The Black Sheep's Redemption

by Lynette Eason

  “And what better way to get to her than to get us out of the way?”

  Without another word, the two men whirled and raced toward the now-cleared hotel building.

  Charles burst through the shattered doors, the glass crunching under his feet.

  His eyes swept the lobby.

  Demi was gone.

  NINETEEN

  Demi answered the officer’s questions as best she could, but she knew she wasn’t much help. He finally let them go and she looked for Ryan and Charles to no avail.

  Where had they gone? She knew they wouldn’t just desert her. Were they hurt? Had they found the shooter?

  “Demi, come with me,” Alan insisted. “My car’s over here.”

  “No, I need to wait for Charles—and Ryan,” she said. “I can’t just leave. I have to make sure they’re all right.”

  “They’re fine. And it’s hot out here. If you want to wait for them, let’s at least do it in air-conditioned comfort.”

  He took her upper arm and urged her to go with him. Looking around, she still didn’t see the two men she wanted to see. “I’m not worried about being hot. I’m worried about Charles and Ryan.” She pulled away from his grasp and started to turn back the way they’d come.

  Alan groaned and stumbled.

  Demi stopped and spun to catch his arm. With a gasp, she asked, “Alan? Are you all right?”

  “Everything all right?” Demi turned to see the officer who had questioned her. He stood there, his expression concerned. “Sir? You need some help?”

  “I’m…diabetic,” Alan said. “M…my medicine is in the car.”

  “I’ll get one of the paramedics,” Demi blurted out. She turned to go get help and he grabbed her arm, his fingers digging into her skin.

  “No,” he said. “Please, just help me get to the car and I’ll be fine.”

  Demi cast another glance over her shoulder. Still no sign of Ryan and Charles, but she could no longer see the front of the hotel.

  She looked back at Alan and thought he did look flushed. The sheen of sweat across his brow convinced her. “Okay, come on, we’ll get your medicine and then I’ll check on Charles and Ryan.”

  “Do you need any assistance?” the officer asked. “It’s no trouble to get some medical help over here now.”

  “No,” Alan insisted. “They’re busy taking care of anyone who may have been hurt in the shooting. And really, I just need to get to my car and get my medicine. I’ll be fine. I promise.” He looked at Demi and licked his lips. “But we need to hurry. Please.”

  Torn, Demi knew she had to help Alan. “Sure. Sure. Let’s get it and then I’m going to come back and check on Charles, all right?”

  “Yes. Yes, that is fine. Thanks. It’s in the glove compartment.” He paused as they walked, Alan leaning heavy on her, his breathing ragged. “I’m sorry to put you out.”

  She took his hand. “It’s no trouble.” It was, but she couldn’t refuse to help the man who’d gone to so much trouble to track her down.

  “There,” he pointed. “It’s the Camry.”

  At the car, she opened the passenger door.

  And felt a hard shove in the middle of her back. She landed face-first in the driver’s seat. “Hey!” Turning, she came in contact with the barrel of a small gun.

  Fear exploded in her chest. “Alan?” Disbelief shuddered through her. “What are you doing?”

  “Move over,” he growled. “Get in the driver’s seat.”

  “No! What…”

  His hand came back and slammed against her cheek. She cried out as pain shattered through her.

  Along with her memories.

  Darkness pressed in on her, but she fought it, refusing to give in and pass out. She needed to think. To remember. To focus.

  Her mind spun, her breathing felt forced. And in that instant, clarity hit her.

  Alan had done this to her.

  And then she didn’t have time to think of anything but surviving another attack by the man who’d beaten her and left her for dead. Ignoring the pain, she strived to gather her wits.

  “Drive!” His furious shout in her right ear made her flinch. She grabbed the wheel and maneuvered behind it, her cheek throbbing.

  Reaching over her, he jammed the keys into the ignition and cranked the car. “Now go!”

  Demi put the vehicle in gear, but her hands shook too hard to grasp the steering wheel.

  Alan muttered to himself as he glanced out the window, checked the rearview and side mirrors. Demi sat in stunned shock as she tried to sort through the sudden surge of memories, knowledge—and terror. She blinked as she remembered her loving parents. The home she’d grown up in. Friends she’d left in Brazil.

  But along with those emotions came a rage like she’d never felt before. She’d been living in the hotel because Alan had scared her. He’d been persistent. Too persistent. When she’d come home to find him in her bedroom one Sunday afternoon, she’d realized something was wrong with the man.

  Terror zipped through her.

  As did a desperation to survive so she could be with Charles. Make a life with him. Through teeth clenched against the pain, she asked, “Where do you want me to go?”

  He jerked as though he had just realized they weren’t moving. He looked around. “Shut up. Let me think.”

  She held her tongue. He started that crazy muttering again. “They’re going to wonder where you are. They’ll come to your house.”

  “My house?” She played dumb. “I have a house? Where?”

  “But they don’t know I was there, they don’t know I was the shooter so they can’t find me, they won’t know where to look.” His words jumbled together into one long sentence and it took an effort to not only hear what he was saying, but to understand it.

  “You were the one shooting?” Hysteria bubbled near the surface and she pulled in a deep breath as they sat in the car in the middle of the parking lot.

  Alan still muttered. “They never saw me, I made sure of that.” He grabbed her bag, rummaged through it and then threw it in the back.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Shut up and drive.”

  She gulped and put the car in Drive. “You gave a statement, Alan. The officer saw me leave with you.” Demi pulled into the traffic going in the opposite direction than where she thought he wanted her to go.

  He hadn’t noticed yet. He was still thinking. He grinned at her and she wondered why she hadn’t noticed before now that his smiles never reached his eyes. He said, “The officer doesn’t have any idea who I am. I didn’t use my name.”

  More memories flooded her. After the bedroom incident, he’d sent her flowers. Bought her a puppy she’d insisted he take back to the pet store. As much as she loved animals, she had no place in her life for one. He’d been angry, yelled at her and called her ungrateful. Grabbed her, pulled her against him and told her that she belonged to him and she’d better get used to the idea.

  Demi remembered the fear that had filled her at his words, the expression on his face—the bruises on her upper arms the next morning.

  And knew he was dangerous.

  Demi had decided to leave. To get away from the man until it was time for her to return to Brazil. So she’d checked into the hotel.

  “Hey, where are you going?” Alan yelled now.

  Demi cringed away from him, scared he would hit her again. “I don’t know. You haven’t said where to go. I’m just driving. I’ll go wherever you want. Just tell me.”

  Her compliance seemed to calm him.

  A little.

  “Turn around. No, wait, just go to the next street and turn left. Then make another right.”

  “
Where are you taking me? Why are you doing this?”

  He sneered at her. “You’re mine.” Then his face softened and he reached out a hand to stroke her hair. “From the moment I saw you, talked to you in your parents’ yard, I knew you were meant for me.”

  She gulped, tried not to pull away from the hand still caressing the back of her head and recalled the few conversations they’d had before he’d turned mental on her. He’d seemed kind enough, like an eager puppy who just wanted to be friends.

  And then he’d asked her out.

  She’d refused because she’d been planning to return to Brazil and hadn’t wanted to start any kind of relationship with a man.

  But that wasn’t the only reason. As kind as he’d come across, she’d also sensed something, read something in his eyes that had set off her internal alarms. She’d used returning to her parents as an excuse not to go out with him.

  He’d taken it well, she’d thought. How very wrong she was. “What made you decide you wanted me? Why me?”

  “You were so kind, so gentle. So good with the children in the neighborhood. I watched how they’d run up to you and hug you.” He swiped a hand across his face. “And you baked me cookies.”

  As a friendly gesture. Nothing more. Initially, he’d seemed lonely, sad, and she’d felt sorry for him. “You said you missed your mother’s cooking. I was just trying to be nice, to be kind.”

  “And you were.” From the corner of her eye, she saw his jaw tighten. She turned right. He continued. “You were nice. So very nice. Then I asked you out and you ran like a scared rabbit. I was so mad at myself for messing things up.” He tapped the gun against the side of his head and let out a humorless chuckle. “Then it came to me. It wasn’t me, it was you. You just didn’t know what you were missing. You didn’t realize that I was perfect for you. So, I decided to show you. But you wouldn’t give me the chance to do it.”

  “Show me how, Alan?” She remembered her version, but wondered what he was thinking, wondered how his twisted mind interpreted her refusal to date him.

  “I tried to convince you to go away with me. Just spend some time alone so you could get to know me. Again you refused. Said you could never go away with a man, that it wouldn’t look right and you had to avoid all appearances of impropriety because of your job.”

  And because that’s the way God had directed her to live her life.

  Three weeks later, Alan had found her at the hotel. How he’d tracked her down, she wasn’t sure, but he’d caught her as she’d been coming back from doing a load of laundry.

  Her laundry. At the hotel. It had been folded neatly. She gulped. He’d folded her laundry. After he’d left her for dead. She didn’t remember the whole attack, but she did remember the first few blows, the exploding pain. The realization that she knew the person attacking her. She remembered thinking she had to fight, to stay awake—or she’d never wake again.

  Nausea swirled, her thoughts scattered at the memory and she wanted to scream.

  Instead, she bit her tongue, forced her breathing to even out and ordered herself to stay calm. “I’m sorry. That doesn’t sound very reasonable of me, does it?”

  Satisfaction spread across his face. “Now you get it.”

  “You put that message in my coffee can, didn’t you?”

  He snickered. “Yeah.”

  “Why? What was the point?”

  He frowned. “To show you that you didn’t belong with that guy.”

  “Charles?”

  “Yes,” he snarled, then mocked. “Charles. I followed you, watching you mooning over him, acting all lovey-dovey. Smiling at him, helping him. That should have been me!” His fist slammed onto the dash and Demi jumped, the car swerving to the left. With effort, she pulled it back onto the road and bit her lip to keep the tears at bay.

  Alan growled, “You belonged to me. Not him.”

  “I didn’t remember, Alan. I didn’t know,” she whispered. Anything to settle him down. “Why didn’t you just come up to me and tell me all of this when you found me?”

  “I didn’t know you had amnesia. The news didn’t say anything about amnesia,” he muttered.

  He’d been afraid to approach her. Afraid she would recognize him and turn him into the police. But he’d approached her at the wedding reception.

  “When did you realize I had amnesia?”

  “I overheard some of the guests at the wedding talking about poor Charles’s new and clueless nanny. When I asked what they meant, they were more than happy to fill me in.”

  And allowed him to come up with a plan to kidnap her.

  She turned her gaze back to the road. “Where to now?”

  “Make the third left up here.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “We need to make a quick stop.”

  A stop? Excitement leaped inside her. Would she have a chance to escape?

  He smirked. “And don’t even think of trying to leave me again. If you do, I’ll go straight back to Fitzgerald Bay and kill every one of Charles Fitzgerald’s precious family members. Including his two little brats.”

  Demi’s heart sank. Would he really? Could he?

  Yes, he would. She had no guarantee she could get to a phone fast enough to warn Charles and his family.

  She was trapped.

  “And then,” Alan said gleefully, “we’re going to my house—our house. The house where we’ll live after we’re married.”

  TWENTY

  Charles was ready to punch something. “Where is she?”

  His question met with silence.

  Ryan’s phone rang and he answered it. Charles moved in so he could hear and Ryan complied by pressing the speaker phone button.

  Owen’s voice came over the line. “Get this. Alan Gregor was indeed in Iraq, but his time line is off. His statement that he was a contractor was true, but he disappeared days before that IED exploded on the convoy. No one died, either. He was listed as AWOL. When they finally located him, they placed him in a mental institution. He just got out a few months ago.”

  Charles felt the blood drain from his face.

  Ryan said, “Send me Alan’s picture. I might need it.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “What else you got?”

  “Nothing on Alan yet, but we released the information about that charm that was found at the crime scene where Olivia was killed.”

  “And?”

  “We’re hoping someone will recognize it and be able to tell us who it belongs to.”

  “But nothing yet?”

  “No. That piece of the puzzle is still missing.”

  Missing along with someone he loved. The silent admission didn’t even surprise. Yes, he loved Demi. And she’d told him that she loved him, too.

  At first, the words had rocked him, but even as he’d struggled to absorb what that meant, he knew without a doubt that he wanted a future with her.

  And now she was missing. The fact that something may have happened to her sent terror shooting through him.

  Charles did his best to calm his fears as he cut his eyes to Ryan. “We can worry about all that later. I have a bad feeling about the danger Demi is in and we need to find her now.”

  Ryan said, “Be prepared to get down here, Owen. Something’s going on and I have a feeling things are going to get dicey.” He hung up and looked at Charles. “Let’s ask around, see if we can figure out who she left with.”

  After questioning several people, they finally hit pay dirt when they approached the officer in charge of the scene and showed him Demi’s picture. “Have you seen this woman?” Charles asked.

  “Yeah, she was here a little while ago.” The man’s name tag read R. Luther.
/>   Excitement leaped inside Charles. “Did you see where she went?”

  Officer Luther’s eyes squinted as he took another look at the picture Charles had on his phone. “Yeah, she got in a car with some guy. I remember because the guy looked like he might have been sick, was leaning on her pretty heavy. Think he said he was diabetic. I offered to get some medical help for him, but he said he had a kit in his car and would be fine. I was needed over here so I left them to it.”

  Charles felt slightly better. “That sounds like Demi. If someone needed help, she’d be the first one to offer. But why would she get in his car? And why wouldn’t she call me and let me know what she was doing?” He looked at Ryan, his heart still troubled. “She would know I would be worried about her. This is really out of character for her.”

  “Sorry, can’t help you with that,” Officer Luther said. He paused then rubbed his chin and said, “It was kind of weird, though.”

  “What was?” Charles demanded.

  The officer shrugged. “I turned back just for a second look to make sure he hadn’t passed out or anything and noticed she got in the passenger side then slid over to the driver’s seat.”

  Ryan and Charles exchanged another look. Ryan said, “You’re right, that’s weird. I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “I mean she could have been trying to help, get the kit, and he asked her to drive him to the hospital for all I know,” Luther said. “But I remember thinking it was kind of strange. Then my boss called and I got distracted.” He grimaced. “Sorry.”

  Ryan shook his head. “The only reason I can think of for that kind of maneuver is if he was forcing her to go with him.”

  Charles’s relief morphed back into worry. He looked at the officer. “Did you see a weapon?”

  “No.” He frowned. “But that doesn’t mean he didn’t have one.”

  “What kind of car was he driving?”

  The officer rubbed his eyes then said, “I’m not sure. Some kind of sedan.” He sighed. “Look, I’m sorry, things were crazy over here and I had already talked to those two, my boss was calling…” He trailed off, glanced back where the car had been then said, “It was blue, I do remember that.”