скачать книгу бесплатно
Once, she had.
Now she hummed softly as she slid a yellow and pink-splashed rose into the vase beside the snow-white lilies. Her brother would have accused her of trying to drown out her destiny, but Danielle no longer believed in such nonsense. Destiny, chance, did not rule her world. There were no such things as lucky or unlucky stars. You created your own fate, made your own choices.
Never again would she chase shadows. Never again would she splurge on instinct.
But the disturbance lingered at the back of her mind, dark and unsettling, choppy like the waters of Lake Michigan on a storm-shrouded day.
She knew better than to look. She knew better than to indulge. But she glanced around the richly paneled lobby, anyway, toward the collection of formal sofas and wing chairs situated next to a stone fireplace. A large Aubusson rug stretched leisurely across the hardwood floor. A huge mahogany bookcase held leather-bound books.
The scene was perfectly normal, a few lingering guests, a woman curled up with a book, almost a carbon copy of a hundred other afternoons since she’d joined the hotel’s staff. And yet, something was off. Something was different. It was like a movie playing at the wrong speed, motion slowed just a fraction, elongated, jerky. Not quite real.
Because of the man.
He sat in a wing chair near the fireplace, impeccably dressed. His button-down shirt was dark gray, open at the throat, and his jeans were black. In his hands he held a newspaper—the same section he’d been holding for close to an hour.
She’d never seen someone sit so very, very still for so very, very long.
The disturbing current pulsed deeper. She knew she should look away, quit staring, but the whisper of fascination was too strong. He was tall. Too tall, too broad in the shoulder, to fade into anonymity. She’d noticed him, felt the ripple of his presence, the second he’d walked into the lobby. He carried an aura of authority like so many of the powerful patrons of the hotel, but the shadows were different. They were thick and they were dark, and they swirled around him like flashing warning signs.
Just like they did her brother, Anthony.
Look away, she told herself again, but then the man’s eyes were on hers, and for a fractured second it was all she could do to breathe. They were a deep brown like his hair, yet the darkness eddying in their depths defied color.
His expression never changed. There was no amusement at catching her staring, no quick swell of masculine triumph, no discomfort, no irritation, just the cool, impassive gaze of a man who saw everything but felt nothing.
It was a look she’d never seen before, and it scorched clear to the bone.
Frowning, humming louder, refusing to let the man affect her one second longer, she grabbed another rose, this one a pure deep yellow with a long, dark-green stem, and debated where to place it for maximum impact. Until she’d come to work at the hotel styled after an English manor house, she’d never imagined something as simple as a vase could cost more than she earned in a month. Granted, it was lead crystal and made in Ireland, but still. She’d always found old mason jars and chipped drinking glasses worked just fine.
“The lights are on, but apparently nobody is home.”
Danielle looked up to find Ruth Sun, one of the hotel’s long-time assistant managers, smiling at her. “Pardon?”
The woman’s dark eyes twinkled. “You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you?”
Danielle’s heart beat a little faster. Everyone in the hotel knew Ruth had the boss’s ear. She’d been around forever. One bad word from her, and all Danielle’s hard work could be for nothing.
“You know how I get when the flowers arrive,” she said lightly. “Everything else—”
“—falls to the background,” Ruth finished for her. “I noticed.” Her smile faded abruptly, and she reached out to grab Danielle’s wrist. “Dear, you’re bleeding.”
Danielle stared at the trail of dark-red blood running against the pale skin of her arm. “I…” Focused on the unsettling man, she hadn’t felt a thing. “It’s just a prick.”
Ruth made a maternal clucking noise, one that should have comforted Danielle, but instead unleashed a sharp curl of longing for the mother taken from her life over a quarter of a century before. “You need to get that cleaned up.”
Danielle nodded but didn’t move. “Did you need something?” she asked. “Before?” When she’d been oblivious to everything but the echo of the cry that had ripped the fabric of the quiet June afternoon, and the man with the disturbing eyes.
“Not really.” Ruth reached into a cabinet behind the long reception desk and came up with antiseptic and cotton. “Just thought you’d want to know someone was asking about you.”
“About me?”
Ruth poured antiseptic onto the cotton. “What your name was, how long you’d worked here, if you were married, that kind of thing.”
Danielle went very still. She worked hard to keep her face clear of all emotion, but when Ruth pressed the cotton to her skin, the sharp sting made her wince. God, she’d been so careful, covered her tracks so cleanly. “Who?”
Ruth kept dabbing. “A man.”
The dread circled closer, tighter. No wonder she’d been edgy all afternoon. He’d finally come looking for her, the brother she’d not spoken with in two long years. Her heart leaped at the prospect, then abruptly slowed.
Her brother wouldn’t ask about her marital status—but there had been another man earlier in the week. He’d seemed charming enough, but Danielle had seen through the aristocratic manners to a muddy aura that warned her to keep her distance. “What did he look like?”
The assistant manager looked up from her handiwork. “I’m surprised you didn’t notice him. He’s been sitting in the big leather wing chair most of the afternoon. Dark hair. Tall.” Ruth let out a dreamy sigh. “Very, very tall.”
With eyes like pools of midnight on a cloudless night. “The guy in the gray button-down?” Danielle asked, and her heart beat a little faster. A lot harder.
“That’s him,” Ruth said. “Real good-looking guy.”
Intense, Danielle silently corrected. Striking.
Gone.
“All better,” Ruth pronounced, but the words barely registered. Danielle stared across the lobby, toward the elegant wing chair that now sat empty, the newspaper abandoned on the floor.
The quick slice of unease made no sense. “Where did he go?”
“He’s right—” Ruth’s words broke off. “That’s strange. He was there just a second ago.”
Frowning, Danielle glanced around the lobby, toward the elevator, the sweeping staircase, the elegant front doors. Found nothing. Not the man, anyway. There were other patrons, the businessmen, the elderly couple from Wichita, the honeymooners from Madison, but the tall man with the flat eyes was just…gone.
Except she still felt him. Deeply. Disturbingly.
“You going to get that?” Ruth asked.
Danielle blinked and brought herself back, heard the low melody of her mobile phone. Through a haze of distraction she reached for the small black device to which only four people had the number—her manager, her sister and her son’s school and day-care center. “Hello, this is Danielle.”
“Turn around.”
She stiffened. “Come again?”
“Paste a smile on that pretty face of yours and turn around, away from the old woman.”
Everything flashed. The motion of the lobby dimmed, slowed, seemed to drag. “I don’t understand—”
“Just do it.”
Her heart started to pound. Hard. Instinct warned her to obey, even as an age-old rebellious streak dared her to lift her chin and defy. She’d done that before, many times. And the cost had been high.
Slowly she turned from the comforting din of the hotel lobby and took a few steps away from Ruth. “Okay.”
“Good girl.” The voice was distorted, genderless.
“Who is this? What do you—”
“I have your son.”
The world stopped. Fast. Violently. She no longer faced the hotel guests, but knew if she turned around, she would see nothing. No movement. No life.
But then the words penetrated even deeper, beyond the fog of shock and the blanket of horror to the logical part of her, the part Jeremy had honed and fine-tuned, sharpened to a gleaming point, and another truth registered.
She was being watched. Someone, someone close, knew her every move.
The man. The man who’d been watching her, asking questions. The one who had vanished but whose presence lingered.
“You what?” she asked, slowly indulging the need to look. To see.
“Don’t move,” the voice intoned, and abruptly she froze. “If you want to see him again, you’ll do exactly what I say.”
The world started moving again, from dead cold to fast forward in one horrible dizzying heartbeat. Everything swirled, blurred. Blindly she reached for the counter. Her son. God, her precious little boy. Her life.
“No cops,” the man continued. It had to be him, she thought. The man from the lobby. The one who’d been watching her, asking about her. The one who’d vanished mere seconds ago. “Call them and negotiations end.”
She wasn’t sure how she stayed standing, not when every cell in her body cried out, louder and harder than the distorted cry she’d picked up an hour earlier. And she knew. God help her, she knew why she’d been on edge. Why she’d been disturbed. Her son. Someone had gotten to her son, and on some intuitive level, she’d known danger pushed close.
But just as with his father, she hadn’t been able to protect.
“What do you want?” she asked with a calm that did not come easy to her Gypsy blood. She’d been in situations like this before, dangerous, confusing, never with her own son, but she’d gone where law enforcement could not go.
“Call the day-care center. Tell them Alex walked home on his own.”
She swallowed hard. That was feasible. The center was only a few blocks from her small Rogers Park home. Alex knew the way. He was an adventurous kid, clever, daring, always in constant motion. It would be just like him to wander off when no one was looking.
“Then what?”
“Wait for instructions.”
Deep inside she started to shake. It was only a sick joke, she wanted to think. A prank. Payback for the sins of her past. But she’d met relatively few people since moving to Chicago and could think of none who would be so cruel.
It was a mistake, she thought next, but even as hope tried to bloom, reality sucked the oxygen from her lungs. She wanted to spin around and run, to shout at the top of her lungs as she searched for the tall man with the dark eyes. But with great effort, she kept herself very still.
“I’m calling them now,” she said with the same forced calm.
“Good girl.” A garbled sound then, something between laughter and scorn. “Do not betray us, my sweet. One word about this call to anyone, and your son will pay the price.”
The line went dead. And for a long, drowning moment Danielle just stood there, breathing hard, praying she wouldn’t throw up.
Then she ran.
“Thank God, Ms. Caldwell. We’ve been looking for him for the past ten minutes. We were about to call the police.”
“Don’t do that.” The words burst out of Danielle like a wild animal released from captivity. Her whole body shook. If the day-care director called the cops, Danielle would have to produce her son. And if she couldn’t, there would be an investigation. An Amber Alert. A full-scale search. In all likelihood, she would become the number-one suspect. She’d be hauled down to the station, detained, questioned.
And the man—the man with the dead-sea gaze, the one from the hotel, who’d sat and watched her for over an hour, who’d coldly issued his threats—would know.
And Alex would be punished.
“Everything’s fine,” she said, clenching the steering wheel with one hand as she raced north along Lakeshore Drive. “We’re headed out of town for a few days and Alex was just excited.” She had to get home. Fast. She needed to be in the small frame house she and her son had picked out, the one littered with his toys. Maybe he was already there. Maybe he’d gotten away, had run and run and run. He could run fast, she knew. He had the same uncanny knack for skirting trouble that she’d had.
Once.
A long time ago.
Before she made the wrong choice, and the wrong person paid the price.
“We’re so sorry,” the director was saying. Fear drenched her voice. The poor woman’s livelihood wobbled at stake. A day-care center that lost children in its care would not stay in business long. “I don’t know how he wandered off. We were watching him the whole time—”
“It’s not your fault, Elaine.” Danielle put on her blinker and zipped around a slow-moving minivan.
“But it is,” Elaine insisted. “This is inexcusable.”
Fear crawled through Danielle, as dark and slimy as an army of the earwigs she’d always hated, but she managed to keep her voice steady as she explained it would be several days before Alex returned to the day-care center. By the time she pulled into the cracked driveway of her little white house, she’d convinced Elaine Myers she wasn’t going to press charges.
“Alex!” She called his name the second she pushed open the car door. “Alex!”
Nothing.
The house looked so still, still and dark and quiet. Too quiet for the house of a six-year-old boy who didn’t even hold still when he slept.
She unlocked the front door, shoved it open and ran into the darkened foyer. “Alex!”
Nothing.
Her whole body started to shake, and this time she didn’t have to pretend. Didn’t have to hold back. She let the tide crash over and around her, let it push her to her knees.
The sobs came next, big, gulping sobs. “Oh, God,” she whispered. “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God.”
Breathe, she told herself. Breathe. Think. But she couldn’t. She’d never felt so helpless in her life, not even the horrible rainy night she’d watched a car spin out of control and crash, then burst into flames. She’d run toward the wreckage, screaming, her brother Anthony trying to hold her back. But there was no one here now. No one to hold her back. No one to hold her, period. No one to help. Her son was missing. Gone.
Images assaulted her then, darker than the fear, the horror, the rage snaking through her. Her little boy. His dark hair and laughing blue eyes. His impish smile. He’d never spent the night away from home. Away from her.
He could be anywhere. His abductors could be doing anything to him. Bile backed up in her throat, and this time she couldn’t stop the churning of her stomach. She gagged, lost what little lunch she’d consumed.
She wasn’t stupid or naive. She watched the news. She knew about child predators. Knew too much.
Anthony.
Her brother’s name came to her on a shattering rush of memory, and with it came more tears. Dear, dear Anthony. So tough and brave, wounded on a level few would ever suspect. He’d taken on a man’s responsibility long before he was able to wear a man’s clothing. And for a long while, he’d succeeded. He’d protected her and her sister, Elizabeth. He’d sheltered them, saved them from the bad man.
But she’d turned her back on Anthony, on them all.
