Page 37 of The Perfect Hosts

The truck slides to a screeching stop in front of the house, and the driver throws open the door. A man steps out, and from this distance, it takes Madeline a moment to recognize him. Dalton Monaghan, Johanna’s husband. Again, she thinks of the tense encounter between Dalton and Wes in the hospital the night before.

“Wes! Madeline!” Dalton calls as he strides toward the front door, disappearing from Madeline’s line of vision.

Madeline turns to head downstairs to let Dalton in but freezes in the doorway when she hears pounding on the front door, followed by a muffled “Open the goddamn door!”

Dalton is angry. She understands that. One moment his wife is at their home celebrating a happy occasion, the next she is dead. But how can he think that she or Wes are to blame? They loved Johanna, considered her part of the family. Or maybe the ATF agent told Dalton how Madeline describedhim as possessive and about the GPS tracker he put on Johanna’s car. Had Wes remembered to set the alarm system before he left?

“Open the fucking door, Wes!” Dalton shouts. The banging on the door becomes more insistent and then is followed by rhythmic thuds, the sound echoing through the valley. He’s kicking the door, Madeline realizes, trying to get into the house. She returns to the nursery windows.

From her vantage point, the ranch appears deserted. There is no sign of Wes, Lucy, or Trent, and a fingernail of fear drags itself down her spine. She prays that Mellie is okay and will call for help.

The pounding stops, and the sudden silence is somehow more unnerving. In the meadow at the edge of the mountain, a dark smudge appears. Wes and Lucy. They are moving at an interminably slow pace. “Hurry,” she whispers, urging them to move more quickly. “Hurry.” Lucy is a world-class distance rider, but today’s the day she chooses to ride at a leisurely gait.

While Madeline remains at the window, trying to decide what to do, Dalton hurries back to his truck, and her shoulders sag with relief. He’s leaving. But instead of climbing into the driver’s seat, he moves around to the bed of the truck and opens the side-mount box, reaches inside, grabs something, and then returns to the front of the house. Next comes a sharp crack, and the sound of broken glass showering down. A scream escapes Madeline’s throat, but she is frozen in place, paralyzed with indecision. She waits for the keening wail of the security system, but it doesn’t come. She has no cell phone, and the landline is all the way downstairs. Madeline looks toward the meadow. Wes and Lucy are getting closer but are taking their time, still unaware of what’s unfolding at the house. Hide, Madeline decides. It’s the smartest, safest thing to do. The ranch has plenty of hiding spots, places to tuck herself away, places Dalton might not think of looking, like the unused storm cellar built into thefloor of the stables, a remnant of the original structure on the property, or in the barn behind a stack of hay bales. But again, she will have to go down the steps to get past Dalton. She thinks of Mellie downstairs in the guest room and hopes she’s safe, that she’ll call the police.

Madeline hears the tinkle of more glass smashing and the sound of wood splintering. Wes and Lucy are close enough that Madeline could call out for help through the open window, and they might be able to hear her, but she doesn’t want to alert Dalton. Instead, she lifts both arms and waves them above her head, big sweeping gestures in hopes they will see her in distress and hurry. They continue toward her at a maddeningly slow pace. Can they even see her through the window?

The hoarse scream of a red-tailed hawk fills the valley, and this is when Madeline realizes that the sounds coming from downstairs have stopped. Is Dalton finished with his rampage? Madeline strains to listen but can only hear the rustle of wind through the meadow and the continued shrill call of the hawk circling above. Wes and Lucy have veered off and are heading to the western part of the property with Pip on their heels. She’s on her own.

Dalton has stopped yelling, and the house is quiet. Eerily so. Maybe he’s given up and is going home. She peeks out the window, but Dalton doesn’t emerge from the house, and the truck remains parked haphazardly in the driveway. Where has he gone? Madeline becomes aware of her breath, loud and rasping, and tries to quiet it.

Then comes the sound of footsteps and of something else scraping along the stairs. “Wes, come out and talk to me,” calls a man’s voice. It’s Dalton, and now he’s in the house. “Don’t be such a damn coward.” He is coming, and he is angry. She imagines he is carrying some kind of weapon—whatever he used to break into the house.

Madeline looks around the baby’s nursery, so lovingly decorated and filled with the best that money could buy. The closet? That will be the first place he will look, and there is no way Madeline can sneak past him and down the stairs. There is nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.

Chapter 16

Mellie

I sit on the edge of the bed not quite believing that I’m in the guest bedroom of the house belonging to my boyfriend. Maybeboyfriendisn’t the right word.Lover?That doesn’t quite fit either. I don’t exactly know how to describe my relationship with Wes Drake, but I love him. I think he loves me too, but that could all change once he finds me in his home. With his pregnant wife. A little shiver of fear zips through me. All I want is the chance to talk to Wes. To ask him why he’s been ignoring me, to tell him how much I love him. If I’m being honest, another reason I decided to come to the ranch was to see what his wife would do when I showed up on her doorstep. I wanted to find out if she meant it when she said I could call her if I needed anything, day or night. So far, Madeline is as good as her word.

The sound of breaking glass startles me to my feet. I go to the bedroom door and open it a crack. More glass shatters, and I hesitate before calling, “Mrs. Drake?” There’s no response, so I step into the hallway and begin to move down the long corridor that leads to the great room. That’s when I see a man carrying a crowbar and a gas tank, and I freeze. He keeps moving in and out of sight as if he hasn’t seen me. Holding my breath, I scurry back to the bedroom and shut the door. The man is shouting now, and I don’t know what to do. I openthe closet door, crouch down in the corner, and begin to pull stacks of quilts over me.

I think of Madeline upstairs. Is he here to hurt her? To hurt me?

“Wes,” the man calls in singsong. “Come out and talk to me. Don’t be such a damn coward.”

So he’s after Wes. I wonder what he did to cause this kind of anger. Who could hate him so much? Through the ceiling above me, I hear Madeline screaming. If I’m going to act, I need to do it now. My phone is on the other side of the closet door. A little voice in my head tells me to stay put, that if I just wait it out, I won’t have to worry about Wes’s wife any longer. But if I don’t, I will forever be known as the girl who hid in the closet. And what if Wes finds out I could have saved his unborn baby?

I’m damned if I do, damned if I don’t.

Chapter 17

Jamie

Jamie drives toward the sheriff’s office for the formal interview with Dalton Monaghan, his head filled with the onslaught of information he’s learned so far, including Sully Preston’s purported drugging of horses and Wes Drake’s wandering eye. Mia Preston has already emailed him a list of three names of men besides Dalton Monaghan who may have a grudge against Wes because of indiscretions with their wives. He’ll cross-check it with the party’s guest list for any overlap.

He and Dalton Monaghan have a lot to talk about—the rumors about his relationship with Johanna, his military experience, and the waitress clocking him going into the barn just before the explosion. Funny how Dalton left that crucial bit of information out.

Granted, the timeline leading up to a blast can often be muddled for witnesses. After his own attack, when Jamie finally came out of his stupor, he had no idea what day or time it was and had blocked what had happened to him out on that gravel road. Over the coming days, weeks, and months it had come back to him in jagged snapshots. The fight with Juneau. The long, dark road. The headlights. The large man coming toward him.

At the memory, the yellow line down the center of theroad blurs, and the car leaves the pavement. “Shit!” Jamie cries out and swings the steering wheel hard to the left, tires squealing. Heart pounding, he pulls the car to an abrupt stop. Breathing hard, he lays his head on the steering wheel. Focus, he chastises himself. He nearly died on one of these roads once, he’s not about to do it again. There will be time to think about what happened to him, what happened to Juneau, but it isn’t right now.

Slowly his heart rate steadies, and gradually his vision clears. Jamie glances at the dashboard clock. Hopefully the pieces of this convoluted puzzle will start to come together soon. Heart rate out of the panic zone, he pulls back onto the road, and his phone buzzes. He looks at the display. Speak of the devil.

Jamie taps Accept, and Sheriff Colson’s voice fills the vehicle. “Hey, Jamie, we just got a 9-1-1 from the Drake house. I’m heading that way now, but I’m about twenty minutes away.”

“What’s going on?” Jamie asks.