The Naughty Nine: Where Danger and Passion Collide

by Nina Bruhns

  “Oh, my good Lord,” Madam interjected. “I knew it was you with her, last night outside Kopeleski’s house, but I didn’t think you’d be stupid enough to…to…”

  “Not so psychic after all,” Giselle said. She paused. “That was more sarcasm in case you didn’t recognize it.”

  Ry moved to stand by Giselle. “You’re not helping matters,” he whispered in her ear.

  “You started this, you lying jerk,” Giselle whispered back. He shrugged. He shrugged so adorably Giselle had difficulty being angry with him, but she managed.

  “I should’ve gotten rid of this horrible girl the first time I saw her,” Madam gritted out between clenched teeth.

  “Now, Mama, you haven’t been trying to kill Giselle, have you?”

  Madam’s voice turned to saccharine sweetness. “I don’t try to kill people, honey. If I was trying, I would have done it. You know that.”

  Madam circled around Ry and Giselle. She looked Giselle up and down. Her lip curled as if she had a whiff of something smelly. “Besides, I’m too well bred to do anything so crass, even if the person is a…is disagreeable like Ms. Hunter.”

  Ry placed a restraining arm around Giselle’s shoulders. It probably appeared to Madam to be a supportive hug. But to Giselle it was more akin to a hammerlock.

  “Anyway, I don’t know what would make you think I would try to kill one of your girlfriends, Ry,” Madam said.

  “There was that time you tried to kill my high school sweetheart. You remember Sally, the cheerleader.”

  “Honey, I wasn’t trying to kill her. I just wanted to scare her a little.”

  “All her hair fell out, Mama.”

  “She didn’t die, did she?”

  Giselle had the urge to reach up to protect her own hair, but she didn’t want to give Madam the satisfaction. Also, Ry had locked down her arms.

  “Aren’t you going to invite me in to sit down, Ry?”

  “No, you’re not staying.”

  “Ry, Ry, my darling boy. I can’t believe this has gotten so bad, so fast. Last night, after the incident at Kopeleski’s house, I did a special tarot reading for you.”

  “Mama―”

  “And the chariot was prominent. That means there is a struggle, an upheaval in your life. Obviously, that relates to this…woman.” Madam glanced at Giselle with a scowl on her lips and narrowed eyes. She turned back to Ry. “The temperance card was there. You know that means you have to exercise self-control. I saw the knight of cups.” Madam tugged on his arm. “You know what that means. You’ve met someone with an intoxicating effect on you. But intoxication isn’t a good thing. Don’t you see that this girl is going to poison your life? You shouldn’t let your little Ry control your decision-making, son.”

  “I am in control, Mama. I don’t want to hear about this tarot-reading bull. You know how I feel about that mumbo-jumbo. Don’t come here trying to pull me into all that crap again. You forced it on me as a child, but no more.” Ry stalked stiff-legged away from Giselle and opened the front door. “Just go, Mama.”

  “Ry. It’s her you should get rid of.” Madam moved forward and clutched at his sleeve. “Why don’t you just get her a ghost? Once she gets what she wants, she’ll leave town and get out of your life.”

  “You don’t give orders to me anymore, Mama.” Ry pulled away from her grasp. Madam reached toward him again and he stepped back. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Madam gave Giselle one last evil eye and flew out the door on her broomstick. Okay, not really.

  Ry threw the door closed and stood with his back against it, staring up at the ceiling. “I told you to stay upstairs,” he said, with a voice so low she could barely hear him. She’d seen Ry upset, but this was in an entirely different category. But then again, she wasn’t so thrilled either.

  “Yeah, well I’m not a dog. You can’t order me to stay.”

  “I can’t believe it!” Ry spun around, his face pinched. He paced away from the door and back again. He tugged one hand through his tousled hair. “I can’t believe I’ve been drawn back into all this crap again. I can’t believe I let you draw me back into it. You’re as bad as my mother.”

  Giselle’s hackles flew up. “Those are fightin’ words, mister. I’m not anything like your mother.”

  Then all the anger just drained out of her. They’d been so happy last night, so in synch with one another. Giselle tried to touch Ry’s arm. He shrugged her away just as he had his mother. “You’re being such a jerk. You’re the one who lied. You’re the one who’s been keeping secrets, but you’re angry with me?”

  Ry didn’t answer. He just stomped up the stairs and then into his bedroom. Giselle followed. She couldn’t bear to glance toward the bed. She stared at the jerk’s back.

  “I think you should get your things and go, Giselle,” Ry said after a few minutes.

  If he’d slapped her, Giselle couldn’t have been more surprised and hurt. Tears flooded her eyes and she blinked them away. She wouldn’t cry in front of him.

  “You jerk. You…you…jerk. You jerk monster in human clothes.” She tore off his shirt and scrunched it into as tiny a ball as possible before throwing it at his back. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a brick and didn’t hit him in his hard head.

  Scrounging around on the floor, she found her own damp t-shirt. Despite the mud still covering it, Giselle pulled it on anyway. She found her bra and panties, in two different locations on the floor, and stuffed them into the pocket of her pants. Her purse was on the entry hall table. She‘d get that when she passed to go out the door. Which couldn’t be too soon, in her opinion.

  Ry stared out the bedroom window again. This time he didn’t smile. Neither did she.

  “Why don’t you call your mama?” Giselle said to his back. “You finally did something she’ll approve of.” Princess Giselle walked out of the bedroom, down the steps and out the front door.

  Rylan Leland was out of her life for good. Who would have thought it? Apparently lying jerkiness did outweigh gorgeous lovemaking after all.

  * * *

  Giselle walked the walk of shame. She’d thought it would never happen. Going home after a one-night stand, wearing the clothes she’d worn the night before. The damp, muddy clothes she’d worn the night before. Giselle started crying. Great. Now she was walking the walk of shame and crying.

  “Whore.” She heard the shout from a passing SUV. Great. Even passing motorists knew her shame.

  The Scooby Doo theme sounded from her purse. Giselle pulled out her cell phone as she turned down Drayton Street toward her hotel. She checked the ID. Willie. Dammit. She’d have to answer it. After hanging up on him last night, he’d probably fire her if she didn’t answer today.

  “Hello?” She choked on the word.

  “I want to talk to you about these credit card charges.” Silence. “Are you there?” Willie barked.

  “I’m heeeere.” Giselle couldn’t help the sob as she said it.

  More silence. “Are you crying?”

  “Yeeees.” More sobbing.

  “Never mind. We’ll talk about it when you get back.” Willie hung up.

  Willie being nice to her? She must be truly pitiful now. Things just couldn’t get worse.

  She swiped at her eyes. The tears kept coming. Giselle swiped at her eyes again and felt rough hands grab her shoulders from behind. They tugged her off balance. Other hands pulled roughly at her legs and lifted her in the air. Two large men seemed to have hauled her right off the street. She had an impression of motion and the distasteful body odor of her abductors.

  She had little chance to struggle. The men tossed her, face first, into the trunk of a car. The trunk lid slammed down, shutting her inside. Darkness engulfed her.

  This really was her fault. She had to admit it. Giselle had tempted fate by thinking things couldn’t get worse and fate had thrown her into the trunk of a car to prove how wrong she could be.

  It was Sunday, who knows what time in the m
orning. She had no ghost, she wore muddy, damp clothes and she lay trapped in a trunk. However, she refused to think that things could not get worse. She didn’t want to tempt fate into another demonstration.

  A Girl, a Guy and a Ghost: Chapter Eight

  Perhaps the trunk of some cars didn’t contain half the trash from the local landfill. This car did. Giselle felt like just one more item for the trash heap. Reams and reams of paper lay around and under her.

  She searched under her body for her purse. Maybe it wasn’t in here with her at all. Maybe it had fallen to the sidewalk. Even now there could be some thief using the magazine’s credit card. For a moment she thought of Willie reviewing the charges the thief would make and the thought cheered her. Wait a minute. She must be hysterical. Why would she be thinking about the credit card at a time like this? Why was she thinking about Willie? Because she didn’t want to think about being in this trunk, that’s why.

  Giselle twisted her left arm into what felt like a pretzel shape but finally got it to a place near the top of her head. The kink in her arm hardly hurt at all when she discovered her purse near her left ear. She rummaged around inside. No cell phone. Dammit, she could never find that phone when she needed it. Quite often she had resorted to calling herself from another phone just to find the stupid thing. Sadly, that wasn’t an option now.

  Omigod. Keep calm. She couldn’t go into a claustrophobic panic now. Breathe deeply. Ooooh. Bad idea. Something in here stank. Giselle hoped it wasn’t her. Although her smell was the least of her worries. Focus, Giselle! Never a strong point. She could admit it. In fact, she could remember that time in college… Stop it. Think!

  Her head hit the top of the trunk as the car’s shocks took a beating on the road surface. Now she could think. She could think about how much it hurt her forehead to hit the trunk.

  Were they driving on cobblestones, on a rutted dirt road? Was it too late to try to keep track of where the abductors had taken her after plucking her off the sidewalk? She had no idea how many left and right turns they’d taken. She didn’t even know how many minutes she’d been in the trunk. She couldn’t recall any distinctive sounds.

  It all seemed so easy in the movies. The heroine could recount valuable clues to help the police locate the kidnapper’s hideout. Of course, Giselle would have to get away from her kidnappers for her amazing cognitive memory prowess to be important. Yeah, the getting away part was crucial.

  Giselle rummaged in the purse again. Her hand came upon a heavy object in the bottom. Swiss army knife. That could be helpful. It had a small flashlight feature. Would it still work? She snapped it on. Light. Yes.

  She directed the small pinpoint beam away from her chin where it wouldn’t do any good, to the trunk latch area. Maybe she’d get lucky and find she was in a late-model vehicle with a childproof trunk latch that would allow her to open the trunk with ease. She located the latch with the light’s beam. Dammit. Not likely. No easy-to-operate escape latch. She was no doubt in some hunk of junk land boat.

  Fumbling with the Swiss army knife, Giselle found a file-type tool. She began jabbing at the latch mechanism. Why hadn’t she paid more attention to her juvenile delinquent friends in high school? When she’d been learning something useless like typing, she could have been adding life-saving information like lock picking to her knowledge base.

  She heard a click in the mechanism. Dumb luck. Thank you, Dumb Luck, and your brother, Dumber Luck.

  The trunk lid began to rise. The land boat veered to the right and the lid flew up. Giselle saw a two-lane highway in the rural countryside stretching out behind the land boat but no cars. Multicolored copy paper fluttered around her and then began flying helter-skelter out of the trunk. The pieces of paper came to rest along the highway like some peculiar tail growing out of the car, longer and longer.

  Surely the thugs in the land boat would notice that they had acquired a dorsal fin and a multi-colored tail at any moment. Giselle wanted to get out of the trunk before that happened. If they pulled over, she’d have to confront them. She was pissed, but she didn’t think that would allow her to overcome their obvious superior physical strength.

  Edging one leg over the rim of the trunk, Giselle clutched her purse to her chest. Could she afford to wait until they slowed? Just when it seemed like fifty mph. was about as slow as they would go, the car braked and its horn sounded. Giselle did a sort of combination jump and fall from the trunk, hitting the asphalt hard and then rolling. Asphalt gave way to grass and then to taller, rougher vegetation. Suddenly she found herself rolling downhill into a storm ditch. As she came to rest at the lowest point of the ditch, Giselle thanked heaven that it hadn’t rained for at least twenty-four hours and the ditch was almost dry. As a result she was only slightly muddier than she had started out.

  Sheets of copy paper—neon blue, lime green, and hot pink—rained down around her. Giselle plucked one out of the air. On sunny yellow background, large black lettering blared, Do you know a VICTIM? Call 1-800-4VICTIM to help. As more paper came to rest beside her, she saw that they all had the same message.

  The first chance she got she would call to help. Giselle knew a victim. She was a victim. The real question was, what did this flyer have to do with her abductors?

  * * *

  After climbing the embankment, Giselle found herself at the side of a very empty highway. Her purse had landed near the centerline a few yards away. She found her cell phone in a side pocket, but, as usual, it was out of service range. Dammit. She’d have to hitchhike back to Savannah.

  She stood at the side of the road and several cars passed before a nice old man with one front tooth offered her a lift in his pickup. Giselle gratefully accepted. She wasn’t so grateful when she found that a Rottweiler and a pot-bellied pig would be her fellow occupants.

  “I’m real sorry, ma’am, but the front seat is occupied by Herbie,” the old man said.

  “Herbie?” Giselle climbed into the back of the truck bed and plopped down into something slick that she thankfully couldn’t identify.

  “Yes, ma’am. Herbie’s my pet possum. He always rides in front. He ain’t too fond of Elmer and Snot Rag,” the old man called from the cab of the truck.

  Giselle guessed he meant the pig and the Rottweiler. The Rottweiler was probably Snot Rag since there was a runny substance oozing from his nose, before a big tongue came out of it and lapped it away. Snot Rage came closer and gave her a sniff.

  “Nice boy—or girl,” she said, edging back against the side of the truck bed. The dog retreated and lay down next to the pig.

  The truck engine roared and a cloud of black smoke erupted from the tail pipe. The wind direction swept the cloud into her face. Giselle hacked as the truck jerked forward and began to bounce along the road.

  On closer inspection, the bed of the pickup was coated with a brown substance topped by bits of hay. Giselle’s hand encountered something sticky when she gripped the side to keep from rolling as the truck took a turn. The truck bed had no doubt seen too many hours of pig and Rottweiler use. But beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  She’d almost gotten used to the rank smell, the slick stickiness and the wind whipping through her hair when the old man pulled the truck to a stop near the front door of her hotel.

  As Giselle limped into the lobby, she tried to shrink herself to a fraction of her height― as if that would make her unnoticeable. If she could just make it to the elevator without being spotted, she could be in her room in no time. She wanted to avoid the humiliation of anyone seeing…or smelling her in this state. She almost made it.

  “Giselle! Arretez-vous. Stop. You are there!” Vector, the skunk, shouted at her from the revolving hotel entrance door.

  The desk clerk looked toward her and frowned. A young couple checking in did a double take. A man in a business suit seated near the elevators stopped reading his newspaper and stared. So much for trying to be inconspicuous.

  Giselle saw to her horror that Vector ran toward her. S
he turned and pressed the call button. There were two elevators, but one set of doors bore a handwritten sign taped to its façade, Out of Service.

  Pushing the button again brought no result. She pressed, pressed and pressed again. The more a button was pushed the faster the elevator would come. Wasn’t that the rule?

  A middle-aged Southern belle, who also waited for the elevator, said, “You’ll break the button. Pushing it like that won’t make it come any faster.”

  Apparently there wasn’t a rule.

  The belle wrinkled her nose and pulled her collar up over the lower half of her face.

  Just fabulous.

  A ping sounded from the elevator, and Giselle noticed that the belle was gone. She’d missed her ride. Vector kept coming. She jabbed the call button again, but she could see by the floor indicator above the elevator doors that it was headed upward. It stopped on the third floor. No movement. Dammit and double dammit.

  “Giselle!” Vector had reached her side. He had a bouquet of daisies with baby’s breath in one hand and a box of chocolates in the other. “Giselle, still you do not call me. I wait for you long time. And you do not come. You do not call. You do not come. So finally I call your magazine and they tell me you are here. Why you avoid Vector?”

  Giselle would have answered but the skunk was on a roll.

  “I say to myself, I say, ‘Vector, why she not call you?’ And then I say, ‘Vector, it is because she does not know you have the interest très romantique.’ So I wait for you on the street with the flowers and the candy. I woo you.”

  After what she’d been through, Giselle had no patience for wooing.

  “Vector, I am never going to call you. We didn’t hit it off on our date. You said yourself that you didn’t find me attractive. Just let it go. No woo. Just go.”

  The skunk seemed to consider this. “Is true you are not beautiful.” He appraised her, as if he’d just seen her for the first time since she entered the lobby. “Like now you have the crazy hair, the dirt and the something else, which is not smelling so nice.” His nose crinkled.