DECEPTION HOTEL: A Wedding, an Affair, and Murder for Hire

by Barlow, Madison

  It didn’t feel like only a couple of days since we arrived at Caldecott Manor. So much had happened that it felt like years had passed. I got goose bumps when I thought of how close he had been to death. I felt shame creep up on me, and threaten to overwhelm me when I thought of what I had done, and how I had lost it in the hotel room.

  There was still a long road ahead.

  I knew that my actions would catch up with me at some point, and that the warmth that we shared now would fade at some point. Andrew would still have to work through what I had done, and there was still a chance he could change his mind about it all, about me and him working out. But there had to be a way even through that darkness. If we had been able to make it this far through it all, and had been able to pass right by death, so close we could smell its rotten breath and live, we could make it through anything.

  I saw his aggressive stance again, his urge to fight for me, and his every intention of winning, and somehow it felt like giving up on us after that wouldn’t happen. But still, I didn’t want to get my hopes up. I didn’t want to believe that I would go unpunished for what I had done. I just wanted to be able to fix things.

  The police had rung to tell us they hadn’t found the suspect yet, but they would. I felt guilty for leaving Peter in a predicament where he would be caught for a murder he never intended to commit, not even when I asked him to. But when I said as much to Andrew, only about the murder part, of course, not about what was intended for him in my moment of insanity, he just shrugged.

  “He could die for all I care,” he said, “a man doesn’t mess with another man’s woman, and come off clean.”

  I looked ahead of me at the road that led as home, and sighed. We were going back to our life now, the world we had created for ourselves, and maybe, just maybe, we could escape the aftermath of the deception hotel, and recreate our fairytale.

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  SPARRING PARTNER

  Cassidy Daniels got into Tae Kwon Do to learn how to protect herself physically, but no one taught her how to protect her heart. Given that most of her relationships self-destruct at around six months and she's just broken up with her boyfriend, it's understandable that she's leery of starting a new relationship with her friend and martial arts instructor Nick Barnes.

  When Cassidy uncovers what she thinks is evidence of a murder on the martial arts school property and then becomes the target of the perpetrator, Cassidy discovers just how well she can take care of herself, both body and soul, and that taking chances sometimes pays off. Will she take a chance on love if it can lead to the perfect relationship she's been seeking?

  Chapter 1

  Lying on the hard wooden floor of the dojang under Nick's weight, Cassidy listened to the silence of the empty martial arts school and wondered exactly what she was doing wrong.

  This wasn't a move she hadn't practiced. A girl on her own in a big city like Atlanta had to know how to defend herself. That's what her daddy had always said and why he hadn't objected at all when she started taking Tae Kwon Do in college. Since starting in her sophomore year, Cassidy had worked her way through a graduate degree in English Literature and a black belt in a Korean martial art. Then, by Nick's request (Mr. Barnes when they were in class, much the same way bubbly, blond Cassidy became Miss Daniels, or even Mr. Daniels if the Korean standards were held), she added teaching rape self-defense to her full-contact and point-fighting. She'd been teaching her first class for seven weeks now with the idea that other women would learn more easily from a five-foot-six blond with a pixy face and curls than from an imposing six-foot-something man like the guy they got to try moves on, Carl, a bodybuilder nicknamed "The Wall".

  The class was going well. The girls had learned to stop making pointy fists that would get their thumbs broken if they ever hit anything with them and they'd learned a variety of techniques for fighting off attackers other than the tried and often not true groin kick (which most of the time missed and just pissed the guy off).

  Only during the upcoming week, they were going to be working on ground techniques. As in, if the guy gets you down on the ground, on your back or on your belly, how do you get him off of you, even if it's just long enough to grab pepper spray or sprint for safety? Nick had taught her the techniques, and Cassidy had practiced them with a lot of other black and red belts.

  Only the techniques weren't working with Nick, and they had to work, because women might need them. And because there was a camera crew coming the next week to film the class for the local news, and Cassidy was going to be throwing The Wall on camera. And not just The Wall; Nick planned to bring in a ringer, he kept saying, until Cassidy finally got him to explain who or what a ringer was.

  "He's a guy you won't know to expect ahead of time," Nick said.

  Cassidy blinked at him. "In a class full of women, if it's not you, Carl, the camera man or the reporter, why wouldn't I know who it was? It'll have to be the other guy."

  "Fine, smartass. But you won't know until then if it's someone huge and strong or small and wiry or a trained monkey."

  I'd notice a trained monkey, too, Cassidy thought, but didn't say.

  At that point Nick had been changing out of his dobok, the white cotton martial arts uniform and into street clothes, changing while standing around the edges of the gym. Cassidy had worked very hard for three years. Not only to earn her black belt, but to earn enough respect from the men -- who didn't want overly girly girls in their class -- so that they'd treat her like one of the guys. And when it worked, the first time Nick started casually changing clothes while talking to her, she'd almost lost it. Gorgeous man, disrobing!

  Now she was used to it. What she wasn't used to was Nick sitting on her for so long. She looked up into his face, working through the correct sequence of moves to throw him off of her. Nick currently rested with his weight extended from her hips, which he straddled, up her torso. His hands pressed her outstretched arms into the floor. Generally it was all about get taken down, get sat on, get it together, get out from under.

  Laying there for so long she had plenty of time to consider how good looking her instructor was. All those girly girl thoughts she'd buried so she could be one of the guys came to the surface. After all, it was a compromising position, and Nick Barnes was gorgeous. A girl could get ideas.

  The hardwood dojang floor began to eat into her spinal column. Cassidy mentally reviewed and started again. Force her legs up into Vs, as if she were just laying around on the floor, maybe reading or watching television. For the average guy, or the average guy/girl height ratio, he couldn't still hold her arms down if he moved his center of gravity farther back down her body. The M of her legs gave her the space to maneuver a little. Simply being bipedal creatures meant when someone straddled her, they created a pocket of space where their bodies weren't touching. Move a considerable amount of body mass like a hip

  into that space and it was possible to leverage a bigger attacker off a theoretically smaller – and female – victim.

  Cassidy leveraged her weight to one side, then canted that hip up. That shook the attacker's center of balance. From there she could jack all her torque into that hip and throw the guy, bringing the leg on the same side up into a roundhouse that could connect solidly with the attacker if, first, he was in the process of getting up and, second, she was flexible enough.

  Cassidy was. Mostly. Or she could bring a leg up and wrap it around the attacker, driving him down if he was slight enough. Something like 70 percent of a woman's strength was in her lower body, and men's was split fairly equally. That meant she might not be equal when it came to upper body strength, but from the waist down she was more than a match for a man.

  Except Nick. Either he was too tall, which meant there was something wrong with the technique, since a girl couldn't exactly pick her attacker, or she was doing something wrong.

  Or right. Having him there felt nice, aside from the whole lying on the hard, dusty floor of the gym thing. Bei
ng held down felt a little bit kinky, and being straddled felt kind of tingly, kind of –

  "Hello," said a voice from above them.

  Nick and Cassidy both jumped, to the extent they could jump, and stared up.

  Ryan Harding stood smiling down at them, his expression quizzical and just a little more tolerant than Cassidy liked.

  "Having fun?"

  Nick, all six-foot-something of him that was on top of her, apparently saw no reason to move. He started to say something conversational to Ryan and shifted his weight in the process, putting more pressure on Cassidy.

  Cassidy squirmed. "Oof. Get off, you brute." She shoved pointlessly at him.

  "Is that your fix for the technique?" he inquired.

  "Does it work?"

  Apparently it did. Nick Barnes rose in one easy movement and held his hand out to spin Cassidy up to her feet. Ryan received her as if the whole thing was some kind of choreographed dance.

  "Not really what I was expecting to find," Ryan said.

  Cassidy smirked up at him. Ryan Harding, sandy haired, muscular, all angular and body builder buff, was taller than Cassidy. They fit together nicely. They looked nice together. In fact, everything about their relationship was nice. He even kissed nice, which he did then, despite Nick's no kissing in the dojang rule. Cassidy tried to concentrate on the nice and not on the fact that the healthy, growing tingle she'd been experiencing while struggling under Nick had gone away.

  "We were working on a technique that isn't working," Cassidy told Ryan.

  He raised one eyebrow, something she had never been able to master. "Nick sitting on you?

  "No, that part worked," Nick said unhelpfully, and stripped off his uniform jacket revealing the chest that had just been leaning over Cassidy. It was a very nice chest, smooth and muscled and thick. She tried not to stare at it. Just one of the guys.

  Just one of the guys or not, Cassidy wasn't going to be changing in the gym itself. After dusting off her uniform, and then dusting off Ryan, and stepping away from him, she bowed to Nick and turned back to Ryan. She didn't remember having a date with him and couldn't think how to ask without sounding like she was asking exactly what she wanted to ask: What are you doing here? Not that she didn't want to see him, of course, but the dojang was her world, where she went and concentrated solely on being the black belt version of Cassidy.

  Mia would have asked. Mia was five-foot-one and looked like a faerie and could ask any guy anything and make him think how cute and tiny and adorable she was. Mia could have asked Ryan if they had a date and made it sound like she was breathless with anticipation and not like she'd possibly forgotten she had planned to see her boyfriend of six months.

  Cassidy would just sound like she'd forgotten they had plans. Even if they didn't and it was spontaneous on Ryan's part, she'd somehow sound ungrateful.

  Maybe you are, said Mia's voice in her head. Mia wasn't Ryan's biggest fan. After the meet-the-boyfriend brunch all those months ago, Cassidy had asked, "So, what do you think?" and Mia had said, "He's pretty. And kind of beige."

  Cassidy grabbed her bag from the chairs along the edge of the gym. "I need to get changed," she said, pointing as if the two men in the room didn't know where the locker rooms were. Nick went on stripping off his uniform and changing to street clothes.

  Ryan followed her out to the lobby of the dilapidated community building Nick Barnes had turned into a martial arts school. "I know we didn't have plans," he started.

  Whew!

  "But I thought I could take you for sushi."

  And that sounded like fun. Ryan was good conversation and a good kisser and a good looking good guy and now she was thinking the word good over and over like she'd thought nice and she went up on her tiptoes to kiss the edge of his mouth. "Give me 10 minutes?"

  Ten minutes to change and stop thinking and start feeling. Nothing was missing, she told herself as she headed down the hallway on the far side of the never-used receptionist's desk. Twin hallways flanked the desk, as if boys and girls locker rooms needed to be separated by more than just doors The women's hallway ran along an exterior wall and through big windows she could see late afternoon Atlanta sky, hazy and spring-warm.

  The hall ran the length of the building, giving her time to think. She liked her relationship with Ryan, it just seemed to be reaching the settled in phase, that time when the newness of a brand new relationship was traded for the – she scrambled, looking for what came next. Comfort! The comfort of knowing he wasn't just going to disappear. It was comforting (not comfortable, that relationship-ending trumpet of doom) to know she had a boyfriend she could depend on. That more than made up for not feeling nauseated with suspense between phone calls, right? And the tingling feeling she'd rather inappropriately been experiencing during the mock attack from her instructor, that would come back after sushi, and more appropriately, this time it would come back when she was with Ryan. They'd go back to his place, or to hers - her best friend and roommate Mia was gone for the weekend on some extended nature hike in the Appalachian Mountains - and they'd have the entire apartment to themselves.

  Then maybe she could try out that stupid ground technique again, because Ryan was big and muscular and taller than her – and if she couldn't get out from under him, well, there were some other techniques she could try.

  SPARRING PARTNER by Madison Barlow

  Available at Amazon.com and other retailers

  A Note from Madison Barlow

  Thank you so much for reading Deception Hotel. I hope you really liked it.

  As you probably know, many people look at the reviews on Amazon before they decide to purchase a book.

  If you liked the book, could you please take a minute to leave a review with your feedback?

  Just go to Amazon.com, look up Deception Hotel - Barlow, go to the book's page and scroll down until you see the orange "Write a customer review button", click it and write a few words about why you like the book.

  A couple of minutes is all I’m asking for, and it would mean the world to me.

  Thank you so much,

  Madison B.