“What?” Shepherd asked, the stunning nature of that question spurring him out of his fear of the people in the room. A woman was kidnapped and a man was dead, and Vincent thought they could spin it? “What do you mean ‘spin’?” Maybe he misunderstood. Maybe this was all a misunderstanding. Maybe this was an elaborate prank, and Deandra was about to walk in the door with an alive landlord on her arm.
But the phone on the large desk began to ring. Ginny’s grandfather stared at it. Bradley hurried to the door and unlocked it. Police officers who were loitering in the hall hurried inside, wearing headphones and carrying recording equipment.
Ginny slipped her hand in his, and it was trembling. Shepherd brought it up to his mouth, kissed her knuckles.
With a deep breath through flared nostrils, the older Mr. Kent answered the phone.
FIFTEEN
Her grandfather said, “Elwin Kent speaking.”
Then there was silence. Presumably, the caller responded. The people with headphones were staring unblinkingly at each other, some scribbling notes down quickly, another hitting buttons on a computer as if he could hack the internet with the force of his typing alone.
“That is quite a bit of cash, sir. Not easy to get hold of, you understand.”
More silence, except for the typing of keys and writing of pens.
Ginny squeezed Shepherd’s hand so hard his fingers went numb.
“Do you have proof of life?”
The room collectively held their breath, Shepherd included. Until now, he hadn’t even considered the possibility that Deandra was dead. She was simply too terrifying to be killed. But there was a very real chance she’d been too much for the kidnapper to handle and he’d—
Elwin gave a thumbs-up.
Ginny collapsed against his arm. She would’ve fallen to the ground if he hadn’t reacted, removing his hand from her vice-like grip to hold her close. She pressed her forehead against his throat, her rapid, shallow breathing tickling his skin. Shepherd rubbed her back in small circles and thought of Lex.
“I’ll need more than twenty-four hours to liquidate that amount of capital, you understand. I could get thirty percent of that by your deadline, however.” Elwin paused. “Hello?” He hung up the phone. “Were you able to track it?”
A young bespectacled man removed his headphones and said, “Well. It looked like the call was coming in from Quebec.”
A woman in a suit put her hand on his shoulder. “We’ve gotenough. Give us a few minutes to look into it, see if we can uncover his VPN.”
The police and agents left the room. Shepherd watched them leave, his mouth hanging open in shock. Ginny felt much more solid in his arms—a relief, because he no longer felt real.
“Did he …” he whispered, swallowing. “Did he just try to negotiate with the kidnappers?”
She wrapped her arms around him in a hug. “Yeah. That’s why I said you were my fiancé.”
Shepherd pulled back so he could look at her face. “What? How are those things connected?”
The corner of her mouth lifted up in a sad little grin. “I’m going to need your vote.”
Shepherd considered himself a man of above-average intelligence. He wasn’t a genius, by any stretch of the imagination, but working in the restaurant business, you got to meet a lot of people, and he’d learned very, very quickly that most people were very, very stupid. Still, he knew it was a dumb thing to say, “But it isn’t an election year,” and yet he said it anyway.
Bradley locked the heavy door. “We have a decision to make,” he announced.
Elwin Kent gestured to the room at large. Ginny’s father and brother took the seats in front of the desk. The women on the couch made room for Ginny. But there was no seat for Shepherd. He stood at her side and put his hands in his pockets and watched as everyone else looked at each other.
Brandy sighed. “Why ishehere?”
It took Shepherd entirely too long for a man of his intelligence to figure out thathewas the he to which she was referring. He laughed and shrugged. “Kinda asking myself the same thing.”
No one else laughed.
Ginny stood up and took his hand. “Shepherd is my fiancé. That makes him family. He gets a vote, too.”
The two women shook their heads in near unison. “Brandy and I had to be married before we got a vote,” Scarlett said. “That’s the rule.”
