Total pages in book: 138
Estimated words: 139147 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 139147 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
We waited and nothing.
We waited more, and more nothing.
This was followed by even more waiting, and nothing.
“Maybe we should call the police,” I suggested.
“Hold,” Tex replied.
“Tex, this is taking a long time.”
“Hold,” Tex repeated.
“Tex—”
“There it is,” he murmured, pushed open his door and got out.
Even in the shadows, I knew that body, I knew that gait.
And sauntering purposefully to the chain-link fence was Cap.
I got out.
Luna got out.
“Hold!” Tex called.
It took everything I had, but I held.
I’d know why in short order.
When he got to the fence, Cap didn’t scale it again.
He took a weird step to the side, then the flash of his gun momentarily lit the dark, the blast of it silenced so it just sounded like a zing. He pulled a chain off the gate and opened it.
I sprinted to him.
He’d holstered his weapon, so when I got to him, he settled both hands firmly to my hips.
Okay, got it.
You didn’t girlie throw yourself in your man’s arms when he was in the middle of an operation.
So noted.
I didn’t get a word in, like You’re the greatest or I love you (too soon for that, still, I couldn’t deny, I was feeling it).
He said, “You’re needed inside, baby.”
I looked to the warehouse and started that way.
He halted me by gripping my hips.
I shifted my attention back to him.
“What you’re gonna see, Rachel, you can’t unsee. No shame you get back in the Denali.”
I stared into his shadowed face.
Then I nodded.
I squared my shoulders.
I looked back to Luna, who was standing close to us.
“You good?” I asked.
“I’m good,” she said.
That was all I needed.
We walked through the gate toward the warehouse.
And then we walked in.
It took a while to find them, the place was that big, a labyrinth of rooms and cubbies, and the things I saw in them I immediately expelled from my Oasis because they didn’t belong there.
But, we found them.
We found her.
Someone had located blankets, and all of the women—curled into themselves and each other, sitting on their asses and lining a wall—had them wrapped around them.
The second she saw us, Cameo came out of her curl and launched herself at us.
We hugged her.
She dissolved into sobs.
Luna took over.
Freed from Cameo, it was then I walked to her, crouched in front of her, caught her lowered gaze, and whispered, “Hey, Christina. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. Your mom wants you to know she can’t wait for you guys to fight over the phone again.”
I barely finished speaking, in fact, it was on the words “your mom,” when, clawing the blanket to her, she managed to roll to her knees and collapse into me.
By some miracle, I kept my crouch, wrapped my arms around her and held on.
It wasn’t my love I was giving her in my hold, it was her mom’s.
Even so, I knew she felt it.
Jorge Alvarez was a good-looking Latino man around the same age as Lee and Mace et al. (in other words, the first generation).
And from the beleaguered looks he gave me, even though our introduction was brief, he didn’t like me much.
Oh well.
It took a whole heckuva lot longer to deal with this mess than it did the Elsie Fay thing (and, uh…I saw it, none of them were dead, even if they looked it, but you couldn’t groan like that and be dead, but we could just say Cap and the guys didn’t fuck around with the men in that warehouse).
Therefore, Luna and I were hanging out, texting Jinx and Jessie and Harlow with the updates when she came tearing in.
She was wild-eyed, wild-haired and out of control.
Some of the uniforms made a move to the waiting area, where we were hanging, and where she was racing, but she was on such a mission, they didn’t get to us before she did.
Betsy Markovic pulled me out of my chair first with a yank so strong, I feared she dislocated my shoulder.
Luna came up next, and I heard her grunt of pain, so I knew she got the same treatment as me.
Then she hugged us both.
“She’s sleeping at the hospital. Sleeping, breathing,” she said in the cadence of an excited prattle. “They say there’s nothing wrong with her, physically, I mean. A little dehydration. They’re on that. She can come home tomorrow. Tomorrow. Tomorrow, she can come home.”
She jumped away from us but cupped her hands on our cheeks with too much excitement, thus she nearly knocked our heads together.
“I had a feeling about you girls,” she said. “I’d lost hope. Then you girls showed up. And I knew. I knew my Christina would come back.”
“We had help,” I told her.
She shook her head in a crazed way. “I don’t care. I don’t care how it happened. She’s coming home tomorrow. That’s all I care about.”
She then moved her hands to the back of our heads, pulled Luna down to press a big smooch on her forehead, then me, and she let us go and raced out of there, just as wild and out of control as she’d arrived.