Page 52 of Diagnosis Attraction

Elizabeth tugged at Matt’s arm.

Come on. Let’s split.

Right.

They both headed back the way they’d come, making a wide circle around the man they’d left lying on the ground.

At the car, he wanted to stop and pull her close, but he knew that the first thing they had to do was get away—before more of Lang’s thugs came after them.

They both got into the vehicle, and Matt drove off, thankful that nobody was shooting at them.

I’m hoping life isn’t going to be a series of narrow escapes,she whispered in his mind.

We’ll be a lot safer when Lang is out of the picture.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Tony Verrazano rolled to his back, trying to figure out where he was and what had happened to him.

He was outside. Yeah. He’d been on patrol at The Mansion.

But now he was lying on the hard ground with his head aching like a son of a bitch. His gun was in his hand, and he didn’t remember drawing it. In fact, he couldn’t call up any memories from the past few minutes.

How had he gotten here?

He struggled to pull anything recent into his mind, but nothing would come to him. In a panic, he sat up too quickly and winced at the stab of pain. After checking the safety on the gun, he stuffed it into his shoulder holster, then pulled up his knees and clasped his hands around his legs. Lowering his head, he ordered himself not to start shaking.

Something frightening had happened, and he didn’t know what it was. Worse, he didn’t even know how he’d gotten here. Yeah, he’d thought that before, didn’t he?

Still clenching his hands around his legs—he carefully went back to the last thing he did remember. He’d had a meal in the kitchen of the whorehouse where Lang kept the girls he’d imported from Eastern Europe. Then he’d gone out on patrol.

He’d been walking around the grounds, and something must have happened to him.

But what?

Had he seen something in the woods? Gone in here to have a look? And then what? Or could he have gone in here to take a leak? No, he remembered doing that after his meal.

Nothing like this had ever happened to him before, and he struggled to damp down the fear coursing through him.

Should he tell someone? What if an intruder had invaded the property? Like the woman who had been here a week ago. She was still on the loose, and the boss had ordered all the guards to be extra vigilant.

But he didn’t think she was here now. Or at least, he didn’t want it to be true. He got up and brushed off his clothing, feeling a lot of dirt on the back of his pants, like he’d been dragged into the trees. Could that be true?

Fear trickled down his spine as he scrambled to devise an alternate scenario. Maybe he’d been investigating something in the woods, tripped over a tree root in the dark, fallen, hit his head, and knocked himself out.

Clumsy of him.

Well, he wouldn’t say anything about it and risk getting fired from what he considered a very good job.

“Now what?” Elizabeth asked as they put distance between themselves and The Mansion.

“We shut the place down.”

“I hate the idea of letting that house of horrors operate for even another day, but there’s a second reason we can’t just goto the police. Those women are in the U.S. illegally. Probably, they’ll all be deported if we just call the cops.”

“Yeah, even if they were brought here under false pretenses, they could be caught in thesystem.”

She sighed. “I wish I knew more about it. I don’t want to get them deported because I’m trying to help them.” She thought for a moment. “Maybe my best bet is going back to Sabrina and finding out if there’s some way her friends in Baltimore can shelter them.”

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