Trusting Taylor (Silverstone)
Page 26
But he couldn’t help but picture Molly Smith’s face. She was petite, around five foot two, and if she weighed more than a hundred pounds, he’d be surprised. She’d earned both her undergraduate and master’s degrees from Northwestern. She was smart, and hopefully resourceful. Her grandparents had raised her after her parents had been killed in a freak train accident on their way home from their jobs in the city one day.
In a recent photo, Molly had shoulder-length black hair, and brown eyes that seemed to hold a lot more pain than the average person’s. Smoke couldn’t stand the thought of her being held against her will.
The woman had gotten to him. Smoke didn’t understand why, but he couldn’t shake it. He’d even had a nightmare about her just last night.
She’d been in a cage magically suspended in the air somewhere in the African jungle, and every time she’d tried to jump out, lions and tigers would appear below, preventing her from escaping. Then someone had materialized out of thin air in the cage behind Molly, shoving her toward the opening in the bars.
The scream that had come from her mouth as she’d fallen toward the ravenous animals had jerked him awake, and he hadn’t been able to go back to sleep.
This morning, he waited in the safe room in the basement of Silverstone Towing for his teammates to arrive, and they’d begin working out the details of their trip. He’d gotten there early since he couldn’t sleep.
One by one, Bull, Eagle, and Gramps finally arrived, and it was all Smoke could do not to get right to the Boko Haram situation. After some small talk, they finally got down to business.
“What do we think about Nigeria?” Gramps asked. “It’ll be a long, hard mission, with no guarantee we’ll find Shekau.”
“Any word on the girls?” Eagle asked.
“Nothing concrete,” Gramps said.
“And Molly Smith?” Smoke asked.
Gramps shook his head.
“I’m in,” Smoke said eagerly.
“Me too,” Gramps agreed.
They looked at Bull and Eagle.
“I’m not thrilled at the open time frame,” Bull admitted.
“Me either. What if we give ourselves a time limit?” Eagle asked.
Smoke hated to agree to that. His worst nightmare would be to call it quits and later find out they’d been only one day away from finding the kidnapped girls or Shekau.
“What were you thinking?” Gramps asked.
“Two months?” Bull suggested.
Smoke breathed out a sigh of relief. That was more than fair. “Agreed,” he said quickly.
“Same,” Gramps said.
Eagle took a deep breath, but finally nodded. “I hate to leave Taylor that long, but she’s in good hands here.”
Silverstone had changed a bit with both Bull and Eagle finding women. And now that Eagle was married with a child on the way, everyone knew things would change even more. It wasn’t that they wanted to stop going after the worst of humanity, but there was more on the line if they failed. Smoke understood that, as did Gramps. They didn’t hold anything against their friends and would protect them even more fiercely now.
“I’ll get with Willis at the FBI and see what information he can give us and what contacts he can hook us up with in Nigeria. I’m thinking we go wheels up in a week. That acceptable to everyone?”
The men around the table all nodded. Smoke would’ve preferred to leave immediately, but he felt better knowing they’d be on their way soon.
A week was an eternity when you were a kidnapping victim, but when you had to say goodbye to the woman you loved, it wasn’t nearly long enough. He could be patient . . . he just hoped the missing children, and Molly Smith, could hang on long enough to be found.
Molly was terrified out of her mind. She had no idea where she was, other than at the bottom of a hole somewhere in the African wilderness. She’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Which was the story of her life.
She’d been nicknamed Folly Molly when she was little, because bad luck seemed to follow her everywhere.
Someone would drop a lunch tray right after she walked by.
The bus she was riding in would get a flat tire.
She’d once told a boy she liked him, and the next day he came down with chicken pox.
The list of things that had happened when she was little went on and on. But that wasn’t the end of her bad luck. As she’d gotten older, it had only gotten worse.
Surprise quizzes, her bike getting stolen—then, in junior high, her parents had been killed. They’d stayed late at work in downtown Chicago, because they’d both taken the next day off to treat Molly to a musical she’d been dying to see. They’d taken the later train to get to their home in the suburbs, and it had derailed.
The only two deaths had been her parents.
Molly had moved in with her paternal grandparents, and she was grateful every day that they’d taken her in.
Her mother’s parents had wanted nothing to do with her, telling her to her face that she was nothing but bad luck.
Molly knew she’d never have survived high school, or gotten her college degrees, if it wasn’t for her nana and papa. She’d recently moved back in with them after a man she’d dated for a while had gotten violent when she’d tried to break things off. He’d continued to harass and stalk her, so Molly had taken a job with a group of scientists traveling to Africa.
Nana had tried to talk her out of it, but Molly had thought if she got out of the country, and out of Preston’s reach, maybe he’d move on.
Things had been going well in Africa. Molly’d thought that maybe, just maybe, the curse of her bad luck had finally ended.
Until the day she’d gone to the school in Askira to be a guest speaker. To talk about the importance of science and the research she was doing in Africa. She’d been relieved that English was the official language of Nigeria, even if many people spoke Hausa, a Chadic language, because she’d be able to share her knowledge of what she was doing without having to worry about a translator.
She’d been sitting in the back of a classroom, awaiting her turn to speak, when men had stormed in with guns and machetes, separating the girls and boys. They’d forced all the girls to walk to trucks parked a few miles away from the small town.
Everyone had been crying and hysterical. Molly had tried to get her kidnappers to let her go, telling them that she was an American scientist, but they’d pushed her right along with the girls. They’d driven for hours before being forced to march through the jungle.
Once they’d reached the camp the men had set up, they’d been crammed into small huts, sleeping practically on top of each other. The young girls hadn’t taken to Molly. They’d shunned her, speaking in their native language so she couldn’t understand them. At this point, she had no idea what was happening to the girls.
Molly also had no idea how much time had passed, but she guessed it had been at least a few weeks. She’d tried to escape twice, and after the second time, she’d been forced to climb down a rickety ladder into a pit in the ground. At only five feet, two inches tall, she couldn’t reach the top of the hole without assistance. It was only about seven feet deep, but that may as well have been a mile. There was no way she could climb up and out of it without the ladder, and most of the time she was ignored by her captors.
Every other day or so, someone would throw down a piece of stale bread, but that was the extent of their interest in her. Luckily, she’d been able to dig down a bit farther in her prison and find water. It wasn’t much, just enough to keep her alive. She supposed her kidnappers were probably wondering why she hadn’t died yet.
Molly kind of wondered that too. The world might be better off without her. She’d heard more than once that if she didn’t have bad luck, she wouldn’t have any luck at all.
Folly Molly.
It was a childish name, but as she languished in a hole in the middle of the African jungle, Molly couldn’t help but think that it still fit her well.
She assumed her captors would eventually make her climb out of the hole, and they’d attempt to get a ransom for her or sell her to someone. As far as she could tell, the group was desperate for money. They were a ragtag bunch of men who didn’t seem to have any real plan in mind for the girls they’d kidnapped. Someone had to be calling the shots, but she didn’t know who that was.
The second she got the chance, Molly would do what she could to escape again. She might end up lost in the jungle, but that was better than being at the mercy of terrorists. Or stuck in a hole, dying from lack of food and water.
Looking up, she could just see a few stars in the night sky. She wondered if there was someone else, somewhere in the world, looking up at the same stars. It made her feel not so alone.
Molly didn’t want to die. Her grandparents would always wonder what had happened to her. Preston would probably laugh and say she deserved it. Fuck him. She was going to get out of here, no matter what. But she couldn’t deny that she could use some help.
A shooting star suddenly flashed across the sky, and Molly closed her eyes and made a wish. Her nana had always told her wishing on a shooting star was good luck.
“I wish someone, anyone, would find me and get me out of here,” she whispered.
A part of her knew she was being ridiculous. She was a nobody. A scientist with a family who couldn’t afford to hire any big-name private investigator. She’d have to rely on herself. Once she was out of this hole, she’d run into the jungle and hide. Then she’d walk for weeks if that was what it took.
But another part of her prayed for a miracle.
She put her head back on her knees and cried. She was too dehydrated for her body to produce tears. Molly knew her time was coming to an end, but she still refused to give up.
She’d set her wish loose into the world, and now she just had to wait for it to reach the right person.
About the Author
Photo © 2015 A&C Photography
Susan Stoker is a New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestselling author whose series include Badge of Honor: Texas Heroes, SEAL of Protection, and Delta Force Heroes. Married to a retired army noncommissioned officer, Stoker has lived all over the country—from Missouri and California to Colorado and Texas—and currently resides under the big skies of Tennessee. A true believer in happily ever after, Stoker enjoys writing novels in which romance turns to love. To learn more about the author and her work, visit her website, www.stokeraces.com, or find her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/authorsusanstoker.
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