Shorts - Thriller 2: Stories You Just Can't Put Down (32 page)

“I just wanted to love her.”

“That’s crossing the line. You can love her. You just can’t love her all the way.”

It made a twisted kind of sense. Nick pictured the day at the watering hole where Mikey Pryce had promised to love Melanie forever, even promising to marry her. Unwittingly, he’d triggered Melanie’s murderous reflex, which she repeated with Matthew Warner, Miles Talbot and now him. They’d all promised their undying love only to see it die.

“God, you’re bleeding bad.” Jamie took his hands away. Blood pulsed from the wound and Nick felt his strength drain from him with every pulse. “There’s nothing I can do. I’m sorry, Nick. Truly, I am.”

Jamie rose to his feet and hugged his sister. “It’s okay. You’ve done nothing wrong. I’ll make this all go away.”

“Call 911,” Nick pleaded.

“I wish I could, but I can’t let the police take her,” Jamie said and turned to Melanie. “It’s okay. You’re safe. Now, go back to the car and I’ll take care of this.”

Seemingly under a hypnotic trance, Melanie followed Jamie’s command and ambled back to the car. Nick screamed out to her, but she was lost to him.

“You can’t keep protecting her, Jamie,” Nick said as Jamie bent toward him.

“I know,” Jamie said with genuine regret, “but I can this time.”

It was the last thing Nick heard as Jamie lifted him over the pier railing and rolled him into the bay.

In the hands of Joan Johnston, the human heart becomes a catalyst for suspense. With more than forty novels and ten million copies of her books in print worldwide, she is a proven master of the craft who knows how to complicate the tensions behind everyday relationships. If there’s a character’s heart to be broken, Joan will snap it in two and decide later if it should be allowed to heal.

In “Watch Out for My Girl,” Nash Benedict finds himself turning Benedict Arnold after promising to look after his brother’s girl while he serves in Iraq. An accidental crush becomes an inappropriate affair of the heart. And
that
leads the characters headlong into a meeting with murder.

“I
had a helluva time getting your number, Benedict. I called because Morgan Hunter is missing.”

Nash Benedict heard the irritation in the voice of Morgan’s boss, Captain Hart, Commander of Fire Station 7 in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He made no apology. He was hard to reach for good reason. A picture of Morgan’s anguished face the last time he’d seen her flashed across his mind. His voice was unexpectedly thick with emotion as he confirmed, “Morgan’s missing?”

“She didn’t show up this morning at seven for her twenty-four-hour shift and didn’t call to say she wouldn’t be showing up. She’s never missed a day of work in five years. Never even been late. You can see why I’d be concerned.”

Nash glanced at his watch. 6:00 p.m. “She’s been missing since seven this morning and you’re just now calling me?”

“I’d have called you sooner, but nobody knew how to reach you,” the captain retorted.

Someday soon, Morgan Hunter would be his sister-in-law.
She was dating his younger brother, Carter, who’d left six months ago for a one-year tour of duty in Iraq.

“Watch out for my girl, Nash. Don’t let anything happen to her while I’m serving my country overseas.”

Nash had known what Carter really meant was
Don’t let some son of a bitch move in on Morgan while I’m serving my country overseas.
Carter had never imagined that something sinister might threaten his girl. Or that the something sinister might be his elder brother.

Nash felt the blood pound in his temples. Carter had asked only one favor. And Nash had failed to deliver. Completely.

He’d done his best over the past six months, while Carter was dismantling IEDs—improvised explosive devices—in Iraq, to keep an eye on Carter’s girl. In between covert missions for the U.S. president, Nash had gone sailing with Morgan on Chesapeake Bay, laughed with her at a revival of
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
at the Kennedy Center and picked crabs with her at the Crab Shack in Baltimore.

Nash hadn’t expected to fall in love with his brother’s girl any more than he’d expected her to disappear.

But he was in love with Morgan Hunter. And no one had seen hide nor hair of the woman for the past eighteen hours.

Nash felt a wave of guilt wash over him. This was his fault. Morgan had run from him. Because of what he’d done last night on her front doorstep.

He hadn’t meant to kiss her. They’d been convulsed with laughter, leaning helplessly on each other. She’d turned her face up to his, sharing the hilarious moment. On impulse he’d lowered his head, and his mouth had found hers. For a moment, she’d responded. Hungrily.

Then she’d gasped and backed up a step. And stared at him in the harsh porch light with wide, wounded brown eyes. Asking him without words how he could betray his brother. How he could betray her trust.

Nash didn’t want Morgan to be the victim of some accident, but he grasped at that possibility as something besides his behavior that might have caused her absence from work. “You’ve checked with the area hospitals?” he asked the commander.

“I called the hospitals, I checked with her father in Bethesda, I’ve left messages on her cell—which have gone straight to voice mail. I even sent another firefighter to her apartment in Avendale,” Captain Hart said.

“The front door was unlocked, but the place was pristine, no signs of disturbance. Her purse was there with her wallet inside. But her keys and her cell phone and her Jeep were missing.”

“Are you telling me no one has any idea where she might have gone?” Nash asked the station commander.

“I figured you would know, Benedict. You’re the one she’s been spending all her free time with.” Captain Hart made it an accusation.

“I don’t have a clue where she is,” Nash snapped. “She was fine when I left her about ten last night.” Except, perhaps, for feeling as guilty then about what had happened between them as Nash did now.

“I can’t believe you kissed me! What were you thinking? I’m going to marry your brother when he comes home. I love him.”
She’d swiped the back of her hand across her mouth as though to wipe away his kiss, staring at him above that erasing hand through wary, watery eyes.

“I miss Carter,” she’d said quietly, using his brother’s name to stab him in the heart. “I think it would be better if we don’t see each other anymore,” she’d added, twisting the knife.

Nash shuddered at the memory.

“One of my best firefighters has disappeared,” the captain said. “If you know anything—”

“I don’t!” Nash could hear the affection and agony in the commander’s voice. He knew exactly how the man felt.

“I’ll be calling the local precinct to file a missing persons report when enough time has passed. I don’t like the looks of this, Benedict. I don’t like it at all.”

Nash closed his cell phone and slipped it back into the pocket of his cammies. He was scheduled to leave for El Salvador with his team on a covert presidential mission at midnight.

Which gave him just six hours to find his brother’s girl.

And make amends. Assuming she would let him apologize. Assuming that the reason she’d disappeared was nothing more sinister than an unwanted kiss.

Nash felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck as he thought of what else might have happened to Morgan Hunter.

What if Juan Espinoza, the drug lord whose coca crop Nash had ruined the last time he was in Colombia, had figured out the identity of his nemesis, “The Ghost,” and made good on his threat.

“I’ll find you,
El Fantasma.
Then I’ll find what you love most. And I’ll destroy it.”

Nash huffed out a breath. He hadn’t feared the threat because he’d been sure his cover was unassailable. No one except his elite team knew that Nash Benedict, son of presidential advisor Foster Benedict, was the scourge of the South American drug trade. And of Montana militiamen. And Basque separatists. And Somalian war lords.

What if one of his many foes had found him out? And come seeking vengeance—through the woman he loved. Maybe his kiss had nothing to do with Morgan’s disappearance.

Nash felt adrenaline spill into his veins. Felt his muscles cord with tension and his neck hairs hackle, a feral beast readying for battle.

But he was also a rational man, and his thoughts held him in place. If Morgan had been kidnapped, why hadn’t he received a ransom note? Or a vindictive message telling him that what he loved most was lost forever?

Maybe the note is on the way.

That thought sent a chill rattling down his spine.

And maybe you’re freaking out over nothing. Maybe Morgan took off for a while to think.

And missed work? Without calling her boss?

Morgan Hunter was the strongest, most confident, most “together” woman he knew, which was a great part of his attraction to her. She was a firefighter who often dealt with life-and-death emergencies. Would a woman with her self-confidence, her physical and emotional strength, fall apart from a single kiss, for which the perpetrator had been well-chastised on the spot?

He had to find Morgan and bring her home safe. That was the least he could do after kissing his brother’s girl.

Morgan Hunter couldn’t believe the predicament in which she found herself. She’d felt confused and upset when she’d grabbed her keys an hour after Nash Benedict had kissed her and gone for a drive to think.

She hadn’t planned to be gone long. She’d left the radio off in her Jeep, because she didn’t want to be distracted or soothed. She wanted to examine her feelings with brutal honesty. Because she had strong feelings for Nash Benedict that conflicted with her love for his brother.

She’d left home without thinking which direction she was going. When she finally noticed her surroundings an hour later, she was driving along a winding, deserted rock-and-gravel road. Almost at the same instant a deer appeared in her headlights.

The deer froze. And so did she.

At least, for that part of a second that would have allowed her to brake before she hit the animal. Or make a wiser choice than the one she made.

Morgan had seen enough accident victims as a firefighter to know that hitting anything head-on, even if she was only going
forty-five, was a bad move. So she jerked the wheel to miss the deer, then jerked it again to miss the gnarled trunk of an ancient black walnut—and flipped her Jeep.

It rolled three times before it came to an abrupt and jarring halt right-side-up in the embrace of a copse of spruce. Sometime during one of those rolls, the driver’s side air bag had deployed. It was already deflating, but Morgan smelled the acrid scent of the cartridge that had exploded to fill it with air, and watched wide-eyed as a stream of white smoke rose behind the steering wheel.

It had all happened so fast!

Morgan couldn’t believe she was alive. And apparently unhurt. She gasped with relief and felt a sharp pain in her chest. Not entirely unhurt. She had either badly bruised or broken a rib. She reached down with a trembling hand to fumble at the seat belt release.

She felt tremendously relieved when she heard a click and the seat belt let go. With the constricting pressure gone from her chest, she took another deep breath.

“Ow,” she croaked. Could that excruciating pain be the result of a rib that was simply bruised? She would have to be very careful. If she put a broken rib through her lung out here in the middle of nowhere, it was goodbye, so long, adios, baby.

She recognized the swelling along the back of her neck as a whiplash injury. Warm blood dripped from her chin, and she realized she must have bitten her cheek or her lip.

Morgan was afraid to move. Afraid to discover another injury. Most of the full moon’s light was blocked by trees that had only half shed their autumn leaves. She reached around the deflated air bag, searching for the keys, which she found in the ignition. She tasted blood as she caught her lower lip in her teeth for luck—and turned the key.

The car was dead.

“Bad words. Bad words. Bad words,” she muttered.

There was no sign of civilization from where she was sitting. Thank God she’d brought her cell phone with her. She’d almost left it at home, because she was afraid Nash would call, and she didn’t want to speak to him until she’d sorted out what she was going to say. She certainly didn’t want to talk to him now. Not after doing something so stupid. Better to call 911.

Morgan reached—carefully—into the shallow pocket of her black leather jacket.

And found it empty.

“Bad, bad words.”

She reached up gingerly to turn on the interior light to search for where her phone might have landed. Which was when she realized the windows on the passenger’s side of the car were shattered. Had her cell phone gone out one of those broken windows?

She felt a flash of panic and shoved it down. She’d recently heard a story about a woman who’d lost control of her car on Route 40 and hit a tree. She’d been found—ten days later—partially consumed by wild animals and riddled with insects.

“That’s not me,” she said out loud.

She tried to turn her head to look in the backseat, but it hurt too much. She shoved at the driver’s side door and it screeched open. She eased herself sideways, groaning when she realized that one of her ankles was swollen the size of a grapefruit.

“Great. That’s just great.”

Her Jeep footwell was high enough off that ground that she would have a drop when she got out of the car. She braced herself with her hands, then scooted off the seat and landed on her uninjured foot.

Even that little bit of jarring hurt both her chest and her ankle. She hissed in a breath and held it as she put pressure on her injured foot.

“Ow,” she said again. “Oh, ow.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, relieved that her ankle was only sprained. Painful, but not impossible to walk on. The back passenger door was crushed and wouldn’t budge. She limped to the hatch and opened it and crawled up inside on hands and knees, leaning over the backseat to search for her phone.

She was appalled at how weak she felt. Shock, she realized. Maybe she was even bleeding internally, if that rib was broken and tearing into her flesh.

She knew too much about internal bleeding. Too much about broken ribs stabbing into lungs. Too much about shock killing you as fast—or even faster—than your actual injuries.

She couldn’t find her phone. She consoled herself with the thought that, even if she found it, there might not be any reception out here. If someone picked her up on the road, she wouldn’t need her cell phone. And if no one picked her up tonight, she could always hobble back here and hunt for her phone in the daylight.

She suddenly realized how cold it was. Cold enough to see her breath. Cold enough to make her shiver in the light leather jacket she’d grabbed on her way out the door.

Morgan found a dogwood limb she could use for a makeshift cane and followed the trail of destruction caused by her Jeep back to the road. Her flourescent watch showed it was six minutes past midnight. What were the chances someone would be coming along this two-lane, rock-and-gravel road at this hour?

Morgan stood at the edge of the road and looked in both directions. She wasn’t even sure which way led to the closet place where help could be found. She hadn’t walked ten steps before—to her amazement and delight—she saw a pair of headlights in the distance.

Almost sagging with relief, she watched the car make its slow, winding way toward her. To her surprise, the car stopped fifty yards downhill from her. She started to yell at the driver as he
stepped out of the car into the bright moonlight. For some reason her breath caught in her throat and held her silent.

Why is he stopping there?

As she watched, he slid a small, slender body out of the backseat and hefted it over his shoulder. A very long striped, light-and-dark scarf was draped around his neck. The woman’s long blond hair hung almost to his butt, nearly even with the length of his scarf.