Youâre just playing a part.
Despite everything, Tate could feel his body responding to Hannah. Responding to the intoxicating, sweet taste of her skin against his lips.
Dammit, get a grip, Colton.
Satisfied that he had performed as expected for whatever camera or cameras hidden in the room, Tate whispered the same message into Hannahâs ear that heâd told her yesterday.
âIâm here to rescue you,â he told her.
He couldnât allow his guard to go down, not even for a moment. âYou and the others,â he added. âBut this isnât going to be easy and Iâm going to need your help to pull it off.â
Hannah turned her head slowly to look at him. He could tell by the look in her eyes that heâd made a breakthrough.
She was finally beginning to believe him.
Her face haunted him.
Ever since heâd seen her on that DVD, the one that had been made to showcase the âselectionâ available for purchase by the members of the âdiscerningâ male audience viewing it, Detective Tate Colton had been equally fascinated and sick to his stomach.
Fascinated because Hannah Troyer, one of several young women displayed on the video, was at once hypnotically beautiful and so obviously innocent. And sick to his stomach because he knew what was going to happen to Hannah. Knew what was going to happen to all the innocent young women who appeared on the video. Each and every one of them was destined to become the object of some depraved pervertâs lecheryâas long as the right price was quoted and met.
Unless he and the FBI agents on his team got to those girls first.
Someone was kidnapping Amish girls and selling them to the highest bidder because in this jaded age of too much too soon, the idea of an untouched, pure young woman still held an almost addictive allure for some men.
In this case, the âsomeâ were exceptionally wealthy men because innocence had become a commodity that did not come cheap. Instead, it was bade and bargained for like the rare product it had become, only to be forever lost at the hands of depraved men who had no idea how to rightly value such a treasure.
Eyes on the screen, Tate went back over the DVD and played it forward again, watching the same small section heâd viewed before of the girl heâd seen while going undercover as a prospective buyer.
Watching her.
Gray-blue eyes, alabaster skin, hair like flame.
They called her Jade. But she was Hannah Troyer.
He knew her nameâher real name, only because Hannahâs brother, Caleb, was desperately searching for his younger sister. The search had created strange bedfellows because, just recently, Caleb had wound up becoming engaged to his sister, Emma, a Special Agent with the FBI. They were working together on a joint task force to find the missing girls. According to what his sister had said, she and Caleb were going to be married once this case was finally wrapped up.
That made it sound so easy, Tate thought cynically. A piece of cakeâand it wasnât.
There wasnât anything at all easy about this case. Not for the two dead girls theyâd already found. Not for the whole of the small Pennsylvania Amish communityâironically called Paradise Ridgeâwhich was holding its collective breath, waiting and praying for their own to be returned to them unharmed.
Tate had an uneasy feeling that wasnât possible. Even if they found all the other missing girls and they were still alive, they were no longer unharmed. Far greater than the physical scars they might have incurred were the emotional scars that had to run across their young, tender souls.
In this sex trafficking ring, the mostly faceless bastards who were abducting the young women were systematically destroying their innocence so that the girlsâall between the ages of 16 and 20âbore little to no resemblance to the sweet young women their families were frantically searching for.
âIâd like to gut each and every one of those bastards,â he muttered under his breath, finally shutting off the DVD player. The large screen heâd been watching went blank.
Emma, the only other person in the room with him, laughed shortly. There was no mirth in the sound. âYouâre not the only one who feels that way.â
As she spoke, she put her hand on Tateâs broad shoulder and was surprised by how rigid it felt. Well, maybe not so surprised, she silently amended. Tate, whoâd been the one to initially ask her to join his task force, took his work very seriously, but this had to be a new level of intensity, even for him.
âI think that if we ever find the people who kidnapped Hannah, Caleb would be tempted to temporarily renounce his pacifistic ways, just for the time it would take to pummel these worthless scum into the ground. But indulging in fantasies isnât going to help us rescue these girls,â Emma pointed out. âAnd we