Six-Gun Showdown

Jax’s eyebrow lifted, and he got that look, the one that condemned her as a mother.

“I want to see him and hold him more than I want my next breath,” Paige clarified. “But if I go inside, it might give the killer a reason to try to get in there, too. He warned me not to try to hide behind my son.”

As if she’d do that.

But she would have to draw Jax into the middle of this. Paige couldn’t see a way around it.

“If I’d thought I could make Matthew safer by going inside with him, I would have already been in there,” Paige added.

That stirred Jax’s jaw muscles, but thankfully he didn’t try to bolt toward the house again. However, he did take out his phone, and he moved into the shadows of the garage, his attention nailed to the house.

“I’m texting Belinda to tell her to lock the doors and set the security system,” Jax relayed to her. “I’ll tell her it’s just a precaution, that a prisoner has escaped. And then I’m calling for backup.”

Paige didn’t stop him from sending the first text. She wanted the house locked down. But she did stop him from texting his brother Jericho. Jericho was the sheriff, and while he would ultimately get involved in this, now wasn’t the time. Ditto for Jax’s other two brothers, Chase and Levi. They were both lawmen, too, and having them here could make a bad situation worse.

“Hear me out before you involve your brothers in this,” she said. “After I got those messages from the Moonlight Strangler, I knew he wasn’t going to back down until he had me. I’m the one who got away, and he wants me dead.”

“I’m listening,” Jax said when she hesitated.

Paige hadn’t hesitated because she thought he wasn’t listening, but rather because she wasn’t sure how to say this. Best just to get it out there. “If I’d thought it would keep Matthew out of danger, I would have just surrendered to him. Would have let him finish what he started.”

Jax cursed again. “Do you hear yourself? You’re talking about suicide. What you should have done is gone to the cops. Or to me.”

“I did come to you, tonight,” she whispered. “You won’t be thanking me for that, though, but it was the only way. I want this monster dead, and I want you to kill him for me.”

He gave a crisp nod. “Tell me where he is, and I will,” Jax said as if it were a done deal.

It was far from being a done deal, though.

“He wants me to meet him tonight at nine on the bridge at Appaloosa Creek. I’m sure he already had the area under some kind of surveillance before he told me it was the meeting place. He said if I show up with anyone but you, then he’ll start a killing spree. One that will involve our son.”

She gave him a moment to let that sink in. It didn’t sink in well. The fire went through his already fiery blue eyes. Actually, plenty of things about Jax fell into the fiery category. All cowboy, even with that badge clipped to his belt. Hot cowboy, she mentally corrected.

Even now, after all this time and water under the bridge, Paige was still attracted to him. Something she shouldn’t be remembering. Not when she had more important things to deal with.

“That’s why you can’t involve your brothers,” she added. “If they go rushing to the area, he’ll know.”

“How?” he snapped.

“I’m not sure. Like I said, I suspect long-range cameras. Of course, that means he has the resources to set up something like that without being detected.”

His stare drilled into her. “Who is he?”

A heavy sigh left her mouth. “I honestly don’t know.”

No one did. The Moonlight Strangler had murdered more than a dozen women before he’d finally made a mistake and left his DNA at a crime scene. There’d been no match for the DNA in the system, but there had been a match of a different kind.

To Jax’s adopted sister, Addie.

“As you know, Addie doesn’t remember her father,” Paige said.

Of course, Addie had been just three when she’d been found wandering around the woods near the Crocketts’ Appaloosa Pass Ranch. When no one had come forward to claim her, Jax’s parents had adopted her and raised her as their own along with their four sons: Jax, Jericho, Chase and Levi.

“As fraternal twins, Cord was the same age as Addie when he was abandoned, and he doesn’t remember anything, either,” she went on.

Something Paige had in common with Addie and Cord since she, too, had been left at the hospital when she was a baby. Of course, she hadn’t been abandoned by a serial killer.

He got quiet again, but not for long. “Did you see the Moonlight Strangler’s face when he tried to kill you?” Jax asked.

This was one of the other questions she’d expected, but Paige had to shake her head and hope she could say the words without having flashbacks or a panic attack.

“He hit me with a stun gun when I was getting into my car in the parking lot of the CSI office in San Antonio,” she said. Her words rushed together, spilling out with her breath. “He was wearing a mask so I never saw his face. He said some things to me...cut me and strangled me until I lost consciousness.”

Jax pressed his lips together for a moment. “What things did he say?”

That required her to take a moment. Things that were hard to repeat aloud, though they repeated in her head all the time.

And in her nightmares.

“He said if he hadn’t managed to get to me, then he would have kidnapped Matthew to draw me out.” There. That was the worst of it. The absolute worst. “The next thing I remember after that was waking up with a San Antonio cop leaning over me.”

“The cop who helped you fake your death,” he mumbled. “Along with Cord.” Jax took the venom in his voice up a notch.

Probably because Cord was obsessed with finding and stopping the Moonlight Strangler. But Paige thought maybe she heard something else in Jax’s voice. Perhaps a little jealousy. She recognized it because she felt that same ugly emotion when Jax said Belinda’s name.

“It’s not like that between Cord and me,” she volunteered.

His glare didn’t soften any. “Then how is it exactly? Why don’t you tell me?”

Well, this was a can of worms that she’d hoped to delay opening. The emotions of it were still too raw, and Paige wasn’t sure she could tell him without choking on the words. But Jax had to know. Because it was hearing this that would hopefully get him to cooperate with her dangerous plan.

“When the killer was strangling me,” she said, but then had to stop to fight back the images of that nightmare. Always the images. “He told me my birth mother was one of his first victims and that he was killing me to make sure her spawn didn’t live another second.”

Judging from the way his eyes widened, Jax hadn’t expected that. “And you believed him?”

“No. But the DNA test I took later proved otherwise.” That required another deep breath. “According to the test, my birth mother was Mary Madison. Her body was found just a few days after I was abandoned in the hospital. I didn’t learn any of this until after I’d faked my death.”

“His victim’s daughter,” Jax said. He did some deep breathing, too, and she could almost see the wheels turning in his head. “That’s why he came after you?” But he didn’t wait for her to answer. “Then why hasn’t he gone after the children of his other victims?”

She had to shake her head. “Maybe my birth mother’s murder was more personal to him? Or he could believe I know something about him that the others don’t.”

“Do you?” he asked, and it sounded like some kind of accusation.

With good reason.

Cord wasn’t the only one who’d become obsessed with finding the Moonlight Strangler. She had as well, and even though Paige had dismissed it as part of her job as a crime scene investigator, it’d been more than that. She’d felt it bone deep.

And she’d been right.