The Worst Best Man(34)

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.

“Look, Elliot. Let’s work this out. I’ll get you whatever it is you want if you let me leave.”

“Nice try, Randolph. But there’s only one person who can give me what I want.”

“Aiden is not going to let you get away with this.”

Frankie froze. This guy had to be someone Aiden knew. Was that the reason he hadn’t let her kick in the door last night? She rubbed the knot on her head.

She was reaching for the door, ready to burst through it and demand answers when she heard a faint knock.

“Stay here and this will all be over soon,” Asshole snapped, slamming the bedroom door.

The closet door flew open, and Frankie jumped back, hitting her head again in the same spot.

“Are you okay?” Chip asked when she doubled over.

“Ouch!” Frankie’s hair snagged on a clothes hanger. She felt a half dozen bobby pins explode out of her head. “Oh, my God!”

“What?”

“My hair! My head! We have to get out of here!”

They both stopped, listened. There was more than one voice in the living room now, and it was only a matter of time before someone came back in.

Frankie rushed to the wall and pulled back the heavy curtains. “Oh, thank God,” she whispered when she spotted the balcony. As quietly as possible, she muscled the sliding glass door open. The noise of ocean and resort life immediately filled the room, and she winced. If they stopped talking outside the bedroom, they’d hear.

Ugh. Three floors up, she confirmed, looking over the balcony edge. There was no way down, but perhaps there was a way out. The railing banister was wider than the railing itself. Some enterprising architect had probably realized people would want to put their crystal martini glasses down to take sunset selfies. And it connected every balcony on the floor.

“Chip, get out here,” Frankie hissed.

He hobbled into the daylight like a hungover vampire.

“Why’s the sun gotta shine all the time here?” he groaned.

“Oh, my God. Climb up here.”

“You’re bleeding!” he said, gaping at her.

She touched her fingers to her hair. “I hit my head on the safe. It’s fine.

“It looks like…” Chip doubled over and breathed deeply.

“Pull it together, Chip.” He’d been pre-med at NYU until he realized that blood made him vomit and faint. “Don’t make me slap you.”