by Cindy Dees
His big body collapsed on hers, sweaty and heaving. But even then, he was considerate of her. He propped himself up with his elbows, giving her enough space to breathe. Of course, even if she’d wanted to move, she was too wiped out to lift a finger. She panted herself, at a loss for words.
That had been epic. Freaking epic.
How long they laid there in silence catching their breath, she had no idea. His forehead rested lightly against hers, and the familiar intimacy of it was like a warm blanket, an old friend, wrapping around her.
At long last, he murmured, “Wow. Am I crushing you?”
“Yes, but there’s no rush on moving.”
Nevertheless, he pressed up and away from her immediately. He moved across his office to the closet and pulled out a pair of jeans. He slipped them on, commando, and they hung low and sexy on his hips as he tossed her one of his T-shirts. She pulled on the oversize thing, which fit her like a baggy dress.
“Ana, we need to talk.”
She hmmphed. “Look where that got us the last time we tried that. Maybe we should just stick to epic sex.”
“Epic, huh?” a brief smile lit his face. Lord, he was beautiful when he smiled like that. His smile faded. “You and I both know great sex isn’t enough to build a lifelong relationship on.”
She winced and tried, “But it’s not a bad place to start. It’s a good indicator of compatibility. And trust. And mutually shared tastes.”
His lips curved slightly. “Good point.” But then waxed totally serious. “We’ve got some important decisions to make.”
Alarm flared in her gut. “Not really. You make a ton of money on this movie, your studio’s funded for the long-term and you move on with your regularly scheduled career as a movie star. I’ll have this baby, and he or she and I will get on with our lives.”
He glared at her, obviously fighting to control his ire.
She used the pause to dive in with “Look. I realize you had no intention of getting into a serious relationship, and you definitely didn’t want a baby out of this. I in no way expect you to become Superdad to a kid you didn’t even want. However, I won’t, under any circumstances, consider an abortion, so don’t even suggest it to me because it’ll just make me mad.”
“Will you, just once, shut up and let me talk?” he finally got in edgewise.
She reared back, startled.
“I’m not going to hold any grudges about how this baby came to be. It happened, and I should’ve taken steps to make sure you didn’t get pregnant. I take full responsibility for that.”
She didn’t know whether to scream or cry. He seriously believed she’d gotten pregnant on purpose. That she’d trapped him. Or at least tried to. She was so engulfed in rage and grief she nearly missed his next words.
“Marry me, Ana. I want to be there for you and the baby. We can go to Vegas and be married tonight.”
Shocked, she retorted, “Why tonight? Are you so desperate to get me respectably wed so when people count on their fingers in a little under nine months they don’t throw you funny looks?”
“This isn’t about my reputation,” he growled. “It’s about doing the right thing—”
She threw her hands over her ears, abruptly so furious she could hardly breathe. “To hell with the right thing, Jackson Prescott. You can take your right thing and go straight to hell!”
She stormed out of his office and down the hallway to the crowded ladies’ locker room where he would not be able to follow her today. Tears built up violently behind the fragile emotional dam she barely hung on to until she made it to her locker. She drew one wobbly, sobbing breath and—
“Oh, my gosh, ma’am. You were incredible earlier!”
“Where did you get your acting training?”
“Screw that. Do you have that guy’s phone number?”
Ana jolted hard. The mob of extra girls. She could not deal with all their perky enthusiasm right now. She yanked on her clothes, scrubbed the worst of the praying-mantis makeup off her face and raced out of the locker room.
She spied Tyrone on her way out and said urgently, “Do me a favor, will you? Tell Adrian I’m sick and have to cancel shooting cleanup shots this afternoon. Tell him I’m really sorry....”
That was it. That was as long as she could hold it together. She whirled as the dam within her broke and tears streamed down her face. She ran for the car and driver the studio had provided for her. Dignity be damned.
Chapter 18
She’d not only turned down his proposal, she’d told him to go to hell. Jackson was stunned. What on earth was wrong with Ana? It was what she’d wanted, right? Why else would she have gone and gotten pregnant if not to wring a marriage proposal out of the confirmed bachelor?
He’d give anything to go home and lose himself in a bottle of bourbon, but he was too damned responsible for that. Instead, he was parked in front of her place in the Hugster, standing watch over her. Or at least on his child. Any sane man would give up on the baby’s mother after her outburst this afternoon.
Completely flummoxed by Ana’s irrational behavior, he let his thoughts stray in a safer direction. He was immensely frustrated by the police’s failure to catch whoever was stalking Ana. He got that they had violent crimes aplenty to deal with, but someone was targeting the mother of his child. He was not about to sit back and do nothing about that.
He spent much of the long night in the Hugster using the internet to research Ana’s past. It took him a while to find the newspaper article detailing her attack—in South Carolina as it turned out. The picture with the article showed Chandler LaGrange in a football uniform, standing with his arm thrown around another football player. The caption said they were cocaptains of the district champion football team. LaGrange was decent enough looking, he supposed, but Jackson recognized the type. The guy’s body would run to fat in a few years, and the guy would spend his adult life reliving the glory days of high school while he worked a dead-end job in a dead-end life.
Thank God Ana’d gotten away from the guy, and guys like him. She had so much talent and potential, so much life in her—
Focus, buddy.
He was startled to read, according to a later news article, that LaGrange had been transferred to a mental institution in North Carolina. Apparently, his family had him moved there when Chandler had trouble with the staff of the county mental hospital in his hometown mistreating the lad. Ana must have been well-liked by the locals.
Jackson couldn’t condone abuse of a mentally ill teen, even if young Chandler had done his level best to kill Ana while they were in college. He shifted his internet search to North Carolina to learn more about the fate of LaGrange.
There wasn’t much. A few release hearings over the years that were declined. Frustrated, Jackson sent an email to the physician of record in LaGrange’s case to verify that the guy was still incarcerated and to ask if the doctor thought there might be a connection between the attacks on Ana and the guy’s patient.
If not Chandler, then who could it be? One thing Jackson knew: she wasn’t leaving his sight again until the bastard was caught, whether she liked it or not. A rental car was delivered to her apartment midmorning the next day, and she used it to drive to a grocery store and back. In the early afternoon, he followed her out to the local shopping mall.
At the mall, he waited for upwards of two hours, parked a dozen spaces away from her car. She must really be going on a shopping spree. Which was a little weird for her. He recalled her commenting before that she hated shopping.
Another hour passed, and he began to get alarmed. Something wasn’t right. He dialed her cell phone, but she didn’t pick it up. He had to have a chat with her about letting his calls go to voice mail until her stalker was caught. It was going to make her mad, but that was tough. Her safety came first.
&n
bsp; He resorted to tracking down a phone number for the mall security office and asking them to check on her. He gave them a detailed physical description and described the clothes she was wearing.
Perhaps fifteen minutes had passed since that call when his phone rang. He snatched it up eagerly. “Ana?”
“No, Mr. Prescott. It’s mall security. We’ve checked all our video feeds and run our guys through the entire mall, and the woman you’re describing is not here. We’ve got footage of her entering the mall a little over three hours ago, but then we lost her.”
Jackson’s blood ran cold. There was a commotion in the background of the call, and the guard on the phone with him swore. “Can you come inside, sir? There’s something we need to show you.” The guy then spoke to someone near him. “Yes, you moron. Call the police and report it.”
Jackson didn’t stick around to hear any more. He sprinted from the parking lot toward the mall.
The security guard showed him footage of Ana walking out of a store and a man approaching her. They spoke briefly, and then the man took her by the arm and led her quickly out an exit on the other side of the mall.
Jackson’s heart dropped into his feet. “Can you get a better shot of that man’s face?”
“We’ve got one more shot of them in the parking lot,” the head guard replied. “Pull it up,” he instructed the technician sitting at the bank of monitors.
“Can you zoom that?” Jackson muttered, staring at the screen.
“Nope. That’s all I’ve got,” the tech answered.
There was something familiar about the man’s face. For her part, Ana looked deeply alarmed. But she didn’t look afraid of the man she was with. Did she know him, maybe?
Brody Westmore arrived at the security office after a few minutes, and Jackson filled the cop in quickly. The mall security cameras had captured a license plate, which Brody relayed to his dispatchers. The police would use their access to traffic cameras in the area to try to spot the vehicle. But it was a long shot. Millions of vehicles transited the Pacific Coast Highway, and Ana’s captor had been driving a popular and nondescript model of car.
The cops told Jackson they would keep him updated and told him to go home and wait for news. So not happening.
He headed over to the studio and filled his men in quickly on what had happened. They all offered to help...but they had no place to go, no idea how to help Ana.
Would her stalker try to ransom her back? The police seemed to think it was a simple kidnapping that was financially motivated. They said they would go ahead and notify the FBI, but Jackson felt time slipping away from Ana fast.
Where are you? Why did you go with that guy? What could he possibly have said to you to make you leave with a stranger?
Jackson paced the halls of the studio restlessly. He was missing something. He recognized that guy at the mall. But from where?
* * *
Ana glanced over at Adrian’s assistant construction supervisor. He was the sort of guy her gaze just slid off of. Bland. Nice-enough looking. But unremarkable. She’d seen Marti Frick around the set a few times before and knew him on sight but had never spoken with him. It was nice of the guy to come get her after Jackson was injured on the set. “And you say Jackson’s not too badly hurt?” she asked him.
“Nah, not too badly. He’s refusing to go to the hospital for an X-ray of his leg, though. That’s why Adrian sent me to find you. He wants you to talk some sense into him.”
Ana snorted. “That sounds just like Jackson. Stubborn to a fault, he is.”
The car turned the wrong direction to head for the studio and she blurted, “Hey! The studio’s that way.”
“Road’s closed down there. They’re patching up damage from last winter’s earthquake. We gotta go around.”
She subsided for a couple more minutes. But then the guy turned the wrong way again. “Where are you going, Marti? The studio’s definitely back the other way.”
“Shut up, you bitch.”
She looked across the front seat in shock. She lurched when she saw the tiny black bore of a pistol pointed across Marti’s body at her. Oh. My. God.
“You! You’re the stalker! But why? I don’t know you from Adam.”
“You’re so stupid. You never recognized me, and I was right in front of you the whole time.”
Her heart rate accelerated to something approaching light speed. She had to keep him talking. Figure out who he was and where he was taking her. She moved her hand an inch closer to her purse and the cell phone inside.
“Should I recognize you?” she asked in as conversational a voice as she could manage. Gotta keep this guy calm. The memory of his boot smashing into an unconscious man’s mouth with casual cruelty came to her.
His laugh was ugly. Mean. And there was something familiar about it....
“Pete?” she asked in disbelief. “Pete Ricollo?” He’d been the star quarterback of the football team in high school. Chandler LaGrange’s best friend, who’d attended college with them. The guy who’d been driving the truck the night that—
“You’re the one who’s been causing all those accidents, aren’t you? And you trashed my motel room. Were you driving the car that hit me, too?” she demanded.
“You never even suspected me, did you?” he ground out. “No one ever saw good old Pete. The invisible man. That’s me.”
“You’re not invisible. I see you clear as a bell.”
“Shut up.” As her hand inched a bit closer to her purse, he snarled. “Keep your goddamn hand away from your purse. I’m wise to you. Gonna call that bastard boyfriend of yours, aren’t you?”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” she blurted.
“But he’ll still come to the rescue like the goddamn cavalry charging to the goddamn rescue, won’t he?”
Jackson undoubtedly would. If he knew she’d been kidnapped and if he knew where this nutcase had taken her. But to Pete, she just shrugged and replied, “I doubt it. We’re done as a couple.”
“I saw you two dry humping on film yesterday. Didn’t look too damned over to me.”
“That was just acting,” she replied as lightly as she could. “He hates my guts.”
“I know the goddamned feeling.”
“What have I ever done to you, Pete?”
“I lost my football scholarship because of you. I was gonna get out of that two-bit town. Make it in the big leagues. Get rich in the NFL. And then you had to go and jump out of my goddamn truck and wreck my life.”
“How did I wreck your life? I’m the one Chandler tried to kill. No charges were made against you.”
“There were questions asked. Rumors. Why didn’t I try to stop him? Why didn’t I pull the truck over?”
“Why didn’t you?”
“You weren’t the first girl he shut up, you know.”
Shut up, as in killed? Stunned, she asked carefully, “How many other girls were there?”
“Three. You’d have made four. You were the last one. One for the road between friends, you know.”
“What happened to the other girls?”
“We shared ’em. Shared everything, me and Chandler. We were even cocaptains of the football team.”
Shared the girls how? She asked carefully, “Did Chandler strangle the others ones first, too?”
“Not the first one. Turned out to be a pain in the ass, her hollering and fighting the whole time. We learned with the second one to shut her up first.”
“And then what?”
He looked over at her, his lewd stare raking up and down her body. Her skin crawled, the answer obvious before he said the words.
“And then we did whatever we wanted to ’em. Had fun with ’em. Did everything we could think up to ’em.”
“After they were dead?”<
br />
He shrugged. “The first one was more fun still squirming and screaming, but Chandler liked ’em quiet and cooperative.”
“Dead.”
“Well, yeah.”
“That’s sick. Twisted as hell, Pete.”
“Shut up. When we get to my place, I’m gonna tape your goddamn mouth shut. And then I’m gonna do all the stuff me and Chandler was plannin’ to do to you. You can squirm the way I like, but I’m sick of listening to your yapping.”
Jackson, where are you? Why, oh, why, didn’t I listen to you and stay with you?
This was all her fault. She and the baby were going to die because she’d been too stubborn to listen to reason. She was never going to see him again. Never going to make mind-blowing love with him. Never share watching their child grow up together. Never have a chance to make things right between them. She’d been an idiot. She should’ve waited as long as it took for him to be ready to commit to her. But now it was too late.
Oh, God, Jackson. Please forgive me.
Chapter 19
“Mr. Prescott?”
He whirled to face the FBI agent who’d spoken from behind him in the high-tech command center. “Anything?” he demanded.
“We got a hit on her cell phone location. It pinged heading into the mountains. We’ve got units and local police headed that way, but we’ll lose cell phone coverage of the area she’s headed into shortly. Do you have any idea why her kidnapper might take her up there?”
“Other than it being isolated and damned near impossible to track people through?” he asked rhetorically.
The FBI agent made a sympathetic sound. “Keep the faith. We’ll find her.”
Jackson nodded, miserable. Yeah, but would they find her before she and the baby died? Something very bad was happening to Ana. He could feel it in his bones. Somehow, this had to tie in to Chandler LaGrange. His attack on her was the only event in her life of any significance that was in any way tied to violence or wackos. But how were the events of then and now related? He opened his laptop and pulled up the articles about Chandler and the attack again.