Staying Alive Read Free

idea of having one of her students left inside the building during an actual emergency situation still took her breath away. It would be days before she stopped obsessing on the horrific notion.
    Thank God there hadn’t been a fire or any other threatening situation.
    The alarm had reacted to an anomaly in the system, whatever that meant. All Claire knew for certain was that it hadn’t been a planned drill; it had been a mistake.
    Peter had bounced back after a carton of apple juice. As she suspected, his sugar level had dropped and he’d put off taking care of the situation until he briefly lost consciousness. He didn’t like that he needed to monitor his levels. A typical man in the making, he assumed he could get through the low without asking for help.
    With less than an hour to go, her students, who had all changed from their damp clothes into their gym attire, had settled back into their work. Instead of reading aloud this afternoon, she’d decided to have quiet, individual reading time. She could catch up on the lesson planning she’d missed during the unintended fire drill.
    Like her, most of the teachers kept a change of clothes at school. Working with kids this age had taught her long ago to expect most anything.
    Her hair, much to her dismay, had coiled into its natural abundance of unruly curls. The ponytail barely restrained the wild mass. She spent at least a half hour every morning smoothing the kind of mane others paid stylists top dollar to create.
    Not Claire. She had always hated her naturally curly hair. Almost as much as she loathed her full figure. It wasn’t that she was fat, exactly. Darlene called her curvaceous.
    Claire worked out. She really did. And she ate right…except for the chocolate. It was her one major downfall. There were far worse bad habits, she reminded herself on a regular basis. And, the fact of the matter was, all the women in the Grant family were healthy-sized…so to speak.
    You couldn’t fight genetics.
    Scuffling in the hall snapped her back to the present and jerked her head up. She was on her feet and moving toward the door before the possible sources of the sounds fully penetrated. Once in a while some of the boys came to blows, but not that often. She was shocked that anyone had been allowed in the hall long enough to get into trouble after the watery fire drill.
    She turned the knob and pulled the door open far enough to ease out of the room. She’d just gotten her students settled. Whoever was makingall the ruckus was going to get a glimpse of her less-than-pleasant side. “What’s going on—?”
    The rest of the words evaporated in her throat as her brain analyzed what her eyes saw.
    Two men wearing black ski masks had Mr. Allen trapped against the wall, a gun to his head.
    Fear throttled through Claire. Before her brain even gave the order she had already pushed the door closed behind her in hopes of somehow protecting her students.
    An arm came around her throat and jerked her backward against a hard body.
    “Don’t make a sound.”
    The threat was whispered against her ear.
    Her gaze met Mr. Allen’s and she saw the extreme fear that mirrored her own.
    “Bring him into this room,” the man holding her ordered.
    The two thugs jerked Mr. Allen away from the wall and started toward Claire.
    …this room.
    They meant her room.
    “No. We can’t go in there. My students—”
    Fingers twisted in her hair and yanked her head back. “Shut up!” he hissed in her ear.
    Her captor opened the classroom door and shoved her inside.
    “Lay your heads down!” Claire ordered, barelycatching herself from the momentum of his brutal push. She didn’t want her kids to see this. The terror she felt was nothing compared with what their impressionable minds would experience. “Lay your heads down!” she repeated. The longer she could put off their panic the better.
    Heads went down onto folded arms. She let go a ragged breath and thanked God that they had obeyed