A Father's Desperate Rescue

by Amelia Autin

  Once again Dirk was intrigued. She’s not impressed with her own beauty, and she doesn’t care for men who are, either, he thought. But asking a man not to notice a beautiful and sexy woman was asking the impossible, especially when it came in a classy package. But that didn’t mean a man had to act on it. Circumstances and Bree had turned him into a gentleman, and Dirk wasn’t about to forget those hard-learned lessons. But Mei-li didn’t know it. Didn’t know him.

  Despite the signals she was sending out that clearly indicated she wasn’t interested in him and was only being polite to an acquaintance of her father’s, he wanted to know more about her. “Are you in the movie industry, too, Miss Moore?”

  She shook her head with vehemence. “One in the business is enough, don’t you think? And who could compete with a talent like his?” she added with a flash of a smile in her father’s direction that indicated nothing but daughterly pride. “No, I’m a pr—”

  What she’d been about to say was cut off by a gaggle of young and not-so-young women who came up to their table. “May I have your autograph, Mr. DeWinter?” the first woman gushed, thrusting a pen and a piece of paper at Dirk.

  Dirk had an unbreakable rule when it came to autographs. As long as he was standing—which he was now—he would sign. If he was seated at a table, either as someone’s guest or with guests of his own, he would politely decline, feeling it would be rude to the people he was with.

  He glanced at Josh and Mei-li. “Excuse me for a moment,” he murmured, stepping a little away from them before scrawling his name on the seemingly endless supply of menus and scraps of paper offered for his autograph. But when one young woman with more gall than sense asked him to sign her bra and began tugging down the neckline of her dress, Dirk shook his head in refusal.

  “Sorry,” he told her as gently as he could, even though he was disgusted that any woman would be so lacking in decency as to ask this of him in a public place. “That’s where I draw the line.”

  It wasn’t the first time someone had requested something similar from him. Women had even asked him right in front of Bree, as if her feelings at having her husband accosted were unimportant, as if those women held his wife in contempt. As if their blatant sexual advances would be welcomed by a man in love with his wife.

  And that reminder of his wife, more than anything else, was what made Dirk decide not to pursue this...whatever it was...with Mei-li any further. Because no matter how attracted he was to her, no matter how much his body wanted to make love to her, it could never be more than physical. It can never be what I shared with Bree, he told himself, believing it.

  * * *

  The streets of Kowloon, one of two mainland districts of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, or SAR, were nearly deserted when Dirk walked out of the soundstage two weeks later and approached the waiting black Rolls-Royce that would take him back to the Peninsula Hotel at the southern tip of the Tsim Sha Tsui neighborhood. The double-decker buses that ran constantly, day and night, and the people who normally swarmed the streets were nowhere to be seen on this first day of May. Everyone and everything seemed to be battened down in anticipation of Typhoon De-De.

  “Thanks, Patrick,” he told his twenty-four-year-old Chinese driver, Shuài “Patrick” Chan, who held the door for him.

  “Hotel, Mr. DeWinter?”

  “Dirk,” he reminded his driver.

  “Yes, sir,” Patrick said, closing the door firmly behind Dirk and climbing into the driver’s seat.

  Dirk smiled to himself as he leaned back against the leather upholstery. He’d yet to break his driver of addressing him formally, and probably never would, any more than he’d been able to break his employees of that habit. His housekeeper, Hannah, insisted on calling him Mr. DeWinter, too, and the others in his household followed her lead. “And yes, the flags are out,” he said, “So I’d better hightail it back to the hotel.”

  The flags were out. Not literally—actual flags to warn mariners hadn’t been hoisted in the Hong Kong SAR in years. But Signal Three had been issued early that morning—which meant schools were closed and the government was shut down, as well as the financial markets and a majority of the private sector. And the Hong Kong Observatory had issued a Signal Eight SE warning a half hour ago. That had caused the studio to reluctantly shut down filming for the day and send everyone home until further notice.

  Typhoon De-De was bearing down on Hong Kong from the southeast—a month early for the normal typhoon season, which usually didn’t begin until June. All public transportation had ceased, especially the double-decker buses that were so susceptible to being blown over by strong winds. The ubiquitous red taxis were still running, as were a few green ones, but without the buses traffic was sparse, and the Rolls made good time as it headed down Kowloon Park Drive toward Salisbury Road.

  A gust of wind out of nowhere slammed into the limo, causing it to swerve and throwing Dirk against the door. “Sorry, sir,” Patrick said, quickly bringing the Rolls back on course.

  “Not a problem. Good thing we don’t have far to go.” He thought for a minute. “You live on the island, don’t you?” he asked, referring to Hong Kong Island itself.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I don’t think you’ll make it home safely today. Not now. You probably should just join me in the hotel—my suite is plenty big enough, and I’m sure Vanessa and the twins won’t mind.”

  Vanessa Riordan was the woman who’d been his twin daughters’ nanny since the day they’d been released from the neonatal intensive care unit—or NICU—at Cedars Sinai in Los Angeles. Dirk had tried calling Vanessa at the hotel earlier, but there had been no answer and he wondered absently about that now. He pulled out his smartphone and tried calling his suite again, then Vanessa’s cell phone, but still no luck.

  Dirk’s eyes met Patrick’s in the rearview mirror, and he could tell his driver was of two minds about accepting the offer to take shelter from the typhoon with Dirk and his family. Patrick lived with his parents, and Dirk figured the young man was worried about them. “Call your parents,” he told Patrick. “I’m sure they’ll tell you the same thing. Better safe than sorry.”

  Patrick Chan wasn’t a limo driver by trade—he was an engineering student at the University of Hong Kong, working on his master’s degree. The young man held down two jobs—teaching assistant at the university and driving the Rolls—to put himself through school and help out at home.

  Dirk had done something similar, working three jobs to make ends meet—including movie stuntman—to support Bree and himself before he got his big break in the movies. He’d never been afraid of hard work. Neither had Bree. But Dirk had been too proud to ask her to marry him until he’d snagged his first starring role. Until he could support her in the style she deserved. Until his success meant Bree didn’t have to work at the menial jobs she’d taken in order to stay at his side through thick and thin as he chased his dream of movie stardom...and long before that.

  Pain stabbed through him as it always did at the thought of Bree. He could never forget that, because God was punishing him for something that had happened aeons ago. Bree had died. And their daughters had nearly died, too. Only a miracle wrought by the doctors and nurses in the Cedars Sinai NICU had kept their premature twins alive.

  Dirk’s phone sounded the tune he reserved for his closest friends, and when he swiped a finger over the touchpad and saw who the call was from, he smiled and answered. “To what do I owe the honor of this call, Your Majesty?”

  The voice of Queen Juliana of Zakhar sounded in his ear, prefaced by a very unqueenly snort. “Cut that out,” she said. “How many times do I have to tell you I’m still Juliana to you?”

  “Ahhh, but what would your husband, the king, say to that?” he teased gently.

  They bantered back and forth for a couple of minutes, then Juliana said, “I hear there’s a
typhoon expected to hit Hong Kong this evening, and I remembered you mentioned you were filming there. Are you and the girls in a safe place? And Vanessa and Hannah, too, of course,” she added, referring to the women who had habitually accompanied Dirk on location ever since the twins were born.

  “Hannah couldn’t make the trip, after all,” he explained now. “She fell down the stairs and broke her leg three days before we were supposed to leave for Hong Kong.”

  “Oh, no!” Dirk knew Juliana’s concern was genuine. Hannah had been his housekeeper for years, and Juliana had met her every time she’d visited the DeWinters during their years-long friendship in Hollywood. “Is she going to be okay?”

  “Yeah. She’s recuperating in a nursing home. But Linden and Laurel ask about her several times a day. And we call her every night.” Hannah, a longtime widow with no children of her own, had taken on the role of surrogate grandmother for the twins in addition to her housekeeping duties, something for which Dirk was supremely grateful. His daughters adored Hannah—whom they called Nana—and she adored them.

  “Email me the address and phone number of the nursing home, please,” Juliana asked. “I’ll send her flowers and a get-well card.”

  “Will do. And don’t worry about us, Juliana. We’ll be fine. Thanks for calling, though.”

  “Kiss your daughters for me.” That was something Juliana said every time they talked, another thing that was genuinely meant—Juliana had her own child now, but was the twins’ godmother and loved them deeply. This time, however, she hesitated, then added in a voice tinged with pain, “I adore the pictures of them you’ve sent me, but every day they look more and more like Bree.”

  At first Dirk’s throat closed with emotion at the reminder of his wife, who’d been Juliana’s best friend before she died, but eventually he managed, “Yeah, they do.”

  Dirk disconnected just as Patrick pulled in at the hotel entrance. He drove past the fountain that had already been turned off, and would have dropped Dirk at the front door, but Dirk refused. “Just find a place to park,” he told his driver. “Call your parents, but I know what they’ll say. Then we’ll go up together.”

  It only took a minute for Patrick to receive his parents’ blessing to shelter at the Peninsula Hotel. More than a blessing, actually, Dirk thought with an inward smile as he heard Patrick’s side of the phone conversation. More like a parental command. But he didn’t say anything. He admired the old-fashioned deference the younger generation showed the older in Hong Kong. Once upon a time that had been common in the United States, too, but not anymore.

  The two men crossed the lobby, heading for the elevators, and Dirk was distracted for a moment by the Peninsula Hotel’s typhoon preparations. The beautiful arched picture windows had already been boarded up, and sandbags were being stacked along one wall, merely as a precaution. The hotel wasn’t that far from Victoria Harbour, and a strong typhoon-induced surge could bring the ocean to the hotel’s front door.

  “That reminds me,” Dirk told Patrick as he rang for the elevator, “we’d better find out what we need to do to make the suite’s windows safe from the typhoon, if the hotel staff hasn’t already done so. And we want to make sure we have plenty of food and drinking water in the suite—if we lose electricity, there’s no way I want to hike down all those floors and back up again.”

  They rode up in the elevator to the palatial Peninsula Suite on the twenty-sixth floor, with connecting bedrooms for the twins and their nanny. Dirk would have been just as happy in something less grand, but the movie studio was footing the bill for the suite, and he’d never stayed here when Bree had been alive—an important factor in his decision to accept the accommodations. The private gym, cinematic screening room and baby grand piano had also been contributing factors, not to mention the isolation. Before he’d become a father himself, Dirk had wondered why parents couldn’t do a better job keeping their children from causing disturbances. Now he knew how nearly impossible that was, but he still didn’t want to impose his daughters’ totally to-be-expected behavior on the hotel’s other guests if he could help it.

  He let himself into the suite and was puzzled at the unusual silence. His daughters might still be napping, although they were usually awake by this time, but Vanessa and the bodyguard—one of three in the entourage that had accompanied Dirk’s family from Hollywood to Hong Kong—were on duty today, and they were missing. Usually, at this time of day Vanessa, the girls and their bodyguard could be found in the living room. The twins were fascinated by the breathtaking sight of Hong Kong Island across the harbor, day or night, and the boats plying the waters, views they could easily see through the floor-to-ceiling windows. And the girls had a habit of standing right up against the windows and smearing whatever they could reach with invariably sticky fingers.

  The spacious living room was empty, but one of the chairs from the twins’ miniature tea table, set up in front of the central picture window, had been overturned...and left that way. Then Dirk noticed other things. The diaper bag, which Vanessa usually kept by the front door, stocked and ready to go should she leave the suite with the girls, was missing. But the double stroller was right where Vanessa kept it, and her purse was on the table by the door. She wouldn’t have left the suite without either of those things, Dirk realized in a flash. Vanessa might have been able to carry one toddler in her arms, but not two—not for long. And even if the bodyguard on duty today, Chet Ritter, had carried one of the girls against protocol, no woman ever went anywhere without her purse.

  There was a strange odor in the air, too—just the faintest trace of something sickly sweet. Dirk couldn’t put his finger on it, but it tugged at a chord of memory.

  Then he heard a sound. An odd, muffled sound, accompanied by sudden thumping, coming from the girls’ bedroom. He strode to the door with Patrick right behind him, and a zing of terror shot through him. Vanessa and Chet lay on their sides on the floor, hands bound behind their backs with duct tape. There was tape around their ankles, too, and across their mouths—the muffled sound was Vanessa trying to call out through the barrier. The thumping was her pounding her bound feet against the carpeted floor, trying to gain attention from the hotel room below.

  Linden and Laurel were nowhere in sight.

  Chapter 2

  “Chet” was the first word out of Vanessa’s mouth when Dirk removed the gag. She coughed and swallowed before adding, “Is he okay? They hit him and knocked him out, then they took the girls.” She gasped, “Mr. DeWinter—”

  “When?” Dirk demanded roughly, then said, “Hold still,” placing his hands on her arms just above the duct tape, making sure she didn’t move while Patrick sliced through her bonds with the switchblade knife he’d pulled from his pocket. When Vanessa’s hands were free, Patrick focused on her ankles. Dirk helped her to a sitting position once she was completely freed, then briskly rubbed her wrists to restore circulation while Patrick did the same thing to her ankles.

  Then both men turned their attention to Chet. A darkening contusion on his forehead showed how he’d been overpowered before he’d been gagged and bound, but he was conscious now. “What happened?” Dirk asked as he and Patrick freed Chet. “How long ago?”

  Vanessa answered his last question first. “About two hours ago, I think. I...I can’t be sure, but I think so. I thought it was room service with lunch when the doorbell rang.”

  Dirk frowned. “The front door to the suite?” he asked. “Not the butler’s entrance in the kitchen?”

  Vanessa looked startled for a moment, as if she’d just realized something. “Oh, I...I didn’t think of that. But yes, the front door. Chet answered it, and before I knew it one of them had knocked him out and there were two men in the living room. One of them was Chinese—” Dirk started to ask another question, but she answered it before he could get the words out. “I didn’t recognize them. But I’d know them if I saw
them again, especially the second man, the one who wasn’t Chinese. The one with a gun.” She shuddered. “His eyes. They were so cold.”

  “Did they leave a ransom note?” Dirk’s brain wasn’t firing on all cylinders, but icy fear trickled down his spine at the thought of his daughters—Bree’s daughters—in the hands of kidnappers. Your fault. His conscience was quick to judge. You failed to keep your daughters safe. Just as you failed to save Bree.

  Vanessa shook her head. “They didn’t leave a ransom note with me. Did you find one in the other room?”

  “No.” Dirk jumped to his feet, tuning Vanessa’s voice out as he pulled his smartphone from his pocket. He scrolled quickly, then selected the number for the US Consulate for Hong Kong and Macau, thanking his lucky stars he’d been advised to store the number in his contacts for the duration of his stay here.

  “Mr. DeWinter!” Chet was trying to get his attention, but Dirk impatiently waved him to silence.

  The phone rang and rang. Dirk started to heave a sigh of relief when the phone was finally answered, but the relief soon turned to despair when a recorded voice came on the line. “Due to the impending typhoon, the US Consulate for Hong Kong and Macau is closed until further notice. We expect to resume normal business operations as soon as the typhoon passes, but please call ahead before coming to the consulate. If this is an emergency, please contact the Hong Kong Police Force or the Public Security Police Force of Macau—” Dirk disconnected before the message ended, then caught Patrick’s eye.

  “The US consulate is closed because of the typhoon,” he said roughly. “The message says to call the Hong Kong police in an emergency. You don’t happen to have their number, do you? Otherwise I—”

  “Not the police!” Vanessa shrilled. “The kidnappers said if you call the police they’ll know, and they’ll kill the girls and dump their bodies in the harbor.”