Merline Lovelace - Military Heroes Bundle - A Soldier's Homecoming / A Soldier's Redemption / Danger in the Desert / Strangers When We Meet / Grayson's Surrender / Taking Cover

“Are the mornings always so chilly here?” he asked.

“Most of the year,” she admitted. “At the height of summer it can get really hot in the daytime, but the nights cool down fast. I’ve never yet had a night when I didn’t need a blanket.”

“That’s the best way to sleep.”

They sat together for a while, sipping coffee, eating toast, no conversation necessary. They had reached that exquisite point where neither of them felt pressed to fill a silence. Connie savored that comfort. To her, that had always been a mark of a truly good relationship, when there could be companionable silence.

Eventually she glanced at the clock. “I guess we may as well go to the early service, if I can get Sophie and my mother up.”

He nodded.

“Do you want to come?”

“Sure. Dress up?”

She shook her head, smiling. “Times have changed. Jeans will do.”

“Nobody complains?”

“Why should they?” She shrugged. “I’ve often felt that God couldn’t care less what we’re wearing when we pray. Clothes are for other people, not for him.”

“I like the way you think, Connie.” Standing, he astonished her with a kiss. “I’ll go wash up real quick while you wake the others.”

Julia awoke quickly, with a smile, and agreed she would like to go to the early service. “Much more peaceful,” she said. “Not so many folks stirring around and coughing.”

Connie laughed. “Then up and at ’em. I’m going to get Sophie.”

She climbed the stairs feeling better than she had in a week. Somehow Ethan’s presence this morning had managed to batter back the night’s vague fears, and the sunlight pouring in every window seemed to fill the world with a crisp, clean glow. The sky, she thought, would be almost unbearably clear and blue this morning.

She knocked on Sophie’s door, then opened it. For an instant she didn’t register what she was seeing. For an endless, eternal instant, she couldn’t put the pieces together.

“Sophie?”

No answer.

“Sophie?” She turned from the bedroom and ran to the hall bathroom, finding it empty.

Then she screamed. “Sophie!”

Only silence answered her.

Chapter 19

Five sheriff’s cars filled the tree-lined street. Gage and Micah were there, along with her other friends. Other cars were already out on the streets and ranging the countryside, searching. Every one of them had Leo’s arrest photo.

Connie had pulled on her own uniform and gun, ready to get going. But Gage wouldn’t let her, not just yet.

“The doors were locked,” she kept saying.

Gage looked at Ethan. “You’d have heard her.”

“If she’d come downstairs, yes,” he said. “I know myself well enough that even when I sleep, I’m still alert if I need to be. And those stairs creak.”

“So that leaves...” Gage’s scarred face frowned at the dormer of Sophie’s room.

“Exactly,” Ethan said. “It wouldn’t have been hard for her to get down.”

“Or someone to get in,” Connie said.

Ethan shook his head. “A normal-size man would have made too much noise. This room’s right over the living room.”

She turned on him. “Are you saying Sophie left on her own?”

He didn’t answer, but his dark eyes said everything.

“Why would she do that, Ethan? Why?”

“She said she saw him on Friday. Maybe she talked to him. If it’s Leo...”

Connie bit her lip. “You think he could have talked her into meeting him?”

“Remember her questions?”

Connie nodded slowly. It was all starting to make sense, and she hated the sense it was making. She looked from Gage to Ethan. Her voice came out as little more than a terrified whisper. “He won’t hurt her. Will he?”

Nobody could truthfully answer.

“Why the hell couldn’t he just knock on the door like an ordinary person?” she demanded.

Gage pulled no punches. “I know you’re upset, Connie. Hell, I’m upset, too. But if he’d knocked on the door, would you have let him meet Sophie?”

Despair swamped her. “No.”

“That’s probably why, then.”

“But what if he takes her away? What if he kidnapped her?”

That was the ugly possibility. The one they all feared.

“We’re working on it,” Gage assured her. “I’m assuming she didn’t leave until the storm let up, so she’s only got a few hours lead on us. Everyone’s looking, Connie, and I’ve notified the neighboring counties. He won’t get past us.”

Given the wide-open spaces that made up so much of this part of the state, Connie had her doubts. Doubts she didn’t want to think about right now.

“Okay,” Gage said. “We’re all fanning out. Julia, you stay here to wait for Sophie. She might just come skipping home. Micah, see that Julia has a radio, so she can call us directly.”

Micah nodded and went to get a spare from his car.

Gage turned to Ethan and Connie. “You two stay together. I know I can’t keep you from looking, Connie. But don’t do something you’ll live to regret. Something Sophie will live to regret.”

She knew exactly what he meant, because right now, in the midst of her terror, she could have killed Leo without a second thought.

“She won’t,” Ethan said, speaking for her. Taking responsibility for her. “She won’t.”

Gage clasped Connie’s shoulder. “Word’s getting out, Connie. At the church, at Maude’s. Everyone in town is going to be looking very soon.”

She nodded, trying to take heart from that, but she couldn’t. What if someone angered Leo or scared him into doing something awful? But she knew as well as anyone that when this county went on alert, there was no way anyone could keep her neighbors from taking a hand. That was the way they’d always lived. Today they would beat the bushes, and if they found any kind of information about where Sophie had gone, they would gather and form a search party faster than you could say lickety-split.

Cars began to peel away as directions were given, but Connie and Ethan remained. He kept looking at the dormer and the cottonwood that nearly brushed the roof.

Connie spoke. “You think she climbed down that tree.”

“That or one of the others. Weird, but the first time I walked around the house, I saw those trees as a security risk. I had to remind myself I wasn’t in Afghanistan.”

“You’d have cut them down?”

“Back there, yeah.”

She nodded, trying to focus on the problem in the now, not on her fears. Fear could only inhibit clear thinking, and she needed her mind as clear as it had ever been.

Okay, she told herself. It was probably Leo. The only reason she could think of for him to develop this interest in Sophie was to get at her. The terrifying question, of course, was what kind of punishment did he want to inflict on her?

But another possibility existed, a slim one. Maybe during his years in prison he’d learned something. Maybe...

No, she couldn’t allow herself to think he might be a changed man. Without proof, that could only be a vain hope.

Ethan started toward the side of the house, to the tree nearest the dormer. Connie’s heart rose to her throat at the thought of Sophie crawling across the wet roof to grab on to that tree and climb down. Had her daughter lost her mind?

No, of course she hadn’t. Sophie wanted something she felt her mother had denied her. Talk about a knife in the heart.

Near the base of the tree, Ethan paused and pointed. “There? You see?”

She did indeed see. Someone had walked on the wet grass, although with all the rain they’d had, the grass had bent, not broken.

“Small footprints.”

Connie nodded. It was then that Micah joined them. “Julia has a radio,” he said. “Am I seeing what I think?”