12
ZACH SWORE AND HEADED FOR THE STAIRS WITH ground-eating strides. What the hell was the matter with him? He was a trained strategist, for God’s sake, but when his sister was in the clutches of a kidnapper and he should be manning, or at the very least somewhere in the vicinity of a telephone, what was he doing? Making out with little Lily Morrisette, that’s what! It made him furious, not only with himself and the kidnapper, but with her, too, for being the constant temptation that she was.
And yet…
Lily wasn’t the one who’d initiated that red-hot necking session. She wasn’t the one who’d said “I want to kiss you,” and then picked him up and dry humped him against the nearest wall. This one’s all on you, cowboy.
Big mistake. Big, big mistake. Yet even so, he found he couldn’t completely regret having gotten his mitts on something as purely delicious as she was—no matter how irresponsible. Reaching the bottom of the stairs, he hesitated, and hearing her clattering down the steps behind him, twisted around.
She caught up in that instant, arriving in his wake slightly out of breath—no doubt from racing after him in those silly-ass shoes. She faltered to a stop one step above him, which put them on a more equitable level than usual, and staring at him, she was all hot pink cheeks, mussed-up hair, and guilty eyes.
He grasped her chin. “You okay?” he demanded, and couldn’t quite prevent his thumb from making a brief pass over her bottom lip. It was soft and damp.
She nodded.
“Good.” Turning her loose, he then did what years in the military had taught him to do: He compartmentalized, putting her firmly out of his mind as he walked into the parlor.
Mrs. Beaumont was there, once again in hysterics. He gritted his teeth, not wanting the kidnappers to hear her panic. He opened his mouth to shut her up, then snapped his teeth closed when he looked at the phone and saw that wouldn’t present a particular problem today.
The receiver was firmly on the hook.
He about-faced smartly to look at her. “What the hell is this?”
“I tried to get him to hold on until you got here,” she cried. “I did!”
“That’s right, she did,” Cassidy said, strolling into the room behind Lily. “She told him she was the maid, of all things.” She shook her head as if lowering one’s standards to such a degree was simply beyond her comprehension, then shrugged and stepped in close to Zach. “She also sent me after you. And let me tell you”—reaching out, she trailed a fingernail from his collarbone to his chest—“I haven’t run that fast since…well, I’ve never run that fast.” She lightly traced a downward path over the ridges of his abdomen.
He snatched her hand before it reached his belt and pressed it back against her own midsection. “Lady, don’t waste my time.”
Ignoring the sudden anger that replaced her seductive expression, he turned his attention back to Mrs. Beaumont. He had some anger of his own to deal with, but he sucked it in. This wasn’t the time. In truth, were he to do a quick soul search, he had the unsettling thought he might discover that his own anger had been misplaced just a little too often recently.
He swallowed a curse, then a sigh, and admitted to himself that he hadn’t handled this situation very well. He’d been commanding soldiers for so long he’d sort of forgotten that a middle-aged woman wasn’t a recruit to be slapped into shape. Standing in front of him was a distraught mother, and he should never have taken her disregard of his sister’s danger personally. He was all shook up at suddenly finding himself on the relative-of-the-victim end of the spectrum, and at least he had some experience with the sort of tactics kidnappers used. He could only imagine how terrified they’d made her. So he bit back the harsh words on the tip of his tongue and asked gently, “You attempted to convince him you were the maid?”
“I did. I really tried, Zach, but he said ‘don’t give me that, you old bitch,’ and called me other horrid names, and he kept hammering at me and hammering at me to admit who I was. He told me over and over again what he’d do to David if I didn’t confess who I was and start talking to him—if I didn’t do exactly as he said. And I got so rattled, I didn’t know if I was coming or going.”
Her face was deathly white, her breathing too rapid and shallow, and Zach stepped forward and rubbed his hands up and down her arms. “Take slow, deep breaths, Mrs. B.,” he said. “I want you to listen to me. You gave it your best, and that’s all anyone can ask of you. Remember what I told you about terror tactics. The kidnapper wants you rattled, so let’s work on not letting him win. We can beat him if you don’t fall apart on me.”
She stared up at him pleadingly, and he said firmly, “We are going to get David and Glynnis back—you can take that to the bank. That’s right,” he commended as she finally drew in a breath that was deep enough to be steadying and then slowly exhaled it. “Breathe. Now another.” Once her respiration slowed and a little color returned to her cheeks, he held her at arm’s length. “Tell me as concisely as you can everything that was said. You can leave off the parts you’ve already told me,” he added hastily when her breathing promptly sped up and grew choppy again. “For instance, are we definitely dealing with a man?”
“Yes, of cour—” She gave him a startled look. “That is—I just assumed he was. But he never actually spoke above a whisper.”
“So it’s not impossible it was a woman?”
“No, but—” She cut herself off, waving her hand as if to push her objection aside. “Never mind. You’ll think I’m silly.”
“Tell me anyhow.”
“Well…it’s just that I got the feeling it was a man.” Color touched her cheeks. “I told you it was silly.”
“Not necessarily. I’m a soldier, ma’am; I never discount the gut. Quite often a hunch, or woman’s intuition, or whatever you want to call it, is actually an observation that you can’t put an exact name to, but which the subconscious has noted all the same. So, for now, we’ll go with your feeling and assume our kidnapper’s a man. Did he make any demands?”
Lily’s scent curled around his senses a nanosecond before her manicured hand came into view with a cup of coffee that she offered to the older woman. “Here, Mrs. B.,” she said. “I poured this from the thermal pot in the dining room. It’s hot and it’s bracing. Take a sip—the caffeine will do you good.”
“Thank you.” Mrs. Beaumont wrapped her hands around the eggshell-thin china cup. Although she didn’t immediately drink the coffee, she seemed to take comfort from the warmth that emanated from its container. She stared down into it as if mesmerized for a moment, then looked back up at Zach. “He said he wants a million dollars, and he wants it in bills of small denomination. Nothing larger than a fifty.”
“Do you have that kind of money?” If she didn’t, he could sell off enough of the Taylor holdings so that, between them, they could come up with it.
She nodded. “Yes. But it will probably take a few days to liquidate part of the business in order to put that much together. Christopher and Richard would know more about that aspect of it than I do.”
“Did you tell the kidnapper that it would take a few days?”
“Yes.”
“And what was his response?” No doubt a recitation of all the painful things he’d do to her son if she didn’t produce it sooner. The kidnapper’s desire would be to keep her properly alarmed—that was standard operating procedure for these jokers. Zach could swear sometimes that there must be a Kidnapping 101 textbook out there advising thugs to always keep the families of their victims off balance—even if nine times out of ten they fully intended to allow them the time necessary to raise the money.
“He told me we have five days to get it together.”
“He told you—” Cutting himself off to keep his incredulity from showing, he said smoothly, “That’s good news. Excellent, really.”
So why did it give him an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach?
Probably because you’re a suspicious sonuvabitch by nat
ure, pal. But still…five days? He squared his shoulders and tried to tell himself that just because this differed from the way these scenarios generally played out, it didn’t make this one dubious.
But when his gut told him something was wrong, he went with it. And he sure as hell didn’t screw around trying to convince himself it was because he couldn’t do much until the kidnapper called again.
He paced a few steps away, then turned back to look at her. “Are Richard and Christopher still around?”
“Yes, I’m sure they are.”
“I need them down here.”
She looked almost pathetically grateful to have something to do and promptly walked over to the telephone. Picking up the receiver, she ran a fingertip down a row of buttons and pressed one.
Watching her, Zach realized for the first time that it was the type of system one usually saw in offices. Very efficient for a mansion this size. Speaking urgently into the phone for a second, she informed the person on the other end that the kidnapper had called, then disconnected, punched another button, and spoke urgently once again. A moment later, she replaced the receiver and nodded to him.
“They’ll be down in a minute.”
Lily brought him a cup of coffee while they waited, and he carried it over to the French doors, staring out into the yard as he sipped it. He wasn’t sure when it had begun to rain, but a fine, steady drizzle turned the world outside the windows a misty gray. It soaked the terrace furniture and formed a murky curtain that obscured the bluff and the straits beyond.
Richard arrived breathless a minute later, and a moment after that Christopher barreled through the door with Jessica in tow. Since Maureen had only told them the bare bones on the phone, Zach filled them in on the details of what had transpired. Richard immediately left to gather the ledgers from the office, and Christopher ran back upstairs for his laptop computer. As soon as both men returned, they sat down to figure out which aspects of the family business could be liquidated and how long it would take to do so.
Zach watched them for a while, then paced the perimeters of the room, covertly studying the dynamics of the Beaumont family.
Both men were obviously well trained and business-minded, but Christopher seemed to have a more concrete idea of which assets were expendable, and without discussion he assumed the dominant role. Richard didn’t appear to have any problem with the pecking order, but Zach noted it all the same.
Down by the fireplace at the other end of the room, Cassidy sat in an overstuffed chair and flipped through the pages of a magazine, her legs crossed and one foot tapping the air impatiently. Jessica fussed over her aunt on an adjacent couch, keeping the older woman anchored with whatever she was saying to her in her soft voice.
And then there was Lily. She wasn’t a part of the family dynamics, of course, but of them all, she was the one his eyes were drawn to most often.
She bustled around the room, jewelry jingling as she saw to it that everyone had coffee. Now that he no longer viewed her through the narrow end of his own misconceptions, he was beginning to notice things he’d missed before. He saw, for instance, that for all that she looked like some rich man’s trophy squeeze, she had a down-to-earth basic kindness about her.
When she topped off Mrs. Beaumont’s cup, she reached out and patted the older woman’s shoulder. She squeezed Jessica’s hand as she spoke quietly to both women. Yet the men, he noted as he watched her go over to refill Christopher’s and Richard’s cups, she didn’t touch at all. She talked to them easily, but kept her hands strictly to herself.
As early as this morning he would have expected it to be just the opposite. Then again, earlier this morning he also probably would have expected her to sit around like Cassidy, exhibiting an air of entitlement as she waited for someone else to attend to her needs. Instead, Lily was the one waiting on everyone, and it obviously didn’t make her feel the least bit diminished to do so.
Discovering yet more evidence of just how far off base he’d been with her was about as welcome as a case of the clap. He ground the heels of his hands into his eyes, then dropped his hands to his sides and watched as she brushed a spill of sugar off a table into her cupped palm and walked over to toss it into the fireplace. He wasn’t a man who ordinarily jumped to hasty, ill-thought-out conclusions. Nor was he accustomed to being in the wrong.
He hated that lately he’d been both.
“Okay, that seems to be it,” Christopher said, and Zach turned to him in relief. He’d think of a way to apologize later. Hell, maybe he should just kiss her again; that had worked pretty slick the last time he’d felt the need to admit he was wrong.
Are you out of your mind? He managed not to pound his head against the nearest wall, but just barely. Jesus, Taylor. You keep your damn distance from that dame before she completely screws up your head. Besides, wouldn’t this apology simply be more of the same old, same old anyway? He was getting confused. Was he in the wrong again or in the wrong still?
His headache was starting to come back—he couldn’t think about this any more. Right here, right now—thank you, Jesus—he had a situation that needed his attention, and it was something with which he actually had some experience. Walking over to where the two men were tossing their pencils onto the table and pushing their chairs back, he demanded, “You’ve projected a timetable for getting the money together?”
“Yes.” Christopher plowed his hands through his expensively barbered hair and stretched his elbows toward the ceiling as he dug all ten fingers into the muscles at the base of his skull. “If I get started right away, we ought to be able to liquidate everything we need in four days. Five at the outside.”
Zach froze. Well, well. What an amazing coincidence. That was the exact amount of time the kidnapper had generously allowed them to raise the ransom money.
Funny thing, though. Zach had never been the type of man who believed in coincidences.
And suddenly this reeked to him of an inside job.
Miguel dashed back to his car through the rain. He let himself in and turned on the engine, immediately cranking the heater to high. Then, shivering, he shook out his hands like a wet cat, flicking drops of water all over the dash. Dios, it was cold! More than anything—more than the mellifluous language of his country, more than its foods so full of flavor and spice—he missed the bone-melting heat of Colombia. He was ready to go home.
He didn’t intend to go back, though, with his tail tucked between his legs. When he returned to his village, he’d do so walking tall—the people of Bisinlejo would not see a man who allowed great wrongs to go unpunished. No indeed, what they would see was a man who avenged his honor.
But first the blonde puta had to come out of the big house.
Leaning over the steering wheel, he wiped a circle in the windshield with his sleeve to clear the fogged glass, and peered out. But the haze wasn’t all on the inside of the car. The weather was socked in.
He’d never seen anything like it. In Bisinlejo when it rained, it came down in violent torrents that pelted the ground and pummeled the surrounding foliage, but just as quickly stopped. One could always count on the sun to come out again and evaporate the moisture until nothing remained but vagrant wisps of steam rising from the ground. This rain, though—it was a thick, almost mistlike drizzle that quickly soaked everything in its path. It seemed to find its way into every crack and crevice, no matter how well you thought you defended against it, and it sank to the bone, chilling and stiffening the joints.
A short while ago he’d pulled out a package of crackers left over from one of the petrol stops he’d made on the way here and had eaten them for breakfast. Although they’d been well wrapped, they were completely limp and soggy.
Still, he could live with that. But he was dressed all wrong, he was running out of food, and what provisions he did have were in pitiful condition. Worse, no one in the big house had ventured out of doors all morning long, and even if the master sergeant’s woman should come outside, Miguel’s
teeth were chattering so loudly, she’d probably hear him a kilometer away and run for the hills!
With sudden decision, he reached for the shift lever, put the car in gear, and released the emergency brake. Leaning forward to peer cautiously in all directions, he inched the car out of its hiding place and started down the narrow country road. Since he didn’t have any idea what Taylor’s plans might be or how long this might take, he could very well be stuck here for a good long while yet.
But regardless whether that turned out to be the case or he accomplished his mission tomorrow, it was definitely time to find the nearest town and properly outfit himself.
13
ALONE IN THE KITCHEN, LILY CHOPPED, DICED, AND minced everything that wasn’t nailed down. Restlessness burned through her veins and along her skin like a fast-spreading rash. Try as she might, she couldn’t seem to get the session with Zach in the upstairs hallway out of her mind.
Whoever would have guessed that a guy so hard-edged aggressive could kiss with such devastating subtleness and restraint? At least at first he had. But then he’d really got cooking, and…
Heat suffused her. She stared blindly across the kitchen as she relived those too few moments, her knife suspended over the potatoes she was currently reducing to uniform cubes. Again she experienced the hunger with which he’d kissed her, recalled the hard length of him wedged solidly between her thighs, remembered the friction and heat she’d felt as he’d rocked and ground against her, generally driving her insane.
The knife slipped from her fingers with a clatter. Startled, she jerked back to reality, and reached for a napkin to blot the perspiration that dotted her forehead, her cleavage, her upper lip. What was it about that man?
A different president had been in office the last time she’d had sex, and she’d never been the sort of woman to tumble into bed with a guy simply because she liked the cut of his jeans. Even if he was a great kisser.
So she was safe. It was a case of momentary lust, that was all. Refuse to give into it, and it would pass.
Getting Lucky Page 14
