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“I’m the surprise, you stupid bitch.”
Jane’s breath caught in her throat. Eli’s voice had dropped several octaves. She recognized it as the voice from the late-night phone calls and the creepy answering machine messages.
“What do you want?”
“I want you to stop giving out your idiotic advice to all the stupid women in the world. You ruined my chances with Lacey and Jennifer and just about every other dumb bitch I’ve met lately.”
Her mouth went dry. She took a few steps backward, but that only got her closer to a king-size bed and Eli’s suitcase resting on top of it.
“I’m sorry you’re having a bad-luck streak, but women make their own decisions. I don’t decide for them who they should date.”
“Do you realize how close I came to nailing your sisters? You owe me big time.”
Looking around for a weapon, Jane spotted a bottle of cologne on the nightstand, along with a lamp and an alarm clock. Great, she could perfume Eli to death. She decided to go for the lamp if he made a move toward her, figuring she could at least get away if she swung hard enough at his head with the base of it.
He dove toward her, and before she could react, she found herself pinned to the bed, Eli’s large body pressed against her, his hands holding hers at her sides.
“Did you like the little gift I left for you in your car?”
“What gift?”
“The book, you stupid bitch. I thought you might like my customized copy.”
She tried to force the tears from her voice as she spoke. “Listen, this isn’t necessary. I could talk to Jennifer and Lacey for you, convince them that I was wrong about you before. I’m sure they’d give you another chance.”
“I’ll get my chance. If I can’t have them, I’ll have you.”
Jane found herself wondering if her bridesmaid dress would survive this ordeal, and she realized with a start that she was practicing avoidance thinking, ignoring the fact that the real question was whether she would survive.
All Luke’s self-defense lessons got rolled up in a jumble of nonsense in her head, until she recalled his most frequent words, to stay calm and to always fight back.
She drew back her head and then thrust it forward as hard as she could, making contact with Eli’s mouth. He grunted, then spit on her, and after he’d trapped one of her hands between their bodies, he grabbed a roll of duct tape from the open suitcase beside them.
“Nice try. Did your hired ape teach you how to do that, or was he too busy sticking it to you to teach you any self-defense?”
Jane felt the rage that had been gathering inside her come to a head, and she used all her strength to buck against him as he tried to bite off a piece of the duct tape. In the scuffle, his ear ended up next to her mouth, and she bit down hard until he got his hands around her throat.
Gasping for air, she realized her own hands were free now, and she reached for his little finger, just as Luke had taught her, and once she’d gotten her hand around it, she gave it a sharp tug down, until she heard and felt the sickening sound of cracking bone.
Eli cried out at the pain and fell to the side, giving Jane her freedom to climb off the bed.
“You bitch, you broke my finger!”
She remembered one more lesson Luke had taught her—not to stick around and see if her attacker was going to get up. She ran for the door, unlocked it, and ran down the hallway yelling for help as loud as she could.
HAVING GIVEN her statement to the police, explained everything to her family, wished the newlyweds a happy honeymoon, and shrugged off all suggestions of a trip to the emergency room, Jane went back out to the hotel lobby and asked the man at the concierge desk to call her a cab, then wandered through the dwindling crowd. With each step she took, her path became more clear, her resolve more determined. She wasn’t sure if she had time—maybe his flight was already on its way to Puerto Rico—but she had to try. What she wanted to say to Luke couldn’t wait.
When the cab arrived, she let the driver know she was in a big hurry, and they sped to the airport, with Jane praying the whole way that she could somehow catch Luke.
Once inside the terminal, Jane ran. She took off the midnight-blue satin heels that had been dyed to match the bridesmaid dress she was still wearing, and she ran as fast as she could through the airport. If the mere fact of running through an airport in her bridesmaid dress wasn’t enough to convince Luke that she loved him, then nothing would.
She halted in front of a monitor with a scrolling list of departing flights. San Antonio, San Francisco, San Juan…Gate B-17, departing on time at 8:30 p.m.…in thirty minutes. She had time to find him, but she had no idea how she’d get past airport security.
