Addison wanted to do just that if it would get Emily safely out of there. But she had just enough sanity left to know this was almost certainly a trick. If she got into the vehicle, there was nothing to stop them from killing Reed and driving away with both Emily and her.
Still, she’d be with her baby.
“Don’t,” Reed warned her when Addison took a step toward the man.
“It’s the only way,” the man insisted. “We have to know what you learned and who you told.”
That stopped Addison in her tracks, and she shook her head. “I didn’t learn anything.”
“Time’s up,” the driver said, ignoring her denial. He pointed his gun right at her. “We need to get out of here now.”
She braced herself for an attack. But it didn’t happen. The man holding Emily charged forward, and he thrust the baby toward Reed. Addison got a glimpse of what was inside the blanket then.
Emily!
The relief was instant. Thank God. And her baby appeared to be unharmed. She was awake and flailing her arms around as if she was about to start crying.
“Take her!” Addison shouted to Reed.
Reed did. He moved fast, and he scooped the baby from the man’s arms. In the same motion, the gunman reached out for Addison, and he probably would have managed to latch on to her arm if the sound hadn’t distracted him. The kidnapper glanced up when the vehicle came around the corner.
It was Colt.
The deputy had obviously taken the turn too fast and was in a full skid. His dark blue truck flew past them just as Reed got the baby inside his own vehicle.
Addison ran there, too, racing toward Emily. However, she’d barely made it a step when Colt’s truck crashed right into the side of the SUV. The air was suddenly filled with the sounds of metal scraping against metal.
The gunman shouted something but got out of the way in time. He was just a blur of motion from the corner of Addison’s eye, and she didn’t wait to see where he’d land or what would happen next.
She hurried as fast as she could back toward Reed’s truck, jumped inside and scooped the baby up into her arms.
Emily didn’t cry. The baby only looked up at Addison as if trying to figure out what was going on.
“Get down!” Reed yelled.
This time, Addison did exactly as he said. She dropped to the floor, sheltering Emily’s body with hers.
She heard the squeal of the tires on the asphalt.
Followed by a shot.
Addison looked up in time to see the bashed-in SUV coming right toward them. Obviously the crash hadn’t disabled the engine.
There was no time for Reed to get his truck out of the way. He could only brace himself for a collision, and Addison tried to do the same. The SUV was damaged, banged up on the side where Colt’s truck had hit it, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t have a hard enough impact to hurt the baby.
Reed managed to get off a shot to try to stop the driver, but the bullet skipped off the roof of the SUV just as it darted around his truck.
And the kidnappers sped away.
Reed finished his call with the sheriff and watched as the medic put the bandage on Addison’s head. She didn’t even react. She had her attention solely on the baby cradled in her arms. The little girl seemed to be sleeping peacefully now, but Emily still occasionally sucked the bottle that the nurse had made for her.
The medic had cleaned away the blood from Addison’s forehead, but there was a dark blue bruise already forming. The same color as her troubled eyes.
“Any sign of the kidnappers?” Addison asked the moment Reed put his phone away. She was still ash pale except for that bruise, and along with the relief of being safe at the hospital, he could also see the fear etched on her face.
Reed had to shake his head. “Not yet. But everyone’s out looking for them. Plus, there’s a CSI team headed out to your place. They might find some prints or DNA to tell us who they were.”
After all, Reed had shot one of them, so there’d be blood in the backyard. If the guy was in the system, then they could get a match, and in Reed’s experience, once they had a name, they could start figuring out what had gone on. People generally didn’t commit assorted felonies, including attempted kidnapping and murder, for no reason.
“Thank you,” Addison told Reed when the medic walked away. “You saved our lives.”
True, but only because they’d gotten lucky by being in the right place at the right time. Reed hated it’d taken something as fragile as luck to make that happen.
Luck might not be on their side again.
After the SUV sped away, his lawman’s instincts had been for him to turn his truck around and go in pursuit, but it would have been too big a risk. Those gunmen could have started shooting again. Reed wanted to catch the dirtbags, but he hadn’t wanted to do that by putting Addison, the baby and even Colt in further danger.
Even though the adrenaline was still pumping through him, Reed forced himself to sit down next to Addison in the E.R. examining stall. Over the past year he’d completely avoided any contact with his ex, and she’d done the same with him. But this wasn’t personal now.
He repeated that to himself.
Funny, but it always felt personal with Addison, and that wasn’t personal in a good way. Too many old, bad memories were in the mix, too.
Before the split, they’d been married for nearly three years, had dated five years before that, but their long relationship had soured big-time when Addison pressed and pressed him to have kids.
And they’d tried despite his reservations about fatherhood and the strain that pregnancy would put on her body.
However, her infertility had only added to their differences. One failed in vitro procedure after another, and they’d finally pulled the plug a year ago on both the baby plans and the marriage, and he had filed for a divorce. Addison had moved to San Antonio, and Reed had thought he might never see her again.
Clearly, he’d been wrong about that, because here she was and apparently in a boatload of trouble.
“I was only going to be here a few weeks,” Addison volunteered. “Just enough time to get the place ready to sell. If they’d come after me while I was at my apartment in San Antonio, they might have succeeded in taking her.”
It was true, but Reed didn’t bother confirming it. Addison was already shaken up enough. “Did the P.I., Blake Rooney, visit you at your apartment?”
She nodded. “He came earlier this week.”
Reed didn’t like the timing of that. “Did you tell him you were coming to your late aunt’s place here in Sweetwater Springs?”
Addison shook her head, at first, but then the alarm went through her eyes. “He saw my suitcases and baby things and asked if I was going on a trip. I told him I’d inherited a house and was going to sell it. You think Rooney had something to do with those kidnappers?”
“Maybe. Colt’s trying to contact him now,” Reed explained. “We’ll make sure he’s okay and bring him in for questioning.”
It was possible Rooney had indeed suspected something illegal about Emily’s adoption or had even been a part of it. That was Reed’s top theory now. But it must have been many steps past being bad for someone to send three armed men to steal whatever the P.I. had discovered.
Or