Delores Fossen - The Lawmen of Silver Creek Ranch

Kade was finally able to release the breath he’d been holding. So, this was job-related. They’d called him in because he was an FBI agent.

But he immediately rethought that.

“An abandoned baby isn’t a federal case,” Kade clarified, though Grayson already knew that. Kade reached down and brushed his index finger over a tiny dark curl that peeked out from beneath the cap. “You think she was kidnapped or something?”

When neither the doctor nor Grayson answered, Kade looked back at them. Anger began to boil through him. “Did someone hurt her?”

“No,” the doctor quickly answered. “There wasn’t a scratch on her. She’s perfectly healthy as far as I can tell.”

The anger went as quickly as it’d come. Kade had handled the worst of cases, but the one thing he couldn’t stomach was anyone harming a child.

“I called Grayson as soon as she was found,” the doctor went on. “There were no Amber Alerts, no reports of missing newborns. There wasn’t a note in her carrier, only a bottle that had no prints, no fibers or anything else to distinguish it.”

Kade lifted his hands palm up. “That’s a lot of noes . What do you know about her?” Because he was sure this was leading somewhere.

Dr. Mickelson glanced at the baby. “We know she’s about three or four days old, which means she was abandoned either the day she was born or shortly after. She’s slightly underweight, barely five pounds, but there was no hospital bracelet. We had no other way to identify her so we ran a DNA test two days ago when she arrived and just got back the results.” His explanation stopped cold, and his attention came back to Kade.

So did Grayson’s. “Kade, she’s yours.”

Kade leaned in because he was certain he’d misheard what his brother said. “Excuse me?”

“The baby is your daughter,” Grayson clarified.

Because that was the last thing Kade expected to come from his brother’s mouth, it took several seconds to sink in. Okay, more than several, and when it finally registered in his brain, it didn’t sink in well.

All the air vanished from the room.

“That’s impossible,” Kade practically shouted.

The baby began to squirm from the noise. Kade’s reaction was just as abrupt. What the devil was going on here? He wasn’t a father. Heck, he hadn’t been in a real relationship in nearly two years.

Grayson groaned and tipped his eyes to the ceiling. “Not impossible according to the DNA.”

Kade did some groaning, as well, and would have spit out a denial or two, but the baby started to cry. Grayson looked at Kade as if he expected him to do something, but Kade was too stunned to move. Grayson huffed, reached down, gently scooped her up and began to rock her.

“The DNA test has to be wrong,” Kade concluded.

But he stared at that tiny crying face. She did have dark hair, like the Rylands. The shape of her face was familiar, too, similar to his own niece, but all babies looked pretty much the same to him.

“I had the lab run two genetic samples to make sure,” the doctor interjected. “And then Grayson put the results through a bunch of databases. Your DNA was already in there.”

Yeah. Kade knew his DNA was in the system. Most federal employees were. But that didn’t mean the match had been correct.

“Who’s the baby’s mother?” Kade demanded.

Because whoever she was, all of this wasn’t adding up. A baby who just happened to match an FBI agent’s DNA.

His DNA .

A bottle with no fingerprints. And the baby had been abandoned at the hospital in his hometown, where his family owned a very successful ranch.

All of that couldn’t be a coincidence.

“We don’t know the identity of the child’s mother,” the doctor answered. “We didn’t get a database match on the maternal DNA.”

And that did even more to convince Kade that this was some kind of setup. But then he rethought that. Most people didn’t have their DNA recorded in a law enforcement system unless they’d done something to get it there.

Like break the law.

“Since you haven’t mentioned a girlfriend,” Grayson continued, “you’re probably looking at the result of a one-night stand. Don’t bother to tell me you haven’t had a few of those.”

He had. Kade couldn’t deny there had been one or two, but he’d always taken precautions. Always . The same as he had in his longer relationships.

“Think back eight to nine months ago,” Grayson prompted. “I already checked the calendar you keep on the computer at the ranch, and I know you were on assignments both months.”

Kade forced himself to think and do the math. He could dispel this entire notion of the baby being his if he could figure out where he’d been during that critical time. It took some doing, but he picked through the smeared recollections of assignments, reports and briefings.

The nine-month point didn’t fit because he’d done surveillance in a van. Alone. But eight and a half months ago he’d been in San Antonio, days into an undercover assignment that involved the Fulbright Fertility Clinic, a facility that was into all sorts of nasty things, including genetic experiments on embryos, questionable surrogates and illegal adoptions.

Kade froze.

“What?” Grayson demanded. “You remembered something?”

Oh, yeah. He remembered something .

Kade squeezed his eyes shut a moment. “I teamed up with a female deep-cover agent. A Jane we call them. She already had established ties with someone who worked in the clinic so we partnered up. We posed as a married couple with fertility issues so we could infiltrate the clinic. We were literally locked in the place for four days.”

Kade had been on more than a dozen assignments since the Fulbright case, the details of them all bleeding together, but there was one Texas-size detail about that assignment that stood out.

Bree .

The tough-as-nails petite brunette with the olive-green eyes. During those four days they’d worked together, she’d been closemouthed about her personal life. Heck, he knew hardly anything about her, and what he did know could have been part of the facade of a deep-cover agent.

“We didn’t have sex,” Kade mumbled. Though he had thought about it a time or two. Posing as a married couple, they’d been forced to sleep in the same bed and put on a show of how much they loved each other.

“There must be someone else, then,” Grayson insisted.

“Alice Marks,” Kade admitted. “But the timing is wrong. Besides, I saw Alice just a couple of months ago, and she definitely wasn’t pregnant …”

Everything inside Kade went still when something else came to him. It couldn’t be that .

Could it?

“The Jane agent and I posed as a couple with fertility problems, and the doctors at the Fulbright clinic had me provide some semen,” Kade explained.

“Could the doctors have used it to impregnate the mother?” Grayson asked.

“I’m not sure. Maybe,” Kade conceded. “The investigation didn’t go as planned. Something went wrong. Someone at the clinic drugged us, and we had to fight our way out of there. But maybe during that time we were drugged, they used the semen to make her pregnant.”

The doctor shook his head. “If the birth mother was an agent, then why wasn’t her DNA in the system?”

It was Grayson who answered. “If she was in deep-cover ops, a Jane, they don’t enter those agents’ DNA into the normal law enforcement databases. The Bureau doesn’t want anyone to know they work for the FBI.”

His brother was right. The odds were slim to none that Special Agent Bree Winston’s DNA would be in any database other than the classified one at FBI Headquarters in Quantico, Virginia.