by Julia Derek
He caught me staring at him. I turned away, sensing how my cheeks heated up. God how I hated that I had such an easy time blushing! It really didn’t take much for me to develop an embarrassing tomato face, and it annoyed the heck out of me that a smug guy like Chase—who must already know how hot he was—saw me get so affected by him unbuttoning his shirt.
Thankfully, I was close to the bathroom, so I slunk through the door and inside it. I closed the door after me and locked it. Well, since I’m already here, I might as well take that shower. To worry about my boss sitting in the other room while I was naked in the bathtub was silly. I highly doubted that he had X-ray vision and could see me in the shower through the walls, despite that he made me think of Clark Kent when he wore his glasses.
I unbuttoned my blouse and slipped out of it. My skirt, bra, and panties soon followed. The cool breeze that entered through the opened window felt nice against my warm skin. Chase was right; it was kind of stuffy in the bedroom.
I turned on the shower and let the lukewarm water spray over my skin. Using the body wash that I found on the bathroom edge, I lathered every inch of my body. I hesitated when I got to my face, though. Even though I didn’t think I had much makeup left on my face except for mascara and eyeliner, I didn’t like the thought of Chase seeing me completely barefaced. And it wasn’t because of him in particular, I told myself. I didn’t like any man seeing me with no makeup. I guess I was vainer than I’d thought. Then again, if I didn’t wash my face soon, I’d probably break out and look like a pizza.
As I was contemplating what to do with my makeup, water hit me square in the eye. It hurt so much my eyes filled with tears, making what was left of the mascara and eyeliner meander down my cheeks.
When I finally stopped rubbing my eyes and took another look in the bathroom mirror, I let out a little yelp. I looked like a blond, female Alice Cooper and it was not flattering. Shutting my eyes closed, I rubbed my lather-filled hands against my face until I was sure all makeup was gone.
Since I didn’t like the shampoo and balsam that also sat on the bathtub edge, I only rinsed out my hair. Then I stepped out of the tub and wrapped myself in one of the big towels, praying that the entire towel was as clean as the part I’d smelled.
Chase knocked on the bathroom door. “Hey, are you gonna be in there much longer?”
I frowned at the door, almost wishing he could see me right then, despite being half naked. “Um, what’s it to you?”
“It gets really stuffy in here when the bathroom door is closed,” he replied. “It was already stuffy before as you might remember.”
“Fine. I’ll be out in a moment.” What was wrong with him? I couldn’t have been in the shower for more than max fifteen minutes. I didn’t think the temperature in the room could have changed that much in such a short amount of time. The usual irritation I felt with Chase returned with a vengeance, and I decided to take my sweet time just to teach him a lesson.
Ten minutes later, I left the bathroom, wearing my clothes again except for my panties that I had washed and hung over the shower curtain rod. It shouldn’t take very long for them to dry enough for me to put them back on again.
As I had expected, it wasn’t particularly stuffy in the bedroom. At least no more than before. To my surprise, Chase was looking a bit embarrassed when I laid eyes on him.
“I’m sorry to have bothered you,” he said, gazing down at the floor repeatedly. “I was just…” His voice trailed off.
I paused mid-step, looking at him interested. Chase wasn’t the kind of person who lost his train of thought often. Or ever, I should say.
“You were just what?” I asked.
Chase met my eyes then and for the first time since I’d looked into that steely gray gaze, I sensed vulnerability.
“I was just worried that something might have happened to you,” he replied at last. “I know that sounds strange since you weren’t in there that long. But long enough to have me worried. You were after all drugged by these people. And I thought I heard you fall.”
Fall? I thought back to my shower. What must have made him think I fell? Then I remembered that I’d slipped and ended up sitting on the edge of the tub. The ruckus I had created had been pretty loud.
“So I just wanted to make sure you were still okay,” Chase continued. “Which I can see now that you are. More than okay.”
I raised a brow at him. “More than okay? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You look so… alive.”
Alive? I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. Was that supposed to be a compliment?
“Yeah. And I mean that in a good way.” His lips curled into a smile.
“Oh.” I decided that he was being sincere, even if it was a weird thing to have said. Still, it was nice to get complimented. And it was kind of sweet of him to worry about me so much. Even though that was even weirder.
Footsteps approached our bedroom door then. We both turned toward it, I for one holding my breath. Would we finally find out what was going on?
Chapter Four
A key entered the lock and the door opened. The huge man from this morning appeared in the doorway, wearing the same long, black leather coat. His facial expression under the ski mask seemed grim. He was armed with a handgun just like the first time he’d come, aiming it at us while gazing at us. He took us in for several long, terrifying seconds, not saying a word while moving the gun back and forth between Chase and me. Back and forth, back and forth, over and over. My heart beat faster and faster, louder and louder. Sweat coated the sides of my ribcage. I felt like I was about to choke it was so hard to breathe. Oh, God, are they gonna kill us after all?
Suddenly he lowered the gun and asked, “What would you like for dinner?” His voice was much too pleasant to fit the situation.
I stared at the man, still terrified. Was this some kind of a test? It had to be. Were there cameras hidden somewhere filming us after all, gauging our reaction? Why else would he be doing this?
“I said, what would you like for dinner?” the thug repeated, his voice still pleasant. “Or maybe you guys don’t want dinner.”
He was actually being serious? He couldn’t actually care what we would like to eat for dinner. Not after a stunt like that. Well, at all.
The thug’s mouth pulled into a little grin and he shrugged. “Okay, if you guys don’t want anything to eat, I’ll be leaving.” He began backing out of the room when Chase cleared his throat, then said, “I would like dinner. For appetizer I’d like to find out why we’re in here and for main course I’d like to know when you’ll let us leave. If there’s dessert, I’d like to meet the woman who seems to be the person in charge. Would that be possible?”
Now I was staring at Chase instead. While I didn’t think it was smart for him to try to be cute, I couldn’t help but be impressed by his balls at the same time. Plus, what he’d said was kind of funny. Not that I was about to start laughing. The guy before us was obviously very disturbed, so unless he laughed, I sure wasn’t about to.
“No, she’s busy,” the man replied curtly, his expression back to grim again. “What do you want to eat?”
“Are you saying we can choose whatever we want?” I blurted out.
Instead of answering, the goon stuck a hand down the pocket of his coat and pulled out a bunch of take-out menus. He held them out, waving them in front of my face. “You can have whatever you want from these menus.”
I expected him to yank them back as I reached for them, but he didn’t, so I took them and opened them. One was from Pizza Hut, another from a Thai restaurant, a third from Subway and the last from a place I’d never heard of but appeared to be a Mexican take-out place.
I flipped through the Subway one with trembling fingers, still expecting the thug to do something crazy. He being so nice all of a sudden, taking our orders like he was a waiter didn’t make sense. But nothing happened, so finally I just picked something, glancing back up at the thug. “I’ll have a six-i
nch turkey melt combo and a large Diet Coke. No ice.”
He nodded and then looked at Chase, who was just standing there, his face set in that sullen way I had seen so many times. I handed Chase the menus. He took them almost as if he was a zombie, not opening any of them.
“What do you want?” the thug asked, not sounding so nice any longer. “I don’t have all day.”
Chase snapped out of his stupor and began flipping through the menus.
“I’ll have the meatball marinara twelve-inch combo from Subway with a large Coke and lots of ice,” he said. “Is there any way you can do something about the stuffiness in here? Is there an AC or something? It’s getting hard to breathe.”
The thug stared at Chase for a long, chilling moment during which my stomach clenched with terror. Chase really needed to stop mouthing off like that. Then the big man removed his gaze and went over to the windows that were both still fully opened. He raised his gun and fired at least a dozen shots into both of them, creating several small holes in the dark material that blocked us from the world. I gasped as I watched him do this, hoping that no one outside had been hit by the many shots. Unfortunately no one would have heard them, even though the shots were a lot louder than I would have expected them to be with a silencer on. Hollywood movies had taught me that shots fired by guns with silencers sounded like mere whistles. Not this gun. I assumed the big thing attached to the front of the gun was a silencer because the shots had not been deafeningly loud but muted, similar to the sound of a series of firecrackers going off. And I didn’t think a bunch of firecrackers going off would alert anyone, especially considering that we were next to a loud freeway, which likely had drowned them out completely.
When he had finished admiring his work, the thug came back over to us.
“That should make it more pleasant for you,” he said curtly and took the menus out of Chase’s hand. Then he left, locking the door after himself.
I turned to face Chase, still a bit shaken by all those shots that had been fired in such rapid succession. My skin felt clammy and cool, and I could hear my pulse pounding somewhere behind my ear.
“Holy crap,” I managed to get out. “That was…”
“Fucked up?” Chase finished for me, looking a little taken aback himself. He ran a hand over his slicked-back hair and looked tired suddenly. Then he walked over to the windows and closely examined the many small holes the shots had created. He laughed without humor.
“Well, it does let some air into the room,” he said. He leaned closer and ran his fingers over the little holes. A couple of the holes were close to the edges of the window. Chase took a step back and tackled the black wall, but again it didn’t move. He tried a couple more times before moving on to the next window. After having given that one a few hard shoves as well, he stopped and leaned in closer to the left edge of the window.
I joined him. “What happened?” I whispered. “Did you feel you could move it this time?”
He ran his hand along the edge. “Yeah, it did feel like it was about to budge a little.” He sighed heavily. “But not enough. Not nearly enough.”
I put a finger to my lips. “Shhh.” Then I whispered, “Remember that they might be able to hear us.” I really didn’t think they could see us, though. No, the reason that thug had done what he’d done was because he was a sadist who enjoyed toying with his victims.
Chase swiped his hand in a downward motion. “Eh. I don’t think they’re bugging us. They seem way too disorganized and sloppy to be doing something like that. And even if they are, I’m sure they don’t think we’re just sitting here, staring at the walls but are trying to get out anyway.”
He walked to the bed and took a seat. He glanced at his Rolex watch.
“What time is it?” I asked and sat beside him.
“A quarter past four.”
He pulled my head close to his lips and whispered, “I only said that thing about the bugging to throw them off in case they are bugging us. This way they’ll think they’re on top of our every move. Let’s only be whispering when it comes to things we really don’t want them to know about. Like you passing out later. Got it?”
I looked at him and nodded, smiling. Smart thinking.
When he didn’t say anything else, I said in a normal voice, “Well, it definitely doesn’t seem like they want us to starve to death, so I guess that’s good. I’m still feeling okay after eating all those bananas and the bar, so they’re probably not trying to slowly poison us to death, either.”
“I feel fine too. It just annoys the hell out of me that they won’t tell us why we’re here in the first place.”
“Yeah, that is really annoying.” I leaned closer to Chase, preferring them not to hear the next thing I said, “And the fact that they seem totally psycho.”
I shuddered as I relived the moment when the armed thug had stared at us in silence, his gun alternating between the two of us.
Chase’s face had darkened. He pulled my head close to his mouth again. “I’m having a bad feeling about this. Let’s put the fainting plan into action as soon as possible. We’ve got to get out of here.”
As he let go of me, I nodded. We definitely did.
I leaned into his ear. “Should we do it when he comes back with the food?”
Chase nodded. “Yes. Hopefully it’ll be just one person again. When he sees you lying on the ground, he’ll be thrown and I should be able to disarm him easily and then we’ll get the fuck out of here.”
“What if he asks what I’m doing on the floor?”
“I don’t think he will, but if he does I’ll tell him you passed out from the stuffiness in the room. It is damn stuffy in here still. It struck me earlier that we should use that to our advantage.”
“Oh, yeah!” I exclaimed, excited. Claiming the stuffiness had made me pass out was a great idea. And since Chase hadn’t banged on the door to let them know I had collapsed, chances were no one else in the house would be on high alert, wondering what we were up to. Assuming there was a bunch of other men in the house, helping guard us. This way it would be a lot easier for us to get out of the house unnoticed.
“Shh,” Chase mouthed, his eyes widening with dismay.
“Oops…” I covered my mouth with my hand. “Sorry,” I added in a low voice.
“Okay then,” Chase whispered, “when we hear someone return, you’ll go down on the floor and act like you’ve passed out. You should lie next to the bed so he has to come into the room before he spots you. This way any potential people outside won’t hear him ask questions.”
“Yeah, that’s best. And then they won’t hear you guys make sounds when you take him down, either.”
Chase nodded. “Correct.” He exhaled. “Well, all we have to do now is wait.”
He leaned back against the wall and crossed his arms over his chest. Contemplating me, he smiled and said in a normal tone, “You must really regret leaving L.A. for New York now.”
“Yeah, you could say that again.” The thought had crossed my mind while I was taking that shower earlier—why, oh, why had I thought it would be so great to live in New York?
“Yeah, being abducted by thugs with socks over their heads was definitely not part of the plan.”
Something about the way Chase was looking at me now made me think of the one-on-one meeting we’d had when I first arrived to work at the New York office. I remembered that meeting very clearly still, even though more than two months had passed.
Chase had been standing with his back to me when I entered, his hands clutched over his lower back as he gazed out at the city through the floor-to-ceiling windows in his corner office. Slowly, he turned around to face me. I had immediately taken notice of how well dressed and handsome he was. Maybe not my type, but he was definitely attractive in a GQ kind of way. He made me think of Christian Bale in that old movie American Psycho, the way he had his dark brown hair slicked back, enhancing his finely featured but distinctly handsome face. He had fired off a blindi
ngly white smile at me and asked me to take a seat in the chair positioned in front of his big, black, shiny desk. As usual, the smile hadn’t reached his cold, gray eyes. When I looked deeper into those eyes, I sensed a sharp intelligence combined with spades of resilience. I also instinctively sensed that this guy was not a fan of mine, which mystified me since we had never before met.
As we had gotten further into the meeting, I realized that I had been right in assuming that this guy disliked me. While he had been exceedingly polite throughout our time together, he never again smiled and not once did he say anything that could be considered a compliment regarding my accomplishments back in L.A. My resume that he had in his hands and kept glancing at was full of them. One of the reasons I had been offered the transfer was because I had performed so well during the short time since I was hired at the West Coast office. You’d think Chase would say something about the fact that I’d been the top producing analyst of my previous team, having been promoted to associate within months. It was a pretty big deal. But all he did was outline what my duties would be and what was expected of me while I was working at the New York office.
“How was it living in Los Angeles?” Chase asked me now, sounding a lot more relaxed than he had during that meeting. It was almost as if he had turned into a different person altogether—a nice, pleasant, accessible guy. Who knew it would take the two of us being abducted for him to act normal around me finally?
I scrunched up my face while I thought about his question. If someone had asked me such a thing a couple of days ago, I would have gone on and on about how shallow and uneducated the people on the West Coast were, how much better just about everything was in the Big Apple—well, except for my new boss until now. But having been abducted and spent the last several hours in confinement made me miss my hometown and its inhabitants with a passion I hadn’t expected. Somehow, what had happened today made me appreciate the simplicity and happiness so typical of L.A. people a lot more. I wasn’t so sure that I would stay in New York when this was over. Eventually it had to be over. Our abductors might be violent and crazy, but I really didn’t think they’d kill us. Not if they were coming into the room, asking us what we would like for dinner and giving us several choices of take-out. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking. That last display had revealed just how unstable they must be. And I’d learned the hard way that you needed to stay as far away as you could from unstable people. I’d known a couple of those in high school, but then I had been too young to realize just how crazy they’d been to remove myself voluntarily. Too young and too scared. Now that I recognized the crazies, I was stuck. I really hoped our escape attempt would go the way we wanted it to. If not… I pushed the thought out of my head, not wanting to explore it further.
