all of them.”
“I gave you simple orders. Find the vehicle. Tape the package in place and then hang around to make sure no one took it before they got back to the car. What part of that did you not understand?”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m stupid. I’m not stupid.”
“You don’t follow orders.”
“No, but I got the job done. Hadley has the video. That’s all that really matters.”
He picked up his empty beer bottle and hurled it across the room, missing her head by no more than a foot.
She jerked to a sitting position. “Don’t you dare throw things at me! I’ll walk out of here right now and tell the freakin’ police where to find you.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Try me. Or just keep throwing things against the wall and the people in the next room will call the cops and save me the trouble.”
“In this dump? No one staying here wants the cops sniffing around.”
“Yet you leave me and the girls alone in this scummy motel every night. You don’t even care if someone breaks in and rapes me.”
“Aw, baby, you know better than that.”
He walked over to the bed and dropped to the edge of the mattress. When she turned her back to him, he reached around her and grabbed one of her breasts, thumbing her nipple until it puckered against the front of her low-cut T-shirt.
“As long as you eventually found the right windshield and the video and phone are in Hadley’s hands, we’ll be fine.”
“It’s in her hands.” That part was true. “But I’m getting a really bad feeling about all of this.”
“You worry too much, Mary Nell. You want the money as badly as I do. You were with me all the way when we decided to do it.”
“That’s when I thought it would all be over in two days the way you promised.”
“It’s only been two days.”
“But we still have the girls and we don’t have the money.”
“I’m working on it. It’s not as easy as I thought. I have to make sure there’s no way the cops will take us into custody or shoot us when we go in to get five million or when we cross the border.”
“We’re in over our heads. Please, let’s just drop the girls somewhere in town. No one will ever connect us with the abduction.”
“We can’t give up now. We’ll never have a chance to be this rich again.”
“I know but I keep thinking what if someone did this to us? What if Lila and Lacy were our kids and someone stole them from us?”
“Stop bitching.” He yelled a few curses.
Lacy woke up and padded over from her pallet in the back corner of the room.
“See what you did. You woke her up. And don’t use that language in front of her.”
“I want my mommy,” Lacy said. “I want to go home.”
“I know you do, sweetheart. And you are going home soon. I promise.”
“You keep playing momma. I’m out of here.” The door slammed shut behind him.
She went over, locked it and then pulled Lacy into her lap. “Do you want another story?”
“Yes. The princess story.”
The princess who met her handsome prince, became unbelievably rich and lived happily ever after in a kingdom where they could entertain royally and dress in finery every day.
“Once upon a time...”
* * *
“HOW MUCH FEED per horse?” Adam asked as he made the rounds to each stall with the bucket of R.J.’s special feed mix.
“Two scoops, except for Hummer there on the end. He gets two and a third scoops.”
“No wonder he’s so big.”
“The other way around,” R.J. said. “He gets more feed because he is so big. I saw him in a show up in Nashville last summer and he was so magnificent I had to have him. I paid more than he’s worth, but I like his style and his arrogance. Reminds of myself in my younger days.”
“Does he give a good ride?”
“You know it. He’s sensitive to every pull on the reins, but there are times he has a mind of his own. He likes nothing better than to gallop at full speed until he’s panting for breath. Then he’ll stop and look around as if to ask how I managed to stay in the saddle.”
“I’d like to take him out one day and let him show me his stuff.”
“I hope you will, Adam. When this is over, I hope you’ll think about moving to the ranch. It would be a great place to ease back into civilian life.