Page 113 of Spooked

This wascrazy. Was I actually considering getting kidnapped on purpose with only the two slackers on hand to rescue me? Jerry hadn’t lost her mind; I had. But those other girls… How could I sleep at night if I left them there?

Brax must have read my thoughts. “I understand how difficult it is to watch this unfold, but putting yourself in danger isn’t the answer.”

Chase surprised me by speaking up. The coffee was gone, and he was sweeping the last of the china shards into a dustpan.

“Jez and Tulsa can do this. Brax, think about it. Think about what happened earlier in the week. You know they can pull it off.”

“I don’t know a damn thing,” he snapped.

Panic began welling up inside me, not just the prickle of fear I’d felt when I thought I was being followed to my apartment, but full-on, out-of-control terror. There could be no good outcome to this.

“I need air.”

Brax took a step toward the door. “We’ll head outside.”

“Please, just give me a minute alone to gather my thoughts. I can’t… I just can’t…”

How had Meera’s European vacation gone so badly wrong?

CHAPTER39

BRAX

The moment the back door closed behind Indi, Brax turned to his former housemate.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Trying to help?”

“By filling Indi’s head with potentially fatal ideas?”

He’d only just met the woman he wanted to spend the foreseeable future with; he wasn’t about to lose her.

“They’re not going to kill the merchandise.” Jerry waved a hand at the laptop screen. “Case in point. A woman’s worth hundreds of thousands of bucks. All they have to do is keep her alive for a couple of weeks, and then they can buy a new Ferrari or whatever.”

“What if you lose her? People can give surveillance the slip. And if they search her, they’ll find a tracking device.”

“No, they won’t. Not if it’s inside her.”

“Tell me you’re joking?”

“I can’t. Really, I’ve told you too much already. But I can promise you that this operation is well within our capabilities.”

“Jerry, what have you been doing for the past nine years?”

“I…” She took a sip of coffee. A stalling tactic, no doubt. “I started out looking for my father, and then I got sidetracked.”

Her father? Brax had vague memories of her mentioning the man, but as far as he recalled, the two had never met. Jerry had been the result of a fling between Britta Knight and a man named Jeremy Pope, who’d vanished from Jerry’s life before she was even born. But not completely. Firstly, Jeremy had made enough of an impression that Britta named her daughter after him. And secondly, for the next eighteen years, she’d received two thousand bucks a month by direct deposit and an extra thousand on Jerry’s birthday. Jeremy hadn’t abandoned his offspring, but not once had he ever gotten in touch. And then, on Jerry’s eighteenth birthday, a car had appeared in the driveway, a vintage Porsche that she’d spent half of her Blackstone House days tinkering with in an effort to get it to run smoothly. It never had.

But Jerry had set out to look for her father?

“Did you find him?”

“If he’s alive, he doesn’t want to be found.”

“So you gave up looking and joined the U.S. Army instead?”

A shrug. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

---