“Two-seventeen,” she murmured. “Out the door, to the left, then up the stairs. It’s right at the top.”
“Key.” Sean held out his hand.
“I-I’m really not supposed to—”
Thorpe raised a menacing brow, promising retribution if she continued to protest. The woman jumped to action, reaching under the desk with trembling fingers to extract a key. She dropped it in Sean’s hand, then cut her gaze to Thorpe, her eyes pleading for approval.
“Is her room paid?” the Dom demanded.
“Through tomorrow night.”
Damn, had Callie intended to skip town in another twenty-four hours or less?
“Very good. You can consider her room vacant in the next hour.” The smile Thorpe bestowed on her then was brilliant, praising as he tapped her chin gently. “Thank you for your help . . . Your name?”
She lapped up that smile like a kitten with fresh milk. “Doreen. Sir.”
If anything, Thorpe’s smile widened. “You’ve been very helpful, sweet girl.”
“I tried,” she breathed with a wobbly smile.
Sean tried to hold in his astonishment. Instead, he leaned across the counter to the clerk and slapped a hundred-dollar bill on the counter between them. “And you never saw us, Doreen.”
She looked at him blankly, then back over to Thorpe. All the man did was send her an expectant stare, and she nodded vigorously. “Never.”
Sean palmed the key and turned to Thorpe, still holding the woman all but hypnotized. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Ten
THORPE turned to him as they made their way out of the motel’s disgusting lobby and headed for the Jeep. “So where’s this club?”
“In a minute. We’ve got to clear her room first.” Sean inclined his head toward the stairs to the upper level of the joint.
“Fuck whatever’s in her room. We need to get to Glitter Girls now, before she gets away again.”
Sean glanced at his watch. “I want to reach her, too. You know that. It’s not quite one, and she’s working until two, so we’ve got some time. But we can’t leave behind any trace of Callie that anyone looking for her could find. If there’s no trail, there are fewer followers.”
Thorpe gritted his teeth. “I don’t like it.”
“I don’t either, but what are our other choices?”
It annoyed him, but Sean had a point. Thorpe conceded with a sigh. “All right. The good news is, it will probably take five minutes or less since Callie won’t have spread her stuff out. Hell, she was with me nearly three months before she put anything in a drawer.”
Sean stared at the upper story of the motel as the chilly desert wind whipped through his light jacket. “Let’s make this quick.”
Nodding, Thorpe followed Sean and darted for the stairs, taking them two at a time until he reached the cracked cement level. The rusted railing had once been painted a bright blue, but had faded and chipped over time. The blue drapes with their blackout backing in each of the room’s filthy windows looked dirty enough to be a breeding ground for bacteria and insect eggs. A few doors down, a man and a woman were arguing at the top of their lungs. In the distance, a gunshot sounded, then tires screeched.
Thorpe knew why Callie had chosen this place, but he still wondered what the hell she was doing here. There had to be someplace else out of the way that wasn’t quite so ghetto-gutter.
In the moonlight, he approached the first door at the top of the stairs and barely made out the tarnished brass numbers.
“Callie chose the corner room, the one with stairs in either direction,” Sean commented.
“Obviously, she’d scoped the place out in advance.”
“Clever, clever girl.”
As they charged toward the room in question, Thorpe tossed him a nod. “You know she is. Don’t underestimate her.”