Irresistible Force (30 page)

Shay risked everything by looking directly into his empty eyes. “All I have is in my purse.”

She held his gaze a long time, longer than she thought possible, as her knees loosened and threatened to buckle. She understood that what he did next would be entirely beyond her control.

He dropped her arm. “Might as well check.”

He moved backward until he reached the table where he dumped the contents of her purse. Gaze darting back and forth between her and the things on the table, he quickly sorted them. Finally, he tore four singles from her billfold.

“There’s nothing here!” His face went dark with anger as he came toward her. “You trying to punk me?”

“No! I swear.” She grabbed her middle and faked a couple of heaves. Not surprisingly, he stopped short. Maybe sex in a puddle of vomit didn’t appeal to him. Good.

Shay let out a shaky breath, nothing faked in that.

Her cell rang.

He glanced back at the table. “Who’s that? You expecting the cop?”

Lie!
She shook her head ever so slightly. “Probably my girlfriend. She’s coming to spend the weekend with me.” She pointed a very shaky finger at the groceries. “That’s dinner.”

His eyes became slits, narrowed between little pillows of reddened flesh. After a moment he backed up and rifled through the mess he’d made until he found her cell phone. She knew who had called by the way his expression changed when he saw the caller ID. “Fucking bitch!”

She jumped to her feet.

He aimed the gun at her. “You lied to me.”

She looked away, her insides tweaking her even though there was nothing left to come up but her boots.

The sound of an incoming text chimed. He glanced at her phone again. This time he smiled. “Boyfriend says he’s on his way. Twenty minutes.”

He put the phone in his pocket. “You all excited about that? It’s got me excited.” He grabbed his crotch with his free hand. “I won’t need twenty minutes to get you all juicy for him. Move over here and take off all your shit.”

But as he waved her toward him, Shay found her legs wouldn’t work anymore. “I—I can’t.”

He pointed at her left knee with the barrel of his gun. “You can strip or I’ll shoot you and strip you. Nicer if you do it.”

She nodded and reached for the edge of her sweatshirt. If she got a chance to run she wouldn’t care if she was cold. Cold was better than … so many things.

It was no striptease. Between numbing fear and weakness from nausea, she moved in slow jerky movements. It took her forever to wrestle out of her sweatshirt. Her Henley shirt clung to her arms damp from flop sweat as she peeled it off.

She didn’t look at him. She would have lost the last of her nerve. What next? Not her bra. Her jeans?
Keep the boots on!
If she got the chance to run she would need her boots.

He is going to kill me. Now. Or later.

The thought struck through her brain like the brilliance of a spotlight. He was on the clock. James was coming. She would be able to identify him. He would not allow that.

Now or later.

She had a choice.

“Fuck this! You’re taking too long!”

He grabbed her by the arm and shoved the small coffee table aside with one foot. It struck the tequila bottle and knocked it over, spilling it on the floor. He jerked her to the center of the rug.

He let her go and then, using the same hand that had dragged her along, he backhanded her across the face.

She wasn’t prepared for the violence. It caught her full force, snapping her chin toward her shoulder as pain ignited from her eye to her jawline. Too shocked to cry out, she reeled backward.

He caught her by her ponytail and jerked her head back against his cinder-block chest. He bent his head toward her. She smelled tequila on his rancid breath.

He tried to kiss her but she opened her mouth and breathed hard into his face.

He recoiled from her vomit breath. “Disgusting!”

She might have smiled if she hadn’t been so scared.

He jerked her hair again, this time pulling some of it out by the roots. She cried out in pain, which seemed to satisfy him.

“Get down!”

She went down on her knees to escape the possibility of another blow that might make her too weak to think. Her thoughts scurried in a frantic circle. Oh please, oh please! Think of something. Anything.

As she slid past his hips she saw the log lighter. It lay on the hearthstone a few feet away.

He grabbed her by the back of her head and jerked her toward the crotch of his jeans. He jammed her face against his groin. She felt his hard-on and the scrape of his zipper as he ground his hips against her cheek. “Show me how the cop likes it.”

Shay stiffened. She felt her gut cramp as it all went watery. “I—I can’t.”

“Useless cunt.” He shrugged and lifted the barrel to her forehead.

She gritted her teeth and shut her eyes. Now. Not later. Her choice.

The pain blinded her but the blow from the barrel sent her sprawling on her back. She let herself fall in the direction of the hearth. Her choice.

He was on her so quickly the force of his body knocked the breath out of her. Gasping for air she knew a panicky moment when her grasping hand met only hard slate. She had lost. She couldn’t fight him and win. If he hit her again she would pass out and all the choices after that, even to the end of her life, would be his.

She went limp beneath him.

Chuckling with satisfaction that he had bested her resistance, he grabbed the front of her bra and yanked it up over her breasts. With a grunt of animal lust he grabbed one breast and squeezed it so hard she moaned in pain.

This seemed to excite him even more. He reared back to reach for her jeans zipper.

Shay turned her face away, as if she could not bear to look at the foul man straddling her, and opened her eyes. She saw it. The log lighter.
Too far away.

He was pulling at her jeans but he couldn’t get them down. “Raise up!”

“I can’t. You’re too heavy. Get off.”

He pointed his gun at her. “Nothing funny.”

She nodded and, coming up on her elbows, scooted backward out from under him when he rose up on his knees.

He watched with greedy eyes as she slipped her jeans down to the top of her hips. But then she couldn’t do it. Couldn’t let him think she’d wanted this, no matter if he killed her. She had been a victim too often in her life, at the whim of circumstances beyond her control. Not this time.

She screamed, levering her torso off the floor with hands curled into talons.

He didn’t hit her with the barrel this time, simply struck her in the solar plexus, the blow knocking her back to the floor.

He was on her, this time not taking any time to enjoy the unique features of the woman beneath him. He even laid his gun down behind his right knee, impossible for her to reach.

Shay grunted in pain as he tore at her clothing, and turned her head. Not everything was out of reach.

He didn’t notice her arm snake out, or the soft click. He had her jeans to her knees but her boots prevented him from tugging them further. He tried to flip her over, and she knew what he was planning to do. This time, she fought back, keeping his attention just long enough.

A lovely blue flame had leaped up by the hearth slate. It ran quickly along the top of the tequila spill line that ran under the chair and into the braided floor rug. The rug caught first. He didn’t notice. He only knew she was losing the fight.

In the end Shay found herself crying out, “Fire!”

“What the fuck?”

“Fire! Get off me!” Shay pushed at him with all her might. The flames were only inches from her face.

His eyes went wide as he scrambled off her. He reached for his gun even as the undercarriage of the chair began to smoke. He backed off and got to his feet. Seemingly confused by the fire, he aimed his pistol at the carpet first and then at the chair, as if the flames would surrender to his firepower.

Shay didn’t wait to see who would win. She rolled away from him and onto her feet. Even as she grabbed her jeans to pull them up over her hips, she headed for the door.

“You bitch!”

She ran. She didn’t look back. She didn’t even cower from the shot she knew was coming. Her choice.

The report was louder than she expected. She stumbled at the threshold as every muscle in her body contracted for impact. The fiery burn of the bullet still surprised her.

From the room behind her, her phone began playing Katy Perry’s “Wide Awake.” It was like music wafting in from another world, a world where there were boyfriends, and dinners to be cooked, and a fire to cozy up next to.

And then she was through the door.

Her world was filled with November darkness, the chill thrill of a damp north wind whipping in from the lake, and the insistent throb of a burning wound.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Go right!

She didn’t spare a second to wonder why her brain was directing her there. Right would take her into the woods. Harder to find. Harder to track. Yet Bogart would know to look for her.

She heard it, perhaps because she had been praying so hard for it, the sounds of a truck. Was it James’s truck turning off the main road? She stopped running at the edge of the woods. Maybe if she could just double back to the road, meet him— She looked back toward the cabin that stood in the way.

The metallic gun barrel shone under the radiance of the NightWatcher light as her assailant paused in the doorway of the cabin. He was coughing and cursing and then he was off the porch at a dead run. She waited to be certain he wasn’t coming her way. She decided he was headed for the campground parking lot on the other side of this strip of woods where she supposed he had parked his vehicle. But maybe not. Maybe he was still looking for her. And if she risked going back into the open too soon …

Survival impulse took over the decision. She turned away and took off at a run, the moist ground sucking at her boot heels as she fled into the underbrush. But within seconds she came nearly to a halt. She ached in every part of her body. It was impossible to catalogue all the pain. She put a hand to her head and it came away with a wet smear. Must be blood. Her legs were rubbery and her stomach burned with a hollow fire. Her arm—no. Couldn’t think about the arm.

The autumn-stripped trees kept the woods from the pitch-black darkness of a summer-night canopy. Overhead the sky glowed faintly with the Milky Way. If she didn’t find shelter her stalker might find her before James. She had to move!

She was familiar with this section of wilderness, and during the day she would not have been afraid to cross it alone. But in the dark, with the wind whipping her hair into her face, she might as well have been in another country. Nothing was familiar, or comforting, or tinged with the presence of another human being.

She thought she heard the moment a vehicle turned off the road into the hundred yards of gravel path that led to her door. The man behind her would have heard it, too. She moved on.

Tired, running on adrenaline and fear, she was acting purely on instinct. And instinct told every hunted animal to go to ground, to hide.

She fretted because her boots made swishing sounds as she passed through the leaves that were knee-high in places. If there was anyone to listen.
Bogart!

She almost closed her eyes to pray that Bogart would hear those
shussh shussh
sounds and know she was in trouble. She’d never needed a Prince Charming more.

After several minutes of running and stumbling, she reached a clearing where a new road was being laid over a narrow stream. Winded and shaking from nerves, she paused again. And squinted.

The starlight was brighter now that she had reached the other side of the tree belt. Ten feet away, gleaming darkly as if they were oiled with tar, long PVC pipes lay stacked like firewood against an embankment. They had been brought in to form a culvert for the stream that ran under new road construction.

Shay closed her streaming eyes. Shelter, if only she had the guts to use it.

She had a fear of tight places. Of tunneling into the ground, a cave getting the farther along she went until she was unable to back up. It was a nightmare she’d had many times.

Behind her she heard sirens and shouts. And then, from somewhere much closer, the sound of pounding footsteps. James? Or him? She couldn’t risk being wrong.

She ran the short distance and dove for the opening of the middle pipe in the stack.

As she scrambled into the opening, she tried to stuff the fear aside. What would she tell a child who needed to take shelter from a—a thunderstorm, or a bear? Yes, a bear. Big bear. It was November. All the creepy-crawlies should be hibernating by now. Snakes would have gone to ground under stumps where it would be warmer than the inside of the cold PVC piping she was being forced to crawl into. It was safe in here.

She paused a couple of feet in, the throbbing from her injured arm making her dizzy with pain. No. Mustn’t think of that.
Think only of survival
.

Though the faintest light glowed at the far end, it was much too dim to see her surroundings. She felt the walls. The space was maybe thirty inches in diameter. High enough for her to be on hands and knees and still not quite touch the top. It wasn’t so bad.

Shay crawled a little farther into the pipe. It was corrugated and rainwater must have gathered over time, making the bottom feel slimy.

I’m not dead. I’m not dead. I’m not dead.
The litany pulsed through her mind, growing louder and faster with every heartbeat. Shay closed her eyes and made herself breathe. She was safe.

But this time the feeling wouldn’t gel. She’d started a fire. Probably burned down her uncle and aunt’s cabin. Her assailant had gotten away. No one else had seen him. Her words against a phantom. No one would believe her. Why should they? And what about the cat? No way she could prove he did that. No way to prove that she was innocent of Jaylynn Turner’s accusations. She should have gotten proof that her attacker was still out there.