Page 10 of The Pretenders of Copper County
But if I’d known the kind of trouble I’d be in once we got to the safe house, I might have noticed that he hadn’t actually agreed with me.
CHAPTER THREE
CHRIS
I was being kidnapped.
That was the only possible explanation.
Admittedly, it was a slow and mostly uneventful kidnapping, but even that made sense in a way.
It wasmykidnapping, after all.
As Reed drove us down the highway, I ran through our conversation on a loop—well, the parts I could remember, anyway—trying to make sense of it all. He’d been grumpy the whole time we’d been in the car, but that hadn’t been a red flag. I’d been nervous-babbling, even though I’d tried my hardest not to, and I’d figured he’d been regretting his choice of “pickup.” I wouldn’t have blamed him.
But then he’d started talking about his de-virginizing fetish with a body count in the hundreds and mentioned where we were heading—in retrospect,secureprobably wasn’t a word people used when talking about their homes with potential bed partners, was it?—and thrown my freaking phone out the window before refusing to take me home, and the conclusion was unignorable, as well as mortifying and high-key disappointing.
What I’d thought was my first date was actually an abduction.
Fortunately, Reed hadn’t tied me up or dumped me in his trunk like the vigilantes did to John Ruffian in season five, and he hadn’t actively attempted to murder or torture me either, unless you considered his totally off-key butchering of classic ’80s songs to be a form of torture. Even when I’d broken my silence and demanded in a quavering voice to know what he planned to do with me, Reed had only given me a hard, angry look, told me to “drop the innocent act and stop with the drama”… and then offered me a granola bar and a bottle of water from his backpack, which might have been thoughtful under other circumstances, but which I’d refused on principle.
None of this made the situation feel any less fraught, though… it just meant that Reed was really bad at kidnapping.
If he’d been better at it, he’d have picked someone who had, like, access to nuclear launch codes, or friends in powerful places, or more than $267 in his bank account to ransom himself with. As it was, Reed was going to learn pretty soon that he’d kidnapped the absolute wrong guy, and once he did… well, I had no idea what he’d do. The idea of being killed or held captive was truly frightening.
Scarier than the time I’d walked in on Uncle Danny and his theater group reenacting a scene from Sweeney Todd in his garage and thought the blood was real.
Scarier than the time Nicky let his pet rat, Pickles, sit on my chest because he’d claimed it would cure my phobia of rodents.
Scarier than the time I’d cannonballed into the YMCA pool because Nonna assured me that my “swimming instincts” would kick in “just in time,” only to find outwhen I was already in the water that my instincts had a really bad sense of timing.
But greater than my fear for myself was my fear of what Uncle Danny would do when he got home from his fishing expedition and learned I’d been kidnapped and/or killed. His face would probably go all red, he’d grab his chest and deep-breathe like he did whenever he got emotional, and he might even end up having another cardiac event like the one that had landed him in the hospital last winter. And it would all be because I’d been foolish enough to think someone as beautiful as Reed Sunday might actually want to hook up with me.
I couldn’t let that happen. So I had to escape.
Think, Chris. WWJRD?
But when I tried to imagine what John Ruffian would do if he was being abducted in slow motion by a frustratingly gorgeous lumberjack-presenting accountant from Washington who’d lured him into his car with false promises of sexual gratification, I honestly couldn’t say.
In episode twelve of season three, John Ruffian had pretended to be a mild-mannered assistant pastry chef while on the trail of a serial killer, when he’d eaten a coconut lime cupcake dosed with sleeping potion. He’d come to in a kidnap shack down by the railroad tracks in time to grab a wooden board, whack the lead pastry chef into unconsciousness, and save the beautiful Giselle from a grisly death.
Then, in episode three of season seven, he’d been impersonating a clown in a circus school when he was abducted by a mysterious scientist who called herself the Ringmaster. In that case, though, it had all been a misunderstanding—she’d thought John was an evil rival scientist and had kidnapped him to save the world, so in the end, they’djoined forces and done it together… before, erm,doing it together.
Since I had neither a handy wooden whacking board nor the ability to cobble together a plutonium death ray from a stack of gum wrappers, I knew I’d have to figure out something a little more Chris-Winowski-appropriate.
So I fell asleep.
Or at least Ipretendedto.
I leaned my head against the window, closed my eyes, and let my breath go deep and even, not even stirring when Reed slaughtered the lyrics to “Livin’ on a Prayer”—Doesn’t make a difference if we’renakedor not?Did he even hear himself? It wasnotendearing. Not even a little—though I did allow myself to make a discontented, sleepy sound like I was experiencing a nightmare because I sort of thought I was.
Gosh, I really hated that I’d been so wrong about Reed Sunday.
Sometime later, Reed slowed the car, and I could tell we were pulling off the highway. Streetlights flashed brightly through the car windows at regular intervals, and I tried to memorize every turn we took and how many seconds passed between each, in the unlikely event that I was able to steal his keys and make a getaway. By the fourteenth (or was it sixteenth?) turn, I was hopelessly confused and convinced he was driving us in circles.
And then we stopped, and the engine shut off.
A shiver ran through my body. This was it. We were there… wherevertherewas. Now was the time when he’d tie me up or throw me in a pit or…
