The Texas Lawman's Last Stand
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“So you put your newborn baby in the arms of my unconscious wife?” Bo didn’t even try to take the sarcasm and skepticism out of his voice.
“She wasn’t unconscious when I left. Tired and sleepy, yes. But conscious. We talked.” Mattie huffed and pushed her hair away from her face. “Nadine agreed—she was to tell you about what I was doing. But only you. And then I told her when it was safe, I’d come for the baby.”
Bo couldn’t even let himself fathom that this might be true. It wasn’t. Jacob and Holly were his. They were his life. And he’d already ascertained that Mattie Collier was a liar. The trouble was, he couldn’t quite figure out why she’d come up with this particular lie.
Maybe to get his help with her Witness Protection problem?
Perhaps. She was obviously troubled and in trouble. But it seemed an outlandish approach to get his help.
And why did he want to help her?
She’d riled him with her accusation about being Holly’s mom. She’d also riled him with her stream of lies and her connections to an alleged lowlife scumbag like Kendall Collier, someone that Bo would prefer not to have introduced into the lives of his children.
Still, Mattie had that vulnerable look about her, and he hoped like the devil that vulnerability was all there was to it. This wasn’t a man-woman thing.
Was it?
But then he rethought that question. It couldn’t be that. Other than a passing glance, he hadn’t noticed another woman since Nadine.
“Do you have any proof whatsoever about what you’re saying?” he demanded.
“No. But you can get proof by doing a DNA test on my daughter. I brought the kits with me.”
“My daughter,” he corrected. “Holly is mine. Both babies have O positive blood type—that matches mine.”
“O positive is a common blood type.” She stepped closer. “I know this is hard for you to accept—”
“It isn’t hard, because I won’t accept it. But I will ask why you’re doing this. Do you think if you have some kind of emotional hold over me that I’ll do whatever it takes to keep you out of the path of your uncle and his hired guns?”
Mattie stepped back as if he’d slapped her. “Even you can’t keep me out of Kendall’s path. An entire team of federal agents failed. I failed.”
“Ahhh. So, by your own admission a dangerous situation still exists in your life. Yet, according to your delusional plan, you told Nadine that you’d come for the baby when it was safe.”
He expected to see some anger in her eyes, especially since he’d just caught her in another lie. But there was no anger. Only weariness and fatigue.
She leaned back against the wall. “I have a friend who works in the Office of Vital Statistics in Austin, and she told me that someone is searching through birth records for the time period my daughter was due to be born. That someone is looking for her as a way to get to me, and judging from the records they’re searching now, they’re getting close to finding her. If I stay in hiding, I can’t protect her, and protecting her is my first priority. That’s a promise I made to her father just hours before he was murdered.”
“Your story just keeps getting better and better,” he mocked. Though he wouldn’t put it past a criminal like Kendall Collier to commit murder. Bo didn’t personally know the man, but from what he’d heard, Kendall was capable of just about anything.
Which only weakened Mattie’s story.
“If you’re telling the truth,” Bo explained, “you wouldn’t be here. A mother wouldn’t put her baby in that kind of danger.”
“A mother without a choice would have,” she countered. “I don’t have a choice.”
“I beg to differ. You can turn and walk out that door right now.” Of course, he wouldn’t let her do that. If she was going anywhere, it was to police headquarters for a long hard interrogation.
“I’ve been living in fear for a long time.” Her voice was strained and low now. “I worried that right after the hostage situation, the hospital would do DNA tests on all the babies. I thought my secret would be discovered then.”
“How do you know the hospital didn’t do tests?” Bo snarled.
“If they had, then you’d know that the little girl in the picture is mine.”
She had him there. But some of the babies had been tested, those in the newborn unit that had been evacuated because the gunmen had set a fire near it before they escaped. And the other group that had been tested was those newborns that had been physically separated from their mothers at any time during the standoff.
That hadn’t been the case with Nadine.
Bo and the other officers had found her and the babies in the nurses’ lounge. Alone. It was obvious Nadine had given birth, and it was equally obvious that she was holding her babies in her arms.
Mattie glanced in the direction of the nursery when one of the babies fussed, but the noise soon stopped.
“Nadine didn’t say anything when you got to her?” Mattie asked.
“Not much.”
“But she said something,” she pressed.
Oh, yes. Nadine had said something. Something that Bo had replayed in his head a million times. Words that he would never forget.
We have to protect her.
Not them.
Her.
The comment had puzzled Bo, but he’d dismissed it as the ramblings of a traumatized, dying woman. Nadine had meant to say them. The twins. Just as she’d meant to tell Bo that she loved him. But there hadn’t been time, and Nadine hadn’t had the energy to speak anything else.
“What did she say?” Mattie whispered. She was begging. And there were tears in her eyes, though she quickly blinked them back.
Bo didn’t like those tears. They seemed genuine. The real McCoy. Still, he wasn’t ready to cut her any slack. Not with what was at stake.