Delores Fossen - The Baby's Guardian

The Baby’s Guardian

Delores Fossen

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Cover

Title Page The Baby’s Guardian Delores Fossen www.millsandboon.co.uk

Dedication Welcome to the first book in Delores Fossen’s fantastic new TEXAS MATERNITY: HOSTAGES mini-series. Don’t forget to look out for the final instalment The Mummy Mystery in April 2011

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

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Copyright

Welcome to the first book

in Delores Fossen’s fantastic new

TEXAS MATERNITY: HOSTAGES mini-series.

Don’t forget to look out for the final instalment

The Mummy Mystery in April 2011

The sound of the gunshot sent Captain Shaw Tolbert’s heart to his knees.

Hell. This couldn’t happen. He couldn’t lose a single one of those hostages.

“Hold your fire!” Shaw shouted to the nearly three dozen officers and SWAT team members he had positioned all around the San Antonio Maternity Hospital.

For a split second everything and everyone around him froze. No more frantic orders and chatter from his men. Even the reporters and photographers who were pressed against the barricades nearly a block away went still, their cameras no longer flashing the bursts of light that knifed through the night.

The stunned silence didn’t last. The officers and the SWAT team already had their weapons ready, and they adjusted, taking aim in the direction of that shot.

But the shot hadn’t come from any of them.

It’d come from the fourth floor where a group of pregnant women, newborns and hospital staff were all being held at gunpoint. Hostages that included Nadine Duggan, the wife of one of Shaw’s own men, Lieutenant Bo Duggan.

That shot meant Nadine or one of the others could have been killed.

Shaw didn’t know all the hostages’ names. Heck, he wasn’t even sure he had an accurate head count. Basically, anyone unlucky enough to have been on the fourth floor at 3:00 p.m. had been taken captive by at least two gunmen wearing ski masks and carrying assault weapons. Shaw had managed to get that meager bit of information from a nurse who’d made a hysterical nine-one-one call during the first minutes of the attack. Since then, neither the nurse nor any of the other known hostages had answered their cells or the hospital phones.

Using the back of his hand to swipe the slick sweat from his forehead, Shaw maneuvered his way through his men and the equipment and hurried from his command center vehicle to the hostage negotiator. It was Texas hot, and the unforgiving August heat was still brutal despite the sun having set hours earlier.

He spotted the negotiator, Sergeant Harris McCoy, in the passenger seat of a patrol car that several officers were using as cover. The blond-haired, blue-eyed officer might look as if he’d just stepped off a glossy recruitment poster, but he was the best that San Antonio PD had. In the past four years, Harris had successfully negotiated nearly twenty hostage situations. Shaw desperately needed him to add one more gold star to his résumé.

“What happened?” Shaw asked.

Harris shook his head. “I’m not sure. I was talking to one of the gunmen on his cell—trying to get the guy to give us his demands. Then he shouted ‘she’s getting away’ and he hung up. About five seconds later, someone fired the shot.”

Shaw cursed. He prayed that shot had been fired as a warning and not deadly force. Because if a hostage had been killed, he’d have to seriously consider storming the place ASAP. He couldn’t sit back and let all those people die. But the SWAT team and police forcing their way onto the ward would almost certainly cause its own set of casualties.

“Try to get one of the gunmen back on the line,” Shaw told Harris.

While Harris pressed redial and waited for the gunman to answer, Shaw held his breath and paced. Not that he could go far. The scene was a logjam of law enforcement officers who’d initially responded, and more had arrived as this ordeal had dragged on. Nine hours. God knew what kind of havoc the gunmen could have created in that much time.

“What happened?” Harris demanded the moment he had one of the gunmen on the phone. Like the other calls throughout the afternoon and evening, this one was on speaker.

“Everything’s under control,” the gunman assured him. Which was no assurance at all.

After nine hours, Shaw was familiar with that voice, though the guy had refused to identify himself. But it was a voice Shaw would remember, and when he had everyone safely out of this, he was going after this SOB and his accomplice. That wasn’t his normal role as a captain. These days, he was pretty much a supervisor working from his desk, but for this, he’d make an exception and do some field duty.

“Is anyone hurt?” Harris asked the gunman.

“No. It was a misunderstanding, that’s all. It won’t happen again. Will it? “

“No,” someone said. A woman. And her voice created an uneasy feeling inside Shaw.

No way.

It couldn’t be her.

Shaw jerked his phone from his pocket and scrolled through the numbers until he found Sabrina Carr’s. He jabbed the call button. Waited. And cursed when he heard the ringing. Not just on his own phone, but the sound was also coming through Harris’s cell. Each ring went unanswered, and each ring confirmed that this nightmare had just gotten a lot worse. Sabrina’s phone was on the fourth floor of that hospital.

And so was she.

“That was Sabrina Carr’s voice,” Shaw managed to say to Harris in a whisper.

Harris’s head whipped up, and he pinned his alarmed gaze to Shaw’s. “You mean …” Harris mouthed, but he didn’t finish.

Shaw didn’t finish it for him, either, but they both knew what this meant. Sabrina Carr was the surrogate carrying Shaw’s child. She was eight months pregnant.

And Sabrina was a hostage.

Shaw resisted the urge to lean against the patrol car that was just inches away, and he choked back the profanity. This was a complication he didn’t need, and the situation had just gotten a lot more personal.

“Are you certain the hostage is all right?” Harris demanded from the gunman.

“See for yourself,” the man answered.

Shaw looked up at the row of eight-foot-tall windows that encircled the entire fourth floor. The building was about thirty yards away, but he still saw the movement behind the thick glass.

Someone pushed a woman into view.

The height and build were right for it to be Sabrina. About five-six and average. So was the pregnant belly that her tan cargo shorts and bulky green top couldn’t hide. Ditto for that mop of shoulder-length red hair—Sabrina had hair like that. But praying he was wrong, Shaw grabbed a pair of binoculars from the officer next to him and took a closer look.

Hell.

It was Sabrina all right.

She was shades past being pale, and he could tell from her expression that she was terrified. Probably because she’d just come close to dying. That shot had no doubt been fired at her.

Even though there was no love lost between Sabrina and him, Shaw wasn’t immune to the terror he saw on her face and in her eyes. After all, she was carrying his child.

Their child, he silently amended.

The image of his late wife flashed through his head. The baby Sabrina was carrying should have been his wife’s. His and Fay’s. Sabrina should have been just a surrogate, that’s all, but that had changed when none of Fay’s eggs had been viable. Sabrina had become the egg donor then, too. Sabrina’s DNA, not Fay’s. More than a mere surrogate. But that was an old wound that he didn’t have time to nurse right now.