For the Sake of Their Son (The Alpha Brotherhood #5)
Author: Catherine Mann

One

Elliot Starc had faced danger his whole life. First at the hands of his heavy-fisted father. Later as a Formula One race car driver who used his world travels to feed information to Interpol.

But he’d never expected to be kidnapped. Especially not in the middle of his best friend’s bachelor party.

Mad as hell, Elliot struggled back to consciousness, only to realize his wrists were cuffed. Numb. He struggled against the restraints while trying to get his bearings, but his brain was still disoriented. Last he remembered, he’d been in Atlanta, Georgia, at a bachelor party and now he was cuffed and blindfolded, for God’s sake. What the hell? He only knew that he was in the back of a vehicle that smelled of leather and luxury. Noise offered him little to go on. Just the purr of a finely tuned engine. The pop of an opening soda can. A low hum of music so faint it must be on a headset.

“He’s awake,” a deep voice whispered softly, too softly to be identified.

“Damn it,” another voice hissed.

“Hey,” Elliot shouted, except it wasn’t a shout. More of a hoarse croak. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Whatever the hell is going on here, we can talk ransom—”

A long buzz sounded. Unmistakable. The closing of a privacy window. Then silence. Solitude, no chance of shouting jack to anyone in this…

A limo, perhaps? Who kidnapped someone using a limousine?

Once they stopped, he would be ready, though. The second he could see, he wouldn’t even need his hands. He was trained in seven different forms of self-defense. He could use his feet, his shoulders and his body weight.

He would be damned before he let himself ever be helpless in a fight.

They’d pulled off an interstate at least twenty minutes ago, driving into the country as best he could tell. He had no way of judging north, south or west. He could be anywhere from Florida to Mississippi to South Carolina, and God knows he had enemies in every part of the world from his work with Interpol and his triumphs over competitors in the racing world.

And he had plenty of pissed-off ex-girlfriends…. He winced at the thought of females and Carolina so close together. Home. Too many memories. Bad ones—with just a single bright spot in the form of Lucy Ann Joyner, but he’d wrecked even that.

Crap.

Back to the present. Sunlight was just beginning to filter through the blindfold, sparking behind his eyes like shards of glinting glass.

One thing was certain. This car had good shock absorbers. Otherwise the rutted road they were traveling would have rattled his teeth.

Although his teeth were clenched mighty damn tight right now.

Even now, he still couldn’t figure out how he’d been blindsided near the end of Rowan Boothe’s bachelor party in an Atlanta casino. Elliot had ducked into the back to find a vintage Scotch. Before he could wrap his hand around the neck of the bottle, someone had knocked him out.

If only he knew the motive for his kidnapping. Was someone after his money? Or had someone uncovered his secret dealings with Interpol? If so, did they plan to exploit that connection?

He’d lived his life to the fullest, determined to do better than his wrong-side-of-the-tracks upbringing. He only had one regret: how his lifelong friendship with Lucy Ann had crashed and burned more fiercely than when he’d been sideswiped at the Australian Grand Prix last year—

The car jerked to a halt. He braced his feet to keep from rolling off onto the floor. He forced himself to stay relaxed so his abductors would think he was still asleep.

His muscles tensed for action, eager for the opportunity to confront his adversaries. Ready to pay back. He was trained from his work with Interpol, with lightning-fast instincts honed in his racing career. He wouldn’t go down without a fight.

Since he’d left his dirt-poor roots behind, he’d been beating the odds. He’d dodged juvie by landing in a military reform school where he’d connected with a lifelong group of friends. Misfits like himself who disdained rules while living by a strict code of justice. They’d grown up to take different life paths, but stayed connected through their friendship and freelance work for Interpol. Not that they’d been much help to him while someone was nabbing him a few feet away from the bachelor party they were all attending.

The car door opened and someone leaned over him. Something tugged at the back of his brain, a sense that he should know this person. He scrambled to untangle the mystery before it was too late.

His blindfold was tugged up and off, and he took in the inside of a black limo, just as he’d suspected. His abductors, however, were a total surprise.

“Hello, Elliot, my man,” said his old high school pal Malcolm Douglas, who’d asked him to fetch that bottle of Scotch back at the bachelor party. “Waking up okay?”

Conrad Hughes—another traitorous bastard friend—patted his face. “You look plenty awake to me.”

Elliot bit back a curse. He’d been kidnapped by his own comrades from the bachelor party. “Somebody want to tell me what’s going on here?”

He eyed Conrad and Malcolm, both of whom had been living it up with him at the casino well past midnight. Morning sunshine streamed over them, oak trees sprawling behind them. The scent of Carolina jasmine carried on the breeze. Why were they taking him on this strange road trip?

“Well?” he pressed again when neither of them answered. “What the hell are you two up to?” he asked, his anger barely contained. He wanted to kick their asses. “I hope you have a good reason for taking me out to the middle of nowhere.”

Conrad clapped him on the back. “You’ll see soon enough.”

Elliot angled out of the car, hard as hell with his hands cuffed in front of him. His loafers hit the dirt road, rocks and dust shifting under his feet as he stood in the middle of nowhere in a dense forest of pines and oaks. “You’ll tell me now or I’ll beat the crap out of both of you.”

Malcolm lounged against the side of the black stretch limo. “Good luck trying with your hands cuffed. Keep talking like that and we’ll hang on to the key for a good long while.”

“Ha—funny—not.” Elliot ground his teeth in frustration. “Isn’t it supposed to be the groom who gets pranked?”

Conrad grinned. “Oh, don’t worry. Rowan should be waking up and finding his new tattoo right about now.”

Extending his cuffed wrists, Elliot asked, “And the reason for this? I’m not the one getting married.”

Ever.

Malcolm pushed away, jerking his head to the side, gesturing toward the path leading into the dense cluster of more pine trees with an occasional magnolia reaching for the sun. “Instead of telling you why, we’ll just let you look. Walk with us.”