Chapter 3: You’re Not the Boss of Me
60 Hours
(Noon Saturday)
A wild, throbbing dance beat reverberated around me. For once in my life, instead of being a wallflower I was on the dance floor, gyrating in time to the deep thrumming of the bass. I was strong, seductive, and alive. All around me, beautiful people moved to the rhythm, sweat gleaming on their faces. An unbearably sexy man wearing tight slacks and a shirt in the same dark shade as his hair and eyes thrust himself into the small space in front of me. As I smiled an invitation, I noticed that a vein in his neck throbbed to the beat of the dance music. When I looked around me, everyone’s neck veins throbbed to the beat of the music that wasn’t really music at all. It was heartbeats, and all the hearts were beating for me. Waiting for me. Pounding for me. Pounding. Throbbing. Pounding.
I jerked awake. At first I thought the pounding of the heartbeats had woken me, then I realized it was the obnoxious ringtone I had assigned to the most annoying person I know. My mama. The ringtone’s purpose was to prevent me from accidentally answering the phone when she called. I needed to mentally prep before I talked to her. If you knew her, you would understand. She was the only person I assigned that ringtone to. Well, it was also my sister Cheyenne’s, but she never called me anyway.
I stretched across the bed to the nightstand where the phone blared and, terrified I would accidentally hit accept, touched the decline option on the lit-up screen. The phone mercifully silenced, I fell back onto my pillow with a sigh. God, my head ached! But it wouldn’t do any good to lie here. Mama would call back. She was nothing if not determined. Resigned, I eased myself into a seated position on the bed.
What the hell! I wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing.
In the pitch-black room I could just make out the shapes of the furniture. I wasn’t in my turret room at The Madam. My chest tightened in panic until I remembered I was in my hotel room at the Dragonfly. My gaze whipped to the other side of the bed. Empty. I wasn’t sure if the sigh that escaped me was one of relief or regret.
Had I really thought Plain Jane Laramie Thompson could go out to a fancy nightclub, pick up a stranger, and spend the night with him? In the cold light of day—or rather, in the dark of a hotel room with the most fantastic blackout curtains I’d ever experienced—the answer was no. Even if I had met someone, I didn’t think I could have gone through with it. Besides, nothing exciting ever happened to me. I sighed again. This time I knew it was from regret.
I was the very untalented middle child in a family of very talented rodeo stars. My daddy and my older brother, Monty, had been professional bull riders. Mama and my younger sister, Cheyenne, were both barrel racing champions. Mama tried, Lord knows she tried, to make me one too, but I just hadn’t had it in me.
Mama always told me, “Laramie, you have everything inside you to achieve anything you set yourself to. You just have to believe in yourself and really want it.”
Sadly, that wasn’t true. Mama had finally realized it, too, and hung her dreams on Cheyenne.
But I would not feel sorry for myself. It was my big day, and I had a birthday party to get to at my parents’ house. Ten to one odds, Mama had been calling to tell me to pick up my own birthday cake on the way there.
I groped for the bedside lamp and turned it on, illuminating the room. I turned my phone to face me and nearly screamed when I saw the time.
It was 12:05pm! I had less than two hours to make it to the party. The drive from Dallas to my parents’ ranch just outside of Faith, Texas would eat up an hour of that time. In a panicked scramble I disengaged myself from the plush comforter and numerous pillows and propelled myself out of the ginormous bed. The room spun, and the infamous big-ass martini from the night before threatened to make a reappearance in the worst possible way. I held myself very still and, after several moments, the nausea passed. The worst of it, anyway. How could one martini, albeit a big-ass one, have done this to me?
The last thing I remembered was . . .
Heck, what was the last thing I remembered?
I tried to clear the fog. My stomach clenched again as I recalled meeting Marek Cerny. Wait, had Council Member Crockett been there? If my last memory was of leaving the hotel, why was I back at the Dragonfly?
No, I remembered something else. I had been walking towards The Madam, and then . . . Had an animal attacked me? No, it had been a man, because he had spoken, hadn’t he? Something about regards and a church . . . or was it a temple with a cross? Just thinking about it made my head hurt. And then . . . someone had stood over me right before everything went black. No, it couldn’t be.
My stomach lost the fight with the martini. I barely made it to the bathroom in time.
Afterward, I leaned my head against the cool porcelain of the bathtub, which did nothing to ease the pounding. A quick inventory proved I didn’t have so much as a bruise on the parts of my body I could see. Aside from the massive hangover, I was fine. Everything after leaving the club had to be a dream.
But how had I gotten back to my hotel room?
Grace! She must have followed me to make sure I made it up to my room. Had I passed out along the way, and she undressed me and put me to bed? And the person I’d seen right at the end? He couldn’t have been there.
I wallowed in self-pity for a few moments over my miserable birthday eve and the fact that a woman as gorgeous as Grace had seen me naked. Mortification and self-pity battled each other for dominance before I decided there was plenty of room on this dismal day for both.
My body jerked as Mama’s ring tone blared again, more as a Pavlovian response to the caller than from being startled by the noise. I might as well deal with her now. I was thirty today. It was time to face my challenges head on. With no small effort, not to mention queasiness, I got to my feet, wiggled into the plush hotel bathrobe, and trudged towards the ringing phone.
“Hi Mama,” I answered, trying to sound awake, cheery, and not at all hungover.
“Where are you?” she asked without preamble.
I jerked to attention. How did Mama know? What kind of radar had tipped her off that I was in a hotel?
“Wha . . .” was all I could force out.
“I hope you haven’t started driving yet. We are going to have to postpone your birthday party. Cheyenne got last-minute tickets to the George Strait concert there in Dallas tonight. She and Bradley are going to be staying at some fancy hotel. The Bumble Bee or Fly or some other kind of bug name. Who in their right mind would name a hotel after an insect?”
“The Dragonfly?” I asked faintly.
“That’s it. They’ve got early check-in. They dropped the girls off for me to look after and are already on the road to Dallas. How about tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?”
“For your party? It wouldn’t be right to have your party without Cheyenne. Two o’clock?”
“Um, sure.”
“Okay, see you at two tomorrow. Don’t be late. Bye.”
The phone went dead without so much as a happy birthday. That was Mama at her finest.
Despite the hangover, I moved faster than I had ever moved before. The last thing I needed was to run into Cheyenne and her husband, Bradley, checking in while I was checking out. She would be on the phone to Mama before I could make it out the front door of the hotel.
In the bathroom, which felt more like a mini-spa, I studied my reflection in the large mirror over the sink. I looked like death warmed over. I winced when the comb I jerked through my hair caught in a thick knot at the back of my neck. I untangled the comb and tried to pull it through again. After it stopped in the same spot and wouldn’t budge, I pulled my hair over my shoulder to work out the tangle. Something caked the matted hair. When I scraped it with my fingernail, some substance flaked off and fell into the sink. I leaned over to inspect the flakes. They were almost black, with a dark red tint. I pulled the matted hair close to my nose and sniffed it, gagging at its putrid odor. I don’t know how I recognized the smell, but I was positive that it was dried blood.
Nausea swept over me again and brought with it a fresh memory of snarling and snapping, and me lying face down on the ground. The scene was so vivid that I dropped the robe and spun around to check my back in the mirror. I sagged against the sink in relief. My skin was unmarred.
Something had happened last night. As I faced the mirror again, I noticed a large bruise on the left side of my neck, several inches below my jawline. The blemish was almost as big as my palm, and the colors in it were a sight to behold. Almost hidden by the rainbow colors of the bruise were two small, white spots about an inch apart. Each spot was roughly an eighth of an inch round, and they had the appearance of old scars. A quick rub of the area made me wince. It was sore, and the marks were slightly raised.
Had I been bitten by the dreaded brown recluse spider? That wouldn’t account for two marks unless it had bitten me twice, but it would explain why I felt so bad today. I was warming to the spider theory when I remembered the blood in my hair and the disjointed images from last night.
That brought an even more sinister thought to mind. Maybe I had been drugged. There had been a lot of stories in the news lately about the date-rape drug. Spiders and drugs? It was all too much to think about, especially with a bitch of a headache wreaking havoc with my thought process and my bitch of a sister closing in on me.
I stared at myself in the mirror and noticed something even stranger: my face was devoid of makeup. Had someone washed my face while I was passed out? If so, what else had they washed?
Even though I could practically feel the noose tightening around my neck as Cheyenne got closer to the hotel, I quickly stepped into the shower. As I scrubbed the Dragonfly’s coconut-scented shampoo roughly through my hair, I fervently tried not to think about what might have happened to me while I was passed out, or about what I was washing out of my hair. The hair part became more challenging when I rinsed it and the water ran a bright red before it swirled down the drain.
I pulled the entire, sopping wet mess into a ponytail and slid my arm across the counter, dragging all my toiletries into my small black cosmetics bag. I left the bathroom to get dressed. The relaxing spa feeling continued throughout the room, with pale greens and aqua mixed with beige, and it oozed expense and understated elegance. I wished I had thought to take pictures with my phone the night before. No time now.
I tugged on the unexciting clean underwear I had brought for my morning after, followed by my boyfriend jeans and the black, V-necked, long-sleeved tee I had worn to the hotel the day before. I completed the outfit with an orange silk scarf, a nod to the fact that Halloween was only a few weeks off. I had included the scarf to dress up my casual outfit, but now its job was to cover the bruise that most people would think was a hickey. I wrapped it around my neck, letting the ends trail down the front of my T-shirt.
Finally I slid my feet into black leather flats and made a quick round of the hotel room, scooping my few possessions into an overnight bag. Where were my LBD and sexy underwear from the night before? Another wasted purchase, although in fairness, they had come from the sale rack at Walmart. I frantically scanned the room and saw them neatly folded on top of the dresser. My face burned again at the thought of Grace undressing me. I grabbed the clothes, intending to put them in my bag and head for the door, but stopped when I realized they were damp.
I pondered why Grace would wash my clothes but not hang them up to dry. Then I remembered that Cheyenne was on her way; I didn’t have time to ponder. I threw the damp clothes into my bag and backed towards the hotel door, reaching behind me for the handle as I scanned the room for any belongings I had missed. Something crackled under my hand. Frustrated at another distraction, I turned and saw a folded piece of paper taped to the door handle. I hastily pulled it free and unfolded it. Written on the paper in a flowing script that called to mind centuries-old documents under glass were one sentence and a name:
Do not leave this room until Grace or I come for you.
MarekCerny
The ramifications almost had me running for the bathroom again. Marek had been in the room last night. Not Grace. Had we? Had he? After a moment of deliberation, I decided no to the first. Unfortunately, I was pretty sure that the answer to the second question was yes. He must have undressed me.
I realized that without even making a conscious decision to do so, I had walked back to the bed. Good girl, Laramie, just follow directions as usual. I was thirty today, dammit. It was time for me to start making decisions for myself. I balled up the note, tossed it onto the bed, and walked out of the hotel room.
