Choosing Forever

by Mary B. Moore

  “Persian rugs,” he looked around all of us at the blank looks on our faces. “You know, drugs?”

  “Are you sure this one’s not…ya know,” Gramps tapped his head as he questioned Coleman about Jeff’s sanity.

  “It’s the slang,” Coleman clipped back. He was as through with all of this fuckery as I was.

  Turning back to Jeff, he nodded with his head and Jeff continued with what he’d been saying previously. “My bets are on this one,” he tapped a building in the photo. They all looked exactly the same to me though. “I’ve got men going to the other ones, but we’ll head here.”

  I wanted to punch something, it was building up inside me. Just as Cole opened his mouth, no doubt to say something else about fucking James Bond or to ask Jeff more irrelevant questions, my control snapped and my fist flew out.

  It was pure luck that the punch followed through and didn’t stop after my fist hit Cole’s jaw. Well for me, not for Ren. I’d apologize to him for his black eye later though. How was I to know that he’d lean in to see the map at that moment. If he hadn’t, my fist would have followed through onto nothing.

  I’ll admit, though, it did make me feel better when both of them went down.

  Looking over at Jeff and Coleman, I saw the understanding on their faces. Whether it was for the frustration and riot of emotions that were going through me at the moment, or the fact that they also wanted to punch Cole, I didn’t know.

  Glaring at me, Cole hissed as he walked past me to the car, “I could kill you with my thumb.”

  Seventeen

  BRETT

  "Where are we?" I whispered, looking around the waste ground that we were walking over towards a derelict building.

  “We’re in Battersea at one of the old warehouses,” Jeff muttered back, being careful where he put his feet. “Watch out for holes and shit. We can’t let them know we’re here.”

  Getting to the entrance, I looked up at the almost evil looking building. The glass of the windows had been shattered years ago and it looked like it was about to fall down. Around us the skeletons of cranes stood tall, but not far away were modern apartment buildings and a bustling area of London. Jeff had suggested that we wait until nightfall to give us the advantage of sneaking up in the dark, and it had been torture. We were so close, but still so far.

  I’d been bracing myself for the screeching of the hinges of the door as it was pushed, but not one sound came from it as Jeff pushed it open. Inside, it was dark and stank.

  Just as we started to climb up the first set of stairs, Jeff stopped and listened to something. It took me a couple of seconds to realize that it was the device in his ear and not something in the building that he was paying attention to.

  Pressing a button on a small box on his shoulder, he whispered, “Please tell me that you’re pulling my leg.” We all looked around us to see what he was on about, stopping when we saw the firm pissed off looks on the Brits faces. “Send that through to me and don’t lose them,” he ordered before turning to us. “Seems we missed them by a hair. My sister is following them though, so she’s going to stay on their tails.” Whirling his finger in the air, his men turned and walked back out, going straight to the SUV’s.

  “What the fuck just happened?” Cole asked, looking as confused as I was before following after the men.

  As we got into the car, I tackled Gough for information. “Is it still the same asshole who has her?”

  “Another one has joined him. The first one is a younger guy, apparently. Georgie says he reminds her of a rat.” The description wasn’t familiar, but then we didn’t know who had been targeting us. “The older guy was wearing a three-piece suit and looked like the guy from the Monopoly game.” Turning to see us all staring at him, he shrugged. “She’s got a descriptive way about her.”

  Coleman hissing as he flipped through screens on his phone caught my attention. “What have you got?”

  “I think I know who has her,” he muttered as he tapped his screen a few more times. “Bingo you sonovabitch!” Reaching across the center console to Jeff, he showed him his screen as he explained it to us. “The rat looking fucker is Henry Pinon, the son of a bankrupt former French nobleman. The guy who looks like Monopoly man is her father.” Sitting back and letting this sink in, I stupidly assumed for a second that he wouldn’t harm her. I mean, it was her dad! “Brett,” Coleman called snapping me out of my musings. “I already had intelligence on them after the shit that happened in Appledore. Pinon is wanted over a missing woman and her father has a record for abuse. Pinon also stands to gain hundreds of millions if he marries her.”

  Fuck me!

  Sabine

  My son moving around and kicking as violently as he was put my mind at ease.

  “So, father,” I sneered the word at him. “In what way can I help you?”

  “Shut up,” he snarled. “You have caused me, us,” he amended when Henry made a frustrated noise beside him, “a lot of problems. I should be in Monte Carlo by now, but you just had to be difficult.”

  “Monte Carlo?” I snorted. “You would stick out like a sore thumb there.”

  Shrugging, he continued driving and I started panicking when I figured out that he was headed to the Eurostar. If we got on that, it would become much harder for Brett to find me.

  The flash of a light behind us caught my attention, and I saw a small Audi TT overtake us. A beautiful young lady made eye contact with me and tugged on her seatbelt, before overtaking and moving in front of us.

  Clicking my seatbelt into place as quietly as possible, I listened as my dad insulted her. “The Brits are such awful drivers. Look at this idiot, cutting in front and not paying attention…”

  The rest of what he was going to say was interrupted by us slamming into the car. The screech of metal and the jarring impact of the two vehicles colliding snapped my head forward and tested the durability of the belt around me. The next thing, we were flipping over onto the roof of our vehicle and continued to flip another time before sliding down the road a good distance from where the accident had happened.

  Once we came to a stop, I didn’t wait to see what would happen next. Instead, I reached for the lock on the belt and tried to get it to release. My hands were shaking too much and I could feel something warm running down the side of my face.

  “Shit, bugger, bollocks, fucking piss…” a very London accented voice sounded from beside me. We had landed the right way up on the road so I didn’t have to twist or do any bizarre movements to see the young girl from the Audi standing beside me. “Stay still,” she advised as she tugged the door open and reached over me. Pressing the release button, she got the belt off me and helped me gently out of the car. “Follow me.”

  Moving as quickly as I could given that I’d just been in a bad car accident and I was heavily pregnant, I followed after her.

  “Who are you?” I panted. I should probably have been wary after being kidnapped, but she had gotten me away from them and that’s what mattered at the moment.

  Pulling out her phone, she hit the screen. “I’ve got her. He was going toward the Eurostar so I had no choice but to stop the car.” Listening to whatever was being said, she let out a frustrated growl. “No, it’s a write off. No, stop yelling and listen to me,” she snapped and then told him where we were. “Uh,” she stopped and checked me over. “Head wound, cut on arm, big buggering bump at the front.” Nodding, she asked, “How are you?”

  Taking stock of the feeling in my body now that we’d stopped moving, I felt some pain, but remarkably, given the severity of the accident, I was okay. I could feel the baby moving too which was my main concern at that moment.

  “Fine!”

  Nodding again, she started walking and waved me to follow. “Okay, see you in five.” Looking over at me as she shoved her phone back in her pocket, she introduced herself. “Sorry, names Georgie. My brother’s a friend of Coleman’s.”

  It seemed like only seconds later that a car screeched
to a halt in front of us and my husband came running toward me.

  Like the big badass bitch that I was, I burst into tears.

  Brett

  "Apart from some bruising and the cut to her forehead, Mrs. Townsend is just fine,” the elderly doctor who looked like Albert Einstein informed us. Picking up a piece of paper with squiggly lines on it, he looked over it and nodded. “Baby Townsend is perfectly happy too. There were some small contractions earlier, but quite frankly that’s not unusual at this stage of the pregnancy. It appears as though the impact of the crash really didn’t affect him at all.” The grin on his face as he continued to go back over the long paper put my mind at ease. “Not everyone is this lucky,” he murmured. “On rare occasions miracles happen, and this,” he looked up at me and gave me the biggest grin yet, “is a miracle.”

  After recommending that we stay there for a day, just to make sure, he left and my family walked back inside the room.

  “Are all British doctors that happy?” Grams asked.

  Coleman interrupted before Sabine could answer. “We need to move. Jeff has been speaking to Harry, who has been most informative,” he looked pissed as he added. “Your father was missing from the vehicle when we got there, but it wasn’t him who ordered that you be taken.”

  “What the fuck?” I barked.

  “They were contacted by an American who offered them both five mill a piece if they took you. They could do whatever they wanted with you, and they would only get the money once you disappeared.”

  “Who was the American?” Sabine sounded croaky as she asked him, putting her hand protectively over her bump.

  “No one knows,” Coleman ran his hand through his hair looking agitated and pissed that we still had no clues. “But, we know that your father told Harry that he was going to get that money before he ran away leaving fuckface in the car.”

  “No one saw him running away from the crash?” I’d been too focused on Sabine, but surely one of them had to have seen him.

  “He was gone before we got there,” Jeff said grimly as he walked into the room. “I have a place I can take you…” he started, but Sabine interrupted him.

  “No, I know where we’ll be safe.”

  “You’re meant to be staying in to be monitored…”

  Glaring at me and putting her hand protectively over our son, Sabine hissed, “We’re leaving. I’m safer out there,” she nodded her head in the direction of the window, “than I am sitting in here attached to all of these,” she picked up a cable and wiggled it at me.

  Before I could argue, the pain in my ass, Tom, danced through the door pushing a wheelchair. “Here’s your seato…” he sang, using the tune to Despacito. Thankfully, he was cut off before he’d even properly begun by Sabine unhooking herself and tenderly moving to the edge of the bed.

  “Wait,” Jeff held his hand up as he walked over to her. Crouching down, he looked at her and asked, “Are you safe doing this? And not just you, but this little man here too?” He put his hand on her bump, something which had me gritting my teeth and counting to ten so that I didn’t yell at him to take his hands off her. It was an automatic reaction, that was my wife and my son he was touching. The baby must have kicked because both of them chuckled.

  “Oui, I wouldn’t risk him,” she sighed. “Especially not after the accident today. Fin can help me if I need him, but I just know he’s okay. Thank you for your concern, though.”

  After a few seconds, he nodded his head and turned to Tom and waved him forward. While Tom was helping her into the wheelchair and everyone was getting ready to go, Jeff walked over to me and Coleman and said words that I hadn’t known that I needed to hear, but that almost had me falling on my knees.

  “She will be safe,” he muttered. “No matter what. I will bring in everyone that I can and we’ll set up a perimeter around her when we get to where she wants us to go. She’s out of this from now on.” Turning his attention to Coleman, he addressed the issue that had been suffocating us for too long. “This bullshit in America – get your men moving and I’ll get mine. The man what got this all set up left a trail somewhere. We’ve got that pussy, Harry, so we’ll get the brass tacks out of him. When we’re done, the sniveling piece of shit will be handed over to the Police, and it won’t be long before we have the other one too.”

  I didn’t even have to ask the obvious question, Cole already had the answer. “Brass tacks means facts. How fucking cool is this shit?”

  Following them all out of the door, I walked beside Sabine as Tom pushed her to the elevator with Coleman in front and Jeff to her right.

  “Once we get out of the lift, the five of us will get into the third car,” Jeff gestured to me, Coleman, Sabine, Tom and himself. “The rest will split between the other vehicles. You’ll have to give the address to me to put in the Satnav,” he passed his phone to Sabine who quickly put something into the Maps app and passed it back. After checking the screen, he looked at Sabine incredulously. “Chuffing Nora!”

  Grinning, she wiggled in the wheelchair and rubbed our son. I wasn’t in a good place during all of this. My wife had been kidnapped and I’d been powerless to do anything to save or help her. Then, my son and wife could have been killed in the car accident and she was leaving hospital when she’d been told to stay in for a further twenty-four hours. Now we were going to wherever she wanted us to go instead of where Jeff thought we’d be safest. Oh, and the cherry on top was that her father wasn’t going to stop trying to get her to do fuck knows what, so she still wasn’t safe.

  Added onto it all was that there was also some psycho back home who had orchestrated all this bullshit with Sabine too and who was intent on trying to kill my family…if my balls could have dropped to the floor along with my heart by way of my ass hole, I wouldn’t even blink. And now I was sounding like Tom. Fuck my fucking life!

  Getting into the vehicle beside Sabine, I put my head back on the head rest and closed my eyes briefly. I couldn’t remember the last time that I’d actually had real sleep and I knew it wouldn’t be happening any time soon. At least, that’s what I thought, but at that moment, Sabine lifted my arm and snuggled into my chest. The smell of her and the assurance that she was as safe as I could make it at that moment lifted the ten-ton weight off my shoulders and I felt sleep take over.

  “Poor bugger’s cream crackered,” I heard Jeff say from the front of the car, but that’s the last thing I heard before heading towards a sleep coma.

  Nine hours later...

  “Really?” I asked her as we drove up to the stone house in the middle of the boonies. “Here?”

  “Nobody knows that Fin is here,” she explained calmly as she opened the door. “And the house isn’t registered to him.”

  The sound of a lion roaring in the not far enough for my liking distance had me freezing as I went to follow. “No fucking way. Get back in the car.”

  “Relax,” a familiar voice advised. Looking over, I saw Fin walking toward us in mud boots, jeans and a flannel shirt. “They’re in the safari park,” he gestured behind him, but all I saw were grassy fields and trees.

  “I thought you lived in the other place,” Tom questioned as he joined us and then looked around.

  “I work for Longleat Safari Park every now and then, so they give me this house to stay in when I need it.” We all looked around us for the safari park that he was talking about. We'd seen the signs for it as we drove here, but so far I wasn’t seeing any animals apart from some sheep. “It’s over there behind those trees,” Finlay explained seeing our confusion. “Anyway, come in and make yourselves at home. I have to go in and check on a patient.” looking at Sabine, he gave her a grin. “There’s a baby Orangutan that’s just come in from one of the zoo’s. They didn’t have the facilities to deal with her, so I’m on baby watch,” looking down at her stomach, he added dryly, “times two.”

  After he left, we all went to catch up on some sleep. We’d dropped Tony and the other women off at a hotel called the
Premier Inn before we drove to Finlay’s house. Tom, Cole, Coleman and Cooper were staying here with me to make sure that Sabine was safe and Jeff and a couple of his men had secured a house near here to stay in as well. Apparently, the land was owned by a British nobleman, but I couldn’t remember the title that they’d told me earlier. He was something to do with the City of Bath though, that I remembered.

  Even though there were people around to help keep her safe, I couldn’t relax. She’d supposedly been safe before and look at what had happened.

  Staring out of the window, I thought back through all of the security details that Coleman had taken me through. The open fields were the easiest bit to monitor, and behind them was the safari park and no one could get onto that land as it was closely guarded and had 24/7 surveillance.

  Behind us was the road that any vehicle would have to take to get to us, and it was a narrow country road so that made it harder for any would-be kidnappers. Unfortunately, it was also lined on the opposite side with bushes and trees, so it would be easier for the assholes to creep up on the other side of them and then surprise us. Thankfully, being former SAS and British intelligence, Jeff had a whole host of gadgets that had been set up and his men were strategically placed throughout the area.