The Community Series, Books 1-3

by Tappan, Tracy

  At last! She heard the distinctive clomp of her husband’s Timberland hiking boots on the walkway outside.

  The front door swung open and Sedge came inside, tossing his duffle bag negligently into a corner of the foyer. “Hey,” he said.

  She hey’d him back, flipping to the next channel with a hard jerk of her hand.

  He paused a moment. “Is something wrong?”

  “Really?” She slammed the remote onto the coffee table. “You’re going to ask me that after you’ve just come home from kidnapping another woman?”

  “Jesus, please don’t start, Kimberly, okay?” He moved through the foyer into the kitchen. “Today’s mission sucked and I feel like crap.” Opening the refrigerator, he pulled out a Heineken. “Vinz got stabbed, you know.”

  She surged to her feet and marched into the kitchen after her husband. “Yes, I do know.” It’d been one of those moments of sheer, unadulterated terror when she’d opened her front door and found Roth Mihnea, the leader of the community, standing on her doorstep with a grim look on his face. She’d thought Roth had come to tell her that it was Sedge who’d been killed. Which would’ve fit in perfectly with her life to date. Because things were going about as right for her as if she’d spent all of her days spilling salt, breaking mirrors, and walking under ladders.

  She plunked her hands on her hips. “If you’re waiting for me to feel sorry for Vinz, then you’re going to stand there till you petrify, Sedge. Because here’s the thing. Vinz wouldn’t have been injured in the first place if you warriors hadn’t been out kidnapping another woman!”

  Sedge didn’t respond. He twisted the Heineken cap and she heard it siss open.

  “Damn it, Sedge, I can’t believe you took another one! Have you heard nothing I’ve had to say about this?” How ridiculously naïve she’d been to think that Gwyn Billaud, the woman who’d been taken after her, would be the community’s last kidnap victim. How completely idiotic to assume that anyone in this barbaric town had actually listened to Kimberly or learned one single thing from forcing Gwyn down here into danger and then losing her.

  “Oh, I’ve heard,” Sedge returned, tipping the beer to his mouth and drinking it down.

  She seamed her lips together. Well, that’s just great. She loved it when men chugged beer around her. It was, like … memories galore. “You men of the Warrior Class think you’re such heroes, saving your people from possible extinction with what you’re doing. But do you know what you really are? Criminals! No better than a bunch of thugs.”

  Sedge lowered his beer and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Yes, thank you. You’ve made that abundantly clear in the past.” He set his beer on the kitchen island. “This is the same argument we’ve been having for two years, Kimberly, and it gets us nowhere. There’s nowhere to go with it. I wish there were, but I’m in an impossible situation here. I have a job that requires me to follow orders, so I follow them, but that means I end up doing something you hate.” His gaze darkened. “That I hate.”

  She curled her hands into fists. “If you hate it, then stand up to Roth.”

  Sedge shook his head. “You know I don’t have the power to change anything around here. But even if I could get Roth to stop sending warriors topside on kidnap missions, how in the world is that going to help you, Berly? It won’t. Nothing will change for you. You’re stuck down here with me, no matter what.” The muscles around his throat tightened and a raw thread of pain entered his voice. “I know you’re miserable. That’s more than clear. I wish I could send you topside daily to your lawyer job – you have no idea how much I want that – but security issues make that impossible. Too many comings and goings risk exposure, and Roth is really paranoid about it. You know that, Berly, okay, so …. I’m truly sorry for how unhappy you are. I mean that from the depths of my heart. But I don’t know what I can do about it.”

  She just stared at him, her chest hitching as she fought back tears. It was more or less the same speech she’d heard for the two years of their marriage, and, as always, Sedge was right. There wasn’t anything he could do to free her, barring killing himself. She was well and truly trapped, and the worst part was that she’d colluded in her own entrapment by marrying him. Worse still, her marriage had handed a victory to Roth, who’d abducted her down here for the very purpose of hooking her up with one of the men. It was the stupidest thing she’d ever done in a long list of stupid things in her life, letting herself fall in love with Sedge.

  He wasn’t even particularly her type. She didn’t like big men, not since her ex-boyfriend, Tim, anyway, and Sedge was huge, nearly six foot four and as wide as the side of two barns. His long mane of blond hair, spread in thick waves across his shoulders, only served to enhance the sheer breadth of him and emphasize his muscular power.

  But behind all the muscle he was sweet and doting, and had a pair of puppy-dog brown eyes that spoke of a good soul. Those qualities in themselves had been difficult enough to resist, but men of his kind also fiercely protected their women, and the allure of the safety Sedge could provide her had ended up proving too tempting. Unfortunately, she also hated herself for that. In her logical mind, she told herself she should be strong enough to look out for herself – she was, damnit! She didn’t need a man! Of course, this fueled the conflict inside her head which invariably had her performing a push-pull dance with Sedge that was far from healthy. She knew it, saw herself doing it, but just couldn’t seem to stop.

  “There’s got to be something meaningful you can do down here,” Sedge insisted. “Then –”

  “Ha! Like what? Build rock gardens?” She braced her hands on the kitchen island and leaned toward him. “Do you know what I did before you people stole my life? I worked for the Peace Corps for two years before I went to law school. After I graduated, I was in-house counsel for an environmental group, saving trees and ocean and air, and right before you kidnapped me, I’d just won a case where I helped to uphold the First Amendment rights of the United States Constitution.” She straightened and threw out her arms. “I used to save the world, Sedge. After that, what the unholy hell do you think I can find to do in this stupid little town that would feel meaningful?”

  Sedge bowed his head. “Tell me,” he implored hoarsely. “Just tell me what I need to do to make you happy, and I’ll do it. Anything.”

  She took a step back from him, torn between how moved she was by his obvious love for her and yet how clearly ineffectual he was at making her happy. She felt nearly consumed by an acute disappointment in her husband, because she believed he really would stop the kidnappings if he weren’t so damned indoctrinated into the community’s system of sole leadership.

  And really, why would anyone question King-frigging-Roth? Why should he question it, when he never suffered any of the long-term consequences of his fucked-up repopulation program? Sure, the abducted women were upset and angry when they first got dragged into the town of Ţărână, but the dawning amazement of finding a community where they could truly belong, when most had faced nothing but rejection in their former lives, and the supremely gorgeous and attentive men who were wandering the streets around here, were pretty damned powerful tools for winning them over. All the women caved eventually.

  Just as she had.

  Her face flushed with heat. Well, not this time. Acquisition number seven, whoever that new kidnap victim might be, was the last straw. “You want me to find something meaningful to do around here? Well, all right. I’ve got something in mind.” She spun around hard on her heels and marched for the stairs. She was damn well going to save the new woman.

  “Ah, hell.” Sedge raced up the stairs after her. “Kimberly, please, you’ve got to stop stirring the pot around here.”

  She kept trudging. “Somebody’s got to.”

  “You’re going about it all crazy, Berly.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “I mean, Jesus, you tried to get equal rights for the Stânga Town kids.”

  “You bet I did. Yo
ur system of hierarchy around here is prejudicial and asinine.”

  He threw out his arms. “You complained that there wasn’t a health inspector for the two places in town there are to eat out.”

  “Three,” she shot back. “Besides Garwald’s Pub and The Diner, you can buy snacks and drinks at the movie theatre. And Roth hired one, didn’t he?”

  “For the love of God, you lobbied for a longer lunch recess for the school kids.”

  “So?”

  “They’re preschoolers,” he told the side of her face as she came to the top of the stairs; she was refusing to look at him. “The stuff you do doesn’t make any sense. It’s completely off the wall.”

  She planted herself in their bedroom doorway, her hand on the doorknob. “Oh, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet, buster.” She slammed the door in her husband’s face.

  Chapter Four

  Toni peeled open one eyelid, swept the room with a glance, then closed her eye again. Wonderful. She was hallucinating. Damn, she’d known something like this was going to happen the moment that strange male nurse had come into her hospital room. Strange, not as in strange-looking. No, actually he’d been gorgeous: stylish flattop blond hair, cheekbones that could cut steel, and a double scoop of sculpted butt that even hospital scrubs hadn’t been able to camouflage. But strange in that he hadn’t known what the hell he was doing.

  Change in doctor’s orders, he’d said, get some solid sleep now. Ludicrous. She knew her doctor, for Pete’s sake, and Steven wouldn’t have altered her treatment plan without first discussing it with her. Not only that, but what kind of change in orders would knock her out right before she was supposed to be discharged?

  She’d just been tee’ing up for a good harangue when Incompetent Nurse … Nurse Goodbody or … Ratched, or whoever he was, had sedated her. And now whatever medication he’d given her had screwed up her poor concussed brain. When she’d cracked open her eyelid just now, she’d found herself not in her hospital room, but in some extravagant bedroom decorated in Louis XVI furniture… which just upped the weird factor even more because if she was ever going to hallucinate, she imagined it’d be in Country French.

  Not that she had any idea what it was like to trip out. She wasn’t straight-laced or anything, just focused and determined. She’d had to be to get where she’d wanted to go in life; the bio undergrad program at UCSD had been brutal, and med school at UCLA even harder, but she’d graduated at the top of her class in both.

  Her mother had responded to these achievements by dubbing her a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, D-cup’ped, over-achiever. Basically, straight-laced in mother parlance, although Toni didn’t do more than secretly roll her eyes over it. Comments from her mother came few and far between these days, and Toni didn’t want to risk putting any more distance between them than already existed.

  Odd thing about her mother. Shannon Parthen had been a fantastic parent when Toni and her older brother, Alex, were growing up. Toni’s Mom and Dad got divorced when Toni was about six, and after that—no doubt because of that—Shannon had thrown herself into the job of motherhood with all her heart. As soon as Toni had gone away to college, though, it’d been like, bam! No need for further involvement now that her daughter was launched into the world. A grown woman. Raised.

  Although the truth was, none of Toni’s female relationships had ever been all that close. Single girls were threatened by her looks, homemakers treated her like an alien from the Planet Zorg because she was thirty-two and still didn’t have any children, and professional women were … well, threatened by her.

  Boyfriends hadn’t exactly proved fertile ground for intimacy, either.

  So it was her brother, Alex, who got an earful of her woes whenever she had them. In fact, she really needed to talk to Alex about that cabbage-headed maneuver she’d pulled by giving her phone number to Detective John Waterson. She’d hadn’t had a chance to talk to him before the accident and –

  The soft chiming of a clock brought her back to her current situation. She snapped her eyes open, both of them this time. Damn. Same Louis XVI head trip going on. Right. She needed to get her fuzzy brain on task here.

  Sitting up slowly, she swung her legs over the side of the mattress and sat on the edge of the bed. A wave of dizziness overtook her, but it passed quickly, leaving a dull ache behind her eyes. She waited another minute, but the swanky bedroom refused to change back into the hospital room at Scripps. Crap, this was real.

  She looked around and found the clothes she’d worn into the hospital the night of her car accident neatly folded on a bedside table, piled next to one of those fancy white-and-gold French Contessa-style phones. And her purse? She reached out carefully to look through her belongings. No purse; no cell. Perfect. She eyed the Contessa phone. There weren’t any numbers on it, but, well …. She picked up the receiver.

  There was a soft hum, then a woman’s voice came on the line. “Operator.”

  Operator? Weird. Had she somehow landed herself in a hotel? “Um … hello, yes … uh ….” How did one go about asking Where am I? without sounding like a complete nincompoop? “Could you dial a number for me, please?” Her brother was probably the best option. “It’s a 619 area –”

  “Ah, Dr. Parthen,” the operator interrupted. “It’s good to hear you’re awake. I’ll send the doctor in to see you right away.”

  The …? Wait – The line went dead.

  She pulled the phone away from her ear and eased the receiver back into its cradle. Doctor? Was she at a –? She shot to her feet, her heart thundering. Dear God, whatever drug Nurse Fine Ass had given her had put her into a coma and now she was in some high-class treatment facility for … for how long?! Holy crap!

  Her head started to spin, and she gripped her forehead, forcing herself to take slow, even breaths. Okay, calm down, Toni. Be logical. She wasn’t hooked up to an IV or a feeding tube, and her muscles were in working order. Weren’t they? She took a few experimental steps. Yes … yes. Okay, then.

  There was probably a simple explanation for this.

  She spied a set of long, gold velvet curtains across the room. The San Diego skyline would be just outside that window, or some landmark which would clear up this where am I? mystery, and then she could stop worrying. She walked over and parted the curtains.

  Bong. She could almost hear her own jaw drop.

  A sliding glass door led out onto a wrought iron balcony … and that’s where all semblance of normalcy ended. About twenty feet beyond the end of the balcony were prison bars. Each steel post was about as big as a birch tree, no more than a couple of feet of space between them, and appeared to surround the entirety of whatever building she was in. As ease of escape-ability went, the place ranked about a Houdini.

  Beyond the prison bars was the real freak-show. Rock above, rock below … she was inside a cave! And a cave that’d been converted into a small town. At the beginning of a long street that continued into the distance she saw a coffee shop called Aunt Ælsi’s, a clothing store named The TradeMark, and around the corner and just visible from the building she was in, there was a movie theatre where Transformers blinked on the marquee, with plenty more of the same, plus people bustling about, doing their everyday business. This was unbelievable. She dropped her forehead into her palm. How concussed was her brain, anyway?

  Jesus, knowing her luck, she was probably –

  Male voices approached her door. She whirled around, her heart speeding again. The raucous voices grew louder, laughing about somebody named Cleeve, then passed her doorway and faded. She dove for the nightstand and started hauling on her clothes: bra and panties, a pair of navy slacks, a turquoise cotton blouse, and Italian leather flats. She’d be damned if she was meeting some stranger, regardless if he or she was a doctor, in a show-your-crack-to-the-world hospital gown. This place was giving her a major case of the creeps.

  She finished dressing and darted her gaze around, searching for a hair brush or comb. Nothing. There wasn’t time to go hun
ting for one, either. The lock clicked and the door swung open.

  She didn’t know who she’d expected to come striding in, but somehow it wasn’t this tall, lean gentlemen. He was elegant and stylish, if a bit too “cleanliness is next to Godliness” in his hygiene standards. His black hair was groomed down to the last follicle, and his Armani suit had been pressed to within an inch of its life. His age was indeterminate. There seemed to be a wisdom and maturity in his turquoise eyes that suggested substantial life experience, yet there wasn’t a single wrinkle on his face.

  “Oh, you’re on your feet,” the man observed delightedly. “Splendid.” He crossed to her, holding out his palm. “I’m Dr. Jess.”

  She didn’t shake his hand, instead pointing to the balcony window. “Excuse me, but where am I?” So much for pleasantries.

  “Yes, I imagine you have many questions. If you’ll come with me, the head of the department will explain everything.” The doctor offered her a close-lipped smile.

  That was probably meant to reassure her, but it didn’t. A guy who gave a girl a big, toothy grin, now that was a man who could be trusted. “Head of what department?”

  Dr. Jess moved to stand by her bedroom door. “I’m sorry, I know this must be unsettling, but the head prefers to give these explanations himself.” He politely waited for her to precede him, that enigmatic smile still on his face.

  She exhaled sharply. Unsettling was putting it mildly. She didn’t trust this Dr. Jess, but what choice did she have but to meet this “head” if she wanted to find out what was going on. “Very well.” She crossed through the bedroom door and into a wide, balconied hallway thickly carpeted in burgundy Berber.