by Sharon Sala
Ally managed a smile. It wasn’t much as smiles go, but there was a yearning in it that East couldn’t ignore.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s a very good thing.”
She held out her hand. “I’m going to the restaurant now. May I have my new key?”
East dug into his pocket and then handed it over. “So, does this mean you’re staying?”
She gave him a slow, studied look and then dropped the key into her pocket.
“Only until you make up your mind—one way or the other.”
Jeff came to in the dark just long enough to realize he couldn’t move. Disoriented and sick to his stomach, he had no idea what was happening to him. Then he began to separate other sounds from the rough gasp of his own breath. He was inside a moving vehicle, and from the sound of the high-pitched whine of tires on pavement, moving at a rapid rate of speed. His stomach rolled, and he took a deep breath, willing himself to hang on. He thought about friends at school, his coworkers at the hospital, and then he thought about his dad and wondered if he’d ever see any of them again. Before he could dwell on his situation, the drug that they’d given him pulled him back under and he gratefully gave up the fight.
The next morning, Ally woke to a gray, overcast day. Just the lack of sunshine was enough to make her roll over in bed and try for another hour of sleep. But as soon as she closed her eyes, her mind began to stir. It had been almost twenty-four hours since the picture and the note had been delivered to her room and she had yet to contact Jonah, because when she did, she knew he would pull her out. And therein lay the rub. She didn’t want to go. As long as she pretended to herself that East was going to change his mind, it gave her a reason to stay.
She buried her nose in the pillow and squeezed her eyes tight, trying to reclaim the memory of his mouth upon her lips and his hands centered in the middle of her back, but it wouldn’t come. She rolled over on her back with a groan and stared up at the ceiling, trying to figure out what it was about the man that was making her nuts. She had seen plenty of good-looking men before and never been bothered with her emotions getting out of control. But with East, it was as if she’d lost every ounce of good sense she’d been born with. Rationally, she knew he was out of her league, but it didn’t stop her from wanting, and oh, how she wanted.
Finally, she got up and stomped toward the bathroom. Maybe a hot shower and some food would put her world back on center. A short while later she stopped in the living room and gave herself the once-over before she went down to eat.
Her clothes were nondescript—a pair of well-worn jeans, a white, long-sleeved cotton sweater and her favorite pair of sandals. The only colors on her body were her red toenails and a pale peach gloss on her lips. Her gaze moved to her hair. It was its usual auburn cap of flyaway curls and nothing she could do anything about. With a shrug, she put her key in her pants pocket and slung her purse over her shoulder, then left the suite.
As she exited the elevator, she automatically looked toward the desk, hoping she might see East. He was nowhere in sight. She kept on walking, telling herself it didn’t matter. When she exited the lobby onto the terrace, a sharp breeze almost took her breath away and she did a quick about-face and chose to eat indoors, instead.
She was seated at a table by the window and giving her order to a waiter, when East suddenly appeared.
“Eating alone?” he asked.
She handed the waiter her menu as he left, then focused her gaze on East. It had been more than twenty-four hours since they’d spoken and she was a little surprised by his presence.
“Not if you join me,” she said.
He pulled out the chair to her left and sat with his back to the view.
“Didn’t you want to order something?” she asked.
“I already did.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Pretty sure of yourself, aren’t you?”
He shrugged. “If I wasn’t here, I’d be somewhere else. They would have found me.”
Ally dropped her elbows onto the table and then rested her chin in her hands.
“Got anything you want to tell me?”
He stifled a smile as he reached for his napkin, unfolding it carefully, then draping it across his slacks.
“We’re out of peanut butter.”
She laughed and the sound dragged itself across East’s emotions. He’d never heard her laugh before—not like this—uninhibited and all the way from her gut.
Still chuckling, she shuffled through her place setting of silverware and absently dropped her napkin in her lap.
“Okay, I get the message, but I’ve got one for you. I’m leaving tomorrow, with or without you.”
East’s heart skipped a beat. He’d gotten too used to seeing her around. The last twenty-four hours had been some of the emptiest times of his life and the thought of never seeing her again seemed impossible to consider. Within a very few days, she’d become someone special. It shouldn’t have happened. He’d been so careful over the years to stay clear of emotional entanglements and now he felt ties to a woman he’d done nothing but kiss—and only once at that. If a single kiss could tie him in knots, he shuddered to think what would happen if they ever made love.
“Look, I—” In the middle of a word, his cell phone rang. “Excuse me,” he said, and took the call.
“This is Kirby.”
“And this is your worst nightmare,” a man said.
East stiffened. “Who is this?”
“It’s not my identity that matters. It’s the identity of my hostage that you should be concerned with.”
“What are you saying?” East muttered, then stood abruptly and walked toward the solitude of the terrace, unaware that Ally was right behind him.
“We’ve got your kid, and if you want to get him back alive, then you’d better do as I say.”
East’s mind went blank. Jeff? Someone had kidnapped Jeff? If this was so, he needed to catch them off guard. He laughed, a cold, ugly bark that ripped up his throat as he stepped out onto the terrace facing the wind.
“Look, you lying son of a bitch, I don’t believe you.”
“Just give your kid a call. See if he answers the phone,” the man said.
East was thinking fast, laying a bet with himself that the kidnappers wouldn’t have known Jeff’s schedule well enough to know when East was bluffing.
“Hell, no. He’s not going to answer his phone because he’s backpacking up in the hills and won’t be home for a good three days, so don’t pull that crap on me.”
Then, before he could change his mind, he disconnected, fully aware that he was gambling with Jeff’s life.
“Ah, God,” he groaned, and covered his face. What if he’d just signed his son’s death warrant?
Ally grabbed him by the arm. “What?” she cried. “What’s happening?”
East turned, then looked down at the phone in his hand as if it had become something foul.
“I think someone’s kidnapped my son.”
Chapter 7
Ally gasped. First the picture and the note—now this. They should have been expecting something more to occur, but how could they have guessed it would affect his son? She thought of the phone in her dresser.
“We’ve got to tell Jonah,” she said and started to leave when East grabbed her by the arm.
“No! We wait. I just gambled my son’s life on the hope that they would let me talk to him just to prove he was there.”
Ally nodded as her estimation of Easton Kirby rose. That was a tough call to make, but one of the gutsiest moves she’d ever seen. And as she watched his face getting paler by the moment, she knew it was costing this man way more than he had to lose. She laid her hand in the middle of his back.
“Then we wait.”
East turned toward the sea, his knuckles white from the death grip he had on the railing. “Now do you understand why I told Jonah no? This is a perfect example of why I refused him. You can’t have a family and be in this business. If it doesn’t kill you, it will d
amn sure kill them.”
Ally had no answer because she knew it was the truth. And the wait continued…
Less than five minutes later, East’s phone rang. The moment he answered, he accepted the fact that he was mixed up in Jonah’s mess now, whether he wanted it or not.
“This is Kirby,” he said shortly.
A soft chuckle rippled through his ear and sent shock waves of panic skittering through his mind.
“And a gutsy bastard, too, aren’t you?”
“Who are you?” East snapped.
“I’m not important, but the people who have your son are not your usual society-page gentlemen, so I strongly suggest you don’t hang up on me again.”
“If they have my son as you claim, then somebody better be proving it to me, and I don’t mean some recorded little bit of his voice,” East snapped. “That proves nothing about his still being alive. I want to talk to him, and I want to ask questions that only he can answer, or we have nothing to discuss.”
“You’re not calling the shots,” the man said. “I am. And it will be proven to you all too soon. However, let me outline what it is that I want from you before we hang up. That way when you get your call, you will already know where we stand.”
“I’m listening,” East growled.
“I want Jonah,” the man whispered, and the hate in his voice was impossible for East to mistake.
“What the hell do you expect me to do about it?”
East said. “I have no idea who or where he is. No one does.”
“But you know how to contact him,” the man said. “And I know that he’s contacted you. I also know that he’s sent you a pretty little helper to bring me down, but it isn’t going to happen.”
The information the man unwittingly gave was important, because it told East that the man wasn’t as thorough as he believed himself to be. Ally hadn’t come to help, she’d come to talk him into something he’d already refused.
“So what?” East said. “Just because I could talk to him, means nothing. I have no way of ferreting information out of a ghost.”
The man chuckled again. “Ghosts aren’t as elusive as one might think. However, that’s not the point. The point is, you will work with me, getting me certain information and I will take it from there.”
East inhaled slowly. “You expect me to steal documents and information that would point back to Jonah as being the thief? That could take weeks, even months to set up.”
“I knew you were a smart man. You catch on fast, and you don’t have weeks or months to do it. I’m no longer a patient man.”
“I won’t do it.”
“Yes, you will, if you want to see your son alive.”
“I don’t know that you even have him.”
“You will,” the man snapped, suddenly tired of the game. “And know this, I will be calling you again and when I do, you’d better have what I want.”
Startled by the abruptness of the disconnect, he inhaled sharply, then turned toward Ally, his jaw set and clenched. “Son of a bitch. The sorry, son of a bitch. He shouldn’t have messed with what’s mine.”
At that moment, Ally knew that in his mind, Easton Kirby had already vaulted the distance from hotel manager back to an agent for SPEAR. But he wasn’t doing it for Jonah.
Jeff had been awake for what seemed like hours, although he couldn’t be sure. Without anything to help him gauge time or distance, he had no idea how long he’d been unconscious or where the kidnappers were taking him. At first, he’d been unable to understand why he’d be anyone’s target for ransom. He didn’t have money and neither did his dad—at least not that kind of money. With the passing of time, the drug began to lose its control and with cognizance came clearer thinking.
It occurred to him that he might have been snatched because of what his dad used to do. East had never elaborated on it, and Jeff had known not to ask, but he did know that his father used to be a spy of sorts. He couldn’t help thinking that he had become the pawn in an ugly game of payback. And while he knew the deduction was pretty far-fetched, so was the fact that he’d been abducted. However, he didn’t think he was in immediate danger of being killed. At least not yet. If that had been the case, they would have done it sooner and certainly closer to home. Why take the risk of being stopped by a highway patrol and being discovered in possession of a bound man in a trunk?
A short while later, the van took a sharp turn. Unable to brace himself, the trunk slid and Jeff slid with it, slamming his face against the trunk with a thump. Stunned by the unexpectedness of the pain, he groaned as the wounds on his already swollen mouth reopened. Cursing the driver and the world in general, he spit blood and prayed for the ride to end.
The ride then became a constant series of jarring bumps, leading him to assume they were now on a dirt road. He tried to measure time in the hope he could gauge some kind of distance, but was without success. It seemed endless and he was in desperate need of water, and a bathroom.
Just when he thought his misery would never end, the van rolled to a stop, and the moment it did, Jeff’s heart skipped a beat. Had he guessed wrong about them keeping him alive? Was this the end after all? When he heard their voices, and then the sound of the door sliding back on the van, he braced himself for the worst.
Thin, gray clouds scattered themselves across the sky like trailing threads from an unraveling piece of fabric, forming a dramatic backdrop for the man who strode out of the weathered frame house in the middle of the Brotherhood compound. Caleb Carpenter was tall and rangy with piercing blue eyes and hair that was as short and dark as his temper. He glared at the trio getting out of the van.
“Elmore, where the hell have you been? You’re four hours late.”
Elmore Todd jerked to attention. “Sir, it wasn’t our fault. There was some sort of roadblock outside of Reno. We had to take another route to safeguard the target.”
“Roadblock? What kind of roadblock?”
The second kidnapper, who called himself Beau, backed up Elmore’s explanation.
“It had nothing to do with us, Caleb, I swear. We heard later on the radio that they were looking for some crazy carjacker who’d killed a woman and her kid.”
The last one, a skinny misfit of a man who answered to the name of Phil, added his two cents to the story.
“Yeah, and can you beat it? The car he jacked was a lousy hunk of metal. You’d think if you was gonna kill for a car, you’d have the sense to pick one that was worth something.”
Resisting the urge to deck Phil on general principles, Caleb pivoted sharply and motioned to the men behind him.
“Get that trunk out of the van now! I need to see what we’re dealing with here.” And then he fixed the three with a hard-edged stare. “And the goods better be in pristine condition as requested, or someone’s going to be sorry.”
Elmore paled. “He put up a hell of a fight.”
Caleb’s lips thinned into a grimace of a smile. “There were three of you and one of him, what the hell kind of a fight could he make?”
“Well, you said his daddy was some kind of a Fed. He must have been the one who taught him all that karate.” Beau blustered, and hawked and spit just to give himself time to think. Then he added, “Besides, I never did trust a man who fought with his feet ’stead of his fists.”
Caleb cursed beneath his breath as he pointed to the trunk that was now on the ground.
“Open it,” he ordered.
The lid came up, revealing the man within. The first thing Caleb saw was fresh blood. He doubled his fist and pivoted sharply, nailing Elmore Todd in the nose. Blood spurted, rocking the man back on his heels. The other two took a nervous step backward, afraid they were next. To their relief, Caleb seemed to be through distributing punishment.
“Next time I send you on a mission, I expect orders to be followed.”
“Yes, sir,” Elmore muttered, and clamped a handkerchief over his mouth and nose to staunch the flow.
“Get him ou
t,” Caleb said, pointing toward the man in the trunk.
Moments later, Jeff Kirby found himself face-to-face with the man in charge. His legs were numb and kept threatening to fold and his throat was tight and scratchy, but he was in so much misery and pain that he was past being scared. He squinted at the man they called Caleb through a half-swollen eye.
“I want a drink of water and a bathroom, and not in that order.”
Caleb Carpenter froze. The last thing he’d expected was a victim making demands. And what a pitiful victim he was—both fresh and dried blood dotted his clothing, and his face was swollen and bruised. Yet still bound, the kid was staring him straight in the eye.
A slow grin spread across Caleb’s face. “The hell you say,” he said softly, then pointed to the man nearest him. “You heard the man. Get that damned tape off his hands and feet and take him to the john, then get him a drink. He’s thirsty.”
Later, Jeff would look back on that moment and realize how fortunate he’d been in not getting himself shot. Every man there had been wearing some kind of uniform and was armed to the teeth. And the tattoo he’d seen on the man they called Elmore was on posters all over the place. Added to that, all of the vehicles in the compound had Idaho plates. At least now he knew where he was—sort of—and he knew his kidnappers’ faces. But that last bit of knowledge was what worried him most. Granted he was still alive, and with a fresh meal starting to digest in his belly, but if they planned to let him go at some future date, then why had they let him see their faces?
Later, he paced the small, six-by-six room that they’d locked him in until his legs ached and the bottoms of his feet began to burn. Exhausted, he dropped onto the single piece of furniture in the room, an old army cot, and stretched out. How in hell would anyone ever find him in this godforsaken place? He might as well be on the moon.
Time passed and the air began to chill as the day turned to night. He huddled upon the cot without benefit of blankets until anger resurfaced, then he crawled off the cot and began pacing to stay warm.