Suddenly, Sophie remembered the mess she’d made of the bed when she took the pillows and the quilt. She picked up one and looked at Reede in alarm.
“I straightened it,” he whispered, his lips touching her ear.
It all depended on if the man had seen the room before. If he had, he might miss the pillows and start trying to find out what had happened to them.
When she heard the man’s footsteps outside the closet, Sophie held her breath. Reede silently put his arms around her. As the man came closer, Sophie went rigid with fear—and Reede began kissing her ear. At first she was annoyed with him. How could he think of sex at a time like this?
But after a moment she began to relax. His lips soothed her, distracted her from the fact that just a few feet away was a man with a gun.
By the time the man slammed the closet door shut, Sophie’s neck was arched backward and Reede’s lips were moving downward.
When the danger was past, he gave her a perfunctory kiss by the earlobe, set her upright, opened the door a couple more inches, and looked out. He seemed to be totally unaffected by what he’d just done.
He sat back down and stared across at her. “You don’t have a cell phone with you, do you?” He answered his own question. “No room in that thing. You know how bad that is for your celiac plexus, don’t you?”
Sophie could only blink at him. What had happened to the man who had been only sweet and kind? “No phone,” she managed to say.
“Look in the basket. I doubt if there’s one in there, but we can hope.”
Sophie quietly rummaged inside the basket, but there was only the remnants of their meal. “What are they doing?”
“They’re eating and there are two guns on the table.”
Reede leaned back against the wall and was glad when the men turned on a radio. It would cover their voices. “It’s my guess that they’re meeting the man Pete here and they’ll spend the night. We may have to stay here until they leave.” He gave her a crooked smile. “Are you prepared for a sleepover?”
If he’d asked that ten minutes ago she would have said yes, but his crack about her celiac plexus still stung. “Maybe I’ll go downstairs and introduce myself. I’ve always wanted to be a gangster’s moll.”
She said it so seriously that he wasn’t sure if she meant it. Some women looked on guns as a sign of power. They—He realized she was kidding. Just as seriously, he said, “Think I could use my Zorro whip and knock both guns off the table?”
“You couldn’t do that!” she said in alarm, then knew he was teasing. “What do we do?”
“Wait. If we leave here they’ll see us. Damn but I wish I could call the sheriff. My gut tells me that these men are criminals on the run. Maybe I should distract them and try to—”
“No!” Sophie said too loudly, then lowered her voice. “We’ll just wait. Even if we have to stay here all night. We have food—some anyway—and wine. What more could we want?”
“Safety,” Reede said as he leaned back against the wall.
He was doing his best to stay calm and not let Sophie see that he was frightened for her. If he were alone he would make his way across the ceiling beam, go down the iron ladder, and out the side window. He doubted if the lock had been repaired since he was a kid. If he couldn’t get out that way, he’d make his way to the side door.
But he couldn’t do that now and leave Sophie behind. He’d already seen that she wasn’t exactly adventurous. Not the type to want to go hang gliding. She’d been frightened just by seeing him swing across a room. It seemed that both leaving her alone and getting her to go with him were out of the question.
On the other hand, he’d seen some other things about her too. For one thing, she wasn’t like those wimpy women who worked for him. Say one word to them that wasn’t kind and considerate and they ran away and hid. But not Sophie. He’d been abrupt with her, and it had put fire in her. When pushed, she snapped back—or poured beer over the person who’d upset her.
He leaned back against the wall and did his best to act as though he were so calm that he was falling asleep. But even with his eyes half closed, all he could do was look at her. She was truly beautiful—and built! The corset pulled her waist in so it was tiny, and most of the top of her was above the fabric. She had on a lacy black blouse over the red corset, but little was concealed. As for the bottom half of her, she had on a black skirt that was slit to nearly her waist, and every time she moved, her legs were exposed: slim, well
shaped, truly beautiful.
Reede had no idea why his sister had tried to push her other college roommate onto him. Or why Kim had concealed Sophie from him. Maybe Kim had thought he’d be too dazzled by Sophie’s beauty to make an intelligent decision. Or, more likely, Kim thought Reede was too bad tempered, too tough, to unleash on sweet little Sophie.
And maybe he was, he thought. And maybe what he was going to do to her in the next few minutes was going to make her hate him. But then, she was already going to hate him when she found out that he’d almost run over her in his car.
Whatever the consequences, he was going to have to get her out of this place—and the only way to do that was to walk across the beam. But first, he had to put some backbone, some courage, into her.
He opened his eyes and looked directly at her.
At Reede’s look, the hairs on Sophie’s neck stood on end. “We have to get out of here, don’t we?”
“Yes,” he said.