Taken (3 page)

“What does that mean?
 
You’ve taken care of it?” I’m squeezing your hand, holding on for dear life.

You tuck my hair back behind my ear. “Don’t worry, Rachael. I’ve taken care of everything. She’s not worried about you.”

Thoughts race through my head. I grasp for them, but they slip through my fingers. “
What did you do to my mother?”

You pick up my sandwich and hand it to me. “Please, Rachael, do you think I’d hurt her? I told you, everything I did, I did for you. I told your mom that your plans to join me here were sudden and you would be in touch soon. Now eat.”

“She believed you? That easily?”

He grins, a dimple studs his cheek. “I can be charming and persuasive.”

I didn’t know my mom could be charmed or persuaded by a man. I take another bite. My throat is constricted, and I’m sure I won’t be able to swallow. You pick up the T.V. remote and turn it on. “Any preference?”

I shake my head and wash down my sandwich with a huge amount of water. “Can I see the hotel?” Maybe I’ll locate a phone or a vehicle I can steal.

You meet my eyes, considering. “Okay. You seem calm now. It’s not like you can go anywhere. The only way off this island is by helicopter. You don’t fly, do you?”

“Fly?” My head instantly aches. “No, I don’t fly.” With my free hand, I gesture to my bound wrist. “Why am I tied to a bed if I can’t get off the island?”

“So you couldn’t hurt yourself.”
 
One side of your lip quirks into a bashful smile. “Or me.”

“Hurt you? You’re a lot bigger and stronger than me.”

“I was afraid you might go crazy.”

I can’t do anything but stare at you and blink. “You abduct me and
you
were afraid
I
might go crazy?”

You bite your lips, trying not to laugh. “I never said I was good at this. It’s my first time. You have to cut me some slack.”

I can’t suppress a sharp laugh. It surprises me as much as it does you. “Other than tying my wrists, you suck at this.”

You thread your fingers through your hair and rest the palms of your hands on your forehead. “I should have never done it. I’m sorry. It was impulsive and stupid.” You let your hands fall and lower to your knees beside me.
 
Your fingers work quickly to untie my bound wrist. When it’s free, you hold my hand and look in my eyes. “I didn’t know how to get you to come with me.”

I can’t shake the feeling that you’re way ahead of me—that your feelings are more than two people who were attracted to each other in a bar one night. “How long have you been watching me?”

You take a deep breath and look down at my hand in yours. “Since about a week after you turned down the job.”

I pull my hand from yours. Your touch isn’t welcome. “Three months. That was three months ago.”

You nod, but won’t look me in the eye. You’re ashamed. “I didn’t peek in your windows or anything like that. I respected your privacy. Nobody has ever refused a project manager position at Rocha Enterprises. When you told me your situation and turned down my offer to relocate you
and
your mom…” You let out a long breath, and your eyes finally crawl to mine. “My intention was to convince you—in person—to take the job. But after I got to you, after I found out what kind of woman you are, I knew there was nothing I could say and no amount of money I could offer to change your mind.
 
I got desperate.”

I stare you down, want to make you flinch under my hard gaze. Your eyes hold steady on mine, up for the challenge. “What kind of woman am I?”

You lift your chin a little more. “Smart, but I knew that from our phone conversation. Beautiful, but a lot of women are.” You reach up with a shaky hand and brush my cheek. “Kind and loyal. Caring. Loving. Selfless.” You smile watching your fingers trail across my skin. When you meet my cold eyes, your hand falls and your smile falters. “The kind of woman who could have everything she wants if she would only take it for herself. But she won’t. That’s why I brought you here.”

I make a fist, squeeze it tight and pound it against my knee. What were you thinking? “Take me on a tour of this place. I can’t think about this anymore.”

I was right. You are keeping me in the attic. It’s the only part of the hotel that’s habitable. Plaster crumbles off the walls. Chipped and broken tile litters the floors. You lead me to the grand staircase.
 
It sweeps in a wide arc from the third floor down to the entryway.

I place my hand on the top of the railing. “That’s not secure,” you say, putting an arm around my waist to keep me from falling over the side.

“This is mangrove root, isn’t it?” I ask, bending to slide my fingers over a twisted wooden baluster.

Your serious, focused gaze is back, appraising me. “Yes. Local to the area. This railing was installed ̶

“During the recovery from the Okeechobee Hurricane in nineteen twenty-eight.” I run my hands over the soft, worn wood. “There wasn’t much money to rebuild, so they used what they had on-hand.”

When I turn back to you, your hands are tucked inside your jeans pockets, and there’s a smug smile on your lips.

“What?” I ask.

“My method for getting you here couldn’t have been worse, but I knew this place had worked its way inside you like it has me.” You run your hand along the railing, stopping beside mine. “Nobody knows its history like you. After our interview, I knew you were the only one I could trust it to.”

“What made you buy it?” I take a step down, and you follow beside me. “It’s falling apart, there’s no access to the island. It’ll take a miracle to make this place operational again.”

“It doesn’t matter. Look at this place.” You stop and open your arms wide taking in the soaring ceiling with thick wood beams and colorful peeling Spanish murals of trees, lakes, birds and turtles. “Tell me you don’t feel it.”

I do feel it. It’s magic. Life throbs outside the long, shuttered windows. Tendrils of tender green vines snake through cracks in the foundation, sneak in under doors and climb up window frames. “I feel it,” I whisper to myself. But you hear me.

“I knew you did,” you whisper back. “Do you know how it got its name? Turtle Tear Island?”

“No. That’s the one piece of history I couldn’t dig up.” I spent hours and hours prepping for my interview with Rocha Enterprises. When I first started researching the historic hotel, I fell instantly for its rustic charm. Turtle Tear was the only place to vacation in the twenties if you were wealthy. Even celebrities stayed on the island for their summers.

I found black and white pictures online of women in cocktail dresses sitting on the tiled patio under the shade of ancient flowering trees. I could almost hear the circular fountain in the center of the patio trickling with water when I stared at the photo. I printed a few pictures and carried them in my day planner until I turned down the job.

“There’s a legend,” you say starting down the stairs again, “that Ponce de León while searching the Everglades for the Fountain of Youth took a Native American lover and kept her on this island. He promised her when he found the fountain, they would marry, and they’d have children together.” You stop to make a point. “I’ve read theories that Ponce was obsessed with finding the fountain to cure his impotence.”

After a shrug, you continue. We’re almost to the bottom of the stairs to the grand entryway. “Ponce never found the fountain and never returned to her. This ties in to the name Turtle Tears because when sea turtles lay eggs, they secrete a gel-like substance out of their eyes to clear the sand, but it looks like tears. The tears of turtles laying eggs on the island became connected to the childless lover of Ponce de León alone and abandoned here until her death.”

We step off the last stair onto the broken terracotta tiles in the entryway. “If my recollection of middle school history is correct, the story can’t be true. Ponce de León was married to a woman named Lenore before he ever came to Florida, and they had kids,” I say.

You sigh and step forward, reaching out to pick a flake of red paint off the wall. “Sometimes men make promises they don’t intend to keep.”

You’re lost inside your thoughts. I wander to the other side of the room, dodging debris. A storm must’ve knocked the window above the door out—shards of glass glitter all over the floor. It sparkles in the sun streaming in from the shattered remains of jagged glass around the frame.

I don’t know what to make of you.

I glance back, and you haven’t moved. You’re still picking paint from the wall, deep in the past somewhere mulling over promises you made and didn’t keep?
 
It’s then I realize I’m not afraid of you. I don’t think I ever was afraid physically. My fear was never getting home.

A wavy lock of hair falls and brushes your cheek. Standing there lost in thought, you look so innocent, so young. “How old are you?” I blurt without thinking.

You turn, startled. I think you forgot I was there with you. “Thirty-two.” Only seven years older than me and you’ve accomplished so much. “Why?” you ask.

You always look so serious, so…alone. I noticed that in photos of you in magazines and online. I wonder if you are alone a lot. “I read about you before my interview, but I didn’t know you were so young.” For some reason, now I feel like I’m the one who’s been spying on you.

You turn and gaze up at the soaring ceiling. “I feel like I’m fifty most days.” Your eyes swivel to mine. “God knows I’ve made enough mistakes to fill fifty years.”

You want me to forgive you. You’ve given me this gift, this dream. You want me to tell you it wasn’t a mistake.

I can’t. I don’t know if I can ever forgive you for drugging me and bringing me here without my knowledge. Tying me up.

Your eyes plead with me.
I did it for you,
they say. But why? I can’t understand what would make you take such a chance? You could go to jail if I made one phone call. You could lose everything. “Why did you risk so much? I’m a stranger to you.”

You rub your hands together and groan, torn about what to tell me. “I owed it to…let’s just say the universe. I owed it to the universe. I had a lot to make up for. I knew how much this place meant to you. I could hear it in your voice over my laptop speakers. I could see it in your eyes and the look on your face. It was more yours than mine. Then I saw you one day...”

You turn toward the window and drag a hand through your hair, tug at the back. “I saw you in a coffee shop near your apartment. You had printouts of photos of this place. When you left, you tore them up and tossed them in the trash. After you got inside your car, I saw you break down in tears and sob against the steering wheel.”

You take a few steps toward me. “You needed this place. It needed you. I needed to give it to you. That’s it.”

 
I remember that day. Why didn’t I see you there? I sat at a table taking my last glimpses of Turtle Tear Hotel, determined to destroy my pictures and smother the hope I’d had of bringing it back to life. Each rip of paper tore through my heart. I couldn’t get to my car fast enough so I could melt into a puddle of tears.
 
“You saw me there.”
 
It seems surreal to go from that moment to standing here in the grand entryway now.

“I saw you there,” you say, shuffling your foot across the shards of glass on the floor.

“Is that when you decided to take me?”

You take a few more tentative steps toward me, glass cracking under your feet. “That’s when I knew I had to do something. That’s when I got desperate.”

My emotions are tangled and warring. For good or bad, you gave me my dream back. Nobody else could see how much taking the job meant to me—nobody cared to see. But you did. A man I spoke to once on the phone. You knew because it meant just as much to you.

I want to hug you, hit you, yell at you, and cry for joy.

You tilt your head and smile softly, like you see all of my pent up emotion written on my face and don’t want it to erupt. Slowly, you reach out and run your hand down my arm. “Let’s finish the tour. You haven’t seen the fountain.”

I let you take my hand and lead me down a hallway that runs under the stairs toward the back of the hotel. We enter a lounge. A stone fireplace is built into the corner and two enormous wooden doors sit on the back wall.
 
You take the iron handle on one of the doors and brace your feet apart. When you pull, the muscles in your arms and back tighten and ripple. The muscles in your thighs press against your jeans.
 
The magnetism I felt at the club rushes back. I fight against my desire to touch you—to have you touch me.