Red Hot Candy (22 All-New Delicious Romance Books by Best-Selling Authors about Alpha Males, Billionaires, Cowboys, and More for Your Summer Reading) (Red Hot Boxed Sets)

by Dani Dundee

  Wulf stretched harder, lengthening his back and the hard bricks of his abdominals as the computer screen dimmed, turning off. The curved screen was almost as wide as his spread arms, well over six feet.

  He faced a solid week without the psychotic flicker of stock symbols and prices, without manipulating the world through the ebb and flow of currency and capital.

  However would he survive?

  He would have to find a suitable diversion.

  Or some suitable diversions.

  Wulf smiled in the dark as he rolled his chair backward to leave his small command center. One last glance at the lower, right corner of the screen before it faded to black confirmed that it was nearly two o’clock and he had missed lunch.

  No matter. He had just enough time to finish packing his toiletries before the cars left for the airport and his leased plane that would fly them to Switzerland. Their wedding clothes had been sent ahead with his sister, Flicka, after the final fittings yesterday.

  Odd, his housekeeper Rosamunde hadn’t called him for lunch when Rae should have arrived home from her meeting with her professors. Rae was working on independent study projects over the summer, one research paper on behavioral interventions in autism spectrum disorders and one on multiple personality disorders, and these evidently required numerous consultations, even one on the very day that they left for their religious wedding in Switzerland.

  Outside the door to his office, he followed the hallway that turned toward the main rooms.

  Usually, cleaning of some sort was carried out in the afternoons, but the light brown furniture in the vast receiving room stood silent in the unoccupied space. Enormous potted plants, his belated addition to try to add some Black Forest lushness to the desert colors, waved in the air conditioning that poured cool air into the space, beating back the desert sunlight that blazed through the high wall of windows. The pool and courtyard outside warped subtly through the thick, bulletproof panes.

  His stomach rumbled, and Wulf pressed his abdomen through his white shirt. He hadn’t worn a tie this morning and his collar was unbuttoned. Rae’s Southwestern casualness was rubbing off on him.

  Lunch was his first order of business.

  He turned past the grand staircase and meandered toward the kitchen, still peering around the conversation groupings for his staff.

  Someone should be around.

  Worry prickled the nape of his neck. His computer room was hidden, and staff weren’t allowed in except for basic cleaning in the evenings. He had been locked in since around four in the morning. Due to insulation and the separate cooling system in there, it was practically a bunker.

  He might not have heard anything if something had gone wrong.

  Wulf stopped, listening to the silence hovering in the formal entertaining room for footsteps or the metallic click of a gun cocking.

  The high walls around the room were unblemished. The bulletproof glass was transparent, uncracked. The pool outside glittered blue in the sunlight.

  No signs of violence.

  His own footsteps tapped the cool marble floor as he walked toward the kitchen.

  Murmuring traveled through the door before his fingertips touched it, and he relaxed fractionally. He pushed the door open, hesitating before he walked through the frame.

  Inside the kitchen, his staff sat at tables and leaned against the counters, arguing very quietly.

  Over by the coffeemaker, one of his most senior security people, Hans, sucked down coffee like he was drowning his sorrows. He poured himself another cup and turned, catching sight of Wulf standing in the door.

  Hans announced, “He’s here.”

  His staff swiveled and caught him in their stares.

  Rosamunde, his house manager, stood over by the stainless steel ovens with her arms crossed, a scowl twisting her face. Most of the other housekeepers had lines of worry between their eyes.

  Hans and Luca, the security men who should have been guarding his wife at her university, hunched their shoulders in their black suits.

  God, no.

  Wulf shoved everything away, and his heartbeat trod steadily in his chest, as calm as if he were on a ridge with a rifle in his arms.

  He raised one eyebrow. “What happened?”

  “We’re not sure,” Hans said.

  “How are you not sure of what happened?” Wulf stepped into the kitchen. The door swung closed behind him.

  Luca set his coffee on the steel counter and straightened. “We maintained a short distance, as Ms. Stone requested. Ms. Stone was approached by a college-age female, approximately five feet-eight with dark blond hair and wearing a long skirt and white blouse. After a very short conversation, Ms. Stone followed the female into the dense crowd between classes. We pursued, but they got into a white, older-model sedan, license plate A-K-G dash four seven nine. The other female drove away. Our car was parked in another lot, so we were unable to continue to surveil Ms. Stone.”

  Wulf breathed naturally, watching the concerned frowns and tense body posture of his people. He tugged his phone from his breast pocket inside his jacket, but he had received no texts nor calls from her.

  He tried calling her mobile, but it went to voicemail before the first ring.

  Rae never turned off her mobile, ever. One of the few things that she had splurged on—and she did consider it a financial splurge, which had amused him no end—was a variety of cell phone chargers: car, rapid, and solar, and even an external battery that she kept in her old dorm room, just in case.

  He texted, Are you all right? Call home or security line.

  Wulf looked up at his people, and their guilty expressions told him that they had already tried all those easy options. “Have we tracked her mobile’s location?”

  Hans said, “We are unable to receive a signal from her cell phone.”

  “I see. What are our options?”

  “We wait until she calls us, I suppose,” Hans said.

  “Other options?” Wulf asked.

  Luca and Hans glanced at each other.

  Hans said, “General rule is that one has to wait three days to file a missing person report for an adult.”

  Wulf tightened his hands. “I am aware of the rules that pertain to other people. I asked what our options are.”

  Hans and Luca looked at each other again. “We can call her friends.”

  “On the contrary,” Wulf said. “We’ll call our friends.”

  Liars

  Two Hours Earlier.

  Hester’s beat-up car clattered like a pile of paint cans as it rolled over the parking lot speed bumps and merged with the speeding traffic.

  Rae was riding shotgun while Hester drove and was peppering her with questions. “Which hospital is she in? Why was she even up here, anyway? Do they know that it was a heart attack? Did they do an EKG? Did the doctor actually say it was definitely a heart attack? Could it just be indigestion? She’s had problems with her hiatal hernia. All those pregnancies, you know.” Rae rested her palm on her stomach. “Did she drink lemonade? She gets horrible reflux when she drinks lemonade. I’ll bet she drank lemonade.”

  “I don’t think that’s it,” Hester said, her watery blue eyes dodging to the rear view mirror.

  “Lemonade or some other citrus. Old Mrs. Trout gave us a bag of grapefruit from her trees when I was about twelve, and Mom ate a whole bottle of Tums that week. I’ll bet it’s just indigestion.”

  Hester spun the steering wheel, and the car turned a corner into a Best Western Hotel. Five stories of cinderblock blotted out the sun as they drove around the building.

  Uh, oh. Rae said, “This isn’t a hospital.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Where’s my mother?”

  “She’s at home. She’s fine. Nothing’s wrong with her.”

  “Then what the hell, Hester?”

  Hester sighed and parked in the back of the hotel, away from the view of the street. “Reagan, we all feel like we need to talk to you about
some things.”

  “No way. No flipping way.” Rae grabbed the hot door handle, but three of her largest cousins, including Craigh, her usually normal cousin, were already opening the car doors. The handle pulled away from her hands, scraping her fingernails over the metal.

  Rae struggled to pull her arms away from their hands, tight around her wrists, but they were much bigger than even she was. “What the hell are you doing, Hester?”

  Hester got out of the car and kept her head down. “It’s for the best.”

  “I am not going back home. I have a plane flight in five hours!”

  Craigh mumbled, “I don’t think you’re going to make that plane. This might take a while.”

  “I can’t believe you’d do this, Craigh,” Rae told him.

  He nodded and pressed his lips together, hunting through her backpack that he retrieved from the back seat. “I can’t quite believe I’m here, either.”

  Craigh found her phone and powered it off.

  Wulf and his security guys wouldn’t be able to trace it. “Come on, man!”

  He shook his head. “They just want to talk to you for a while. And stuff.”

  “They, who? What kind of stuff?” She twisted her arms, trying to break her cousins’ grip, but they hauled her toward the hotel.

  Rae was a nice girl, raised to be nice and polite and go along with everybody. Maybe she should have sat down on the asphalt or shrieked, but the tall, brick hotel blocked the line of sight from the cars speeding by on the street out front, and all the hotel’s windows and curtains were shut tight against the June summer heat. Air conditioning units on the roof roared like swarms of hornets, louder than any screaming she could have done.

  So she walked in with them, though she jerked her arms, trying to slip out of their bruising fingers.

  They jostled her through the back door of the hotel—glass, Rae noticed, not even bulletproof acrylic—and into one of the first rooms on the main floor.

  Well, good. When she managed to get away from her crazy family, she could dart straight for the lobby and tell them to call the damn cops. There wasn’t even a stairwell for her to fall down, klutz that she was.

  Inside the small conference room, the laminate conference table and chrome-plated dining chairs had been pushed back against the walls, leaving an open space in the center. A pillow and a blanket were crumpled in the center of the room.

  Rae’s father, Zachariah Stone, and several of her grizzled uncles flanked Minister Stoppard. Her father stared at his scuffed, Sunday-best shoes. The pastor’s black eyes raged at her, and he held a Bible clenched in his fist.

  A bell and a candle lay beside the pillow on the floor.

  Bell, book, and candle.

  “No freaking way,” Rae said. “Protestants don’t believe in empty rituals, remember? We don’t do exorcisms.”

  Minister Stoppard raised his Bible high in the air. The soft cover flopped open, and half the pages drooped. “By the power of Jesus Christ, begone demon!”

  “That is so not the way to start an exorcism,” Rae said. One of her psych classes had discussed historical treatments for mental illnesses, and she’d read the Catholic Rite of Exorcism just for fun and had been thoroughly creeped out by it. “You begin with a Litany of the Saints, not by jumping straight in and yelling at the demon. Here, I’ll start. ‘Lord, have mercy.’ Now y’all say that back.”

  Her father and uncles recoiled from the Catholicism.

  Minister Stoppard shoved the book toward her, even though he was all the way across the room.

  Chicken.

  He shouted, “I command the demon to begone!”

  “Seriously. This is not how you do an exorcism. It has to be in a church with an altar. Minister Stoppard,” Rae pointed at him, “you have to go to confession first. Otherwise, you’re in a state of sin and the demon can jump into you. Why don’t we call Father Manuel over at Our Lady of Perpetual Help and get a consult?”

  “Begone demon! Begone demon!” Stoppard screamed, his black hair flopping over his forehead. His black eyes were getting crazier with every shout.

  Maybe Rae should just foam at the mouth, spit at them for a while, maybe barf on Minister Stoppard’s pants—yeah, she definitely needed to vomit on him—and declare herself exorcised.

  She stole a glance at the clock.

  If she managed it right, she could still get to the airport in time to keep the flight schedule for Switzerland to get church-married.

  Okay, now she had a plan. That was good.

  And yet, she just couldn’t humor them. She had seen too much. She was, indeed, too worldly to even listen to this kind of repressive, angry, frightened, superstitious stuff anymore.

  She jerked her arm out of her cousins’ grasp. “This is stupid. This is utterly stupid. I’m leaving.”

  Stoppard called out, “Boys, lay her down.”

  Rae’s cousins grabbed her again and forced her toward the blanket in the middle of the room. Craigh held her right arm.

  “This is kidnapping,” she told him. “If you don’t let me go right this minute, I will press charges. I mean it.”

  Stoppard yelled, “That’s what a demon would say! Once she’s exorcised, she won’t want to press charges. She’ll be glad that she’s free of the demonic possession.”

  Rae rolled her eyes in her head, exasperated at all of them. “Oh, for crying out loud. What a crock.”

  They wrestled Rae down, and Craigh’s shoulder shoved into her stomach, right near the baby.

  Rae gasped. If they hurt her, they might kill that fragile bundle inside her. “Okay! I’ll lay down! Don’t push me!”

  Craigh backed off. Rae eased herself down to the floor, resting her head on the pillow. She rolled on her side and clenched her arms over her stomach.

  New plan: go along with everything so they wouldn’t hurt her or the baby.

  Maybe she should just tell them she was preggers. That way, they’d go easy on her stomach.

  They all must be pro-life. Stoppard preached on abortion at least once a month, and nodding was mandatory. She was ninety percent sure that no one here was so dead-set against her marriage that they would pull out a coat hanger.

  But Stoppard was more than a fanatic. His small amount of societal power and his entire income from tithes were in jeopardy, and Rae’s rebellion was the focus of that danger to him. If he thought her pregnancy would turn these people against him such that they might allow her to escape, he might beat the crap out of her, slamming his hard fists into her belly, a back-woods abortion. He would probably tell them that the demon was lying about the baby and that he was beating the Jesus into her.

  She couldn’t tell them, not if she wanted to protect their child.

  Rae said, “Just don’t hurt me. I’ll do whatever you want.”

  Our Friends

  Wulf sat in his office again, a dim, windowless room. His wide computer monitor surrounded the desk, dead and black. Electrically charged dust stung his nose, and he tried not to flinch every time Luca and Hans fidgeted and rustled papers on the extensions of the desk behind him.

  There really was nothing they could have done if Rae had been determined to go off on her own. Wulf held tightly to that thought rather than make any decisions concerning their employment.

  He tapped a contact on his phone and suffered through the rings.

  A click, and a woman’s gravelly voice chirped, “Theo Valencia’s phone! Wulf? Is that you?”

  “Yes, Lizbeth. It’s rather urgent. Is Theophile available?” Surely, a County Prosecuting Attorney would have some influence in a missing person case.

  “I’m walking back to his office now. What’s up?”

  Wulf’s voice held steady. “We can’t locate Rae. We were wondering if he could offer any alternatives.”

  “What? Okay, now I’m running to his office. Is she okay?”

  “We’re not sure.”

  “Shit. Theo!” she shouted, and there was more but Wulf couldn’
t make it out.

  A man’s voice said into the phone, “Rae is missing? Isn’t she pregnant?”

  “Yes,” Wulf said. “Evidently, she has been missing for three hours, and her phone has been shut off. We’re very concerned about her welfare. I was wondering if there was anything that could be done.”

  “Nothing official. Hang on a second. Noah!” Theo Valencia shouted, and again there was muffled discussion, but with more than one male voice. “We’re going to call some friends. Do you have any other information?”

  Wulf told him the license plate number and description of the car.

  Theo said, “That’ll help. I’ll call you when we have something.”

  Wulf tapped the phone to hang up and immediately clicked and called another contact. A County Attorney was one kind of help, but Wulf might need a mercenary.

  A man answered, speaking Alemannic, one of the Swiss dialects. “Durchlaucht, I am on the road to the airport. I will beat you to your plane and drink all your scotch.”

  Wulf drew a deep breath. “Dieter, there’s been a problem.”

  “On my way.”

  Demons Who Named Themselves Legion

  Rae squeezed her eyes shut, enduring the men screaming for the demon to leave her body. She lay on the stale carpeting on her side with her arms clenched over her belly, even though her stomach was still approximately as flat as it ever had been. Her waist felt thicker around.

  Her cousins held the blanket over her, pressing the edges down with their fists even though she hadn’t struggled for the last two hours.

  Another damn tear leaked out of her eye, and she pressed her cheek to the pillow rather than let anybody see.

  They would get tired of this stupidity soon, she believed.

  They would let her go soon, she insisted to herself.

  Minister Stoppard, her father, her uncles, and her cousins yelled Bible verses about Jesus casting the demons who named themselves Legion out of a possessed man and into a herd of swine.

  Really, they couldn’t see the political parable there?