“Are you talking about Tack?” Lanie asked and Aunt Bette nodded to her and looked back to me.
“Let’s start with that. Who’s called ‘Tack’ and why?”
I slapped some hangers on the rack and replied, “Tack’s called Tack and I don’t know why.”
“His kids are in your kitchen and he sticks his tongue down your throat as a good-bye and you don’t know why he’s called Tack?” Aunt Bette asked, her eyebrows to her hairline.
“Uh…” I mumbled.
“He’s her boss,” Lanie shared at this juncture, Aunt Bette’s eyes got huge as her brows stayed glued to her hairline and her gaze stayed glued to me.
“Uh…” I repeated and Aunt Bette tipped her head to the side in a go on gesture. I knew I had her undivided attention because she was standing in front of a rack of clothes at Nordstrom’s and paying no attention to it but I had nothing more to give.
She looked back at the rack and started slapping hangers but I knew she wasn’t looking at the clothes.
“Your uncle and I understood your need to check out, Tyra. Sometimes in people’s lives, they need to check out. But I gotta tell you, your uncle isn’t fired up about how you’re checking back in.” She slapped a hanger across the rack. “The tattoos, he could handle.” Hanger cracking. “The needing a haircut, he could handle.” Another hanging cracking. “The grown kids, he could handle.” Another hanger went. “The grown kids cursing freely without him saying a word, he could handle.” There was another hanger crash. “The hot and heavy make out session as a good-bye in front of your uncle and Tack’s kids, he could handle.” And yet another hanger. “Even his ex shouting the house down, he could handle.” No hanger as her eyes cut to me. “All of that together?” She shook her head. “Um… no.”
“Things are confusing right now, Aunt Bette,” I said quietly and Aunt Bette’s gaze grew sharp.
“I see this,” she replied, hesitated then finished, “Clearly.”
“I like him,” Lanie announced, pulling out a top and holding it down her front as I stared at her in shock. “I think he’s lush.”
“I thought you wanted me to give notice,” I said to her.
She stopped looking down at the top and looked at me. “I did, until he made me pancakes. Now I think he’s lush.”
That feeling I had that morning swept through me as Aunt Bette muttered, “Gotta say, those pancakes are definitely in the plus category.”
I started slapping hangers, declaring, “I can’t talk about this.”
“Why?” Aunt Bette asked.
I stopped slapping hangers and looked at her. “Because I don’t know what to think about it. He’s a complicated man. There’s too much going on, with him and just with me, and all of it is happening fast. One day, I knew where my life was heading. The minute I woke up, I knew what I would be facing. Two and a half months ago, I changed that and now I don’t know what I’m doing, where I’m heading. All I know is, wherever it is, I have to get there. And as for Tack, he can be…” I stopped then started again, “a lot of things. Some of them are good, really good. Some of them are bad, really bad.”
“What’s bad?” Aunt Bette asked.
I shrugged and started moving hangers. “He’s unlike any man I’ve ever met. He takes bossy to an extreme. I’ve never experienced anything like it,” I answered. “And he has multiple personalities. He can be extremely gentle, thoughtful, warm. Then he can get angry and it’s scary. Then he can, I don’t know, disappear. He’s there, we work together for the most part, but he’s not.”
“Has he ever handled you the way he handled his ex?” Aunt Bette asked quietly and I took in a soft breath.
Then I admitted, “If he wants your attention, he finds a way to get it.” Aunt Bette’s eyes flashed and I hurriedly went on, “But it isn’t exactly the same. She’s a crazy woman and she makes his life a living hell and their kids. You heard it but what you saw is constant for him and they’ve been divorced for four years. And he said he’d never hurt me and he never has, not that way. He promised that. He said he’d rather cut off his own arm than ever hurt me.”
“He said that to you?” Lanie asked.
“Yeah,” I answered.
“Wow,” she whispered then she looked at Aunt Bette. “He strikes me as a man of his word.”
Aunt Bette looked at Lanie then murmured, “Well, that’s two in the plus category, not exactly batting a thousand.”
Oh boy.
I heard chiming coming from Aunt Bette’s purse, she opened it, pulled out her phone and hit some buttons.
Then she hit some more while saying, “That’s Marsh. He’s done communing with the golfing brotherhood and he’s hungry. I need to feed my husband. He says he’s at a place called Club and he already has a martini. If we don’t get there soon, he’s ordering.” She hit one last button and I sighed a relieved sigh that this particular conversation was over (for now). She dropped the phone in her purse and looked up at me. “Is this Club place close?”
“Yes, just outside the mall,” I answered.
“But we have to drive there seeing as I’m wearing heels and they have really cool cocktail glasses so it’s likely a taxi night anyway since you have one cocktail in a really cool glass, you have to have seven,” Lanie explained.
This was totally true and this also obviously worked perfectly fine for Aunt Bette for she nodded once then said, “Let’s roll,” as a reply.
With no other choice, since when Uncle Marsh was hungry, everyone ate, even I knew that, we left our rack and headed to the parking garage.
We motored through it toward my car since Uncle Marsh had their rental. I headed to the driver’s side. Lanie to the passenger side back because Aunt Bette’s legs were shorter than mine. And Aunt Bette to the passenger front.
I’d bleeped the locks, doors were opening all around when suddenly and with no warning I saw nothing but black. My body went solid in shocked surprise and I heard a scuffle right before I opened my mouth to scream.
But not that first sound came out because I stopped seeing black when everything went black.
Chapter Fourteen
McGyvering
As I lay on my side on a floor in the dark with my hands bound behind my back, my ankles also bound together, instead of freaking out and visualizing all the possibilities that would bring about what might be my imminent torture, violation and death, I took this time to reflect on why I had never married and why I fell in love with Tack over tequila and sex.
I did this because I wanted to think about Tack who was big and he was strong and he made me feel safe (when he wasn’t making me feel unsafe) but mostly he made me feel alive. If there was nothing else to be said about Kane “Tack” Allen, he made me feel alive. Every minute I spent with him from his initial, “Hey,” to when he kissed me hard and wet and long before he left me that morning, I felt tingling. I felt excitement. I felt fear. I felt pleasure. I felt warmth. And I felt anger. I laughed. I wanted to yell so badly it made me want to explode. I wanted to cry so badly it hurt not to do it.
And I’d been one hundred percent alive through all of it.
What I did not want to think about was where Lanie and Aunt Bette were because they were not with me. And also I did not want to think about where I was. And further I did not think of why I might be there. And lastly I did not think about what might become of me because I was worried that what might become of me was that I wouldn’t be alive anymore.
Instead, I forced my mind to Tack, a man who was not perfect.
But he’d seemed that way when I met him. He was everything my mind had made up in my daydreams of the man I wanted to be mine since I was fourteen and started having them.
He was handsome. He was strong. He had a beautiful voice and an even more beautiful laugh. And he laughed a lot. He had a light touch and he had a sweet touch and he had a sexy touch. He drank tequila like it was water and ate roasted hog sandwiches like they tasted as good as the finest fillet mignon. And
when I had his attention, I had all of it. That night at the Chaos party, he made me feel like I was the only one there. He made me feel funny and interesting and beautiful. And when he took me to his bed, he made me feel a lot of other things that were even better.
It felt like, all my life, I’d been living in black and white and didn’t realize it and suddenly, across a rowdy biker party, I saw this man and the world filled with vibrant color. It didn’t leach in slowly. It slammed in with a kapow!
I didn’t know that was what I was looking for. I just knew I wasn’t going to settle for anything less, not anything less than perfect. I was going to find the man of my daydreams and nothing else would do. So I never got married because I never found him, no one ever brought that color into my life.
Until Tack.
And lying on my side in the dark, bound, I realized that color shot back through my life every time he was filling it. It muted and trickled away when he didn’t, but it would burst out bright and beautiful the minute he came into my space.
After all these years, I finally was alive and now I feared I was going to die.
Tears filled my eyes only moments before I heard the door open and then I heard a thud. I instinctively knew what that thud was. It was a body hitting the floor.
I tensed and the door slammed.
“Who’s there?” I called into the darkness.
“Tyra?” Aunt Bette replied.
Thank you God!
“Aunt Bette.” I started squirming toward her voice. “Are you okay?”
“No, I’m not okay. We’ve been kidnapped and Marsh is drinking martinis and probably flirting with the waitress!” she snapped and it sounded like she too was moving but not in my direction.
This was likely true. Uncle Marsh flirted. It was harmless but he was hot, hot guys did this even if they were taken. Aunt Bette knew there was no one for him but her and he never flirted where the flirtee would get any sense it was going anywhere. But he was a good-looking man. It was pure instinct to keep those skills sharp.
And anyway, Aunt Bette had been shopping. Uncle Marsh would probably have a three course dinner and four martinis before he worried where we’d gotten to.
“What happened? Where were you?” I asked.
“I was in a room tied to a chair where they asked me questions about an Elliott Belova. They thought I was Lanie’s mother, do not ask me why. A, I don’t look a thing like Lanie and B, I’m not old enough to be Lanie’s mother!” she stated, sounding more than slightly perturbed and I had to admit, since her A and B were very true, and she’d been tied to a chair, she had a right.
“Elliott is Lanie’s fiancé, or was until last night,” I informed her as I stopped moving and listened to her continuing to do it.
“I think I got that from her shouting it to him fifteen times on the phone this morning,” Aunt Bette returned.
“Right,” I muttered.
“What’s he into?” she asked.
“Well, according to Tack, the better question is to ask what he isn’t into,” I answered.
“Is Tack involved in this?”
“Um, not until Elliott involved him by asking him to whack the top man in the Russian mob,” I explained then hurriedly finished, “He refused, of course.”
“Of course,” Aunt Bette muttered, still moving around.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“So we’re dealing with the Russian mob here?” she asked back instead of answered.
“I don’t know,” I answered.
“They had Russian accents,” she told me.
“Then yes,” I replied, thinking that was a good guess.
“Not good,” she whispered and kept moving around.
“Aunt Bette, what are you doing?”
“Trying to find something sharp to cut through these restraints.”
I fell silent. I did this because Aunt Bette had also been in the Air Force. That was how Uncle Marsh met her. This was before she “retired” and she did this early then took a contract job working for the Air Force. She told me what she did but it always confused me. She talked in a lot of acronyms like “TDY” and “PCC” and “FIGMO”. I didn’t speak Air Force acronym so I never knew what she was on about. It sounded like a desk job. She boiled it down to “human resources” but I always got the sense that she likely wasn’t filing away performance evaluations because I’d visited her office before and after she retired and seen how people were around her. There was respect and there was the respect people gave Aunt Bette.
I also fell silent because Aunt Bette had been in an avalanche. No joke. She’d lucked out and had an air pocket once the snow stopped covering her. She also picked the right direction to dig. Further, she used Aunt Bette Secret Skills to find every other member of her skiing party and dug them out too. It took her hours but she didn’t stop. She had everyone out and even splinted someone who broke their leg before the rescue people found them. She made the papers. It was big news.
And there was the fact that she was in the Air Force at all. The Air Force didn’t attract wusses.
Therefore, I had a feeling Aunt Bette was thinking of taking on the Russian mob.
I finally ended my silence. “Why are you doing that?”
“To get us out.”
Oh boy.
“Maybe we should wait until Uncle Marsh figures out we’re not coming and raises an alarm,” I suggested. “Or maybe someone saw us being abducted from the parking garage and called the police.”
“Tyra, this is the Russian mob.”
“Yes, I know which is why I think maybe we shouldn’t cause a ruckus and make them angry.”
“We won’t make them angry,” she assured me though I wasn’t feeling assured.
“Well, I’m thinking, they went to all that trouble to kidnap us, we try to escape, that won’t make them happy,” I returned.
“Excellent!” she whispered excitedly. “I think I found an exposed nail.”
Oh boy.
I heard her sawing away at the plastic restraints and tried to push up to sitting, saying, “What about Lanie?”
“We’ll get her before we go.”
I got to my bottom and stared in the direction of my Aunt’s voice. “You mean rescue then escape?”
“Of course,” she replied like I was a dim bulb.
“Aunt Bette!” I hissed. “We don’t know where we are. We have no weapons –”
“I’ll figure out something.”
Wonderful. Visions of Aunt Bette McGyvering an explosive with that exposed nail, some lint from her pocket and spit filled my head just as the door opened quickly and shut just as quickly.
I went still and I heard nothing but booted feet moving on the floor. Aunt Bette had wisely stopped sawing away at the plastic restraints.
“You’re safe,” a deep voice growled. “I’m Hawk. I’m getting you out of here. Be quiet, be smart and do what I say. Yeah?”
Oh thank God.
Since he told us to be quiet, and he sounded like he knew what he was doing as well as a little scary, I was debating whether or not to answer with a “yeah” when Aunt Bette said, “Plastic restraints, wrists and ankles.”
I heard movement, more movement, some more then I felt strong fingers close on my wrist then they were free, movement at my side and then my ankles were free.
Hallelujah.
I rubbed my wrists and heard Aunt Bette ask, “Do you have an extra weapon?”
“This is gonna go quiet. No heroes. ‘Specially not ones who don’t know what the fuck they’re doin’.”
Aunt Bette replied with, “I know you. JTF Able Promise. I’m Lieutenant Colonel Bette Mansfield, retired.”
Silence for a beat then, “Right.”
There was more movement then I heard the sounds I heard on TV when people were fiddling with a gun.
Oh boy. I had a feeling the dude called Hawk spoke Air Force acronym but I didn’t know if this was good or bad.
“You good?” H
awk asked.
“Talk to me,” Aunt Bette ordered sounding curt, bossy and scarily like she knew exactly what she was doing.
Oh boy!
“Neutralized the boys outside. No guard on this door. Two boys on the first floor. Two with your girl who’s on the second floor.”
Oh God. What were they doing to Lanie?
“You have backup?” Aunt Bette asked.
“Called it, the boys we’re dealing with, couldn’t wait. Right now it’s just me. Plan is, I get you out safe, I go back for the girl. My backup should be here by then.”
“Works for me,” Aunt Bette stated.
“It doesn’t work for me,” I butted in. “We need to get Lanie.”
“Quiet,” Hawk ordered.
“No, seriously, this is the Russian mob. They might be –”
My mouth was covered with a big hand and how he hit the target with such accuracy in the dark was beyond me.
“Quiet,” he growled, took his hand away and ordered, “Everyone up. Let’s go.”
I pushed myself to my feet feeling achy and stiff from being tied up and lying on the floor for so long. But I didn’t take the time to stretch. The door opened and I felt Aunt Bette grab my hand. She pulled me out the door into a dark, unlit hall.
We walked about five feet then I heard Aunt Bette whisper, “Stairs,” right before I tripped up the first couple of them.
I righted my footing and moved up the stairs. Hawk opened a door and late evening sun showed through. It also showed on Hawk who was tall, built, dark-haired, wearing a skintight gray tee and black cargo pants and if I hadn’t seen all the gorgeousness that was Tack our rescuer would be far and away the most handsome man I’d laid eyes on in my life. One word: hawt.
As hot as he was, he was also carrying a gun, surveying the area outside the door, giving us a nod and moving forward agilely and alertly. Aunt Bette had a gun too and Lanie was somewhere with two of the bad guys so I had no time to appreciate how hot he was.
Aunt Bette gave me a head gesture that told me to precede her, I did, following Hawk. We made it through the room, out the door and across a lawn with no incident. We stopped under a long, very tall, solid fence.