Keeping Caroline Read online

  “Caroline…” Matt murmured, taking a step toward her. “I’m sorry I can’t give you what you want. Sorry I can’t be the man you want me to be.”

  His anguished apology lit her up like a short fuse. Shifting the little girl in her arms, she turned to face him at last.

  Confusion washed over his features as he saw the bundle in her arms for the first time. “What’s she doing here so late?”

  “She lives here.”

  His eyebrows drew together. His mouth opened, but no sound came out. The baby nuzzled against Caroline, whimpering.

  She knew this wasn’t the way to tell him about the precious gift he’d been given. Not in anger. But fury and soul-deep hurt drove her on.

  Without breaking eye contact with Matt, she raised the baby to her breast.

  “She’s our daughter.”

  Dear Reader,

  They say that March comes in like a lion, and we’ve got six fabulous books to help you start this month off with a bang. Ruth Langan’s popular series, THE LASSITER LAW, continues with Banning’s Woman. This time it’s the Banning sister, a freshman congresswoman, whose life is in danger. And to the rescue…handsome police officer Christopher Banning, who’s vowed to get Mary Bren out of a stalker’s clutches—and into his arms.

  ROMANCING THE CROWN continues with Marie Ferrarella’s The Disenchanted Duke, in which a handsome private investigator—with a strangely royal bearing—engages in a spirited battle with a beautiful bounty hunter to locate the missing crown prince. And in Linda Winstead Jones’s Capturing Cleo, a wary detective investigating a murder decides to close in on the prime suspect—the dead man’s sultry and seductive ex-wife—by pursuing her romantically. Only problem is, where does the investigation end and romance begin? Beverly Bird continues our LONE STAR COUNTRY CLUB series with In the Line of Fire, in which a policewoman investigating the country club explosion must team up with an ex-mobster who makes her pulse race in more ways than one. You won’t want to miss RaeAnne Thayne’s second book in her OUTLAW HARTES miniseries, Taming Jesse James, in which reformed bad-boy-turned-sheriff Jesse James Harte puts his life—not to mention his heart—on the line for lovely schoolteacher Sarah MacKenzie. And finally, in Keeping Caroline by Vickie Taylor, a tragedy pushes a man back toward the wife he’d left behind—and the child he never knew he had.

  Enjoy all of them! And don’t forget to come back next month when the excitement continues in Silhouette Intimate Moments.

  Yours,

  Leslie J. Wainger

  Executive Senior Editor

  Keeping Caroline

  VICKIE TAYLOR

  Books by Vickie Taylor

  Silhouette Intimate Moments

  The Man Behind the Badge #916

  Virgin Without a Memory #965

  The Lawman’s Last Stand #1014

  The Renegade Steals a Lady #1104

  Keeping Caroline #1140

  VICKIE TAYLOR

  has always loved books—the way they look, the way they feel and most especially the way the stories inside them bring whole new worlds to life. She views her recent transition from reading to writing books as a natural extension of this longtime love. Vickie lives in Aubrey, Texas, a small town dubbed “The Heart of Horse Country,” where, in addition to writing romance novels, she raises American quarter horses and volunteers her time to help homeless and abandoned animals. Vickie loves to hear from readers. Write to her at: P.O. Box 633, Aubrey, TX 76277.

  This book is dedicated to Frank, for the wealth of information he’s provided on police procedures (the good stuff is his; the mistakes are all mine) and for making the world a better, safer place.

  And to my good friends Cathy, Linda and Jennifer, for their constant spirit, enthusiasm and encouragement.

  Thanks, girls!

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Prologue

  “I wanna talk to my wife. You get her here, or I’m gonna kill the kids. You there, cop? You listening?”

  Damn. Matt Burkett paced helplessly, cursing again as he banged his knee on the postage-stamp-size table in the four-by-four cubicle allocated to the primary negotiator. Double damn. The Port Kingston, Texas, police department had laid out fifty-thousand good dollars renovating this old RV into a state-of-the-art Mobile Command Center, and there wasn’t even room to pace decently.

  Downing an antacid with a swig of warm Diet Coke, he adjusted the microphone on his headset so he could speak. This Hostage Taker had been barricaded in the ex-wife’s house with their two kids going on fourteen hours now. Every time Matt got him halfway calmed down, the man went off again for no reason, regular as a friggin’ cuckoo clock.

  One of these times Matt wasn’t going to be able to pull him back.

  “I’m here, James. I told you I’m not going anywhere until we work this out. And I’m listening.”

  “I wanna talk to my wife!” The voice on the other end of the phone rose to a disturbing tone of shrill. From the series of dull thuds he was hearing, Matt guessed the H.T. was kicking the walls again. Punching doors. “Get the bitch here. Now!”

  Little Jasmine’s terrified cries pierced the static in Matt’s ear. His stomach lurched. If he’d eaten anything in the last fourteen hours, he might have lost it then. “You think killing your kids is going to make you feel better, James?”

  “If I can’t have them, at least that bitch won’t have them, either.”

  Matt rolled his shoulders, willing himself to relax. Let the H.T. scream, tremble, sweat all he wanted. It was the negotiator’s job to stay calm. Steady. And Matt was the best at containing the turmoil around him, inside him. “You don’t want your ex-wife to have the kids?”

  “She won’t let me see them, man. She cut me off. Got a court order.”

  Matt validated the man’s feelings, as he’d been trained. “It’s important to you to see your kids.”

  “’Course it’s important. She’s got them. I ain’t got nothing.”

  “It’s lonely without your family, huh?”

  The H.T. muttered something unintelligible, then swallowed audibly. “It’s like livin’ in limbo, man. An livin’ in limbo ain’t really living at all.” The H.T. was sobbing now. “You don’t know. You just don’t know.”

  The hell he didn’t. Matt knew enough about limbo to teach a graduate course. “Maybe I do.”

  “You got a family?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “What happened? Some bitch leave you, too?”

  Matt gave up pacing and sat on the bench seat beneath the window. “Something like that.”

  He pried up the shutters on the window. Down the block the H.T.’s house sat quiet. Almost peaceful-looking.

  “She take your kids?”

  He let the shutters fall back in place. “No. That isn’t it.”

  Caroline hadn’t taken his son. God had.

  Matt propped his elbows on his knees and dropped his head into his hands. “Death is awfully final, you know James?”

  Were the kids hearing this conversation? Were they scared?

  Sure they were. Hampton was using the speakerphone in his ex-wife’s home office. The kids could hear every word, just as Matt could hear their frightened whimpers. They knew the score—and the stakes of the game.

  Hampton sniffed. “No more
final than what she’s done. Moved half across the country, where we can’t even try to work things out. You know what that does to a man?”

  “It’s tough.”

  The H.T. sniffed, mollified. “Your wife run off on you, too?”

  Matt shrugged, knowing Hampton couldn’t see him. Caroline hadn’t so much run off as he’d driven her away. “She moved back home. She’s got a little farm just outside a small town a few hours west of here. Sweet Gum. Ever heard of it?”

  “Naw, naw. I’m from Iowa, remember?”

  “I remember.” Even if he hadn’t, the dossier the intel officers had already put together on Hampton would have reminded him.

  “At least she’s close enough you can go see her. Talk to her. You should go talk to her, man.”

  “Yeah, maybe I will,” Matt said noncommittally. “After all this is over.”

  “My wife don’t want to talk to me. She took my kids away.” The H.T.’s sniffing grew more ragged. “Took them where I can’t see them again, ever. I just couldn’t let that happen, you know?”

  Matt knew. He would do anything to see his son again. Anything. Squeezing his eyes shut, he pushed Brad’s image from his mind. More than miles separated him from his son.

  “I just wanna ask her why she did it,” Hampton continued. His sniffles broke down into sobs. “Please, can I just talk to my wife.”

  Matt opened his eyes. “That’s not so easy, you know? There are regulations—”

  “The hell with regulations!” The H.T. let out a high-pitched groan, like wrenching metal. “Get the bitch here now!”

  Jasmine wailed—a pitiful, keening cry.

  “Shut up! Shut up, Jazzie.”

  The more the H.T. yelled, the louder the girl cried. The older brother shouted in the background.

  “James? Talk to me, man! Come on, I want to help you.”

  No answer. Matt’s gaze landed hard on the hostages’s pictures pinned on the negotiation room wall. The girl, Jasmine, eight years old and her brother, James Junior, sixteen.

  Just a few years older than Brad would have been now, if he’d lived.

  Matt severed the thought in one brutal mental swipe. He didn’t have time for personal baggage right now. If he didn’t get this H.T. out soon, the guy was going to hurt those kids. When he did, there wouldn’t be any more negotiating. The tactical team would take over. All hell would break loose. Who knew who would get caught in the cross fire.

  Matt couldn’t let that happen.

  “James, I got an idea. An idea how you can talk to your wife.”

  “Send her in here.”

  “She’s not on scene,” he lied. “But I got an idea how you can talk to her. Let me run it by command and see if we can set it up, all right?”

  “You’re stalling again!”

  “These things take time, James. There’s logistics. Give me a few minutes to set something up.”

  “Five minutes,” the H.T. yelled into his ear. “That’s it.”

  “Might take a little longer, but I’ll try. You’re going to wait for me, right? Stay right there and do not do anything until you hear back from me?”

  Three choppy breaths sawed across the line. “I’ll wait.”

  Matt pointed at his backup negotiator, indicating Todd Thurman should stay on the line, stall.

  Throwing his own headset aside, Matt headed for the door. The commander met him in the intelligence area, where two uniformed officers manned computers, gathering all the data there was to be had on one James Hampton.

  “What the hell are you doing, Burkett, promising him he can talk to his wife?” his captain accused without preamble.

  “He’s dug in, Cap. No other way to get him out.”

  “You know better than to bring in a third party. Especially an ex-wife. She’s liable to push him right over the edge.”

  “I can make it work.”

  “No way.”

  Matt turned to the officer decked out in black fatigues behind the captain. “What’s the tactical situation?”

  The tactical liaison shrugged. “There isn’t one. He’s holed up in a back room with the hostages. No windows, only one access—down a long, narrow hall.”

  Matt stared hard at his captain, the on-scene commander. He didn’t have to state the futility of sending a tactical team into a setup like that.

  Castro, one of the intelligence officers, swiveled around in his chair. “We’ve located the H.T.’s doctor from Iowa. Medical records don’t look good. Man’s got an anger management problem. His shrink says he could definitely go through with it.”

  “Hell,” the captain muttered.

  “He got a history of family violence?” Matt asked.

  Castro turned back to his computer and tapped a few keys. “He’s slapped the wife around a few times.”

  “Anything on the kids?”

  Castro leaned closer to his screen. “Nope. Just the wife.”

  Matt nodded. “Good. I can use that. He doesn’t really want to hurt those kids.”

  The captain pinched the bridge of his nose. “All right, what’s this idea of yours?”

  “We get the wife on video. We can rehearse her. Keep it short and control every word, every expression. Send in a tape.”

  “What’ll that do, besides maybe set him off like a roman candle?”

  “I can trade the tape for one of the kids.”

  “Still leaves him with a hostage.”

  “One less than he had.”

  The captain’s frown said he wasn’t buying it. Matt couldn’t blame him. But this H.T. was dangerously close to flaming out already, and as it stood, they had no alternatives if that happened.

  Matt looked at Castro. “How many VCRs in the house?”

  The intelligence officer reached for a phone. After a brief conversation, he looked up, grim. “One. In the front room.”

  Matt glanced at the house on the overhead video monitor. The front room had lots of nice big windows for the snipers. And the blinds were open in all of them.

  His stomach did a neat tuck-and-roll.

  Sometimes it was necessary for the negotiator to set up the tactical solution, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. He’d been working crisis scenes for ten years and never lost a hostage—or a hostage taker—yet. He didn’t plan to start today.

  “Do it,” the captain said, then nodded at the tactical liaison. “Tell your team to get ready.”

  “Cap.” Matt spoke up before the tactical officer exited. “If I get the kids out, we negotiate the H.T. as long as it takes, right? Give him a chance to end this the right way.”

  “You want this son of a bitch out in one piece, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.” He always formed some sort of bond with his H.T.s, but the connection with James Hampton was especially strong. Matt saw too much of his own life in the man’s situation. Heard his own frustration in the man’s words.

  “The man’s a wife-beater.”

  “Last I heard, we don’t shoot people for that.”

  Sighing, the captain shook his head. “You get those kids out, you can talk to him till Christmas for all I care. He goes off on them, though—” He nodded at the tactical officer. “Brooks takes over.” Then to Matt he said, “We’ll have the tape in ten.”

  Back in the negotiator’s room, Matt pulled on his headset and sat down. With a deep breath, he signaled his backup that he had control now. “All right, James. We got your wife. Here’s what we’re going to do.” He explained how they would send a videotape to the front door via robot.

  “There’s just one thing,” Matt added nonchalantly. “We’re going to need something from you in return.”

  “What the—?”

  “You’re going to have to give us one of the kids.”

  The H.T.’s breathing shifted to a faster gear.

  “Come on, James. I’m trying to help you. Work with me.”

  James hiccuped, and Matt knew the crying had started again. Hang in there, man.
<
br />   “It’s a trick.”

  “No trick. Just a trade. Send out one of the kids, and you get the tape. You want to see what your wife says, don’t you?”

  The H.T. whimpered. Matt let him think.

  “All…all right.”

  “Good, James. Great. We’re setting up the robot now.”

  Giving him the thumbs-up, Todd Thurman switched the phone to mute. “You’re one cool dawg, Burkett. You got him.”

  Matt sat back, his heart kicking painfully. He wasn’t so sure he had anyone.

  His skin prickled with nervous sweat. He had to up the stakes now, while he was still in the game. He cleared his throat and motioned for Thurman to open the microphone again. “Which kid are you going to send out, James?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  The video monitor in the corner of the room showed the robot rolling up the front walk. About twenty feet out, the cop at the controls stopped the radio-controlled ’bot, waiting for their payoff.

  “Which one do you love the most? Jasmine—Jazzie? Or James Junior? Your only son, or your little girl? Which one deserves to live? You choose.”

  Thurman slapped the mute button on the phone controls. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Getting the kids out of there. Both of them.”

  “You’re gonna lose him.”

  “I’m not going to lose anyone,” Matt exploded. “Now turn the damn telephone back on.”

  His blood screaming in his veins, Matt waited until the light blinked green. “James, you still there?”

  “I—I can’t do it. I can’t decide.”

  “One of them has to go.” Matt closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. His throat felt as though it had been scraped raw. His head felt as if it was going to explode. “You have to choose. Which one lives, which one stays, and maybe dies?”