by Karen Leabo
“Do you want to tell me some more?” he asked. “I’ll listen, if you want. Off the record. Sometimes talking things out makes them less scary. When I was little, my father used to make me describe the monsters. During the day, he’d ask me to draw pictures of them. The night terrors stopped pretty soon after that.”
“Yeah, but your monsters weren’t real. The terrorists are.”
“You’d be surprised how vivid my imagination was. They were very real monsters to me.”
Christine found that she did want to talk. She hadn’t told Ryan anywhere near the complete story yet. But it seemed silly for the whole thing to be off the record. She’d only have to repeat herself tomorrow for his tape recorder.
“I was getting ready for a party,” she said. “Um, before I go on, would you like to get more comfortable? You make me nervous just sitting there like that.” So close, but not close enough. “I can hear you breathing, I know you’re near, but I can’t touch you.”
“Do you want to touch me?” He sounded surprised. “You sure didn’t a minute ago.”
“I was in the throes of nightmare hysteria. Come on, get under the covers. It’ll be like when my sister and I were little. We would snuggle under the covers and tell scary stories.”
He stood up. “Uh, Chrissy, I hate to break this to you, but if I get under the covers with you, it most certainly won’t be the same as two little girls.”
Well, all right. She’d known that. Feigned innocence wasn’t working, so she might as well fess up to the uncomfortable truth. She wanted Ryan Mulvaney to lie down with her. She needed to be held. That was the worst thing about being a hostage—the aloneness, her inability to articulate her fears to anyone who cared a whit.
She took a deep breath, then swung the covers back in a silent invitation.
Chapter 9
Ryan could hear his own heartbeat in the suddenly too-quiet room. Chrissy had just invited him into her bed, and he didn’t know quite what to do.
He’d been propositioned by sources before. He often bought information from street-savvy prostitutes, and more than one of them had tried to turn a cut-and-dried business arrangement into a working arrangement. A couple of times, sources he was just about to nail had offered to trade him a high-priced call girl for his silence. And once, a high-ranking police administrator’s wife had come on to him, a last-ditch effort to keep her husband’s blatant corruption off the front page. He’d been smart enough to gracefully get out of all of those situations.
But this...this put him on a whole different level of temptation. His impromptu kiss with Chrissy, documented on Fran’s film, was bad enough. But to compromise the whole story by sleeping with her was unthinkable.
Then why was he thinking about it? She might be manipulating him, trying to get him to have sex with her so that she could lay another big guilt trip on him. And she might just succeed. He was already having a hard time thinking about how he was going to nail Stan Greenlow to the wall; it would be a hell of a lot harder after sleeping with the man’s daughter.
“Well?” she said. She was trying to sound cavalier, he could tell, but her voice quivered just enough that he knew his decision meant something to her.
He should have done the smart thing and taken a cold shower, but he couldn’t make himself even stand up. Manipulation or not, he honestly believed Chrissy needed him, needed whatever comfort he could offer. If that made him a schmuck, so be it.
Anyway, no law said he had to do the deed with her. She claimed she was after a good snuggle, and he could provide her with that He swung his legs up and under the covers in one smooth move, then eased down beside her. She felt warm, even through the thick terry cloth of that infernal robe. He remembered the way she’d glowed after her bath, both last night and tonight, her skin blushed to a delicate pink.
She took a quick, shallow breath as he smoothed the blankets up over them both. “You must think I’m extremely juvenile, or naive...or slutty,” she said.
Ryan found it difficult to speak—all his senses were clogged up with impressions of Chrissy’s long, lean body—but he managed. “I don’t know what to think. You’re either incredibly trusting, or you don’t care much about your virtue.”
“Is my virtue in danger?”
“I would hope so.” His hands itched to stroke her, to at least acknowledge this newfound intimacy. “I’m not a eunuch, and I haven’t exactly made it a secret that I find you attractive. At the same time, I know that the two of us...getting intimate is about the stupidest thing either one of us could do.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s not really what I want, although...”
“Although what?”
“Nothing.” She sighed.
“Then what do you want?”
“For you to hold me,” she answered without hesitation. “I haven’t had anyone do that in a long time—unless you count the kidnappers, and that was hardly comforting.”
Suddenly, more than anything, Ryan wanted to erase Denny’s obscene touch from Chrissy’s memory. He felt a strong urge to break the nose of anyone who’d laid a hand on her. He slid one arm behind her neck. “Come here. I’ll hold you.” And that was all he would do, God help him. He’d been crazy to let her start this, but he was stuck with the situation now.
“Mmm, that’s better. Certainly better than a sister could do.” Her voice was laced with humor, nothing provocative, but she must not have known what that timbre did to him. He suspected she didn’t have a true picture of just how enticing a creature she ways.
“You’re not a virgin, are you?” He needed to know.
She didn’t seem offended. “No. I had a boyfriend in college. And then there’s Robert, though I’m not sure I can count him.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s...I don’t know, almost asexual. I swear, the way he handles it, you’d think sex was some annoying but essential duty he had to perform. Maybe that’s the way he sees it.” She gave a little gasp. “Oh, God, Ryan, you wouldn’t quote me on that, would you?”
“We’re off the record, remember?” Ryan found that, at the moment, he didn’t feel the slightest ambition to work these revelations of hers into the story. All he wanted was to keep holding her. The fact that she trusted him with such intimate details of her life, even when she knew what he was and what he was ultimately after, gave him a warm feeling like nothing he could remember.
“Oh, good.” She relaxed another degree. “So, where do you want me to start?”
“Anywhere you like.”
“I’d do better if you’d ask questions.”
“Okay. Let’s start with the kidnappers. Just who exactly are these guys?”
“I’ve told you pretty much everything I know. They’re part of this environmental group that’s been the terror of Capitol Hill the last two years. Now I guess they’re taking lobbying to an all new level.”
“That’s a good turn of phrase, Chrissy,” he said. “See, you could be a writer if you wanted.”
“Oh... well...” she stammered.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to wander off the subject. So you’ve never had trouble with this group before? I mean, you or your father personally?
Chrissy hesitated. “It seems I remember my father complaining about them a couple of times. But then, he complains about a lot of things, so it didn’t really stand out in my mind. The first I knew that Dad and I were targets was when they grabbed me.”
“And how did they accomplish this feat?”
“They posed as deliverymen. The wedding is in about three weeks, you see, and I’ve been receiving a steady stream of wedding gifts ever since the invitations went out. I didn’t think twice when the two men came to the door. They wore uniforms and everything.”
“Do you normally answer the door?”
“No. But I was close by, so I did this time. It amazes me that they got so lucky. On a normal day, they wouldn’t have been permitted access to the house, much less to me. But I was there, in my
party dress and my jewelry, Johnnyon-the-spot to rake in another wedding gift. Before I knew it I was being wrapped in a blanket and stuffed into the back of a truck.”
“No one saw you?”
“Apparently not. Dad was probably in his office with his secretary. Connie would have been upstairs cleaning or something. Our cook had the day off, I think. I don’t know where the chauffeur was. That’s all the employees we have.”
Ryan had visualized the Greenlow household as a bit more complicated. He would have to verify the situation through some other source, he supposed—
He stopped himself. He wasn’t supposed to be thinking like a reporter right now. He was supposed to be Chrissy’s surrogate big brother, slaying the dragons of the dark for her.
Only he was hard as a rock—a most unbrotherly attitude. She had only to move her leg a couple of inches to discover that for herself.
He tried to herd his thoughts onto more reasonable pathways. “When did they drug you the first time?”
“Oh, as soon as they grabbed me. I think they must have thought the drug would work faster, because I kept yelling and thrashing, and they seemed surprised that I hadn’t passed out right away.”
“How long before the drug took effect?”
“I think about ten minutes. First I got really happy and complacent, then I passed out.”
Clioxydine. Ryan had done some research on the Internet on the various tranquilizers Chrissy might have been given. Clioxydine, a veterinary drug, seemed to fit the bill, given the symptoms she’d mentioned, and it was cheap and readily available. He’d heard that an oral variety had been the culprit in several recent date-rape cases.
He hesitated to ask his next question. But if the answer was yes, Chrissy needed to talk about it. “When you were under the influence of this drug, did these guys...you know, hurt you?”
There was a long pause. “I’m not really sure, but I think not. Wouldn’t I know...I mean, wouldn’t I be able to tell if I’d been raped?”
Involuntarily, Ryan shuddered, again remembering Josette. She’d been in the hospital for six days after she’d been raped. He’d interviewed other victims when he did a story about a serial rapist; his inclination was to believe that a woman couldn’t be violated without knowing it. Anyway, he would tell Chrissy what she wanted to hear. “You’d know.”
“Anyway, the drug lasted a few hours. When I woke up, I was in this terrible, nasty room, tied to a pipe, lying on a dirty mattress with no sheets. Through an open door there was another room, and the terrorists hung out in there, watching TV, smoking dope, drinking, and talking about how to deal with me.”
“And how long were you there?”
“I’m not sure. I think two days, but my sense of time got all mixed-up.”
“And for two days you just sat there? Did they feed you?”
“No. One of the women took me to the bathroom, and I drank water from the tap. And one of the guys gave me a sip of his beer. That’s all I remember.”
“What did they talk about?”
“About how to get my father to pay a million-dollar ransom.”
“Did they give any indication as to why they’d chosen you as a target?”
Chrissy hesitated, and Ryan sensed the first evasion she’d shown all evening. “It was political. They didn’t like the way Dad voted on some key environmental issues, and they said he took money from oil companies and other antienvironmental lobbyists.”
“It seems a lot of congressmen would be targets, then, if that was all it took.” Ryan had been researching Greenlow’s politics, comparing his voting record to that of other senators. He definitely wasn’t an environmentalist’s dream, but he wasn’t their nightmare. Others were worse.
“Maybe I wasn’t the only target,” she said, sounding the slightest bit defensive. “Maybe there were other attempted kidnappings, but I was the first successful one.”
She was hiding something. Ryan’s journalistic instincts were kicking in, despite his best efforts to keep them at bay, and he knew when a source was trying to explain away something that hadn’t even come out yet. His impulse was to argue with Chrissy, to fluster her. But he couldn’t. First off, they were off the record, so why bother? And second... he couldn’t make himself be mean to her. Her father was involved in something sleazy, and she was the one who got caught in the middle.
Tomorrow would be soon enough to challenge her.
“Who knows what motivates animals like that?” he said, though he knew very well. Money. And for some reason, these environmental terrorists believed that they could get it out of Stan Greenlow.
“So did these guys contact your father?” Ryan asked.
Another hesitation. “They did.” She yawned melodramatically. “I’m getting tired, now. Could we talk about this in the morning?”
Ryan knew that if he dropped the subject now, by morning she would have her story straight. Again, his journalistic impulse was to push. Whatever she admitted, he could work on getting it on the record tomorrow. Or confirming the facts through independent sources. But again, he couldn’t make himself harass her.
“Sure, we can drop it till morning,” he said. “I’m kind of tired, too.” And horny. “Do you want me to stay here, or go back to my own bed?”
“Um...” Whatever her answer would have been, a knock on the door silenced her. Ryan pressed one finger to her lips, indicating that she should remain silent, then slipped out of the bed, his senses alert.
The knock came again. “C’mon, Ryan, open up.”
Fran! He’d forgotten all about her. He flipped on then bedside lamp, then grabbed his jeans and pulled them on, zipping them up as he walked to the door. Not that Fran hadn’t seen him in his underwear before, or that she would even blink, but he felt very uncomfortable with the idea of her seeing him so...casual with Chrissy in the room.
He peered through the peephole in the door, just to make sure Fran was alone, then let her in.
“Took long enough,” Fran said, her eyebrows arched speculatively. “What’s our little princess up to?”
“Don’t call her that,” he said, annoyed. At the moment, Chrissy was doing a beautiful job of feigning sleep. Ryan’s computer was still on, and his notes were laid out all over the bed, as if he’d been working. “She’s been through hell the last couple of days. And she’s being a really good sport about the inconveniences.”
“Oh, some inconvenience. I wouldn’t complain, either, if some guy put me up at the Sheraton so he could interview me. Has she made it worth your while?”
Ryan chose to accept a nonprurient slant to Fran’s question. “I’ve got a hell of a story shaping up. Come out in the hallway for a minute, and I’ll tell you.”
“You afraid the princess will miss some of her beauty sleep? Jeez, if anyone doesn’t need beauty sleep, it’s her. She’s so damn photogenic it’s scary. Wait till you see these pictures.” Fran handed Ryan a large brown envelope.
He laid it on the corner of the bed. “Come on.” He ushered her out into the hallway, leaving the door open only a crack. “This is turning into a better story than we bargained for. I think Stan Greenlow’s got a secret, a real dirty secret.” He wasn’t referring to the illegitimate daughter, either. That was a secret Ryan had decided to keep, given that it wasn’t relevant to his current story. “Chrissy has told me a lot of stuff, but she’s holding something back, too. These NATURE guys and girls were trying to make a point by targeting Christine and her father. There’s something juicy beneath the surface here. I can feel it.”
“So you really believe she was kidnapped?” Fran asked, clearly amazed.
“Unless she’s an incredibly good liar. I can usually spot liars.”
“I don’t know, Rye. Raging hormones can cause any guy’s judgment including his lie-spotting abilities—to go right out the window.”
“My hormones are not raging,” he lied succinctly.
“They are, too. What’s she doing in your room, anyway?”
/> “It’s our room. She didn’t want to stay by herself, and I don’t blame her. She’s really spooked. And in case you didn’t notice, she’s bundled up like an Eskimo and sleeping in her own bed.”
Fran narrowed her eyes. “She trusts you that much?”
“Yes, and I wouldn’t even think of violating that trust.”
Fran snorted. “Now I know you’re lying. You might be able to curb your wayward impulses, but you’ll never believe that you aren’t at least thinking about... waywardness.” She smiled coyly. “Hey, you want I should take a picture of her asleep?”
“No,” he said hastily. Chrissy wasn’t really asleep, and she would never allow Fran to point a camera at her now. “You can take more pictures tomorrow. She’ll consent to it, I’m pretty sure. Let’s not risk making her mad.”
Fran rolled her eyes. “Okay. But I think you’re going soft on me...parts of you, anyway. Your killer instinct has taken a hike.” With that, Fran turned and sauntered down the hall toward the elevators.
Christine had made a dive for the envelope full of photos the moment she was alone in the room—she couldn’t resist. Now she was Hipping through one glossy eight-by-ten after another, horrified by what she saw. Here she was making a phone call at Costello’s, and there she was stuffing her face with a cinnamon roll, appearing as if she didn’t have a concern in the world.
Here she was fleeing down the street as the police arrived at Costello’s; there she was riding the crowded subway. Smelling flowers at the zoo..
Lots of zoo pictures. She certainly looked as if she were having fun. My Lord, she thought, who would believe the woman in these photos had escaped from captivity just the previous evening? Who would believe she’d been threatened with rape and mutilation?
Christine Hipped to the last picture and gasped. She and Ryan, wrapped up in a passionate kiss. His face didn’t show. Hers did, quite clearly, despite the steam rising up around them.
The picture made her hot in more ways than one.
He was using her. The wholly natural attraction she felt for Ryan would be her downfall. She could already imagine the photo caption: And Where Is Fiancé Robert In This Picture?