Tall bookshelves took up most of the outside wall; they overflowed with exquisitely costumed dolls in velvet frocks and feathered hats. There was even a small wicker tea table with child-size chairs pulled up around it, and an antique armoire pushed up against the wall Pollyanna shared with The Wild One. Delicate bunches of violets had been painted on the doors of the armoire, making it an even more lovely piece.
“Oh, pooh.” Emily sat down on the bed, curling her hand around the carved wood bedpost. She’d only been here five minutes and she’d already fallen under the spell of the Pollyanna room. “I actually like it here.”
Somehow, Beau the cat had sneaked into the room with her, and she bent to pet his head absently. Apparently deciding that was an invitation, Beau hurled himself into her lap.
“Whoa.” He was one heavy cat. She tried to be friendly, but he began to sniff and paw at her cognac-soaked skirt, and Emily got the hint. “I was going to change it,” she told him. “Everyone is a critic.”
So she slipped off her jacket and skirt, even her panty hose, tossing them onto the bed. Much better. Beau immediately curled up on the pile of discarded clothing and began to lick his paw.
“I’m glad you’re happy, Mr. Kitty. But what do I wear now?”
While hanging out in her silk blouse and underwear was comfy for right now, it had its disadvantages in the long run—like the fact that she couldn’t leave the room.
“Aha!” Emily announced, stooping and dragging her laptop out of her briefcase. After carefully moving the tiny tea set, she opened her computer on the small wicker table, managing to squeeze herself into one of the junior-size chairs. “Let’s do a little E-commerce,” she muttered, booting it up and searching for the nearest decent clothing store. It took a few minutes, but she hit pay dirt eventually. “Ooh, this one’s good. Based in San Francisco, and they even deliver.”
She clicked on an image of a plain white T-shirt, and then a pair of khaki pants. “And let’s see. Maybe a pair of sneakers and some socks.”
All it took was quickly verifying the inn’s address, keying in her credit card info, and then sitting back and waiting for her new clothes to arrive.
“I love technology,” she said brightly. She felt so smart, so hip, so now, coping with the various challenges of her impromptu adventure.
But what now? She had to do something while she waited. Of course, she was keeping an ear peeled for any activity next door in The Wild One, but so far, nothing. She’d already read her book, and she had no intention of working on that stupid Bentley file. Not here. Not now.
But the Bentley file did remind her that she’d sneaked away from work in the middle of the morning, and left not so much as a note to explain her hasty departure. A quick check of her watch told her that in Chicago time, her parents would have expected her home for dinner about an hour ago. They probably would assume she had a date and refrain from calling out the National Guard for at least a few more hours, but she had to do something.
“E-mail.” It was the only solution. So she sat there at her laptop, composing a good cover story for her nosy, overprotective family. “Hmm…how about Sukie Sommersby?”
A few cheerful E-mails detailing a frantic call from Sukie were a cinch to come up with. “Sukie had another emergency,” she typed, “so I’m off to Miami for the weekend. Don’t worry—everything is fine. You know Sukie! See you on Monday.”
She was just sending the last note when Beau bolted from his perch on the bed and went racing to the armoire. He began to howl—not just meow but howl—and to purposefully scratch his nasty little claws against the beautiful wood.
Emily hustled over to try to pry his paws off the cabinet. “What is it you want, Beau? You can’t want to go inside the armoire, can you?”
He spun around suddenly, bounding to the bed and leaping on top of her clothes, and then just as suddenly dashing back to the armoire, where he started the caterwauling and scratching act again. He repeated this mad dash two or three times.
Emily was struck with a very odd thought. “Beau,” she said out loud, “this can’t really be your way of telling me to hang up my clothes, can it?”
It was the best theory she could come up with. So she dutifully shook out her jacket and hung it, not quite shutting the armoire doors as she toted her skirt into the adjacent bathroom to rinse off as much cognac as she could. She was still carrying the dripping skirt when she noticed Beau seemed to have disappeared.
“Where did he get off to?” she mused. But there was no Beau to be seen. Shrugging, she hung the skirt in the bathroom, and then searched under the bed and behind the rocker. Nope. “Okay, so he must be stuck in the armoire.”
But when she opened the doors this time, she noticed a wide crack all the way around the back wall. And she could see daylight through there.
What was this? A magic armoire with a secret passage at the back? Emily’s heart beat faster.
“Beau?” she called. “Did you go through the crack?”
Peering closer, she couldn’t help but give the partition a little push, and then a little look.
And before she knew it, she’d shoved it open wide, climbed through the back of her armoire, and scrambled out the front of the one next door. There she was, standing in the middle of The Wild One in her underwear!
“This room is so cool,” she whispered, her eyes wide. Cool wasn’t the half of it. The bed frame was shiny chrome, while the spread was black leather, stretched taut against the frame. The footboard looked like the front grill of a motorcycle, and it actually had handlebars that twisted back around the corners. “Yowza.”
It made her want to take a ride on that bed and see where she ended up.
“Yowza,” she said again, although that was not a word she could ever remember uttering before in her entire life. She whirled around in the room, drinking it in. Decorated completely in black-and-white, it had a big poster of Marlon Brando in his motorcycle gang attire from the movie, a black-leather director’s chair near the front window, a dresser that looked more like the counter at a fifties diner, and a big silver trophy sitting on its own special shelf. Beau was curled into a half circle in the director’s chair, and he lifted his head long enough to fix her with those infuriating, all-knowing green eyes.
Emily swallowed, fingering the handlebars. This was like all her fantasies come true. It was adventure and excitement boiled down and turned into a bedroom. And she absolutely loved it.
“Okay, get a grip,” she ordered herself. “You wanted to know more about Tyler, didn’t you? This is your chance to snoop around, handed to you on a silver platter—by a yellow cat.”
She shook her head. Whether Beau had led her here or not, the reality was, she was inside Tyler’s room, and she might as well make the most of it. She chewed her lip, glancing around.
“The duffel bag,” she declared. It was tucked neatly under the leather chair. “Look in the duffel bag.”
But she barely had her hand on the zipper when she heard the sound of the side window scraping open behind her. She spun around in time to see a huge, bulky man vaulting in over the windowsill. Sensing danger, Beau leaped over her head and skidded under the bed.
Suddenly her little adventure had gotten scary. Very scary.
Oh, God, what now? The intruder was even bigger and uglier than that Slab person she’d seen at the coffee shop. He had muscles and bulges everywhere, including his neck, and he looked mean enough to pop a blood vessel just for fun. He also had a dull, vacant squint to his eyes—in her experience, the mark of the terminally stupid.
Not