Mother by Fate

“How did she do with the swimming lessons?”

“It was rough at first. You know how she hates having her head underwater...”

She had at two. That could have changed.

“But in the end, she was swimming like a fish.”

“Underwater?”

“Not as easily, but yeah.”

Sara smiled. Bessie was one determined little girl. She was proud of her.

“So, yeah, I hate to cut you off, but I gotta go, Sara, I have to...”

Sara might have forced him to talk to her a little longer—after all, she hadn’t transferred the money yet—but her phone buzzed with an incoming call.

“I do, too. Bye,” she said to her ex, and clicked over to take the other call.

“Lila, what’s up?” The managing director of the Lemonade Stand, the unique, privately funded women’s shelter where Sara worked, didn’t ever call her at home just to chat. “It’s Nicole. She’s gone.”

“What do you mean gone? She left?” Dropping her towel, Sara reached for the closest pair of cotton pants she had. With the phone propped between her shoulder and her ear, she slipped into underwear and then her pants. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said, buttoning the pants with fingers that fumbled in her haste. “Why would she go? She’s not safe and... She called someone and got word that her son was being moved, didn’t she?”

It was the sole reason the woman would leave the only place where she was safe. Where her secrets were safe.

“She made a call,” Lila confirmed. “But no, she told one of the girls that Toby hadn’t been moved yet.”

There was a neighbor in LA across the street from where Nicole had lived with her husband and son, an older woman Nicole’s ex didn’t even notice, who’d been keeping an eye on things for Nicole. Specifically on her son. Because Trevor, Toby’s father, a white-supremacist higher-up in a national neo-Nazi organization was going to run with him. Nicole knew it. Now the police knew it. And if he did run, the woman would never see her son again. Worse, the boy would have little chance but to be indoctrinated by the man who’d spawned him for one purpose only. To populate the world with white men who hated anyone who wasn’t a white man.

White men who believed that ridding the earth of nonwhites was their God-given purpose.

If Nicole didn’t get Toby away, the boy would most likely grow up to be just like his dad. As Trevor had done before him.

Sara had a bra on and was in the process of pulling a short-sleeved cotton top over her head. “She wouldn’t leave,” she said. “Not without Toby.”

Late the night before, the Santa Raquel police had promised Nicole they’d get her son out of Trevor’s house and into safe custody, after the LA Police Department had withdrawn the warrant that had been issued for her arrest. A child-welfare representative, a member of the High Risk Team, had already been briefed and was waiting for Toby to arrive in Santa Raquel.

“She left,” Lila said, her voice unusually agitated. “She was at the thrift shop, looking for some jeans...” All they’d had in the on-campus store were women’s sizes. Nicole, who was twenty-seven years old and five foot two, barely weighed a hundred pounds. “And then she was gone. Out the side door where we empty the trash...”

The thrift shop, one of the many businesses operated by the Lemonade Stand that were open to the public and provided the shelter’s primary means of support, fronted an open city street. Residents accessed it through a back exit, and from there the only admittance to the locked grounds of the Stand was via fingerprint recognition.

A new safety measure that had been instigated over the summer as part of the work the High Risk Team was doing.

“She got spooked,” Sara said, slipping into a pair of light blue flats, then slinging her bag over her shoulder before heading out the door. “Dammit, someone was there. Someone scared her into running.”

“From what we heard last night, if Trevor gets hold of her she’s as good as dead.”

“And then he has Toby all to himself,” Sara said. “You’ve already alerted everyone...”

“Of course.”

“I’m on my way.”

“Good.”

Sara and Lila, in these jobs they worked together, had seen more ugliness than most people ever would. Lila always appeared to handle it all calmly.

With only the briefest shrug of disappointment about the fact that she wouldn’t have been able to have her dinner date with Hot Pool Guy that night, Sara drove carefully, but over the speed limit to the Lemonade Stand. There wasn’t much she could do at this point, but maybe there would be. Once she talked with some of the women. They might relax and open up to her more easily than they would with a member of law enforcement. Maybe one of them saw something that would give them a clue as to where Nicole had gone.

A direction even.

Regardless, Sara needed to be at the Stand.

Because just as Lila leaned on her, she leaned on Lila, too.

They were two strong women, caring for victims to the best of their ability.

And though they never spoke of their personal lives with each other, they both seemed to understand, without having to say as much, that they were two women with secrets of their own.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_969eb394-6b60-50e4-98dc-deccc1254c95)

MICHAEL WAS GOOD at what he did. In just a few short years he’d become one of the top ten bounty hunters in the country. And while Michael had bills to pay, he didn’t hunt criminals to make a living. He hunted them strictly to save innocent lives.

He’d brought in the head of a Mexican drug cartel for a sum that would have kept him and Mari clothed and fed for more than a year if he’d chosen to stop working.

A tiny bitch of a woman wasn’t going to get away from him.

She was good, though. Her ex-husband, when he’d gone to the guy to find out what he could about the woman listed on the warrant he’d been given, told him she’d been hunted before.

Trevor Kramer had been only too happy to speak with him—relieved to know that the woman who’d posed a threat to his son’s life was soon going to be behind bars for good.

Michael had been hanging out on the street where he’d spotted her the evening before, after tracing her to a bus stop in Santa Raquel. She’d been with Sara Havens and the two had disappeared before traffic had cleared enough for him to get across the street. He was certain now that someplace close by, but not easily discernible to him, was a women’s shelter that was unknowingly harboring a criminal.

He still didn’t know where the shelter was, but less than an hour after leaving Sara Haven’s condo complex that afternoon, he’d seen Nicole, and their cat-and-mouse game had begun. She’d been inside the thrift shop he’d visited the evening before looking for information on her or Sara. From where he’d been standing out on the street, he’d seen her by a rack of pants. Moving slowly, casually, he’d drawn closer. He’d counted two doors with access to the shop—one on the side, the other in the front. Heading toward the corner of the building, he’d had both covered.

But by some divine timing for her, the woman had shot out the side door at the exact time a delivery truck had pulled into the alley. It had been turning around and she’d been standing on the far side of the bumper, clutching a ring attached to the side of the truck, catching a ride away from him before he’d had a chance to approach her.

He’d lost a precious few minutes getting back to his SUV, but he’d kept the truck in sight. Apparently he’d had a little divine intervention, as well—the big truck was having trouble maneuvering through the crowded city streets. Just as he got close, the truck stopped and the woman on the back jumped off.

He’d swerved into a parking spot and had taken off after her on foot.

They’d been running for more than an hour now. In and out of neighborhoods. Over fences. He’d lose her, and then find her again. Anytime he’d thought she was too tired to go on, she’d disappear on him again.

It didn’t take him long to figure out that she ducked under and behind thick shrubbery to rest.

The third time she tried that trick he had her. She was in a front yard in a quiet neighborhood. It didn’t look like anyone was home. Michael had her cornered.

His paperwork had her listed as armed and dangerous. She’d already taken one shot at a man. Her ex-husband. She’d broken into two homes. And had attempted to steal a baby out of his crib on two different occasions, both times while bearing a loaded gun.