“No,” she protested. “Don’t put me back in the room. Not yet.” She leaned against the gnarled brown bark of one of the tree trunks and glanced at him warily. “Did you really grow up in Boston?”
He looked surprised by the question. “Yeah, I did.”
“So that wasn’t a lie?”
“No. I’m from the east coast, like I said.” He shrugged. “Though I haven’t been back there in two decades.”
“Why not?” She immediately berated herself for the display of curiosity. He was her kidnapper! Next thing you knew, she’d be wielding a machine gun and calling herself Patty Hearst.
“Never had any reason to go back.” Another shrug, this one indifferent.
“No family?” Another mental kick in the shin.
He shook his head. “My parents died when I was fifteen.”
Despite all common sense, a rush of sympathy slid through her. “That must have been tough.” She paused. “How did they die?”
He hesitated for several long seconds, and when he finally spoke, his answer chilled her to the bone. “My father shot my mother in the head before turning the gun on himself. Good old murder-suicide.”
Lana gasped. “Oh, God. Why…why did he do it?”
“To this day, I still have no clue.” His entire face had darkened, making him appear lethal, unapproachable.
“That must have been awful,” she whispered. “Did you go to live with family? Grandparents? Aunt and uncle?”
Deacon’s eyes grew shuttered. “No.”
“Then where—”
“Delta! Bring her over here!” came Le Clair’s hard shout, officially putting an end to the conversation.
Lana found herself overwhelmed with sadness as she followed Deacon. Her brain reprimanded her for being affected by Deacon’s horrifying tale, while her heart wept for the angry, grief-stricken teenage boy who’d lost his parents in such a gruesome way. She fought the urge to squeeze his arm and shifted her focus to Le Clair, who’d walked down the porch steps to meet them.
When Le Clair stuck his cell phone in her direction, all thoughts of Deacon and his painful confession flew out of Lana’s head in one fell swoop. “Say hello to your father, princess,” Le Clair ordered, “and make it fast.”
Joy exploded in Lana’s body like a burst of Fourth of July fireworks. Her father! Oh, thank God, this was finally going to be over!
She grabbed at the phone like a passenger on a sinking ship grasping for a life preserver. “Daddy?” she said urgently.
A hiss of static, and then her father’s familiar voice came on the line. “Lana! How are you? Where are you?”
Her dad sounded as if he might be fighting tears, and Lana blinked back the moisture seeping from her own eyes. Think! she ordered herself. She had to be smart, had to give her dad a clue about where she was.
She let out a wobbly breath and spoke into the mouthpiece, slowly, evenly. “I’m fine, Daddy. I know we haven’t always gotten along, but I want you to know that I love you. And on the remote chance that I survive this ordeal, I hope we can elevate our relationship to a higher place—”
“Time’s up,” Le Clair snapped, and then the phone was snatched out of her hand. Her captor repeated the same warning into the mouthpiece. “Time’s up, Kelley. You know what to do.”
Le Clair jammed on the disconnect button and shoved the cell phone into the pocket of his impeccable wool trousers. Then he glanced over at Lana with a smirk. “So you and Daddy don’t get along, huh, princess?”
Actually, they got along great, but Lana had been grasping at straws. She’d tried revealing her location in the mountains with the words remote, elevate and higher place, but she had no idea if Hank had picked up on it.
The sound of her father’s voice still echoed in her mind. She’d never heard him sound so frantic, so broken-up. He’d always been the smooth-talking senator, but during those precious few seconds, he’d sounded like a worried, heart-broken father. The thought made her sick with anxiety. The rest of her family must be going out of their minds, too.
“He’s a hard man to love,” she said vaguely, in response to Le Clair’s mocking query.
“Can’t say I’m surprised,” he answered, smirking again. “Your sweet mother must be finding it difficult to love him, too, if what the news stories are saying is true.”
Lana had no desire to talk about her parents’ marital problems with this son of a bitch. Gritting her teeth, she turned to Deacon. “May I go back to my room now?”
Le Clair let out a laugh. “Ah, I see I hit a nerve. By all means, Delta, take our princess back to her royal chamber.”
Deacon led her back inside, and the second they were alone in the bedroom again, he spun around, his hazel eyes flashing with fury. “What the hell are you doing, Lana?”
She almost stumbled from the force of his glare. “What are you talking about?”
“‘Elevate our relationship to a higher place’?” Deacon made a frustrated noise. “Don’t think I didn’t pick up on what you were doing, dropping hints to your father.”