‘Kendra,’ he managed. ‘I need to know where Kendra is.’
‘I haven’t seen her, Mr. Thorne.’
He could tell the security man was making an effort to keep his voice calm and to keep the irritation at Garrett from showing. He didn’t give a shit. He just wanted to find Kendra.
The man gestured toward the opening beyond the trees. ‘She’s probably back in the field, Mr. Thorne, where you need to be too, so we can do our job.’
Ignoring the grab of brambles and the slap of overzealous saplings, needing to see her, needing to make sure she was OK, he hurried back into the open, back to where the blankets were spread onto the grass. She wasn’t there!
‘Kendra! Kendra!’ He swung the flashlight wildly, bathing thin strips of woodland in yellow light, light that danced over skeletal branches and hanging moss, light that caught macabre shadows that slunk over tree trunks and burst from behind rhododendrons. In the woods he could hear the security man fanning out, searching. He could see the flicker of their lights.
This couldn’t be happening. Dear God, this couldn’t be happening! She was the bright spot. She was the center pushing back his own darkness, and he couldn’t lose her. He couldn’t lose her!
‘Kendra!’ He yelled for her until his throat was raw. ‘Kendra, answer me!’ Why the hell didn’t she respond?
Almost before he knew it, Ellis and Dee were on either side of him, both with flashlights. Ellis was carrying a baseball bat.
‘I can’t find her,’ Garrett managed between gasps for breath. ‘Jesus, I can’t find her! She was there one minute next to me. I could hear her and then she was gone.’
He headed back into the woods, ignoring Ellis’s call after him to wait.
He had just reached the point where the world was swallowed completely in darkness other than the swath cut through by his flashlight when he saw her, lying face down on the pine straw, and his heart stopped. And the world stopped. And it was all his fault. He raced toward her, feeling like he was moving through quicksand, feeling like everything had downshifted into slow motion, feeling like everything was conspiring to keep him away from her. He stumbled over an exposed root, practically falling on top of her.
Then he heard her moan, and everything launched back into real time. ‘Kendra! Kendra! Jesus Christ! Kendra, are you all right?’ He slid in next to her on his knees just as she forced herself up into a sitting position and coughed and gasped.
‘I’m all right,’ she assured him. ‘Fell. Winded myself. ‘I’m fine.’ Her last words were swallowed up in a little gasp as Garrett pulled her to him.
‘I told you to stay,’ he whispered. ‘I told you to stay. Damn it, Kendra! Don’t ever, ever do that to me again!’
‘I couldn’t stay,’ she managed between his rain of kisses. ‘Not when you were out here alone.’ She touched his cheek. ‘Garrett, you’re bleeding! What happened?’
‘Just a branch,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing.’ He pulled her still tighter to him, forcing another breathless grunt. ‘Jesus, woman, what am I going to do with you? What am I going to do with you?’
‘I don’t know.’ She wrapped her arms around his neck as he eased her up onto her feet. ‘What you did back there on the blanket a few minutes ago, that seemed to work pretty well.’
They barely cleared the woods before Dee broke into a run and grabbed Kendra in a fierce hug. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered against her friend’s neck. ‘I’m so sorry. We thought you’d be safe here. I swear we both did.’
Kendra pulled away and ran a hand through Dee’s sleep-mussed hair. ‘I am safe,’ she replied with a smile that was way more confident than anything Garrett could have expected under the circumstances. ‘Don’t worry, Dee, I promise, I’m fine.’
Dee pulled her back into a rib-crunching bear hug with a laugh that was more of a sob. ‘God, I was so scared.’
‘There was someone out there,’ Kendra said, as Garrett came forward and pulled her back to him, not yet ready to let her go, lest she vanish again. ‘There was.’ She nodded fiercely. ‘You saw him didn’t you, Garrett?’
‘I saw something,’ he said, wishing like hell he’d got a better view.
Just then Ellis joined them with the head of his security team. He gave Kendra a tight hug and surprised Garrett by giving him one too. Then he rummaged in his pocket and handed Garrett a handkerchief for his bloodied face.
‘It’s possible,’ the security man was saying. ‘There could have been someone out there.’