~ 8 ~
PEYTON
“Yes, that’s right. We have her.”
The voice belonged to the leader; the one who strode so confidently back into the house. I knew he was also the one who’d tackled me. I’d outrun my backgammon buddy, and the guy whose balls I destroyed wouldn’t be running any races, anytime soon.
“No, she’s not cooperating. She refuses to go back.”
The voice buzzing at the other end of the phone was Donovan’s. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I recognized the tone, the inflection. The gruff way he ordered everyone around, except me.
“She’s wearing it, yes. So we have that too.”
Wearing it?
Alarmingly, I remembered I was still naked. Or at least, I ought to be. Somehow, I was miraculously clothed again. Jeans. Hoodie. Even my socks. I was on the couch, hands locked together, with some scratchy pillow jammed under my head. My wounds stung. They also seemed to beeverywhere at once.
I still kept my eyes closed, though. Listening…
“But that’s not what we discussed, sir.”
Donovan’s voice grew louder, but also darker in tone. He was barking a series of orders I couldn’t hear, because the guy with the phone — who at one point, he called ‘Colson’ — was pacing in and out of the room.
I rolled my ear off the pillow, straining to listen.
“Why don’t we just take it, and let her go?” the asshole who tackled me asked. “It isn’t like she—”
My ex-fiancé was screaming now. He cut his underling off, shouting like a lunatic. Or maybe someone who’d just been stood up at the altar; humbled before the world, in the most devastating way possible.
The phone clicked loudly, as Donovan slammed the connection shut. But not before I heard threeverydistinct words.
WANT HER GONE.
The phrase sent a chill rocketing through me. Still, this was Donovan Prescott we were talking about. I couldn’t say I was all that surprised.
“That didn’t go very well, now did it?”
Three heads whirled at the sound of my voice. I blinked a few times, groggily, as the familiar faces of my captors swam into view. The man with the phone, the one Donovan had called Colson, looked much less confident than before. Seated beside him was my personal towel boy; from the dock. The Ziploc bag of ice he was holding between his legs made me smile in grim satisfaction.
“Which one of you morons dressed me?”
They stared back at me as if the question was absurd.
“Why?”
“Because my panties are on backwards. I can feel it.”
The guy with the ice pack shifted, uncomfortably. “Those weren’t panties,” he growled. “They were more like… string.”
I smiled at him, and blew him a kiss.
“And what about you, Cleo?” I sneered, turning to my backgammon buddy. “Did you get to cop a feel, too?”
He looked utterly miserable. Emotionally wounded.
“It’s Theo.”
I laughed. “Whatever. Besides, you sure as hell don’t look like a Theo.”
