Talk Flirty To Me: Cheap Thrills Series Book 4

by Moore, Mary B.

  Before she could say anything else, I hung up and gestured to the men in the room who were all now standing. Apparently I’d been so absorbed in the phone call and dealing with a real-life version of Satan, that I hadn’t seen the new arrivals to the group.

  “I don’t know what it is, but whatever he wants is hidden in that bear because the toy itself is worth jack shit.”

  “I’ll go get it,” Bond offered, Canon and Reid nodding and standing close to him. “Is it still on the shelf in her room?”

  Shaking my head, I went to push past them, but DB caught my arm. “You’re not going. The house needs cleaned up, Jarrod. You seeing that again with this new information will fry your brain and we need you.”

  Seeing the wisdom in this, I swallowed over the lump in my throat and then cleared it so I could talk. “Yeah, it’s in the Steiff box that the other bear came in. We’ll meet at the garage and I’ll call Perkins with the news.”

  Not needing to be told what to do, my brothers turned and left to get it. They’d just cleared the door when a hand grabbed my other shoulder and I turned around and saw Leo standing there, his face wearing what I figured was a similar expression to mine.

  “If anything happens, I want her dealt with. I’m thinking you don’t have the power you made her think you have, but whatever needs to done I’ll help you with.”

  The conviction and determination in his voice shocked me, and then I got why he’d looked so confused when I’d asked him if he was with me before. “This is your daughter we’re talking about. I’m not sure it’s possible for you to do that to her, man.”

  “No, my daughter wouldn’t do this to her family or her daughter. My daughter wouldn’t have walked out of the hospital after she pushed Elodie out. My daughter wouldn’t set her baby up to the possibility of having her life taken from her by giving her something that belongs to a man who’d take lives to get it back. So that isn’t my daughter, that’s a fucking nightmare and I want her stopped.”

  Nodding at him, I shifted the angle of my body to include him in what I was going to ask the men to do.

  “We meet at the garage and wait for them to come with the bear. As soon as I’ve got it in front of me, I’ll call Perkins to arrange a meet.” All the men nodded at this plan, but there was more. Focusing on DB and his men, I said, “You’re the law enforcement in this, so I need to know what you can do and give you the lead once we’ve got the bear.”

  As the sheriff, the onus on this fell on his shoulders. “Get the area for the swap. We’ll look at it and figure out where we can go and not be seen. The more people we have around him the better because we don’t know what he’s carrying or how many people he has behind him, so the rest of you,” he addressed the remaining men, “will have to act as backup. You act within the law, do you understand? Failure to do that risks Elodie and Gloria’s lives and puts getting justice for what’s happened at risk.”

  The normally light-hearted and easygoing Townsend family remained silent and serious as they all nodded.

  “I’m going to call Carter and tell him what to bring to the garage,” he continued. “We do this tight, men. And by tight I mean sticking to the plan unless we move to Plan B.”

  All of them confirmed they got it, and then we were moving. As I was walking out the door, Dad caught up with me.

  “We’ll get them back,” he muttered. “And your mother’s going to be pissed.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him what was burning in my gut after seeing what Shane had done to Maude and Katy, and that was the likelihood that he’d done the same thing to her. If I thought about that for too long I’d lose the control I had and, not being experienced in this sort of thing, I needed that control to get them back.

  This morning everything had been laid out ahead of me. I was in love with Katy, she was in love with me, I had my family and hers around us, we were all healthy and happy, and Elodie had fed me toast, pinching tiny pieces off at a time. As I’d left to go to work, she’d called out, “Love cawot!” and my gut had clenched in a good way hearing it.

  Fuck, I wish I’d taken the time to stop and appreciate it all more. I also wished I’d have woken Katy up when she’d said she loved me as she fell asleep and said it back.

  Seventeen

  Jarrod

  “Yes?” the sick son of a bitch answered, sounding like he had nothing going on.

  “Shane, it’s Jarrod Kline,” I clipped, making a point to talk quickly. “I’ve got what you wanted back.”

  I’d learned from DB on the way to the garage that it was apparently no secret Shane had many bad attributes. He was a racist and at one stage it looked like he was bordering on being a white supremacist, too. He’d been investigated over the sexual assault of quite a few women – women who’d withdrawn their statements shortly after he was questioned over the incidents – but he’d always been released due to lack of evidence. Yesterday they’d found his car abandoned just outside of town and it looked like it had been in an accident and they’d already been looking for him when all of this happened to find out what had happened. I hadn’t ever paid much attention to him, so I didn’t know any of this, but now that we had all of this information it didn’t take a genius to put two and two together about his car and the hit and run we’d been involved in.

  “Is that a fact? Seems I’ve got two of what you want right here,” he said in a singsong voice which put me on edge.

  This fucker was crazy crackers, and he had two pieces of my world in his hands.

  Taking a deep breath in to try to stay calm, I made eye contact with DB and nodded when he mouthed “calm” at me just like his brother had earlier. I could see the wisdom in them saying it because losing it wouldn’t get us what we wanted, but it was starting to fuck me off.

  “Well, you’ve gone to a lot of trouble to find what I’ve got now, Perkins, so it seems to me you’re wanting this badly, bad enough for us to not fuck around and risk it getting lost. You with me?”

  There was a pause on the other side of the phone followed by a clanging noise like a metal door shutting.

  “Meet me at the lake. There’s a cabin two miles up the slip road just past the entrance.”

  With that, he hung up, proving that he had no clue what he was doing. This is why boys shouldn’t play with big boy toys, kids. At no point did he tell me to come alone – even though I definitely wasn’t – and he sounded too confident. His confidence was irritating, but the fact he didn’t know what he was doing concerned me because it meant he was acting on instinct now and that instinct might tell him to just say fuck it and kill Mom and/or Elodie if shit didn’t go his way.

  My role in this done for now, I looked over at DB and his team who began giving out orders.

  “I’m sending the coordinates of the cabin to your phones. Cut and paste them into a search and one of the map sites online will bring up the area,” Raoul shouted, tapping the screen of his phone. “DB, where do you want people to be?”

  Squinting at the screen of his phone, DB assessed the area around the cabin with Garrett looking over his shoulder. “What do you think, Garrett?”

  “You’ve got dense trees around it. If they split up into groups of two, spread them out around here,” he suggested, making a shape like a C around the area behind the cabin. I don’t know what ground foliage we’ve got, but there should be enough cover. We’ll come in from the front with Jarrod. He’s expecting him and thinks he’s got this, so if we go here and here, we can come in behind Jarrod and get him while he finds Elodie and Gloria.”

  Nodding at his brother’s suggestion, DB split the group up into twos, with me being teamed with Leo. With a final nod to everyone, we got into our cars and headed to the lake. It felt like it took forever to get there even though it was only ten minutes outside of town, and by the time we parked up I’d sung Swing Low, Sweet Chariot so many times in my head that I was now calm and focused.

  “You ready?” DB asked, walking up beside me as we star
ted making our way to the cabin.

  “You have no idea how ready I am.”

  Gloria

  I was sitting on the floor in a tiny pantry that had a thick metal door on it, but there was enough room for me to rock Elodie who was still whimpering.

  The things I’d seen this man do today would haunt me for the rest of my life. The cold brutality that he’d beaten Maude and Katy with was unnatural, and the look in his eye was like the devil had taken him over.

  “Yeah, man, I need it. No, I don’t care where you have to get it from, I need a hit,” he shouted as he spoke to someone. Through the gap between the door and the floor, I could see his shadow moving back and forth as he talked into the phone. I knew he’d been speaking to Jarrod earlier when he’d pointed his gun at where I was sitting with Elodie in the living room and had then pointed it at the door to where we were now, slamming it shut behind us once I was inside and only giving me a second of light to glance around the space. “Look, I’m just waiting for a delivery and then I’ll be down. Make sure you’ve got it.”

  After that he was silent, but the shadow continued moving like it had been until I heard him walking away. I couldn’t sit here and do nothing.

  Gently putting Elodie on the floor, I leaned down so that my mouth was beside her ear. “Don’t be scared, ok, ‘Lodie. Auntie Gloria will get us out of here.”

  Any other one-year-old would be screaming or panicking, but not Elodie. Like the precious cherub that she was, she whispered back, “Yeah.”

  I’d seen the handle of something poking out of a box in the far right corner of the room before he shut the door, so I slowly reached over and grabbed it. It was attached to something much heavier than I thought it would be, but when I felt the flat circular surface of it, I smiled.

  A cast iron frying pan – one of the old style ones that weighed a ton.

  Getting up onto my knees, I whispered again, “Stay here for Auntie Gloria. I’ll be right back.”

  I didn’t want to leave her, but I didn’t want to risk anything happening to her, so I had to do something and this was all that I could think of.

  Leaning against the metal door, I almost rolled my eyes when it opened. The guy didn’t have a clue what he was doing!

  It took a couple of blinks to get used to the light, but then my eyes adjusted and I looked around the room for a place to wait. On the left side of the small living room was a cabinet with a small gap between it and the wall. Because he’d enter on the opposite side of it, he wouldn’t be able to see the space until he was in front of it. That’s where I was going to go.

  Walking as quietly as I could across the floor, I thought of all the times I’d had physical fights with my sisters. My twin really was a bitch, so those fights had been intense and heated. I was going to imagine her face when I hit him, that way I knew my swing would be a good one.

  Jarrod

  “He can’t be fucking serious,” Leo whisper hissed at me as we looked at the cabin. “This guy’s a complete moron.”

  I knew what he meant – it was totally open, and he hadn’t even chosen a place where he had a good chance of escape, even in the dark – but there was still the matter of what he’d already done today.

  “He’s also wanted for the attempted murder of Maude and the injuries he gave Katy,” I reminded him, turning to look at him in the little amount of light that we had where we were crouched down. “Let’s not underestimate him.”

  “Fucker,” he growled, almost making me laugh, but I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to ever do that again after this.

  Just then the screen of my phone lit up with a text from DB.

  DB: Go up and knock on the door.

  Yeah, that gave a good indication of how weak this man’s plan was because that’s all I had to do.

  Passing it to Leo, I got up from my crouched position and made my way to the door. Just as I was about to knock on it, I heard a scream followed by a shout from inside. Moving back, I kicked the door open just as Mom hit him around the head with a frying pan while he was on his knees.

  “You’re a nasty man,” she screamed as he fell face down on the floor. Lifting it up again, she brought it down on his ass. “Nasty, nasty man.”

  Not even sure what I was looking at, I yelled, “Ma!” watching her bring the pan down again in the same place.

  “Jesus Christ, is your mother spanking him with a frying pan?” DB called as he ran across the room.

  Confused and, I’m not ashamed to admit it, terrified out of my mind, I scanned the room not seeing any sign of Elodie, and that scared me even more.

  “Ma,” I shouted again, finally getting through to her.

  With the pan lifted above her head, she looked over at where I was standing with DB now beside me and Garrett behind us.

  “Officers, arrest this man,” she ordered, lowering her arms and dropping the pan on the back of his thighs.

  The heavy thud it made when it hit the floor afterwards told us all we needed to know – she’d hit him with a motherfucker of a pan. If his ass wasn’t broken, his head definitely would be, and I didn’t have it in me to give one shit about that.

  “I’ll call for an ambulance,” Garrett offered in a tone that made it clear he didn’t want to, as DB pulled his cuffs out and made his way over to the asshole who was lying unconscious on the floor.

  Stepping toward Mom, I started panicking over the fact I couldn’t see Elodie anywhere. “Where’s Elodie?”

  Looking up at me with tears building, she opened her mouth to say something but was interrupted by a high-pitched squeal that came from behind us.

  “Boo!”

  DB had just been bending over to give first aid to Shane, and the scream made him jump up and grab for his gun. That was joined by a clatter behind us and the word “fuck” was shouted as Garrett dropped his phone. Me, I froze and battled back the tears I wanted to cry at seeing her unharmed but also at seeing evidence of how truly unaware she was of the gravity of the situation she’d been in.

  Christ.

  “Phone’s out,” Garrett barked, picking it up off the floor.

  Pulling mine out, I made my way over to where she was clapping her hands at DB who was holding his chest now. Hitting 911 (even though the last thing I wanted to do was save the bastard), I reached her just as the operator answered and asked what service I wanted.

  “Cawot!” she squealed, watching as I crouched down in front of her.

  I’d be her cawot for the rest of my life if she needed to me to be, so long as she was safe and smiling.

  Unable to talk, I passed my cell off to DB to carry out the checks and shit the operator wanted and lifted her up, closing my eyes as she tried to strangle me with an overly enthusiastic hug. It was the best hug I’d ever had in my life.

  “Clear,” Garrett bellowed to the others outside the cabin, before he came back in and crouched down beside us. “Cawot’s a hero, baby, so you hug him tighter, ok? Heroes need hugs when they conquer a dragon.”

  I wasn’t a fucking hero at all. Right now Maude was lying in a hospital bed fighting for her life, my woman was in pain and scared out of her mind, and it was a miracle that Mom and Elodie weren’t in the same way. So, what I was was a man hanging on by a thread who wanted to rip the fucker lying on the ground’s head off.

  I’d take the Elodie hug, though, every day for the rest of my life.

  Eighteen

  Katy

  We passed the room that Shane was being treated in as Jarrod wheeled me through to Maude’s room. Thanks to Gloria’s efforts he had a severe concussion, a hairline fracture on his skull, and a broken coccyx, and was recovering in what looked like a nice room. For what he’d cost my family, he deserved to be dumped in a swamp.

  Looking away from it, I focused on breathing as deeply as I could for what was about to happen.

  After they’d returned from wherever Shane had been holding Gloria and Elodie yesterday, the doctor treating Maude had asked to meet with the family in
my room. Apparently, after running tests on her, they weren’t sure if she was going to survive, but they’d be monitoring and assessing her constantly over the next twenty-four hours.

  The good news was that she’d survived.

  The terrible news was that after looking at her file, they’d found out she’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer three months previously. She also had an injury to her head, and even if they relieved the pressure inside her skull, it was unlikely she’d regain consciousness. It was too severe, and her body was too weak from the cancer.

  Apparently, after she’d been feeling unwell for a while and had delayed going to the doctor thinking it was just a bad flu or old age catching up with her. After a barrage of test and scans, they’d discovered cancer in her lungs and that it had spread to her brain. It was so far gone that treatment would have been useless, so she’d told them she accepted it and was just going to live life to the max while she could.

  Well, she couldn’t, not anymore.

  The doctor who diagnosed her rang Dad last night and said he’d never met a braver and stronger woman in his thirty years of practice, and that’s what she would have wanted. We had the choice to agree to them drilling holes in her skull to release the pressure and they’d keep her on life support, or we could let her die with dignity - which again would have been what she’d have wanted. So they moved her out of ICU and into a private room where she could slip away when it was time.

  Looking up from my lap, I saw that Bond, Canon and Reid were standing sentry in front of her door, and as soon as we got close enough they opened it for Jarrod to wheel me in.