Under Wraps (13 page)

“Marnie,” he shouted, not seeing her right away. He called again, louder, as he burst into the bathroom.

There, cold wind blew across the empty claw-foot tub. An open window had curtains whipping in the breeze as snow gathered and melted in a pool on the tile floor.

She was gone.

“B
E VERY, VERY QUIET
.”

Alec Mason's voice whispered against Marnie's hair as he hauled her across the side lawn of the inn through the blinding snow. The pistol barrel wedged under her jaw and the duct tape strapped across her mouth were far more persuasive than his lowly growled words, however.

She hadn't found one chance to tip off Jake about Alec's return. She'd been so worried about Lianna after the scream that she'd sealed her ear to the exterior door to hear what went on in the room down the hall; Marnie had never heard her ex-boyfriend steal in through the window and right into the suite. God, she hated that she'd let him take her so easily after all the warnings Jake had issued about being vigilant. To think she'd double-locked the door—but who would ever expect someone to climb in a third-story window?

Now, after wrestling her down the narrow fire escape and out into the bitter cold, Alec led her through knee-high snow to the woods. Her slippers had rubber soles,
but didn't begin to keep the chill at bay. She shivered in a pink sleep shirt and pajama pants. Behind them, she thought she heard Jake and Rico at the windows, but that might have been wishful thinking. Her heart beat so loudly in her ears she could hear little else.

“Here we go.” Alec spoke softly as they arrived at his transportation, his voice puffing clouds in the air. His wiry frame was surprisingly strong, his expensive cologne pungent in her nose. How could she have ever thought for one moment this man was date material?

She stumbled, her slippers not gaining much traction in the snow, and the gun barrel nudged scarily deep. As he yanked her to her feet, she saw where they were headed.

There in the woods, behind a potting shed, sat the horse-drawn sleigh from the Marquis. She recognized the elaborately scrolled tack and the stacks of furs. Except the driver wasn't an inn employee with a sprig of holly in his top hat. It was one of the guys who'd grabbed her and forced her into the tiny hidden room back at the resort. Alec wasn't some lone bad guy. He had backup. An operation.

Marnie had the swelling sense that she was in far deeper than she'd ever imagined. With his knack for adopting aliases, Alec had probably committed more crimes than they'd begun to ferret out.

“Up we go.” Alec continued to give her directions as if he were her date instead of her abductor. Still, his ironclad hold on her never wavered while he handed her up into the sleigh.

As soon as he had her inside, lying sideways on the
pile of furs and blankets, he kicked the back of the driver's seat. Fur tickled her nose, but at least the heavy weight of the blankets cut the wind. The creep with the reins in his hand urged the horses forward. As they moved into the forest, they made very little noise, especially with the fresh snow muffling all sound, and there were no lights on the conveyance. Maybe a horse-drawn sleigh wasn't such a crazy choice for a getaway vehicle in a blizzard.

How would Jake ever follow her?

Alec removed the gun from under her chin, but he looped a rope of some kind around her leg, tying her securely to the sleigh with a painful cinch of the cord. Where was he taking her?

New fear set in faster than the cold. What could he possibly gain by hurting her? Then again, what else could he want from a woman he'd set up to take the blame for a felony? His plan for her to be in jail had failed, so maybe he wanted to ensure she never implicated him.

For once, she needed to think like Jake and see all the possible ways this could end badly. Maybe that would help save her somehow.

Beside her, Alec moved up into the bench seat while keeping an eye on her on the floor. Snowflakes gathered on her face, but he covered the rest of her with the excess furs. Her foot remained tied to the sleigh, and her toes were numb through her slippers from the walk through the snow. As her body warmed, her skin burned with the ache of nearly frostbitten skin returning to life.

With the gun resting on his knee, Alec's guard was
a bit more relaxed now that they'd put some distance between them and the inn. Her captor pulled out a cell phone and started tapping keys, the electronic glow illuminating his unshaven face. And as she lay there staring up at this man who'd deceived her in more ways than she could count, she tried to imagine what Jake would suggest she do in this situation.

Buy time.

The answer was there so quickly and with such certainty, she would swear she caught the message on a wave of ESP direct from the source. Jake would come for her—she knew that. But she needed to make sure she remained in one piece long enough for him to catch up.

“Mmpf.” She braved a small noise behind the duct tape now that his firearm wasn't jammed against an artery.

Alec looked down at her almost as if he'd forgotten she was there, his watery blue eyes visible until he snapped his cell phone shut and cast them in total darkness again.

“Mmpf!” she tried again, pointing to the duct tape and hoping she wasn't pissing him off by reminding him of her existence. But maybe if she could talk to him, she could find out his plans and delay him somehow.

“The lady wishes to speak,” he mused, cocking his head sideways so he could look at her more directly in her awkward position on the floor. “I hope if I allow you the freedom of speech you will be kind. You look like a Christmas angel there, wrapped in your furs with that
lovely skin. And I hate to lose that image of you with ugly words.”

The odd comment made her wonder if Alec might be losing some of his grip on reality. He'd always been charming, but his attempt at gallantry now seemed downright ludicrous.

He must have decided to risk the outburst as he gave a brief nod, indicating she was free to speak.

Gently, she pried up the edges of the tape with one hand, carefully removing the restraint.

“Thank you.” Her skin burned from the sticky glue and she didn't feel one bit grateful, but she tried to stay calm so as not to rile him. “Alec, I'm frightened. Where are you taking me?”

She hoped to appeal to his human nature, assuming he still had one underneath his mask of clean-cut, all-American good-guy looks. With his J. Crew clothes and trimmed dark blond hair, he appeared boy-next-door trustworthy when everything about him was a lie.

“We're making a brief stop at the Marquis to change vehicles, then we're lifting off at dawn by plane.” He smiled as he spoke, a lock of dark blond hair slipping loose from the navy-blue wool cap on his head. “I know how you like to know your travel particulars. I've missed you, Marnie.”

The handgun to her throat was a funny way of showing it. But she tried to keep the conversation more focused on relevant information and less focused on his personal delusions.

She closed her eyes and conjured up a vision of Jake's face. He would find her before Alec did anything crazy.
She trusted in that and as far as she was concerned, that wasn't optimistic thinking. That was a logical fact based on everything she knew about Jake Brennan. He'd promised to keep her safe and he would do anything and everything in his power to do so.

She was lucky that he was so committed to his work. Lucky that he didn't just clear her off his suspect list, but also make sure she didn't get framed for someone else's bad deeds. She loved that he put so much of himself and his honorable nature into his work. Hell, she just flat out loved him.

She loved him.

That knowledge was there as sure as her faith in him and the realization of that love gave her the courage to maintain her cool with a desperate criminal.

“You've missed me?” She tried to sound only slightly surprised and not at all accusatory. Finding the right tone, in fact, required one hell of an acting job. “But you broke up with me.”

On Facebook, no less. But Christmas angels didn't remind crazy men of things like that when their lives were on the line.

She twisted away from a bough full of snow that dropped suddenly into the sleigh and noticed a little give in the rope around her ankle. Under the cover of her fur blanket, she hitched at the rope with her other foot.

“I needed to distract attention from me for a while until I could hide the movement of the money.” He shook his head while he brushed some of the fallen snow from his lap. “It was like a shell game trying to hopscotch the money from one account to the next, creating diversions
and dead ends all the time. You know I'm not as organized as you, so it wasn't easy to keep track of it all in my head.”

That was why normal people took jobs to make money instead of stealing it! But she stifled that thought, too, and strained for any sign of other sounds in the night besides the dull clop of hooves through the soft snow and the swish of the sleigh runners.

Would Jake return to the Marquis? Or would he try to follow their path through the woods?

She wished she could communicate with him now, to warn him that Alec seemed to have grown a little mad and that a calm, quiet approach might work better so as not to startle him into violence. The thought of anything happening to Jake sent a dark, panicky chill through her, jabbing at a heart still tender from the newfound realization of how much he meant to her. How much she'd lose by never seeing his face again, never feeling his strong, muscled arms around her.

“How did you find me tonight?” She couldn't understand how he came to be lurking around the All Tucked Inn so soon after she'd sent her email. He had to have another way of knowing her movements besides tracking her computer.

“Luckily, the lady lawyer is even more dutiful about reporting in to friends and family than you are. She sent a text message from her phone a couple of hours ago, letting her sister know she was at the charming All Tucked Inn. As luck would have it, I'd been staying there myself this week, keeping an eye on things at the Marquis until a couple of more deals came through for
me, so I was very familiar with the layout of the place.” He winked at her as he pulled his wool hat down more securely over his ears. “That part worked out so well, you couldn't have planned it better yourself.”

Marnie ignored his self-congratulations to focus on what else he'd said. A couple of deals? How many people had he been swindling? She tried not to let her distaste show as she chose her words carefully.

“I'm worried there are a lot of people looking for you,” she confided, keeping her voice low so the driver didn't hear her. She couldn't be certain how involved he was in Alec's plans, but she knew from experience that he didn't much care if he hurt her. “You might attract less attention if you put away the gun once we arrive at the hotel.”

“Innocent Marnie.” Alec tucked the weapon into a holster beneath his wool pea coat. “It's precisely
because
so many people are looking for me that I need to have the piece within easy reach. Your P.I. friend has run me ragged the past two months trying to cover my tracks, but he's not going to win in the end. One bullet keeps him quiet forever.”

He patted his coat where the gun rested beneath, and a thick dread rose like bile in her throat. Alec had every intention of killing Jake. A vision of Jake lying cold and lifeless in the snow pierced her heart and chilled her blood in a way no snowstorm could.

The sleigh began to slow as the driver pulled back on the reins.

“Looks like we're nearing our destination.” Alec reached down to replace the duct tape on her mouth and
haul her up to the seat beside him as the sleigh halted in the woods near the Marquis. The driver jumped to the ground and disappeared into the dark. “You're coming with me until I'm safely out of the country. Your new boyfriend isn't the only one looking for me now.”

Marnie's heart dropped at the realization that he'd only taken her to be a hostage.

She might never see Jake again.

Click.

The unmistakable hitch of a weapon being cocked for fire sounded inches behind them.

“I'm the only guy looking for you that counts.”

Jake. He stood inches behind the sleigh, his 9 mm pointed at the back of Alec's head. She had no idea where he came from as he'd arrived in total silence, but somehow he was there.

Marnie wanted to warn Jake that Alec had a gun and that there was another guy with him, but Alec held her arms so she couldn't remove the duct tape.

“Let her go,” Jake warned. “I've got backup and we've already got your driver and his friend. It's all over.”

In the distance, Marnie heard the wail of a siren. Headlights entered the resort parking lot nearby, ringing the sleigh with light.

Thank God. Thank you, Jake.

She sat very still until she felt Alec make a sudden move. Her captor released her to go for his gun, but Jake was in the sleigh and on him in a nanosecond. Three slugs from Jake's fist and he was out cold, slumped and bleeding on the furs.

All at once, the woods were filled with light and
sound and people. Rico and his brother arrived. The brother—Raul—had a pair of handcuffs and he took care of dragging Alec out of the sleigh. His ease with the job made her guess he was probably one of the people who had been hunting for Alec.

“Hold still.” Jake's arm went around her as he took the seat beside her, his other hand gently peeling the tape away from her mouth. “Are you okay? Did he hurt you?”

“I'm okay.” She swallowed hard, still trying to take in what had happened. She wanted to find out how he knew where to find her, how he'd arrived at the Marquis before them. But right now she was just so grateful to see him safe that she flung her arms around his neck and buried her head in his shoulder. “You found me.”

 

T
WO HOURS LATER
, Marnie still looked spooked.

Jake watched her as the local detective finished taking her statement in the lobby of the Marquis at dawn. He'd talked to a half-dozen different departments and task forces that had been investigating crimes linked to Alec Mason. Or at least, it seemed like there had been that many. The cop work was a blur because he hadn't given a damn about closing out an investigation. His one concern was getting Marnie out of here and back home safely as soon as possible.