Special Forces Father - By Mallory Kane Page 0,54

to kick him out. If he’d stood up to her and forced her to listen to Dawson’s plan, the kidnapper would never have found her alone.

He flexed his right fist and eyed the wall next to the front door, but he stopped himself. He was reminded of something that Kate had told him, long before he joined the army’s Special Forces division.

You don’t have to give in to the anger, Travis. It is not stronger than you are.

He’d always given her hell for psychoanalyzing him back in college, but now he knew she was right. It had taken him a long time and a lot of specialized training to understand that anger was not only wasted energy, but wasted effect, as well. He had to look at this situation rationally. Kate had been taken by the same kidnapper who held their son. He needed to talk to Dawson and get the rescue operation started. For a few moments, he carefully studied the living room, searching for clues to where the kidnapper had taken her, but found nothing. As he headed for the door, he spotted Max’s wooden toy car on the floor next to the couch. Kate had told him the car was Max’s favorite. Travis picked it up and put it in his pocket.

* * *

FROM THE MOMENT the man had shoved her into the backseat of his car, Kate had been too sleepy to pay attention to anything around her. It seemed to her they’d driven a long way. But she kept drifting in and out of sleep, so she couldn’t be sure. At one point she’d roused enough to push herself to a sitting position so she could see out of the windows, but the vehicle’s backseat windows had been covered with dark plastic. She tried to look out the windshield, but the brightness of the sun forced her eyes closed and once she closed them, she drifted back to sleep.

Something different in the rhythm of her sleep woke her. She opened her eyes and remembered she was in the kidnapper’s car. She had no sense of how much time had passed. “Where are we?” she asked, but the man didn’t pay any attention to her. He killed the engine, got out of the car and opened the driver’s side rear door.

“Let’s go,” he said impatiently.

“Where are we?” she repeated.

The man shook his head. “You’re mumbling, Doc. I got no idea what you said. Time to get you into the house and into bed, so you can sleep off that sedative. Come on.” He wrapped his thick fingers around her upper arm and pulled.

“Ow,” she whined. “That hurts.” She leaned toward him, trying to take the pressure off her arm. Her eyes were blurry and so was her head. “I need water,” she said. “My mouth is so dry.”

“Come on, Doc. Try to walk and stop mumbling. I think it’s going to be about four or five hours before you can speak clearly. Meanwhile, you need to sleep. They told me the damn pill would last a long time, but I didn’t know they meant hours.” He snaked an arm around her and half carried her toward an old, rusted and peeling mobile home, the kind that could be towed behind a truck.

Squinting, she saw that its far end had been backed into the thick woods and underbrush that surrounded the small trailer park. Her hazy brain couldn’t figure out why. If it was supposed to be hidden, it wasn’t.

Once she was up the metal steps and at the door, he let go of her. She did her best to stay upright. But when she lifted her head, everything started spinning dizzily and she felt queasy and faint. He opened the door and shoved her inside.

Kate’s feet felt too heavy to lift, but with the man behind her pushing, she managed to stay on her feet inside the house. But when he crowded in behind her, she stumbled and almost fell face-first into the orange carpeting.

“Get up!” he growled, then louder, “Shirley? Where are you? Get out here.”

Shirley peeked out from a room off the living room through a flimsy aluminum door. “Bent, hush!” she hissed. “Oh,” she said when she saw Kate. “You must be Dr. Chalmet.”

Kate met her gaze. “Where’s my son?” she asked, concentrating on speaking clearly to her.

Shirley poked a thumb backward, in the direction of the tiny bedroom.

Kate tried to move in that direction, but the kidnapper, Bent—or whatever the woman had