A surge of awareness hiked his senses into overdrive, and Benning followed it to the hospital room door. Brown eyes ringed with green centered on him, and the world dropped out from under him. She’d come. In the minutes following Olivia’s arrival at the hospital, he hadn’t known who else to call. Or if she’d come back to Sevierville. The kidnapper had warned him not to involve law enforcement before knocking him unconscious, but Ana Sofia Ramirez wasn’t just a federal agent. She’d been everything to him. Before she’d ripped his heart from his chest in the middle of the night without warning.
Her flawless Hispanic heritage intensified the angles of her cheekbones and nose, silky dark hair reflecting the fluorescent lighting from above, just as he remembered. Pressure built behind his sternum—had been for the past seven years—and he wanted nothing more than to close the distance between them in an attempt to release it. “Ana.”
“I came as soon as I heard the news.” She rushed toward him and dropped a duffel bag at her feet. Wrapping her arms around his waist, the woman who’d walked out of his life melted into him, and everything inside him quieted in an instant. The insecurity, the rage, the fear and the failure. Now there was only calm. Clarity. Hints of her perfume—something light and fresh—tickled the back of his throat as he buried his nose against the crown of her head. At five foot five, she fit perfectly against him. Toward the end of their relationship, he’d even believed she’d been made specifically for him. Skimming her chin along his shoulder, she set her mouth at his ear, eliciting a shudder from his spine, and lowered her voice. “The kidnapper could be listening. Pretend we’re two friends randomly coming back into contact, and my team and I will do whatever it takes to get your son back.”
His insides tightened. Right. Her team. The hug hadn’t been personal, simply a way to get her message across. She hadn’t come because he’d called in a personal favor. She’d come to do her job. But given the fact his kids had been targeted in order to get to him, he’d do whatever the hell she instructed. He just wanted his son back. No matter the cost. He increased the space between them, shutting down the internal reaction to her proximity exploding through him, and cleared his throat. “What are you doing here?”
“It’s my parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary. My brothers and I are flying in to surprise them, but then I heard about what happened, and I wanted to make sure you were okay.” Weaving truth in with the lie. He’d read about that, how law enforcement officials, especially those assigned undercover work, trained to remember their stories by inserting bits and pieces of their own lives into their cover stories. Ana did have brothers. Three of them. But as for the wedding anniversary and wanting to check up on him, Benning was sure she’d improvised. Ana pulled her hair back in a tie and turned toward Olivia still asleep in the bed. Her knees popped as she crouched to unzip the duffel she’d brought. In his next breath she straightened with a small black box in her hand and moved toward the bed with the device raised out in front of her. Pulses of green light strengthened on the screen as she moved around the room. “How is she? Any news about Owen?”
She believed the kidnapper was listening. That was what she’d said. Waiting for him to see if he’d call the police? But unless the man who’d broken into his home knew Olivia would escape the SUV and which hospital room she’d be assigned when she arrived, Benning didn’t see how it was possible after Olivia had been checked in. He’d been by her bedside the entire time, only her nurses and doctors coming in and out of the room. “Nothing yet. Olivia suffered a concussion when she escaped the SUV. Doctors aren’t sure if the damage goes deeper than her short-term memory, but they’ll—”
A red light flashed on the device in Ana’s hand, and she stilled. With a quick glance over her shoulder toward him, she reached behind the faux wood headboard of Olivia’s bed and detached something from the back. Swinging her hand toward him, she stepped away from his daughter and held out the miniature circle-shaped piece of metal. She extended her index finger of her other hand in a spiral motion to signal him to keep talking.
Someone had installed a bug in his daughter’s hospital room. Either they knew she’d wind up in this hospital room or—Benning curled his fingers into tight fists as he ran through a mental list of people who’d stepped foot inside this room—one of the people on Olivia’s medical staff had placed the bug while attending to her injuries. He swallowed, tried to keep his voice even as Ana stared up at him. “They’ll run more tests once she’s awake.”
“How are you doing?” She nodded before maneuvering past him to the other side of the room. Dropping the bug into the glass of water at Oliva’s bedside, she searched the rest of the room, not seemingly interested in his answer.
“It’s been a long night,” he said.
The light on her detector remained green. Physical relief smoothed her expression as she pocketed the black box into her knee-length coat when she was finished, and a hint of the woman he remembered returned. “The rest of the room is clear. They won’t be able to hear anything now. I’ll be sure to get the bug to one of
