Page 16 of Forever Treasured

“Thank you, Gemma. Holly, baby, why don’t you go back to our suite with Gemma and try to rest? You were sick all morning. We’ll find her.”

“I want to stay with you,” she whispered.

Elijah started to argue, but Gemma reached out and took his hand. “Why don’t you take Holly back to the room? Text me the number and I’ll meet you up there in a bit, and you can come back down to search with Russell. It sounds like he’s taken over.”

Elijah stared at her blankly for a minute as if her words hadn’t processed, but then he squeezed her hand and helped his wife stand. “He said something about organizing a grid search. That sounds so sinister. It’s something you see on CSI.”

Holly choked on a sob, and Elijah schooled his features and tucked her close to him. “Come on, baby. You don’t need to be down here right now, and you don’t need to be in the cold. The best place for you is warm in the room, so you can take care of Melissa when we find her.”

“But I want to help.”

“I know, baby. But rest is what you need right now.”

He was being strong for Holly, but it was clear the man was terrified. And Gemma didn’t blame him. The little girl hadn’t been gone long, but there were dozens of places she could have gotten trapped in a place like this.

Gemma put a hand on Holly’s shoulder. “I’ll make you a deal. You go upstairs and drink a cup of tea while I find out what the plan is. If there’s something Russell needs us to do, I’ll come get you, OK?”

She nodded, and Elijah flashed her a grateful smile before he nudged his wife toward the elevator.

When Gemma approached Russell, he put a hand on her shoulder. “You’re just in time. Can I give you a job?”

She gave him a solemn nod. “Of course. Whatever you need. If you’ve got something Holly can do that would be good, too.”

“We’re going to get the entire staff to do a grid search and put out the word that guests are welcome to join, too. I’ve got a map of the entire place on its way. You’re going to sit here, and mark grids off as they get called clear and assign new people to a section if they come to join the search.”

She rolled her shoulders to clear the tension and squeezed his hand. “Got it. Elijah wanted me to come get him and sit with Holly.”

“Let her assist you. We’ll set you up in the conference room together. Having something to stay busy and feel like she’s helping will be a good thing. Elijah can come out with me. I won’t let him out of my sight.”

The resort manager approached with several printouts, and the key to a nearby conference room. They quickly sectioned the maps of the various areas into grids and labeled them, then sent out word for the staff to gather as security passed out radios.

They could have called the police, and could end up needing to, but Russell was concerned about the press and had assured Elijah that the police would end up doing a grid search but would take significantly longer to get it going.

When Elijah brought Holly back down twenty minutes later, her eyes were red from crying, but her shoulders were square, and she was ready to help Gemma.

“David and Emily are on their way from the airport, and they already know what’s going on. They’ll jump into the search with us,” Elijah said before he followed Russell outside to their assigned location.

Gemma’s insides were twisted in pain for her friends, and part of her wondered whether having kids was worth it. Russell would become ten times as anal about security and protection once they had a little one of their own. And with good reason. This was proving to her it was so easy for anything to happen. Holly and Elijah had come to the resort in Switzerland for the same reason she and Russell had—to escape life in the public eye for just a little while and now they were on the verge of making international news again if they couldn’t find little Melissa soon.

Emily Eastman burst into the room and pulled Holly into a hug a half hour later, and Holly cried into her friend’s shoulder.

“David is with Elijah already. They’re making good progress. We’ll find her, sweetheart.”

“It makes me wish I had let Elijah put the GPS trackers into her shoes like he wanted.”

Emily snorted. “I’m surprised he didn’t want to implant one in her skin.”

Holly wiped at her eyes and reached for the box of tissue. “Honestly, me too. In the end, he didn’t fit any of her clothes with anything because there wasn’t enough evidence that the technology couldn’t be hacked, and it wouldn’t be used against us to kidnap her for ransom.”

Gemma shuddered. The world was terrifying sometimes. The radio crackled as another section of the grid was cleared, and she marked it off on her map.

Ten minutes later, someone called out that they’d found the little girl’s scarf in a pile of snow near one the cabins, and Holly started sobbing again.

“It’s a good sign, honey. It means we can send more people to the sections close to that part of the grid.”

She rattled off numbers on the radio, directing people to the new focus area of the search.

Her phone buzzed with a text from Russell.

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