Page 105 of Guilty as Sin
The woman on Paige’s right stirred and said, “Chris? It’s me. Tell her to let me go. She attacked me and dragged me here at gunpoint.”
Jace said, “Sergeant Worthington, I presume. Here’s your sister Jennifer. I can’t wait to hear the rest of it.”
Jace needed to see how bad Paige’s face was. “Sensitive” didn’t sound good to him, and the bees were still buzzing around. Sergeant Worthington got stung, yelped, and swatted, and Jace felt all the satisfaction of it. Sometimes, it was good to lie quietly on the ground, and an angry, disturbed beehive was definitely one of those occasions.
It was another ten minutes or more, though, before he got to check on Paige. When Worthington finally had handcuffs on his sister and her husband—surely not an experience any officer would relish—Jace said, “Paige has been badly stung. I need to take her into the house and check it out.”
“You can’t,” Paige said. “I didn’t bring my purse. The keys are in there.”
“Hand me that torch, mate,” Jace told Worthington, and when he didn’t comply, added, “Flashlight. Let me check.”
Paige was right. She was sensitive. Her upper lip was three times its size, and her ear and cheek were puffing up, too. He asked, “How do you feel?”
“Not bad,” she mumbled through that fat lip. “My throat’s fine. I told you. I’m sensitive. I need a steroid shot, that’s all. It doesn’t matter.” She asked the woman beside her, “Why would you do this? You heard Brett Hunter say he’d pull out of the project if something happened to me.”
Jennifer said, “Because that was a lie. Obviously it was a lie. He’s not going to leave a profitable project like this on the table because somebody messed with your chickens and bees. He was just saying that. This is business.”
“Joke’s on you,” Paige said, “because my sister’s already made an agreement with Hunter for her land. You’re making your brother arrest you, you’re facing charges for malicious mischief and a lawsuit, and your reputation’s going to be toast, and it’s all for nothing. It was going to happen anyway.”
“What sister?” Jennifer asked. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Her husband didn’t say anything. He hadn’t said a thing so far, in fact. Dragged along, Jace would bet anything, and wishing like hell that he’d married somebody else. Paige said, “I’m not Lily Hollander. You didn’t even get the right woman. I’m Lily’s sister Paige. I’m with the San Francisco Police Department. Like I said. Joke’s on you.”
Life didn’t always give you that moment of pure satisfaction, but this time, it did. Until Paige suddenly said, as Worthington was leading Jennifer’s still-silent husband to the patrol car, “Lily.”
Jace asked, “Lily what?”
“Something’s wrong with Lily. Something bad. We need to find her. We need to go.”
Worthington tried to stop her. Paige didn’t listen. The truck was blocked by the patrol car, so she told Jace, “Run,” put the goggles over her eyes again, and did it.
Her leg hurt, and so did her face and her shoulder. She ignored all of them. Down the paved road, around the corners. Jace was out in front of her, his long legs eating up the ground. Her lungs told her she hadn’t done anything aerobic in a month and that she had too many bee stingers in her body, and she ran anyway.
Please, Lily,she thought.Please be at Jace’s.Lily had said before that if somebody broke in, she’d run through the woods. If she hadn’t made it to Jace’s, though… where would she be?A bear,Paige’s treacherous mind tried to say.A mountain lion.The pulsing waves Paige was getting felt like that. Like fear, not pain. Like terror.
Less than five minutes to get down the road, and Jace had turned onto the gravel side road, was running uphill. They were almost to his house. She could hear something, now. The deep, husky sound of a very big dog barking.
Tobias was outside the cabin. One front leg tucked up against himself, crashing all the same into the front door, then doing it again. And barking. He turned at sight of Jace and Paige, and Jace ran up the stairs, his tread light, motioned Tobias back, and shoved the door open, moving inside with care and deliberation, shotgun first.
It was unlocked. Or more like—the lock was torn out, because the frame around the deadbolt was splintered. In the stone-flagged entryway, a metal box lay crumpled. The panel to the alarm, prised out of the wall.
The lights were off, and Jace didn’t turn them on. Paige slipped past him, signaled to him.I’ll go upstairs. You check down here.
He nodded. There was no sound, but there was somebody here. She felt it, and she knew Jace did, too. No car. No truck. But somebody was here. Lily would have slipped out the back again while the person was breaking in the front, taking on Tobias. She was out there in the dark, and somebody was hiding here, waiting for Jace. Paige hoped.
She moved up the stairs weapon-first, placing her feet as silently as she could. When a board creaked underfoot, she didn’t freeze. She kept going. Another creak.
Nothing.
No door to the bedroom, nothing but shadowy space. The heat-registering goggles weren’t picking up anybody, either. She swept the drapes at the two windows aside with a quick hand. Nothing.
Bathroom.
She’d cleared the door when the figure came at her from the right, from behind another door.Water heater,she registered even as somebody jumped onto her, smashing down on her gun hand with something very hard. Theclunkof the revolver hitting the floor, and Paige felt a prick at her throat sharper than the bee stings, and then the warmth of blood.
“Don’t move,” the woman said, her voice low. Shaking. Furious. “I’ll kill you.”
Noise behind her, and the world lit up. Paige got that starburst again, had to close her eyes. The woman was shouting. Screaming.
