Page 45 of The Worst Best Man

“Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god,” Frankie chanted. She surveyed the room and ran for the next closed door. It was a bathroom. The next one was a freaking walk-in closet. Finally, she spotted another closed door on the far side of the room. When she jiggled the handle she found it locked.

She yanked out the keyring Flor had loaned her and fumbled with the lock. She got it on the fifth try and ducked into the room. It was dark in here too, and it smelled like old eggs.

Frankie quietly closed the door behind her. “Chip?” she whispered. “Are you here?”

She tripped over him before she saw him. He was laying on his back on the floor beside the bed.

“Oh, my god, Chip,” she hissed.Was he dead? Had that sonofabitch killed Chip?

She reached a tentative hand toward him knowing that if she touched cold skin, she was going to throw up and then go commit a murder so heinous she’d go down in Barbados history. “Please don’t be dead,” she whispered.

Chapter Nineteen

Frankie prodded Chip hard with two fingers. It wasn’t the cold flesh of a corpse that greeted her but a still-warm warm armpit and a snore.

“Chip!” She shook him again.

“Huh? What?” he struggled to wake up.

She breathed a sigh of relief so big it almost brought her breakfast back up. Her phone vibrated in her pocket. A text from Pru.

Pru: Where are you? Where’s Chip?

Shit.

“Chip, it’s me, Frankie. Are you okay?”

“Frankie?” he asked, groggily. “Does Elliot still have me? Does he know you’re here?”

Frankie looked back toward the door. “No time to talk. We have to get you out of here. Can you walk?”

“Of course, I can walk. I just fell asleep doing sit-ups. They gave me something to knock me out. Plus, super hungover. How’s Pru? Is she mad? Is her dad—”

“Pru’s fine. She’s anxiously awaiting you in a poufy white dress.”

“She didn’t cancel?” Chip lit up like the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.

“She doesn’t know you’re missing yet.”

Frankie’s phone vibrated again and then again. A rapid succession of texts she imagined.

“Why were you doing sit-ups?” Frankie asked, grasping his hand and pulling him into a seated position.

“Didn’t want my six-pack to suffer just because I got abducted. I’m good. I swear.” To prove it, he bounded to his feet and promptly fell on the bed. “Sorry. My foot’s asleep.”

Frankie pulled him back up. She could hear a voice in the other room and footsteps.

“Hide,” Chip whispered.

Frankie ran around in a circle panicking and was eyeing the bedspread as a potential hiding spot when Chip opened the closet door and shoved her inside. He had just shut her in the dark when she heard the room door open.

Was Asshole Kidnapper coming to kill her? Reflexively, she hunkered further into the closet and hit her head on something large and metal.

“Mother f—”

Frankie clapped a hand over her own mouth when she heard the bedroom door open.

“Stay in here until I tell you to come out,” Asshole Kidnapper demanded.