Miss Impractical Pants (42 page)

Mensur shouted something in an unfamiliar language and a fourth person appeared from hiding: a timid, cherub-faced boy with olive skin—no more than eight years old. Mensur barked at the boy again. The boy hesitated before crawling into the car with Katie. With shaky little hands, he began duct-taping her hands and feet.

“
Noooo
!
Stop! Please!” Lucas pleaded breathlessly as he ran toward them, tearing up the beach.

Mensur pushed the boy out of the way upon Lucas’s approach. Without warning, Mensur sliced the side of Katie’s thigh. Neither her thin pajamas nor her flesh protested against the acute sharpness of the blade. Katie wailed—more from shock than pain. A warm well of blood gushed from her wound. She’d never seen so much blood—not in real life, anyway.

“Get back!” Mensur waved his knife at Lucas, flinging drops of Katie’s blood across the sand.

Lucas dropped to his knees. With his head bowed, he wheezed, “Please, won’t you take me instead?”

Sidney ran up alongside them. “Take me,” he begged. “I’m quite wealthy if
it’s
money you want.”

Katie choked as if she were gagged all over again. More tears streamed from her eyes. But these weren’t cowardly tears.

Mensur took an astonished step back. “No! It is the Duchess we want!”

Lucas and Sidney exchanged confused glances.

“Duchess?
You mean Katie? She can’t be—she’s American! Listen to her accent,” Lucas ventured.

Katie mouth dropped open. If she weren’t bleeding to death, she might have laughed out loud at the notion.

Lucas’s words went ignored.

The boy, who had moved to sopping Katie’s blood with old blankets, suddenly grabbed a paper from the backseat and dashed off to meet up with one of the original attackers, who
was
returning to the scene, huffing and puffing. Mensur and the other attacker shouted a heated discussion in their own language. The other attacker thrust the paper in Mensur’s face and stabbed his finger into Lucas’s society page photo.

Mensur flung the paper to the ground and threw up his hands. “Okay, you can come.” He jabbed his knife toward Lucas. “Janek thinks you could be useful.”

“Thank you.” Lucas stood and took a tentative step toward Katie.

Mensur swiped the knife through the air, inches from Lucas’s face. “Tie him up!”

“Please,” Lucas entreated the other man, Janek, and nodded toward Katie. “She needs help—let me have my hands.”

Janek
inched in Katie’s direction and peered into the vehicle. His shoulders lurched and his fists clenched until his knuckles turned completely white. He gaped at the ceaseless flow of Katie’s blood and her wan complexion. His pupils grew large and his arm flew up, backhanding Mensur across the cheek.

Janek
turned back to Lucas. “Okay, but we don’t want
no
trouble. You give promise for yourself not making trouble, no one get hurt.” He gestured first to Katie, then Sidney, before extending his motion down the beach toward his assembled family.

Lucas nodded. “I give you my word.” He ducked into the vehicle and Mensur slammed the tailgate shut, practically smashing Lucas on top of Katie.

“Why did you do that?” she demanded. “You have to get out of here!”

“
Shhhh
,” he consoled, tracing his finger along her cheek, repositioning himself out of a pool of blood. The side doors flew open as the two men and the young boy took their places and the engine roared to life.

A nauseating moment of panic flashed through her, and she was afraid she was going to be sick. “Get out of here, Lucas!” she whispered fiercely. She pushed at him, hoping maybe she could send him through the rear window.

He trapped her flailing wrists in one of his hands. “I won’t leave, so just lie still.”

She shot up. “I mean it, Lucas! Get out of here before you get yourself killed!”

He pressed a wadded blanket against her wound. She yowled.

“What’s the point?” he said. “As soon as Uncle Avery finds out what’s happened to you, I’ll be dead anyway.”

“Lucas, you can’t leave your family—they’ll be worried sick about you.”

“They’ll be fine.” He took one last look at the crowd of loved ones growing smaller with the increasing distance. “I’m not leaving you.”

“You stubborn ass!”

He chuckled.

His untimely amusement set her already-frazzled nerves on edge. “Don’t be stupid, risk your life,
and
break your family’s hearts for the chance to be a hero!”

He leaned unnervingly close to her face. “I’m not. I’m going to be stupid, risk my life
and
break my family’s hearts for the chance to be with you. But first I have to save you.”

The tension between Mensur and Janek was palpable as the Golf wove through a maze of cobblestone streets. The young boy kneeled against the backseat and peered over the headrest, eyes glued on Katie and Lucas. Lucas held a hand against Katie’s forehead while applying pressure to her wound with a clumsy wad of blankets. She wanted to wail, but the silence was so taut she didn’t dare disturb it.

Every muscle ached against the urge to bolt upright, but the force of his hand kept her firmly pinned. She ground her teeth, balled her fists, and hissed. Maybe from pain, maybe from anger—she didn’t know and she didn’t care. She just knew that being pissed off made her less afraid. Clenching her eyes against the pain Lucas was inflicting upon her, she focused on building her rage.

A hovering presence broke her concentration. Her eyes shot open just as the boy reached over the seat and collected one of her tears on his dirty little finger. She locked eyes with the boy in a moment of mutual assessment. With his big dark eyes, he reminded her of a lost fawn. He dipped his head as scarlet began to creep into his chubby cheeks. She tried to give him a compassionate smile, but only managed to choke on a sob.

He leaned further over the seat and did what he’d seen Lucas do a hundred times already: He pushed the hair away from her face and stroked her cheek with his hot little hand. This time, she couldn’t have stopped her smile even if she’d wanted to.

He melted into an adorable dimpled grin. Putting his lips against her ear, he whispered, “You are movie star?”

Her low chuckle hung in the air, at odds with the heavy atmosphere. “No, I’m not.” She wanted to laugh, but his face was so serious. “What would make you think that?”

He puffed out his chest and gave her a toothy smile. “Your eyes are shiny—like green kryptonite.”

For the first time, Lucas took his eyes off Katie. He grinned at the boy, “You know, I’ve never noticed that before. You’re absolutely right.”

The boy beamed, then was flung into the passenger side door as the car screamed around a corner and came to a screeching halt, depositing him on the floor between the seats. After a short bout of foreign dialect, the two front doors opened in unison. Katie’s heart froze mid-beat as she heard the footsteps that brought the men to the back of the vehicle. Mensur threw open the tailgate and faltered, nearly fainting at the sight of the blood-soaked blankets and hostages.

“She needs a doctor,” Lucas pleaded to Janek, a short, sturdy man in his late forties. Janek’s head exploded with a thick nap of fat black and grey curls, and Katie couldn’t help but notice the family of tiny buttery-looking nuggets lurking inside his ears.

He gave Lucas a noncommittal nod and produced a thick roll of duct tape.

Already chafing around the binds at her hands and feet, Katie flinched, provoking an angered reaction from Lucas.

“Remember promise,”
Janek
warned. “We no want trouble. You help me, I help Duchess.”

After a moment’s contemplation, Lucas dropped his hands and submitted to being bound and taped.

“Stop!
Please…” Katie raised herself up. “You don’t understand! I’m American. I’m not a duchess! Don’t—”

With a nasty smirk, Mensur brought the roll of tape around her entire head as he taped her mouth,
then
gave her the same treatment around the eyes. The ominous screeching of crisp, new tape being ripped from its roll thundered around her, making it almost impossible to hear Lucas’s rising protests against her maltreatment. Eventually, she was shoved to the back of the vehicle, flinching as the tailgate slammed shut, and the Volkswagen Golf tore off down the rutted road.

***

Lady Waverly stared disinterestedly out the window into the gardens, barely hearing the conversation taking place among her brunch guests, the wives of some of the men in attendance at Lord Waverly’s committee meeting.

“Nonsense Esther, Samantha Cameron is a wonderful and quite respectable figurehead.”

“Honestly, if Sam-Cam is going to compete with Michelle Obama, she really needs to—” Esther Denby interrupted herself as she heard her cell phone ring. “Pardon me a moment, ladies. I must take this call.” She dipped into her intricately beaded, limited-edition Fendi baguette and pulled out her bedazzled Christian Dior phone. “It’s my daughter, Olivia. She’s just gone to meet her fiancée in Croatia.”

Lady Waverly, having been informed by Lucas of Katie’s exodus to Croatia, could not imagine a worse plight for her new friend than Olivia’s presence. She strained to hear Esther’s voice over the clackety-clack-clack of her high heels as the woman glided to the other end of the room.

“He’s been taken hostage! Lucas has been kidnapped!” Esther cried as she returned to the group, nearly toppling over as her pencil skirt refused to accommodate her long strides. “Oh dear God, this can’t be happening! I’m sure they must have been after my darling Olivia—who survived the danger intact, thank the Lord.”

Lady Waverly’s hand flew to her mouth as the other women were set about clucking like chickens.

“Gordon! I must tell Gordon!” Esther fanned herself with both hands, as she tried to squint out a few tears.

“Of course, Esther, I’ll go find him.” Lady Waverly was already making the move to the meeting room.

“Have you heard from Katie?” Lord Waverly asked when his wife spoke the news into his ear.

Lady Waverly answered with a discreet shake of the head.

“You must try to contact her and find out what the devil has happened. I’ll apprise Gordon of the situation.”

Lady Waverly stole into her private library. Unable to make her trembling fingers work fast enough, she flipped through the pages of her address book. She punched in the numbers, praying intently Katie would answer.

***

After an entire night of questioning, the only vital clues they held were Mensur, whose identity could not be found in any background search, and the torn newspaper article retrieved from the beach. No one could say how long Lucas’s family and a flummoxed, underequipped police team stared glossy-eyed around the room in a state of disbelief, muttering only half-coherent sentences.

“Where in Imelda Marcos’ shoe cupboard is that noise coming from?” Lottie demanded grumpily.

Sidney perked up and Andrew flung himself toward Katie’s bags as they both recognized the upbeat tune of her ringtone. They all beheld the ringing phone with apprehension, looking to their assigned investigator for instruction. He signaled for Lottie to answer the call.