Just My Luck by Adele Parks (best romance books of all time txt) 📗

trust them, but as our daughter is currently bound and gagged God knows where, we have to do something.”

“Let me do some reading,” offers Jennifer. It’s an eminently sensible suggestion under normal circumstances—due diligence and research before employing someone is a good plan. I want to stab her. We’re so far from normal circumstances. She is close at my side, her hand hovering over the mouse. I realize she’s expecting me to relinquish my control of the laptop. I’m not sure I can. So much seems outside of my control, I need to cling to this. Jake puts his hands on both my shoulders, gently helps me to my feet and leads me away from the laptop back to the kitchen table. He guides me into a chair, and when I resist, the pressure exerted increases fractionally. I flop into the chair and he releases me. The moment he does I leap to my feet. “I can’t just sit here.” I rush into the hall. All eyes are on me. They look concerned and a bit exasperated. They are looking at me as though I’m a crazy woman, but they are the crazy ones, just sitting here, accepting this, waiting.

“Where are you going?” demands Jake.

“I don’t know, I need to be out there. To comb over the party site again. I need to find her.”

“I’ll come with you,” says Fred. I nod, grateful, willing to enter another truce with him even though he collaborated in the seizure of my phone. People are not queuing up to help me, and I’ll take what I can get. I am aware that it should have been Jake offering. Jake who wants to be with me, hunting for his daughter.

Instead, he says, “I can’t imagine it will do any good, though. If we are dealing with professionals, which I think we are, they are hardly going to have left a big arrow pointing to where they’ve gone.”

“We have to do something!” I scream.

At that moment my phone buzzes. We all rush back to the table. I’m the most determined. An animal, I snatch at it first and answer. “Hello.”

“Have you called the police?” The voice is not recognizable. Whoever is speaking sounds like a robot. I remember from some spy film or other that you can get apps and devices that can be attached to your phone that disguise your voice. I could be talking to a man or a woman, someone with a posh London accent or someone speaking in a second language—it’s impossible to tell. I curse the person with the mind dark and clever enough to invent this app.

“No, we haven’t.”

“Don’t, or else.” The mechanical way the threat is delivered in no way diminishes its power. I don’t need to know what the “or else” is. I can imagine it, but still—in order to underline the point—I hear my daughter yell out in pain. Her voice is not disguised. I don’t know what caused her to yell. Did they hit her, kick her, pull her to her feet by her hair? Worse? I start to cry. Jake impatiently gestures to me that I should hand over the phone, but I just move farther away from him, glad the table is between us and he can’t snatch it from me again.

“We want ten million pounds.” The robot again.

“Okay.” It doesn’t cross my mind to argue the point. I’d give them every penny I won and every penny I had before the win. I would.

“Bank transfer. We’ll send details. When we have the money, we’ll tell you where she is.”

“Okay.”

The line goes dead.

CHAPTER 38

Emily

I don’t know how long I have been here. I’m too terrified and disorientated to be able to keep track. I wish I could sleep, let some time pass without this horrendous, impossible to describe fear, but I can’t sleep. I am trying, really trying, to stay calm. That’s what Mum and Dad would want. If they were here, they’d tell me it was going to be okay. They’d tell me I am brave and strong and that it will all be over soon. Mum would be the one to say, Don’t think about the pain, Emily, don’t anticipate it, you make it worse. Try to think about something else. That’s what they said when I had to go to the doctor for injections or had to visit the dentist. It’s almost laughable that I was once scared of those things. Now I see that those things are nothing to be scared of. Nothing at all. I also see nothing is laughable and that maybe it’s not all going to be okay.

I wish my mum and dad were here.

Where are they? They will be coming for me. I know that. I cling to that. They will come for me soon. They will have called the police and there will be a massive search for me already underway. Mum will be insisting that helicopters with big beaming lights scan the dark night, Dad will be walking through fields searching for me with gangs of other people, too, everyone who came to the party will be looking for me. We have friends, we have resources, they will find me. I listen hopefully for the sound of a helicopter engine or my dad calling my name. Nothing.

I think we are in a barn or farm building of some sort. The ground is uneven and doesn’t feel tiled or wooden, it feels like earth, but I can’t be sure because I’m too woozy—shock, drink, dehydration, plain old-fashioned terror. All this combined has left me confused, unsteady. I’m sitting on a hard plastic chair, my arms tied to it behind my back and my legs splayed, tied to each front leg. The rope is thick and hurts my wrists. I am freezing cold and my feet have gone numb. I’m parched. When they tied me to the chair, they took off the tape from my mouth.

“Don’t scream. No one hear you. I hit you