Lola’s pulse throbbed in her ears and throat as Gunner picked up his phone and dialed. She assumed he was calling 911, but instead, he said someone’s name, and then said things were getting worse, like some kind of movie villain. She thought of walking briskly back to the staff room, grabbing her own phone and calling the police, but his gaze was fixed on her in a way that made her wary of any sudden moves. She wasn’t sure exactly what was going on. He’d had the right ID, and he was on the emergency list, but ID could be faked. The list would be harder, but not impossible. Laurel had never mentioned Grace’s father, other than to say that he wasn’t in her life. Could this be some kind of custody kidnapping?
No, that didn’t make any sense. Gunner was on the list. More likely, if the father was suddenly back in the picture, Laurel was caught up with him, and Gunner was here to make sure that Grace was safe. But if they thought she’d been kidnapped, surely the first thing to do was to notify the authorities?
Unless every single adult in this situation is involved in something dirty. Then involving the cops might be more trouble than it was worth. For them. But it might save Grace’s life. Who knew what was happening to her?
Lola needed to think. How could someone have gotten Grace out of this room? The staff offices were closed off, and there was only the one door, unless…
She grabbed Grace’s backpack — she didn’t know if Gunner had noticed, but Grace’s inhaler was still in the bag, and that was potentially a real problem for the girl — and headed back into the staff offices. She didn’t have asthma flares often, but when she did, they were intense and got worse quickly. Lola hadn’t been working at the center at the time, but she knew that last year, someone had to call an ambulance because Grace’s breathing had turned to wheezing so quickly.
She’d glanced around the staff room quickly, just looking for a little girl who might be hiding to play a silly game. Now, she looked more closely — and, yes, the table in the corner, which they used for meetings and which blocked the unused door to the playground, was out of alignment. As if someone had tried to pull it back when they had closed the door, but there was no way to get it all the way shut, not in a hurry.
“Gunner!” Lola shouted and heard his footsteps behind her. She went to the door, hauling the table out of the way. The door was unlocked, which was strange, and the screws that had held it shut previously had been removed. At a quick glance, she couldn’t tell when it had happened, and that didn’t matter right now. She pulled the door open and glanced around the playground. Yes — there. Across the long field, she could see someone running, a small bundle tossed over their shoulder.
There was a small bloom of fear in the center of her chest, but most of her body was consumed by anger. Someone had taken a child, a child who was under her care, and from the limp way that the small body was bouncing, she had probably been sedated. Lola didn’t know a ton about asthma, but she knew that when her older brother had been sedated for surgery, the anesthesiologists had to give him different meds because sedation and asthma could combine together into a deadly situation. Whoever that person was, did they know? Were they going to take care of Grace? It certainly didn’t look like it from here.
She was already running before she had the conscious thought to give chase. She heard a male voice shout behind her, and assumed Gunner was close on her heels.
The jerk ahead of them had too much of a lead, though. He skipped through the gate around the fenced in playground and ducked into a waiting car — new model and dark paint, something American, but she wasn’t sure from halfway across the field of the make and model, though she would have guessed Ford if she were pressed — and sped off. She sagged, her breath ragged from the run. She was never a sprinter, although she’d been built for it; small and lithe. She was better at yoga, and at endurance events when she did track, and why in the name of all that was holy was she thinking about this right now.
Gunner pulled up next to her, and his eyes were sharp. He was still on his phone, and his breath was quick, but not ragged like hers. “Late model Ford, Explorer, black. Yeah, I know, nothing really distinct.” A pause. “No, you shithead, there’s not an airbrushing of the Death Star on the side.” A laugh that carried nothing like humor. “Okay. Get to work. I’ll see you soon.”
He clicked the phone off, and she found herself looking at him, waiting for him to dial the police. He looked back at her. The moment grew and grew until it was awkward and uncomfortable.
“Aren’t you going to call the police?” she finally said. Her tone was snappish. His eyes narrowed, and his lips tightened.
“No,” he replied. “And it would be best if you didn’t either.”
“I—” she sputtered for a moment, then forced herself to refocus. “I didn’t really introduce myself before. I’m Lola Sykes. I’m one of the care providers here, and as such, I’m responsible for the kids until they’re picked up by their representatives. I’m a mandated reporter in this state. Do you know what all of that means?”
He watched her, clearly waiting.
She forced herself to keep going, pretending it was just one of her aunties glaring her down. She’d mastered that at sixteen years old. Some super-gorgeous man with stunning eyes the color of bronze was absolutely not going to convince her to back down. “It means that I’m legally liable for her. If I don’t call the cops, it’s not just that I could lose my job, I could be prosecuted for all kinds of things. Interfering in an investigation, child endangerment — they could even decide that I was an accomplice.”
He nodded. “I understand,” he said, but his tone didn’t convey much in the way of understanding. “Go ahead and go back inside. I’ll call the police. You just go ahead and go home.”
“But —” He couldn’t be in on it. He’d panicked just as hard as she had when Grace hadn’t been in that room. There was something bigger going on, but he wasn’t a part of it. She needed to believe that right now if she didn’t want to just crumple to the ground in a pile of fear and tears. “The police will want to ask me questions. They’ll want to talk to me. To both of us.”
“Sure,” he said. “Give me your phone number so I can give it to them. I’m sure they’ll call you if they have any questions.”
She shook her head. “You’re a really bad liar, you know that?”
He laughed. “I’ve heard it before, now and then. Look. I can’t call the police. I don’t know who has Grace, but I have some guesses, and if they’re right, then things are going to go from bad to worse, and involving the cops is just going to make things worse.”
“Where’s Laurel,” Lola asked, watching his face carefully. She saw his jaw tighten and his gaze flick away from her face. “She isn’t just running late, is she?”
He was quiet for a long time, his gaze focused on the middle distance, staring at nothing but seeing everything.
“No,” he eventually said. “No, I think someone grabbed her, too.”
“Who?”
“I’m not sure. But there’s stuff going on in this town that you don’t know.”
It was Lola’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “You’d be surprised what I know.”
He looked her up and down, and this time his gaze didn’t tell her about how much he liked her curves and her hair and the way she stood. This time he saw nothing beyond the costume that she wore to fit in with a bunch of rich, white women who sent their kids here for “after school enrichment” like it was a fancy babysitting service.
“Maybe I would,” he said. “But the truth is, Miss Sykes, that you’re in danger now, just as much as I am. That shithead saw you running with me, and pardon me for stereotyping, but I doubt it would be hard to pick out the Latina who works here. I’m guessing you’re the only one?”
Oh, she wanted to kick him in the ankle. Or higher. Asshole. “Is this the part where you tell me that I need to come with you if I want to live?” She hadn’t meant to say the word “come” quite as hard as she did, and heat flushed through her again. He smirked, the heat and spark between them pushing the danger a single pace back for just a moment — or maybe making it flare all the hotter.
“Would it work if I did?”
“No,” she snapped, which of course made it even more obvious that it absolutely would. Shit. Shit forever. “I love that kid,” she said after a moment. “I can’t let anything bad happen to her. They didn’t even take her inhaler.” She held out the small Star Wars backpack, emblazoned with the latest female heroine. Grace had been so proud the first day she got to bring it to school. She’d said that one day, she was going to be in a Star Wars movie.
He stared at her for a moment, and then he nodded sharply. “Okay. Go back and get your purse. We’ll head over to the police station. Believe me, this will go faster if we’re both there. I’ll drive you. Is that good enough?”
He was still lying, but the crazy thing was, this was at least progress.
“Fine,” she said, and spun on her heel, walking back toward the school. She didn’t make it half a dozen steps before his hand closed over her upper arm, and he was directing her towards the other fence gate, the one that let out onto the parking lot.
“Do me a favor and don’t scream, okay?”
“What the hell are you doing?” She liked a little rough handling in bed, but that was not at all what was happening here. She tried to jerk her arm free, but she didn’t have the leverage from here, and he was hustling her along way too fast for her to go for a pressure point or try to really twist around on him. She could go dead weight and force him to drag her, but the odds were he’d just throw her over his shoulder, and then she’d be in an even worse position.
Instead of pulling her farther along, he stopped, spinning around, his face painfully close to hers.
“Listen to me, and listen to me very carefully. I love that little girl more than I have any right to, and I one-hundred percent believe that if you call the police right now, the people who snatched her— and Laurel — are more likely to harm her than they already are. Right now, they have leverage over the people I know and over me. Once the cops are involved, that leverage goes away, and they will know that. If you care about her as much as you say, please, just come with me. Come with me, and I promise, we will figure out how to get her back. But I can’t let you call the police right now. I can’t.”
In the end, it wasn’t his surprisingly sincere speech that put Lola over the edge into trusting him. It was a good speech, all things considered, but it wouldn’t have been enough. No, what finally convinced her that he was speaking the truth was the wetness that suddenly glimmered on his lower eyelashes. There was no way such a shitty liar could fake tears that easily. So, whatever was going on, she believed it. And she certainly hadn’t ever been witness to a kidnapping before. It was weird, though; if Laurel and her kid were so important, why were they scholarship students at the center? Why did Grace come in with second-hand everything, so proud to show off that her new backpack was brand new, the kind of new that meant no one had ever had it before? It just didn’t quite stack.
But at the same time, there wasn’t enough evidence to show that something was wrong, either. Lola wanted to go with the story she knew, the one where she called the police, and everything was fine. But if she did that, and it hurt Grace, she’d never forgive herself.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. But I need to get my purse. All right?”
“Yeah,” he replied. “Do that. Go ahead.” He loosened his grip, and she stepped away. “No, wait,” he added, and she paused. “Just grab your absolute essentials. Leave your purse here. If we need to, later, we can tell the cops that you were snatched, too, but got away. All right?”
“Okay…” Lola ducked back into the building and pulled her phone out of her purse. She pulled a small wad of cash after her wallet and left the wallet itself inside her bag. She had two small bottles of medicine that she kept with her all the time — and thank goodness she did — and then she was done. She stuffed her phone and the bottles down her bra and headed back outside. She’d half hoped that Gunner would be gone, but he was standing there, waiting for her.
Well, the good news was that she was about to get her first ride in a Gran Sport. That was something.