Avenging Angel

by Janzen, Tara

  “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.

  He had his coveted silence, thank God. All he’d had to do was give her his car.

  He consciously relaxed his shoulders and let out a long, deep breath. Lacy dark tendrils of sleep began a slow spiral inside his head, beckoning him, promising him blessed oblivion. He drifted in their wake, floating ever downward, descending further and further into the welcoming abyss of—

  “I can’t believe that with what Austin was paying you, all you’ve managed to accumulate in assets is a car.”

  The tendrils of sleep fled before her snide, judgmental voice. His body instantly tensed to its more familiar alertness.

  “It’s a Shelby, a classic,” he finally said.

  “Oh.”

  The silence came again, but he didn’t trust it. He didn’t trust her. She was lying in wait for him—much as he’d lain in wait for her in her apartment hallway.

  His first pang of guilt hit him. That was the trouble with his line of work: It was damn hard to do someone a favor and be nice about it. The stakes were always too high.

  In lieu of the apology he wasn’t willing to give, he swore silently to himself and prayed she was done for the night. His chest was burning, his head ached, his body hurt, and his eyes were gritty with the need for sleep. He couldn’t take much more.

  Seven

  Johanna blinked sleepily at the light seeping in at the top of the drapes. She felt languorously alive and smiled, stretching her body into the unaccustomed pleasure of waking. Most mornings felt plain and predictable, but not this morning. A delicious, heavy thrill tingled through her; an inexplicable excitement filled the air. She yawned and stretched her arms—and found the limits of her tethers.

  The night came back to her in a flash, and her eyes flew open to find Dylan Jones draped across her body. Her languor disappeared in a wave of anger and self-reproach. Where was her fortitude? Where were her survival instincts? And what in the hell did he think he was getting away with this time?

  She wasn’t supposed to have fallen asleep. She’d assured herself it would be impossible given the circumstances. But sleep she had, and well, if the enemy’s incursions were any indication. His leg was lying casually and comfortably over her left calf and thigh with her knee cupped in the back of his. His pelvis was snug against her hip, and his hand was snug between her legs—quite snug. She could only imagine what kind of lewd mind it took to direct a sleeping man’s subconscious to fondle a woman in her most private places.

  Given half a chance, she would have shot him for all the horror and humiliation he’d put her through, and now this final, excruciating embarrassment of being groped in her sleep. But her one hand was still tied to the bedpost and her other was pinned with his against his rock-hard abdomen, alternately touching and not touching him as his muscles moved gently with his breath.

  His breath . . . dear Lord. His breath played teasingly across the sensitive skin at her nape where he’d buried his head in the crook of her shoulder. He was all over her, pressed on top of her, touching her where he’d only dared to look before. She had to get away from him before anything else awful happened.

  She cringed at the memory of the previous night and grew even angrier with herself. How in the world had she ever let herself fall asleep? And how in the world was she going to get away from him?

  He had the guns, and that damn roll of tape he was always so eager to tie her up with. Her gaze inadvertently slid over the broad shoulder resting below her chin and followed the curved lines of muscle down his arm. He was strong, she admitted, but she was smart—smart enough to elude Austin without Dylan Jones’s dubious help. She could lay low, follow the newspapers, wait for Austin to get arrested.

  She could wait forever for Austin to get arrested, she thought in dismay. There lay the truth of the matter. She had done a good job for Austin Bridgeman, maybe too good.

  Dylan groaned softly and shifted in his sleep, and she felt the slow contraction and relaxation of each of his muscles like a heat wave caressing the length of her body. Her throat went dry, and she tried to remain perfectly still, perfectly blasé, while her senses ran amok.

  She was in trouble, the kind of trouble she was famous for avoiding. Johanna Lane did not go around getting herself entangled with men, any kind of men, either emotionally or physically. She had never bought in to her older sister’s theory of “It’s a man’s world, so get a man and get ahead,” a theory her mother had raised to a high philosophy of woman as wife, mother, helpmate, hostess, and slave to an autocratic if benign potentate, namely Johanna’s father, the most renowned trial lawyer in the state of Illinois.

  Johanna was different. Johanna was smart. Johanna was going to be like good old Dad. But Lord; if good old Dad could see her now.

  Her gaze traced the prominent veins running down the inside of Dylan’s forearm to where his large, square hand rested so intimately on her. A small distressed sound escaped her. She fought the urge to rudely awaken him. Given his current position, it could do her no good, and she’d rather be spared the embarrassment of him knowing how close he’d gotten to her in the night. She didn’t want to waken him only to find herself gazing into his midnight-dark eyes from mere inches away. Her position was compromised enough as it was without having to endure either his cold disdain or—even worse—his hot regard.

  Damn him. He was captor and savior. The man lived too much on the edge with no middle ground. There was no place to be comfortable with him.

  As well there shouldn’t be! her offended sensibilities chorused. He’d kidnapped her at gunpoint and saved her life . . . and tied her up again. Another groan escaped her. Lord, she wished he would move his hand and stop breathing in her ear.

  A hushed, whispery sound drew her attention to the window again. The mattress was sliding down the window, pushing the chair before it, and allowing sunlight into the room.

  That’s what had awakened her, she realized. The room had been pitch-dark when Dylan had turned off the lights to sleep. Now she could see, and what she saw gave her a glimmer of hope—her first. Having him s
o close on her side of the bed might be the stroke of luck she needed. If he’d had her pulled over to his side, she never would have seen where he’d hidden the phone, let alone been able to reach it.

  Using the slack he’d left in her bindings, she worked her right hand down to the phone cord snaking under the bed. The phone made a lot of rattling noise as she pulled it out onto the carpet, and she was sure he was going to wake up at any second. As nerve-racking as the thought was, she kept pulling the cord. He would either wake up or he wouldn’t, she told herself. If he did, he would be angry. But he’d been angry with her before and she’d survived. According to him, that was the entire raison d’être for her abduction—her survival. He didn’t want Austin to kill her.

  Well, neither did she. At least they had that much in common.

  The phone came into view on the floor. She scooted closer to the edge of the bed, stopping only when he groaned in her ear. Her heart missed a beat in the ensuing surge of panic, then started back up at an accelerated rate.

  Holding her breath and stretching her fingers to their limits, she managed to knock the receiver off its cradle. It thudded to the floor. She slanted Dylan a look out of the corner of her eye and then, ever so carefully, leaned over the side of the bed and punched in Henry’s office phone number.

  It would have been quicker and easier to dial 911, but a lawyer in crisis wanted nothing so much as another lawyer, and despite his deplorable methods, Johanna believed Dylan. Austin having police connections that could infiltrate and retrieve information even from so lonely an outpost as Laramie, Wyoming, was no more unbelievable than what she’d been reading in the newspaper. Influence peddling, extortion, assassination. Nothing seemed beyond her ex-employer—except Henry Wayland’s integrity. Henry was a man a woman could trust, unlike Dylan Jones, who could only be trusted as far as it suited him.

  She finished punching in the phone number and managed to get a grip on the receiver. Privacy for her conversation was out of the question, and given the silence in the motel room, she didn’t know which would be most likely to lull her captor in continued sleep—a whisper or a quiet, normal tone of voice.