Ransom (Benson Security 4)

There was a knock at the door, and Dimitri poked his head in. “You ready?”

“Nowhere near.” Ryan had to fight the shame of revealing he’d been conned. “Remember the girl I brought back from the reception?”

Dimitri nodded. “Cute. Lots of hair. She was a waitress, right?”

“Yeah, well, she’s also a thief.” Ryan ran a hand over the top of his head. Damn, Lake and Callum were going to hand him his backside over this. “She cleaned me out.”

Dimitri’s eyes turned hard. “What do you mean?”

Ryan gestured around the room. “Look around. She even took my passport and backup gun.”

Dimitri checked the room. When he’d finished scanning the bathroom, he turned to Ryan. “This doesn’t add up.”

“Which part? The part where she ripped me off, or the part where she screwed me first?”

“The part where she only took supplies for travel. Look.” Dimitri pointed into the bathroom. “One of each of the towels is gone. The travel-sized shampoos and soaps are gone.” He walked over to the closet. “Her clothes are here, in a pile with your laundry. But there are empty hangers, saying she took some of your clothes, but not all. If she was going to sell them, why not take all of them? You’ve got sneakers in here worth hundreds of bucks.”

Ryan stilled as Dimitri’s words pushed through his anger and humiliation. He looked around the room again. It was neat. She’d even made the bed and unpacked his bag onto hangers. This wasn’t a hurried ransacking. She’d cared enough to tidy after herself.

“She left a note.” Ryan handed it to Dimitri.

He read it and his lips thinned. “Your girl’s in trouble.” He passed the note back to Ryan. “Running, by the looks of things.”

“She isn’t my girl.”

“Whatever. She’s definitely the woman with your passport. That’s going to be a shit-ton of stress to replace.” Dimitri looked around the room, no doubt seeing what Ryan saw—evidence of a conscientious thief. “You reporting this, or hunting her down?”

“Oh, I’m hunting her ass down.” And when Ryan got hold of it, he was going to spank it so freaking hard, she wouldn’t be able to sit for a week.

What the hell? He meant he was going to lock her ass up in jail.

Yeah, that was what he meant.

“I’ll help once we get back.”

“Thanks.” Ryan looked back at the note.

I will pay you back one day.

No kidding she would. If it was the last thing he did. Esperanza, Essie, would definitely pay him back.

Much to Beast’s surprise, Belinda’s idea of using the mosquito net to catch fish actually worked. While he dealt with their catch—which meant removing the heads, because Belinda insisted she couldn’t cook or eat anything that was looking at her—Belinda built a fire. It was small, but big enough for their needs. She stabbed several Y-shaped sticks into the ground on two sides of the fire, then rested more sticks in the Y shape to make a grill. She then wrapped some small twigs in a wipe from her bag of many tricks and set fire to it with the matches he’d taken from their guard.

“The antibacterial wipe is mainly alcohol,” she explained. “Makes a good fire starter.”

He watched in amused bewilderment as she got the fire going. Her brain was a bottomless pit filled with random bits of information.

“You get that from the Bear guy?”

Her cheeks turned a rosy shade of pink that made him want to strip the sheet she was wrapped in from her body and make her scream all over again.

“No, I learned that by accident when I put some wipes too close to a candle and set my trailer on fire. It was on the set of a movie I did in Morocco. The fire put us behind schedule and

made everyone mad at me.” Big blue eyes blinked up at him. “I’m not allowed candles in my trailers now. It’s written into my contracts.”

Beast smothered a laugh. She looked so downhearted at the prospect of a life on set without candles.

“It’s ready.” She pointed at the fire. “Make me dinner.”