MacKenzie's Promise
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Catherine Spencer
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Harlequin
HarlequinCHAPTER ONE
THE day they shipped her sister off by ambulance to the psychiatric wing of Lion’s Gate Hospital was the day Linda Carr decided to take matters into her own hands. The police had had their chance and, as far as she could tell, were getting precisely nowhere. Bad enough that the baby had been missing for seven weeks now; to stand idly by while June retired farther into the fuzzy world of tranquilizers was not to be countenanced.
Not that Linda blamed her sister. She’d known her own share of sleepless nights since the infant girl had disappeared, and she could only imagine how much worse it had been for the new mother to be told that her firstborn had been smuggled out of the hospital nursery—by the father, no less!
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that Kirk Thayer would resort to extreme measures. From all accounts, he’d shown an astonishing lack of moderation in most things to do with June, practically from the day he’d learned she was expecting his child. It was the main reason she’d refused to marry him. But that he’d go so far as to kidnap the baby and disappear without trace…!
“I’ll bring your little daughter home,” Linda promised, when she visited June the morning after she’d been hospitalized. “You just concentrate on getting well so that you’re ready to be a mommy, and leave the rest to me.”
“And how do you propose to do that?” Linda’s friend Melissa asked that night, as the two of them dined on pasta primavera at their favorite West Vancouver restaurant. “Being a bona fide European-trained chef doesn’t exactly qualify you as a private investigator. It’s already been established that Thayer left town the same day he stole the baby and probably returned to the States. He could be anywhere by now, and given his unpredictable state of mind, I think you’re going to need an expert to track him down.”
“Uh-uh!” Linda shook her head decisively. “Not an expert, the expert—and I’ve got you to thank for finding him for me. Remember that magazine article you sent to me when I was living in Rome—the one you wrote about the maverick police officer who quit the force because he refused to be bound by all the red tape surrounding it?”
Melissa eyed her incredulously. “Please tell me you’re not referring to the reclusive Mac Sullivan, former ace detective now living in exclusive solitude on the Oregon coast.”
“The very same. Going through the conventional channels isn’t working. It’s time for a more radical approach.”
“Quite possibly it is, but Mac Sullivan’s not your man. He won’t even return your phone calls, much less agree to help you. I’d even go so far as to say that he’s the most bullheaded creature on earth, and I know whereof I speak. Researching that article was worse than pulling hen’s teeth. Setting up a private tell-all interview with the Queen of England would have been easier.”
“I don’t care. He’s the acknowledged expert when it comes to tracking down missing persons—practically clairvoyant, according to your article—and I’m prepared to camp on his doorstep so that he trips over me every time he sets foot outside his house, if necessary. It beats sitting on my hands and watching June turn into a wraith of the woman she used to be.”
“I can’t say I blame you. I barely recognized her the last time I saw her. She’s nothing but skin and bone. And those haunted eyes…!” Melissa inspected her glass of wine and let out an exaggerated sigh. “So what can I do to help—since I assume that’s why you’re bribing me with this very fine merlot?”
“I want you to check your sources and find out exactly where this Sullivan man lives. I need something a bit more specific than ‘on the Oregon coast’, which covers a lot of territory.”
“I don’t need to check any sources for that. He lives right on the beach in Trillium Cove.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Not many people have. It lies between Bandon and Coos Bay, and caters to the rich and reclusive, not tourists or newshounds. We were treated like lepers when we started nosing around town. Your best bet, if you’re determined to go this route, is to be discreet and look sophisticated, which shouldn’t be too difficult, given your worldly, cosmopolitan air. It’s a small town and none of the streets have names, so there’s no point in looking at a map. On the plus-side, though, his place lies at the end of a gravel road running directly west of the post office, so you’ll find it easily enough. But for what it’s worth, if you do find him—”
“When,” Linda corrected her. “I will find him, Melissa. I have to. June can’t go on like this and neither, come to that, can our mother. She’s been sick with worry for weeks now and the stress…well, you know how much she has to put up with already. This could be the last straw for her.”
“Then when you find him, don’t rush your fences.”
“Why not? This is an emergency and time’s of the essence. What’s wrong with being up-front about that?”
“Trillium Cove isn’t Rome or Paris—or even Vancouver. Things don’t happen at breakneck speed around there just because you want them to—and Mac Sullivan’s definitely not someone to be pushed. You can’t go hammering on his door and expect the only thing he’ll ask is ‘How high?’ just because you tell him to jump. If there was one thing which came across loud and clear during the brief interview he granted us, it’s that his priority these days is completing the book he’s writing on criminal profiles, and he resents anything which takes time away from that, although he did admit to doing a bit of police consulting on the side, once in a very rare while.”
“He’ll make an exception when I explain what happened. He has to.”
“Uh-uh!” Melissa scooped up a forkful of pasta and shook her head decisively. “He doesn’t have to do anything. This is a man who values both his privacy and his freedom to pick and choose how he spends his time.”
“He’ll choose this case when he finds out how much I’m prepared to pay.”
Again, Melissa shook her head. “He’s also filthy rich. It takes more zeroes than I earn in three months to pay the taxes on that property of his, let alone afford all the other little perks he enjoys. No, kiddo. To get him to take an interest in your case, you’re going to have to adopt a sneakier method and be very persuasive—if you get my drift!”
Linda’s stared at her, affronted. “I hope you’re not implying I come on to him?”
“I wouldn’t have put it quite like that, but since you did, then yes. In a way.”
“Fat chance! The day has yet to dawn when—”
“I’m suggesting you stroke his ego, not show up stark naked and offer to give him a full body massage, for heaven’s sake!”
“No!” Linda was adamant. She’d fended off romantic overtures from infatuated master chefs and five-star restaurateurs with equal dispatch during her years of training abroad, and wasn’t about to compromise her standards now for some small-town ex-police officer with an overblown sense of his own importance. “Apart from the principle of the thing, I can’t afford the time for those kinds of games.”
“You can’t afford not to! And if appealing to his vanity gets the results you’re after, what’s another couple of days?” Melissa’s tone softened. “Look, Linda, I know better than anyone that this isn’t how you usually operate. You’re the most straightforward person I’ve ever met—to a fault, sometimes. But there’s nothing usual about what’s happened to your family. It’s cruel and heartbreaking and scary beyond any normal person’s wildest imaginings, and if you want to put an end to the misery, the only thing you can afford to focus on is bringing your niece home safely and seeing that Kirk Thayer is brought to justice.”
Linda chewed on that for a while, then sighed deeply. “Loath though I am to admit it, I’m afraid you might be right,” she said, not much liking it but realistic enough to recognize there was no getting away from the truth of Melissa’s analysis. “If flattery will bring Mac Sullivan on board, I’ll butter him up one side and down the other so thoroughly, he’ll glow. I’ll do whatever it takes, and worry about my methods when that baby is back in her mother’s arms where she belongs.”
“And I wish you luck. Because, believe me, you’ll need lots of it.”
Even in mid-August, after weeks of hot, dry weather, the ocean was cold. Enough that Mac wore a wet suit when he rode the Windsurfer, though not enough to keep him from his early-morning swim. He needed that bracing dash into the icy waves to clear the cobwebs from his brain and prepare him for the day’s work. One thousand words minimum before four in the afternoon, fifteen hundred if he was lucky—and that didn’t count the research, or the pages of notes he compiled before he tackled the latest chapter.
The surf was wilder than usual that day, requiring he keep his attention on what he was doing, which probably explained why he wasn’t aware someone had invaded his section of beach until he practically stepped on her as he waded ashore.
Still half-blinded by the glare of sun on water, Mac detected the visitor was a woman only by her voice. Clear, bossy, cultured, it accosted him as he hoisted the Windsurfer under one arm and prepared to climb the steps to the house. “Watch what you’re doing with that thing! You just about took my head off!”
“A danger you could have avoided if you’d paid attention to your whereabouts,” he informed her murky silhouette. “You’re on private property, lady.”
“How am I supposed to know that?”
He jerked his head to indicate the signs nailed to the twisted trunks of the scrub pines edging the low-rising dune. “You could try reading—assuming you know how.”
His vision clearer by then, he watched with grim amusement as she reared back in outrage. “I’d heard you were a bit short on social graces,” she huffed, “but I’d no idea you were such a Neanderthal.”
“Well, now that you’ve been enlightened, why don’t you go back to wherever you came from and leave me to grunt in peace?”
“Because,” she said, and faltered into silence.
She had wide-spaced blue-green eyes almost the color of the sea close-in to shore. Blond hair framing a heart-shaped face in a halo of short curls. Full, stubborn mouth, dimpled chin. Slight build, shapely legs, about five-four in her bare feet, and weighing around a hundred and ten pounds. Fingers braided so tightly together it was a wonder they didn’t dislocate. Twenty-sixish, possibly a bit younger. A very uptight woman.
He noticed all that not because he gave a damn but because he’d been trained to observe. Eleven years on the police force stayed with a man, even after he turned in his badge.
“‘Because’ isn’t a reason,” he said.
She looked down at her knotted fingers. “I’m sorry if I’m trespassing. I really didn’t notice the signs.”
“I don’t see how you could miss them. They’re in plain enough sight.”
She took that under consideration for a minute, then drummed up an obsequious smile and said, “But so were you. And I was captivated watching you on the Windsurfer. You’re amazing.”
“So I’ve been told—by women a lot more subtle than you.”
She blushed, the color running up under her honey-gold skin and leaving her looking like a kid caught dipping into the cookie jar behind her mother’s back. “I’m not trying to flirt with you.”
“Sure you are,” he said. “You’re just not doing it very well. So why don’t you spit out whatever it is you’re really after, and get it over with?”
“I need your help. My sister’s baby has been stolen by the father, and she’s beside herself.”
Mac repressed a sigh and turned to stare out at the rolling ocean, preferring its eternal tumult to the unending stream of human misery which hounded him no matter how much he tried to distance himself from it. “He’s probably just taken off for the day. He’ll come home again as soon as he realizes it’s time for a diaper change.”
“No,” she said. “You don’t understand. He’s not my sister’s husband. They don’t live together. He stole the baby right out of the hospital nearly two months ago when she was only one day old, and no one’s heard from him since.”
Oh, jeez! “Then you should have called in the police long before now.”
“We did.” The bossy tone had disintegrated into something too close to despair for his peace of mind. “But it’s been seven weeks, Mr. Sullivan, and they haven’t made much progress.”
“What makes you think I can do any better?”
“Your reputation speaks for itself.”
Again he turned away, unable to confront the unwarranted hope in that wide-eyed gaze. Not many things touched him anymore, but a child gone missing, a newborn ripped from its mother’s arms, and by the estranged father no less, touched a sore spot which no amount of time seemed able to heal. Any guy who would pull a stunt like that should be strung up!
“You haven’t done your homework,” he told her, not a hint of emotion in his voice. “If you had, you’d know I retired from active duty three years ago. But there are any number of private investigators who’ll take your case and I’ll be happy to refer you.”
“I don’t want them, I want you.”
“You’re wasting your time. I can’t help you.”
“Can’t—or won’t?”
Mac spun around, the ghost of a lost child’s cry echoing through his mind. “Look, Ms…..”
“Carr,” she supplied. “Linda Carr. And my niece’s name is Angela. She weighed six pounds, eleven ounces at birth and was nineteen inches long. But all that will have changed in seven weeks. She probably looks nothing like the photo taken only hours after she was born. Her mother doesn’t know if she’s thriving, if she’s well cared for, if she’s gaining weight the way she’s supposed to. She doesn’t even know that she’s still alive.”
“If the father’s the kidnapper, the baby’s probably fine. What reason has he to harm her?”
“What reason had he to steal her?”
“Presumably because there was trouble between him and the mother.”
She nodded. “Yes. Their relationship fell apart a couple of months before Angela was born.”
“Is she your sister’s first child?”
“Yes, but Kirk’s second. He has a son from a previous marriage whom he rarely sees because the boy lives with the ex-wife who returned to Australia after the divorce.”
“That probably explains it, then. The guy probably feared he’d be denied access to this child, too.”
“I really don’t care what he feared, Mr. Sullivan,” she said, the bossiness returning full force to her tone and setting his teeth on edge. “I care about my sister who’s on the verge of complete mental collapse. And I care about a baby being left to the uncertain mercies of a man who’s clearly unbalanced. I should think, if you have a grain of compassion in your soul, that you’d care, too.”
“I can’t take on the world’s problems and make them my own, Ms. Carr,” he said wearily. “I’ve got enough to do fighting my own demons. The best I can do for you is recommend that you hire someone who specializes in locating missing persons, and if this man’s been gone nearly two months already, then the sooner you get on it, the better.”
Mac didn’t wait to hear all her reasons for ignoring his advice, nor did he tell her that with every passing day the chances of the baby being recovered grew slimmer, because he wasn’t getting any more involved. Period.
To underline the fact, he cleared the dunes and marched up the steps, surfboard and all, and left her to figure out another game plan, confident he’d closed the door on any possibility that it would include him.
Well, so much for subterfuge and sweet talk! Totally deflated, Linda stared at his departing back.
Why hadn’t Melissa warned her?
Why hadn’t she mentioned that Mac Sullivan was no ordinary man, that he had the face of a fallen angel and the body of a god? Why hadn’t she seen fit to point out that his voice flowed over a woman like molasses, dark and rich and bittersweet?
Disgusted with herself, with her inappropriate susceptibility, Linda buried her face in her hands. Melissa wasn’t to blame, she herself was, for having been fool enough to pin labels on him, sight unseen.
She’d read too many novels about hard-bitten, granite-jawed, flinty-voiced detectives, that was her trouble. Seen too many movies of officers with thick middles and double chins slurping coffee and demolishing doughnuts in between reading people their rights. Spent too many hours talking to the RCMP and local police who were hamstrung by protocol.
She’d come here believing she was prepared—and found she was prepared for nothing: not the endless drive lasting nearly two days; not the interminable congestion of the I-5, which had her clutching the steering wheel in a white-knuckled grip all the way from north of Seattle to Olympia; not the snaking coastal road crowded with tourists in Oregon. And definitely not Mac Sullivan.
Even her final destination was alien. She’d grown up in Vancouver, Canada’s third largest city. She’d apprenticed in New York and New Orleans, in Paris and Rome. And felt more at home in any one of those cities than she did on this empty stretch of beach bordered on one side by the wild ocean and the other by sand dunes rising twenty feet or more in places.
For all her world travel and supposed sophistication, she was truly a stranger in a strange land. And no closer to finding June’s baby now than she had been on her native turf.
Exhaustion swept over her, softening the edges of her disgust with the threat of tears. She’d been so sure, so determined she’d succeed where the police had failed. All during the drive south, she’d rehearsed how she’d approach Mac Sullivan, what she’d say. And been blindsided before she’d even opened her mouth. Spellbound by his commanding presence, commanding looks, commanding everything!
An image of June staring sightlessly out of her hospital room window, and another of a newborn’s sweetly sleeping face, were shamefully eclipsed by the more recent memory of a man emerging from the rolling surf and striding up the beach. Of him shaking the saltwater from his dark hair and sending the drops flying around his head in a shimmering halo. Of a pair of magnificent shoulders and long, powerful legs. Of eyes glowing smoky blue-gray in his darkly tanned face.
Oh, fatigue was making a fool of her! What other explanation could there be for the way her mind had emptied of everything that mattered and fastened instead on the physical attributes of a stranger? Why else was she slumped on a chunk of driftwood, with no place to stay that night and no clue as to what her next move should be?
Already the sun was sliding down on the horizon, allowing a hint of pre-autumn chill to permeate the air. She was hungry and travel-worn and disconcerted. She needed a comfortable hotel room, a hot bath, a good dinner, and an even better night’s sleep to fortify her for the battle ahead. But she knew from her earlier exploration that she’d find none of those things in Trillium Cove. The only inn in town had displayed a discreet No Vacancy sign and from what she’d seen, there weren’t any restaurants.
“Stop wallowing in self-pity!” she ordered herself. “It’s as unattractive as it’s unproductive. Get up off your behind and do something because you’re accomplishing nothing with this attitude!”
But her normal resilience had hit an all-time low. The accrued worry and frustration of the last few weeks had finally caught up with her and no amount of self-reproach could chase it away. Discouraged, dejected, she rested her chin on her folded arms and stared blankly at the empty horizon.
Damn her anyway! How long was she going to sit there like a lost mermaid waiting for the tide to sweep her back out to sea?
Irritated as much with himself as with her, Mac leaned back in the wicker recliner, propped his feet on the deck railing and took a healthy swig of his bourbon. Usually, topping off the day with an ounce of Jack Daniel’s and a perfect sunset was all he needed to give him a sense of well-being beyond anything money could buy.
Usually.
Usually, though, he didn’t have a desperate woman spoiling the view. He didn’t have a woman at all, except by choice, and even then only occasionally. And he made sure whoever she was didn’t come loaded down with expectations he had no intention of meeting.
Raising his glass, he squinted at the prisms of late-afternoon sunlight spearing the amber liquid. Fine stuff, Jack Daniel’s! Drink enough of it, and a guy could sink into a hazy stupor which nothing could penetrate. Trouble was, he’d learned long ago that when the effects of too much booze wore off, all he had left was a thundering headache and the same old problem he’d tried to elude to begin with. Which brought him back full circle to the woman on the—on his—beach.
Thoroughly ticked off, he slapped the glass down on the table at his side, lunged to his feet, and glared at her. She hadn’t moved a muscle in the last half hour. Head bent, shoulders bowed, she sat sunk in palpable misery. But what irked him beyond measure was that despite there being no law which said he had to make her problems his, the sight of her remained superimposed on the forefront of his mind regardless, and his thoughts kept turning to the problem she was trying to resolve.
If it had been an errant husband she was chasing after, or someone who’d taken her for a whack of money, he’d have been able to dismiss her without a second thought. But a child…a helpless baby gone missing? A man had to have traveled a long way down the road of indifference to turn his back on that.
He had the wherewithal to help her: contacts in high places, should he need them; knowledge and experience by the bushel right at his fingertips. But he’d laid down a set of rules by which he’d sworn to live. Rules which spared him having to call on any such resources.
It was fear, not rules, which held him back now, though. Fear that all he could do at this stage was discover she’d left it too late. Fear that, at the end of it all, the only thing she’d be taking back to her sister was a miniature white casket holding a baby’s remains.
He couldn’t go through that a second time.
Restlessly he paced the length of the deck and back, then turned for one last glance down at the beach. It lay deserted, not just directly below the house, but as far as the eye could see to either side. Not a living soul marred the two-mile expanse of sand he called his backyard.
She’d given up. Gone back to wherever she’d come from, or else in search of someone else’s help. He could eat dinner with a clear conscience. Praise the Lord!
His kitchen faced southeast, with a patio beyond the sliding glass door which caught the morning sun. He kept his barbecue out there, a gas-powered luxury model designed for year-round use regardless of the weather, but especially suited for an evening such as this.
He’d pulled a steak from the freezer and was in the process of searching the refrigerator for salad fixings when the bronze knocker on his front door struck the solid plank of oak. Not loudly or confidently or imperatively, the way he’d have approached it, but with a timid little pflunk!
The sixth sense which had served him so long and so well during his years on the force clicked into gear. Muttering a few choice words not fit to be heard in decent company, he strode through the living area to the hall, already resigned to what he knew he’d find waiting outside.
“Please,” was all she said when he opened the door, and he was lost. Lost in the bruised shade of her eyes, more blue than green in the descending twilight. And lost in that simple entreaty which spoke more poignantly than a flood of more urgent and articulate pleas.
“I should have realized you couldn’t disappear into thin air quite that fast,” he said, gesturing her inside.
She was shivering, pale, and just about ready to drop in her tracks. He grasped her upper arm and was shocked at how chilled her skin felt—far more than the cooling outside temperature merited. Shocked, too, by her air of frailty. “When did you last eat?” he inquired sharply.
She thought about it for a second, then said, “I stopped for coffee this morning.”
“I’m talking about a square meal.”
“I don’t know.” She lifted her shoulders indifferently. “Last night, I guess.”
Mac swore again, and propelled her to the leather couch in front of the fireplace. “Sit!” he ordered, and after she responded to the command like a well-trained member of the dog squad, he grabbed the knitted afghan his mother had sent him and flung it around her shoulders.
She curved herself into its warmth and blinked. She had the longest damned eyelashes he’d ever seen. Indulging in a few more choice obscenities—old police habits died hard—he knelt to put a match to the wood and kindling already laid in the fire grate then, while the flames took hold, returned to the kitchen and heated water to make a mug of his special hot rum toddy.
“Here,” he said, marching back to the living room some five minutes later. But she was already zonked out. Head cushioned against the arm of the couch, feet tucked under her, she slept like a baby.
Parking the rum toddy on the edge of the hearth, he piled a couple more logs on the fire, then leaned against the mantel shelf and rolled his eyes in disgust. He’d grown accustomed to his comfort zone, in which he was responsible only for himself; accountable only to himself. Still, he retained just enough humanity to be touched by her troubles.
A child had gone missing, for God’s sake, and even he—especially he!—knew the burden that cast on a person’s shoulders. And he was afraid. Afraid of his response to a woman so full of need that someone had to step in on her behalf, because she couldn’t do it alone. Afraid because, of all the people she could have turned to, she’d chosen him.
He’d looked into her eyes and remembered them not for their clarity of color or symmetry of shape, but for the faith he’d seen in them, and for the grief. And he was afraid of failing again.
“Jeez!” he growled. “Why me? Of all the people living along this stretch of coastline, why the hell did I have to open my door to this particular stray?”
She stirred. Puffed a little breath between her lips. Sighed. And settled more comfortably into the corner of the couch.
Sighing himself, he stalked back to the kitchen and yanked open the freezer in search of another steak. No point in deluding himself. She was there for the duration, whether or not he liked it.
But lest there be any doubt, he liked it not one bit and intended driving the message home to her as soon as she was alert enough to comprehend it—which, given her present comatose state, was unlikely to be anytime soon.
