Lethal Ransom Read online

  A kidnapper with deadly intentions

  ...and a US marshal who must come to the rescue

  The carjacking that ended with Kristen Lang running for her life—and her federal judge mother kidnapped—was a nightmare. The ransom, however, is worse: Kristen in exchange for her mother. Deputy US Marshal Nick Sandoval will do almost anything to safely recover the judge—except trade Kristen. But can he shield the woman he’s falling for and bring her mother home?

  “The woods give us plenty of places to hide.”

  “Come. I found a place where you can get a little sleep.” Nick helped Kristen to her feet. “I’ll be close enough to hear you if you have trouble, but far enough away to give you privacy.”

  So considerate, so thoughtful that she might need some time alone.

  As if she needed to think about Nick Sandoval’s benefits. “I’m sorry I dragged you into this.”

  “I think I’m the one who dived into this.”

  She smiled. “I should have listened and not gone off on my own.”

  “It’s done, Kristen. You can’t undo the past. You can only move on with the future.” He laughed, though she didn’t know why. “Try to sleep.”

  She couldn’t deny his kindness.

  Or the fact that her feelings for him weren’t exactly brotherly.

  She smiled and dreamed of a Fourth of July celebration with fireworks shooting brilliant stars and flowers and flags into the air.

  And awoke gasping for breath with the realization the fireworks of her dream were, in wakeful reality, gunshots.

  Laurie Alice Eakes dreamed of being a writer from the time she was a small child. Now, with her dreams fulfilled, she is the award-winning and bestselling author of over two dozen historical and contemporary novels. When she isn’t writing full-time, she enjoys long walks, live theater and being near her beloved Lake Michigan. She lives in Illinois with her husband and sundry cats and dogs.

  Books by Laurie Alice Eakes

  Love Inspired Suspense

  Perilous Christmas Reunion

  Lethal Ransom

  Join Harlequin My Rewards today and earn a FREE ebook!

  Click here to Join Harlequin My Rewards

  http://www.harlequin.com/myrewards.html?mt=loyalty&cmpid=EBOOBPBPA201602010002

  Lethal Ransom

  Laurie Alice Eakes

  There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.

  —1 John 4:18

  To Red, whose friendship encouraged me through this difficult year and helped keep me writing.

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  DEAR READER

  EXCERPT FROM UNDERCOVER JEOPARDY BY KATHLEEN TAILER

  ONE

  Kristen Lang had to be mistaken. The same vehicle that had followed her from her office to the courthouse where she’d picked up her mother, the Honorable Julia Lang, could not be tailing her down the Eisenhower out of Chicago. The world was surely full of gunmetal-gray SUVs.

  With her mother’s job, threats were not uncommon. For the past ten years of her life, Kristen had learned to be vigilant of anything out of the ordinary.

  Seeing the same—or very similar—vehicle three times in one afternoon was out of the ordinary.

  Kristen took one second to glance at her mother. “Is everything all right with you?”

  “When is it not?” Mom’s voice sounded a little too bright.

  “Oh, I don’t know, Mom. Maybe when someone threatened to blow up your car, or you had that stalker two years ago, or—”

  “Why would you think anything is wrong now?”

  “Because you’re not answering my question with anything but questions.” Kristen checked her rearview mirror.

  The dark SUV loomed closer.

  Beside her, Mom sighed. “I have no reason to think anything is wrong. I haven’t had any threatening phone calls or mail.”

  “But?” Kristen squeezed the word past the tightening of her chest.

  “Nothing that doesn’t make me sound like a silly old woman.”

  Kristen laughed at that. “You are the last person I would call silly or old.”

  “Thank you for protecting my ego.” Her mom patted Kristen’s hand on the steering wheel. “Now tell me what’s going on with you.”

  Defeated for the moment, Kristen shrugged. “Everyone else left the office early for one reason or another, and I decided to finish up paperwork at home. You know I don’t like being there alone.”

  “I don’t blame you. If you had an office in a better part of town, that wouldn’t be a problem.”

  “We’re there to be closer to our clients.”

  “If you had better clients, such as ones who pay—”

  “Someone has to advocate for poor victims of crimes. And I get paid, Mom, you know that.”

  “A tenth what you would make if you’d gone to law school.”

  Kristen sighed over the age-old conversation. “I wouldn’t be doing as much good as I am now for those who can’t afford to pay to get help.”

  The work she was certain God wanted her to do, but her mother didn’t want to hear that.

  “You could do pro bono work with better support staff than you get at that nonprofit organization you work for now.”

  With the rain starting to fall more heavily, Kristen concentrated on her driving and didn’t answer. Rain made the road slick, and her tires weren’t the best. One moment of inattention, one need to slam on the brakes, and they could hydroplane into the path of a larger vehicle like a truck.

  Or an SUV appearing out of nowhere again.

  She shivered, and her knuckles whitened on the steering wheel.

  “It’s not too late to change your career.” Mom’s voice broke her concentration. “You’re only twenty-five. It’s too late to get into a law school this year, but if you apply this fall, you can start next year. You’ll only be twenty-nine when you finish.”

  Kristen didn’t want the sort of corporate lawyer job her mother thought good enough. She liked being a social worker, helping rebuild people’s lives.

  “I thought you wanted me to get married.” Hearing the sarcasm in her voice, she opened her mouth to apologize.

  “I would, of course, but you don’t seem to meet any men on your own or like any of the men I introduce you to,” Mom said first. “I saw Marcus Ashburton today, and he said you turned him down for a second date. Why?”

  “He’s boring.”

  Traffic was anything but boring, especially with that SUV behind her. Kristen wanted to concentrate on driving, not discuss her love life—or lack thereof—with her mother, the matchmaker.

  “That young lawyer you went out with last week is a good man,” Mom continued. “He does a great deal of pro bono work.”

  Kristen grimaced. Marcus had spent nearly the entire dinner talking about his “charity” work and how good a person it made him. Not a way into Kristen’s good graces. If someone had to tell her he was good, he was probably drawing attention away from too many parts of him that were not.

  “He says he’s good.”

  At being
nice, at being a lawyer, at choosing fine restaurants. He probably thought he sneezed better than anyone else.

  “I don’t like him,” Kristen said. “He only does the sort of free legal services that bring him maximum attention from the press.”

  Kristen struggled to keep one eye on the dark SUV bobbing in and out of her rearview mirror, and the other eye on traffic. The latter seemed to close in on her so much she could scarcely breathe. And the former was drawing near.

  “The press loves him.”

  Even if she hadn’t found him boring, she’d never date a man with a job that kept him so busy—a man she couldn’t count on to be home when she needed him. Her lawyer father had been absent for nearly every important moment in her life.

  “I don’t want to talk about Marcus, Mom.” Kristen sounded tenser than she intended.

  “All right, but I was sure you would like him.”

  “He’s a perfect gentleman. He’s just not my type.”

  Mom pulled her phone from her bag and began to text. “What is your type?” she asked as her thumbs flew across the screen keyboard.

  “Someone who...um...”

  She forgot the question she was answering as the dark SUV filled her rearview mirror.

  She needed to get away from that vehicle, return to the left lane. If she could find an opening in the line of cars and trucks streaming past her, she would accept traveling beside the “L” train. Anything to get clear of that behemoth riding too close to her rear bumper.

  “See, you don’t even know what you want.” Mom sounded victorious.

  Mom’s phone pinged with an incoming text, so Kristen didn’t bother to respond. Her goal required her attention. She needed an opening.

  Nothing but endless vehicles sending up plumes of rain water. Nothing... Nothing...

  Yes. There! A break in traffic at last.

  She stomped on the gas in an attempt to surge into the break in traffic. Zero to sixty in her aging vehicle was more like zero to thirty, but she managed to slip into the next lane.

  And that oversize SUV cut in right behind her, its engine far more powerful than hers.

  Kristen wanted to scream in frustration and beat the steering wheel instead of gripping it like a rip cord on a parachute jump.

  If only she could bail—from the highway, from the conversation with her mother, from the fear that the vehicle was following them, or more likely her mother, the judge who often made unpopular decisions in the name of justice and had experienced trouble in the past.

  And this time, the second time since Kristen was fifteen, the pursuer was bringing her into the picture.

  Unless she was mistaken and this wasn’t the same vehicle. That was entirely possible. Likely, even. Only, past events were making her anxious.

  “You don’t even know which lane you want to drive in.” Mom didn’t raise her gaze from the phone in her hands. “And you’re going too fast for the conditions.”

  “I’m trying to keep up with traffic so we’re not run over by that monster behind us.”

  “You’re too close to the car ahead of us.”

  She was, but only by a car length or so. If she dropped back, that SUV would be too close by about a gazillion feet.

  “Kristen, get back into the right lane.”

  “How? I forgot my shoehorn.”

  “Don’t be sarcastic. It isn’t attractive.”

  Kristen sighed. Her mother—every carefully blond hair, dyed to look natural, lay in place in an elegant twist, her makeup glowed as fresh as it had been that morning, and her charcoal-gray suit hung on her slim frame without a wrinkle—might be a circuit judge in the federal court system, but she was still a mother and applied herself to the role with as much vigor as she had applied herself to everything else in her life.

  “There’s an opening coming up where you can get back into the right lane.” Mom tapped on the side window.

  Kristen shook her head. “Can’t make it.”

  “If you had a better car—”

  “Please, don’t start.”

  She was too tired and too worried about that gunmetal-gray SUV to deal with the “If you had a better job, you could have a better car” lecture. At that moment, she needed to tell her Mom she intended to get off at the next Oak Park exit instead of continuing to her mother’s house farther west. She needed to lose this tail before she led him straight to her mother’s home—or her own.

  But the SUV was even closer.

  “Kristen,” Mom said with exaggerated patience, “get into the right lane. You can move in there.”

  “But I want to exit the expressway.”

  “Not here.”

  “Who’s driving here?” Kristen tried to laugh to lighten the question.

  “Just listen to me for once.”

  Kristen glanced at her mother and read tension in the tightening of the skin around her blue eyes.

  “You know,” Kristen murmured.

  “That we’re being followed? Yes. Now change lanes.”

  Hands gripping the steering wheel hard enough for her knuckles to whiten, Kristen managed to slide into the slower lane.

  And the dark SUV wedged in right behind her. Mere inches from her bumper. Just as her foot pressed harder on the gas to create more distance between her Camry and the SUV, a pickup roared into the gap between Kristen and the car ahead of her.

  “What are they doing?” Kristen cried.

  Mom didn’t answer. She held her phone to her ear. “I think we are about to be carjacked.”

  “Mom, who are you talking to?” Kristen’s voice had gone squeaky again as she sought for breath—breath and the Harlem Avenue exit. She passed it every day, and she couldn’t remember if it was on the left or the right. She couldn’t remember if Austin or Harlem was first.

  Her sweating palms slipped on the steering wheel, and the car swerved. “I need to get off the expressway.”

  “We’re easier to find if we stay on the Eisenhower.” Mom’s tone remained quiet, calm. “If we get off in Oak Park, there’s too many quiet side streets we could end up on.”

  And the exit loomed too close. Moving over for a left-hand exit was impossible at the moment. The pickup was slowing. The SUV was not. The faster lane flowed with an unbroken line of cars and trucks. At the moment, a semi roared alongside them, flinging water from beneath its enormous tires, sending diesel fumes into the intake vents for the air-conditioning.

  Kristen’s stomach rolled with the anticipation of what was about to happen and the knowledge she might fail at the drastic measure she must take in an attempt to stop it.

  “Mom?” Kristen kept her tone as calm as she could manage. “Hold on.”

  She spun the wheel to the right.

  “Don’t do it,” Mom cried.

  Too late. The Camry’s tires rumbled on the edge of the pavement. The car hit the shoulder, water and rocks spraying, pinging against the fenders. Kristen’s foot pressed harder on the gas. Fifty-five. Sixty. Sixty-five.

  “Kristen!” Mom shouted.

  She saw it looming in her rearview mirror—the SUV riding her bumper. Ahead, a disabled vehicle stood on the side of the highway, flashers blazing into the rain-created twilight. To her left, the pickup kept pace, blocking her ability to swing back into the flow of traffic.

  Trapped, she eased up on the gas, praying the SUV wouldn’t crash into them, and moved her foot to the brake. Slow and steady. Water flooded over the road. She could hydroplane and cause a pileup if she slammed on the brakes and lost control. If she didn’t stop fast enough, she would plow into the aged Buick ahead of her.

  She was losing momentum too quickly. The back of the Camry fishtailed. The SUV blasted its horn, and Kristen jumped.

  “Just past the Harlem exit,” Mom was saying into her phone.

  “Put the phone dow
n.” Kristen barked out the order. “If we crash, it could break your face.”

  If they crashed? When they crashed.

  Or something crashed into them.

  The thud came from the left, a tap against the bumper. From the corner of her eye, she caught sight of the SUV looming dark and menacing in her side mirror. Roaring up closer, crowding her to the right where she could go over no farther. Threatening the back of the pickup.

  Bang.

  The SUV hit the left-hand back door. Kristen’s foot slammed on the brake in a convulsive effort to maintain control. Water blasted against the undercarriage.

  And control was only a dream.

  The Camry spun perpendicular to the lane, missed the pickup by a hair, then smashed its front bumper into the side of the SUV.

  The air bags exploded, slamming Kristen against her seat, driving wind from her lungs. Mom emitted a soft gasp, then began to cough from the dust.

  Kristen couldn’t breathe at all. Her vision blurred. Her chest tightened, squeezing, squeezing...

  Between the air bag and seat belt, she couldn’t move. Cocooned. Strangled. The air bag was already deflating. A click and the seat belt would be off. This was mere seconds.

  It felt like a lifetime.

  A scream reverberated through her head, couldn’t reach her lips, choked her.

  “No panic attacks now.” Mom never raised her voice, but it was sharp nonetheless. “No weakness.”

  Weakness. Mom considered panic attacks weakness. Must not show weakness.

  Nausea clawed at Kristen’s middle. She swallowed, reached for the seat belt lock with one hand and the door handle with the other.

  The door popped open without her aid. It should have been locked, but a man stood in the opening on her side and another on Mom’s side.

  “Get out,” the man on the right commanded.

  “Stupid move there, lady,” the man on Kristen’s side said. “Who taught you to drive?”

  “I will wait for the police here in the vehicle.” Mom made the declaration and folded her hands against her waist.

  “You’re going to get out now.” The man on her side grabbed her arm and reached across to release her seat belt.