Authors: Blush
She hated having to accept his help. Worse, in all the commotion the tarp seemed to have dropped off her, leaving her exposed, and the blindfold had slipped down just enough to cover her nose and cut off her air.
She settled back with an exasperated sigh. "Could you at least take this blindfold off so I can breathe?"
"I could," he allowed, "but then I'd have to kill you. "
"Oh, funny, " she mumbled, but the word stuck in her throat. It was hardly an idle threat considering what he'd already done. She had been trying desperately not to think about the guard. She didn't want to get sucked back into the horror of what had happened, nor did she want to think about the fact that she might have been an unwitting accessory to murder.
He flipped the tarp up around her shoulders, covering her, then pulled the van back onto the road. The car radio blared on next, startling her as he skipped rapidly from one station to another, apparently searching for news of the kidnapping, but never stopping long enough for her to hear any details. Finally he caught a female commentator in the middle of a report.
"One badly shaken security guard was taken to the hospital, " the woman was saying, "where he was treated for a dislocated jaw and severe shock. He reported to the police that the kidnapper tricked him with an exploding gun and rendered him unconscious with a tranquilizer bullet. A spokesman for the LAPD reports that the tranquilizer gun used is a highly controversial weapon. It's a brand-new device, still in the research and development stages, and not yet available, even to law enforcement.... "
The commentator went on, but Gus didn't hear another word.
A tranquilizer gun? He
hadn't
killed the guard? A man
wasn't
dead and she
wasn't
an accessory? The relief that swept her barely lasted long enough for her to acknowledge it. Her shock at the news was too great. She couldn't believe he'd allowed her to think he'd killed the man in cold blood. She'd been reduced to a sobbing, pleading, gibbering idiot when two words would have calmed her.
Tranquilizer gun.
That's all he would have had to say. The
bastard.
He'd made her stammer he'd frightened her so badly! The slight speech impediment was one of the legacies of her childhood terrors. She'd had to teach herself to speak all over again in order to conceal it. It mattered little to her now that her breathy, hesitant manner had become part of her trademark style and was one of the more endearing qualities of her public personality. All she could think about was the way he'd humiliated her.
"How could you d-d-do that?" Her fury spiked when she couldn't quite master the word. She wrenched at the remaining strands of tape binding her wrists, pulled one of her hands free, and jerked down her blindfold.
It didn't occur to Gus that her question was absurdly rhetorical, not for one blinking second. It didn't even occur to her that she was taking a terrible risk. She might have her sight back, but her moral outrage and her passion for justice had blinded her to the fact that she was dealing with a killer, a man capable of almost anything.
"How could you let me think he was dead?" she demanded, struggling to untie the wretched blindfold and rid herself of it altogether. "What kind of monster are you?"
"What the hell are you doing?" The van veered into the other lane as he threw out a hand to block her from whatever she might be about to do.
Gus didn't have a chance to do anything besides grab for the dashboard to steady herself. They were all over the road! Fortunately the highway was deserted as he got control of the vehicle and pulled it to the shoulder. It was also lucky the windows were up, because the dust that swirled up from the tires enveloped them like a mushroom cloud.
Once they'd come to a complete stop, and Gus had caught her breath, she hazarded a glance at him. She found herself blinking into his slitty-eyed glare, and as the icy warning in his eyes registered, it hit her like a thunderbolt what she'd done. She had looked upon the wizard. The hostage had seen her captor's face and now he was going to kill her.
"I didn't see anything!" she cried, wrenching around the other way. She hadn't, certainly not enough to identify him. But she doubted he was going to take her word for it.
"I should have let you smother in that rug, " he said, his breath rasping softly with the declaration. "Back where you were. On the seat. Facedown.
Now. "
Gus knew better than to fight him. She released an unsteady sigh as she allowed him to reclaim her shoulders and put her back where she'd been. She assumed he was going to knock her cold enough to give her a lasting case of amnesia. Instead, he produced something that must have been a knife, bent over her body and began to cut away the rest of the electrician's tape. When he was done, her hands and feet were free, she'd been relieved of the manicure scissors, and her blindfold was a thing of the past.
She rubbed her tender wrists and wiggled her bare feet to get the blood flowing. Thanking him didn't seem appropriate given that he'd tied her up in the first place and his next move might be cold-blooded murder. During the one or two minutes she'd spent at Vassar, before she'd bailed out of college to seek her fortunes elsewhere, she'd come to the conclusion that there were two kinds of male intelligence— frontal and animal. Blends were a rarity. Most guys were either computers with legs or testosterone-fueled power tools, and this guy was definitely Door Number Two. It didn't seem possible that somewhere in his primitive response system lurked a truly humanitarian impulse. But she could hope.
Gooseflesh rippled her thighs, reminding her that the tarp had fallen to the floor and she was wearing a bikini. She gathered it up and covered herself, careful not to look at him, even though she sensed he was looking at her. He was there in her periphery, a dark energy field, and she could feel the weight of his appraisal. But she didn't sense the same heated interest she was used to from the opposite sex. There was a coldness to his observation, as if he had little use for women like her, beautiful or otherwise, naked or otherwise.
Women like her? she thought. What did that mean?
His van was a black Chevy Blazer, and as he pulled it back onto the highway, she realized they were somewhere in the desert. The rolling, salmon-colored hills in the distance were surprisingly beautiful, yet there was nothing in between but miles and miles of scorched clay, studded with spiny cacti and blue-gray sagebrush. It looked like a desolate outpost on the moon.
If this was the Mojave, and she suspected it was, temperatures routinely soared to one hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. She'd read somewhere that Death Valley was the hottest place on earth during the summer, and this was dead-center July. He'd chosen well, she realized with a growing sense of despair. The infernal heat and total isolation would make escape impossible.
Rippling gooseflesh prompted her to pull the tarp tighter around her. The van's air-conditioning was blowing like a gale, which explained the draft on her feet. But she couldn't blame her sudden desire to tremble on that, and she was reluctant to call it fear, simply because she loathed the emotion above all others, and she didn't want to give him that much credit.
Still, her trembling hands wouldn't let her deny that something was very wrong as the Chevy Blazer peeled down the lonely highway toward oblivion, leaving black tracks on the asphalt and civilization in the dust. It was shock, she told herself. It had to be that. She was suffering shock.
"Where are we going?" she asked him, staring out the window. She had just discovered that the tarp was actually a man's huge raincoat, and since it was conveniently inside-out, she'd tucked her hands into the pockets, not wanting to expose her unsteadiness.
"To a spa in the desert." His monotone turned faintly sardonic as he added, "You'll love it. "
As they sped down the road, a solution occurred to Gus. She might be able to buy him off by offering him more money than he'd been promised. Since everyone would think she'd been kidnapped anyway, it was possible she and Rob could still follow through with their plans. It would be risky. She was close to grabbing the brass ring and reluctant to do anything to jeopardize that, but the kidnapping scheme had already gone awry.
She curled her fingers into her palms. "If I made it worth your while, would you let me go?"
"What makes you think you've got anything worth my while?"
Subtle he wasn't. "I was talking about money."
"I know. I wasn't. "
"Then what do want?" She felt a twinge of pain beneath her breast as she sank deeper into the coat. Absently she wondered if she'd sprained something or cracked a rib.
"Not that either, " he assured her.
The edge in his voice made her turn, and at the very moment she did, he settled back in the seat and did the same thing. She met his eyes briefly, sharply. She'd only meant to glance at him, just a tilt of her chin to catch his expression, but something happened when he looked her way, something that so rarely happened to Gus, she couldn't remember the last time.
He blew her off!
Clearly in no hurry, he held her startled gaze with the precision of a surgical laser, freezing her alive with the wintry coldness she'd sensed. Seeming satisfied that he'd found nothing of interest, he checked out the rest of her, dismissed her with a slanted eyebrow, and turned back to the road.
She was too astonished to be insulted. Still, he'd done it so contemptuously, she felt as if he'd cut her off at the knees and left her bleeding.
Who was this guy? No man had ever looked at her that way.
God, if she'd thought her hands were shaking before!
She could identify him now, and with or without his mask, he was the phantom assailant of every woman's nightmares, the brutal street tough you'd least want to meet in a dark alley. He looked frighteningly jaded, yet wildly attractive. His hair was black, his features harsh, but his face was so beautifully shaded with secrets, it was all she could do not to ask him how many people he had actually murdered.
His blue-black eyes had tiny, glinting diamonds at their center. But it was his voice that had awakened her to his inner state of mind. He spoke in a monotone that was low and burnt out, as dead to life as the hostile terrain that stretched before them. It had made her think of the desert, a wilderness with everything of value scorched out of it, with nothing left but the ashes.
Her theory about two kinds of men had been shortsighted where he was concerned. She saw that immediately. This one was in another category altogether, the quiet-but-deadly type that exists on the outlaw fringes of civilization. She'd come across the term in a magazine article about movie villains, and it fit her kidnapper to perfection. He looked capable of killing, of sex with the dead... of anything.
Her heart was racing as fast as her thoughts, but she refused to let it rattle her this time. When she was anxious or just needed to think, she often found herself clicking her fingernails against her teeth. It was an irritating, nervous habit at best, and she resisted the impulse now, although it was a powerful one. Instead, she calmed herself with a couple of deep breaths and some mental tough talk.
She was forgetting what was at stake. Deadly or not, his looks weren't relevant. He'd released her from her bonds, and he must want the money or he wouldn't have taken the job. Therefore, he wasn't going to kill her and feed her to the vultures. And she
was
going to get through this, because everything she'd ever wanted was hanging in the balance—her independence from the Featherstones, a chance at the respect she'd long been denied.
There were only a very few people in Gus's life who had penetrated her formidable emotional barriers. One of them was her deceased stepsister, Jillian, and another was Bridget, Jillian's child, the five-year-old to whom Gus had become reluctantly and hopelessly attached. What Gus wanted as much as her own independence was the chance to pay tribute to Jillian, and more important, create a legacy for Bridget.
Yes, she thought, almost sadly. It was important, this pipedream of hers. It might be the most important thing she had ever done in her life.
The kidnapper hit the brakes and wheeled the van onto a road that headed straight into the hills. Gus propped her hand against the door, jolted out of her thoughts and acutely aware of the pain just below her breast. Once he'd straightened the car out, she delved under the coat and discovered that one of the bones of her bikini bra top was digging into her rib cage.
A quick adjustment brought some relief, along with the realization that if she could get the raincoat on her body instead of over it, she would feel much more protected. With a glance at him, she began to try to work her way into the huge thing without uncovering herself.
She was still engaged in rearranging herself moments later when she realized that he was watching her. If her heart fluttered and froze for a moment, it was a completely wasted response. She'd thought he might be getting ideas. Foolish of her. She'd even thought she might be arousing his prurient interest. After all, she had aroused lots of that in her time. Even more foolish of her. His reaction was another one of those not-if-you-were-the-last-woman-on-earth looks. And that was the most that could be said for it.
Insulted, she jerked the coat off and wrestled her way into it, not giving a damn what he saw. Once she had the voluminous thing on, she belted it loosely and sat back with a sniff. The damn bra top stabbed her again, but she was too annoyed to care. Apparently Mr. Quiet-but-Deadly reacted to nothing but death threats. She could have stripped down to the buff and finished painting her toenails right in front of him and he wouldn't have blinked an eye.
Something told her she ought to be grateful for that.
Something else told her she wasn't going to be.
"Our Gus, kidnapped?" Lily Featherstone clutched the neckline of her white satin kimono together and clapped a hand over her mouth in astonishment. Her stepsister had been
kidnapped?
Before she could stop herself, she was gasping with laughter, which was very unlike her.