To Trust a Stranger

by Karen Robards

  Sandra’s cell phone snapped shut with a tiny sound that spoke of pure disgust. The man started walking away from them toward the corner of the house as if he might be headed for the barn. Carly stuck the flashlight in the front pocket of her jeans and tightened her grip on Hugo, who growled in protest. Poor cat, he hadn’t liked the trip, he hadn’t liked the rain, and he never liked being held against his will. He was going to like what was coming next less than all of it put together. In preparation, the fingers of her left hand locked around his front legs like kitty handcuffs, and her right forearm, on which his squirmy twenty-pound bulk rested, clamped him like a hotly contested football against her side.

  Ready now, Carly glanced at Sandra. “I don’t know about you, but I vote we get while the getting’s good.”

  “I hear you.”

  Before they could execute the required about-face, a totally unexpected sound shattered the peace of the night. Loud as a siren, it seemed to go off right in their faces; both women jumped about three feet in the air. Under the circumstances, the shrilling tones were a little less welcome than a cloud of angry yellowjackets. Appalled, Carly realized even as her feet touched down again that the noise seemed to be coming from Sandra. Or, to be more precise, from Sandra’s phone.

  “Shut it up! Turn it off!” Carly instinctively grabbed for the electronic traitor even as Sandra, staring down at the shrieking thing in her hand with as much horror as if it had suddenly morphed into a writhing snake, flipped it open and started punching buttons in a frantic effort to comply. Carly’s grab dislodged the phone. It somersaulted through the air to land smack at her own feet. From its new location it emitted another of its hideous bleats. Then another. And another. Frozen to the spot, she was too rattled to do anything except stare at it with dropped jaw and saucer eyes.

  “Who’s there?” The challenge, issued in a raised voice, held a menacing note, and it snapped Carly’s appalled gaze up again. The man was no longer walking away. Though the darkness obscured much about his appearance, it was clear that he had turned around. In fact, though she and Sandra were now at least a quarter of the way back down the slope and partially concealed by soggy foliage, he seemed to be looking in their direction—damn that stupid phone, anyway!—and the hand holding the gun was definitely in motion. It was rising. More to the point, the gun was rising with it—and pointing their way.

  Carly’s stomach dropped like a broken elevator.

  “Shit,” Sandra said, summing up the situation perfectly. As one, the two of them pivoted and bolted for the U-Haul.

  “Hold it right there!”

  The command slowed neither Carly nor Sandra by so much as a whisker. Heart pumping a mile a minute, hanging on to a now-struggling Hugo for all she was worth, Carly ran for her life. Sandra, arms and legs moving like pistons, her black leggings and oversized black T-shirt making her little more than a rapidly vanishing blur as she tore down the hill, shot past her, opening a commanding lead.

  Who knew? Carly lost focus long enough to marvel that normally indolent Sandra had it in her to move that fast. Then she thrust the thought aside, and put heart and soul into saving herself and her ungrateful cat. In other words, she tightened her death grip on writhing, clawing Hugo, put her head down, and ran.

  Was he coming after them? Even as she ducked low-hanging branches and slithered on slimy moss, the prospect sent icy prickles down Carly’s spine. Worse, was he staying put, but taking careful aim as a prelude to shooting one of them in the back? Which, given the way her life had been going lately, would be her, of course. Thanks to Sandra’s unexpected burst of speed, she was closer to the prospective shooter, and in her jeans and yellow T-shirt undoubtedly a far more visible target. Carly cringed as she tried not to imagine what it would feel like to have her spine drilled by a bullet.

  “You there! Stop!”

  Not in this life. Gasping for breath, Carly ran faster. Her heart pounded as if it was determined to beat its way out of her chest. Blood thundered in her ears. The shout had sounded closer—hadn’t it? Where was he? Were those his footsteps she heard thudding behind her now that the damned tell-tale phone had finally stopped ringing? Or was it her own pulse pounding?

  Unable to resist a lightning glance back, which showed her exactly nothing except a whole lot of night, she stumbled over a root. She’d felt the flashlight being jarred looser and looser with every step; now it fell, hitting the ground beside her feet. It rolled, she stepped on it, and suddenly she was about as stable as a hog on ice. Hugo, taking despicable advantage of the situation, chose that moment to push off against her side with a powerful thrust of his hind legs. Thrown even more off balance, she snatched after him and came up empty. Plumy white tail waving triumphantly, he shot away from her.

  “Hu—oomph!”

  Windmilling, calling after Hugo, she never even heard it coming: Something hit her from behind with the force of a speeding truck. Slamming nose-first into the soggy ground at the foot of a stand of dripping live oaks, she realized that she had been tackled.

  By the man with the gun. His arms locked around her hips, his head thudded like a dropped bowling ball into the curve of her back, and the crushing weight of his torso pinned her legs to the ground.

  Carly screamed. Well, squeaked was more like it, because right at that moment she couldn’t draw enough breath into her flattened lungs for an honest-to-God scream. Her flight-or-fight instinct, now that flight had been so rudely interrupted, switched to fight in an instant. Fueled by adrenaline, she twisted violently onto her back and in the process almost succeeded in dislodging him. Almost was the operative word, though, and it wasn’t enough. A hard-breathing, featureless shadow in the dark beneath the trees, he grabbed her again before she could wriggle away. Locking one hand in her waistband, he gave an almighty yank. Thank God the metal button held; snug to begin with—she had never thought she’d live to be grateful for having gained seven pounds from the stress of the divorce—the jeans didn’t budge. But she did. Her whole body slid several inches in the wrong direction, and suddenly his head was at the approximate level of her crotch. She was excruciatingly aware of his hand, warm and rough as it slid across the silky bare skin of her stomach. A wave of horror hit her: It didn’t take a genius to figure out what he had in mind.

  “No, no, no!” Carly went into a frenzy, beating at his head and shoulders with her fists, ramming her knees into his chest, digging her heels into the rain-softened earth. She had borne much over the last few months, but she couldn’t bear this. She had to get away, had to get away, had to get away. . . .

  “Let me go! You let me go! Help! Sandra! Somebody!”

  The volume of her gasping cries would have shamed a cornered mouse, she realized with despair. He said something, the tone of it harsh and guttural, but she was beyond making sense of mere words. Her heart pounded so hard that it could have been playing drummer for Ozzy Osbourne. Her throat was dry as cat kibble. Terror tasted like aluminum foil in her mouth. She was facing rape, death, probably both together, and she didn’t know why she was even surprised. Her life had been in the toilet for at least the last two years, and every time she thought things couldn’t get worse it took a header into an even deeper, smellier part of the pit. But this—this was crossing the line. It was too much. It was the proverbial straw that broke the poor, pathetic, long-suffering camel’s back. God or fate or whoever was running the circus up there was hereby put on notice: Carly Linton was mad as hell, and she wasn’t going to take it anymore.

  Summoning her last reserves of strength and determination, she channeled her inner Mike Tyson and contorted like a pretzel as she went for his ear with her teeth. He dodged in the nick of time, and what she got for her efforts was a head-butt to the nose. Falling back, eyes watering with pain, she changed channels but continued to fight. The slippery wetness of the ground beneath them helped her, hindered him. Wriggling like a worm on a hook, kicking at him, finally using the fortuitous contact of her foot against his shoulder as impet
us, she managed to get free, and swarmed backward in a frantic belly-up crawl. He surged after her, grabbing her around the knees. At this recapture she screamed like a steam whistle—thank God her lungs were functioning at full capacity again!—and yanked one leg free, kicking him as hard as she could in the head.

  “Son of a bitch,” he roared, rearing up with a shake of his head. Before she could react, he lunged forward again and dropped on top of her, flattening her beneath him. The breath went out of her with the force of a blown tire. Sprawled and winded, she bucked feebly in an effort to throw him off. Fully atop her now, he was too heavy to budge. Her right hand was pinned between their bodies: useless. Even as she tried to yank it free, she abandoned Iron Mike in favor of Catwoman and went for his eyes with her free hand. She was not going to go gentle into that good night—or whatever else this thug had in mind for her.

  “Scratch me, and I’ll make you sorry you were ever born,” he snarled, locking a hand around her wrist in mid-air and bringing it into forceful contact with the wet ground, where he held it pinned. She was all but immobile now, but still she refused to give up. With the thumb and forefinger of her trapped hand she managed to get in a vicious pinch to the meaty part of his chest. He yelped and delved between them for her other hand. Resisting, she bucked and screamed again, right in his face.

  Their battle had taken them out of the oaks’ shadow into the open. The moonlight fell on his face, and as he grimaced at her shrill screaming she got her first good look at him. Her eyes widened, her jaw dropped, and just like that the fight went out of her. Lying sprawled beneath her attacker’s approximately two-hundred-pound weight, she felt oddly boneless, and realized that this was what it meant to be limp with relief.

  “Matt Converse, what do you think you’re doing?” she demanded furiously.

  He froze. His eyes met hers, and his brows snapped together.

  “Carly?” He sounded doubtful.

  “Yes, Carly.” There was bite to her voice. Even as she sucked in a much-needed breath, memories of the last time she’d lain beneath him like this rushed back at her, about as welcome as a rubber check.

  “Jesus, you’ve got boobs.”

  His hand, with hers flattened beneath it, rested partly on top of her right one. She could feel his fingers flexing, gauging the curve of her breast. She yanked her hand free—and he copped a feel. Last time his hand had been wrapped around her breast she’d barely filled an A cup. Now she was a lush and lovely C, thanks to years of exercises and creams and good living and—all right, about five thousand dollars’ worth of implants. Not that she meant to tell him that.

  “Yeah, well, boobs happen.” She glowered at him. Lucky for him his hand had slid on out from between them or she would have slapped him into next week. She owed him a slap. Had owed him for twelve years. She was practically itching to pay up.

  “And you’re blond.” He was sounding mildly stupefied. His gaze was on her shoulder-length, stick straight, stylishly choppy platinum blond hair. Its natural state was a wildly curly mouse brown, as he well knew.

  “Blond happens too. Want to get off me now? At least, I’m assuming the rape’s off, since it turns out we know each other.”

  “Rape?” He snorted. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Is that what you thought?”

  “You know, I don’t know why, but when some guy tackles me in the dark and starts feeling me up, rape tends to be one of the possibilities that enters my mind.”

  Her words dripped sarcasm. His mouth quirked into the slightest of smiles.

  “Curls, is that really you?” Seemingly in no hurry to move, he propped himself up on his elbows as the nickname he’d bestowed on her years before took her back to places she didn’t want to go. With his dead weight still pinning her to the ground, he did a quick visual inventory of each feature. It galled her to realize that any claim to beauty she might under better circumstances have possessed had been done in by an unfortunate combination of the weather, the lateness of the hour, the marathon drive she had just endured, and her lingering depression over the implosion of her entire, carefully constructed life. Since she’d been driving, she’d washed her face with plain old liquid restroom soap and water at the last pit stop in an effort to keep awake, which meant she had no defenses left. What he was seeing was her face just as he no doubt remembered it: the same unadorned blue eyes, the same freckled and sure-to-be-shiny nose, the same too-wide, bare-except-for-Chap-Stick mouth. Her face, without blush to shape it, was still more round than oval, her neglected eyebrows were once again well on their way to reverting to uni-brow mode, and, in a complete antithesis of the woman she’d become over the last dozen years, not even a trace of tinted moisturizer remained on her to stand between him and the unvarnished truth. This circumstance did not make her feel any more kindly toward him; in fact, it increased the vitriol factor about a hundred-fold. As their eyes met again, she scowled. In response, his smile widened into a full-fledged grin.

  “Baby, you’ve changed. And not just with the boobs and the hair. Way back when, you used to be sweet.”

  The teasing infuriated her all over again. If he had forgotten the most recent chapter in the history of their acquaintance, she had not.

  “Way back when I used to be a lot of things—like stupid. Very, very stupid. Now get off . . .”

  She never finished. A copper-bottomed saucepan interrupted her as it came swooping out of the darkness like a navigation-impaired bat to crash with a sickening thunk into the back of his head.

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