Descended (The Red Blindfold Book 3) (9 page)

As if on instinct, I
opened my eyes just as light arced across the bedroom wall. Drex
heard the sound before I did, the distant crunch of tires on gravel
and the low roar of a car engine.

“What the hell?” he
muttered.

Rolling quickly away
from me, he got up. He shut off the wall switch, leaving the room
dark except for the glow from the terrace. “Hell of a guard dog in
the living room,” he muttered. “Not even a bark.”

I sat up in bed. “What
is it?”

“Shhh.” He went to
the window and pulled the drapes back an inch. “Somebody’s here.”

“Somebody?” I
whispered.

“Yeah. Might be some
guys I don’t want to see.”

“Why not?”

“Let’s just say
I’ve got some old scores to settle. Personal ones, that go back
years.”

An engine turned off
and a car door shut. I felt a cold jolt of fear. The whole house was
silent.

“You said something
about the security here,” I said, a shudder bristling across my
skin.

“The lack thereof,”
Drex said. “This is exactly what I meant.”

His expression was
stone-cold and emotionless. After a minute, he leaned toward the
window and peered out again. I heard him mumble something under his
breath.

“What’s happening?”

“I’m not sure.
There’s one truck and three men, from what I can see.”

“Could it be your
father?”

“He wouldn’t come
looking for me,” Drex said, reaching for the nightstand drawer.
“Not unless he wanted something from me, and he knows better than
to ask.”

I saw a glint of metal
as he stuck something in his waistband. “What’s that?”

“A gun,” he said
matter-of-factly. “You think a gun store owner has a house without
one? Or ten?”

Arms crossed, he leaned
against the wall and waited. He looked almost bored. We were in the
middle of nowhere and outnumbered, but Drex seemed more
inconvenienced than anything else.

The nerve of the man.
He either had a spine of steel or a very good poker face.

There were footsteps
outside the window and around the house. Neither of us said a word.
Eventually, the truck’s engine roared to life. Headlights lit up
the drapes, and the men drove off.

I let out a long, tense
sigh. Drex didn’t move until everything was dark and silent again.

“I’m surprised they
left,” he said, putting the gun back in the drawer. “Doesn’t
make sense.”

“Could they have come
to see the owner?” I asked.

“He doesn’t live
here. It’s an investment property for him. Everybody knows he lives
in a fortress on the other side of Chimayo.”

“You didn’t
recognize the truck?”

He shook his head. “I
haven’t been here in a long time. I remember a few people, but
hopefully they don’t remember me.” There was a faint note of
amusement in his voice.

“Maybe it was a
mistake,” I said, walking over to him. “A wrong turn or
something.”

“There are no wrong
turns out here. Only people looking for trouble.”

“You think they were
looking for you?”

He pulled back the
drapes and looked out, scanning the empty driveway and the dirt road
running across the desert. “Maybe they were. Or…” He quirked
his mouth.

“Or?” I said.

Letting the curtain
drop, he turned toward me. “Or maybe, darlin’, they were looking
for you.”

I left Jane asleep in
bed the next morning, her hair spread temptingly across the pillow
and her bare shoulder rising and falling with every breath.

She didn’t want to go
to the police, and neither did I. All I wanted was to slide up behind
her and wake her with my hard cock, but instead I quietly got dressed
and left the house. Somebody had to do something intelligent for the
first time in almost twenty-four hours.

I drove into Chimayo to
the station where one of my high-school buddies, Miles, was a
homicide detective. We’d kept in sporadic touch, and he was always
the first guy I contacted when my father was wreaking havoc and I
needed inside information.

On the way into town, I
called and gave him Jane’s story. By the time I got to the station,
he’d looked up everything there was to know about her. Which was
absolutely nothing.

Well, not exactly
nothing. But a far cry from what I was hoping for.

“You only got one
call about her, yesterday morning?” I asked.

Miles leaned back in
his worn, creaky desk chair. “Yup. Gas station manager saw her
walking through town half-dressed and called it in, thinking she was
some psycho. By the time we sent somebody out, she was gone.”

“And no missing
person’s report.”

“Nope, not from any
state in the country. Even Alaska and Hawaii.” Miles grinned as if
impressed by his own attention to detail.

“How about Mexico?”
I asked. “Could she have been reported missing there?”

“Maybe,” he said,
pulling absently at his goatee, “but she’s an American. When an
American vanishes in Mexico it usually grabs somebody’s attention.
We get a few of those a month, usually a drug mule or a suicide.”

“So you’re saying
nobody’s missing this girl? If you saw her, you’d understand why
I find that hard to believe.”

Miles shrugged his
wide, rounded shoulders. “Not everybody’s life is neat and tidy,
especially down here. People on the run, nutcases, addicts –”

I swallowed down a
surge of frustration. It wasn’t Miles’s fault, but he was in the
regrettable position of being the only one in the room with me. “I
told you on the phone, she’s not one of those.”

He put his worn-soled
boots up on his desk and crossed his ankles. “How do you know? How
do you know this alleged memory loss isn’t a story she invented so
you’d do what you’re doing now? Taking care of her? Leaving her
in John Manson’s nice, big house all by herself?”

“Instinct,” I said
without a moment’s doubt. “That’s how I know.”

He gave me the jaded
look of a man who’d been jerked around by a woman more than once.
“Many a guy’s life has gone to shit because of an instinct about
a pretty girl.” He put his hands behind his head and laced his
fingers. “Did you fuck her?”

I squinted at him.
“Miles.”

“Oh, great,” he
said, with a sigh. “You fucked her. This situation’s not
complicated enough?”

I had to smile. “Like
I said, you gotta see her.”

“Come on, Drex. Think
about it. You know how many drugs cause memory loss?”

“For Christ’s
sake.”

He gave me a look of
mock innocence. “Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m just trying to
talk some sense into you, is all.”

“Sorry,” I said,
leaning against the chipped gray wall. “This whole thing has got me
stumped.”

“You take a picture
of her?”

“Not yet. She’d
probably have decked me if I tried. I mean, she
did
deck me, but that was about something else.”

“She’s a spunky
one, huh?” Miles said with a suggestive twitch of his eyebrows.

“To say the least.”

He took a long swig
from a Styrofoam cup. “Well, I wish I had better news for you. At
least with your dad we know he’s around here somewhere. It’s just
a matter of smoking him out of his hole.”

“Nobody’s spotted
him recently, though?”

“Not since you came
to town.”

I snorted. That was how
it always went. As soon as I showed up, the man turned into a
phantom, capable of vanishing into the desert without leaving so much
as a footprint.

“Hey, listen,” I
said. “You know anybody around here who drives a green F-250? About
five years old? Dent in the front fender? Big mud flaps?”

Miles frowned. “Where’d
you see it?”

“At John’s house,
last night. After midnight. Drove in, hung around ten minutes, drove
away.”

“Nothing comes to
mind but I’ll keep an eye out. You know how many transients we get
around here. Don’t read too much into it.”

“Yeah, but I’ve got
an instinct.”

Miles shook his head.
“Those instincts again. Someday they’ll get you into one hell of
a quandary.”

“I think they already
have.”

Leaving his office, I
tried really hard to stay frustrated. Instead of finding Elijah and
getting back to the company that needed me, I was wasting precious
time trying to figure out how a blue-eyed stunner had walked out of
an ugly Chimayo afternoon and straight into my life.

But now that I knew
nobody was looking for her, all I felt was relief. Relief and the
crazy urge to drive back to the house at Nascar speeds to see her.

It was tough to admit but damnit, it
was the truth. Every day Jane stayed lost was another day she got to
stay with me.

Sitting in my truck in
the station parking lot, I called every hospital in a two-hundred
mile radius to ask if any female patients had left without being
discharged. I’d never heard the word
no
so many times in one day, not since I’d tried to get investment for
my first pool hall.

No, you’re too young.
No, you’ve got a record. No, your ideas will never work.

I remembered how close
I’d been to fulfilling Elijah’s shitty prediction about me. If it
hadn’t been for Brooke Marshall’s father, I might still be a
self-taught shark with a dream and a pile of ill-gotten gains in the
bank.

If Brooke knew what I
was dealing with down here, she wouldn’t like it one bit. Not just
because her father only invested in people he considered “above
board” with “impeccable reputations.” She was still in love
with me, as hard and as often as she tried to deny it.

It didn’t help that
she worked for me and saw me every day. But that had been a condition
of the investment: give the woman who’d never had to work a day in
her life a job she wasn’t qualified for, simply because she liked
the title. I’d surrounded her with competent people to keep her
from screwing up too much, but what I hadn’t been able to do was
change her attitude. That rich-girl sense of entitlement that rankled
every time I looked at her.

Some of us had come up
from nothing. Some of us still worked our asses off like there was a
wolf at the door, because we knew someday, there might be.

I owed Brooke a lot, I
knew that. If she hadn’t vouched for me, her father never would
have given me a dime, let alone millions. I had to admit, she’d
done a bang-up job of explaining things that made me look like a very
bad bet. Articles online, rumors, grainy photographs taken in bars.

When I’d first met
Scott, I was an ambitious, win-at-any-cost professional gambler with
a felon for a father and a taste for the fast life. Now I was a
success story, the reformed bad boy who mixed in polite society and
collected wine and sculpture.

But since I’d decided
to expand the company to other states, my tie to Brooke and Scott
felt more like a stranglehold. I didn’t like being controlled by
anybody, no matter how much they’d done for me. I’d paid Scott
back ten times over, and as far as I was concerned, the debt was
settled. Any future investment would require only that I work
tirelessly for the company I’d built.

As for Brooke, her
position at Cougan Inc. needed to be renegotiated. Immediately.

I had unfinished
business that I’d let linger way too long. Meeting Jane made me
want to wrap up loose ends, turn over a new leaf, and God knew what
other clichés.

She was the kind of woman who could
change a man for the better just by being around. Trouble was, I knew
she wouldn’t be around for long.

When I woke, Drex was
gone.

Along with a still-hot
pot of coffee, there was a note on the kitchen island.
Gone
to take care of some business. Back in the afternoon.

If he’d gone to the
police, it was too late to stop him. Even if I’d tried, he wouldn’t
have listened.

As I filled a mug, I
knew I should feel bad about what had happened on the counter, the
table, and Drex’s bed. But I didn’t. Whatever I’d done, I’d
done it because I wanted to live and be happy.

I didn’t know what
past was waiting for me, but Drex was right – we only had today.
The hospital had found nothing wrong, but what if they’d missed
something? What if I had a month to live, or less? Shouldn’t I
enjoy the time I had?

That was easy to say
with no memory or responsibilities. I didn’t even have a change of
clothes to weigh me down.

I went to the marble
ensuite bathroom to wash my face and comb my hair with Drex’s comb.
At the sight of my kiss-bruised lips in the mirror, a sexy shiver
went through me. The pleasure of moaning Drex’s name had been
matched only by the thrill of following his orders, on my knees
surrounded by broken dishes.

Maybe I liked giving up
control after three days of craziness and confusion, or maybe I’d
always been like this. Either way, I couldn’t wait for him come
back and do it all over again.

If he didn’t bring
the police instead. Considering my three-day spree of criminal
offenses, it was amazing they hadn’t tracked me down already.

Somebody at the motel
must have called 911 after they found the stone-drunk trucker tied to
the vinyl headboard in their cheapest room a hundred miles from here.
He deserved to be tied up – worse, actually – but I’d done him
a favor by leaving it at that and taking what little cash he had on
him.

I figured he owed it to
me after promising me a meal and a bed for the night, no strings
attached. Right.

Another hard lesson
learned: don’t hitchhike just because you saw some hippie guy doing
it on his way to a music festival. I hoped that in my real life, I
never would have done something so stupid.

If a cruiser hadn’t
pulled into the motel parking lot just as I was gagging the trucker
with his own shirt, I wouldn’t have had to leave my shorts behind.
But it was either get my cutoffs or get the hell out of there, and I
was not about to go to jail for doing what was only fair.