Page 15 of The SEALs' Single Mom Baby Surprise

My small crew is opening the delivery bay as we prepare to offload a hundred and five boxes and crates. I only have a few minutes to prepare them for the changes we need to make on this one. Given all of the mistakes that have been uncovered, we’re going to have to open every box to be sure they’re packed with what they say they’re packed with.

It’s going to take a while, but it’s necessary.

I shake off the way Rhett, Cole, and Shepard watch me from the background and take control of what’s in front of me.

8

JACK

After reviewing the systems logs and network traffic, I trace the IP and track the digital footprint. Everything leads to dead ends.

But the man from the video, Caspian Vorn… I know that guy—his face, but under a different name—and he’s suspected of working with some nasty people. Trafficker level people. The kind who will have no problem killing an innocent young woman and leaving a six-year-old motherless.

Worse, they wouldn’t think twice about killing the girl, too, if they couldn’t get to Sloane alone.

We need to watch her, even if she doesn’t want us to. And I don’t really want to go behind her back to do so.

Vorn isn’t giving me many options, though. Sloane will have to deal with us. It’s not safe for her otherwise.

So, I do something else she’ll likely hate me for. I dig into her life. The barrage of texts she got between 10:15 and 10:30 spiked my interest. According to Hastings, she didn’t even check them.

What connection did that have with the warning Boone gave us about her?

I check her personnel file again. Her address has recently been changed. She signed a new lease four days ago, got a new bank account three days ago, a new license plate and car registration in-progress.

Her old address is in someone else’s name. An Alistair Fitzwilliam. Her ex, presumably.

I don’t see a simple breakup, as hard as those can be with any number of variables. The way Sloane is reacting screams of more.

This isn’t the broken heart Hastings coddled for the last year after he came back from a month-long deployment to find his wife with another woman. It looks different.

She’s fighting for control, something she’s comfortable with at work but not outside of it. That’s more than obvious from her reaction to being protected. The termbabysittingoffers a power dynamic, and it’s not simply our age or positions.

It’s whatever she had to make a clean break from. Whatever sent her to a new bank account with little money in it, even though her bank records show no credit cards and nothing in her name beyond the new account.

So, where did all of her money go?

Was she paying the bills in her ex’s name? Would make sense with where she’s leased a temporary one-bedroom apartment. It’s not a good side of town, but the rent is low and the leases are short.

It only leaves her more vulnerable. Especially with the open apartments in her building.

Fuck, Sloane.

If I could gain that from a few public searches, what has this Caspian Vorn dug up on her?

My fingers itch to keep digging, but she has no active social media profiles. At least not for the last six years. They’ve been deactivated, but the remnants I find show her so very young and pregnant in front of the local college campus, with an infant in the hospital… and then, nothing.

What happened to that proud momma, the one clearly shown to us this morning?

I refrain from looking into her life before then, her childhood, and what left her alone in that hospital room with Reese Moxie Montgomery. I’m sure what I’ve already uncovered will more than bite me in the ass.

I don’t know this Alistair Fitzwilliam, but I don’t like him and whatever he’s done to Sloane. And I sure as shit know I’ll find something if I look into him.

Abandoning her desk, I slip into the stacks alongside Hastings and Cole, watching her in her element.

God, it’s sexy. She’s in charge. No-nonsense. Comfortable with ordering people around, making them slow down and open up boxes and crates even as they grumble at her.

She waves them off, literally, like they’re bugs buzzing annoyingly in her ears.

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