But this … He never should have let Terry tempt him into getting involved. He wouldn’t have, except he needed the money. And he’d justified it by convincing himself that he wouldn’t be responsible for whatever happened to Evelyn Talbot. If he didn’t nab her, for that kind of money someone else would. It was the guy footing the bill who was to blame.

If he’d been told she was pregnant, however, if he’d seen it mentioned in any of the things he’d read about her online, he wouldn’t have done it, especially if he’d known she was so far along.

Shit! What kind of man had his former cellmate and brother-in-law gotten him involved with? And what did he have in store for the woman who was now locked in the old cooler? Emmett hadn’t heard of Dr. Talbot until Terry had given him her name, but he’d learned quite a bit about her since—everything except that she was about to have a baby.

He tried telling himself that she’d wind up dead at some point, regardless. She was surrounded by men as evil as Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy, for God’s sake. Considering her choice of profession, she was asking for it.

That calmed him down a bit—until the feeling of her rounded stomach pressing into his arms as he grabbed her flashed through his mind again. What would his grandmother say if he was ever charged with the death of a pregnant woman? His “nana” was the one person in this world he loved. Lord knew she was the only one who’d ever stuck by him.

He wiped the sweat from his forehead and squinted at the clock, which still hung on the wall from when this building had been used to clean and process eggs. He needed to get some glasses, but, with effort, he could make out the time. He’d guarded Evelyn for only ten or eleven hours, but they were the longest ten or eleven hours of his life, and that included prison. He’d been worried the whole time that the stress of her situation—and the memories it had to evoke given what he’d read about her background—would put her into labor. He didn’t want her baby to come while he was in the picture.

What would he do if the baby did? He couldn’t call for help, not without giving himself away. Maybe there’d be no time to get help, anyway. And he didn’t know the first thing about childbirth, except that his mother had lost her life giving birth to him, which told him how dangerous it could be.

Stupid ass Terry! He should never have introduced his old cellmate to his sister.

Emmett pushed the tattered couch he’d bought from the local Goodwill store, along with a rickety old table he used for his laptop, farther out of the way and grunted as he forced himself to do another fifty push-ups. When could he get out of this place? What had happened to the phone call he’d been expecting?