Reclaimed (2 page)

That accomplished nothing. She knew she wasn’t dreaming, anyway. An awful taste filled her mouth as the curtains closed, blocking her view of the dark sky. The thick, tasseled sashes landed on the bed just before the bright light of the bedside lamp shone in her eyes
. Jameson had come to stand
beside
her. By then, his henchman was tying off her second ankle, leaving her legs splayed. She wished she’d put on slacks this morning, not the black skirt now
rucked
to her thighs.

She had counseled women who’d been raped. To think she might soon
suffer what they’d gone through
filled her with revulsion
and rage
.

When Jameson held up a hand, encased in a silicone glove, she stared at it, horrified. It took her a second to realize he was clasping her home phone.

“Now,” he drawled in his thick-as-molasses accent, “it’s time to call your husband.” He nodded at his goon, who rounded the bed with his knife. He leaned over her and laid the razor edge against her pulsing jugular.

Connor
.
Just the thought of her tall, capable husband sent hope tingling to Karen’s extremities only to slam into the reality that Jameson had planned every detail of this event, and he would orchestrate it like a master puppeteer, down to the smallest detail.

Those details crystallized in her mind. No doubt they involved catching Connor by surprise, forcing him to watch his wife
be degraded
by a stranger, then, when that was over, Jameson would murder them both, making it look like a double murder-suicide, with Connor responsible.

Oh, n
o. She refused to draw
him
into this.

“Listen,” Jameson purred, leaning over. His eyes shone like coals. “Your very life depends on your doing this right. I will dial your husband’s number and you will invite him over. Tell him anything more and my boy, here, will start cutting off your body parts. He’s been restraining himself, haven’t you,
Cubbins
?”

An abrupt burning on her neck followed by the warm gush of her own blood made Karen cry out in terror, made her abandon her resolution
not
to call on Connor.
Swallowing a scream,
she tried to assess how badly she’s been cut.
Cubbins
lifted his blade, showed her the blood on it, and made an elaborate show of licking it off. 

Karen jerked her gaze away.
Don’t react
. Just think. T
hink
, damn it
!

Clearly, she couldn’t martyr herself, not even to protect Connor. She wasn’t that brave, but she
was
clever. She would signal her situation to Connor somehow, without Jameson or
Cubbins
realizing. 

“
Just.
. . give me a second to get my breath,” she panted, fighting to control her fear so she could
think
.

All the while, her inner child was screaming,
I don’t want to be cut up!
Jameson had threatened
Skyler
with that very thing aboard his yacht: cutting her into pieces and feeding them to the sharks.
D
on’t think of that. Think of what to say to Connor! 

“Time’s up.” Jameson lifted a gloved finger to the phone’s keypad. “Tell him to come over. Not a word more.” As he tapped out
Connor’s
number, Karen recognized the sequence of tones and wondered how he’d ever come by
it. As ringing sounded on the other end,
he put the phone on speaker and held it close to her face. 

What am I going to say?

On the third ring, Connor answered with a hint of bemusement in his voice. “Karen?” 

“Hi.” Her brain shuffled through options and seized on the first one to pop into her head. “It’s so quiet with Drake and
Skyler
gone. I thought you might like to come over?”

The long pause that followed told her either that her offer had caught him off guard or her use of
Skyler’s
real name had raised a red flag. She was hoping for the latter.

“Uh, sure,” he said at last.
Another weighty pause.
“Is everything okay?”

She glanced at the warning glint in Jameson’s eyes. “Yeah, fine. Just bring some brandy, will you? I’m all out.”

Jameson
snatched
the phone back and severed the call. “What was that?” he snarled at her. “Brandy? Was that code for something?”

“No. That’s what he drinks. I don’t have any.”

“I don’t believe you.”

The phone started to ring, and Karen’s heart leapt with hope. Connor was calling her back. He suspected something was amiss.

Jameson tossed the ringing phone onto the chair behind him. “
Cubbins
, cut her clothes off,” he commanded with relish.

“No, please!” She caught herself begging and immediately bit her bottom lip. Squeezing her eyes shut, she thought about the man she knew was grinding his molars as he listened to her phone go to voicemail. What he would do after that depended on whether he
’d
understood her hidden message. They’d been married for twenty-nine years.
Hell, that
had to count for something.

Chapter T
hree

No answer
.
Something wasn’t right. Connor glanced down at the piles of paper littering
his
desk in his fourth-floor office in the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C. He’d planned to stay in the office all night, if he had, to. How the hell was he supposed to kick back and relax knowing Ashton Jameson, whom he’d worked so hard to put behind bars, had violated the terms of his ba
il and left the state of South Carolina
?  

Where the hell had the
Centurion
mobster gone?

And why would Karen call him, tonight of all nights, when she’d made it clear at Thanksgiving and, again, at Drake’s wedding that she wasn’t giving him a second chance? It was bad enough that she’d left him standing on the dance floor all alone, looking like a fool. What the hell kind of game was she playing, asking him to come over now?

Maybe she’d changed her mind. And if she’d forgotten to put the cordless on the charger, which she often did, that would explain why she wasn’t answering his call.  

Only, she’d sounded so strained, and t
hen there was the slipup with
Sk
yler’s
name.

She had to be drunk, which
would
explain the comment about the brandy
, ex
cept that she hated fucking brandy.

He cast a preoccupied glance at the paperwork strewing his desk. As his gaze fell on the memo concerning
Ashton Jameson
, a sudden suspicion speared him straight through the chest. 

Jesus.
It couldn’t be
.

But the suspicion only grew. Shooting to his feet, he pulled his
Glock
from his desk drawer, checked that the clip was full, and leaned over to jam his pistol into his ankle holster.

Heading to the door, he snatched his trench coat off the rack and left the office. He was still threading his arms into the sleeves when he reached the emergency exit stairs. No time to wait for the elevator.

The ringing in his ears resembled an alarm going off. Dread banded his ribcage. He ought to have considered the possibility earlier that Jameson would drive straight from
South Carolina t
o Virginia to avenge the federal agent who’d arrested him. Jameson’s last words to him echoed in his ears:
I swear you’ll regret you ever laid a hand on me. 
 

As he raced down the stairs, Connor snatched his phone off his belt clip and thumbed a number he kept on his speed dial. He would not take chances with Karen’s life.

“Special Agent Gallway.”
The Hostage Rescue team lead answered right away.

“Hey, it’s Donovan.” His voice echoed off the sandstone walls. “Listen, I need an eight-man team dispatched to my wife’s home address,
now
. You remember
where that is?” Gall
way used to attend the Christmas office parties Karen hosted.

Startled silence on the other end.
“Yes, sir.
What’s going on?”

“I think Ashton Jameson’s holding my wife hostage. Meet me on the corner of 24
th
Street and North Trenton
,
and I’ll fill you in.” 

Hanging up, he pushed open the heavy door to the parking garage and ran for his car, one of
a
few remaining. As he squealed out of the parking lot, he suffered the sense that time was
ticking away on an imaginary stopwatch. He gripped the steering wheel harder and floored the accelerator.

**

Jameson’s dark eyes raked her now-naked body.

Karen angled her chin and stared at the ceiling, outwardly composed, though she felt anything but confident with her clothes stripped and peeled off her body. 

“You take good care of yourself,” he noted with approval.

Fuck you
, she thought, refusing to look at him. She worked out five nights a week to keep from going home to an empty house, not so
sickos
like Jameson could appreciate her body.

Cubbins
, standing at the foot of the bed, smacked his lips with relish. She
’d
never felt so vulnerable, so transparently helpless. The loss of her dignity she could deal with. But Connor would see her differently if
Cubbins
defiled her. And that would hurt the most.

Clinging to the thin thread of hope that he’d guessed her circumstances, she prayed that he would hurry. For thirty-five years, now, he had dealt with men such as these. Surely he had picked up on her distress. Nor would he walk blindly into the trap Jameson thought he was setting for him.

A hand landed hot and heavy on Karen’s calf, sliding toward her knees. Bile crept up Karen’s throat.

“Not yet,” Jameson snarled, arresting
Cubbin’s
advances. “You’ll have her soon enough. Go wait by the front door. Tell me when you see him coming.”

With a snarl of impatience,
Cubbins
slumped away and left the bedroom. Karen swallowed hard
at the reprieve
. Jameson, she was fairly certain
,
wouldn’t touch her himself, for fear of leaving DNA behind. He’d hired
Cubbins
for that purpose
, in the event
that
authorities suspect
ed
third-party involvement.

“What’s taking him so long?” Jameson threaded his gloved fingers through her short, russet hair.  

“He’ll be here soon.” Her voice cracked. She wondered if she ought to try and reason with him. Talking clients off of ledges, both real and symbolic, was a common-enough task for her. “You know, it’s not too late to walk away,” she said, smoothing the tremor from her tone. “You have to know there’ll be consequences for your actions.”

“No one will suspect me.” His nasty smile informed her that she was wasting her energy. Whatever conscience the man still had was overshadowed by his narcissism. It was simply inconceivable to him that he might lose at this game he was playing.

Stepping toward the chair where he’d tossed her telephone, he retrieved it. “Find out where he is,” he demanded, tapping out Connor’s number a second time. “Tell him you’ve left the front door open. One more word and I’ll strangle you myself.”

Encircling her neck in one gloved hand, he held the phone to her face. 

Connor answered immediately. “
Karen
.
”

His feral tone sent relief flooding through
her heart.
He knew! Oh, he knew.

“Are you almost here?” Her voice wobbled with desperation, and she glanced fearfully at Jameson as he tightened his grip.    

“I’m picking up the brandy you asked for.
How many bottles?”

Her heart skipped a beat. Was he asking how many men were in the house? “Two,” she said. “Just get one expensive one
, though
. The front
door’s
open,” she added as Jameson slowly squeezed her windpipe.

“I’ll be there soon.
And, Karen?”

The constriction of her throat made it impossible to answer.

“I’m sorry for everything.” Connor’s voice seemed to come from so very far away
,
and for a
heartbreaking
instant, she considered she might never see him again.

With a punch of his thumb, Jameson ended the call. He hurled the phone aside, closed a second hand around her neck, and squeezed harder. “You bitch.” He shook her by the throat. “You tried to tell him who I am
!
”

Her words of denial were stuck in her throat, along with the air that could neither get out nor in. She fought to stay calm, to keep her racing heart from using up all her oxygen.
He
doesn’t want me dead yet. 

At last, he
released her and stepped back
. Her
lungs expanded with relief
.
 

“Hey, boss,”
Cubbins
called suddenly from the front of the house. “I think I see a car coming.”

As Jameson left the room to confer with him, Karen’s composure shattered. She released the sob she’d been holding in since Connor’s apology
. I’m sorry for everything.

Dear God, so was she. If she’d just accepted his compliment on the dance floor at Drake’s wedding, then maybe she wouldn’t be alone and vulnerable at this moment.

If only he’d apologized
to her
then, instead of now. Funny how four simple words,
I’m sorry for everything
, could obliterate three decades of
resentment.
It didn’t even matter that he’d missed Drake and Lucy’s childhood because he was busy forging his career.

Suddenly, ironically, she could see
why
he’d been so aloof
,
at least about his job. Who’d want to talk about the kind of fiends he dealt with on a daily basis? She’d spent less than an hour with two of them and she’d had enough to last her whole life. Connor had probably locked her out of his world to protect her, not to mention so he didn’t have to think about the bad guys in his off-hours.

If anyone should apologize, it was she. For thinking another man could supply the emotional intimacy she craved. For being unfaithful to the only man she’d ever loved.

Hot tears overflowed her eyes and ran into her hair.
I’m sorry, too
, Connor
.
I’m so
terribly
sorry
. She only hoped she still had the chance to tell him.