Harlequin Intrigue, Box Set 2 of 2 Read Free Page A

out the door to the lobby. Opening her eyes, Katie lifted her blind focus up the sloping aisle. “Tyler? This isn’t a good time to play hide-and-seek.”
    Why weren’t the security lights coming on? They ran on a separate power source from the rest of the theater. “Did we have a power outage?”
    Why wouldn’t anybody answer her? Panic tried to lock up the air in her chest. The dark wasn’t a safe place to be. She’d been reading those old case files, had lingered over the pregnant teen whose kidnapping and unsolved murder would have been Katie’s story if she hadn’t been lucky—if her aunt and uncle hadn’t moved heaven and earth to find her. Why did it have to be so dark? Maybe that had been Doug or the security guard or some other Good Samaritan rushing out to get upstairs to the tech booth in the balcony. She just needed to be patient.
    Only it felt as though several minutes had passed, and the lights still weren’t coming on. Maybe it had only been seconds. But even seconds were too long in a blackout like this. She swayed against the remembered images of hands grabbing her in the night, of her dead friend Whitney and a teenage girl whose life and death had been relegated to a dusty cold case file.
    â€œStop it.” Rubbing at the bruise forming on her hip, letting the soreness clear her mind, Katie forced her eyes open, willing her vision to focus in the darkness and her memories to blur. Her work took her to the past, but she lived in the here and now. With Tyler. He’d be frightened of the pitch-black, too. She had to find her son. “Think, woman,” she challenged herself. “Tyler?”
    But the only change in the shroud of blackness was her brain finally kicking into gear.
    â€œUgh. You’re an idiot.” Rational thought finally returned and she pulled out her phone, adjusting the screen to flashlight mode to make sure someone could see her before shining it up toward the tech booth in the balcony and shouting again. “Lights, please? Doug?” Her light wasn’t that powerful, but the booth looked dark, too. “Is anybody up there? I’m on my way out. My son’s here, too. Please.”
    She waited in silence for several more seconds before she heard a soft click from the stage. She turned and saw the ropes of running lights that marked the edge and wings of the performance space had come on.
This way
, they beckoned. Really? That was the help she was going to get? Put in place to help the actors find their way offstage during a blackout at the end of a scene, the small red bulbs barely created a glow in the shadows.
    â€œThanks! For nothing,” she added under her breath, pointing her phone light to the floor to illuminate the stairs she climbed to get onto the stage. Somebody with a twisted sense of humor must be trying to teach her a lesson about her tardiness. Up here, at least, she could follow the dimly lit path the actors did, and she ended up pushing through the side curtains to get to the backstage doors and greenroom and dressing areas beyond.
    Her stomach twisted into a knot when she pushed open the heavy firewall door. It was dark back here, too. Her annoyance with Doug turned to trepidation in a heartbeat. “This isn’t funny,” she called out. Where had everybody gone? Where was her son? “Tyler? Sweetie, answer me.”
    She kicked the doorstop to the floor to prop the steel door open. Okay. If somebody wanted to spook her, wanted to teach her a lesson about keeping others late at the theater, he or she had succeeded.
    But with her son missing, she couldn’t allow either fear or anger to take hold. Katie breathed in deeply, waiting until she could hear the silence over the thumping of her heart before following her light into the greenroom, or cast waiting area. Turning her phone to the wall, she found the light switch and lifted it. Nothing.
    Had someone forgotten to pay