“Dylan, what the hell—”
“Stay right there. I mean it, Alice, do as I say for once,” he growled tensely. She gasped in disbelief. Did the man have night vision? How else had he known that she was untangling her legs from the sheet in order to jump up and follow him? She thought she heard him moving in the room in the fractions of the seconds between the swelling shrieks of the alarm.
She blinked when the bedside light switched on. She squinted at the vision of Dylan standing next to the bed. He’d pulled on a pair of dark gray pajama bottoms with stunning speed. His face and torso looked tense and hard as he handed her the phone.
“I want you to get up and lock the door after I leave.”
“But—”
“There’s someone in the house, Alice. If you don’t do exactly what I say, I swear I’ll—”
“All right, all right,” she said in a beleaguered fashion, convinced by his snarling intensity. She threw back the sheet.
He started toward the wood-paneled door. “Call nine-one-one as soon as you lock the door after me,” he said over his shoulder. “The police should be on their way since the alarm was triggered, but see if you can have them inform the officers that I’m downstairs in the house. I don’t want to be accidentally mistaken for the intruder by the police.”
The reality behind his words penetrated. What if the police shot Dylan? What if the burglar did?
“Dylan, wait, no—”
“I can take care of myself,” he said, pausing briefly with his hand on the doorknob. “Now lock this door and stay in this room until I come to get you. I’ll be distracted if you don’t do exactly what I asked you to do. Alice.” He said her name like an ominous warning. She realized he saw her defiance stamped on her face. The heavy crease of worry on his brow and his fierce glare nudged at her.
She nodded in agreement. He disappeared.
She knew what he said was true, even if it didn’t calm her any. Dylan had grown up on the streets. He was no stranger to confrontation or violence. He was no fool. She didn’t want to be responsible for him worrying about her safety, distracting him, while he investigated the potential breakin.
She hurried to the heavy carved door and locked it. A few minutes after she’d called nine-one-one and yanked on her robe, she heard approaching sirens mixing with the screeching alarm. She jogged to the window and pulled back the curtains, her nerves crackling in anxiety. Over the top of the long, steep road leading to the castle, she saw the pulsing reflection of red lights against the opaque night sky. Not three seconds later, two police cars topped the rise and zoomed onto the circular turnabout in front of the entrance, their sirens wailing. Alice saw one cop get out and run around the house while the other—a big man—approached the front door. Straining her ears, she thought she heard the sound of banging, and then distant male voices.
The teeth-grinding wail of the security alarm abruptly ceased. A heavy, suffocating silence followed. Remembering her promise to Dylan and feeling like a trapped animal, Alice hurried to the locked door, pressing her ear to the wood, desperate for signs of what was happening below.
After a tense minute of hearing only her own pounding heartbeat, her few remaining threads of control snapped. She jogged to Dylan’s walk-in closet. Flinging open the door, she found the light. The room was illuminated fully to her eyes for the first time—and it was a room not a closet, at least in Alice’s limited experience with luxury. She sought among immaculately organized cedar shelves and what seemed like hundreds of hung suits and tuxedos. Her gaze latched on a potential target.
Several seconds later, she padded silently on bare feet down the enormous, curving grand staircase, a golf club gripped in both hands.
THREE
Dylan conferred quietly with Jim Sheridan, the sheriff of Morgantown, in his den. Alex Peterson, one of Jim’s deputies, was still doing a cursory check of the house and grounds. Jim was convinced it’d been a false alarm, however. Every point of entry was intact, and everything appeared to be in order.