Inescapable (Men of Mercy Novel, A) Read online

  Inescapable

  Joss Wood

  INTERMIX BOOKS, NEW YORK

  INTERMIX

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  INESCAPABLE

  An InterMix Book / published by arrangement with the author

  Copyright © 2016 by Joss Wood.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  INTERMIX and the “IM” design are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  For more information about The Berkley Publishing Group, visit penguin.com.

  eBook ISBN: 9781101989487

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  InterMix eBook edition / July 2016

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  TessG: Flick darling, please do something about Rufus. He’s gorgeous but I really can’t deal with the way he expresses his love for you, especially at two in the morning.Oh, and get well soon, Ms Gina. Hope to see you up and about soon!

  HankPriceCheatedOnMe: For sale: 14 KT white gold engagement ring, size 7. Call Mickey at 555-6721. Selling it because Hank Price is a cheating bastard who can’t keep his zipper closed!

  SawyersFutureWife: Waiting in the wings . . .

  ***

  “Aunt Gin, you’re the topic of conversation on Mercy OnLine.” Flick Sturgiss booted herself up onto the high hospital bed at her aunt’s feet and waved her cell phone in her direction. “Well, you, Rufus, Hank Price, and Sawyer.”

  “It’s only been live for a couple of days and Sawyer is already a topic of conversation?” Pippa grumbled, dumping her bag on the floor next to the visitors’ chair before kissing her mom hello. “Rufus I can understand—that dog is adorable—but Sawyer?”

  “This woman has no sense,” Flick said. “She calls herself Sawyer’s future wife.”

  Pippa looked horrified. “Good grief.”

  “What on earth is Mercy OnLine?” Gina demanded.

  “It’s a new community forum where the residents of Mercy can post their concerns, talk about local news and politics, sell stuff,” Pippa replied. “It’s an Internet-based notice board.”

  “Oh.”Gina tossed her a brisk look. “May I at least rate a smile, Felicity? This is hospital visit, not a visit to the morgue.”

  Flick made a concerted effort to drop her hunched shoulders and to look relaxed, even though she knew she wasn’t fooling her aunt or her cousin. She blew her aunt a kiss and was rewarded with a yeah-yeah smile. She hated hospitals and was only visiting because Gina was her second mother and she loved her. Hospitals swept her back to a time she preferred not to remember—this hospital in particular. Her brother Andy had passed away just down the hall after countless visits for chemo treatments, and her mom had followed her youngest child a year later. Flick’s reticent father had been unable to deal with her emotional, pre-teen meltdown and her much older brothers had taken comfort in each other. Gina and Pippa had been the safe harbor she’d run to, and she adored them.

  She’d left New York and her job as a sous chef in a popular restaurant to return to Mercy in order to revive her grandmother’s bakery, to work and live with Pippa. To spend time with Gina. Being in the same town as Jack—her brother—and her cousins was an added bonus.

  She’d do anything in the world for her family.

  Unfortunately, anything included hospital visits after dreadful car accidents. Two weeks ago, on a trip back from D.C., Gina had had a close encounter with a big rig whose trailer had jackknifed, connecting with Gina’s little compact as she passed him. Gina’s car had lost. Flick was just eternally grateful that her second mother—actually, she’d been more of a mother to her than her own had been—had suffered no more than a fractured pelvis and a broken arm and femur. Her injuries were bad and she’d be in the hospital for a couple more weeks but it was better than her being dead.

  Dead, as she knew, was so damn final.

  Flick pulled in a deep breath and pasted a smile on her face. “As, I said, there are lots of people wishing you well.”

  Gina took Flick’s cell from her hand and squinted down at the screen. “I can’t read this without my glasses. Read them to me.”

  The First Lady of Mercy expected to be obeyed, so Flick took her cell back and swiped a finger across the screen. “Mayor Bob would like to wish our ex-mayor a speedy recovery after her accident and hopes that she’s back home soon.”

  “I was the mayor’s wife, not the mayor,” Gina grumbled. Gina’s husband had been the town’s longest-serving mayor until his death six years ago.

  “You took over Dad’s duties after he died, Mom,” Pippa told her, tucking a long strand of copper toned hair behind her ear. Flick lounged across the end of the bed, head supported by her hand, marveling at the fact that, despite the neck brace and a wrist in plaster, Gina was perfectly made up, not a hair out of place. It didn’t matter that she’d been slapped by a massive truck—appearances had to be kept up, order had to be maintained.

  Pippa had inherited that trait from her, Flick mused. Gina was sociable and outgoing and Pippa was more reserved, quiet, and serious than her gregarious mother. But, like Gina, Pippa was utterly reliable and, in the best way possible, a control freak.

  “Are you going to read the other messages or not, Felicity?” Gina demanded.

  Oh, right. Flick swiped her finger across the screen. “DocMolly wrote, “Get well soon, Gina.”

  Gina sniffed her disdain. “Molly Wishlade. That girl never did have an original bone in her body.”

  That “girl” was Mercy’s favorite female doctor. Gina was still mad at her for telling her that she was pre-diabetic and that she had to give up sugar. Judging by the candy wrapper peeking out from under the book on her bedside table, Gina still wasn’t listening.

  Flick read the next message silently.Hunter4U:Gina has such a pair of brass balls that the truck probably just bounced off her. She decided not to share that message aloud. Jerk.

  “Helen Smith and Lola Pearson—LolaP as she calls herself—both wish you well and a speedy recovery. HotNurse suggests that you not boss the nurses around.”

  “I am not bossy! Gina retorted. “And why don’t they put their real names, instead of those silly ones? HotNurse? Who is that?”

  “Some people use their own names, others choose to post anonymously or use names that describe them.” Fli
ck exchanged a look with Pippa. They’d discussed the new forum on the ride to the hospital and neither of them liked the idea of residents being able to hide behind anonymous names. It was too easy to use, abuse, and slander that way. Mercy fed off gossip, like any other smallish town in America, but there were still rules to what was said aloud. Behind a computer monitor, with anonymity guaranteed, fair play, respect, and responsibility tended to be forgotten. As evidenced by Hunter’s comment and the fact that neither of them had the faintest idea who Sawyer’s next wife was. If they did, they’d sit her down and explain that their childhood friend was a lovely guy, a charming flirt, and ridiculously gorgeous, but that he was not husband material.

  Mostly because he had the attention span of cooked noodles when it came to women.

  “On a different subject, someone is complaining about Rufus’s bad behavior,” Flick commentated.

  “Again, that didn’t take long.” Pippa smiled. “How long has the site been up, three days?”

  “You certainly have a knack for choosing lost causes, Felicity,” Gina told her, smoothing the covers across her lap.

  She really couldn’t argue with that. Flick ran through another couple of messages—someone was selling a boat, someone else had lost her driver’s license—half listening to Gina and Pippa’s conversation.

  After five minutes Pippa looked up from the notebook on her lap, her pen tapping against the page. “Mom, I was doing your taxes and I saw a receipt for a storage locker in D.C.” Pippa flipped through the pages of the diary. “I think I put it in here to show you.”

  Flick happened to be watching Gina and saw the panic that flitted across her face. Over a receipt for a storage locker? Why? Flick sat up slowly, noticing that Gina’s expression now registered mere puzzlement, yet her hand was clutching the bed covers in a white-fingered grip. “A storage locker?”

  “Mmm,” Pippa replied and huffed an impatient sigh. “I can’t find it. I must have left it on my desk in the office. They must have billed you incorrectly. . . . Why would you have a storage locker in D.C.?”

  “Why indeed?” Gina said, her voice vague. Okay, Gina was lying through her teeth, and Flick was surprised that Pippa hadn’t picked up on it. Then again, she was a lot more emotionally perceptive than her reserved, pragmatic cousin.

  Flick started to call Gina on her great big fib, but her aunt’s slight shake of her head had the words dying in her mouth. Okay, very weird.

  Gina closed her eyes and let out a series of puffs. “Pippy, honey, would you mind checking with the nurses to see when I’m due some pain relief?”

  “You had a pill a half hour ago,” Pippa told her. “They won’t give you more.”

  “Can you check? No, don’t ring the bell; it’s so rude! Be a dear and find a nurse, please?” Gina pleaded. Flick heard the order under her sweet words and when Pippa stood up, she knew that she had heard it too. Flick waited until Pippa was out of earshot before speaking again.

  “Why are you lying, Gin?” she demanded.

  “Goddammit.” Flick didn’t know if she was more shocked by the curse that fell from her well-spoken aunt’s lips or the admission of her guilt. Gina rubbed a hand over her face and looked ashen. Fear sloshed around Flick’s stomach like two-day-old margaritas.

  “What’s going on, Gina?”

  Gina tossed an anxious look at the door. “You can’t tell Pippa!”

  “I tell Pips everything, Gin. You know that. We don’t keep secrets,” Flick protested.

  “I need your help and I’m asking you to keep this between us, until I find a way to tell Pippa myself. I don’t think that you’ll fully understand, but Pippa will have a total meltdown.”

  “Tell her what?” Flick used every inch of her self-control not to scream the words.

  “There isn’t any time to explain,” Gina stated. “Take my house keys—they’re in my bag in the side cupboard. Hurry, Flick, she’ll be back in a minute.”

  Flick sent Gina a hard look as she stood up and dropped to her haunches, wishing that Pippa would step back into the room so that Gina couldn’t push her into this situation.

  “I’ve never asked anything of you, Felicity. Not once.” Gina’s words dropped onto her head. “I’m asking you to go to the storage lockers and also unlock the third-floor bedrooms at the house. Take a look.”

  Flick’s head snapped around and up. The third-floor bedrooms? Nobody had been up to the top floor of Gina’s house for years—there had been no reason to. After her boy cousins left home, Gina—as they’d been told—had packed up the rooms and closed up that floor. What on earth did she want out of those rooms? And did she say lockers? As in plural?

  “I have no idea what’s going on,” Flick muttered as she opened Gina’s bag to look for her massive bunch of house keys.

  “It’ll be self-explanatory,” Gina replied. “I’ll text you the directions to the storage facility.”

  Flick stood up, tossed the keys into her own tote bag, and jammed her hands into the pockets of her jeans. “I don’t like this, Gina.”

  “Don’t like what?”

  Flick held her aunt’s pleading eyes as Pippa stepped back into the room. She didn’t like having to make the choice between mother and daughter, between the aunt who’d been her mother in every way that counted and her cousin who was her soul sister.

  “It’ll be okay, darling,” Gina murmured. “I just need some time. And maybe some help.”

  “Time and help for what?” Pippa asked.

  Anxiety-generating ants crawled around Flick’s stomach, up her throat. “Time and help to get better,” Flick explained, her voice breaking as she uttered the lie.

  “You’ll be fine, Mom.” Pippa placed her hand on Flick’s back and Flick couldn’t help jumping at her touch. She felt rather than saw Pippa’s concerned look and stared at the floor, avoiding her gaze. “But you might have to sell your house. You won’t be able to manage the stairs.”

  “I am not selling my house,” Gina said between gritted teeth.

  Because there was something else in that house that Gina didn’t want anyone to know about, Flick thought. What could it be? A skeleton? A toy boy? An altar? Okay, she was letting her riotous imagination run away with her. But what could Gina be referring to? It had to be bad if she wouldn’t tell Pips.

  “You keep postponing the discussion about your house but you have to deal with it at some stage, Mom. It’s silly that you have an entire top floor you never use, that half the bedrooms on the second floor are closed up too, and that you rattle around there like a ghost.”

  “I am not discussing this any longer, Phillipa.” Gina said in her best don’t-test-me-anymore voice. “What did the nurse say about my drugs?”

  “As I told you, you’re not due yet,” Pippa replied.

  “Then I might as well try to rest,” Gina said. “You two can go now.”

  There was no room for discussion, so they dutifully kissed her good-bye and left the room. In the corridor outside, Pippa threw her hands up in the air. “Is she acting weird or was that just my imagination?”

  “Yeah, weird,” Flick admitted. That, at least, was the truth. Should she tell Pippa about her mom’s requests? If she was going to, then now was the time.

  “I wonder what’s worrying her?” Pippa’s hand clenched and unclenched around the strap of her tote bag.

  “Not sure.” What Flick was sure of was the strong feeling that she really wasn’t going to like whatever Gina had sent her to look at.

  ***

  “It’s still dark. Why are you calling me?”

  “It’s oh-six-hundred, so get your ass out of bed and let’s go. Eight klicks, if you can pull your head out of said ass.”

  “ESAD.”

  Kai Manning smiled. If his best friend and business partner could successfully spit out the acronym for “eat shit and die,” then
he was halfway to waking up and he wouldn’t need to break into Sawyer’s house—the pale gray and white bungalow he was standing in front of—and physically kick him out of bed for their early-morning run. How Sawyer had managed to complete BUD/S and be an effective SEAL with his ongoing love affair with sleep was something he still wondered about. Standing in the chilly autumn air with the phone still to his ear, Kai heard Sawyer yawn, followed by a shuffle that suggested that he was out of bed and marginally functional. He ended the call and sat down on his front steps, rested his arms on his bent knees, and looked down the road. All the seasons in Mercy, Virginia, were lovely, but autumn was the prettiest of them all. The trees were all turning from green to rust and red and gold, and were the perfect contrast to the still-green fields and the bluey-purple of the Blue Ridge Mountains that formed the majestic backdrop to the town.

  Kai placed his elbows on the step behind him and stretched out his long legs.

  Pretty town, pretty houses, pretty river . . .pretty fucking everything. Blergh.

  And now he needed to decide, ASAP, whether he agreed with making Mercy—population barely topping ten thousand—the headquarters of Caswallawn International. Caswallawn . . .

  Mike should be here, sharing in the spoils of the business they created. Instead, to honor and remember him, they’d named their holding company Caswallawn after his favorite Celtic god of war. Mike had been always been obsessed with the Celts and the early history of the British Isles—a strange interest for the son of a fiercely patriotic Army sergeant.

  Thinking about Mike hurt too damn much, so Kai switched mental directions. As a company they’d been here for three years, renting an old warehouse off Main Street, partly because Sawyer wanted to come back to his hometown but mostly because the setup costs for the business had been a lot cheaper in Mercy than in Washington, D.C. Their meager savings had stretched a lot further here. He reluctantly admitted that the location wasn’t bad. It was only a thirty-minute drive from Dulles International and it was an easy commute for anyone from D.C. attending their personal-protection-training courses and corporate-team-building events.