Her smile, though distant, was genuine. Like fresh water to look at. A massive lake of it.

  In Colorado, bears could come into neighborhoods, but it wouldn’t be as likely. And it made sense that they were looking for someplace isolated, though from what they’d been told by Smith that day, people had bunkers in the middle of big-city properties, too.

  “And he learned to shoot a gun in his own backyard.”

  Very likely more remote than city or neighborhood living.

  “Did he ever say how he got to school?”

  “He was homeschooled.”

  Isolation.

  Everything was leaning toward the Fitzgeralds living off the grid.

  Which was going to make finding them a lot more difficult.

  And also made him one of the best men for the job. He’d spent more time in foreign desert and mountainous land off the grid than in his home country in recent years.

  What he didn’t add was that Colorado had a load of state land—mountainous, nearly-impossible-to-access land—where someone could live an entire lifetime and never be seen.

  No point in giving her more than one mountain to climb at a time.

  “Tell me about Mark’s skills. What was he good at? What were his hobbies? What did he enjoy doing?”

  He had to ask the questions. And wanted to know the answers, too. Not just because he needed them. Who was this man who’d won Theresa’s love and life partner commitment? Who’d fathered two very special little girls.

  “He was a good swimmer. Insisted that the girls start taking lessons before they were even a year old. But he didn’t particularly like swimming. He liked food trucks and festivals. He liked going to the zoo, and he loved amusement parks. I always kind of thought that he was a kid having the childhood he’d missed, but he never said so.”

  She caught Ezra’s eye and didn’t look away. He couldn’t desert her, even as he knew he should. Eventually, she blinked. Looked down. Pulled at a string on a cloth thing set in the middle of the table with a bowl of fruit on it. And then said, “He was great around the house. Knew how to fix anything and everything.”

  Mark’s parents had trained him to be self-sufficient. Something Ezra hadn’t learned until after he’d accepted the fact that his father hadn’t been the man he’d thought him to be.

  “Oh, and he must have been pretty good at mountain climbing,” she said. “We never went, but one time when we vacationed at a little resort in the Rockies, Neve asked if we could go to the very top and sit in the clouds, and he’d told her that he’d climbed that mountain to the very top once, and there were no clouds there. It just looked like they were the same from down below.”

  And...damn.

  The man the Fitzgeralds had raised was proficient enough to climb a mountain. One that, considering his daughter thought it was high enough to be in the clouds, could likely take superior skills to scale.

  Unless... Did Ezra dare hope that the guy had just been spinning a yarn for the sake of his little girl?

  It was possible.

  But he couldn’t risk going with that more palatable theory.

  He couldn’t risk reaching out and touching the fingers that were unraveling a corner of the table’s center decor one thread at a time, either.

  But, God, how he wanted to.

  * * *

  Some seconds, Theresa felt like she was holding on by a thread. And then she’d have some question to answer, some task to do, and she came back into her strength again. At some point, was that ability to persevere going to run out?

  She couldn’t let it. Whatever it took, whatever she had to do, she would acquire the capability by any means to find her girls and bring them safely home.

  “I know this is hard, Theresa.” Ezra’s tone had softened again. She didn’t need or want his pity. Sympathy weakened her.

  But his personal attention... Life kindled inside her just a bit. Keeping her...present.

  Giving her impetus to sit forward and tend to his next question. “Anything else you need to know?”

  “I need anything you can think of.”

  “Jennifer and Eric risked discovery to stop and buy ice cream sandwiches. Probably because they thought the girls would be thrilled with them. Means they are trying to tend to the girls’ happiness.” It meant that they didn’t even know their granddaughters well enough to know their food preferences. It also meant they were planning to keep the twins someplace where they wouldn’t have access to purchasing ice cream sandwiches for a long time.

  Ezra’s hand covered hers on the table, stopping her fingers from moving. And she realized she’d been pulling at a string on a doily to the point of damaging the lacy work. “You can talk about it,” he said, giving no definition to his vagueness. “I know I’m not the most sensitive guy in the world, but I get that this has to be killing you and you’re stuck with me at the moment, and...if you need to talk...I can sit and listen. Not too many ways to screw that up.” He grinned with the last line, probably trying to lighten the moment—and kind of screwing it up, too.

  She wanted to smile back. Was tied too tightly to do so. She couldn’t show any loose threads. The slightest tug and she’d unravel.

  “I’m fine,” she told him. “This isn’t about me.” And she didn’t need him wasting any of his precious brain cells on worrying about her. She needed him coming up with a plan by morning that would get them closer to her children.

  “So, you’ve been shot at before today?” he asked.

  Of course not. And, yeah, she’d been shaken there for a bit. She was over it. “Technically, I wasn’t shot at. Only trees were shot at.” Thanks to his training and skills. “And the Jeep, of course,” she added, remembering the terrifying moments when she heard breaking glass so close by and a horrifying thud as bullets pierced the back of the seat just above her head.

  Her heart had cried out for Ezra as she’d braced for a wreck. And worse.

  But she was over that, too, she told herself, pushing memories, emotions away from conscious thought by focusing on other things.

  “It’s okay, you know. The aftershock. I’ve gotten many of my men through it...”

  His men were part of his team. She was...a blip in time. They could afford to lean on him. She couldn’t.

  “Believe me, I’m far more ripped up inside about my daughters than I am about a few flying bullets.” Truth.

  Ezra sat back, was studying her. “Those bullets could take your life.” The words were calm. Matter-of-fact. Just like she was being.

  And she answered without a second’s hesitation. “I’ll die if I have to to save my children...”

  “Death is the end, Theresa. If you’d been shot today, how would you then go on to save your kids?”

  Good point. She started to shake, as she had after they’d escaped from Smith. He leaned forward again, took her hand and held it on top of the table, sandwiched between his much larger ones. Warming her.

  “Your girls have already lost one parent,” he said quietly, and yet the words hit her core. “They need you to be waiting, healthy and ready, when they return.” He was right. And had understood something she had not. The girls didn’t just need to be found. They needed her to be present and ready for them.

  Ezra Colton might not be in her life for long, but his impact was huge. The man was one of those special beings who’d always hold a place of importance in her heart. He was leaving. She knew that. Just as she knew she needed him to go. But she would never forget him.

  “One way you prepare to be capable of providing whatever emotional sustenance and understanding they’re going to need once we find them is accessing the help offered you,” he continued, unaware that he’d just been on the stage of her heart, being awarded top honors. “Finding your daughters, bringing them safely back to you... This isn’t something you can do alone.”

  “So why do I feel like I have to?”

  “Because it’s easier than opening your emotions up to the help that’s being offered.” His statement was like a confession. She had the thought, sat there studying him, and he said, “I adored my father when I was a kid. And as I grew, I idolized him. I wanted to be just like him. To help so many people...and to rid the world of the criminals that hurt people.” He paused, pulled their hands down from the table to his knee, bringing them closer. Playing with her fingers, he continued, “When his duplicity first came to light, I didn’t believe it. I fought anyone who tried to speak evil of him—and at that point, pretty much everyone was talking about him. On the news and everywhere else. I would have died defending him. Even after he called me into his office alone, and told me what he’d done and why, I still didn’t believe him. I thought he was protecting someone...”

  Her heart aching, Theresa swallowed back tears. She could feel the grief of the young boy he’d been. Wanted so badly to make the pain go away.

  “Once I realized that he’d really done what everyone was saying he was doing...” He sat up, letting her hand drop. Leaned back in his chair. “I needed no one,” he finished. “Let’s just say it wasn’t a pretty last two years of high school. Not until I joined the army, became a part of a unit of people again and found my purpose. I found my way to being the man I’d thought my father was.”

  If there’d been any minute hope that Ezra Colton would ever decide to hang around Blue Larkspur, or change to a less dangerous career, that hope had just been dashed.

  If possible, her respect for him had grown. And her trust in his ability to find her daughters had expanded so far there was no room for doubt.

  “My whole point here is that I know what I’m talking about, Theresa, and I know how to minimize the fallout. This is what I do for a living—get soldiers prepared for battle and go into battle with them, yes—but a big part of my job is also teaching them how to cope with the aftershocks of shooting and being shot at or walking through a field that could explode under your foot at any given moment. If you don’t deal with the residual emotions, you might survive or even win the battle, but you won’t be good when the war is over.”

  He’d drawn the curtains across the window, mostly hiding the darkness that had fallen. A somewhat blinding light shone through a crack where the two sides of the drapes came together. The parking-lot security lights.

  She appreciated that they were there. Knew she couldn’t stare straight at the light or she’d be blinded.

  Much like Ezra. She was thankful for his presence, but she couldn’t get too close and be burned.

  “I’m not saying you have to speak to me,” he said then. “Obviously, the kind of coaching I know how to do is vastly different from a parent dealing with child abduction. I just... You haven’t made a single phone call to anyone since we’ve been together. Other than to get your duties covered at work. If you need some privacy to talk to someone, I’m fine to provide it.”

  She’d texted a few people, a neighbor, the day-camp coordinator, and the mother of the twins’ closest friend. Their horror and sympathy had only fed her own at a time when she couldn’t afford to be weak.

  “In a way, I’ve been going it on my own since I was two,” she told him then. “And with Mark’s illness ongoing as it had been, I learned how to carry the weight on my shoulders.” She was going to leave it there. Meant to. Looked over at him, held his gaze...and couldn’t keep it in. There was something he could do for her. Right then. Right there. Something that would instill some good feeling in the midst of all the debilitating pain.

  Something that would give her a few minutes of escape from the horror that had become her existence.

  In the morning, for the rest of her life, she’d probably regret opening her mouth. The morning seemed light-years away.

  And uncertain. For over a minute, he’d sat there maintaining their visual connection.

  “You know what would help?” She was doing it. That in itself was a relief.

  “What?” And then, with a softening in his expression, “Tell me.”

  Leaning forward slowly, she opened her mouth...and his phone rang.

  Chapter 16

  Ezra and Theresa turned at once to look at his phone vibrating against the table, the screen fully visible.

  Dominic.

  Reining in the chest-weighting disappointment that hit him, he turned from his chance to receive Theresa’s confidences and find out how to help her and picked up the cell.

  “Yeah.”

  “Am I on speaker?” Code for don’t put me there, which couldn’t be good.

  “No.”

  Something had happened and he sat unprepared. Seconds too late. Lacking in the knowledge he needed to help an incredible woman over the impossible hurdle in front of her.

  “We got the client list. It’s as thorough as you’d hoped, but the Fitzgeralds aren’t on it.”

  Steeling his face to show nothing—another talent he’d honed to perfection—he didn’t respond, either, waiting for his brother to lay it all out for him before giving Theresa any board from which to dive off.

  “He didn’t build their bunker. Doesn’t even know where it is. Four years ago, they bought a plumbing system from him to pump water into the bunker from an underground well. And two years before that, a pump-and-dump toilet with one hundred feet of piping to shoot waste one hundred feet from the bunker on a diagonal to the surface, where it apparently composts and fertilizes. We’ve got the paperwork for both, and the measurements of the diagonal, which tell us that the bunker is ten feet down from the surface. They paid cash for both, picked both up at Smith’s shop. He assumed by the questions they asked that they were doing the labor themselves.”

  Feeling Theresa’s gaze on him, and because there were some good points in the conversation, he nodded. “Sounds like they trenched it in,” he said, speaking of the bunker based on what Dom was describing about the plumbing designs he’d also seen.

  “Trenching’s good.” Theresa’s words drew his gaze to her. He left it there. Holding her up in whatever way he could. “Prevents cave-ins,” she told him.

  At the same time, Dom was saying, “He claimed self-defense on the shots fired. Said that you two acted odd by just getting up and leaving without a word, and he saw you go for your gun...”

  “He did not. My hand was on it, but it was stuffed in my jeans, under my shirt.”

  “No cameras to prove that. And all he’d need to do is convince police that he had reason to believe he saw a gun.”

  “That’s bull...” He finished a string of words Dom had heard from him before.

  “You were on his private property,” Dom continued. “Colorado law gives him the right to defend himself...”

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He got it.

  “So what now?”

  “We’ve got a specialist looking for underground wells starting around Benson and branching out three-sixty from there. And we’ve got the referral list. Doomsday preparers tend to be in close-knit groups. Hopefully one of them knows something...”

  “You think they’d turn on one of their own?”

  When the line went quiet, he knew Dom had hung up.

  His brother had told him what he could. And hadn’t hung around for Ezra to say something that Dom would have to warn him against.

  Theresa sat watching him, her features the most beautiful thing in the world as they reflected the woman glowing inside her. She was waiting.

  Not demanding.

  “We don’t have an address. Or bunker type.” He laid it out clearly. “What we do have is some building specifications. We know that the plan is for long-term underground living...”

  “And that it’s trenched,” she said, as though needing some encouragement to help her hold it together.

  “Six years ago they bought a pump-and-dump flushing toilet system. And then two years later, a plumbing system that taps into an underground well for water.”

  “They bought the toilet system the year the twins were born. You think they somehow knew? And have been planning this since then? Even before Mark got sick? I mean, they don’t have just a bunker. They’ve got an underground home,” she said, her lips pursed as she nodded. “I saw some pictures. They have actual flooring, not just dirt. And furnishings. Neve might convince Claire they’re on an adventure...”

  He had to give it to her. The woman knew how to make lemonade out of lemons.

  And he needed to get to work. “I’ve got enough specifics here, and with a topographic map, we’ll at least be able to pinpoint some possibilities... Generally, the pump and dumps go straight up or horizontal. I’m guessing the diagonal angle of theirs means that there’s rock face in the way. Which would most likely specify mountain terrain. And we want to stay within a couple of hours of Benson. Can’t be too far out with the Fitzgeralds making frequent trips to Blue Larkspur.”

  “They could have stayed in motels. It’s not like they chose to build to be close to Mark. They had no idea where he was.”

  “A simple assessors records search for his name could have shown them property owners in the state. And with probable dark-web access...”

  “But you said credit cards hadn’t shown any motel stays...”

  He had said that. They could have paid cash. Or used assumed names. But since they hadn’t been hiding their presence in Blue Larkspur, why would they do either? Most motels didn’t even allow check-in without a credit card to pay for any damage done to the room.

  “Okay, we’ll narrow our start to within sixty miles of Benson. Obviously, they shop here. The ammunitions guy knew to watch for us. And keep us out.”

  He texted Dom. He’d failed to relay that information and wanted his brother on it.

  Out of the text app and back to his search engine, he found a topographic map that allowed him to narrow down regions with specific geographic qualifications. No lake or stream nearby—the ground would be too vulnerable to flooding and caving. No underground utility lines, probably not a huge consideration out in the middle of nowhere. And probably not in a wooded area—trenching with trees would be a nightmare of roots. Mountain region...