Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 70574 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70574 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
“Hey, guys,” I said when they stopped moving. Of course, they were only about two feet away at that point. “What’s up?” I knew some tricks and most men underestimated me because of my smaller stature. Having said that, there were still four of them.
“They said you had a smart mouth on you,” the man leading the pack said. “Sounds to me like you’re just too dumb to keep your mouth shut to prevent smart ass words coming from it.”
I shook my head, wanting to tell him what he’d just said didn’t make a fuck’s worth of sense, but figured that wouldn’t win me any brownie points, so I tried for a different angle. “Who’s they?”
“Doesn’t matter,” he answered. “Here’s how this is going to happen, little man. There’s an easy way and a hard way for you to spend the next three minutes of your life. You can either walk out of this alley with us, acting all obedient and quiet, or we can do what it takes to make you quiet…maybe permanently.” He grinned. “What’s it going to be?”
This guy wasn’t going to be a problem—he was all talk and those assholes usually didn’t have the ability to back their shit up. The one to his right looked like there was nothing going on between his two ear holes, so some quick moves would confuse him enough to give me the chance to take him out. The other two? They were going to be a problem. I’d been in enough company training to recognize when a man knew how to fight. Those two knew what they were doing. “Not to be a smart ass about anything, but I seriously doubt you’re here to shut me up, uh, permanently,” I countered. “If you wanted me dead, I’d already be dead, and you’d be long gone from here. That means whoever sent you must want me alive.”
He frowned and snorted at me in disgust. “So? What’s it matter, anyway? You’re coming with us. End of story.”
“It matters because it tells me to make as much noise as possible because you aren’t going to do a damn thing about it. You need me alive and kicking,” I answered. But, before finishing the last of the sentence, I charged the man in front. A kick to his knee followed by a fist to his throat dropped him like a sack of potatoes. After that, everything turned into a blur of fists, kicks, and, of course, me screaming at the top of my lungs. Drawing attention was a good thing, I kept telling myself.
The second man, like I’d expected, didn’t have the finesse required to counter any of the moves I’d spent the biggest portion of my life learning, and he tumbled almost as quickly as the first one. The last two…well, they were a different story. Smarter than the others, they recognized that teaming up might be in their best interest. Not to brag, because I was seriously not in a position to brag about anything, but I put up a really good fight—landed some excellent punches and marked men that were nearly twice my size with some damn good bruises. Other than that, it didn’t take too many seconds to realize I was fucked. Escaping these two was above my pay grade.
Shit; losing me was going to hurt my father really bad.
As a particularly harsh punch to the kidney caused me to drop to my knees, I couldn’t help but wonder if my sudden disappearance would affect Eli at all?
Probably just piss him off because he wasn’t going to be able to seek his revenge against me for my big fat lie.
“Would you look at that? He’s sassy and scrappy,” one of the men remarked. “He’s going to fucking pay for that.”
The fucker tried to disguise his heavy breathing to act like battling with me hadn’t had any affect on him, but it wasn’t something he could hide. From my spot on the disgustingly sticky pavement, I noticed the other man was bent over, hands resting on his knees and struggling for deep, even breaths. It pissed me off that my father, Eli, or the rest of the team probably wouldn’t ever know how valiantly I’d fought them.
“You boys just made the biggest mistake of your lives,” a low, husky voice interrupted. “And you’re going to fucking pay for that.”
Oh, that beautifully familiar voice—the voice I’d spent many nights replaying in my memory as I jacked off to images of him. Eli. I looked up to see him speak into his smart-watch. “Back alley. Now.”
“Who the fuck is—”
The man who’d knocked me flat with the punch to the kidney started to say, but he never had the chance to finish. If I’d thought for one minute that I’d put up a noteworthy defense against the two burly men, it was nothing compared to how quickly Eli rendered the two of them helpless. Even after they were down and completely unconscious, he added a couple of well-placed kicks to their most vulnerable spots.