Total pages in book: 113
Estimated words: 105825 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 529(@200wpm)___ 423(@250wpm)___ 353(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 105825 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 529(@200wpm)___ 423(@250wpm)___ 353(@300wpm)
I shook my head, panting with fear. I knew it wouldn’t hold them for long but we had to buy time until the police got there. I got Cody’s seatbelt off and pulled him along the seat, switching places so I was between him and the men. His body was stiff with fear and his eyes were unfocused. I took his face between my hands. “Hey! Hey, look at me.”
He slowly focused on me.
“We’re going to get through this,” I told him. “You and me, okay?” Panic was choking me but I tried to make my voice strong. “You and me.”
It’s a thing we have, ever since his father left. You and me against the world. Cody nodded shakily.
I turned to look at the gunman. He raised his gun and leveled it at my head.
My throat closed up. I couldn’t breathe. I’d never even seen a gun up close before.
The muzzle swung down for a second, gesturing at the door handle. Then it swung back up to my face, that dark circle sucking all the heat from my body.
I glanced towards the central locking button, debating. Then I heard my dad’s voice in my head, his Scottish accent rich and warm. If they wanted you dead, he reasoned, they’d have shot you already.
I shook my head at the gunman again.
I saw his eyes narrow. Then the butt of his gun smashed the window, showering us with scratchy nuggets of safety glass. He reached in and unlocked the door, then swung it wide. Sunlight and heat blasted us.
One of the men was holding cloth bags, to go over our heads. Oh God, this was a kidnapping. Three bags: my dad, me, and—
I looked over my shoulder at Cody. No. No! As the gunman reached for me, I grabbed hold of the grab handle above the window and wedged my feet under the seats, making myself a human wall between him and my child. “No!” I screamed. “NO!”
But two of the men grabbed my wrists and ankles and hauled me, kicking and screaming, out into the street. One of them held me pressed up against the SUV as the other reached in to get Cody. A third man stepped forward, lifting one of the bags to put it on me—
A bottle smashed over his head and he crumpled to the ground. Behind him was the man who’d hit him: I got a glimpse of blue jeans, a white shirt, and a cream Stetson.
My rescuer grabbed the guy who was trying to take Cody and rammed his head into the car’s door frame. As he fell, unconscious, the man plucked the handgun from his waistband, turned, and shot the man holding me.
All three of the gunmen were down and the whole thing had taken no more than five seconds. I stood there hyperventilating, the world going blurry. Then I focused on the boots of the man who’d saved me. They were scratched and worn, boots that had been to the four corners of the earth. And there was something about the way he stood. You know how nervous people shift their weight from foot to foot and can’t stand still? This was the exact opposite of that. He stood like a statue built from granite and lead.
My breathing slowed and I lifted my eyes. Blue denim, faded from the sun, the soft fabric stretched tight over muscled thighs. Then a thick leather belt with a silver buckle as big as my fist. The breeze was flattening his white shirt against his body like a lover’s hands, showing off flat, hard abs, wide, curving pecs, and shoulders that looked like they could carry the weight of the world.
I was looking straight ahead, now, but I was only up to his chin: the guy was big. I tilted my head back…
I’m thirty-seven and he was a little older, forty or so, with just a little silver dusting his black hair at the sides. And he was absolutely gorgeous in a way that jolted me right to the core.
There was something hard about his face, in his rugged jaw and thick black stubble, as if he’d been shaped someplace tough and unforgiving. But there was a softness there, too: he had tiny crinkles in the corners of his eyes like he smiled a lot, and he had the sexiest mouth I’d ever seen, with a gorgeously full lower lip.
I felt my breathing slow to almost normal. I was still terrified but there was something about this man that calmed my panic. He exuded authority: it was in the way he scowled disapprovingly at the men on the ground, in the way he stood, so strong and calm and still.
In the midst of chaos, the law had arrived.
He looked at me and I caught my breath. His eyes were as piercingly pale blue as a prairie sky on a cold, clear day, eyes you couldn’t lie to and that couldn’t lie to you. They were more than beautiful, they were soulful: eyes that had soaked up a lifetime of experience.