It wouldn’t be much, but she already knew how to stretch a dollar.
Outside her window, the wind blew, making the log walls creak, and her gaze drifted to the rubber door stop wedged between her bedroom door and the floor. For now, she was safe. No way John would risk permanent damage to Marla’s precious hundred-year-old house to get to her.
The man was petrified of his wife. No exaggeration.
To be fair, the woman intimidated the crap out of Summer too. Not because she was a strong, independent, powerful public figure but because she was meaner than a junkyard dog when the cameras weren’t facing her way.
She’d never been on the receiving end of one of Marla’s cold rages, but she’d witnessed more than one, and it hadn’t taken her long to figure out the best way to deal with them was to avoid them altogether. All she had to do? Follow the rules.
Not so bad, really.
Until John started making his overt sexual advances.
Yeah, as much as she loved the Wagners’ children, she needed to leave. Hell, if she didn’t need a paycheck and a place to live, she would have shoved her meager belongings into the cardboard box she kept in her closet and left hours ago.
Unfortunately, she already knew what sleeping in her car was like, and if she could avoid it during the cold winter months, she would. At twenty-four, she’d already spent more time being homeless and working odd jobs to survive than your average starving musician.
Her mother’s doing. Melanie Summers wasn’t exactly the picture of parental perfection.
Far from.
Summer looked at the phone still in her hand. She had no desire to make her once-weekly call to Melanie in the morning. Not after everything that had happened. Between the run-in with John and the mass shooting in Boston, her heart felt heavy and sad.
She couldn’t even pick up her guitar. Forget about the song she’d been working on. She didn’t have it in her to be creative right now. She should just try to sleep. Close her eyes on this day. And hope for a better tomorrow.
Instead, she jammed her earphones into her ears, opened a new browser, and pulled up the CNN live feed. Jesus. One hundred and twenty-three people had been killed in what the media had coined as the Boston Christmas Massacre.
The youngest victim not even ten months old.
Her insides twisted, fear and anger adding to the feeling of helplessness swamping her. Whole families had been killed. Others ripped apart by the senseless violence. And she couldn’t even find solace in the fact the three gunmen were dead.
She didn’t want them dead. She wanted answers. Or maybe just one answer.
Why?
Why did little Honor-Marie Issacs have to die? She was a baby. A tiny, helpless, innocent baby who hadn’t deserved to die in her mother’s arms three weeks before herfirst Christmas. None of them deserved to die. Not one single soul.
Not like that. Not with such terror in their hearts.
It wasn’t fair.
Her eyes filled with tears, and the faces on her phone blurred. She felt so useless. Helpless. Scared even. There didn’t seem to be a safe place left on the planet, and she couldn’t help but wonder—what would she do?
What would she do if someone pointed a gun in her direction? Threatened her baby? God, she prayed she never had to find out.
* * *
“What doyou mean he’s not there?” Around the jet’s boardroom table, four heads cranked in Adam’s direction.
An hour from landing at Logan International Airport, Jay and the rest of the JTT had been going over the evac plan to get Jamie out of the hospital and Boston without getting anyone else shot full of holes in the process.
“Hang on, Dax, I’m putting you on speaker.” Adam thumbed the button on his phone and set it down. “Go ahead.”
“Jamie’s not here,” Dax O’Reilly said. “I’ve got a three-man team on site with me, and we’ve been searching for over an hour. He’s not in his patient room. He’s not back in the SICU or the OR. And he’s not in the morgue. It’s still a madhouse around here, and none of the hospital staff have a clue where he is. We’ve been running in circles and coming up empty-handed.”
Jay reached for his laptop, his stomach dropping as the plane hit a pocket of turbulence. With a couple of keystrokes, he pinged the location of Jamie’s phone.
Still at the hospital.
