Unmasked (12 page)

“I’m fine,” she said.

He rolled away from her lap and sat up quickly, then clenched his jaw and pressed the heel of his hand against his head.

“Oh, be careful,” Charlotte said. “They hit you awfully hard.”

Jackson breathed slowly through his nose for a while before he shifted to his knees. “I tried to stop them, but I didn’t do much good.”

“Don’t blame yourself, Jackson. It’s my fault. I should have been more careful, but I was worried about Luc and wasn’t paying attention to my surroundings. The Corbins came out of nowhere.”

“They were counting on Luc to be a distraction.”

“Is he…?”

“Luc’s a fighter. The last I saw of him, he was still hanging on.” He patted his pockets. “Damn, they took the phone.”

“You had a phone?”

“I found yours in the lobby.” He looked around. “Where are we?”

“I don’t know. After they knocked you out, they blindfolded me and—” Her breath hitched as she remembered the terror of that ride. “I couldn’t see you. I didn’t know how
badly you were hurt until they dumped us in here. Are you sure you’re okay?”

He ran his fingers along the back of his head, then scrutinized them. “No blood, not much swelling. I’ve probably got a mild concussion, that’s all. I’ll have a headache for a while, but it won’t need treatment.” He peeled off his jacket and reached out to swing it around her shoulders.

She started to shrug it off. “No, Jackson, you need this.”

“You’re shivering.”

“I’m all right.”

“Now’s not the time to be stubborn, Charlotte,” he said. “Keep the jacket. I can hear your teeth chattering.”

She slid her arms into the sleeves and his warmth enveloped her instantly. So did his scent, chasing away the dank smell of the room. She rolled the cuffs back above her wrists, remembering that she’d worn Jackson’s shirt the night before. It seemed impossibly long ago now.

“Better?”

She swallowed against another wave of tears. “Everything’s such a mess. How did we end up like this?”

He regarded her in silence, as if he wasn’t sure whether she was referring to what was happening to them or what was happening between them.

He chose the less personal topic. “Luc overheard the Corbins plan to kidnap you. They obviously intend to hold you until Anne signs the hotel over to them.”

“She won’t do that.”

“She’ll do it in a heartbeat.”

Charlotte overlapped the front edges of Jackson’s jacket and crossed her arms over the extra folds of denim. Paper
crackled in the breast pocket. Dimly she remembered that Marie had slipped the package with her gris-gris in there. God, that seemed impossibly long ago, too. “Mama can’t give up,” she murmured. “It’s more than just a pile of old bricks to her. She knows how important—”

“Anne loves you. She would never choose the hotel over you.”

Somehow the topic was turning personal anyway. Charlotte inhaled shakily and pressed her back against the wall. “I’m sorry, Jackson.”

“I’m sorry, too.” He braced his knuckles on the floor and shoved himself upright. He swayed for an instant, bumping into the wall with his shoulder, until he stretched out his arm to steady himself. He walked to the door and tried the latch. It didn’t move. “I should have been thinking of you, but I was too wrapped up in my job.”

“I didn’t mean I’m sorry about this situation,” she said, waving her hand at the room. “Although I am. But I was talking about what happened…before.”

He studied the door for a while, then returned to stand in front of her. He squatted and rested his forearms on his thighs. “So was I, Charlotte.”

The light from the bare bulb overhead was harsh. It accentuated the bruises on Jackson’s face and the taut lines beside his mouth. It also made the sadness in his eyes impossible to miss.

She wiped her cheeks, not surprised to find them wet. “I never cry, you know. I don’t lose my temper or raise my voice either. But since you came home, I can’t seem to stop doing all three.”

“The hotel was your home, not mine,” he said. “I was always a visitor.”

They were picking up the argument where they’d left off, except the passion was gone. That made it even sadder. Charlotte dropped her head back against the wall. “We’ve been abducted and locked into a windowless closet by a pair of criminals who are bent on stealing my family’s legacy. Doesn’t it strike you as strange that we’re still pulling apart our past?”

“Maybe. But now that we’ve opened the wound, we might as well let it drain.”

“Always the doctor.”

“Exactly. I’ll always be a doctor. It’s who I am.”

“I know. I’ve seen you in action. It’s what you were meant to do.”

His jaw tightened as he regarded his hands. The harsh light made the scar on the right one appear darker and longer than usual. “That’s true now, but it started out as a way to prove myself. That’s why I went into medicine instead of taking over my father’s appliance business or joining you at the hotel. I needed to feel I was worth something.”

“Jackson—”

“You said earlier that you wanted me to be honest. You deserve to hear all of it.”

She hugged his jacket more tightly as she looked around their prison. Maybe it wasn’t so strange that they were continuing the discussion. Jackson would have realized as well as she did that if they didn’t finish this now, they might not get another chance.

“I saw medicine as a means to give value to my life,” he said. “It was one way to put my meddling nature to good use. But
that wasn’t the main reason I was so eager to accept that scholarship. I saw it as an opportunity to get out of New Orleans.”

“What?”

“You had a big family and deep roots, along with money and a snazzy hotel. I was jealous of it all. I felt I couldn’t compete. I knew that I’d never be happy here. Even as we were making all those plans when we were in high school I realized they weren’t for me. Once I left, I never intended to come back.”

Her throat closed. He really
had
meant to leave her. Hearing him admit it stirred all the old pain.

“My motives weren’t noble,” he continued, “they were selfish. I thought if I left, I could force you to give up your life here and choose me.” He briefly touched his index finger to her swollen lip. “I was wrong to try to force you. I’m sorry, Charlotte.”

She nodded.

He withdrew his hand, backed up and sat on the floor across from her. “That’s the real reason working overseas first appealed to me,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking about what would make you happy, I was mainly concerned with myself.”

The same could be said about her, she thought. She hadn’t considered what would have made Jackson happy when she’d stubbornly refused to go with him. Her dreams of a fairy-tale future had been centered around the needs of the princess, not the prince. “I stayed behind because I wanted you to prove your feelings by choosing me over your career.”

“I know.”

“It wasn’t right.”

“Neither of us was right.”

She licked away another tear. The problems between them
had gone deeper than she’d imagined. “We really did make a mess of things.”

“Yeah.” He pulled up his legs and propped his arms on his bent knees. “But even if we could rewrite the past, it wouldn’t make any difference because no matter what detail we changed, we’d still be the same people.”

How often in the last few days had she told herself the same thing? As much as they tried not to, perhaps they really were destined keep hurting each other.

Yet her dream for her future hadn’t been only about the hotel or children or working as a partner with her husband. At its core, her dream had been about love, but she’d been too stubborn to make that her priority.

She should have. She’d loved Jackson from the first moment she’d seen him, the gangly boy with the crazy hair, the crooked smile and a gaze the color of a summer sky.

She loved the man he’d become even more.

The realization was no surprise. It was as undeniable as the tears that continued to trail down her cheeks. Oh, yes. She loved him. She’d never stopped. Why else was she crying? She’d done her best to rationalize it away, to call it nostalgia or stress or sex, but there was no mistaking what was in her heart.

She was in love with Jackson Bailey.

Again.

Still.

Probably forever.

And she had this grand realization when they were trapped in a windowless closet, at the mercy of criminals who were fully capable of killing them.

“Jackson?”

The look he gave her was hard to interpret. His eyes held regret mixed with the sadness, and his jaw was set with what could have been pain.

The words she wanted to say died in her throat. What good would a confession do now? It might make her feel better, but it would make Jackson feel worse. He hadn’t wanted this complication. He’d been adamant about that from the start. She should be thinking of his needs, not hers. She shifted to her knees and crawled across the space between them. Without any preamble, she placed her hands on either side of his face and kissed him.

He responded gently, barely moving his lips, as if he worried about hurting her again.

She sobbed and opened her mouth, giving vent to her frustration. With the understanding he’d always shown, he slid his hand into her hair to hold her steady and deepened the kiss.

For a few precious minutes the floor didn’t seem as hard or as cold and the fear that sat on her shoulder was shrugged aside. She was once more his Charlie, in love with her Jackson, and life had limitless possibilities.

And oh,
God,
she wished with all her heart that she still believed in magic.

There was a sudden clunk from the other side of the room’s steel door.

Jackson got to his feet. Charlotte scrambled to stand beside him, but he caught her arm and guided her behind his back just as the door swung open.

Richard Corbin stepped into the doorway. He was holding a small black gun, probably the same one he’d used to force
Charlotte into the car. Had he also used it to shoot Luc? Pointing the gun at Jackson, he stepped to the right of the door frame and pressed his back to the far wall so that he maintained the maximum distance between them. “It’s about time you woke up. You were one heavy bastard to drag.”

Jackson spread his feet apart and crossed his arms. “What do you want, Corbin?”

“You’re not that stupid. You know what we want. The Hotel Marchand.”

Charlotte moved to Jackson’s side. She’d lost her shoes somewhere between here and the hotel and she missed the illusion of confidence the extra few inches in height would have given her. Still, she wasn’t going to let this criminal see her cower. She drew herself up to her full five feet three inches and fixed Richard with a cold stare. “This is an outrage, Mr. Corbin. I demand that you release us immediately.”

He swung the barrel of the gun toward her. “Not before we get what we’ve come for.”

Jackson placed himself in front of Charlotte again. “If you think you can get the hotel through means like these, you’re mistaken.”

“Wrong.” He gestured with his gun. “And you can skip the human-shield heroics, doc. We don’t plan to kill her yet.”

Yet?
Oh, God, Charlotte thought. This couldn’t be happening.

As if he could feel her horror, Jackson moved his arm behind his back and held his hand palm up in invitation. Charlotte clasped it gratefully, lacing her fingers with his.

“It’s not too late to get yourself out of this, Richard,” Jackson said. “Luc isn’t dead. You’re not facing a murder charge.”

Richard laughed. “Luc? Wrong again. He’s dead, all right. I heard he never made it to the hospital.”

Charlotte pressed closer to Jackson’s back, fighting to keep her whimper inside. She didn’t want to believe that the charming young man her family was so fond of could have succumbed to his wound. It seemed so unreal. Was that going to be her and Jackson’s fate?

Dan Corbin moved over the threshold and joined his brother at the side of the doorway. While Richard appeared edgy, his older brother was unruffled, his tie straight and his hair neatly brushed. He looked as calm as if he were conducting a normal business meeting.

Charlotte’s sense of unreality deepened. How could either of these men think they could get away with criminal behavior like this?

Dan looked at Charlotte. Instead of a gun, he held a roll of duct tape in his hands. “Come here,” he ordered.

Jackson squeezed her fingers to keep her where she was. “The Marchands aren’t going to sell, Dan. You’d be better off releasing us now—”

Richard pointed his gun toward the wall and fired.

Charlotte screamed and clapped her hands over her ears. The bullet burrowed harmlessly into the wall amid a puff of dust and crumbled brick, but the noise of the shot in the small room was deafening.

“The next one’s for your boyfriend,” Richard shouted. “Now get over here.”

Charlotte lowered her hands. “Don’t hurt him.”

“Then do what we tell you.”

She tried to slip past Jackson, but he barred her way with
his arm. “She’s not going anywhere without me, Richard,” he said. “And unless you’re a damn good shot, that .22 you’re holding isn’t powerful enough to stop me from reaching you before you can pull the trigger a second time.”

“If you try anything, I’ll shoot her,” Richard said.

Jackson’s reply was eerily calm. “If you hurt her, I will kill you.”

Dan ripped off a piece of duct tape. “We’re wasting time,” he said. “We’ll bring them both.”

M
IKE
B
LOUNT LIFTED THE
wineglass to his nose and inhaled greedily. It was the good stuff, more than two hundred bucks a bottle retail, so he was going to enjoy every ounce of it. This was a night for celebration. The next time he cracked open one of these bottles, he’d be doing it from his own private table in that fancy restaurant at the Hotel Marchand. Crystal and white linen. Only the best from now on.

He took a sip and held it in his mouth, savoring the taste. Then he placed the glass on his desk, checked his watch and pointed to the phone. “It’s time, Dan.”

For once, Dan Corbin didn’t hesitate to obey the order. He picked up the phone and dialed.

Mike smiled and leaned back in his chair. The Corbin brothers weren’t good at thinking for themselves. They’d had the right idea last week when Richard had tried to abduct Anne—the threat of death was always a good motivater when it came to getting people to fall into line—but they’d chosen the wrong Marchand.

Mike slid his gaze to the woman in the corner of his office. The eldest of the Marchand daughters was the general manager of the hotel. It was mainly because of her that the Corbins’ plan to ruin the business had failed to produce the desired
results. She was the most dedicated of the four sisters, she lived and breathed for that hotel, so even if her mother didn’t agree to sell now, the place wouldn’t survive long without Charlotte.

Either way, Mike was going to get what he wanted.

“Hello, Mrs. Marchand,” Dan said. “Have you signed the contract?”

Until now Charlotte had been keeping her expression blank. She had refused to meet Mike’s gaze, angling her chin in the air as if she were sitting at some tea party and he was the hired help. He didn’t know how she pulled it off—in that oversize, stained denim jacket, dusty skirt and torn hose, she should have appeared ridiculous. Yet even with a few yards of duct tape wrapped around her torso to hold her to the metal chair where she sat and more duct tape binding her wrists and covering her mouth, she still managed to look down her nose at him.

As soon as she realized that her mother was on the other end of that phone, though, those elegant green eyes of hers filled with panic.

“Yes, she’s alive,” Dan said.

Mike gestured to Richard, enjoying himself more than he had thought possible. “Remove the tape from her mouth,” he said. “Let her say hello to her mama.”

Richard’s gaze flicked uneasily to the man who was bound to the chair beside Charlotte.

His hesitation was understandable. Although Mike didn’t doubt the information Otis had given him was accurate, Jackson Bailey didn’t act like any doctor that Mike had met before. Despite the duct tape that held him motionless and the
gun Richard kept trained on him, he looked like a dangerous man. It wasn’t because of his physique, although with his height and his solid build he could do some serious damage if he got loose. No, it was his eyes.

This man understood the situation. He appeared to miss nothing as he studied his surroundings and his captors. He had the look of someone who had seen death often enough to recognize it. Unlike the hothouse-flower Marchand woman, he appeared to realize that Mike couldn’t afford to let either of them leave here alive.

Mike snapped his fingers. “Richard!”

Keeping his gun trained on the doctor, Richard sidled up to Charlotte’s chair, gripped one edge of the duct tape that covered her mouth and gave it a swift yank.

Tears brimmed in her eyes, but she didn’t make a sound. It was the doctor who flinched. He looked at her, then fixed Richard with a stare that made him take a reflexive step backward.

Mike tried to contain his impatience. “Remove her boyfriend’s gag, too,” he ordered.

Richard pressed the muzzle of his gun against Charlotte’s neck, reached across her and ripped away the tape that covered Jackson’s mouth. Once he’d accomplished that, he backed away with a bravado that was close to recklessness.

The Corbins had nearly fulfilled their purpose, Mike reminded himself. Until this point they had been his go-betweens, doing his dirty work so that his hands remained clean. He wouldn’t have to put up with them much longer. “Dan?” he prompted.

Dan carried the phone to Charlotte and pressed the receiver to her ear. “Go ahead.”

Charlotte spoke immediately. “Mama, I’m all right. So is Jackson. Please don’t worry. We—”

“That’s enough,” Dan said, pulling the phone away. “As you heard, Mrs. Marchand, your daughter is alive. How long she stays that way is up to you. Now I’m asking you again, have you signed the contract?”

There was a pause. Dan lowered the phone and looked at Mike. “She wants to know why your name’s on this one instead of ours.”

Mike snapped his fingers again and held out his hand for the phone. He was going to enjoy this, too. “Hello, Mrs. Marchand,” he said. “This is Mike Blount.”

“Who are you?” The voice that came through the phone was as sweet as warmed honey in spite of the anxiety in the words. It took generations of good breeding to produce a classy accent like that, along with a lifetime of wealth. Anne Marchand sounded exactly as Mike had thought she would—he would bet if he could see her, she would be looking down her nose at him, just as her daughter was.

“I’m a business associate of the Corbins, Mrs. Marchand,” he said.

“Please don’t let them hurt my daughter.”

“I’ll do my best, but the Corbins are desperate men. They’re in financial difficulty, just like you. Simply put, they are in my debt, and to pay me back they have promised to acquire your property for me.” He smiled as he looked at Charlotte. “We do have a deal, don’t we, Mrs. Marchand?”

“Yes,
yes!
” Anne cried. “Let Charlotte and Jackson go.”

“And the contract?”

“It’s signed and notarized, exactly as Dan Corbin asked.”

“Excellent. Place it at the concierge’s desk in the main lobby. Someone will be there shortly to pick it up. And no cops,” he added, “or the deal is off.”

“I haven’t told anyone, I swear.”

Mike’s warning had only been for show. He knew that Anne hadn’t called the police. According to Otis, the Marchand women hadn’t said anything about the kidnapping, in spite of his questions. They’d maintained complete silence as soon as they had received the ransom demand. There was no buzz around the station or through any of Otis’s contacts either. Everyone at the hotel had closed ranks—they were following Mike’s demands to the letter.

“What about my daughter and Jackson?” Anne asked.

“As soon as I receive the contract, they will be released.”

“How? Where?”

“We’ll be in touch,” Mike said. “Oh, and one last thing, Mrs. Marchand.”

“Yes?”

“I expect your cooperation to continue. Otherwise…” He paused to let the threat sink in. “You have three other daughters. You have a granddaughter, as well. A lively child, from what I’ve heard.”

“What—” Her voice cracked. “What do you mean?”

“If you attempt to void this contract by claiming it was signed under duress or if you speak to the police now or at any point in the future, someone else in your family will suffer the same fate as your eldest daughter.”

“Mon Dieu.”
Anne’s voice was no more than a whisper. “You can have the hotel. I won’t say anything. Please, I beg you, just leave my family alone.”

Mike terminated the connection and placed the phone on his desk. He savored the moment for a while—the taste of victory was almost as good as the wine.

“Did she go for it?” Dan asked.

Mike nodded once. “Yes. The Hotel Marchand is mine.”

Richard pumped his fist in the air and reached for the wine bottle. “This calls for a toast.”

“Put that down,” Mike ordered. “We’re not finished yet. I need you to go outside and wait for my driver.”

Richard glanced at Dan. There was an almost imperceptible nod again.

Mike slapped his palm on the desk, making both Corbins jump. “Outside, both of you. And leave the gun beside the bottle, Richard. I might need it.”

After a telling hesitation, Richard laid his gun on the desk. Dan straightened the knot of his tie and cleared his throat. “So we’re square now, right, Mike?”

“Certainly, Dan. I’m a man of my word. Once my driver gets here with the purchase contract, we can consider your debt to me paid in full.”

Mike listened to their footsteps ring on the steel staircase outside his office, then watched through the glass wall until they had crossed the warehouse floor. The Corbins were going to meet more than simply his driver, they were going to meet their fate. He glanced at the gun and smiled. How obliging of Richard to leave a clear set of fingerprints. Apart from the necessity of having Carter killed sooner than Mike would have preferred, this was all working out exactly as he’d planned.

“You’ll get what you asked for,” Jackson said. “Let us go.”

Mike took his time topping up his wineglass before he replied. “I believe you understand why I can’t do that.”

Jackson looked at Charlotte, then back at Mike. “I understand you need to demonstrate your power to the Marchands to leave them too terrorized to back out of the deal. You can accomplish that by killing me instead of Charlotte.”

After having to endure the Corbins, it was refreshing to speak with an intelligent man for a change. Mike could see that the doctor wasn’t like the Marchands, either. He was educated, but his speech didn’t have the polish of old class. The guy had guts, too.

Charlotte twisted her head to look at Jackson. “What are you doing?”

Jackson kept his gaze on Mike. “Surgeons are well paid. I donate the bulk of my income to charity, but my fees from last year are still in my bank. You can have it all as long as you let Charlotte go.”

It was tempting to take him up on the offer. Mike seldom turned down an easy profit, and one dead body could be as much a deterrent as two. “This is a first for me,” he mused. “I don’t believe I’ve ever had a man offer me money to execute him rather than someone else.”

Charlotte’s chair wobbled as she strained against the tape that held her. “Jackson, no!”

“Stay out of this, Charlotte.”

“I won’t leave here without you.”

“Yes, you will. And you’re going to swear that you won’t go to the police.”

“No, it’s me they wanted in the first place, not you.” She looked at Mike. “Let Jackson go. You don’t need him anymore.”

Mike took what he calculated was a twenty-dollar mouthful of wine and swished it through his teeth. She wasn’t looking down her nose at him now, he thought. If he asked her to, she would probably get down on her knees. Chuckling, he leaned over to open the top drawer of his desk and drew out one of the skinning knives that Otis had returned to him. “This is all very touching, but business is business.” He stroked the flat of the blade with his thumb. “I’ve waited a long time to get my hands on the Hotel Marchand. And believe me, I didn’t get where I am today by leaving any loose ends.”

J
ACKSON FOUGHT TO KEEP
his expression impassive as he worked at his own loose end. The edge of the duct tape wasn’t flat. Dan had been in too much of a hurry to smooth it out when he’d bound Jackson’s wrists, and as a result, there was a corner that hadn’t adhered fully. After more than thirty minutes of painstaking effort, he had finally succeeded in pushing his right index finger beneath the gap.

It wasn’t much—the tape was looped around his wrists three times and would have to be unwound millimeter by millimeter if Jackson was going to free himself—but at this stage he was willing to grasp at the smallest straw of hope…even if he was unable to grasp.

He wasn’t sure how much time they had left, but he prayed it would be enough to break free. It felt as if he were touching the tape through a wall of glass shards. The ache that had been building in his strained tendons was getting worse. Muscles that hadn’t responded in weeks were screaming in protest. He could almost feel the tissue that had managed to heal ripping apart, cell by cell.

Damn, he wished he had two good hands. Not so he could be a surgeon. No, he couldn’t care less whether he ever held another scalpel or tied another bandage. He wanted his nerves to mend so that he could save one life, not hundreds.

“I’m sorry, Jackson.”

The whisper was so faint he wasn’t sure that he’d heard it. He turned his head and saw that Charlotte was looking at him, her eyes blurred with tears.

There were so many things they both could apologize for, it made no difference what she meant. He shook his head quickly—he didn’t want her to waste the time they had left with regrets—but the motion made the ache from his concussion worse. He gritted his teeth to bring the pain down to a manageable level.

“This is all because of the hotel, and you never wanted any part of it,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry you got dragged into—”

“Stall,” he whispered.

“What?”

Jackson flicked his gaze behind his chair meaningfully. “Get Blount talking again. Keep him distracted.”

Charlotte glanced at where Jackson’s wrists were bound behind his back.

“What are you two whispering about?” Blount demanded.

“I remember you now, Mr. Blount,” Charlotte said.

Jackson resumed his efforts to unwind the tape. Although Charlotte’s face was tight with tension, she had gone into her tea-in-the-parlor mode again, her voice steady and politely detached. He was relieved to hear her back in control. Her
stubborn pride was one of the things he loved about her—it had killed him to see her plead.

“You came into the hotel lobby last week,” she continued as if it were completely normal to be having a conversation with a man who was brandishing a skinning knife. “I saw you talking to our concierge.”

“I’ve been in the hotel plenty of times,” he responded. “You just didn’t see me.”

“I’ve been kept quite busy lately.”

Blount laughed as he put down his knife and poured himself another glass of wine. He displayed no signs of inebriation, though—his celebration appeared to be as calculated as everything else about him. “I bet you have,” he said.

“Were you behind all the problems we’ve had? Or was that the work of the Corbin brothers?”