by Liz Crowe
Skye had followed her to the bathroom where she’d run that day, first to throw up, then to cry. They’d sat a while together, and Sam had finally gathered her wits and said she needed some air. Skye had nodded and said she’d wait with Jax in Wade’s room until she got back.
But of course, she’d not gone back.
She was such a big baby, a loser, an unsupportive wimp. But the concept that she would allow herself to feel as deeply as she wanted to about Wade Roberts—even to love him—only to see him head out to work every single day with the risk of drowning, or burning alive, or being shot by some crazy person, simply would not compute.
She’d buried herself in work the past weeks, managing to increase her personal bottom line, only to find herself staring out into the Dallas skyline all night, every night, managing to doze an hour or two right before it was time to get up and start all over again. It was killing her. It had taken everything she had to go to the station today. His reaction had told her everything she needed to know.
It had been fun for approximately twelve hours. Then the reality proved too much for her, and he had zero patience for that shit. She could hardly blame him.
“Sam, you have a guest in the lobby. Sam Weaver, your guest is in the lobby,” the receptionist intoned over the office intercom.
She leaned forward on her elbows, pondering her computer screen a few more seconds. When she realized she had nothing scheduled with anyone for today, she took a long breath, stood up and plucked her suit jacket off the back of her seat. Nothing like a mystery client to distract her, she supposed.
She pasted a smile on her face and re-fastened her hair back in a ponytail. When Wade’s words about how he wanted her to wear it down all the time, and why, wafted across her brain, she had to stop in the hall for a few seconds to collect herself.
“Shake it off,” she muttered to herself. “Shake it the fuck off.” She stamped her expensively clad foot. A couple of her colleagues gave her a wide berth, hurrying by on their way to their own real estate crises.
“Sam Weaver, your guest is waiting in the lobby,” the receptionist called over the speaker again, sounding a bit strident this time.
With another sigh, she buttoned her jacket over her camisole, squared her shoulders and marched out to the lobby. “Hello there,” she said to the tall man sitting in one of the leather lobby seats. “I’m Sam. How can I help you today?”
The man rose, his smile large and a tiny bit creepy. Sam couldn’t shake the sensation of his eyes raking her up and down. She shook it off at his words. “Hi, Sam. I came to talk with you about listing my house. It’s on Echo Brook Lane. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?”
Sam heard the receptionist suck in a breath behind her. Her own smile widened. “Yes, of course, I have. I sold a lovely home on Royal Springs Drive just a few months ago.”
The man seemed to relax and appear less creepy all of a sudden. “Yes, you’re the best. I follow you on Facebook.”
Sam blinked. The sensation of red flags waving in her head was almost too hard to ignore. But seriously, Echo Brook Lane was in Preston Hollow, the most exclusive neighborhood in Dallas. She’d managed to list a few homes on its periphery and had sold a couple of the bigger homes within its storied perimeter. Both deals had netted her more money than she’d ever thought possible.
The man’s smile expanded. “So, you can come out and see it today, right?”
“Oh, uh, okay. Sure.” She glanced around her as if something might give her a clue as to how to handle this. Her inner realtor was clamoring for her to hop in her car and follow the man to his no-doubt giant mansion. Another part of her—a loud part—was warning her to make an appointment for another day, to do a bit of research and make sure the guy was legit. He was a self-admitted Facebook stalker, after all.
The man raised an eyebrow at her. For some reason, a memory of Wade burst across her consciousness.
Deflect, distract, get busy with work and forget him already.
“Sure, Mister, um . . . sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”
“Call me Matt,” he said. “You can follow me now if you like.”
“Uh, okay, sure. So, um, what’s the house number? I need to tell Lizzy,” she said, indicating the receptionist behind her. When the man’s face seemed to collapse in on itself in unhappiness, she felt that qualm again—the one telling her that even though it was still light, with several more hours of daylight left, she would be a full on idiot to follow this total stranger to his house. Even if it was on one of the streets with the most expensive housing in Dallas. “It’s protocol, Matt.” She emphasized his name, trying to reestablish some kind of a normal connection. “I’m sure you understand. If not, we can make an appointment for another—”
“No, no, it’s fine. I understand. It’s fifty-four hundred Echo Brook Lane.” He glanced at the receptionist, who nodded and wrote it down. “Now, I only have about an hour and really want to get going on this thing. I want your sign in my yard by the end of the week. Can you manage that?”
“Of course,” she said, letting her inner realtor quash her quavering Nervous Nellie. “I’ll follow you there.”
“Great! Super. Awesome.” The man practically gushed. The receptionist met Sam’s gaze. “See you there, Sam.”
“Yeah, okay. Meet you there.”
“Okay, you got the address, right?” she asked the receptionist. “I’m not feeling super confident about this.”
“I’ll make sure Joe knows,” the young woman said, naming the office sales manager. “Go! Jeez, Sam. It’s Preston Hollow.”
“I know, I know. You’re right.” She marched back to her office, grabbed her purse, keys, phone and sunglasses, and got behind the wheel of her Porsche, giving herself a pep talk to quash the heebie-jeebies. As she made her way across town, she kept up the inner mantra of Preston Hollow—Preston Hollow—Preston Hollow.
Her onboard navigation system delivered her not to 5400 Echo Brook Lane, but 5412 Echo Brook Lane. The house was gargantuan. But it still didn’t match the address she’d been given, even though the car Matt had driven away in was parked in its circular drive. She pulled in behind him, then, as per her safety training, she backed around and pointed her SUV nose outward before sending a quick text to the office, changing the house number.
Getting a grip on herself, she got out, tugged at her skirt, and made her way up the flagstone path to the massive double doors. This could easily be her biggest listing ever. And the guy, Matt, had sought her out specifically. He’d shown his face at her office in broad daylight. What crazy person would do that?
She rang the doorbell, smiled at the man when he opened the door and made her way into the freezing cold interior. The door made a loud clunk behind her and sent a shock of fear down her spine that she couldn’t ignore.
“Okay, so Matt, I don’t have but a few minutes, so let’s take a look around, shall we?” She kept her voice light but kept her phone in her hand. “Kitchen first. Please?”
He shrugged. She forced herself to relax. But as a precaution, she sent a specific text message with shaking fingers to the first phone number she pulled up, which turned out to be Skye’s.
911 -- 5412 Echo Brook, which was realtor shorthand for “Warning, I don’t feel safe at this house, send help.” She prayed that Skye would interpret it, or show it to Jax, who would know what it meant.
“Sam, are you coming?” Matt called from the echoing kitchen. She rubbed her sweaty palms against her skirt, then pulled her phone back out of her jacket pocket, as if she could use it as a weapon. The walk down the hall from the cavernous foyer was the longest she’d ever taken. Her heart pounded louder with every step. When she walked into the shocking white space, complete with cold black granite counter tops, skylights and commercial grade appliances, there was no sign of her new client at first.
“Um, Matt?” She peeked around the corner. “Hey, uh, I don’t have a lot of time, so . . .”
The next to last thing she r
emembered was the sight of the ceramic tile floor rising to meet her for some reason. Pain bloomed across her brain, spread down her spine, and made her vision fade from the outside in, until all she knew was the agony and encroaching darkness.
“Wade,” she whispered, as she forced herself to her hands and knees, tears blurring her vision. “Help me,” she said when her fingers found the lower cabinets, and she tried to haul herself up to her feet.
“Sam, you should relax,” Matt’s voice hit her ear. “Really. Let me help you upstairs.”
“Don’t fucking touch me, you creep,” she screamed as she scrambled to her feet just in time to receive the full force of the baseball bat to the side of her head.
Chapter Fourteen
Wade sat clutching a beer, his feet in the pool, trying to be happy about the prospect of a visit from whatever random chick he’d invited over earlier. He leaned back on one elbow, favoring his still slightly sore wrist, relishing the residual heat from the day’s sun on the state-of-the-art concrete surround.
No matter what he did, no matter how many beers he drank, no matter how much he tried like hell to purge the woman, Samantha Weaver would simply not exit his thoughts or, worse, his dreams.
Kind of like right now. He groaned and laid all the way back, one arm over his eyes, willing her gone. But all he could see was her smile. All he could smell was her perfume. And forget about her taste.
“God…damn…it,” he muttered as his dick hardened, like a champ.
Leaving the half empty bottle on the concrete, he lurched up, stripped off the wrist brace, and slipped into the cold water. He sat on the bottom as long as he could stand it then started lapping back and forth until he could barely breathe and his every pore was waterlogged.
After sitting on the wide steps to catch his breath, he hauled himself out, his brain quiet from the rush of endorphins. The sound of the doorbell stopped him in his tracks. As the water dripped off his skin, peppering the concrete beneath him, he waited, listening to it and recalling the day Sam had rang it repeatedly. The day he’d blown her off, not knowing why.
After about five minutes of doorbell-leaning and fist-whamming, the woman whose name he couldn’t even recall gave up. The sound of her car tires squealing on the asphalt and the loud, obnoxious horn blowing all the way down the long drive made him smile. Once he figured it was safe, he headed inside and straight to the shower, grabbing his phone off the kitchen island on his way past.
After taking a cursory glance at the screen out of habit, he froze in the hallway. The words wouldn’t register, no matter how many times he stared at them. When the device buzzed with a call from Jax, he dropped it, still too shocked to move.
“What the fuck is going on?” he barked into it once he’d retrieved it and answered.
“Get over here, Wade. It’s Sam. We’ve got half a dozen cops, and they called out the hostage negotiators. He’s…” Jax hesitated. “He sent pictures of her using her phone to Skye. You need to fucking get here now.”
Without a response, he ran full tilt into his closet, threw on jeans and a T-shirt and leapt into his truck, his heart in his throat. It took him almost forty minutes of jaw grinding traffic to get to the mansion in Preston Hollow. He found it surrounded by cops, a crew of his own, plus the smaller of the fire trucks.
Head spinning, he ran up to a clump of blue uniforms. “Who the hell are you?” one of the cops asked him. “This is for official—”
“I’m official. I’m also the victim’s…ah, her boyfriend.” The word sounded natural enough. And he wanted some answers. He flashed his badge, relieved to see Jax run up in his full gear.
“Fill us in, Nick,” his friend demanded of one of the cops. “What can we do?”
“Well,” Nick said, eyeing Wade doubtfully.
At that moment, a phone rang. A guy in a coat and tie held up a hand for silence, then answered it. Wade watched and listened, stunned at the bizarre reality of this situation. Without even thinking, he reached across the scrum of uniforms and yanked the phone out of the guy’s hand and started walking straight to the front door, still holding it.
“Wade!” He heard Jax hollering for him, but he didn’t give a shit.
The other cops were trying to intercept him, but he either stiff-armed them or ducked out of their way, the phone clutched in his hand. He had one focus. The over-the-top double front doors, behind which some psychotic asshole had his woman held hostage. Despite all the hubbub behind him, he kept moving forward until he hit the door and slammed it back against the inner wall. It made a satisfying crash.
Once he was in the ice-cold hallway, he realized he may very well have endangered Sam even further. “Sam!” he bellowed, wincing when the house echoed the name back at him. “Sam, where are you?”
Silence met his ears. With a curse, he put the phone to his ear. “Tell me where you’re keeping her, you sick fuck, and prepare for me to rip your spine out through your asshole.”
But the line had gone dead.
He gripped the thing tight and tried to take in everything he could, listening for any clue. He stomped into the kitchen, dropping to his knees at the sight of a pool of blood by the island. With a shudder, he picked up her phone, lying half in, half out of the blood. Fury roared through his psyche. He turned at the sound of a footstep and came face to face with Sam’s bloodied face.
“Don’t move,” a man’s voice hit his ears.
Wade swallowed hard, using all the control he possessed not to lunge forward and drag her away from the guy. Everything in him rebelled at the sight of her, of his Sam, his woman, gagged with something, her nose obviously broken, tears streaming down her messed-up face. She still had on her blouse and skirt and high heels, he noted, trying to keep it clinical while his inner alpha male roared and rattled its cage. He took a deep breath, forcing himself to remain calm and not make this worse than he already had.
The creep behind her produced a handgun which he pointed at her temple.
“I’ve been watching and waiting for this for months,” the guy said, staring at Wade as he put his face near Sam’s, making her shiver and close her eyes. “And now, I have an audience. How lovely.”
“Listen, dude, just calm down, all right? Put the gun away. We can talk—”
“No,” the guy burst out, his face splitting in an ugly grimace as he shoved Sam into the wall face first. Her scream of terror ripped through his brain, forcing him forward without a second thought to his own safety.
He grabbed the guy by both shoulders and hauled him backward, slamming him against the stainless steel fridge. With a noise even he didn’t recognize, Wade kicked the gun out of his hand, likely shattering his tibia if the asshole’s screech of pain was any indication. When the weasel tried to duck aside, Wade snatched his scrawny neck and pressed him back, squeezing, enjoying the way the man’s eyes popped as he scrabbled at Wade’s huge hand.
“You have no fucking idea who you are messing with,” he growled, putting his face close and keeping up his hand’s steady pressure.
Someone tried to pull him back, but Wade was bigger and stronger than almost every man he knew, and he was on a mission now. “Wade!” someone bellowed in his ear even as four sets of hands pulled him back, forcing him to release Sam’s attacker. The guy slumped to the floor, spluttering and coughing.
Wade wrenched himself away from the hands holding him back, lifted the guy up by his sweaty shirt collar and started pounding with his other fist. Blind and deaf to anything but the recent memory of Sam’s bloodied, teary face, and the way this asshole had manhandled her. Had held a fucking gun to her face.
“You. Are. Going. To. Die. Today,” he said through clenched teeth as he pounded in time with his words, relishing the crunch of bone and sinew under his knuckles.
“Wade, God damn it, stand down now,” a loud voice broke through his concentration. Jax forced himself between Wade and the man who had hurt his woman, shoving back so hard Wade had to let go of the other guy’
s bloody shirt. “Go over there,” Jax said, staring into Wade’s face. “Go to Sam. The cops have this covered.”
Shaking, Wade turned slowly, clenching and unclenching his bloody fists and watched as Cal and two others of his own paramedics tended to Sam. She was hysterical, her chest hitching up and down and preventing them from getting any decent vitals. He froze, terrified by the strength of his own fear at that moment.
“Go to her,” Jax said, shoving him forward. “Calm her down.”
Wade stared at his friend, his pulse racing. “I…can’t.”
“The fuck you can’t. Go.”
One last hard shove sent him stumbling across the kitchen. He dropped to his knees and held up a hand to keep Cal and the others from trying to do anything more, studying her with as objective an eye as he could manage.
Her busted up nose looked even worse up close. He tried not to see all the other things wrong with her, but his medical training wouldn’t allow it. He saw it all, more or less all at once—the angry ligature marks on her wrists, the darkening red line around her throat, her broken fingernails, her hair hanging in clumps, some with scalp still attached. His hands hovered over her a few seconds until she opened her eyes and met his gaze.
Fresh tears poured down her cheeks. “Wade,” she whispered. “Wade... I’m, I’m sorry. I was s-s-s-stupid.” She sucked in a long breath, which seemed to be painful. “He…hurt me.”
Every small hesitation he’d experienced flew right out the window. He took her hand and put it to his lips as she erupted in a fresh bout of sobbing. But as he nodded for Cal to resume getting Sam’s vitals, her hand slipped out of his and her head slumped to the side.
He shoved the man aside and put his bloodied fingers to Sam’s neck. “Her pulse is thready. She’s going into shock. Get blankets.” He glanced up at the faces around him. “Did I stutter? Get a line in and start valium.” He sat on his butt, gripping Sam’s hand and brushing her hair from her battered face while his crew did their jobs, stabilized her and got her ready for transport.