A Great Kisser

by Donna Kauffman

  Well, that made things a little trickier. So, her time frame was going to be a bit tighter. Worst case is she could conference call Daphne, have her patch a call through back to Cedar Springs. Or just get Daphne to pretend to be Lauren, with a fuzzy connection. Or something. She’d worry about that part later.

  Then Melissa abruptly slid the gun between her thighs and leaned over to untape Lauren’s wrists. Lauren desperately wished she was like some super cool movie heroine who could masterfully head butt her captor, then take her in a quick, decisive battle for control. But one head butt was likely to land her in a coma. At least that’s what it felt like. And Melissa was a lot closer to the firepower than Lauren was.

  So she sat still—very still—while Melissa used a penknife to free her wrists. As soon as they were free, Melissa snatched the gun again and waved it an inch from Lauren’s nose.

  If Lauren thought she’d tasted fear already, she’d been pathetically wrong. The bile rose so swiftly she had to fight the nausea and pray she didn’t puke right there in the truck.

  “Straight in, clean up, rent a car, straight out. I’m going to be sitting right here. If you take too long, I’m going to come in, and damn the consequences.” She shoved the muzzle of the gun against Lauren’s temple.

  Lauren could feel it vibrate against her skin, proving how badly Melissa was shaking. That was not a good combination. “Okay.”

  “I’m keeping your bags out here. And your phone.” She leaned back, the gun still trained on Lauren. “Put it on the center console.”

  “I need that back,” Lauren warned her. “All my contact info is in there. Private numbers. Potentially big donors. If Arlen wants my help, then I have to have that phone.” She saw a considering look enter Melissa’s expression. “Those numbers and names won’t mean anything to you. And they won’t give you the same attention they’ll give to me. I have to keep the phone.”

  “Fine. Just as soon as you come out with a set of rental keys.”

  Lauren groaned silently, but nodded. She’d just have to contact Jake…and her mother, as soon as she was on the road. And somewhere where there was cell reception. She flexed her wrists and felt tears sting her eyes as the blood rushed back into her fingertips.

  “Phone,” Melissa barked, smacking the top of the console that separated the backs of their seats.

  Lauren slid off her seat belt and fished her phone out of her pocket. The screen was dark, and there was no way of secretly checking her call history to see if she’d been successful in “answering” any of the calls. “Here,” she said, laying it between them.

  She could always make a call from inside the airport building.

  “Ten minutes. Any longer, I’ll be coming in after you.” She waved the gun. “Don’t test me.”

  Lauren’s hands were shaking as she reached for the door handle. Was she actually going to walk away from this? Don’t get ahead of yourself.

  “Ten minutes.”

  Lauren nodded and slid out of the truck. Her knees buckled the second she put her weight on them, but it was more due to the overwhelming, almost crippling wave of emotion that coursed through her than her actual physical condition. In fact, she didn’t think she was as bad off as she’d initially thought, injury-wise. It mostly felt like her head and chest. But once she got her sea legs under her, she realized the rest of her felt mostly okay. She ached everywhere, but that might have been as much the lock-jaw tension she’d been under the past several hours than the accident. That tension didn’t leave her as she walked directly, if not exactly confidently yet, toward the hangar. She wasn’t bobbing and weaving, so there was that.

  She tried to force her thoughts to what best to do next, how to handle those ten minutes to the very best of her ability, but all she could think about, all she could feel, was that big-ass gun aimed directly at her back. She felt it as keenly as if it had laser traction. Her thoughts didn’t free up until she stepped into the building and had the door shut behind her. She immediately stepped to one side, to have a solid wall at her back.

  She glanced at the bathroom and thought how ironic it was that she couldn’t seem to enter this airport looking like anything other than roadkill. Only this time that description was a little too close to reality to be all that amusing. She dismissed the cleaning-up part of the deal. No time to waste and she frankly didn’t care how scary she looked. These people here probably knew Jake. Someone here knew Jake. She just had to find that person and make them listen to what she had to say.

  But the moment she started toward the desk, another man came sprinting across the small waiting area.

  “Lauren Matthews?” he asked, looking at her then beyond her as if expecting to see someone else. “Are you alone?”

  “Not really. Who are you?”

  The young Hispanic man grinned, showing off an impressive set of very white teeth. “I am Xavier. And I am very, very happy to see you.”

  It was one too many things to process. Was this a trap? Should she run? But her instincts were apparently still too shaken up to inform her, because all she could do was stand there and stare at the man. “Why?” It wasn’t, perhaps, the most lucid question, but it seemed the best way to figure out what side he was on.

  “You borrowed my truck. When you flew in. I work here. I am a friend of Jake’s.”

  Xavier. She wasn’t sure she’d caught his name the first time, but she’d been a little discombobulated having just met Jake. Wow, she thought a bit abstractedly, that seemed like a long, long time ago at that moment. So much had happened since then. But the little ache that sprang alive inside of her told her all she needed to know about what she wanted where Jake McKenna was concerned. “How did you—” She wasn’t sure anymore what was going on. “Is he—did you speak to him?”

  Xavier nodded, then looked beyond her again. “We need to get out of here. Come, follow me.”

  Lauren looked back now, too. Half expecting to see Melissa come through the doors, guns blazing. “I—I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

  “Who is out there?”

  “She has a gun,” was all Lauren said. “A big one. I have ten minutes to rent a car. She has my phone. And all my stuff.”

  “I have a phone. Jake is flying in. He’ll be here any minute.”

  Lauren just stared at him. Had he really just said—“Flying in? Now?” How had he known? It was one too many things to figure out.

  “He called,” Xavier said, looking more than a little anxious now. “Told me you were in trouble, that you might come here. I’ve been looking out for you. Come, we have to go.”

  “Where?”

  He took Lauren’s arm and she didn’t fight him, but she looked over her shoulder the entire time that she half-walked, half-tripped along behind him.

  “You okay?” he called back to her. “You don’t look so good.”

  “I’m…” She didn’t try to finish the thought. It was taking massive effort just to concentrate on keeping up with him and trying to figure out what to do next. “Accident,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  She was huffing a little, and her vision was a tiny bit blurred, her head swimming a little as they pushed through another set of doors and found themselves back outside again. She looked back one last time, but most of her view of the interior of the airport lounge was blocked now. She had no idea where Melissa was. She swung her gaze around, then closed her eyes as her vision swam. She really needed to just sit down. Five minutes. Collect herself, take a quick stock of herself and this quickly changing situation.

  “This way,” Xavier said, pulling her farther away from the main building.

  Lauren wasn’t sure if she should just blindly follow the guy, but he didn’t have a gun. Which, at the moment, made him one of the good guys.

  She heard a whine and a rumble. Xavier slowed and pulled her closer to the side of the hangar building they had just gotten to. “Sounds like he’s coming in.”

  Jake? Here? Could it be true? She felt both intens
e relief and heightened fear. She didn’t need him anywhere in the vicinity of Melissa and her big gun. “Where is the—”

  Xavier turned her just then and she saw the lit runway and the lights flashing up in the sky, just beyond the end of it. Jake.

  She was keenly aware that her ten minutes were close to expiring. And anyone with eyes could tell Melissa what direction the crazy, banged-up woman had gone. She felt like any second it was all going to go terribly wrong. Jake landing, Melissa and her gun out there somewhere, Xavier with his hopeful, happy face, glad to play Good Samaritan. It was all too surreal…and too terrifyingly real.

  “Just get on the ground,” she murmured under her breath. “Can we get any closer to where he’s going to end up? How soon can we take off again?” Once she was in the air, away from crazy Melissa, then she could breathe, then she’d be able to think straight.

  “Not right away, but it’s okay, he’ll make things okay. Jake is good at fixing things.”

  Can he make us all bulletproof, she wanted to say, but forced her thoughts in a more positive direction. With another quick glance over her shoulder, she urged Xavier to keep moving.

  They rounded the front of one of the hangars just as the small plane touched down.

  “This way,” Xavier said. “He’ll come to find me as soon as he taxis over.”

  Lauren saw Jake’s plane rolling toward another hangar about three down from where they were and picked up her pace until she left Xavier behind. She was running now, wanting nothing more than for that door to open and to see him step out of the hatch, but all she could think was “Melissa-gun, Melissa-gun,” and wanted him out of harm’s way as fast as was possible.

  She had no idea how far behind her Xavier was now. Her gaze was fixed on that door. The plane had rolled to a stop long before she got there, and the hatch was opening just as she half-stumbled, half-ran across the final stretch of tarmac. The stairs took a lifetime and a half to lower, but when they did, she was already on the steps when Jake appeared in the open doorway.

  “Oh, thank God,” he said, and a split second later, she was pulled tightly into his arms.

  And that was when she burst into tears.

  “I don’t know why I’m crying,” she said, her face muffled against his chest. “I was fine. Handling it. Under control.”

  Jake hugged her tightly. “I know you did. What happened? What in the hell happened?” He leaned back just enough to tip her face up to his. “Oh, baby, who did this?”

  “That bad?” she asked.

  “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he said, so heartfelt it made her tear up all over again. “Whoever hurt you is going to feel the wrath of hell—”

  “It’s Melissa, Jake. It’s—a long story.” Reality came crashing back in and she struggled in his arms until she could look behind her, across the tarmac, toward the airport buildings.

  Xavier was standing by the open hangar door, waving. Jake lifted a hand in a salute back at him. “Melissa,” he said, not sounding entirely shocked. “Why the hell is she doing this?”

  “We can’t be standing here like this, Jake,” Lauren said, the tension springing right back and making her feel sick all over again. “She’ll come after me. She has a gun, Jake.” She shuddered involuntarily. “A really big gun.”

  Jake pulled her up the last step and they ducked down into the body of the plane.

  “When can we take off? When can we leave? We shouldn’t just sit here like this. How in the world did you know where I was?”

  He sat and pulled her down into his lap, stroking her hair. “Your phone. Ruby Jean and I alternated calling every other minute and at some point, your line opened up. I overheard you talking. I didn’t know who it was. Did she run the Jeep off the road?”

  “Jake, I want to tell you everything, but we really need to get out of here.” Her heart was still pounding so hard it made it hard to breathe, to think. She wanted them as far away from crazy Melissa and her lethal bullets as she could get.”

  “We will, we will, but—”

  “So, everyone knows? About the Jeep?” She let her chin drop, then raised it again as more reality slammed into her still scrambled brain. “My mother! We have to—”

  “She knows about the accident, and I had Ruby Jean call her and tell her I was flying out here. We didn’t know much more than that, but she knows, she’s fine, she—”

  “No, she’s in danger, Jake. From Arlen. Melissa said they were just using her, using me now, too, for political gain, but then he was planning to make my mom vanish like he did his two other wives.”

  “What?”

  “I know, she’s like, totally insane. I don’t even know if that’s true, but we can’t take any chances. I want my mom as far away from Arlen as possible until all this is settled.”

  “I heard you say your mom was in danger, on the phone. Ruby Jean is getting her away from the house, from Arlen. But…you really think that Arlen—”

  “I don’t know what the hell I think. My head feels like it’s split half in two.”

  “We should get you checked out, we—”

  “We need to get the hell out of here and away from Melissa. I can tell you everything I know while we fly back to Cedar Springs. We can fly back, right? I mean, is the school equipped for night landings?”

  “Yes, the strip is lit and the guys know I’m coming back. They’ll handle what needs handling, but—”

  She climbed out of his lap. “I’ll feel better when we get in the air.”

  Jake shifted his weight to the armrest and turned Lauren toward him, rubbing his hands up her arms. “You’re safe now. We’ll get back to Cedar Springs, call over to the clinic, see who’s on call tonight and get you looked at.”

  “I’ll be okay.” She touched his face. The past few hours had been so surreal, it was hard to reckon all she’d just been through with where she was now. With Jake, in his plane, safe. Not tied up in the front of a car with some crazy person pointing a gun at her head. “I just need to get away from this, from here, make sure my mother is okay. Jake, this is serious, dead serious; we have to stop them.”

  “We will. I’ll put a call in to O’Hara—he’s the police officer who responded to the scene of your accident—”

  “I’m so sorry about your Jeep, I never even saw—”

  “Shhh,” he said, pulling her close, between his legs so he could slide his hands around to her back. “Please. I was terrified, Lauren, when we couldn’t find you. Then we found out you’d packed everything and left your room but hadn’t checked out. I didn’t know what to think or where to look. Scared the ever-loving shit out of me. I couldn’t think straight—”

  “I was coming to you,” she said, feeling immensely warmed by his concern, hating that he’d been put in that position. “I couldn’t stay in that room. It was giving me the creeps that someone had been there. That someone was Melissa, by the way.”

  Jake stood and they crouched a little inside the small confines of the plane as he pulled her into his arms. “I thought I’d lost you,” he said, his gaze boring into hers. “I’ve never felt so—the thought of losing you—”

  “You didn’t,” she said. “And I’m not going anywhere.” She framed his face with her hands and told him the one thing she was absolutely clear about. “I’m here, Jake. I’m staying here. I’m in. You were right. This is more. And I want it. I want you.”

  His hands shook as he covered hers with his own, then pulled her into his arms and kissed her like a man taking his last breath. She knew just how he felt. Only here, in his arms, in this moment, did the terror subside. But for now, that moment had to end, and it did, all too soon. She pulled from his arms, tugging on his hands. “Come on, get me back home. There’s unfinished business. And I’m worried—really worried—about my mom.”

  “I’ll put a call in to RJ. She and your mom should be up at my house. They’re okay, Lauren. But we’ll call; we’ll make sure. You can talk to her.”


  Lauren finally started to feel like maybe they were really going to turn this around, figure it out, take action. And be safe. “I feel like I’m in the middle of some kind of nightmare.”

  Jake smiled and gently pulled her bruised face in for another kiss. This one gentler, but no less profound in what it did to her. “We’ll get through it together,” he murmured, kissing the corners of her mouth, then her lips, so softly, then the corners of her eyes. So reverently, it made her eyes sting with tears.

  He pushed the hair from her face. “We’re a team, you and me. Nothing is taking us down. We’ll take care of our loved ones. It’s all going to be okay. Better than okay. We’re going to get this resolved, then go back to being bloody amazing.”

  “Okay,” she said, feeling stupidly shaky, but she’d hit the wall. “Can we go home now?”

  “Home. I really like the sound of that.”

  Unfortunately, the sound that immediately followed that pronouncement was the one made by the cocking of a gun.

  Chapter 29

  Jake immediately pulled Lauren behind him as he spun to face the intruder. “Melissa, hey,” he said, striving for conversational ease, but he was having a really hard time getting past the gun she was holding. “Let’s talk and get this worked out, okay? Why don’t you put the gun down—”

  “Why don’t you all come down here,” a voice called from outside the plane.

  Melissa turned, the gun waving dangerously in her hand. Jake started to make his move, but then she said, “Arlen! How did you know—”

  “All of you,” he said, causing Melissa to frown and Jake to hold off. At least for the moment.

  “But…I did this for you. For us. Don’t be upset with me.”

  “Now,” he repeated, his voice cold and hard. “Don’t try my patience.”

  Jake crouched down to spy out of one of the side porthole windows. Arlen stood on the tarmac, not too far from what appeared to be one of the resort’s private helicopters. But Jake was too busy looking at the sleek black gun in Arlen’s hand to spend much time wondering who had flown him in on the chopper.