Rx Missing (Decorah Security Series, Book #10): A Paranormal Romantic Suspense Novel (4 page)

“Yeah?”

“Where were you?”

He was tempted to say, “Getting laid by the lake.” Instead, he reported, “Getting the lay of the land.”

“You’re in?”

“Uh huh.”

“Keep me posted.”

“Let me do my work.”

“We’ve got a deadline here.”

“Then don’t interrupt me. I’ll call you when I have anything to report.”

He hung up, annoyed that the guy was breathing down his neck.

He walked toward the wall at the edge of the hotel property. It had several wooden grillwork sections where he could look into the manicured grounds. And a door. As he turned the knob, it opened, but when he tried to push through, some kind of invisible barrier stopped him. It seemed that he had to stay out here, which meant he’d have to persuade one of the people on the grounds to come visit.

“Come on,” he murmured. “I just need one of you to come over this way.”

oOo

With Lily beside him, Mack turned and strode into the building, crossed the lobby and headed for the office where he’d left Jay Douglas tied up on the couch. When he opened the door and stepped inside, he took a moment to evaluate what he was seeing. The two phone cords and the masking tape were lying on the couch. So was the guy’s clothing, but the man was missing.

Mack picked up the knit jacket of the running suit, then threw it down again.

When he heard a gurgling sound behind him, he pivoted.

Lily was staring at the couch as though it had turned into an open grave.

Mack gestured with his hand toward the phone cord, packing tape and pile of clothing on the sofa. “That’s all there is, folks.” He gave her a direct look. “What does it mean?”

“He could have taken off his clothes.”

“How did he get untied?”

She shrugged helplessly.

Mack felt a surge of frustration. “Maybe he’s Houdini. And maybe he’s nuts. If he’s on the loose, he could attack someone else. We’d better warn the others about
that, too.”

Lily opened her mouth and closed it again. She had gone pale, and he saw she was pressing her hands against her sides, trying to keep them from trembling. But it wasn’t working.

“Don’t go freaking out on me,” he said. “What do you know that you’re not telling me?”

“Nothing.”

She could be lying, but she looked so helpless that he reached for her. He’d held her in his arms after she’d been attacked, but he’d had to let her go to take care of the guy who was now missing.

As he gathered her close, she made a little moaning sound, and he felt chills rippling over her skin.

“What are you worried about?” he asked.

“Everything.”

He sensed that she was a woman with a core of strength, which made her obvious distress all the worse.

She seemed to be completely out of her element in this weird environment. Shaken to her bones.

Maybe he was, too. At least he was in a situation he didn’t understand. Like being tossed into a game arena where you didn’t know the rules—or even the goal. But the human contact with the woman in his arms was like a balm to his own churning emotions.

He couldn’t
do
anything about this confounding place or the strange events that kept cropping up. But he could
connect
with Lily Wardman.

He wanted to comfort her, to wipe away her fears. And outrun his own. Because in all his life, he had never encountered a situation where he didn’t have some measure of control. His father had owned an outfitter business, and he’d taught his sons to be self-sufficient.
There was always something you could do to help yourself, even if you were lost or injured in the middle of the woods.

But not here, it seemed, in this place where his memory stopped at an inconvenient point—then started again when he woke in the hotel room. Worse, he didn’t know what was around the corner. One moment the sky was blue. The next, it was changing colors as if a kid with a crayon set had scribbled outside the lines. What was next?

He didn’t want to speculate. Instead, he focused on the woman in his arms.

When she lifted her face to him, they stared at each other for a long moment full of tension. Not like the tension he’d felt in the bar. A more personal intensity.

Her hands gripped his shoulders. He stopped himself from running his hands up and down her back. There was something going on between them. Something that had flared to life almost from the moment they’d met.

Or was he making that up because she was the most appealing thing he had encountered here?

How did she feel about him?

In any other circumstance, he would have said she was attracted.

Here, he wondered if she only wanted the protection of a strong male who could fight off the terrors of a shifting environment.

He couldn’t read her, probably because she was hiding something, but suddenly he couldn’t cope with how much
he
felt.

The desperation of his own need was a shock. He wanted the woman in his arms. But he knew that physical attraction was only one component. He realized that he was also trying to prove that he was still the same man who had ejected from his plane.

And when was that?

Not yesterday. Days ago? Weeks?

He saw the look of regret in her eyes and wondered if her thoughts were similar to his.

“I’m sorry,” he said as he eased away from her. Sorry that he wasn’t pushing this further? Or that he’d let his imagination run wild when he’d embraced her?

He watched her take a step back and run a nervous hand down her side.

“It’s this place,” he said. “It’s got us off-balance. And the guy disappearing doesn’t help.”

“I know,” she agreed too quickly, then turned toward the door. “We’d better go back to the others.”

“Right,” he thought as he followed her out of the office. Safety in numbers. We won’t have to worry about how to behave when we’re not alone.

Lily kept her back to Mack as she struggled to regain her composure. She’d come close to kissing him. And that was absolutely the wrong thing to do.

He must be as confounded as she in a situation that was becoming stranger by the minute, yet he was dealing with it in a way that told her he had hidden resources she hadn’t guessed at.

It was tempting to walk in his shadow, but she had to make her own decisions. Too bad she kept feeling like she was standing on a hill of sand that was shifting out from under her.

She’d thought she understood what she was getting into. Every time she turned around, some new surprise popped up like a demon in the dark corner of a fun house. Only in the fun house, you knew someone had put the shivery stuff there to scare you.

She’d been confident she knew the secrets of the place. But it turned out that she and everybody else had wandered into a backroom that wasn’t on the blueprints.

Wishing she could talk to Phil Hamilton, the man who had sent her here, she dragged in a breath and let it out.

“Are you okay?” Mack asked.

Of course not. For so many reasons, but she gave him the only acceptable answer, “Yes.”

Still, she couldn’t face him yet. Her reaction to him was inappropriate, but not exactly a total surprise. She’d helped take care of him before they’d arrived here. Maybe he sensed that, because he’d asked if they knew each other.

She’d denied it, hating the lie yet knowing she couldn’t get trapped into explanations.

Mack Bradley shouldn’t be here at all, she’d told Hamilton, and he’d ignored her objections. Now she was even more convinced that this was a mistake.

Not just for Mack. For everyone. She didn’t have the same personal feelings for them, but she knew too much bizarre stuff was cropping up. Stuff nobody had warned her about.

Or was that the point? Was she just as vulnerable as everyone else? And to what, exactly?

“What are you thinking?” the man beside her asked.

She dredged up a plausible answer. “About the guy who disappeared.”

“Yeah, we’d better clue in the others.”

“Tell them the truth?”

“As we know it.”

Again, she gave the only response she could. “Okay.”

“You had something else in mind?” he asked, his voice harsh in her ears. Probably he was trying to put some distance between them, pretend he hadn’t pulled her close and held her in his arms, when they both remembered it vividly.

“No,” she answered, wishing she were somewhere else. That didn’t seem to be an option at the moment.

When they got back to the bar, she knew Roper must have described the cloud show in vivid detail because everyone was talking about it.

“Not like when the sun goes down or when a storm comes up?” Jenny Seville asked, looking toward her and Mack, probably hoping to get a different answer from someone besides Roper.

He scowled at her, his voice turning angry
.
“I
told you.
It happened too fast for any of that.”

“I just want to make sure,” she whispered.

Lily went to her and put an arm around her shoulder, feeling the young woman tremble. Wishing she had a better answer, she said, “Like the movie.”

“But why?”

“We don’t know.”

When Mack cleared his throat, everyone looked toward him, and Lily knew he’d become the leader of the group.

“What?” Tom Wright snapped. The way he’d first strolled into the bar, he’d projected calm composure. Now his confidence appeared to be shredding around the edges.

“We need to deal with something else that happened,” Mack said.

“Oh great,” George Roper muttered. “Now what?”

“When we first arrived, Lily was attacked in the lobby by a man,” Mack answered

As she expected, fear flickered around the room.

“What man?” Paula Rendell asked. “Where did he come from?”

“He said his name was Jay Douglas. I assume he was one of us.”

“Was he wearing a running suit like we woke up in—or something else?”

“Running suit,” Mack said.

“What else can you tell us?” Ben Todd asked.

“The only thing we know is that he was . . . out of control.”

“He wasn’t a hotel staffer?” Paula asked.

“No. He sounded like an American. Maybe from the Midwest.”

“And you don’t know why he attacked? I mean—you didn’t do anything to him?” she pressed.

“He seemed to be . . . disturbed,” Lily answered, wishing she could tell them that she was almost certain he wasn’t coming back. But then she’d have to explain why she thought so. “Mack subdued him, and tied him up,” she added. “Right before we met up with you, but when we went to check on him just now, he was gone.”

“Gone where?” Ben Todd, the lawyer, demanded.

Mack shrugged. “I hate to keep saying we don’t know. But it’s true. My best advice is to keep an eye out for him—just in case he pops up again.”

“Aren’t we okay if we stick together?” Chris Morgan, the skier, asked.

“We can’t just huddle in here,” Mack snapped. “We need to find out more about this place.”

“You mean go exploring, so we can get attacked?” Paula challenged.

“Or what if one of
us
disappears?” Jenny murmured.

“I don’t think that will happen,” Lily said.

“Why not?” Roper asked.

Mack tipped his head toward her. “Yeah, why not?”

Trapped, she shrugged. “Maybe I hope not,” she said lamely.

“We’ll keep using the buddy system,” Mack answered.

“Fat lot of good that will do if there’s another maniac—or the same one—lurking out there,” Chris Morgan muttered.

“Or if someone’s gonna disappear,” Todd snapped.

Lily kept herself from offering anymore reassurances on that point.

Mack continued, “Every woman gets paired with a man.”

“I’ll go with you,” Lily heard herself say. She’d been thinking that she and Mack shouldn’t stay together, but she’d said just the opposite.

You can’t get involved with Mack Bradley,
she told herself.
It will only end badly.
Her heart squeezed. She had to distance herself from him. But that seemed beyond her current ability. Not when she was in the worst trouble she’d ever been in in her life.

The others paired up. Paula was with Roper again, like they’d been when she and Mack first encountered them.

Tom Wright, the car salesman, insisted on going alone which meant that Ben Todd, Chris Morgan and Jenny Seville made up the final team.

“You have any suggestions for how to divide up the territory?” Mack asked Paula.

“I remember the pool and tennis courts are out back and to the left,” Paula said. “The spa’s in the other direction. There should be a map of the hotel property.”

“Where?”

She shrugged. “At the front desk?”

“What else do you remember?” Mack asked.

“The restaurants are mostly on this floor. And, of course, there are shops with expensive jewelry and saris you can take home.”

“If we ever get home,” Wright muttered.

“We’ll look on the bright side,” Chris Morgan answered.

They all chose a general direction.

Wright said he’d go upstairs and take the west wing. The Chris Morgan, Ben Todd and Jenny Seville team took the east wing.

Roper and Rendell would stay on the ground floor in the main part of the hotel.

“We’ll meet back here in half an hour,” Mack said, looking at his watch. “What time do you all have?”

Conveniently, everyone had a watch, and they were all set to the same time, which was four fifteen. Presumably in the afternoon, judging from the light.

When the others had departed, Lily scuffed her foot against the marble floor. “We could check out the guest rooms on the next floor.”

Mack waited a beat before answering. “I don’t think so.”

She slid him a sidewise glance. He looked restless and hemmed in.

Without waiting for her to comment, he walked to the double glass doors, then along the covered passage to the lawn, where he stared at the manicured hotel grounds.

She followed his gaze. Everything seemed quiet and peaceful, but she sensed dark currents swirling just below the surface of what was obvious.

When he heard her follow, he asked, “What do you think? Can we get out of here?”

“I don’t know.”

“You sure you don’t have inside information?” he asked with an edge in his voice.

“Why do you think so?”

“Your reactions.”

“If you’re saying I’m jumpy, everybody’s jumpy.”

He turned to look at her. “But you keep acting like you know what to expect. Then you’re surprised when events don’t follow the script.”

Startled by his perception, she wanted to tell him there wasn’t any script. Instead she settled for, “Am I?”

“Yeah.”

She shrugged but couldn’t meet his eyes. For a split second she wanted to ask him what to do about the strange things that kept cropping up, even when she knew that asking was out of the question. Plus, what did he know, anyway?

He let several seconds of silence pass before demanding, “Tell me some more about yourself.”

“There’s not much to tell,” she said.

“Everybody has a story. Where did you grow up? Where did you go to school?”

“In the DC area. Bethesda.”

“Your family was well off?”

“Yes. My dad’s a lawyer.”

“But you came to Baltimore.”

“It’s not that far away. I went to school there—Hopkins.”

“They have a nursing school?”

“Yes.”

“What do you do for fun when you’re not working?”

She thought about that for a moment. What was she going to tell him—that she should have gotten married and had children the way her parents wanted, but she’d been too driven to make up for her families’ sin? She settled for, “I haven’t had much free time lately.”

“Why not?”

“We’re short staffed. I volunteered for double shifts.”

“Did you get along with your family?”

She hesitated. “It wasn’t always perfect.”

“What was wrong?”

“My little sister got killed,” she said, skirting around the real story.

“I’m sorry.”

“Auto accident. What about you?” she asked, moving the subject away from herself. “You said you were from western Maryland. What did your parents do?”

“My mom was a housewife. Dad had an outfitter business. My brother took it over after Dad died. I graduated from the Naval Academy and went to flight school.”

She already knew his background, but she was hungry to hear about his life—in his own words.

“You got along with your parents?”

“Yes. Mom had a business baking cakes and other stuff for people. Dad was pretty strict, but it was good for us.”

“What happened to them? I mean you keep talking about them in past tense.”

“They were on vacation in Paris and got caught in a terrorist attack.”

She winced. “I’m so sorry.”

“We had a good family life. It was over too soon.”

When he didn’t volunteer more, she said, “And you never married?”

His face hardened. “I was, but it didn’t work out. I was away too much of the time.”

“Sorry.”

He lifted one shoulder. “Living on an aircraft carrier suits me. I work out in the gym. Read. Watch the movies they fly in. Go out on missions. The internet keeps me in touch with the world.”

It sounded like an empty life, but maybe not more empty than hers. Was that part of what made him attractive to her? Two lonely, scared people reaching out to each other.

Maybe part. But from the moment she’d set eyes on him, she’d felt something for him.

When he started across the lawn toward the stucco wall that marked the boundary of the hotel lawn, her stomach clenched.

“Come back.”

“I want to see what’s in the woods.”

Her hand shot out and grabbed his arm. “No!”

“Why does that idea frighten you?”

“It’s outside the hotel grounds.”

“So what?”

“You heard what Paula said.”

“I don’t trust
her
either.”

“You’re saying you don’t trust
me?”

He turned to look at her. “I want to. Should I?”

She longed to say, “Yes.” She longed to tell him that she had his best interests at heart, but she couldn’t get the word past her suddenly parched lips. When she’d taken on this part of the assignment, she’d been excited about a new adventure, but she hadn’t been thinking about these people as individuals. Talking to them had changed her perception.