Page 95 of Winter Vows

And there was still a tiny, albeit rapidly fading, part that hoped the dad made a clean getaway with his boy. That part made him work all the harder to find the two of them and get them home.

Armed with pictures of Bobby and Paul, along with the tag number and description of Paul’s car, plus the Yellow Pages’ listings of hotels and motels, he began making his way around town.

He started with the fancier places first, guessing that even in a situation like this Paul would want his creature comforts. From everything he’d learned from Kelsey, the man was seriously into status. Besides, exclusive, luxury hotels were famed for their discretion. They might be inclined to ask fewer questions of their guests as long as their credit cards had very high limits.

He strode into the lobby of the fifth hotel just as a man and a boy exited the coffee shop off the lobby. His pulse leapt. He crossed the lobby in quick strides, almost panicking when the elevator doors opened before he got there. But the elevator was going down, not up, and the pair waited for the next car.

Dylan edged closer, then took a good hard look. The boy had Bobby’s sun-streaked hair, but that’s where the similarities ended. The eye color didn’t match, the freckles that should have stood out across his nose weren’t there. The man regarded Dylan with an open, friendly smile, then turned away as the elevator came.

“You going up?” he asked, holding the door. Dylan shook his head. “No, sorry. There’s something I need to do first.”

He headed back to the desk. Here, as at the other hotels, the clerks shook their heads after looking over the pictures.

“Nope. Haven’t seen them,” the supervisor said. “If you want to wait a minute, I’ll compare the tag number to those on file.”

“How about letting me do that?” Dylan suggested, offering the man a fifty-dollar bill.

The man pushed it back with obvious regret. “Sorry. It’s all on computer, and I can’t let you back here.”

Dylan nodded. “I’ll grab a cup of coffee and come back.”

He ate a sandwich while he was at it, though five minutes later he couldn’t have said what it was. He kept thinking about the last few minutes he’d spent with Kelsey, about her refusal to trust him. He wasn’t sure why that had cut straight through him. He’d tried telling himself it was just because her silence could be keeping him and Justin from finding her kid, but it was more than that. It was personal.

After all, he thought, still vaguely disgruntled, he’d put aside his reservations about her and the whole sole-custody thing. He’d respected her feelings, listened to her, but when push came to shove, she wasn’t willing to return that same level of trust. Why? he wondered. Just because he was a man and her ex-husband had turned her off men? Or was it about him, some innate distrust of him specifically?

Or was it as simple as fear? Was whatever she was hiding so devastating that she felt she didn’t dare reveal it? What could be that bad?

He went over it and over it and couldn’t come up with a thing. What could a woman like Kelsey James, a brilliant doctor from all reports, have to hide? Or was it her ex’s secrets?

Damn, this was getting him nowhere. He went back to the desk where the supervisor told him he hadn’t been able to find a match for the tag number. Dylan gave him his card. “Call me if anything turns up, okay?”

“Absolutely. I have kids of my own. I can’t imagine what that mother must be feeling.”

“She’s terrified,” Dylan said succinctly.

“Well, I’ll keep my eyes open. You can count on that.”

Dylan nodded and set off for the next hotel on his list. He was running out of big, impersonal hotels. A few more and he’d be down to the moderately priced chains. There were a lot of them, scattered from one end of Dallas to the other with more in Fort Worth. Maybe he should just take a page out of Becky’s book, find a room for himself and settle down with a phone. He could call faster than he could visit. It was a less time-consuming form of legwork, even if it was less likely to put a dent in his restless energy.

He booked a room near the airport, ordered up a pot of coffee, then settled down at the desk. The first call he made wasn’t to a hotel on the list, but to Kelsey. Most clients didn’t get frequent updates, didn’t expect them, but this case was different and not just because she was a terror-stricken mom, either. It was because he had the unmistakable feeling that she was the kind of woman who could matter to him, a disconcerting discovery in the middle of a kidnapping investigation, especially when there was so much distrust between them.

“Hey, Kelsey,” he said when she snatched up the phone on the first ring.

“Dylan? Where are you?”

He tried not to sigh at the eagerness in her voice. It wasn’t for him. It was for news of Bobby. There was no point in lying to himself about that. “In Dallas, checking out the hotels.”

“Anything?”

“No. Sorry, darlin’. Anything turn up back there? Any calls from Paul?”

The question was greeted by silence. “Kelsey?”

“Oh, sorry. No. I was shaking my head, but I guess you couldn’t know that,” she said wryly. “I’m not thinking very clearly.”

“You’re excused.” He fell silent himself, aware that he had nothing more to say that she really wanted to hear and that they were tying up the line as well. “Listen, I’ll check in with you every so often. You hang in there, okay?”

“I’m doing the best I can. And, Dylan...”

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