head lifted, her hair and the torn remains of her tulle veil obscuring part of her face. “Owen?”
“Yeah, it’s me. Careful,” he added when she tried to sit up and nearly fell over.
She managed to steady herself in a sitting position and shoved her hair and the veil away from her face with clumsy hands. They, too, were secured by duct tape, he saw, though her captors had bound her hands in front of her rather than behind her. She seemed to belatedly notice the bindings and stared at her wrists. “What’s happening?”
“We’ve been abducted,” he said, though he wasn’t sure abduction was the right term. Neither of them was exactly rolling in dough, so he didn’t imagine they’d been taken for ransom purposes. Tara’s fiancé was successful but not what anyone would term wealthy. Not yet, anyway.
So why had the men grabbed her?
“That’s insane,” she muttered, still pawing at her veil, which sat askew on her head. “Why am I so woozy?”
“They put a pillowcase over your head.” He waved his hand at the offending piece of material lying against the front of the cargo hold. “I think it was soaked with ether.”
“Ether?” Tara finally pulled her veil free and threw it on the floor beside her. The van took another turn, forcing Owen to brace himself against the side of the cargo hold. Tara was unprepared, however, and went sprawling against his side, her nose bumping into his shoulder.
“Ow.” She righted herself, rubbing her nose. She finally noticed Owen’s bound hands, her eyes widening. “You’re tied up, too.”
“Think you can get the tape off me? Then I’ll return the favor.” He twisted around until his back was facing her.
“My fingers aren’t working so well,” she warned him as she started fumbling with the tape. She wasn’t lying; it took a full minute before she was able to find the end of the tape on his bindings and start to slowly unwrap his wrists. But she finally ripped away the last of the tape, making the flesh on his wrists sting.
He stretched his aching arms, grimacing at the pain.
“What time is it?” Tara asked.
He pressed the button on his watch that lit up the dial. “Just a little after four.”
“Oh.”
He turned to look at Tara. “You were supposed to get married at four.”
She nodded. “I was supposed to.”
He reached for her, taking her bound hands in his. “We’ll get you back there, Tara. We’ll get out of this and get to a phone so you can call Robert and tell him what happened. And then we’ll get you back to the church and you’ll get married just the way you planned—”
“I was going to call it off.”
He went still. “What?”
In the low light he couldn’t make out much about her features, but the tone of her voice was somewhere between sad and embarrassed. “I was going to call it off. Right before that guy knocked on the door and told me there was a package outside.”
“That’s how they got you outside to the van?”
“Yeah.” She wriggled her bound hands at him. “Get this off me, please?”
He pulled the tape from her wrists, taking care with the last few inches to spare her as much of the sting as possible. When she was free, he rolled up the tape from both of their bindings and shoved it in his pocket. It might come in handy if they could get themselves out of this van alive.
Freed from her restraints, Tara curled into a knot beside him, wrapping her arms around her knees. The puffy skirt of her wedding dress ballooned around her, almost glowing in the low light, making her look like a piece of popcorn.
Owen had the clarity of mind not to speak that thought aloud.
He put his arm around her, trying not to read too much into the way she snuggled closer to him. They were in the middle of an abduction. Of course she was seeking a little comfort from the guy who’d been her best friend since middle school.
“What do they want?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t suppose Robert is secretly a multimillionaire with a hefty trust fund?”
“Not that he’s ever told me.” She made a soft mewling noise. “I am so woozy. They used ether?”
“That’s what it smelled like to me.”
She cocked her head toward him. “Exactly how do you know what ether smells like?”
“I took a history of medicine course in college, when I was still considering a medical degree.”
“And they let you sniff ether?”
Tara’s skeptical tone made him smile. She was sounding more like her old self, which meant the effects of the ether were wearing off. “Not on purpose.”
He glanced to the far side of the van’s cargo hold, where he’d thrown the ether-soaked pillowcase. In this confined area, the fumes it emitted might still be affecting them, he realized.
“We need to find a way to wrap up that pillowcase so that we limit the fumes it’s putting out in this van,” he told Tara. “I wish I had a garbage bag or something.”
“Don’t suppose you carry one of those around in your back pocket?”
“Not in a rented tux, no,” he answered with a grin, feeling a little less grim about their chances of survival now that his smart-ass Tara was back. He shrugged off his jacket. “I can wrap it in this.”
“The rental place isn’t going to like that,” Tara warned.
“Not sure it’s enough, though.”
“Well, I have about twenty yards of silk, lace and tulle you can use.” Holding his shoulder, she levered herself to her feet and started to tug at the seams of her skirt until the fabric tore free. In the darkness of the van’s enclosed interior, Owen couldn’t make out much besides a cloud of faint brightness in the gloom floating away from her body. Tara gathered the fabric into a ball and presented it to him. “Will this do?”
He crossed carefully to the corner of the cargo hold, feeling a distinct unsteadiness he attributed to the moving van, although he should be a lot more worried about the blow he’d taken to the head. He’d been unconscious long enough for their captors to shove him inside the van and tie him up. He might have a concussion. Or worse.
But for now, he was conscious. His head didn’t hurt too badly. And he had a job to do.
He wrapped up the pillowcase inside the layers of silk, tulle and lace, and pushed it back into the corner. Already, the distinctively sweet scent of the ether was almost gone.
Gingerly, he edged his way back to where Tara perched on the wheel well cover. “That should take care of—”
The
