her eyes at a manicure mishap herself. “Yeah. I’ll do that.” Because a perfect French manicure was so easy to achieve, especially when one nail was now considerably shorter than the rest.
How on earth had she managed to choose a career where things like manicures and stiletto-heeled shoes practically came with the job description? Lord, if the kids she used to run around with back on Boneyard Ridge could see her now...
She dug through her purse for the manicure kit she always kept with her, but it wasn’t there. Had she left it in another purse? No, she distinctly remembered getting it out of yesterday’s bag that morning.
And leaving it on the breakfast bar in her apartment.
Damn it, damn it, damn it!
The resort had a gift shop at the far end of the hotel that carried things like nail files and other items hotel guests might have forgotten to pack. But she barely had time to get to her meeting with the Tri-State Law Enforcement Society’s representatives, who were meeting with her and hotel security to go over last-minute plans for the conference that would start on Friday.
With a glance at Marcus to make sure he wasn’t watching, she dipped her hand into her purse and grabbed the slightly bulky Swiss Army knife she also kept with her at all times. Its attached file was a bit rough for a good manicure, but it would do for the meeting. Then she could run down to the gift shop for a nail kit to do the job right.
Flipping open the nail file as she hurried down the corridor, she bit back a laugh. All this drama for a broken nail!
For the first sixteen years of her life, she’d chewed her nails to stubs and never thought twice about it. She’d owned one purse at a time, which she carried only when absolutely necessary. Skirts were the bane of her existence, baring as they did the scars of a lifetime of scratches and scrapes, and high heels were so far off her radar she’d had to spend a whole week of secret practice sessions with her cousin from Raleigh before she could navigate her way across the room in a pair.
How had she turned into such a girl?
The obvious answer was leaving Boneyard Ridge, making a new life for herself in a world where little redneck tomboys from the hills could easily find themselves chewed up and spit out before they could blink twice.
She wasn’t going to let her grandmother down, the way everyone else always figured she’d do.
As she waited for the elevator to the third floor, where Ken Dailey, head of Highland Hotel and Resort’s security team, would be waiting for her with three of the law-enforcement society’s event organizers, she ran the coarse file across her nail, wincing as it snagged heavily on the broken edge. The friction, she saw with dismay, was doing horrible things to the French tip polish. Giving up on the nail-file attachment, she flipped open the scissors and snipped off the whole tip of the broken nail.
The elevator dinged and the doors swept smoothly open just as she snapped the scissors back into the knife handle. She quickly dropped the knife into the pocket of her jacket and pasted on a smile to greet whoever might be inside the elevator car.
There was only one other occupant, a scruffy-looking man wearing a maintenance-crew jumpsuit. His green eyes lifted in surprise as he pulled up to keep from running straight into her.
“Sorry,” he said in a voice as deep as a mountain cavern. He stepped back into the elevator to let her in.
“You aren’t getting out?” she asked.
“I pushed the button for the wrong floor.” His gaze dropping, he reached out and started to push the button for the third floor, then looked sheepish when he realized it was already lit up.
He was a rangy man in his early thirties, with shaggy dark hair that fell into his darting eyes, making him appear to be looking at her from under a hood. He would probably be nice-looking if he didn’t come across as such a sad sack, Susannah thought, torn between pity for his obvious discomfort and irritation that he wouldn’t lift his head and look her in the eye.
He had spoken in a strong hill-country twang, reminiscent of the harsh mountain accent she’d ruthlessly subdued since leaving Boneyard Ridge.
“Grubby little tomboys from here don’t get to live out their dreams, Susie,” her grandmother had told her as she handed Susannah $400 in cash and a bus ticket to Raleigh. “You gotta learn how to make it out there in the real world.”
The maintenance man let her off the elevator first when they reached the third floor. She moved ahead, trying to ignore the prickle on the back of her neck as he brought up the rear. He didn’t overtake her, despite his longer legs. When she stopped to straighten her clothes before entering Meeting Room C, she spared a quick glance his way.
He kept his head down, apparently determined not to meet her gaze as he passed behind her. He walked with a strangely deliberate gait, as if each step were a decision he had to make before he committed himself to the next one. A couple of steps later, she figured out why. He had a limp.
She couldn’t remember ever seeing him around the hotel before, but maintenance workers and hospitality staffers had a pretty high turnover rate. Plus, while she wasn’t someone who saw the people who pushed mops and brooms as interchangeable drones, the stress and speed of her job as the resort’s head events coordinator meant she didn’t have the time or opportunity to get to know many people outside of her own office.
For that matter, she thought as she pasted on her best go-getter smile and opened the door to the meeting room, she barely knew the staff in her own office, including Marcus, her right-hand man. They rarely had time for chitchat and she wasn’t one to socialize with her coworkers off the clock. Or anyone else, for that matter.
She couldn’t afford friends.
Four men awaited her in the meeting room, Ken Dailey with hotel security and three others. They stood in a cluster near the large picture window that offered a spectacular view of the mist-shrouded Smoky Mountains to the east.
She looked with envy at their cups of coffee but knew she didn’t have time to get a cup of her own. They had business to discuss, and she was running out of daylight.
“Gentlemen, sorry I’m late,” she said, even though she knew full well she was at least five minutes early to the meeting. “We have a lot to cover, so shall we get to work?”
* * *
HUNTER BRAGG STOPPED at the end of the hallway and turned back toward the meeting rooms clustered in the center of this wing of the hotel. The door closed shut behind her, and he started to relax, shoving his hair out of his face and straightening his back.
She hadn’t recognized him from the news reports. He hadn’t really feared she would, given how different he looked from the clean-cut Army sergeant whose abduction had been a weeklong sensation until something new came along to take over the news cycle.
Of course, he’d recognized her easily from the photo Billy Dawson had shown him and the men he’d selected for the job a few days earlier. “Her name is Susannah Marsh. She’s in our way. Y’all are gonna take her out.”
In that photograph, taken by a telephoto lens from the woods that hemmed in the resort’s employee parking lot, Susannah Marsh had given off a definite aura of money and sophistication. Her well-tailored suit, the shimmery green of a mallard’s head, and shiny black high heels had offered an intoxicating blend of power and sexuality that
