Free In the Enemy's Arms by Marilyn Pappano

damn near good enough to—
    Deliberately he blocked the thought. Cate, he reminded himself. The last woman in the world he was interested in. The last female in the universe he would get involved with.
    He held the tablet where she could see the screen, too. “My buddy came through.”
    Twenty-two names scrolled down the screen. The youngest had been five at the time of adoption, the oldest eleven. Their alleged new homes were mostly clustered in the South, with six or eight scattered across Texas, Arizona and California.
    Twenty-two girls who’d already been orphaned or abandoned, who’d already lived through too much hardship. Twenty-two girls who could possibly be living a normal life…or facing anything from slavery to sexual exploitation to death.
    “All Susanna ever wanted to do was help girls like these. It was her dream. Her calling.” He felt Cate’s glance—so close; how could he not?—but he didn’t look at her. He couldn’t take his gaze from the names. “She just needed money, and the Wallaces had so much of it to give. She never imagined… I never imagined…”
    Cate shook off the heavy silence that had settled over them. “Evil often hides behind good deeds. The Wallaces will pay for what they’ve done, and the girls… We’ll find the girls. We’ll make it right.”
    Then he did gaze at her. She wore an expression of fierce determination, the same look he remembered from the night before the wedding, when he’d told her she didn’t deserve Trent. He loves me, she’d said icily. We’ll make it work.
    They hadn’t. Trent had been no more interested in marriage than Justin had been. At the bachelor party, he had admitted as much, but it had been easier to go through with it than to disappoint his bride and his parents or upset all the elaborate plans. Back then, going along had always been easier for Trent, dealing with the fallout later. He figured there was no problem that wouldn’t get better with time. Arguments would be forgotten, tempers would fade, a wife would undergo a total personality change and stop minding his absences…
    Justin grimaced. Cate really had deserved better.
    * * *
    “Okay.” Cate breathed deeply, sweet oxygen laced with expensive aftershave filling her lungs, then repeated, “Okay. We can’t just sit here and wait for the Wallaces to call or for Trent’s and Susanna’s bodies to wash up on the beach somewhere.” The thought made her shudder and a knot formed in her gut, but she doggedly went on. “We can at least try to find out what happened to these girls.”
    Justin glanced at her. “You want to go back to the States and…what? Ring some doorbells?”
    “Why not? Let’s look at what we know. One: Susanna asks questions about the adoption agency’s policies and gets the brush-off. Two: she steals computer files regarding the agency and only the agency, right?”
    He nodded.
    “Three: she and Trent go missing. Four: people shoot at you and me just for being at the shelter. Five: you get a call threatening both of us, accompanied by a photo of the last person who pissed off the brothers.” She gazed at the fingers she was holding in the air. Five small fingers, five big points. “If the adoptions were all legitimate, if they’re just trying to recover stolen files, do you think they’d really use tactics like kidnapping, intimidation and threats of murder?”
    Earlier he’d been trying to convince her the Wallaces were capable of murder, she reflected. It seemed he’d succeeded. It was the photo. She didn’t need to see it. Just the look on Justin’s face had been more than enough. If it had persuaded him the men were dead serious, she’d take his word for it.
    “Okay. Where do we want to go?” He studied the database. “The best flight home would probably be Atlanta, and that would put us within reasonable driving distance of one, two, three…six girls.”
    “Then let’s go to Atlanta.”
    He shifted the tablet, then began a search