Heart of Gold - By Tami Hoag Page 0,48

would think.

“We’ll find her,” he said, half shouting to be heard above the wind and the sound of the sea crashing against the beach below them.

The beach.

His heart pounding, Shane bolted for the edge of the cliff and the wooden steps that snaked down it. He hit the beach running, sand kicking up behind him. Frantically his eyes scanned the area. For the first time in a long, long time he started praying, praying that Lindy hadn’t fallen over the cliff or wandered too close to the surf and been swept out by the treacherous waves this coast was known for.

Then he spotted her. He stopped in his tracks, air sawing in and out of his lungs like hot razors. Lindy sat in the sand, half-hidden behind a boulder, playing happily with her herd of plastic dinosaurs. Her ever-present doll was propped up against the rock, watching the proceedings with one eye stuck shut. She danced her dinosaurs around a lopsided sand castle, all the while singing at the top of her lungs “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

Relief rolled over Shane with all the power of the waves that were crashing against the shore fifty feet away, leaving him so weak he nearly went down on his knees. Lindy looked up at him suddenly, and a smile lit up her pixie face like a sunbeam.

“Hi, Shane! Did you come to play with me?”

He couldn’t answer her for the knot in his throat.

Faith ran across the sand, her legs feeling like lead, her lungs on fire. She pushed past Shane and dropped down in the midst of the dinosaurs, scooping her daughter into her arms. Sobbing, she hugged Lindy until the little girl squirmed.

“Oh, baby, you’re safe!” With a shaking hand she brushed at her child’s silky red-gold curls. “I was so scared!”

Lindy’s lip quivered as she looked at her mother. “Don’t cry, Mama. I don’t like it when you cry.”

Faith tried to smile and laugh, but in the end all she could do was hold her baby close and let go of all the tears fear had built inside her.

“I could have lost her.”

Faith sat on the edge of Lindy’s bed, watching her daughter sleep, running her fingertips over her child’s hair. Hours had passed since the crisis of the afternoon, and still the fear lay just under the facade of her calm, threatening to erupt at any second.

She felt as if something had shattered both inside her and around her. The last of her sense of safety had been fragmented. Through all of this hideous business the one thing Faith had clung to was the knowledge that she would always have Lindy. Now that too had been snatched away from her.

She’d been forced to realize that Lindy could be taken away. In the blink of an eye her child could be gone. It hadn’t happened today. Today Lindy had simply taken herself to the beach. But that didn’t mean it wouldn’t happen in the future. Faith could still hear that evil silky voice promising to kill the most important person in her life—her child. A shudder snaked through her body and tears welled up in her eyes yet again.

“I love her so much,” she murmured brokenly. “I’d die if something happened to her.”

“She’s all right, Faith,” Shane said softly. With a gentle grip he took her arm and drew her up from the bed and gathered her close against him, not bothering to wonder where all this tenderness was coming from. “We’ll make sure nothing happens to her. She’ll have a full-time babysitter from now on. And tomorrow you’re having a fence installed with a locked gate at the top of those steps.”

Faith looked up at him, her expression so bleak it nearly broke his heart. As the tears slipped past her dark lashes and spilled down her cheeks, she said, “I’ve never been so scared.”

“I know.”

He knew because the same fear had raked its talons through him, the force of it leaving him shaken. Not so long ago Shane had thought himself incapable of caring that deeply. He had believed the job had robbed him of that basic human quality, but he’d been wrong.

He ran a hand into Faith’s tangled curls and eased her head to his chest where she wept silently, her tears soaking into his shirt. She felt so small in his arms, so fragile, so in need of his protection.

“Come on, honey,” he murmured, leading her toward the door that connected her room to Lindy’s. “You