Page 19 of Operation: Unify

“I’m going to pound this door down if you don’t come out of there.” His voice had gone quiet and steady. Somehow, that was even more threatening.

Lacy lowered herself to the floor where Melinda sat with her knees curled up to her chest. She’d wrapped her arms around her legs in a protective shell. “Melinda? You okay? He can’t get in here. We’ll be okay.”

A wire fished under the door, bobbing toward the door handle. Lacy crawled toward it. “Oh no you will not,” she whispered and yanked on the thin wire with a loop on the end.

She heard something hit the door on the other side and a grunt of pain. He jerked the wire from her hands. “Are you still there?” she asked the man at the front desk.

“Yes, I’m trying to get a hold of the police to see when they’ll be here. It’s a small station and they don’t always know when they can come.” She heard him tapping on the computer.

“Thank you, I hope they hurry.”

She heard him hang up another phone. “Hold on for just a minute, okay? I mean it. Don’t open the door. Stay by the window. If he tries to get in again, just stay back.”

She wasn’t sure what he had planned but she hung up the phone and gathered Melinda from under the table.

“How is standing over here going to save us? I don’t understand.” Melinda hung so tightly to Lacy’s hand that it reminded her of when Connor was in the hospital, fighting for his life, fighting to hold onto her.

“I don’t know. I just do what I’m told.”

A moment later, the fire alarm went off and the sound of water hitting the walls filled the room. Tod screamed on the other side of the door. Lacy waited, sure that a little water wasn’t going to stop him. Then the sound of the fire trucks blasted.

A light knock on their door came and the man from the front desk’s calm voice said, “You can come out now. He’s gone.”

Lacy rushed to the door and opened it. The man who’d scared her so badly just a few hours before now stood in the hall with an umbrella. He grinned. “My boss is going to flip when he finds out his brother pulled the fire alarm.”

“Oh, no.” Had he gotten himself fired and caused so much damage for them?

Melinda rested a hand on Lacy’s shoulder. “He means Tod, his brother owns this hotel. I was sure when he came to the door that he would have a master key card and be able to get into any room. I figured, as soon as we heard him, I was done for. Sincethe room was in your name and there’s nowhere else to go, I might be okay.”

The water stopped spraying and ran in rivulets down the wall. The man from the front desk closed his umbrella and shook it off. “He does and he would have except I had an eye on the cameras, and I kept switching the code to your room as he would try to use his card. Then he tried brute force. I know him. I knows he’s a rotten drunk and I knew you were in this room.” He nodded toward Lacy.

“Thank you for not holding my rudeness against me. I don’t know what we would’ve done.”

“You would’ve only had seconds to prepare. The lock makes that click sound as it disengages. That would’ve been your only warning. So, where are you both going now? They’ll have to clear out this hotel until they can figure out what caused the fire alarm to go off. It’ll take a few days to do the water cleanup too.”

Lacy looked at Melinda since she was from the area. “How in the world did I manage to pick a hotel owned by your husband’s brother?” If she’d known, she would’ve chosen another one.

“If you want to avoid hotels and stay off grid, so to speak, my dad owns one of those houses that he rents out by the day. It’s an Air BnB or something.”

Lacy got excited for a few seconds, then reality hit. “It’s the week before Christmas, there is no way his house isn’t rented out. I don’t know where we’re going to stay. I would take you home with me if it weren’t out of state.”

“Let me call my dad. Oh, I’m Randy, by the way. Nice to meet you.”

Lacy looked outside the room at the grumbling hotel patrons rushing to the empty front desk to check out after the fire alarm. The morning would’ve been so much worse if she hadn’t gone through a few minutes of discomfort to meet Randy. “I’m Lacy, and it’s nice to meet you, too.”

Chapter Seven

The front desk at the hotel where Lacy was supposed to be wasn’t answering phone calls. Connor pressed his screen to dial once again, hitting the phone a little harder than necessary.

“Tell me again why you don’t just get in your truck and go?” Dad chuckled. “You’re not doing anyone any good if you’re sitting here worried and focused on that phone.”

He’d considered it a half-dozen times. “But I can’t do that. It will tell her I don’t trust her. What good is trying to get her to trust me enough to come back if I show her that I don’t, even if that’s not what I mean.” He’d been rolling the cons around in his head for hours.

“Connor, she’s known you longer than she hasn’t known you. Trust isn’t the issue.” His dad massaged his sore knee.

“Then why did she need time to herself? She needed time away, that’s what she said. There was no, ‘do you want to come with me’? It was clearly, ‘I need time away from you,’ and running after her seems pretty desperate.”

Maybe he was desperate. Maybe he was one of those guys who just couldn’t get his head on straight in the morning untilthe woman he loved was doing well. He’d always thought he wasn’t the kind of guy who needed to prove anything, but the last few weeks, her silence was testing him.

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