That all-too-familiar sense of instability rocked through him.
“I need to hand over the evidence.” Benning shoved to his feet, his entire body buzzing with the need to take action. He should be out there looking for his son, doing whatever it took. Not holed up in some safe house imagining all the ways this investigation could go wrong. Placing the coffee mug on a side table, he scraped his fingernails across his scalp, shoulder-length hair caught between his fingers. Long stretches of trees and mountains on the other side of the massive floor-to-ceiling wall of windows increased the isolation growing inside. The sun had started dipping behind the Smokey Mountains. They were running out of time. Everything—the kidnapping, the shooting—it was all on him. “None of this would’ve happened if I hadn’t started looking into Britland Construction. I should’ve left it alone. I’m the one who’s supposed to be responsible for him. I promised him I would always keep him safe, and now Owen’s out there in the hands of a possible killer because I wanted to play detective.”
“You and I both know once you hand over that evidence, the person responsible for taking your son won’t let you or your family walk away. You’re too much of a risk.” Her voice dipped to soothe the rough edges of anxiety tearing him apart from the inside. Movement registered from behind, and he turned to find her setting her own mug on the end table beside the bed. She closed the empty space between them without a single sound, taking special care not to wake Olivia. She motioned toward the bed with the crown of her head, but he couldn’t look away from her, couldn’t ignore the sudden shift in her expression. “Do you see that beautiful little girl there? She’s alive because of you, Benning. You protected her from getting shot in that parking lot, and you tackled me to the floor in her room before the shooter could take me out. Neither of us would be here if it weren’t for you.”
She was right. Turning over the evidence wouldn’t guarantee Owen’s release, but his insecurity—the need for action—pricked at the back of his neck. “I want to be the one out there, looking for him.”
“I know, and I know it doesn’t feel like you’re doing much, but I promise you, you are exactly where you need to be.” Raising her hand, she settled it on his forearm. Heat and electricity coiled together in a dangerous combination that traveled down his spine. Tantalizing hints of her perfume nudged at the raw memories he’d tried to forget, and it took everything inside him not to give in. “We’re going to get your son back. Together.”
Her confidence, combined with her hand still on his arm, slowed his racing heart rate, and suddenly he was more aware of her than ever. Aware of the way her bangs settled along the curve of her cheeks, the way the swell of her lower lip was slightly fuller than the top and how the brown in her eyes had seemingly deepened over the past few minutes. She was a strong, intelligent, confident woman who’d committed herself to saving the lives of strangers on a daily basis, not to mention she was one of the most intense people he’d ever met. Admirable. Honest. Observant. Everything he thought he’d wanted in a life partner. Gravity pulled his gaze to her dark red fingertips resting against his skin. Until she’d left without a word. “Tell me why I had to find out you’d requested a transfer to Washington after you’d already left.”
She let her hand slip away, the burn of her touch chased back by the cold penetrating through the wall of windows on his right. Diverting that mesmerizing gaze of hers toward his daughter in the bed, she took a step back. “Benning, we don’t have to do this now.”
“I was afraid you were dead.” The admission tore from him. The hollowness he’d struggled to fill had been increasing every second since the moment she’d walked into that hospital room, and he couldn’t take it anymore. “I called the police, the hospitals, the FBI, anyone who might’ve been able to tell me where you were or what’d happened to you. I looked for you for three days, Ana, with no phone calls, no messages, no emails or texts.” He forced himself to take a deep breath before their conversation woke Olivia. “I woke up, and you were just...gone. I want to know—”
“Because my partner found her body.” A hardness etched into her expression, her voice dropping into level territory. No emotion. No infliction. In an instant, the woman who’d joked with him a few minutes ago disappeared. Nothing but the cold, distant, detached federal agent he’d believed her capable of being all these years.
Confusion gripped him hard. “Whose body?”
“Samantha Perry,” she said.
He’d heard that name before. Why did it sound so familiar? Somberness overcame him, his hands relaxing at his sides. Recognition flared as snippets of memory of his and Ana’s first meeting rushed to the front of his mind. The first time he’d set eyes on her, she’d been partnered with another agent, but while Benning couldn’t remember her partner’s name, he could never forget Samantha Perry. Hell. “The teenage girl you’d come to Sevierville to find.”
“They found her in the corner of an alley between two restaurants in Knoxville, discarded like a piece of trash three months after she disappeared.” Her eyes remained steady on his, but almost absent, distant in the way she never blinked. “I was assigned to find her. I promised her family I would find her. She was an innocent fifteen-year-old girl who’d been taken from school by a janitor named Harold Wood who worked there, but we couldn’t prove it.
