The Great Escape (Wynette, Texas #7)(3)

Run! The word shrieked through her brain. Run!

From outside the chamber she heard the crowd noise grow momentarily louder and then muted again, as if someone had opened the front doors of the church, then quickly closed them.

Run!

Her hand grasped one of the dark blue choir robes. She jerked it from its hook and pulled it on over her disheveled hair. The cool, musty robe slipped along her body, covering her French bra, covering her tiny panties. She stumbled toward the small door at the end of the antechamber. Through the dusty windowpanes, she saw a narrow, overgrown walkway enclosed by a cinder-block wall. Her hands weren’t working properly, and the lock didn’t give at first, but she finally managed to open it.

The walkway led toward the rear of the church. The cracked pavement grabbed at her stilettos as she made her way past an air-conditioning unit. Spring thunderstorms had blown trash into the gravel at the side of the path: smashed juice boxes, bits of newspaper, a mangled yellow shovel from a kid’s sandbox. She stopped when she reached the end. Security was everywhere, and she tried to think of what to do next.

She’d lost her Secret Service detail a few months earlier, at the end of her mother’s first year out of office, but the agency still guarded Nealy, and since she and her mother were so frequently together, she’d barely noticed the absence of her own detail. Ted had hired private security to supplement the town’s small police force. There were guards at the doors. The L-shaped parking lot overflowed with cars. People were everywhere.

Washington was her home, not this Central Texas town she’d failed so miserably to appreciate, but she remembered that the church sat on the edge of an old residential neighborhood. If her legs could carry her across the alley and behind the houses on the other side, she might be able to get to one of those side streets without anyone seeing her.

And then what? This wasn’t a well-planned escape like the one Nealy had pulled off from the White House all those years ago. It wasn’t an escape at all. It was an interruption. A suspension. She needed to find a place where she could get her breath back, pull herself together. A child’s empty playhouse. A hidden nook in someone’s backyard. Someplace away from the chaos of the press, from her betrayed bridegroom and bewildered family. A temporary hideout where she could remember who she was and what she owed the people who’d taken her in.

Oh God, what had she done?

A commotion on the other side of the church caught the guards’ attention. She didn’t wait to see what it was. Instead she stumbled around the end of the cinder-block wall, rushed across the alley, and crouched behind a Dumpster. Her knees were shaking so badly she had to brace herself against the side of the rusty metal bin. It exuded the fetid stench of garbage. There were no cries of alarm, only the distant noise of the crowd packing the bleachers that had been set up in front of the church.

She heard a thin cry, like a kitten’s mew, and realized it was coming from her. She made herself creep along the row of shrubs that separated the old Victorians. The shrubs ended at a brick-paved street. She rushed across it and into someone’s backyard.

Old trees shaded the small lots, and detached garages opened into narrow alleys. She pulled the choir robe tighter as she moved blindly across the yards, from one to another. Her heels sank into the soil behind freshly planted vegetable gardens where marble-size green tomatoes grew on the new vines. The smell of pot roast wafted through an open kitchen window; the sound of a television game show came from another. Soon that same television would broadcast the story of former president Cornelia Case Jorik’s irresponsible daughter. In the space of one afternoon, thirty-one-year-old Lucy had blown seventeen years of good behavior. Seventeen years of proving to Mat and Nealy they hadn’t made a mistake by adopting her. As for what she’d done to Ted … She couldn’t have hurt him more.

A dog barked and a baby cried. She stumbled over a garden hose. Cut behind a swing set. The dog’s barking grew louder, and a rusty-haired mutt charged the wire fence that marked the next yard. She backed around a statue of the Virgin Mary toward the alley. The toes of her stilettos filled with pebbles.

She heard the roar of an engine. Her back straightened. A beat-up black and silver motorcycle spun into the alley. She ducked between two garages and flattened her spine against peeling white paint. The bike slowed. She held her breath, waiting for it to pass. It didn’t. Instead, it crept forward, then stopped in front of her.

The rider gazed into the space between the garages to the place where she stood.

The motor idled as he took his time studying her. One black boot hit the gravel. “’S’up?” he said over the engine noise.

’S’up! She’d crushed her future husband, mortified her family, and if she didn’t do something quickly, she would become the country’s most infamous runaway bride, yet this guy wanted to know what was up?

He had too-long black hair that curled past his collar, cold blue eyes set above high cheekbones, and sadistic lips. After so many years of Secret Service protection, she’d grown used to taking her safety for granted, but she didn’t feel safe now, and the fact that she dimly recognized the biker as a guest at last night’s rehearsal dinner—one of Ted’s odd assortment of friends—didn’t exactly reassure her. Even semi-cleaned-up in a dark suit that didn’t fit well, a rumpled white shirt open at the collar, and motorcycle boots that appeared to have received nothing more than a dusting, he didn’t look like anybody she wanted to meet in an alley. Exactly where she happened to be.