Wyoming Christmas Ransom Read online

  What the hell was happening?

  But Jesse hefted Gracie easily and tossed her into the truck. She tried to scramble back out immediately, but he blocked her with his body as he slid into the passenger seat.

  With the light, she could fight back more effectively, but Kayleigh slammed on the accelerator and the unexpected movement of the truck caused Gracie to fall forward into the dash. Which allowed Jesse the chance to grab her arms again and pull them behind her back. He pulled her onto his lap and Gracie struggled to free herself, but he only laughed.

  Then his voice was in her ear. “You don’t want to excite me, sweetheart.”

  She nearly retched right there. But she stilled. She could kick across at the steering wheel or Kayleigh’s leg on the accelerator to make Kayleigh crash, but there was too much risk she’d die since she was sitting this close to the windshield. She could keep fighting Jesse, but he could outmuscle her so easily it was a waste of energy.

  She’d have to wait it out. She knew Bent and the surrounding areas as well as anyone. They couldn’t take her anywhere she wouldn’t know how to escape from. As long as she could escape Jesse’s too-tight grip, she might have a chance.

  Then there was the fact Jesse had her phone. If it was still on, it was possible Laurel could trace it even if Gracie couldn’t get a message to her.

  She had to calm herself. She had to focus. Except she kept going back to that sickening crack and the thud afterward. What about Will? Would someone find him there in the dark?

  “What did you do to Will?”

  “Nothing your family hasn’t done to mine,” Jesse replied as if they were discussing the weather.

  She wanted to ask about Cam, but she was afraid that might tip them off. She had to hope Cam was unharmed and had seen them take her and was following. Or something. The less these two knew about which Delaneys knew what, the better.

  “I don’t know what I have to do with this,” Gracie said, trying to do her best to sound calm and unafraid. “Or how you’re involved in Paula’s death, or—”

  Jesse laughed, squeezing her wrists so tight she whimpered.

  “I did what I had to do to protect my family. To stand up for them. And somehow I ended up in jail when your uncle is the one who deserves so much worse than that.” Jesse’s evil smile glinted in the headlights of an oncoming car. “Now I finally have the means to make him pay and pay.”

  She wanted to cry, or scream, but neither would help her any. Or Will. God, Will. The only way she could help him was to survive and get out of here. So instead she paid attention to where they were going. Down Main, like it was the most normal thing in the world.

  But it could be good. Maybe people would see them. Laurel would have to come searching for them soon, and she would have people who had witnessed where they went.

  Of course it was late and Bent was pretty much closed down for the night and—

  Positive thoughts. There was no room for negativity. She had to get through this, so she had to believe she could.

  Kayleigh drove out of town, but not far. It only took a few more minutes for Gracie to realize she wasn’t being taken to some off-the-beaten-path, hidden-away place at all. They were driving right up to the Delaney Ranch.

  “What is this?” she demanded as Kayleigh drove onto Delaney property, as if this had been their planned destination all along.

  “Would have preferred your cop cousin, honestly,” Jesse said, something like black, evil excitement twisting his features. “I knew it’d be a lot easier to get you though, and I don’t have the time to be picky anymore. Your uncle will think twice before messing with my family again.”

  Gracie swallowed. “If you think I mean anything to him, I hate to break it to you—”

  “Damn Delaneys are always so naive. He doesn’t need to love you, little girl. You’re a Delaney. Blood is all that matters. It’s all that ever will.”

  * * *

  THERE WAS A BLACKNESS. A terrible pain. Was he back on the side of that road? His arm sure hurt badly enough, but there was something hard on it. And the person calling his name, over and over, the fingertips touching him, it wasn’t Gracie.

  If it wasn’t Gracie, the blackness seemed like a better place to stay.

  But something wasn’t right about that. Because Gracie wasn’t here. She should be here. Where was she?

  He struggled to open his eyes, to move. Someone was saying his name. It just wasn’t Gracie.

  “He’s coming to,” the woman said. “You both need an ambulance.”

  “No one is getting in an ambulance until we figure out where Gracie is. He’ll need stitches, but there’s no major damage,” a man’s voice said.

  They didn’t know where Gracie was, and that made him fight the darkness even harder.

  “You’re not a doctor, Cam,” the woman said—Laurel. It had to be Laurel talking. And she was talking to Cam, who was the man’s voice.

  “I dealt with plenty of medical emergencies as a marine. He’ll live. How long will the trace take?”

  “They have to contact the phone company. Once they get through, it should be soon.”

  Will tried to speak, but his tongue felt five times its normal size and he couldn’t make any part of his body move. God, his arm hurt almost as badly as when it had been originally broken. He had a sudden flash of Jesse hitting it inside the bar.

  Jesse. He tried to speak again. “Jesse. Jesse took her.”

  Laurel peered down at him. They were outside in the parking lot, but there were lights now. Laurel had a flashlight, too. “We’re pinging her phone. Presuming she has it. Will, are you okay?”

  “Jesse has it. The phone. He has it.”

  “Good. Even better to ping him. Did he say anything? Anything at all that could give us some idea of what’s happening or where they were going?”

  It was fuzzy. Flashes here and there. He glanced at Cam and frowned. The man had a dried streak of blood from his temple down his cheek. “You’re bleeding.”

  “Lead pipe to the temple. Just like you. Yours is worse.”

  “I want to sit up.”

  “You need a hospital,” Laurel said. “This is probably your second concussion in a few days. You both need a hospital.”

  “I’ll live,” he said, struggling to get up. Cam ended up helping him. He was woozy, nauseous, but Gracie was missing. Missing. With that giant man who’d hit both him and Cam with a lead pipe.

  “Why didn’t he just kill us?” Will muttered, feeling like he’d been bruised and battered. Well, he supposed he had been.

  “Murder is a little more jail time than battery,” Cam replied. “But he’s certainly racking the charges up. Can you remember anything?”

  “He came in. He made Ty and Kayleigh leave, and you were all gone.”

  “We didn’t want him to see us,” Laurel replied. “The three of us in a Carson bar, even with me engaged to Grady, is just a little too weird.”

  “I think he knew.” Will took a deep breath and let it out. It seemed to help with the nausea and the pain, but not with the roiling fear that Gracie was with that lunatic. “Or something.”

  “Yeah, he knew something enough to take me out using Kayleigh as a damn diversion,” Cam muttered, clearly disgusted with himself.

  “He was talking about Delaneys, something about Delaneys getting what they deserve, but I can’t figure out what he meant exactly, or why he’d want to take Gracie. We have to find her.”

  “The department is going to call me as soon as they have the trace information.”

  Laurel sounded so calm, seemed so absolutely fine with her cousin being kidnapped by a psychopath, and he might have yelled at her for that but he saw the way her hand trembled before she curled it into a fist and stood.

  “We need to get inside. You’re both freezing and hurt.”

>   But just as she said it, the door opened and Grady stepped out. “Carson grapevine worked. Someone saw Jesse’s truck on the road up to the Delaney Ranch.”

  “Why would he go there?”

  “Wish I knew. You sure they don’t need an ambulance?” Grady asked, nodding toward him and Cam.

  He probably did. He felt worse than he had after the car accident, and he hadn’t thought that was possible.

  But Gracie was out there. And Jesse was taking her to Delaney property.

  “We all have to go,” Will said, trying to get to his feet. It took the wall and Cam’s help to get him there, but after a few woozy seconds things smoothed out. “We have to go.”

  “I don’t want to take my cruiser, or your truck for that matter, Cam. Both are way too conspicuous.”

  “What about Gracie’s truck? Isn’t it at Carson Auto? Doubt Jesse would know it. Unless he’s the one who shot the window out. Even then, it’s fairly nondescript.”

  “I’ll go ask Van,” Grady said, immediately disappearing back inside.

  “I guess he didn’t smash your brain completely to bits,” Laurel offered, sounding a little surprised.

  “Laurel, Cam, I know you aren’t going to want to hear this, but this somehow connects to your father. I don’t know how. I really don’t. But after all these little threads, and now Jesse Carson is headed for your father. He connects.”

  “If he connects, then we will deal with that. I promise you.”

  Vanessa Carson came out the door, and made a quick hand motion. “Follow me to the shop. Faster to walk probably. Gracie’s truck is fixed.”

  “Thanks, Vanessa,” Laurel said, but Vanessa just grunted.

  Laurel and Vanessa moved at rapid speed down the boardwalk to Carson Auto. Will’s head and arm ached and burned with every step, but he thought of Gracie. Alone. In the middle of something that had nothing to do with her.

  By the time Will and Cam caught up with Laurel, she was already sliding into the driver’s seat. Cam went for the front seat, so Will used his good arm to awkwardly open the back door. Damn, everything hurt.

  Vanessa pulled a face at the awkward, overly gentle way he and Cam moved. “You two look like crap.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” Will muttered, sliding into the back seat. Laurel was pulling out of the garage before Will even had the door closed and all he could do was lean back in the seat and hope like hell they could solve this once and for all.

  All that really mattered was that Gracie was safe and unhurt. He couldn’t even consider the possibility of anything else because it hurt worse than his many injuries.

  Laurel’s phone went off. She pulled the phone to her ear. “Delaney.”

  Will strained to hear whatever the person on the other end was saying, but it was no use. The few seconds that passed were agony, even as Laurel drove them toward the Delaney Ranch.

  She dropped the phone. “Pinged at the ranch house.” She swore, a rare sign of emotion. “What the hell is Jesse Carson doing?”

  “Feuding,” Cam returned darkly.

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “It’s not a reasonable answer. But it’s an answer.”

  “It connects to Paula,” Will said firmly.

  “Paula is a Carson,” Cam pointed out. “Maybe Jesse believes what you do. That someone killed her. This is revenge. He thinks it was a Delaney.”

  Will didn’t want to say it, but it was important. “Look, it could have been a Delaney. The woman at the motel said the man having an affair with my wife drove a black—”

  “Gracie told me,” Laurel said quietly. If there was emotion in her over her father being implicated, she didn’t show it. “At the bar. She told me Dad might be involved.”

  “He could have been having an affair with Paula. It’s possible.”

  “He’s just as big of a hater of the Carsons as Jesse is of him. I can’t imagine him messing around with one. Let alone a married one.”

  “Okay, well, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe Jesse only thinks he was. The truth isn’t as important as whatever Jesse thinks is the truth. It has to connect, or he wouldn’t have used me as part of it.” A memory slapped him, hard and painful, and Will couldn’t believe it had slipped away. “Wait. He told me. He told me when he talked to me he had evidence your father was involved. That’s how he lured us outside.”

  Laurel pulled through the archway to the Delaney Ranch, a determined set to her jaw. “Well, we’re about to find out the truth, one way or another.”

  “Nothing is more important than Gracie not being hurt. Not even the truth,” Will insisted.

  Laurel turned off the lights and pulled Gracie’s car off the drive up to the house. Though the night was dark, the Christmas lights of the main house and a cabin off in the distance lit their drive. Instead of heading for the main house, Laurel drove toward a cabin on the far side of the property.

  She stopped the car behind the cabin, hiding them from the view from the main house. She turned to Will.

  “Gracie is the most important thing, which is why we need to have a plan before we head in there. A plan we all agree to follow no matter what. A plan that minimizes surprise and damage. Once she’s out, we’ll find the truth. Period. But no one risks themselves.”

  Will couldn’t make that promise. He’d risk himself a thousand times over to keep Gracie safe.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Gracie was shaking. She didn’t know if it was fear or cold, or possibly both, but she couldn’t stop it no matter how many times Jesse warned her to knock it off. They had been crouched in the snow next to the porch of the Delaney house for she didn’t know how long. Jesse had tied her hands together, with just enough extra rope so that he could hold on to the end of it and jerk her this way and that or pull her like a dog.

  Gracie couldn’t take it anymore. “He’s asleep. Are we going to wait here all night? You’ll freeze to death just as much as I will.”

  “Shut your mouth, girl.” He jerked her rope so hard she fell over without her arms to break the fall. The ground was hard and the snow was cold and piercing.

  Jesse and Kayleigh laughed like it was a good-natured prank.

  It made her want to give up, but she knew she couldn’t do that. She and her uncle might not be close, but she couldn’t let Jesse hurt him. And what if no one had found Will? What if Cam was hurt, too? There was too much riding on her surviving. She couldn’t let the Carsons’ cruelty get to her.

  Gracie struggled onto her knees. In the distance she thought she heard a car engine. It could be her imagination, a desperate hallucination. It could also be a truck on the highway in the distance—they usually didn’t hear traffic up here but it was a cold night. Engine noise could travel. But she didn’t want to take the chance it might be help, and the Carsons might see or hear it and hurt whoever could possibly be coming for her. So she started coughing. Coughing and coughing, even when Jesse told her to shut up and jerked the rope again.

  She simply fell into the snow and coughed some more.

  Jesse swore up and down, threatening her with all sorts of things, but she didn’t stop coughing. She had to try to mask the sound just in case.

  When Jesse kicked her in the ribs, hard, she squeaked at the sharp, unexpected blast of pain. She had to stop coughing because it hurt too much and it was taking everything she had to try to breathe through the crushing pain in her ribs.

  “Are you sure you sent it to the right number?” Jesse demanded of Kayleigh, though Gracie had no idea what Kayleigh was supposed to have sent. There was some kind of plan they’d clearly devised before they’d taken her, and Gracie couldn’t figure any of it out. Most especially why they were here.

  Before Kayleigh could answer her father, a light inside flipped on. It illuminated the satisfied grin on Jesse’s face and if Gracie wasn’t in so much pain she might ha
ve had the wherewithal to get more afraid.

  Jesse pulled her by the rope and didn’t give her a chance to get to her feet. He dragged her through the snow as she wriggled and struggled to find a way to get up. It was only once they got to the porch that he stopped dragging her through the snow.

  She tried not to sob, even though that was what she wanted to do. This was painful and demoralizing and she didn’t understand how she was in the thick of it. Jesse jerked her to her feet just as the front door opened.

  Her uncle stood there looking as polished as he ever did. His short hair didn’t have one sleep-flattened section, and he wore a robe like most men wore a suit. He looked at the trio of them with regal superiority.

  When his gaze met hers, some of that faltered for one second before it smoothed back out. “Grace,” he said in that disappointed tone she’d known all of her life with him. He frowned at her. “I should have known it would come down to you.”

  Gracie didn’t have a response. She didn’t have anything. She could only stumble forward as Jesse pushed her inside.

  “Carson, I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but surely you know it’s only going to end in jail time. Again.” He looked at Kayleigh with that sneer of disgust Gracie didn’t think he was trying to hide at all. “And bringing your daughter into it. You’ve made a misstep here.”

  “Have I?” Jesse asked, studying the vast living room bathed in a warm glow from the chandelier above. The Christmas tree lights were off, but the prettily decorated tree stood big and full in the corner, cheerful and mocking.

  Jesse jerked the rope again and this time it propelled Gracie forward into an end table, sending a shooting pain up her leg and knocking over a lamp in the process. It crashed to the ground.

  Jesse sat on the couch, still grinning, as he jerked the rope again. Gracie was ready for it this time so she didn’t fall, but she did have to take the steps toward the couch as he pulled on the rope.