A Bad Day for Romance (13 page)

She clicked off before she could strain her own prevarication skills any further.

“You are the world’s shittiest liar,” Chrissy observed.

“Yeah,” Stella agreed morosely. “At least when it has to do with my own personal life. Well, now we got you rescued, I guess we might as well head back, or Lloyd’s liable to send out a search party.”

CHAPTER TEN

“WHO ALL’S WITH YOU?” CHRISSY ASKED.
They’d taken a seat at the edge of the ballroom, where they could keep tabs on the comings and goings of the remaining partiers. She’d called Lloyd, who had apparently been dragged along on the stag party, which had accumulated all the male guests like a snowball rolling down a hill before heading out to a local roadhouse. The men had all evidently packed themselves into the back of Goat’s old Ford F-150 pickup, which was the sort of illegal that tended to get overlooked on country lanes, where speeds rarely exceeded leisurely and the man at the wheel was sober as a judge, with a badge to boot. “Uh-huh… uh-huh. And they been with you the whole time?”

After a bit more chatting, followed by Chrissy’s evasive promises to see Lloyd later if she happened to still be up and needing to talk—an amateur’s ploy for sure, as Stella was not aware of any female who longed to bare her soul to a man who’d come stumbling out of a bachelor party in the wee hours—she hung up and confirmed what they’d suspected. “It wasn’t anyone from the party.”

“Okay. So whoever attacked you, we got it narrowed down to either male or female and probably not a close personal friend or relation to Dotty or Kam.”

Chrissy frowned. “Well, when you put it that way it don’t sound like much.”

“That’s ’cause it ain’t.” Stella took a long, contemplative sip of her drink, a double Johnnie Walker Black she’d bribed the bartender to fetch for her from the hotel bar in place of the well whiskey they were serving for free in the ballroom. “Which is sure inconvenient, because if someone wasn’t trying to kill you, I’d say our job was done, seeing as Divinity’s likely going to get free Monday and nobody’s too shook up about Bryant, and now Dotty’s going to have her wedding after all and Mrs. Rangarajan will be able to calm down.”

“Well, I
will
have Ian with me tomorrow,” Chrissy said. “He can protect me, I’m sure.”

They were silent for a moment, the attempt on Chrissy’s life nagging at Stella. If indeed it was Bryant Molder’s killer who’d kidnapped her, he had somehow managed to find out they were on his trail. Had he been hidden in the forest, drawn back to the killing field by curiosity or some sort of twisted pride in his accomplishment? Had he seen them head down the road toward the state park, and managed to follow them without drawing Stella’s attention?

Neither seemed likely, but the fact remained that someone wanted very much to dissuade them, and Stella was not about to let the matter drop in hopes it would just go away on its own. Maybe it was the fact that she and Chrissy had narrowly escaped death together not that long ago, recovering in side-by-side hospital rooms from injuries that might have killed weaker-willed women. Granted, whoever’d tied her assistant up this evening hadn’t been made of much, but sometimes luck favored the bad guys. If he hadn’t dropped the rope… if Chrissy hadn’t been able to call Stella… if he’d decided to take on the pair of them, even with a seriously underpowered sidearm… how far would he go to shut them up?

“Well, listen,” Stella finally said, coming to a decision when there was little left in her glass but she had a pleasant buzz. “Now that the ladies are taking care of Dotty’s dress, and she ain’t even going to need it until Monday anyway, I don’t suppose I have to stay holed up here all day tomorrow. Noelle and Cinnamon aren’t coming down until the afternoon, so that gives me all morning to see if I can figure this out.”

“Don’t be looking to drag me along.”

“I know, I know, you got a tantric morning planned.”

“What are you gonna do, anyway?”

“Thought I’d head over to Branson and see if I can find out who all Bryant’s pissed off lately. And I thought I could talk to that Lexie girl. Maybe she’s been making day trips out this way.”

“Mmm, I don’t know. I don’t get why she’d want to kill someone she just stole from his old girlfriend.”

“Well, it’s a tangled web, ain’t it? You got your love and money mixed up together, that’s pretty powerful.”

“You could just wait and talk to her on Monday, couldn’t you?”

“Well, if she’s even still coming to sing at the service. I don’t think Dotty’s got all the details worked out yet. Besides, waiting around just gives someone a couple extra days to come after you. And me, too, you gotta assume, so this is a preventive-type measure.”

Stella and Chrissy watched the party wind the rest of the way down. Dotty, exhausted from being the center of attention but still wearing the lovestruck expression that seemed permanently pasted onto her face, headed upstairs with her future sisters-in-law, who had promised to show her adorable baby pictures of Kam, as well as embarrassing adolescent school shots from before he got his hair under control. Novella and Gracie polished off the remaining shrimp puffs and wrapped up the leftover cheese cubes in a napkin before departing, and soon it was just the weary waitstaff, cleaning up the dregs of the celebration.

“Well, I guess that’s it, then,” Stella sighed. “Ain’t much sense waiting up for the boys to come back. You don’t want to be here when Lloyd comes in—I don’t think there’s enough Pabst Blue Ribbon in the world to take the edge off his fix on you.”

“You okay, Stella? You want me to stay with you tonight?”

“No, that’s all right, you got to get up early,” Stella said with a heavy heart. She was thrilled for her assistant—and her best friend, Dotty, and her daughter and everyone else who’d found love. Only, it was kind of lonely, being the one left over. Which was stupid, because there was BJ, just as soon as he was up off his back, anyway, and that was one boyfriend more than a lot of ladies had. “You get your beauty rest so you’re at your best tomorrow when your sweetheart shows up.”

“Well, if you’re sure,” Chrissy said. “But just call if you want company, okay?”

Stella tried to keep a spring in her step as she retreated to her room. It took her a few minutes to shimmy and wriggle out of her dress—she was certain she’d split one of the seams Novella had tailored—but once she was in her nightgown with her makeup scrubbed off and her hair combed out, she felt a little better. She snuggled under the covers and dug her book out of her suitcase. She found the passage where she’d left off in Nora Roberts’s
Heaven and Earth
—saucy female cop Ripley was being pursued around the island by a madman and that delicious Dr. MacAllister Booke was nowhere to be found—when there was a knock on her door. Not the gentle tapping that Dotty employed or the no-nonsense rap-rap-rap of Chrissy, but an impatient pounding.

Stella sighed and padded to the door and peeped through the peephole and just about fainted.

“Very funny, Big Guy,” she muttered. Naturally, He would wait until she’d taken off every speck of makeup and unsprung the flesh that had been imprisoned in the tight dress, to bring the man of her dreams to the door. Stella pinched her cheeks and ran her tongue over her lips to shine them up a bit. She bent at the waist and fluffed her hair with her fingers and, when she straightened up, sucked in her gut and gave her breasts an encouraging pat to make sure they were resting more or less evenly under her nightie. At least she had packed a decent gown, a scalloped-hem lavender floral knee-length number with a satin bow at the neckline.

Which wasn’t the least bit sexy, of course, which suddenly struck Stella with the force of revelation. Because there was
another
nightgown in her dresser at home, one that still had the tags on it, one that was not the least bit nice or respectable. It was black as sin with straps about as wide as a whisper, and it barely grazed her thighs, and she’d bought it not long after the last time Goat kissed her and had tucked it into the drawer, where it had stayed, untouched. She’d had to reach right past it to get the lavender gown, and there could be only one reason for that decision: Her subconscious mind didn’t feel like getting sexy with BJ.

“Um,” she said, her hand on the doorknob.

“Stella, open up!” Goat’s face loomed in close to the peep hole. “It’s important!”

She took one last deep breath and pulled open the door. Goat pushed past her into the room, then spun and glared at her. He held up a length of electrical cord.

“What the
hell
have you gotten yourself into this time?” he demanded. He held up the cord, which had been roughly cut at one end. Stella took it from him and held it up close, squinting to make out the frayed wires. “This thing was connected to a sensor at one end and a propane tank on the other. Would have caused a hell of an explosion if it went off.”

“Where’d you get this?” she asked, suddenly full of fear. “Chrissy’s room?”

“
Chrissy’s
 . . . what? No, Stella, this was in your
Jeep
. The tank was wedged in between all that crap you keep in the back and the sensor was jammed under your back wheel, where you would’ve drove right over it. All it would’ve taken was you putting that damn thing in drive, and
bam
, it would’ve blown sky-high, and you in it.”

“
My
Jeep? What were you doing there? I mean, not that I’m not grateful…” She examined the cord before wadding it up and tossing it toward the trash can in the corner of the room. Like the rope, it was cheap and generic; their would-be kidnapper-killer was shrewd enough not to make beginner mistakes, even if he or she had struck out twice now.

Stella’s temper was starting to be tested. Whoever’d taken Chrissy had been industrious enough to rig up a bomb in the time it took for the party to wind down—even if it wasn’t much of a bomb, by any kind of standards. Whoever it was, they clearly weren’t going for style points—they just wanted Stella and Chrissy out of the picture. “How’d you even get into the Jeep, anyhow?”

“Just a damn minute, Stella.” Goat wiped his hand over his face, which still bristled with anger. “We’re talking about
you
here. You leave town, you get sloppy. I get it, your friend’s getting married, you’re a bridesmaid or what have you, but you—you—
you
of all people—”

Goat looked around the room like he was searching for something to break. For a second it looked like he was going to reach for the lamp and hurl it across the room; then he made a fist and a sound like a bull backed up against a fence and, before Stella could do so much as blink, slammed it into the wall so hard the floor shook below her feet.

“Hiyyyyeeee!” he yelled, jumping back. “Oh, Jesus, Jesus, sweet Jesus Pete! Ahhhh!” He wrapped his hand around his fist and then yelled again. “Holy, hoooooly owwww. I think I broke it.”

“Let me,” Stella demanded, and Goat stumbled out of the way.

“Keep back, woman, I said it’s
broken
.”

“Well, damn, Goat, what did you go hitting the wall for?”

“Aw, hell, Stella, you know damn well why!”

“I sure don’t, but standing around here arguing about it’s not going to do any good.” Goat’s fingers were already swelling, the skin on his knuckles broken and bleeding. “Come on, tiger, I’ll drive you to the clinic. Only, I’m not going in my nightgown, so cool your jets here for a minute.”

Stella ran for the bathroom, grabbing clothes out of the closet on her way, ignoring Goat’s protests, which were liberally laced with cursing. She slammed the door and grabbed her beauty balm and squeezed out a dollop and started rubbing it furiously into her face. She managed mascara and a swipe of lipstick, as well as a subtle spritz of White Diamonds in her cleavage, before pulling on jeans and a slinky purple sweater.

All of which was pointless, because what man noticed a woman’s clothes and makeup when he’d broken his hand? If Stella had learned one thing in her two-woman crusade against violent offenders, it was that men’s pain tolerance, compared to women’s, was rock bottom. A woman could get smacked so hard her ribs cracked and every inch of her skin was black and blue under her clothes, but she’d still walk out the door in the morning to get the paper, take the kids to school, drive herself to work—and in many cases, keep her pain and injuries hidden for years. A man gets a hangnail, on the other hand, and—stop the presses!—he’s got to carry on and let everyone know how terrible his agony is.

Still, when she looked at Goat’s broad handsome face, now squinched up in pain, when she followed him out the door, letting her eyes linger on the well-worn Wranglers riding low on his tight ass, she could barely focus on the fact that he’d been hurt.

When they got to her Jeep, she hesitated before opening the passenger door. “So, you, uh, checked out the rest of the Jeep? That bomb thingy was all you found?”

“Yes, Stella, I went over this damn thing front to back. Be mighty curious to know what you keep in that lockbox bolted to the floor. Oh, and I’ll just keep to myself what you got in those Rubbermaid totes in the back.”

Stella swallowed hard. She held the door while Goat got in, then slammed it, her face burning. In the steel box were a blunt little Kel-Tec pistol and a pretty Ruger .357 with an ivory grip, the latest in an ever-changing stream of firearms she made a practice of keeping handy. And in the larger tote was a selection of crops, whips, ropes, and restraints; in the smaller one were assorted tools of her trade, such as clamps, gags, prods, pliers, and so forth. Goat wasn’t dumb; Stella was pretty sure he’d long ago put two and two together when it came to her methods, so it shouldn’t have surprised him that she kept a few of her tools handy. Now, though, seeing what he’d seen, he could have come up with the whole quadratic equation.

As Stella turned the key in the ignition, the implications dawned on her. Goat now knew everything. There was no way either one of them could pretend otherwise anymore. No wonder he’d hit the wall—he probably had wanted to hit
her
instead.