Between the Lines by Jayne Ann Krentz Page B

guests.
    A few minutes later Amber drummed her nails on the table and glanced at her watch. How long did a man normally spend in the men's room?
    Assuming Gray had gone to the men's room.
    Amber glanced thoughtfully toward the door of the lounge, noticing that neither Roger nor Ozzie were in sight. That was odd. Usually one or both were in the vicinity.
    A few more minutes passed with no sign of Gray. His half-finished glass of tequila sat on the table in front of Amber. The more she looked at it, the more uneasy she became. It wasn't like Gray to simply disappear without an explanation.
    Feeling oddly concerned, Amber got to her feet, picked up her huge straw shoulder bag and slipped out of the lounge. The spacious lobby was nearly empty.
    Driven by a strange premonition that had no logic behind it, Amber pushed through the sliding glass doors that opened onto the pool terrace.
    She emerged into the balmy darkness just in time to see three figures disappear around the corner at the far end of the wide, meandering gardens. The man in the center of the trio was identifiable not only by his size and build but by the way he moved. It was Gray, and he was being escorted away from the lights of the resort by Roger and Ozzie. Even as Amber watched, the three men vanished into the night-shrouded desert foothills.

Chapter 5
    amber's fingers tightened around the strap of her straw bag as she watched the three men walk out of sight. She was more than uneasy now. She was frightened. It didn't require any feminine intuition or brilliant deductive reasoning to realize there was something very wrong about the whole scenario. It was as simple as one, two, three.
    One: Cormick Grayson prepares to turn in a negative financial report on Vie Delaney's resort. Two: Vie Delaney conveniently asks Grayson's wife to dance for the first time in four evenings. Three: Grayson disappears in the company of two well-muscled young men while unsuspecting wife is otherwise occupied on the dance floor.
    It could, of course, all be very innocent, Amber told herself as she began making her way through the shadowed terrace gardens. But Gray had said nothing about any business meetings this evening. Surely he would have mentioned an appointment. It certainly wasn't like him to simply vanish while she was dancing with another man.
    Then again, she thought as she skirted the silent, underwater-lit pool, she wasn't really sure how Gray felt about her dancing with another man. She'd never danced with anyone else in front of him. He had certainly let her go into Delaney's arms without any protest.
    She was well beyond the brightly lit lobby now. On this side of the hotel the foothills rose immediately at the border of the terraced grounds. The gardens ended and the natural terrain took over shortly beyond the children's playing area. The discreet garden lights faded quickly after that. But, just as in a typical Twitchell poem, the sky was filled with stars, and there was even a sliver of a moon to light Amber's path.
    The trouble was that she wasn't certain where she was going. She had lost sight of the three men just as she'd stepped out of the lobby. She had been walking in the same general direction in which they had disappeared, but she was no longer sure she was on the right path now. When her sandaled feet stepped off green lawn and landed on desert sand, she came to a halt and tried to listen. Around her the ground was twisted and convoluted as it began the process of changing from foothills into a mountain. A giant saguaro loomed up in her path, ghostly and overbearing. There was a brief scuttling sound somewhere in the vicinity of Amber's feet. The knowledge that the desert was not, by any stretch of the imagination, an empty, barren place hit her with full impact. She didn't want to think about what else was running around out here besides herself. Unfortunately there was no sign of anything two-footed.
    She was about to turn to the right and search in that