Every cell in his body honed in on that one purpose. To find Drennan. Now. It latched on to every thought and drove the lactic acid buildup in his muscles to a dull sting. He’d already failed her enough to haunt him for the rest of his life. He couldn’t leave her out here to fight alone.
Ranger Jordan stepped in, dragging her water bottle from her pack and sucking down a strong mouthful before returning it to the compartment at the side of her bag. “Trail rangers aren’t trained to confront a suspect. I am, and I’m armed. We don’t know who’s behind Dr. Hawes’s abduction or if he’s carrying a weapon. It’s enough we have one missing person. We can’t have you disappear on top of that.”
“You’re right. Trail rangers aren’t trained to confront suspects, but soldiers are.” That training was already taking hold. Sinking deep into his nervous system. Calming his heart rate and spreading a numbness he hadn’t let himself feel in a long time. It was the same kind of numbness his father sank into right before the son of a bitch exploded. The calm before the storm, but Harvey was willing to do whatever—to become whatever—he needed to find Drennan. To bring her back alive. “Don’t worry about me. If splitting up comes back on you, tell Simpson it was my idea, and you tried to stop me.”
He turned west, keeping to the riverbed as Drennan’s abductor would. No longer looking to escape the predator hiding under his skin. He wanted it right at the surface. Whoever’d taken Drennan had a few tricks up his sleeves.
Water lapped around his boots, quiet and unchallenged, as he followed the stream. He didn’t want to give away his presence too soon, not knowing how a scared animal would react to surprise. He couldn’t risk the kidnapper deciding Drennan wasn’t worth the effort and doing something rash. That familiar heat he’d run from most of his life built with every yard gained, his senses tapped out. The birds had quieted with his passing,as though sensing an apex predator had neared. Harvey didn’t have any weapons. He didn’t need them, but that didn’t mean whoever had abducted Drennan had the same beliefs. And if she was hurt… He stopped the growl rumbling through his chest. He couldn’t think about that right now.
He’d consciously made decisions in exact opposition to his father over and over. Anger management, self-help books, therapy, keeping his emotions under control in even the most dire situations, strict routines, isolating himself to protect others. The women he’d been with over the years had been nothing more than passing interests. Purely physical. They’d known there wouldn’t be anything more once they parted ways. No dates or vacations. No meeting the parents or talk of the future. He’d done whatever he had to in order to keep himself from becoming the man he hated most, the man who’d ultimately killed Harvey’s mother because he’d been too weak to control himself.
And it’d been enough. For a while.
Right up until two months ago when he’d seen her from across the bar and recognized the same haunted look in Drennan’s eyes that stared back at him from the mirror every morning. And he’d wanted her. More than he’d wanted anyone or anything in his life. He’d wanted to make the shadows in her pretty green eyes fade, to know who or what had put them there and to make sure they never touched her again. And he had. For a little while at least. And she’d done the same for him. He’d looked in the mirror the next morning and almost hadn’t recognized himself. The heaviness that’d aged him in a matter of days after learning about his father’s death had lifted. His gaze had been brighter, some color had come back into his face, but more, something inside had shifted. Released to the point he felt as though he could breathe for the first time in years.
Drennan had done that. And he’d gone and thrown that gift back in her face when she’d told him she was pregnant. What would his father have done? Hell, his dad would’ve made sure that child—and the woman carrying it—suffered. That they both broke under the sick bastard’s influence until they were just as miserable as Harvey and his mother.
But he wasn’t his father. He didn’t get his rocks off at a woman crying at his feet or a child stepping in front of its mother to protect her. He didn’t enjoy putting others’ lives at risk or seeing how little it took to manipulate people into fearing him. He didn’t want any of that, and he sure as hell wouldn’t ever lay his hands on an innocent woman or their child.
Harvey wasn’t that man, and Drennan… She was everything he’d ever wanted. She was the dream he’d dared to envision all those times he’d let himself think of the future, of escape, of being anywhere but stuck under his father’s thumb. She was strong and caring with a smile that could knock him off balance. A woman who enjoyed giving pleasure as much as she enjoyed experiencing it and went out of her way to stand up for herself and the people she cared about. Drennan Hawes was intelligent beyond belief with a sharp tongue that could eviscerate him in a single sentence while putting other people ahead of herself. Dependable and kind and soothing in a way he’d never experienced to the point she risked burning herself out just to make sure everyone else had what they needed.
A woman like that needed someone who would step in and put her first. A protector to make sure she didn’t give too much of herself, that she was getting enough to eat and reminding her to go take a bath or a nap when things got to be too heavy for her to carry alone. And, damn, Harvey found himself wanting to be that guy. He needed to be that for her and for the baby to destroy the sins of his father, but he had to find her first.
Pressure wedged between his shoulder blades. Slowing to a stop right there in the middle of the stream, he listened to his surroundings for a series of breaths. His fingers twitched at his side. He hadn’t held a gun in a long time, but something about being watched from behind brought back the need for the comfort warm steel provided. Nothing had changed. Birds still flew overhead. The stream hadn’t altered course apart from around his boots. He saw nothing to get his defenses raised, but his instincts told him he wasn’t alone. Harvey craned his chin over one shoulder. There. Movement in the corner of his vision, behind the copse of trees to his right. “You take her?”
“Gotta say, she didn’t make it easy.” That dark outline keeping to the trees shifted. “But if I’m being honest, I’m surprised you’re here alone. Figured SAR would be all up my ass on this one, but NPS has so much red tape to cut through, it’s a wonder anything gets done around here.”
SAR. NPS. That was a whole lot of acronyms for a random man kidnapping a medical examiner. Tension bled into Harvey’s shoulders. Drennan had fought back, but how much had the son of a bitch made her pay for that choice? He didn’t recognize the owner of the voice as he faced the threat head-on. “Where is she?”
“Safe. For now. And you. I know who you are, Ranger Knight.” Dress slacks that’d lost their clean lines hung off the man’s waist. He was tall, maybe taller than Harvey, but not as developed in other areas. His T-shirt was too tight and darkened with sweat around the collar and under his arms, and Harvey just didn’t like the look of his face with all that gray beard growth and slicked-back hair. Like the guy couldn’t stop running his hands through it. Drennan’s abductor reached behind him, pulling a gun. Taking aim at Harvey as he descended the slight dip toward the stream. In a matter of feet, the gun barrel pressed into Harvey’s chest. “Dr. Hawes is going to run a little errand forme. Until I’m done with her, I suggest you turn around and walk back the way you came.”
Harvey scanned the trees, searching for something—anything—that could lead him to Drennan. “You know who I am? My background?”
The bastard nodded.
“Then you know you have exactly three seconds to put the gun down and bring me Drennan.” Harvey had had plenty of weapons pointed at and used against him. He was prepared for whatever came next. “One. Two.”
He didn’t wait. Harvey slammed his palm over the barrel of the weapon and ripped the gun free of its owner. Turning it back around, he dropped the magazine and cleared the chamber, tossing the gun a few feet away. “Three.”
“I think I’m going to like facing off with you, Ranger Knight.” Hands raised, the abductor smiled as he backed up the incline and slightly to the left. The bastard was running. “But it seems today is not that day.”
In seconds, the abductor had disappeared over the sharp incline leading into deeper backcountry, leaving Harvey alone.
“Drennan!” He hauled himself up the easy hill and into the trees, his chest tight and pressurized. “Dren—”
Soft curves overrun by navy-blue gear and long hair sticking to bark materialized at the base of a tree. Her arms had been secured behind her, her chin nearly to her chest with her legs splayed in front of her. Alive. She had to be alive.
His heart threatened to break his rib cage as he charged the tree and pulled a blade from his pack. Cutting through the rope binding her wrists around the tree, he caught her upper body from collapsing forward. “Drennan, open your eyes.”
Unfocused eyes the color of the water in the Emerald Pools flickered open. Her gaze settled on him, and the invisiblemonster beneath his skin curled up and lay down for the first time…ever. Her voice broke. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
She slipped back into unconsciousness.
Chapter Seventeen
The curtain cutting her off from the rest of the ER snapped back.
“I’m getting tired of seeing you in a hospital bed.” Cassidy brought her attention up from her clipboard and used her foot to drag the bedside stool behind her. There seemed to be a few more lines around her friend’s eyes and mouth as she looked Drennan over, and a similar heaviness responded in Drennan’s chest.
