Taming the Rancher: Mail Order Bride (Brides and Twins Book 2)

by Natalie Dean

  Her world became violent. All she saw was flashes of black and white as they beat her senseless. Someone got smart and wrestled away her gun, but she drew the other one from her thigh holster and shot someone in the chest. Screaming and yelling ensued. Someone clocked her in the rib and the pain almost knocked her out, but she brought up a leg, hoping to hit someone. She got one of them in the crotch, and he started swearing.

  She caught just the briefest glimpse of The Celtic before he emerged from the bushes towards her. He wanted to help, but he was unarmed and had already been shot several times. He might be able to take one or two of them, but after that? The gig was up. She shot him a warning, and hesitantly, he backed deeper into the cover.

  As they pounded her, she realized that she had been stupidly heroic. She was totally and utterly screwed. Those men were going to kill her. She could take one of them no problem. Two? Less likely. Three? Probably not. Four? No way, Jose. She’d given up her only option of life by telling The Celtic to bail on her and therefore saving his life.

  Was she fond enough of him to do that?

  To doom herself to let him have a chance?

  Well then.

  It didn’t even hurt anymore. They weren’t professional fighters like The Celtic. That much she could tell from fighting them—they left themselves exposed and took too many risks. But every time she hit them, three of them popped her. Finally, she was hitting slower and her vision was blurred. Her whole body just felt numb.

  And then her world went black, right there on the pavement in the middle of nowhere. She was vaguely aware of someone picking her up.

  Chapter 6

  In the movies, the hero always wakes up in some abandoned factory tied to a wooden chair. Adrianna always thought it was idiotic. Nobody would really do that!

  Well, as it turned out, that’s exactly what The Owl did.

  When she woke up, she immediately wanted to go back to being unconscious. Her broken rib was the least she had to worry about. A solid half of her body was covered in bruises, and the other half was still developing them. She found herself, cliché as it was, sitting on an old chair with zip-ties tying her legs to the ancient wood. Except for the fact that her hands and feet were tied up, she was otherwise untethered. It wasn’t like she could do much. She could stand, but her legs were still strapped to the chair. If she tried to make a getaway, she’d fall flat on her face.

  She moaned. She felt like puking. “Son-of-a,” she muttered, tasting blood on her tongue. “Ow.”

  She looked up at her captors. She recognized the two of them as the ones that had beat her up, and she saw two others patrolling the second floor of the empty building.

  And the biker was in front of her. Even though he wasn’t wearing his helmet, she recognized him immediately from his build and the odd way he stood.

  “Let me guess,” she said. “The Owl?”

  His lips turned up in an ugly grimace of a smile. “Wrong, but good try.” He walked towards her. His boots slapped against the ground loudly. He stroked her jawline with his rough hand. “The Owl doesn’t like to bother with the dirty work, so he sends me.”

  “So, why am I still alive?” she asked. “I mean, I figure with the whole threatening vibe you’re trying to give off here that I would already be, you know, dead.”

  She was acting tough, but it was her worst nightmare. It was any FBI agent’s worst nightmare—to be captured and helpless, with no chance of help coming anytime soon. If she’d been able to contact someone to let them know that she was captured, someone might get there in time. As it was, Agent Stone wouldn’t care at all. He would just not check on her and be slightly upset when it showed up that she had been killed in action.

  “Because we want to know where the Celtic is,” he said. “And we’ll find out, Agent Whetmore, the easy way or the hard way.”

  “Let’s take… none of the above.”

  He bared his fangs with a sadistic, wicked grin. “I was hoping you would say that, my dear.”

  The next hour was hell.

  They weren’t willing to kill her yet, but she learned to push the limits of what she thought she could endure. She refused to break. They’d kill her either way. It wasn’t like if she sang, they’d let her go—not to mention that she had no idea where on earth The Celtic had gone. For all she knew, he’d died from his gunshot wounds way out in the middle of nowhere.

  They tossed her back into an abandoned part of the room hours later. The room was in the far part of the compound, past a couple flights of stairs and a hallway. It was a pretty standard room. Maybe the previous company had used it to stack products in or something, but it served as her jail cell. She curled up in the back of the room and stared at the door. She couldn’t see out. She’d already tried.

  She started snooping around the room for ways to escape. It wasn’t likely that they’d leave something out for her to use to escape, but she felt better exploring than just sitting there feeling bad for herself. She started toying with the walls. All of them were concrete, unfortunately. Wood? She could’ve busted out. Sheetrock? She could’ve blown on them and the wall would just fall apart.

  The snooping was boring and pretty frustrating, so she let her mind wander. Suddenly, she was back at her father’s funeral, which was undoubtedly one of the worst days of her life.

  She was standing with a small crowd of people on a grassy hill overlooking their town as his coffin was placed in the ground. She was trying to remain steely, but he’d been everything to her. Sure, she had her stepmom, but they argued over everything. Her and her father, they’d just… fit somehow.

  Her black dress was blowing in the sharp north wind. It was cold. She wanted to put on her jacket, but instead she just stood, staring off at the lights of the city far below, blurred from tears in her eyes, goosebumps standing up on her exposed arms.

  The priest was doing the service, then his old war buddies came up and talked about the good old times they’d had in the war. It was good stuff. They were all excellent speakers. All of Adrianna’s siblings and stepmom were crying at the end of it—loud, sniveling sobs. Adrianna tried to keep calm. She really did, even out of respect to him.

  Finally, though, she just lost it. She felt like screaming and attacking the old buddy that was up there talking about the time that he and her father had gone out on a scouting mission and found a bunch of enemy troops. It ground on her for her to think about the fact that he’d known her father longer than she had…

  She stood over by the knob of the hill, looking over the city far below. The wind blew her hair about wildly, but she didn’t flinch. She stood silently, quivering, hearing the speaker at the service. He was too far away for her to hear what he was saying, but she could just make out little snippets.

  “-Bravest man I’ve ever seen-”

  “-And boy, you all know that he could make you laugh at the most minuscule things-”

  “-I remember this one time-”

  Back at the cell, that last sentence that she remembered stuck out in her mind. All she was doing was remembering. Remembering the old days. Remembering their argument. Remembering.

  Well, you know what?

  No.

  She was tired of living in the past. She was tired of being hindered by it. Suddenly, something washed over her. She wasn’t sure what it was, but abruptly, sore and miserable inside that pseudo jail cell, a wave of peace washed over her. Maybe it was just a collection of all the bottled up emotions from the last day or two, but abruptly, she just let it go.

  She was a grown woman, and an amazing one at that. Sure, she couldn’t change what had happened to her father, but he wasn’t ever really gone. She’d spent so much time trying to contain him in that gun he’d given her, that when she was unarmed, she felt scared and alone.

  Well, that was just unnecessary.

  And she realized it right then.

  She realized that she had to get out of that jail cell. Important, character-building revelations or
not, if she didn’t figure out a way to escape, it wouldn’t matter. She couldn’t find any immediate weaknesses in the room. It was built too sturdily, and she could tap and listen all she wanted without learning anything. She had no idea when the guards would be back, but there was one obvious tool she had: her powers.

  She’d never considered using her powers to find the structural weakness of a wall. She just sensed other stuff: feelings, guilt, past visions. But then again, it was worth a shot.

  She sat on the ground and crossed her legs. Sitting like a Jedi master, she reached out into the walls. At first, it was weird, like trying a new and mysterious food. She wasn’t sure if it would work, or how to do it. But finally, her mind crawled into the wall and snooped around.

  She was immediately disappointed.

  That wall was as sturdy it looked. There wasn’t even a blemish on the entire thing. But maybe not every part of it was that strong. She searched the whole wall, found no weaknesses whatsoever, and moved onto the other walls.

  Again, no weaknesses.

  She opened her eyes and groaned, throwing back her head in exasperation. That’s when she saw it, way up there: a vent.

  It had been closed off with wood, but it was obviously there. She looked deeper at what was connecting it. She grinned when she saw that they were nails. Excellent. Screws would never give, but nails could slide right out if she could get up there.

  She glanced towards the door and held her breath. She couldn’t hear anything. She was pretty sure that nobody was guarding her. Sure, if she started banging on the walls they would come running in, but if she was quiet, they were probably patrolling or something.

  She looked back at the vent. It was too high for her to just grab onto; it was higher than a normal ceiling, maybe ten or so feet high. She might be able to get it with a good jump, but she had to get that cover off. She could see four nails, one in each corner. That wouldn’t be easy to pry off.

  She stood and reached for it. Just like she thought, she was way too short, even at her height. She muttered under her breath and jumped. The very tip of her fingers touched the rough, plywood cover.

  “Okay,” she said to herself. “I got this.”

  She didn’t know why she spoke aloud. If any of the guards were outside listening, they would have heard her attempting to escape. But luckily, nobody came in. She realized that she needed a plan. The cover was about two by two feet. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to fit inside, but her immediate problem was actually pulling it down.

  She jumped again, timed it better, and actually got her fingers to catch the side of the plywood. However, before she could pull it down, her finger strength gave way and she dropped.

  “Mother-of-God!” she groaned, feeling the half dozen splinters in her fingers. She didn’t want to try that too many times.

  After she’d picked all the splinters out of her fingers, she tried again. This time, she went for maximum height. She timed it well. As she flew up to the top, she grabbed the board with the smallest tips of her fingers and tried with all her strength to hold on.

  She was extremely powerful. Back in high school, she’d been undefeated in arm wrestling—even against all the guys that decided to arm wrestle her. She’d whooped up on her peers. She also had briefly tried out gyms and found them to be too time-consuming, but in the time she had worked out, she had been very pleased with her own strength.

  So it was with that strength that she held onto that board.

  The first nail shifted out slightly, and the second followed suit.

  Her fingers gave way and she dropped to the ground like a cat. She landed wrong, and something in her knee popped. She barely held in a yelp as her joint gave and she hit the ground.

  She’d hurt it young, but it still hadn’t fully healed. She had no idea what she’d done. She never had surgery, which probably wasn’t a good idea, but it had seemed smart at the time. Every now and then, she’d hit it wrong and it would fall out from under her. Every time she did, it felt like she had torn something.

  “Aaaaahhhhh….” She bit her bottom lip so hard she wondered if it was bleeding. Her leg felt like it was on fire. It was a bad one. It was going to swell up when she let it sit still.

  Not too much scared her, but right near the top of her list was hurting her knee again. She’d spent most of a year trying to rehab before it even started to feel okay again. Every time she popped it, she felt a flush of fear. It always went away when she realized that she was okay, but it was still debilitating for a moment.

  She wiggled her leg around. All good. The pain was fading fast, and her knee seemed to stay where it was supposed to.

  Slowly, gingerly, she stood up. Her knee wobbled a little, but it held.

  She readied herself for another jump. She had to be prepared. The plywood was close to coming off, but her knee was also ready to give at any time. The last thing she wanted to do was jump up, grab the wood, and pull it off to expose her valve of freedom, come down and wipe out, dropping the wood and making enough noise where the guards came to figure out what was going on.

  It was a guessing game. Usually her knee ran just fine, but every now and then, it got into these little kinks. Here in about thirty minutes, she’d be fine. Given the option, she’d wait around for half an hour, but she had no clue when the guards were headed back for Round 2 of the interrogation.

  She had no intention of being there when they showed up.

  She jumped for it again, grabbed it, and came back towards the ground. She landed well, but for a second she wondered if her knee was going to take her down.

  Luckily, though, it held.

  She was standing in the middle of the room with a two-foot panel of plywood in her hands.

  It had worked.

  And the guards hadn’t heard.

  She set the plywood down in the corner where it wasn’t easily seen from the door. Now, the second part: actually wiggling into the vent. It was entirely too small for her to feel confident about fitting through, but if she could make it through the entrance, she’d be fine. Right after the hole came a wider section that she could crawl through.

  She made a jump and grabbed the steel vent and scrambled into the hole, trying to conceal the sound as much as she could. Her jeans caught on the metal and she nearly fell out. She kicked through the air and dragged herself in.

  Her jeans had held, surprisingly. Almost as surprising was that she had actually managed to fit. She wasn’t a small lady. She wasn’t particularly heavy, but she was tall and athletic, so her hips had barely squeezed in.

  She froze for a minute or two, waiting for guards to come running in. Nobody came.

  Smirking, she started the slow process of crawling through the vents in the direction that she hoped led her outside.

  Chapter 7

  Adrianna was having a grand ole’ time crawling towards her freedom until she hit the outside vent. For some time, she figured that that she could just bust out and that the hard part would be getting into the vent.

  But then she hit the vent leading out of the building and she realized that she was completely wrong.

  If she’d been crawling legs first, it would have been no problem. She could’ve just kicked the grate out. As it was, she was army crawling chest-first, and she had nowhere near enough strength in her arms to shove open a screwed-in grill.

  “Uh-oh,” she said. She pushed on it. It didn’t budge. “Uh-oh.”

  At any second, the guards could discover her absence. She was tragically aware of that fact, and what would happen if they found out she was missing.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she muttered. “Why does this have to be so hard?”

  Because you’re breaking out of an abandoned building from dangerous, murderous thugs who are willing to torture you, her brain replied.

  She braced her legs against the inside of the vent—it was a tight enough fit as it was—and pushed on the grate. It barely bent out as she strained, but when she stopped
, it snapped right back into place.

  She had to twist around and kick it open.

  In a tiny space.

  She curled up as much as she could, but when she was done, she could just barely twist around. For one frantic moment, she was afraid that she was stuck in the fetal position, but then she brought her legs around. It took her a second to unwind herself.

  She touched the grate with her boots to get the spacing right. Too close, and she wouldn’t get enough power. Too far, and she’d extend an inch away from it.

  She brought her legs back, clenched for a second, and kicked the grate. Immediately it ripped free and sailed off—straight into the face of someone outside.

  Surprised, she resorted back to her martial arts training and kicked the person in the face. She quickly locked the man in a headlock with her powerful legs before he could scream and alert the others to her position.

  The man turned out to be The Celtic, head locked in her crotch. “You’re alive!” he choked out, barely able to breathe in the leg lock. It wasn’t a great one, but she had reacted instinctively. The whole point was just to keep any guard from yelling loud enough for someone to hear and come find her.

  “Oh, uh,” she blushed and unclenched her legs, and he pulled away. “Sorry. What are you doing here?”

  “I tracked you here,” he said, holding out a hand. She took it and used it to hop down. She let her mind wander for one second and her knee gave again—it hadn’t really locked in place from earlier. She tumbled to the ground.

  “Are you okay?” The Celtic said, obviously startled. “Did you just… fall?”

  She peeled herself off the ground. “Augh… yeah…. I got a bad knee.” Suddenly, she realized. “You’re here to rescue me?”

  “Well, duh,” he said, clearly not sure if he should help her or not. On one hand, he wanted to help. But on the other hand, he could tell she didn’t want him to help. She wanted to get up on her own. She hated feeling helpless.