Excerpt of Christmas in Cancun by KaLyn Cooper

Jillian had been ready to scream for the police when the man grabbed her baby. She’d read about airport kidnappings in foreign countries and how, if the parents didn’t pay up immediately, they’d sell the child. She didn’t have much money and no idea how to get the massive amounts she was sure a kidnapper would require. She couldn’t let him take her baby. No, she wouldn’t let him take Addi.

The dark evil thoughts that raced through her fatigued mind delayed understanding the fact that he’d called her baby girl by name, her nickname. Then he’d said he was Jack Girard.

Jack? No. This couldn’t be Jimmy’s brother Jack. He was a Navy SEAL. Every picture she’d seen of him, and there were several, he’d been in one uniform or another. Or he’d been in nothing but low-slung swim trunks and behind the wheel of a boat as a teenager. He’d been clean-cut with short hair, was close shaven and extremely good looking.

The man who held her daughter was a different man altogether.

Jack Girard wasn’t this long-haired, shaggy, sun- bleached-blond Adonis with bulging tanned muscles under a blue polo shirt with a sailboat logo emblazoned over an impressive chest. The man before her looked deadly on every level. His light blue eyes were hard as arctic ice with hints of green. Then she watched his whole face transform as he smiled at Addi and poked a finger into her baby’s belly. The green had overtaken the blue, and he looked like a loving father playing with his child. Her child.

Jillian couldn’t breathe.

“You ready to meet your hellion cousins, little princess?” His voice was playful, yet its low tones reverberated through Jillian, shaking parts of her soul that had been dormant for more than two years. Since her husband’s murder. Addi squirmed at his touch and giggled.

“Uh…I’ll take her,” Jillian managed to push out through her tightened throat as she grabbed for her child. When he turned his broad smile toward her, her world focused on his white teeth, all of them perfectly straight except for one eyetooth, which turned slightly.

It was Jimmy’s smile. Except Jimmy was dead.

Her knees went weak. Her vision blurred. No matter how hard she tried, her lungs refused to work. Indistinct sounds echoed in the tall room and overwhelmed every one of her senses. The world went white.

“Whoa.” Jack’s voice shot through the encroaching fog in her brain, and a strong arm snapped around her back. “Breathe, Jillian. You’re safe.”