Zeke flashed her one of those slow, lopsided grins that never failed to make her bones melt. Then he said, “Natalie Westfield Patterson, will you make me the happiest man alive by agreeing to become my wife?”
Natalie’s throat went so tight that all she could do was nod. Zeke slipped the ring onto her left hand, then pushed to his feet and bent to kiss her soundly on the lips, no easy task with the guitar between their bodies. Everyone in the house applauded wildly. Then they began calling for the rest of the song, with both of them singing this time.
It was the most beautiful moment of Natalie’s life—and without question her most memorable performance, not because her delivery was perfect, but because every word came straight from her heart, and she had only to look into Zeke’s eyes to know that the words came straight from his, too. He really and truly wanted her, forever and for always.
At a tender age, Natalie had given up on dreams of true love and lasting happiness. For the last several years, she’d been grateful for a so-so life and had allowed herself to expect nothing more. Now, suddenly and inexplicably, all the wishes she’d made as a young girl were coming true. Right when she’d convinced herself that there was no such thing, she’d finally found a handsome cowboy prince and love to last a lifetime.
Earlier, Zeke had asked if she was prepared for all the upheaval their combined families would bring into their marriage. Natalie was ready for anything. She wanted a life with this man. He was surely heaven-sent. She believed with all her heart that God had looked down on her miserable, sad little life and decided to send her a hero.
When the song ended, Zeke kissed her again and left the stage to return to his seat. People in the audience began clapping their hands and stomping their feet, calling for Natalie to begin another number.
Feeling content and complete, Zeke sat back to enjoy the performance. Natalie was a brilliant flame in the red dress, so beautiful that half the men in the room couldn’t take their eyes off of her. Zeke didn’t mind. She loved him, and she’d just promised him forever by letting him slip that ring on her finger. Let them look and eat their hearts out. The lady was taken.
As always, she electrified the air before she ever opened her mouth to sing again. The dancers fell silent, and people at the tables went motionless. As though to build the suspense, she caressed the handle of the mike and smiled at the crowd. “This next number is one of my favorites because it can be so much fun. I hope you’ll keep the beat and sing along with me.”
She settled the guitar on her hip and strummed a few notes, her dimple flashing in an impish grin. Then, her voice a honeyed explosion of magic, she shouted, “Sweet Home Alabama!” The crowd cheered and whistled. The dancers began to stomp their feet and clap their hands to the music. Grinning at their enthusiasm, Zeke sang along, too, tapping his toe to keep time. Natalie. She was a born entertainer, blessed with an uncanny ability to captivate an audience.
Pretty soon, the vibration of stomping feet was making Zeke’s table jiggle. Watching Natalie, he suddenly got an eerie, inexplicable sense of impending disaster. His heart started to pound. His body tensed. The crazy thing was, he had no idea why. Perhaps it was a sixth sense kicking in to give him a vital few seconds of forewarning so he would be able to react quickly.
Then he saw it—a slight shift of the sound-system platform suspended above the stage.
He leaped to his feet with such speed and forward momentum that he sent his chair flying backward. Natalie turned her dark head to look at him, her brown eyes filling with question. Running toward her, Zeke thought, Oh, God—oh, God!
It was as if everything happened in slow motion. Zeke had to cover only a few feet—six to ten, at the most—but it seemed to take an eternity. He saw the platform above Natalie break completely loose from the ceiling on one side, plaster raining so slowly downward that it seemed to float like feathers. Natalie glanced up, her face contorting with terror. Her guitar slipped from her hip and fell in a wide arc, the neck grasped in only one of her slender hands. Beyond her, Frank Stephanopolis jumped up from the piano bench, turned, and tried to run.
Zeke saw it all unfolding before him like a scene in a movie. His boots impacted so hard with the floor with each running step that jolts went clear through his body. Trying to save herself, Natalie hunched her shoulders, threw up an arm to protect her head, and fled toward the edge of the stage. Not quickly enough. Zeke had no idea how much the speakers, amps, and framework weighed, but he instinctively knew that it was enough to kill anyone unlucky enough to be standing below.
Natalie. In a last, desperate attempt to reach her before the platform collapsed on the stage, Zeke pushed off with one foot in a flying leap. He caught Natalie around the waist, carrying her along with him as he hit the steps and rolled. He heard screams and shouts, followed by a deafening explosion of noise.
When Zeke and Natalie came to a stop, he rolled a final time to come out on top and hunched his body over hers to shield her from the falling debris. A two-by-four struck him across the back. A speaker fell beside them, one corner colliding sharply with his hip.
Then, almost as quickly as it happened, the noise stopped, and a hush fell over the room. It lasted only an instant before chaos erupted. Running footsteps, screams and curses. Zeke lifted himself off of Natalie, frantically running his hands over her arms and legs to check her for injuries.
“Are you all right?” he cried. “Are you hurt anywhere?”
“Fine, I’m fine. What happened?” Even as she asked the question, she looked toward the stage and screamed, a long, high-pitched wail, followed by, “Frank! Oh, dear God! Frank?”
Zeke sprang to his feet and ran toward the stage where Frank Stephanopolis lay buried under the demolished platform. Motionless. Even as Zeke tore at the boards and sections of blue plywood to reach the unconscious piano player, he yelled, “Someone call an ambulance!”
Natalie despised speckled linoleum. Zeke’s sports jacket draped over her shoulders, she sat on the edge of a chair in the ER waiting room, holding a vendor cup of cold coffee between her hands, wondering vaguely how her life had become such a nightmare. Frank Stephanopolis was in surgery. He had sustained a serious head injury, several broken bones, and a crushed pelvis. The doctor who’d come out to see them a while ago said that the piano was all that had saved Frank’s life. The platform had crashed onto the Baldwin first, sparing Frank’s body the full impact of all that weight.
Sharon Stephanopolis, Frank’s wife, sat huddled across from Natalie on an ugly green chair, her hair mussed, her eyelids smudged with mascara. She was a thin woman with a bony, angular face and dishwater-blond hair. Every once in a while, she glanced at her watch.
“It’s been so long,” she said again. “Surely he’s out of surgery by now.”
Natalie shook her head. “It’s been only forty minutes. Have faith, Sharon. He’s going to be all right. He has to be.”
Sharon looked at her imploringly. “Why does something like this happen to someone like my Frank? He’s such a good man. He’s never hurt anyone.”
Natalie felt as if a party balloon were being inflated inside her chest. Every time she looked into Sharon’s pain-filled eyes, the pressure increased. She wanted to say that the collapse hadn’t been intended for Frank, that it should have fallen on her. But if she so much as hinted that the collapse hadn’t been an accident, Sharon would ask a dozen questions.
Natalie had no answers yet. Zeke had driven her to the hospital to be with Frank, and then he’d returned to the club to see what had caused the platform to collapse. He’d called her on the cell a few minutes ago, his voice taut with worry, to tell her that the eyebolts anchoring the sound-system platform to the ceiling had been cut nearly in two. Not an accident. That was all Natalie could focus on. Zeke hadn’t overreacted the other night after the burglary at the club. Someone had indeed sneaked inside and hidden until Jake and Hank left, and the place had been booby-trapped, just as Zeke had suspected. He’d only guessed wrong about
the threat. Someone had spent all those hours compromising the eyebolts, expressly to make the platform fall during one of Natalie’s performances.
After first hearing the news, Natalie had been frightened. Now she just felt furious. Frank. He might die because of her. He had two little boys and a wonderful wife. Sharon was right; he had never harmed anyone so far as Natalie knew. And now he was in surgery, fighting for his life because someone wanted her dead. How could this happen to a nice man whose sole endeavor in life was to create beautiful music for the pleasure of others?
Why? The question circled endlessly in Natalie’s mind. She’d seen nothing significant inside Robert’s home. She had an insane urge to run outside the hospital and scream, “I don’t know anything, damn you! Leave me alone! Leave the people I love alone!” Worst of all, according to Zeke, the police were saying that the collapse had been an accident caused by too much weight on weakened supports. They believed the bolts had snapped under stress when people in the crowd had started stomping their feet. Zeke swore up and down that any idiot could see the bolts had been cut, but Monroe had just accused him of being an alarmist.
Natalie felt so tired. So awfully, horribly tired. The events of the last week were a jumble in her mind. Before ending their conversation, Zeke had made her promise not to leave the ER waiting room alone. It was madness. Someone was trying to kill her. Things like this didn’t happen in Crystal Falls, yet it was happening. Her grand reopening had culminated in a grand disaster because someone wanted her dead.
Natalie was staring into her coffee, pondering the absurdities of that when her mom and dad arrived. Naomi sat on one side of her, Pete on the other. Each of them curled an arm around her. Natalie looked at Sharon and felt awful. Frank’s wife was the one who needed family around her right now. Unfortunately, Sharon and Frank’s relatives lived clear down in Modesto.
A half hour later, the surgeon came out to speak with them. Still dressed for surgery with a blue cap on his head, he sat beside Sharon.
“He’s out of the woods now,” he began.
“Oh!” Sharon covered her face with her hands and started to weep. “Oh, thank God.”
The doctor patted her shoulder. “He was a very lucky man, Mrs. Stephanopolis. If he’d been standing under that platform, he wouldn’t be with us now. As it is, he’ll be a week in the hospital, recovering from the surgery, and convalescing at home for at least twelve weeks after that.”
He went on to describe the injuries that Frank had sustained in the accident, which Natalie knew hadn’t been an accident at all. She couldn’t focus on all the medical jargon. She was just relieved that Frank hadn’t lost his life.
“When can I see him?” Sharon asked.
“He’s in recovery now.” The doctor glanced at his watch. “An hour or two. The nurses will come get you when it’s okay for you to see him.”
Tears streaming, Sharon nodded and closed her eyes. “Thank you, Doctor. Thank you so much.”
Before the physician left, he turned to Natalie and her parents. “Are you relatives?”
Natalie’s tongue felt like a wad of cotton. She pried it loose from her teeth to say, “No, I’m Mr. Stephanopolis’s employer.” And the person who almost got him killed. “We’ll stay with Sharon until she can go in to be with him.”
The doctor nodded. “That’s good. The waiting is always easier with company.”
Three hours later when Natalie crawled into bed, her head was filled with jumbled recollections of Zeke’s parents and siblings, who had arrived at the hospital right after the doctor left. She smiled, albeit sadly, as she slipped under the covers, remembering Zeke’s prediction that their life together would never be calm with so many people on both sides of the family to cause upheaval. Natalie liked his mom and dad, and she had been relieved to see Jake and Hank, who had stuck to her like glue, accompanying her even when she walked up the hall to the ladies’ room. It had been almost as good as having Zeke at her side. Almost.
Zeke had called from the club several times to give her updates as he dealt with the police and then tried to clean up some of the mess while the employees closed. Natalie imagined him shifting debris, sweeping up plaster, taping frayed wires to prevent fire, pulling down the tills, and then making a night deposit at the bank, all necessary tasks that she’d been unable to do herself. She was deeply appreciative of the fact that he had stayed to take care of things. But at the same time, she ached to feel his arms around her.
The yearning and need she felt for him made her feel small and selfish. Sharon Stephanopolis was sitting beside her husband’s bed right now, praying for his life. Zeke would come to her soon, whole and healthy. He would slip under the blankets and gather her close in his arms. She’d be able to touch him—be able to feel his hands, so big and gentle, on her body. He would come, and then everything would be all right again.
On that thought, Natalie slipped into an exhausted sleep, dreaming of him beside her.
Sometime later, Natalie awakened when the mattress sank under someone’s weight. Zeke. She smiled drowsily and lifted her arms to him, so glad to have him with her that her pulse quickened even though she was still half-asleep. She curled her hands over his shoulders, vaguely registered that they didn’t feel like Zeke’s, and bleated in surprise. Before she could scream, a hard, cruel hand clamped over her mouth, shoving her lips against her teeth with bruising force. Terror slowly dawning in her sleep-fogged brain, she stared at the shadowy shape of a man above her.
“Dumb bitch!”
Not Zeke. She instinctively clawed at the dark blob of a face above her. Her nails sank into soft flesh, which, yet again, definitely didn’t belong to Zeke. Panic. Just that quickly, and Natalie was fighting for her life. Only he was all over her, a large, heavy body that anchored her to the mattress. Her legs, caught under the sheet and blanket, were useless. She could fight only with her hands. The man swore, grabbed the extra pillow, and shoved it over her face to muffle her screams as he wrestled to grasp her wrists.
Natalie bucked and strained to move, but her arms and legs were pinned. Her assailant’s knees bracketed her thighs, pulling the sheet and blanket as taut as a straightjacket around her body. Horror welled within her. She tried futilely to scream, but the pillow was cutting off her airflow and muffling any sound she might have made. She attempted to twist her face free, but the man’s forearm anchored the down over her nose and mouth.
She couldn’t see, couldn’t wriggle away. Her lungs grabbed for oxygen that wasn’t there, throwing her body into a convulsive struggle for breath. Natalie had always imagined herself putting up a good fight in a situation like this—scratching, clawing, and kicking. Now, helpless to move, she could only lie there, fighting frantically to breathe. The man wasn’t that much stronger than she was—she’d felt that when she touched his shoulders and clawed at his face—but he had the advantage of greater weight and the bedclothes to help hold her down.
An awful airless pounding filled her head. Her chest convulsed spasmodically. Her muscles began to twitch as her lungs caught short, her yawning mouth drawing in only pillowcase. Oh, God. In some distant part of her mind, she knew she was dying.
How long could she go without breathing? That question became her only focus, not who this was or how she meant to get away. Everything narrowed down to that one question—how long could she hold on? Her mind swirled with an awful, airless need for oxygen. Her fingers clutched frantically at nothing, her nails lacerating her palms and drawing blood. A heavy, black panic descended over her.
Dying. She saw Robert’s still face. She thought of her children, who needed her. She shoved with everything she had, trying to jerk her wrists from the man’s grip. Then, in a last, desperate bid for freedom, she arched her body and attempted to throw him off of her. Nothing she did made a difference. The next breath she tried to draw was stopped short, only the pillowcase fluffing up her nostrils and into her mouth.
Zeke stepped up onto the porch rail, a dilapidated woode
n support that wobbled more precariously each night from the repeated jostling. He definitely needed to marry the lady, he thought. This was nuts. He gripped the roof, lifted his weight with his arms, and flung up a foot to gain purchase on the shingles. With a twist and a roll of his body, he was lying on the roof.
As he pushed up on his hands and toes, he heard a muffled sob. Natalie? He wondered if she was dreaming. No small wonder. The poor woman had been through so much over the last seven days that it was a miracle she was still sane. Zeke crept toward her window, hoping to awaken her from the nightmare with a kiss. God, he loved her. He could almost taste the sweetness of her mouth as he curled his hands over the windowsill to climb into her bedroom.
As one foot touched down on the interior floor, Zeke froze, his startled gaze riveted to Natalie’s bed. He couldn’t actually see what was happening, only that the shadowy shape hunched on the mattress was too large to be a woman. He swung his other foot in over the sill and sprang forward.
“Hey!” he yelled.
The man—as Zeke drew closer, he could tell for certain that it was a man—whirled around, his face a whitish blob in the moonlight that came through the window. With a bestial snarl, he leaped, his body striking Zeke’s with such force that they both crashed to the floor. Zeke barely felt the impact. Natalie. In a rush of disjointed thought, he put two and two together and knew that this flailing, cursing assailant had been trying to harm her.
Rage ignited in Zeke’s veins, turning his blood molten. He hooked a leg over the other man’s thighs and rolled with him. When Zeke came out on top, he didn’t bother with throwing punches. He went straight for the bastard’s throat, biting in hard with his thumbs at the larynx. It wasn’t a decision or even a thought; Zeke just wanted him dead.
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