Chapter 5 #2
She turned and saw Chase hustling his sister toward her in the same urgent, not-gentle-at-all way.
It would’ve been comical—Rayne still had ahold of the grocery cart and Chase was literally dragging her and the cart to where he’d basically thrown Sadie—but because of the deadly look on Chase’s face, it wasn’t.
She opened her mouth to ask what was going on, but Chase beat her to it.
“I saw someone crouched by my car. Stay here. Stay down. Do. Not. Move. I’ll be right back.”
And with that, he was gone.
“Shit,” Sadie muttered, knowing whatever was happening couldn’t be good.
Rayne dug into her purse and pulled out her cell phone. She pushed a couple of buttons and put the phone up to her ear.
“I’m in the parking lot of Walmart with my brother and Sadie.
He just shoved us behind an SUV and told us he saw someone hanging around his car.
” She paused, listening to what whoever was on the other end of the line was saying.
Then she said, “Right. Okay.” Another pause.
Then, “I don’t know.” Finally, after a long moment, she whispered, “I love you. Bye.”
Sadie waited impatiently for Rayne to hang up. When she didn’t say anything about their situation, Sadie whispered, “We need to do something to help Chase.”
Rayne shook her head. “Ghost said to stay put.”
Sadie ground her teeth in frustration and lifted her head enough so she could look through the window of the car they were hiding behind.
She didn’t see anything unusual, and Chase was nowhere in sight.
She turned back to Rayne and gestured toward the phone she was still clenching in her fist. Her fingers were white with the tension of her grip. “Ghost is coming?”
Rayne nodded.
For some reason, Sadie was more freaked out now than she’d been back at the school when Jonathan had pushed her down on the bed.
Maybe it was because she didn’t know what was going on.
Maybe it was because Chase could be in danger.
She wasn’t sure. But she was sure she didn’t like the feeling.
Not at all. She had no idea what had happened to the badass Sadie she’d been up in Dallas, but at the moment, she felt completely out of her league.
“Maybe we should go back into the store,” she finally suggested.
“No,” Rayne replied immediately. “Ghost said to stay put, so we’re staying put.”
She didn’t want to say it out loud, but she was wondering what would happen if whoever it was that Chase saw circled around and came at them from behind.
Suddenly knowing the person Chase saw was Jonathan, Sadie began to shake. She knew Jonathan was obsessed. She also knew she’d tricked him, and he was beyond pissed about it.
But crouching by that SUV in the middle of the day, wondering if Chase was all right, Sadie knew without a doubt, after he’d had his way with her, Jonathan was going to kill her.
She’d wounded his ego. His male pride. And with the way he’d been raised by Jeremiah, he wasn’t going to just get over it.
He’d need to prove that he was man enough to deal with her.
She didn’t know how much time had passed, but it seemed to be going by extremely slowly.
She wished she had her small pink gun on her, but she’d stupidly left it back in the apartment over the garage.
Sadie wanted Ghost there now. Hell, anyone who could help Chase would be super.
For the first time, she understood a bit better what the men and women of McKay-Taggart did on a daily basis.
How in the world the wives, and husbands, dealt with knowing their spouses were facing bad guys like this was beyond her.
She hated the thought of Chase being in danger. Especially since it was because of her.
When she couldn’t take the waiting for another second, Sadie peered over the edge of the door once more, needing to see Chase. Needing to make sure he was all right.
As if her thoughts about Jonathan had conjured him out of thin air, she saw him crouched behind a car a row over from where Chase’s vehicle was parked.
She knew it was Jonathan because he turned his head and looked right at her.
She’d recognize his blond hair, pointed nose, and the hateful look in his icy blue eyes anywhere. Even across a parking lot.
He turned from her then and aimed his pistol.
Sadie looked in the direction he was facing and saw Chase cautiously moving between two cars near Jonathan. Her mouth was open and she was yelling at Chase before she even thought about what she was doing.
“Chase! Behind you! He’s behind that red car!”
He spun at the same time Jonathan pulled the trigger. The small-caliber pistol he held made a slight popping noise, which seemed somehow muffled in the busy public parking lot.
Her eyes glued to Chase, she held her breath until he took two giant steps and disappeared behind a Jeep. “Oh my God,” she said softly. Her eyes went back to where Jonathan had been hiding behind the car, but he was gone.
“Where’d he go?” she said, more to herself than Rayne.
“There he is,” Rayne said, pointing off to the side. “And Ghost is with him now.”
Sadie looked where her new friend was pointing and saw Chase huddled with Ghost. She hadn’t been asking about Chase, though. She’d been wondering where Jonathan had gone.
Before she could freak about it, Fletch materialized next to them.
“Come on,” he said, motioning toward an idling Highlander SUV nearby.
“Did Ghost call you?” Rayne asked.
Fletch looked at her as if she were insane. “Yeah, Rayne, he did. Now come on, we need to get out of here.”
“What about our groceries?” she asked. “It would suck to get Sadie all the way back home, only for her to realize she has to come back here to get something to eat.”
“Jonathan was by a red car,” Sadie told Fletch, ignoring Rayne’s asinine argument about the food. “Chase didn’t see him, and he got off a shot.”
“Ghost has his back,” Fletch reassured her.
Sadie looked around for Chase for a moment but no longer saw him. She turned to Fletch and nodded. “Okay.”
“He’s going to meet us at the house. I need to get you out of here, Sadie, in case Jonathan decides to go after you next.”
“Are the cops coming?” Rayne asked.
“Doesn’t look like it,” Fletch told her. “No one seemed to notice the gunshot. He probably has a silencer on his gun.”
“How’s that even possible?” Sadie asked, shaking her head. “I heard it.”
“You were looking right at him when he shot, right?” Fletch asked.
“Yeah.”
“You heard it because you were watching him. Even with all the mass shootings happening lately, people don’t expect something like that here in the middle of the day, in the middle of a Walmart parking lot.
And even if they did hear it, they probably thought it was a car backfiring or something.
Now come on, we have to get out of here. ”
Fletch quickly led them over to the black SUV with tinted windows. Sadie struggled, suddenly not wanting to leave without making sure Chase was all right.
“Sadie, get in,” Fletch told her.
“I want to see Chase,” Sadie told him, putting out a hand to brace herself so she couldn’t be shoved into the backseat.
“He’s fine. Get in,” the man repeated.
“If Emily was shot at and you didn’t know if she was hurt or not, would you leave her to continue on with a mission? Even if I told you she was okay and in the hands of another guy like yourself?”
“Yes,” Fletch said immediately. “If she was with Chase or Ghost or any of my other friends, I’d trust them to get her the fuck away from the situation safely. Get in the damn car, Sadie.”
It finally sank in that she was being ridiculous. Not only that, she was putting Chase and Ghost in danger by hesitating. Possibly Rayne, Fletch, and herself too. Her uncles would kick her ass if she did the same thing to them in the middle of a dangerous situation.
Without another word, she ducked her head and climbed into the backseat.
While she’d been trying to convince Fletch to let her see Chase, Rayne had grabbed their groceries and thrown them into the SUV. Crazy woman.
The second Fletch was behind the wheel, he peeled out of the parking lot as if the hounds of hell were after them.
Rayne put her hand on Sadie’s leg in silent support as they sped through the city back to Fletch’s house.