HERO FOR HIRE.

Marie Ferrarella.

Chapter 1.

He saw the pain in her eyes the moment she walked into his office.

Another man not in his line of work would have noticed the young woman's slender figure, the honey-blond hair smartly done up in a variation of a French twist with just a few rebellious hairs out of place at her temples, or the cut of her clothes.

She was wearing a powder-blue, single-breasted jacket and skirt that most definitely hadn't come off some department-store rack fingered by the general public. This woman, with her hundred-dollar-an-ounce perfume that softly entered the room with her, was someone of taste and breeding who knew exactly what was becoming to her and who could easily afford it, no matter what the price.

All those things registered, but only on a secondary level. Because the pain in her eyes captured the bulk of Chad Andreini's attention and immediately expressed to him the fact that a life-and-death situation had brought her here.

He half rose in his chair, fragments of manners his mother had once tried to teach him before she wasn't able to teach him anything anymore surfacing automatically. Politeness, she had liked to say, never went out of style. He hoped, in the world his mother now inhabited, that it never did.

The woman entering his office seemed oblivious to the courtly gesture. It was apparent that she was fighting for composure as she moved toward him. She was employing that strange, disembodied gait that people find themselves unconsciously resorting to when their entire worlds are crumbling down around them and they can't understand why they are still drawing breath, still alive, when something very precious has been s.n.a.t.c.hed from them. Perhaps forever, though the thought was always far too horrible to contemplate.

She had that look about her.

He'd seen it before and would see it again, but it was nothing he would ever get used to.

Carrie, the secretary he and the others at ChildFinders, Inc. all used, had buzzed him half a minute earlier, telling him that a new client was here. It was his turn to try to pick up the pieces of this latest case and glue them into some semblance of a whole as he attempted to solve the puzzle. He knew nothing more about her than her name. Veronica Lancaster.

She looked like a Veronica, he thought now, silently taking measure of her. The woman's bearing was regal. Regal even in the time of a parent's worst nightmare.

At least, that was the facade.

But Chad knew how easily and quickly facades could crack and break apart, letting everything within spill out. Leaving only an empty vessel and a fading memory of composure in its wake.

Veronica Lancaster, for all her effort, looked close to breaking apart.

He liked to keep his distance. It helped keep his mind clear and focused on what was important. Right now, he felt like a spectator at a pending disaster. The feeling left him wanting to do something to prevent it. It was not only his job to do something about it, it was his calling.

"Please sit down, Mrs. Lancaster."

Veronica heard the gently worded instruction. The voice was deep, strong. It penetrated the constantly recurring fog about her brain, and she looked around the room, focusing for the first time. There was a chair right in front of his desk.

Veronica complied with the man's urging. It didn't occur to her not to.

Hands on the chair's arms, she lowered herself into it slowly, as if some part of her was afraid that any sudden movement might make her collapse into it.

Or collapse entirely.

Oh Casey... baby... how could this have happened? she thought.

Veronica felt moisture beginning to form at the corners of her eyes and she blinked as she drew air into her lungs. The silly thought came to her that if she filled herself completely with air this way, it would prevent anything from

spilling out that wasn't supposed to.

Like the wail of agony that scratched and clawed at her throat, threatening to burst out.

She couldn't break apart, she couldn't, she ordered herself silently. She had to hold herself together. Every second counted. Every moment she gave way to despair and the abject terror that was tightening around her heart was a moment she couldn't use, a moment that was taken away from rectifying this incredible, horrible wrong that had been done.

A moment that might mean the difference between Casey's coming home and not.

Taking another breath, she began, "My baby..."

No, he wasn't a baby. Casey hadn't been a baby for quite some time. He liked to draw himself up importantly and crisply informed her of that fact whenever she slipped and called him that.

I'm not your baby. Mama.

But he was. He would always be her baby. And someone had stolen her baby.

And her world.

"My son, Casey," she corrected herself with effort, "has been kidnapped."

Chad Andreini nodded his head slowly, encouragingly, as if what she had just said was a revelation and not the obvious reason anyone would come to the agency in the first place.

ChildFinders, Inc., specialized in recovering kidnapped children and in locating runaways. It had originally been established when Cade Townsend's own son, Darin, had been kidnapped. The agency had a record of success rivaled by none. Recovering kidnapped children was a cause very dear to Chad's own heart, having been one himself once. There had been no terror involved in his kidnapping, other than the lie that had been tendered to him as the truth-that his mother, younger brother and sister had all been killed in a car accident. No terror and no suspicion because the man telling the lie had been his own father. His father, who had abducted him from his home so cleverly that no one had suspected a thing.

It would probably have continued to remain a secret for a long time, instead of just two years had Chad not, in a fit of youthful rebellion, left his father's house and hitchhiked back to his old neighborhood. It had come in the wake of yet another argument with his father, and Chad had been determined to return to a time and place when life had been less traumatic for him.

The trauma had come, anyway. Seeing his mother, barely functioning in her grief over losing him, and his brother and sister alive had been a shock. But it paled in comparison to the fierce sting of betrayal he felt when he realized that the man he had placed at the center of his universe, had kidnapped him from life as he knew it and lied to him.

It was something he frequently buried in his mind, but never managed to quite get over, even after his father had been sent to prison.

Odd how things worked. That event in his faraway past had brought him to this place in time, sitting at this desk. Waiting to listen to this woman with the pain- filled green eyes.

Eyes that were fighting back tears.

In a fluid motion, Chad reached over to the small, state-of-the-art tape recorder beside his computer and pressed the record b.u.t.ton. The second he did, he saw apprehension bloom in her face.

Her eyes darted to the small sleek machine. "What are you doing?"

"Recording this meeting." Did she have something to hide? He studied her quietly, toying with half-formed notions.

Distaste entered her eyes as she continued looking at the recorder. Veronica Lancaster had grown up living a fish-bowl existence where microphones and cameras were periodically pointed at her for one reason or another through no fault of her own. Her great-great-grandfather had a.s.sured the family fortune through methods that had not always welcomed scrutiny in the light of day. It took three generations and sizable contributions to almost every major charity for that to be smoothed over.

Now all that was remembered was that there had been a couple named Lancaster on

the Mayflower, newly married young travelers who had made that first crossing to a brave new world almost four hundred years ago.

It seemed to Veronica that people were always interested in what the Lancasters were doing, treating them as if they were a cross between their next-door neighbors and visiting G.o.ds. Veronica had grown up hungering for privacy the way a person on a never-ending diet hungered for a taste of chocolate.

Knuckles taut and white, she struggled to keep her voice from quavering as she nodded at the tape recorder, "Is that really necessary?"

Chad made no effort to turn the machine off. His yes was silent.

"It helps us piece things together. You might forget things later," he told her, his voice low, quiet. "Sometimes things you've overlooked come back to you when you listen." The machine remained on, softly whirling. There were few rules at the agency, other than Don't Fail, but Cade insisted on having the first interview with a client recorded. Chad saw no reason to break that rule. But he saw that having the recorder on troubled his client. He understood the desire for privacy, too.