Avenging Angel (9 page)

She hated him. He was a despicable, unprincipled, criminal lout. He was a man without honor or conscience, and he was paranoid. There was plenty of proof for that assessment. All she had to do was look at the motel’s furniture. He’d shoved one of the bed frames up against the door, then had angled the mattress over the window, propped up by a chair. He was mean and cruel and thoughtless, and he was crazy if he thought she was going to let him tie her up again.

“No,” she said, her hands tightening into fists at her sides. She backed farther into the bedroom, widening the space between her and the belt coiled in his broad hands.

“It’s for your own protection,” he said calmly, following her with an easy, measured tread.

“Go to hell.”

“I need to get some sleep. I can’t do that if you’re up and wandering around, or up and wandering out of here.”

“Then I guess you’ll have to stay awake.” Damn the man. She had put stitches in his skin, suffered along with him through every single stab of the needle, and he thanked her by tying her up again? Over her dead body.

“Impossible. I’m running on empty.” He stopped at the edge of the bed and faced her, and as quickly as that, she was trapped once again. There was nowhere left to run in the room.

“That’s your problem.” To hell with compassion and empathy, she thought. She’d be damned if she let him tie her up. He did look like he was running on empty. He couldn’t last too much longer.

“My problems are your problems,” he said. “Or more to the point, your problems are my problems.” He quickly and efficiently made a loop out of his belt.

“They don’t have to be,” she said, growing terse as the situation grew desperate. “You can’t possibly know what Austin wants, and I do.”

“Austin wants you dead. That’s all he wants. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you can barter with him. When you signed your name to Morrow Warner, you signed your own death warrant.”

She blanched, and her heart skipped a beat. He’d said the damning words no one was supposed to know. “How do you know about Morrow Warner?”

“I looked.” He shrugged, a tired lift of his left shoulder. “Every night you and Austin worked late, I went back and looked over your work. If you think about it, you might remember that I was always the one on duty those nights. Or you might not remember. My job was to be inconspicuous.”

“I remember,” she said. She remembered too well, watching him out of the corner of her eye and feeling something she shouldn’t have felt. “What you did was unconscionable and—and against the law. Those files were confidential.”

His eyes narrowed for a moment in disbelief, then his lips curved into a sardonic smile. “Don’t you ever forget you’re a lawyer?”

“Austin could have fired you for looking at those papers,” she said, lifting her chin to support her claim even as she realized how silly and empty her threat sounded.

“Austin Bridgeman is going to kill me, Miss Lane,” he said dryly, all traces of his smile fading from his face. “And if I’m not as good as I think I am, he’s going to kill you too. Then it won’t matter which one of us knows what. You got yourself in good and deep by putting together Austin’s little secret company, and now the piper wants his due without your interference.” He lifted his hand and pointed behind her. “Get on the bed and lie down.”

“I will not.”

Dylan’s jaw clenched in reaction to her prissy, holier-than-thou refusal. He heard his teeth grind together and felt muscles tighten in his face. Damn the woman. Didn’t she know he could break her in five places and not even work up a sweat?

She had been his sole fantasy for six long, frustrating months, but he was beginning to think he’d been fantasizing about the wrong woman. Elegant Miss Johanna Lane, with her silk dresses and silk-clad legs, wasn’t supposed to be scrappy. He had instinctively known it would be harder on him if or when she remembered him, but he was only beginning to figure out why. He’d thought it would be because of the night they had gotten so close to a kiss; he could still remember the sweet pressure of her body pressed up against his—because he wouldn’t have left her with only a kiss. He would have had all of her. In his dreams he’d had her more than once. He had thought the memories of all that sexual heat would make it more difficult for him to remember he had a job to do, more difficult for him to remember that the end of his life was a damn poor time to get involved with a woman.

What he hadn’t counted on was the elegant Miss Johanna Lane having steel in her backbone, for there being an edge to all the softness he’d seen and all the softness he’d visualized. Lawyers were supposed to be tough on paper and tough with words. But Johanna had made fists out of her expensively manicured hands, and he thought there was the chance she might use them.

Somewhere between the gas station and the bathroom, he’d started losing control of the situation. He’d lost completely the moment she recognized him. He needed to turn the tables around and get her back on unstable ground, and as long as she had thoughts about going to the police, he had to restrain her.

He started turning the tables by lowering his gaze from her wide eyes to her breasts. He deliberately stared, watching the slow increase in the rise and fall of her peach silk T-shirt, hoping to unnerve her before she had him on his knees, begging. She had beautiful breasts, and he could still see the lace of her bra. The image left itself open to a lot of wild imaginings.

He lifted his gaze back to her eyes and took a step forward, coiling the belt in his hands, remembering what he was about. Then he lowered his lashes and let his gaze sweep down the length of her body, with lingering moments on the curve of her hips and the juncture of her thighs. Her jeans fit her like a second skin without looking the least bit forced or strained. She was sleek and lovely, utterly female, and he was suddenly willing to risk everything to get closer to her, to feel her heat and hear her sigh.

Forgetting the belt and the job at hand, he took another step, much against the insistent clamorings of his common sense, which was telling him he was the one losing his balance. He couldn’t deny that deep down inside, past the veneer of civilization and anyone’s code of honor, there was a part of him that had saved her life only to make her his.

Johanna took a half step back, the only half step there was to take. The room was growing warmer, the tension rising, and he’d done it all with a glance of his midnight-dark eyes, a long, heated, suggestive glance that had visually traced her body and left her feeling touched.

“I think we should compromise,” she said hurriedly, feeling the bed press against the backs of her knees.

“Compromise?”

“Negotiate.”

“With what?” he asked, his voice a wary mix of confidence and sin-ridden hope.

She wet her dry lips with the tip of her tongue. He still wanted her. None of the attraction they’d felt had been forgotten, and it was all coming back to life under circumstances so wildly inappropriate as to be laughable, if they weren’t so dangerous.

The man had guns—his ever-present shotgun, two or three handguns, and possibly a grenade or two in his duffel bag. She hadn’t gotten a real close look, but she’d seen enough to realize he was a traveling arsenal.

When she had known him before as her boss’s bodyguard, he had been physically attractive, mysteriously sexual, unfailingly polite—except for once—and he had been absolutely prohibited.

Now he was her ex-boss’s enemy, anything but polite, and too damn close for comfort. Unfortunately he was still physically attractive and mysteriously sexual. She knew she needed her head examined, and the look in his eyes told her that he’d be willing to go along with any kind of personal examination she might care to come up with, but her intellectual parts wouldn’t be his first choice for a starting place.

“Money,” she said, more to break the increasingly uncomfortable silence than to make an offer—though she would be eternally grateful if he would take money to let her go. She needed to get away from him. He was half-naked and barefoot and they were alone, and all she could think about was the way he breathed and how his skin had felt when she had touched him. She tried to remember that he was the bad guy, that he had always been the bad guy, but her whole consciousness seemed to revolve around him being just a man and her being just a woman.

Dylan slowly shook his head. “I don’t want your money, Miss Lane.” He wanted her. But just like that other night, he knew he wasn’t going to get her. He wondered what in the hell he’d ever done to deserve wanting this one woman he couldn’t have. He had been far more physically intimate with other women without enduring a tenth of the frustration and longing he felt for Johanna Lane.

He narrowed the distance between them, taking the final step, until he could feel her breath upon his bare skin and watch her eyes darken to a deeper brown shot through with gold and green. He had kidnapped her. By any measure of morality, even his, she was as much forbidden fruit now as she’d been six months ago.

But he wanted a taste. Just one taste.

“Don’t,” she murmured, standing stock-still in front of him, barely daring to breathe, not daring to meet his eyes.

His hand touched her waist and slid to the small of her back, and he felt the quickness of her indrawn breath. He brushed his mouth across the top of her cheek, warming her skin, and waited for her to say no again. She trembled in silence.

He lowered his mouth closer to hers. She turned away, and her voice accused him in ragged, breathless tones.

“Is this what you brought me here for? To . . . to abuse me?”

A pained smile briefly curved his mouth. “Is that what you were thinking every time I caught you checking me out?” he asked, letting a moment pass before he lifted his head. “That I was the kind of guy who would abuse you? Or were you thinking something else, Miss Lane?”

She’d been thinking something else, Johanna thought, and he damn well knew it. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of an answer, though, not now, not in this place. She hardly dared to breathe for fear of increasing their contact or setting him off.

“You’re right,” he said, sounding defeated as he withdrew a few inches. “We’ll both be better off if I never kiss you.” His hands fell to her wrists and pulled them together, snaring them in the coils of his belt.

It took her a moment to realize what he’d done, but with realization came fury. She jerked her hands back, too late to free herself.

“You . . . you
bastard
!” She struggled, fighting the bindings in a losing battle. His greater strength won out with a judicious use of pressure and leverage.

“I’m worse than that, Miss Lane,” he said, calmly slipping the belt back through itself in the final knot.

“
Liar
.”

“Now you’re getting closer to my true nature,” he said, mocking her fury with infuriating composure.

An inarticulate screech of rage lodged in her throat.

* * *

Trussed, Johanna thought. No, she amended. Trussed meant tight and her bindings of belt and tape were quite generous. She could move, she just couldn’t move away. From him.

Hobbled was a better word. Hobbled and humiliated. Humiliation seemed to be his particular talent. He wasn’t bad at hobbling either.

Groaning sleepily, he rolled over to face the wall, and half of her went with him—her left arm and her left leg to be precise. Her right hand was tied to the bedpost

“How in the hell,” she muttered quietly, “am I supposed to get any sleep with you dragging me all over the bed?”

“And how in the hell,” he muttered back, not nearly so quietly, “am I supposed to get any sleep with you talking all night long?”

“Let me go.”

“Shut up.”

“Bastard.”

Dylan groaned in frustration. She was torturing him, deliberately trying to drive him over the edge of sanity. Every time he came close to slipping into the blessed nothingness of sleep, she started talking. She had already given him a rundown of his deplorable legal position as a felon. In her esteemed estimation, nothing short of life imprisonment would atone for his crimes against society, and most particularly for his crimes against her.

She had a thousand little comments tucked inside her smart, pretty head, a thousand little complaints, and he wasn’t going to get any sleep until she’d voiced every one of them—or until he gagged her.

It was a thought, seductive in its simplicity. A washcloth. A strip of sheet. A double overhand knot. Blessed silence.

He groaned again, softer, more painfully. He didn’t have enough strength left to gag her. He’d hit the wall. He hurt again. The respite allowed him by the sandwich and his shower was gone. The last vestiges of his energy had been stripped away.

“My partner, Henry Wayland—”

Dylan snorted a curse into the bedspread. God, how he hated her my-partner-Henry-Wayland.

“—is widely known for his belief in victims’ rights. We’ll demand restitution, and we’ll get it. You can rest assured, Mr. Jones, that your assets are all but gone, all but mine.”

“Mustang,” he mumbled.

“What?”

“My Mustang. That’s all there is and you’re welcome to it.”

He waited for her comeback, but she said nothing.