Page 80 of Safari Murder Party
The jaguar bounded into the foyer with a roar. All teeth, Naya tore Opal off Fletcher’s back. Maybe Fletcher could be convinced to become a cat person after all.
The saleswoman scrambled back, scared stutters falling from herlips. Too slow. Fury glowed in the cat’s yellow eyes as she stalked toward Opal. A growl rumbled deep in Naya’s chest.
Fletcher wouldn’t watch as Naya’s incisors sank in, couldn’t listen as Opal’s screams started, then silenced.
“Let’s get out of here,” Waylon said, tucking the safe into his backpack and Fletcher under his arm as they plunged into the raging tempest outside.
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Rick either didn’t know they’d been inside or didn’t expect them to live long enough to escape.
As Fletcher and Waylon rushed into the belly of the storm, Rick hesitated, startled, before bringing his ridiculous Mad Max gun to his shoulder. Aiming. “You aren’t welcome here,” he shouted. “Are you illiterate? The sign was right there.”
“Just leaving!” Fletcher called back.
A malevolent wind thrashed as Fletcher and Waylon bypassed Rick, diving beneath the jungle canopy. Gunpowder swirled through the petrichor as a few blasts fired. Missing them. Badly. A couple disgruntled toucans flapped through the treetops. One even let out a little nervous squawk.
Waylon shot ahead. “This way. I know a place where we can wait out the storm.”
“Please tell me it’s bulletproof,” prayed Fletcher.
On cue, another stray bullet whizzed past them, too far left to do any bodily damage, but it still managed to crack a tree limboverhead. The branch splintered, cracked. Above, a pair of macaws bristled, darting after the toucans as the branch broke away from the trunk.
Waylon leaped forward, but Fletcher startled back, seconds away from blunt force trauma.Slam!The bough crashed against the wet earth. Cold mud splashed up her calves, her thighs, over the threads of her skirt. Everywhere. With Rick trekking after them, a stain was hardly the gravest of her worries.
Fingers lacing around her hips, Waylon hoisted her up and over the branch. If they weren’t running for their lives, she might have registered the flutter of endearment at his touch. The way his nearness no longer repulsed her. They raced forward, never straying too far from the other. Always within reach. Close enough to catch.
Being that Kent had monopolized Fletcher’s romantic life for the last decade, she had never been exposed to the horrors of New York’s dating culture. Didn’t know the terrors of swiping right on a cute guy only to get stood up in the pouring rain outside a restaurant she never could have afforded. All she had were Ford’s stories, and he wasn’t exactly a reliable narrator. But as Waylon set her down gently, she wondered what it might have been like to get to know him under ordinary circumstances. Dinner. Drinks. The downtown lights illuminating everything around them.
Wanting that from Waylon used to be so far off the table, it splattered on the floor.
But now? Would it be so bad to admit she did—that she always had wanted it? To be with someone who actually sawherwhen he looked at her, and not whatever manic pixie farm girl Kent wanted her to be? Even if that someone was the last person on earth she ever expected.
It didn’t matter.
In the city, Waylon had only ever been an enemy, and theyweren’t splitting an overpriced appetizer right now. Rick had been only momentarily deterred by the consequences of his terrible aim. His mud-wet footsteps thundered behind them, and with a peek over her shoulder, Fletcher watched as he planted a hand on the fallen limb and heaved himself over.
Rage contorted Rick’s face. A sneer, a snarl. The same bloodred hunger she’d seen in his eyes in the sitting room before he shot his manager, but this time Fletcher recognized it as greed.
Right now, Fletcher and Waylon were just obstacles between him and a billion-dollar company.
“What Opal said about Eliza,” Fletcher started as she pumped her arms to keep up with Waylon. The words scraped up her throat, both from the fear of knowing and the Usain Bolt pace she was trying to keep. “Is it true?”
“Is now the best time for an oral history?” Waylon asked. Another shotgun blast shook through the canopy.
Fletcher ignored him. “Is it true?”
Waylon made a noise that was half scoff, half self-deprecating laugh. The truth was buried in it. “What, that she dumped me? Or that she only wanted to marry me for my father’s name and my father’s money and my father’s influence?”
Fletcher’s stomach pitted.
“That I was young and in love?” When Fletcher didn’t immediately respond, he asked, voice deep with vulnerability, “Or that I had a heart to break?”
They ducked beneath a wiry limb, green with new growth, and Waylon dragged it with them. When he let go, the branch slingshotted back, lashing toward Rick with an angrywhack. It slowed the rabid salesman, but it didn’t stop him.
Fingerling branches swiped at Fletcher’s skin, cuts stinging in therain. Finally, when they met the murky waters of the river, she asked, “What happened?”
“We’d been together for six months, engaged for three. My dad wanted me to move through the company ranks, but it was really just his way of keeping me under his control.” The storm winds blew faster, as if spun by Dyer’s undead hand. Still mad postmortem that he hadn’t gotten his way. “I wanted out.”
