Saving Tess

  Saving Tess

  New Pleasures Book 5

  M. S. Parker

  Belmonte Publishing, LLC

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 Belmonte Publishing LLC

  Published by Belmonte Publishing LLC

  Contents

  Reading Order

  Free Prequel

  1. Clay

  2. Tess

  3. Clay

  4. Tess

  5. Clay

  6. Tess

  7. Clay

  8. Tess

  9. Tess

  10. Clay

  11. Tess

  12. Clay

  13. Tess

  14. Clay

  15. Tess

  16. Clay

  17. Tess

  18. Clay

  19. Tess

  20. Tess

  21. Clay

  22. Tess

  23. Clay

  24. Tess

  25. Clay

  26. Tess

  27. Clay

  28. Tess

  29. Clay

  30. Tess

  31. Clay

  32. Tess

  33. Clay

  34. Tess

  35. Tess

  Also by M. S. Parker

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Reading Order

  Thank you so much for reading Saving Tess, the second book of Clay’s story. I highly recommend reading them in this order:

  Rona and Jalen

  1. Claimed by Him

  2. Played by Him

  3. Saved by Him

  Clay and Tess

  4. Finding Brianne

  5. Saving Tess

  6. Brianne’s Secret (Dec 28)

  Free Prequel

  Get an exclusive prequel to the New Pleasures series! Click Here to subscribe to my newsletter and start reading the exclusive 50 pages prequel – NOT available anywhere else.

  One

  Clay

  If someone had told me two months ago that I’d get to spend all of January in San Jose, Costa Rica, I would’ve told them that I’d pick a better vacation spot.

  The country was beautiful, but if I’d been the one choosing where to go, I would’ve picked somewhere with fewer people, somewhere I could enjoy the solitude. Maybe ice fishing in Alaska or something like that.

  But I hadn’t been the one to choose Costa Rica, not in a typical sense anyway. My partner, FBI agent Ray Mathews, had suggested I take some time off after we’d closed a particularly difficult case, but not so I could relax. After just a couple months, he knew me well enough to know that I wouldn’t just take time off and lounge around, which was why he’d given me an off-book investigation.

  Through a series of connections, he’d been asked to look into a missing group of Red Care workers, and he’d passed that on to me. Since the FBI didn’t have jurisdiction in other countries, I didn’t have any back-up, and if I crossed any lines, I was screwed.

  Except I’d found someone to back me up. Fate or destiny or whatever had brought Tess Gardener, my adolescent crush, back into my life. Her older sister, Brianne, had been with the Red Care group we’d rescued, but as far as I’d known at the time, my guy, Taylor MacIntosh, hadn’t. My original assignment wasn’t that important at the moment, though. Brianne and I had something more important to focus on.

  Tess was missing.

  It was the first Sunday afternoon in February, and she’d been missing since the second Wednesday in January. She and I had left Brianne at the hospital that morning, intending to return later when Bri could be discharged. That was when I’d made my critical mistake.

  I’d had sex with Tess. Again.

  It’d been completely consensual, and I’d thought that both of us had been on the same page when we’d fallen asleep after. Except I’d woken up a couple hours later to find that she’d disappeared. No note, and nothing but her purse and phone missing. At first, I’d thought she’d gone to get Brianne on her own, but when I’d arrived at the hospital, Brianne had been as clueless as me.

  And now I was searching Costa Rica for another missing Gardener woman, except this time, Brianne was looking with me and Tess was the one who was lost.

  I barely glanced at the desk clerk as I walked from the front door to the courtyard entrance. Over the past two weeks, he’d gotten used to Brianne and me coming and going at all hours without explanation. Bri had taken over her sister’s room, and to my surprise, had performed a thorough search immediately after entering it. I’d known Brianne had to be a badass since she’d been in the army since she was eighteen, but this was beyond normal badassery. She’d still been weak from her time being held hostage, and while her dislocated shoulder had been put back by the doctor, she wasn’t exactly in fighting shape.

  I took my usual seat near the pool and pulled my notebook from my pocket. The weather was gorgeous, the temperature perfect, and the scenery was something from a postcard.

  I barely registered any of it.

  No sightings at airport. No tickets purchased by anyone matching description. No sightings at bus stations. No tickets purchased by anyone matching description.

  The words came automatically now. Every other morning, I went to the airport and the bus stations with a picture of Tess and asked if anyone had seen her. On opposite mornings, I did the same at car rental places. And every morning, no matter where I went, I got the same results. No one had seen her.

  Getting out of the country without her passport would have been difficult, but getting a forged passport was possible. Not that I thought Tess would have done that. What would have been the point? She wasn’t on the run from anything, hadn’t done anything illegal. Sure, the drug cartel we’d rescued Brianne and the other Red Care workers from wasn’t happy with us, but Tess wasn’t the sort of person to run from danger.

  Hell, I’d had a nearly impossible time keeping her away from danger.

  “Anything?” Brianne asked as she took the seat next to me.

  “No,” I didn’t look at her as I answered. With aquamarine eyes and a tall, athletic build, Brianne didn’t really look much like her indigo-eyed, petite sister. Only their dark brown curls were the same. But whenever I looked at her, all I could see was the reason Tess and I had been here to begin with.

  Even though I knew that Tess and I never would’ve met again if it hadn’t been for this trip, I would have given up the time I’d had with her if it meant she was safe.

  “I finally found the desk clerk from that afternoon.”

  My head jerked up. When we asked about the man who’d been on the hotel desk that night, we’d been told that he was a temp brought in just for a couple days, and that had been his last day, not just at the hotel, but at the temp agency too. It seemed a little too much to be a coincidence, but anything was possible.

  Coincidence or not, we still needed to talk to him. He was our only chance of finding out exactly what time Tess had left, and if she said or did anything to give us a hint about where she’d gone. Or if she hadn’t left under her own power after all.

  “And?” I asked impatiently when Brianne didn’t immediately follow her statement up with more information.

  “He moved to Cartago, about fifty to sixty minutes away from here. Explains why he isn’t working at the temp agency here anymore.” Brianne pulled her new phone from her pocket and studied the screen.

  A few days after Tess’s disappearance, I’d been curious to know why Bri kept looking at her phone, so I’d snuck a peek when she’
d left it on the table, but her lock screen had only been a picture of two hands, the pinky fingers linked – a picture she still had thanks to the wonders of cloud technology. When I asked her about it, she’d finally told me that she was the real reason I’d been sent to San Jose.

  While in the army, Brianne had met Sofie Harmon, the younger sister of Dorcus Ganesh, late wife to Secretary of State Fares Ganesh, who happened to be second cousins with my partner Ray Matthews’s ex-wife, Ellie. Our own little six-degrees-of-separation.

  Apparently, Brianne and Sofie had been involved for a couple years, always careful to keep their relationship quiet, so when Bri had wanted to come to Costa Rica with Red Care, they’d both agreed it would be better for her to use an alias.

  The alias Taylor MacIntosh.

  Who was the person I’d been sent here to find?

  It was enough to make my head hurt.

  Brianne lightly touched the screen, and I knew she was thinking about Sofie. The picture was of their hands, Bri had finally told me. Not wanting to risk anyone finding her phone and seeing pictures of her and Sofie, she’d taken the shot of their hands one night in bed, knowing that the reminder of her lover could pass off as a stock photo if necessary.

  I didn’t press Brianne about how serious things were between the two, not wanting her to turn the questions around on me. I hadn’t told her that Tess and I had slept together, but every so often, I caught Bri giving me this intense look, like she knew something about me that I was trying to hide. I was fairly certain that the only thing that kept her from demanding answers was that she was hiding something too.

  “Do you think we should both go?” I asked.

  “That’d probably be a good idea,” Brianne said reluctantly. “This guy could just be run-of-the-mill, but if he’s involved in what happened to Tess, he might not be.” She rubbed her shoulder. “As much as I hate to admit it, I’m still not quite a hundred percent, and if I re-injure my shoulder, it’ll just take that much longer to heal.”

  I nodded. “Do you have an address?”

  Juan Moreno looked nervous when he opened the door, but I couldn’t tell if it was the sight of two strangers or the way Brianne was glaring at him. I couldn’t blame him for either one, really. This street didn’t seem like the type that had a welcome wagon, and Bri was giving him a look that I was sure had scared the shit out of plenty of insurgents when she’d been overseas.

  “We need to talk to you,” Brianne said.

  I shot her a sideways look and addressed Juan in Spanish. “Mr. Monero, I understand you did some substitute work at Hotel Santos Tomas a couple weeks ago?”

  “Sí,” he said, his expression still wary.

  I held out my phone, Tess’s picture already on the screen. She’d been annoyed at me for taking the photo, but every time I had to show it to someone, I was glad I hadn’t let her talk me into deleting it. “On your last day of work, did you see this woman leave the hotel?”

  He studied the picture, then nodded. “She left shortly before my shift ended.”

  I pushed down the flare of excitement that threatened to distract me. “Did she say where she was going?”

  He shook his head. “But I did see that the taxi she took went to the east.”

  It wasn’t a lot, but it was more than we’d had an hour ago. “What time was that?”

  “Around two thirty.”

  That had only been about ninety minutes before I’d woken up. If she’d only waited for me, we could’ve gone wherever she’d wanted to go. Not for the first time, I wondered if that had been the problem – she hadn’t wanted me to go with her.

  I asked Juan a few more questions, but he didn’t have anything else to offer. Still, as we got back into the car, my mind was already putting the new information into place with everything else we’d learned. It wasn’t actually much, but even these two new bits of information gave me a better picture of where we should be looking.

  Tess wouldn’t have missed getting Brianne from the hospital, and she would’ve known that Brianne wouldn’t want to wait to be discharged, so it was logical to assume that she would’ve wanted to be back at the hotel by four-ish. At the very least, if she’d thought she’d be late, she would’ve let me know to go get Brianne without her. Which meant that it was logical to assume that wherever she’d gone, she’d intended to return before too long. If I factored in the time she left, and the direction she’d gone, I’d be able to determine the best area to search.

  I refused to be discouraged because I refused to give up. I’d call in every favor I had coming to me, utilize every resource I had at the FBI, and even work the connections my dad’s position as a member of the House of Representatives offered.

  I wouldn’t leave Costa Rica without Tess.

  Two

  Tess

  “You are in Costa Rica, and today is the first Sunday in February.”

  I understood the words themselves, but it was the facts surrounding a couple of them I was having difficulty processing. Like Costa Rica and February.

  The last thing I remembered before waking up in an unfamiliar room with a stranger watching over me, was talking to my mom from my apartment in Hell’s Kitchen on Christmas Day. Now, I was in another country, with someone I didn’t know, and missing more than a month’s worth of memories. If my body hadn’t felt like it’d been through a blender, I might’ve thought this was a nightmare, but no dream had ever hurt like this.

  I struggled to sit up, but my mysterious benefactor put his hand on my shoulder and eased me back down onto the lumpy mattress.

  “You need to rest.”

  “I thought I’d been resting for the past two weeks,” I pointed out.

  Two weeks here in his apartment…and three, maybe four, more weeks between Christmas and whatever had happened to make me unconscious. At some point in that time, things had been set into motion that led me here. I just needed to figure out what those things were, and then I could concentrate on what to do next.

  “My name is Tess Gardener,” I said, holding out the hand that didn’t have the IV in it.

  “Luis Orozco.” He shook my hand, his obsidian eyes boring into me with an intensity that made me decidedly uncomfortable.

  Despite that, I didn’t squirm, but I did pull my hand back a bit faster than necessary. “You said you found me hurt?”

  He nodded, his dark, shaggy hair falling over one eye. He pushed back the jet-black locks with an impatient gesture that told me he usually preferred his hair shorter, and I wondered if the time he’d spent nursing me back to health had prevented him from his usual haircut.

  Speaking of nursing…

  “Can I ask why you didn’t take me to the hospital?” I kept my tone even and light, not wanting to set him off if he had some sort of Misery situation going on here. I wasn’t an author, but judging by the way he was looking at me, I had to consider that he might try to hobble me if I made him angry. Maybe it was cynical of me to think like that considering he’d taken care of me when he didn’t need to, but if journalism had taught me one thing, it was that thinking the worst was generally a smart approach.

  “I did not have a car to take you,” he said, a flush staining his cheeks. “I am unable to afford one.”

  “What about an ambulance? You said I was unconscious when you found me.”

  He shook his head. “Ambulance. Police. Fire. They do not come to this part of the city. Too dangerous.”

  The righteous indignation that I normally would’ve experienced upon hearing such a statement was muted in the face of everything else. Maybe I could check that out later for a possible story, but right now, I needed to know what had brought me down here in the first place. The possibilities weren’t many.

  I hadn’t been working on anything specific before the holidays, though I supposed I could’ve found something after Christmas that had sent me down here. All I needed to do was call the paper. They’d be able to tell me more, even if I wasn’t here for work. I would’ve h
ad to give them some reason for my absence.

  “May I have some more water, please?” Luis held the cup of water to my mouth, and I took another welcomed drink before asking, “Do you have my phone?”

  “I am sorry,” he said as he sat back down on the edge of the bed. “When I found you, I did not see any personal items.”

  Something about the way his gaze shifted made me suspect that there was something he wasn’t saying, but I didn’t call him on it. I needed to be smart about how I approached this. If I asked all of my questions first, I could get general information and then worry about what Luis was holding back.

  My muddled mind was starting to sort itself out. I was still missing a chunk of time, but I was at least thinking clear enough now to realize that the first thing I needed to do was assess my injuries. If Luis was a threat rather than a savior, knowing if I had the physical ability to fend him off or get away was important.

  “You said I hit my head.” I could feel it now, something across my forehead. It didn’t feel like a bump, but rather more like a cut. When I was six or seven, I stepped on a glass Christmas ornament and cut my foot badly enough to need stitches. This felt similar.

  A scream of frustration bubbled up inside me. I could remember what it had felt like to have stitches twenty-five years ago, but not anything that’d happened in the past five or six weeks.