The Christmas Clue

Matt looked down at Cass at the exact moment she looked up at him. He tried to brace himself for whatever Ronald was about to say, and judging from the sympathetic look that passed through Cass’s eyes, he was about to get some very shocking news.

“According to my source, Vanessa didn’t get involved with another man after you.” Ronald paused several snail-crawling moments. “If I were a betting man, I’d say yes, Dominic Cordova has your daughter.”

Chapter Three

“Well?” Cass challenged. “Do you finally realize I’m telling the truth?” But she dropped the snarky attitude when Matt groaned, rolled off her and landed on his back on the floor.

“I can’t believe this,” he said. And he kept repeating it, punctuating it with some profanity.

Cass tried to sit up, but he put his arm across her stomach to keep her down. “I know it’s going to take some time to sink in—”

His glare cut her off. “Don’t say anything. Don’t move,” he said, through clenched teeth. “And don’t you dare pull out another weapon.”

“Because you already have enough to deal with. Yes, I understand that.”

Besides, she had no intention of holding him at gunpoint. Not now. That phone call was exactly the impetus that could get Matt Christensen to cooperate with her plan.

Well, maybe.

Maybe he would go in an entirely different direction and try to turn all of this, including her, over to the authorities.

She couldn’t let that happen.

Because with Dominic’s recent pact with the powers-that-be, no one would be looking hard for evidence to exonerate her. Heck, they might even destroy those surveillance tapes to protect the tenuous relationship they had with a man who could help them catch bigger, meaner fish.

“Truth time,” Matt insisted, groaning and turning his head toward her. Unfortunately, that put their faces only a couple of inches apart. Practically eye-to-eye. “Did you doctor that photo?”

“No.”

He studied her a moment. “But you had reason to doctor it.”

“True, but if I hadn’t thought the child was your daughter, I wouldn’t have come here.” Because all that intimate eye contact was starting to distract her again, she looked away. “I figured…hoped,” she said, rethinking, “that you’d want to find Molly.”

“How?” he tossed at her like a gauntlet. “Your plan sucks, and it has crater-size holes in it. For instance, if by some miracle you do get inside Dominic’s estate, what then? Have you even thought beyond that point?”

“You bet I have. The plan is simple—we find the evidence and your daughter, and we take both her and the surveillance disks and get out of there.”

Because he still had his arm slung over her stomach, she felt his muscles tense. “My daughter.” A moment later he hissed out a breath. “If it’s really true, then why wouldn’t Vanessa have told me?”

Cass could think of a reason—maybe the snobbish Vanessa hadn’t wanted her middle-class ex-boyfriend to know because she’d had no plans to keep their child—but Cass didn’t voice that aloud. Judging from his silence and the way his jaw muscles had declared war on each other, Matt had already drawn the same conclusions.

“Look, I know it’ll take you awhile to come to grips with all of this,” she said to him. “But the truth is—we don’t have time to spare. Remember that part about Dominic recycling disks every year. Well, in eight days it’ll be a year since he murdered his business associate and framed me. I have it on good authority that he didn’t bother to erase those disks, probably because he’s too arrogant to believe he could ever get caught. We have eight days at the most to get the evidence, and each and every one of those days means that your little girl is living under the same roof with a man like Dominic.”

His gaze snapped to hers, and his teeth came together. “I don’t need that reminder.”

She wasn’t immune to that emotion she heard in his voice. A father’s concern. Even though she wasn’t a parent, Cass had no trouble imagining how she would feel if their positions were reversed.

“For what it’s worth,” she offered, “Dominic’s sister, Annette, has apparently been taking care of the child since the adoption. In fact, Annette’s the one who wanted a baby, and Dominic adopted Molly for her because she can’t have children of her own.”

“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“It should. Annette’s physically handicapped and overly devoted to Dominic, but from everything I’ve heard about her, she’s also, well, human. And kind. I’ve never met the woman, but I don’t believe she’d hurt your daughter.”

Cass prayed that was true anyway. Dominic was Annette’s baby brother, and Cass figured if it came down to it, Annette would protect Dominic at all cost. Unfortunately, that now involved an innocent baby girl.

She pushed off his arm and got to her feet, not easily. Cass winced at the soreness in her backside and legs. She’d have bruises from their wrestling match, but then Matt likely hadn’t escaped injury, either. “You should probably get dressed so we can start making plans to leave.”

However, the moment the words left her month, a chill went down her spine. Not because of the leaving part—that was a necessity—but because the full impact of that call hit her. She’d let the news distract her, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time.

“Just who was that on the phone anyway?” she asked.

“Ronald McKenzie.” Matt got up from the floor. No wincing for him. He accomplished it quite easily, then put her weapon on the counter next to the tranquilizer gun, picked up his pants and put them on. “He works for the FBI.”

That spine chill got significantly worse. “Oh, mercy.” She stepped in front of him. “Didn’t you hear that part about the leak in official communication’s channels?”

“I heard, but I trust Ronald.”

“Yes, but you can’t trust the people he questioned about your child.”

Matt opened his mouth and closed it. Cass could almost see the thought process happening in his head. But what she couldn’t determine was where exactly those thoughts were leading.

“You need me to get into Dominic’s estate,” she said, in case he was thinking about ditching her. “I’ve been there, and I know the layout. Without me, it’ll take you a lifetime or two just to find your daughter.”

He just stared at her.

“Okay, maybe not a lifetime,” she countered, when that stare crossed over to making her uncomfortable. “But if we do this right, it can be a quick in and out. An extraction, I believe you special agent guys call it. You could bring Molly home where she belongs.”

Matt zipped his pants. “Or I could simply ask Dominic Cordova to hand her over to me.”

It was an angle Cass had already anticipated, and she had a cautionary answer. “You could, but what happens if he refuses? The Justice Department won’t be on your side. You said so yourself. Dominic is their new best friend.”

He paused a moment and then shook his head. “You’re asking the impossible. I can’t break the law. I’ve sworn—”

“I know.” Best to nip the doubt before it could grow into a full-blown argument. “But if we think this through, we may be able to skip anything illegal. For starters, I know the head groundskeeper at the estate. He’s a semifriend, and he can hire us as part of the crew who’ll be decorating the estate for Christmas. That way we wouldn’t technically be breaking and entering.”

“No. We’d only be stealing. Last time I checked that was still a crime even for former debutantes.”

She hated that label and hated even more that it bugged her. And he knew it bugged her.

“You have a right to your daughter,” she reminded him. “And Dominic obviously isn’t planning on just handing her over, or he would have already done it. If he didn’t know beforehand, he certainly suspects now that the adoption was illegal. It was all over the news, and the lawyer who handled Molly’s adoption was arrested.”

“All of that could mean nothing.” But his body language told her that Matt knew she was right.

Cass pushed a little harder. “Here’s my suggestion. You ask for some vacation time. If your boss wants to know why, you can say it’s some sort of family emergency. Which it is. Then, you borrow the jamming equipment, and we can leave immediately. If all goes well, you could be back as soon as the day after tomorrow—with your little girl.”

“No,” he said, buttoning his shirt.

Stunned, Cass replayed that one word, hoping she’d heard him wrong. “No? To what part of the plan?”