The Adventurous Bride

by Molly Liholm

  She heard the door lock snap shut—naturally he didn’t have to jiggle it like she did—and her stomach leaped. She was alone with this gun-wielding desperado, no one would look for her until Monday morning—thirty-six hours from now—and her heart was pounding fast and furiously. But it was no longer from fear.

  Meg turned around to face him and as unobtrusively as possible pinched herself. The man didn’t disappear and Meg was irrationally happy.

  He stood at about six feet, Meg noted. A taut and muscled six feet. For a moment she lost herself admiring his broad shoulders. She’d always been a sucker for broad shoulders—that had been part of Max’s allure.

  The man limped toward her. Meg stood perfectly still and raised her chin, telling her crazy libido to rein itself in. She’d read that fear could be a powerful aphrodisiac, but she was behaving ridiculously! Her pulse pounded furiously. “There’s over three hundred dollars in the cash register,” she tried to say calmly, but heard a quaver in her voice.

  The man turned those hard cold eyes on her, and she was afraid again. She remained frozen to the spot as he assessed her from head to toe in a calculating, derogatory way. She locked her knees together to remain upright.

  “I’m not here for your money.”

  Oh God, Meg prayed silently. “Don’t hurt me, please.”

  He advanced toward her until he stood only inches away. Meg could smell him, a mixture of leather, sweat and male. Her knees threatened to buckle but she held herself upright. She wasn’t going to let him see her fear.

  He pressed the gun nozzle between her breasts and Meg screamed. To hell with not showing her fear. She stepped back to run—as fast and as far as she could—but his hands grabbed her, one like a steel vise around her waist, holding her against him, the other over her mouth, stifling her scream.

  Her pleasant little Antonio Banderas fantasy shattered at being held captive by this potential rapist. She bit him. Hard.

  “Dammit!” the man shouted in pain, the arm pinning her to him loosening enough for her to break away and run.

  She heard him curse again, and hadn’t taken more than half a dozen steps when a hand on her shoulder pulled her back and spun her around to face him. She used the momentum of his movement to swing her arm back and punch him in the stomach.

  This time he made an extremely peculiar noise, dropped the gun and fell back. Meg dove for the weapon, grabbed it and pointed it at him with shaking arms.

  He got to his knees and while clutching his middle—surely she couldn’t have broken a rib with only one punch—raised himself to his feet. He’d looked dangerous before, but as he glared at her, she became even more frightened—which was ridiculous because she was the one holding the gun, she reminded herself. The piece of practical advice didn’t cheer her the slightest, however.

  On his feet he took a menacing step toward her. “Stop or I’ll shoot,” she said, not nearly loudly enough, her voice again quavering.

  “I don’t think so.” He took another step forward and stopped.

  How did he do that? she wondered. How could he scare her silly with just his tone? Now he was calmly assessing her while the gun shook in her hands.

  He studied the gun and then her. She was imprisoned by the fierceness of his eyes, by the green that was so dark it was almost black. The gun was now bobbing up and down in her clasped hands like a life jacket caught in a storm. She hoped he didn’t try to grab for it; she might shoot him by accident.

  He took another step forward.

  “Stop. I mean it.” She held the gun tighter, trying to stop the trembling.

  “You’ve never fired a gun in your life—much less at a person, Abigail Milton,” he said with complete confidence.

  His arrogance made her mad. He might have twice her strength and be intending to rob her or kill her or whatever, but he didn’t need to insult her. “It’s a Smith and Wesson .45,” she said. “With eight bullets in the magazine, plus one chambered. The design gives it greater accuracy, so that when I release the safety, like this—” she did so “—it’s ready to fire. Because it has a hair trigger, the slightest movement could set it off, so I’d suggest you stand very, very still. Because you’re right, I’m very nervous, but I am aiming at your chest, the biggest part of you, so I’m bound to hit something.”

  The man didn’t move, but she could see him ready himself to strike if she lowered her guard even for a second. Meg took a deep breath and then another, wishing she’d paid more attention to Greg’s mantra lessons about calming herself. Her new Sedona friend believed in meditation, claiming it could save one even in a life-threatening situation, giving one the calmness needed to analyze the possibilities of one’s actions. He’d tried to teach her, believing she would need it on the dangerous streets of New York City, not the quiet sidewalks of Sedona. Unfortunately, she’d found all the deep breathing a little silly, but now wished she’d paid more attention and had some way to lessen her fear.

  “Who are you?” she demanded.

  “You asked me to come, Abby.”

  “I’m not Abby,” she snapped, before realizing that telling him the truth might be a mistake.

  He scowled at her, seeming to take up even more space in the tiny shop without moving a muscle. “Abigail Milton is the owner of The Gateway. She lives in her store. I watched this place all day, and you’re the only one here.” His words came out in a gasp as he held his middle. How badly had she hurt him? Meg realized abruptly that he’d been injured before he’d walked into her store; the bruises on his face, the way he held himself made it obvious.

  Thinking of him watching her and her shop all day made her neck prickle. When she’d stepped outside for a few minutes during lunch, she’d felt something unusual, but thought it was only her growing dissatisfaction with her search for adventure. She really should be careful what she wished for. She wiped a bead of sweat off her face. “I’m Meg Cooper. I work for Abby.”

  The man shook his head. “Abby said she would be here. She asked me to come.”

  “She’s not here,” Meg said almost gladly. Maybe the man would just leave if she told him the truth. “She went on one of her retreats. She’s been gone for over a week. I don’t know how long before she’ll be back.”

  The man seemed to sag. It was only a slight movement in his shoulders and a lessening of the rigid tension in him, but it was as if he’d just lost a portion of the fight.

  Meg realized she was no longer as scared as she’d been a moment before. Now she was more curious and worried. Abby did know a lot of unorthodox people, but why would she be involved with a man like this? Why would she have asked him to come and then not waited for him? No, this story was too suspicious; he was probably trying to trick Meg into letting down her guard. She tightened her hold on the revolver.

  “Damn,” he muttered. He gave her a funny half smile full of confidence and arrogance, just like Travolta did in all of his films. “Now what do we do?”

  Meg ignored the tingle she felt at his smile, ignored the sweat on her hands. “Why did you want to see Abby?”

  “She asked me to come,” he repeated, his green eyes holding Meg’s gaze.

  She blinked to break his spell on her. Didn’t he know how to say anything else? He certainly wasn’t a very creative liar. “Abby didn’t tell me about you.”

  He shrugged, and Meg stiffened, afraid he would strike. “I didn’t tell her when I was coming.” He studied Meg and then smiled again, a lady-killer smile. Meg’s heart raced.

  “If it’s okay with you, I’ll just leave now.” He took a slow step backward, his hands raised in the air to show that he was harmless.

  He would never be harmless, Meg thought as she watched him take another careful step toward the door, toward freedom, away from her.

  He was practically at the door, and Meg could only watch with fascination as one bead of sweat after another trickled down his face. Was she really just going to let him leave?

  In this suspended moment in time,
where there was only Meg and this dangerous, sexy man, Meg watched him reach the door. His hand was on the knob. “Wait,” she cried, and the man froze.

  “It would be better if I just left.” The words came out hard and clipped, and Meg could see that sweat was now drenching his black T-shirt.

  His fierce eyes came back to her face, burning her, holding her captive. He raised an arm toward her. “I need my gun.”

  Meg had taken a step toward him before even being aware of deciding to help him. She was too late to catch him as he fell face forward on the floor.

  “Oh, no. Let it be nothing awful. Not him,” she said, chanting her own personal mantra as she rushed to his collapsed body. He lay very still, and for one moment Meg wondered if he was dead. Or if this was a trick, but she didn’t have time to worry. She had to help him; she couldn’t explain the compulsion, she just felt it. Kneeling down beside him, she touched his neck and found his pulse erratic. She rolled him over onto his back, frightened by his pale face. His shirt was soaked and she struggled to pull off his leather jacket. Finally she managed to tug it off one shoulder and then the other.

  She ran her hand over his chest, stopping when she touched something warm and sticky.

  She stared at her hand.

  Blood.

  She pulled up his T-shirt and saw something of the wound—a slash made by a knife, caked with dried blood and fresh rivers of bright red. She tore off the old bandage it looked like he’d wrapped around himself and stared, her heart pounding in her ears, her eyes clouding over.

  She blinked, clearing away some of the nausea. Stay calm, she told herself, trying to quell the sickness. It didn’t work. She raced to the small bathroom at the back of the shop and threw up.

  Once finished, Meg splashed cold water on her face and then glanced in the mirror. Was this wild-eyed woman really calm, collected Megan Elizabeth Cooper? Her brown eyes glittered; her cheeks were flushed. Shaking her head at her reflection, she wondered what she was getting herself into.

  She’d asked for an adventure and she seemed to have received her request. In spades.

  On legs that wobbled, she walked back through the shop and looked at the unconscious man. “It’s okay,” she told him. “I’ll help you.” She felt a little click inside of herself, as if a missing piece had just found its home.

  She set to work, picking up a medical book and some of the natural drug therapies. She’d need boiling water and clean towels. After she checked out the deepness of the cut, perhaps put in some sutures and bandaged the wounds, she’d figure out how to get him to the storeroom. Meg thanked fate that a year ago she’d volunteered at a health clinic in Los Angeles. At the free clinic in a desperately poor neighborhood that included gangs, she’d expected to fetch and carry, to hold patients’ hands and do some filing, but due to the shortage of staff and funding, Meg had done much more. She’d watched enough nurses and doctors fixing wounds to know what to do now.

  On the way to the kitchen she passed the phone and stopped. She should pick up the receiver right now and dial 911. Calling for help was what any calm, sensible, rational person would do. She lifted the receiver, but slammed it back down.

  The old Megan Elizabeth Cooper would have called the authorities, but the new Megan Elizabeth Cooper was determined to find out if this man was what she’d been looking for.

  She plugged in the kettle and gathered the towels. For herself she added a bottle of whiskey, taking one quick gulp out of the bottle. It burned on the way down, but it gave her confidence.

  Returning to the man, Meg touched his proud, hard face. He didn’t move. She might be the most susceptible victim of the Stockholm syndrome ever, when hostages began to sympathize with their captors, but she knew she had to help him.

  She didn’t believe he was a murderer or a rapist or anything awful. She searched his pockets for identification, but found nothing. Maybe he was a private detective. Or a spy. All she really knew was that he was a desperate man and he needed her help.

  No matter who he was or what he wanted, Meg wasn’t going to let him die. Or turn him over the authorities. Somebody had stabbed him and she was going to save him.

  Because he was her adventure.

  2

  HE FELT PAIN.

  Everywhere.

  He kept his eyes closed, isolating the injuries. His ribs were definitely broken. They’d been broken before; he’d survive. The rest of his body felt sore, but nothing else was broken. He moved carefully and a searing pain in his right side made him gasp. Fighting to stay conscious, he searched his memory for what had happened to him ever since he’d begun this stupid investigation.

  He remembered the parking lot at the Phoenix airport, the Arizona heat scorching him to his bones. Then something hitting him hard. He had faint memories of being bundled into a car and being driven to what seemed like an empty warehouse. Two men who kept asking him who his contact had been. The beating and the knife. They’d threatened him with it, telling him all the slow, painful ways they could cut him. He’d thought of his sister, Kelly, and how she’d been hurt and never said a word. Slowly he’d realized the two men hadn’t wanted to kill him. When they’d heard noise which turned out to be the janitor unlocking a door, the blond younger man had panicked and thrust the knife into him. He’d managed to twist slightly so that the blade made a long cut and he bled a lot. Feigning unconsciousness, he’d dropped to the floor and the thugs had run. Their mistake. They should have made sure he died. Their carelessness, he judged, meant they weren’t professionals.

  He opened his eyes. His mistake. The woman was sitting on a chair next to him.

  She smiled. “Good, you’re awake. I was getting worried. Here—” she raised a glass of water to his lips “—you must be thirsty.”

  He drank, trying to figure out where he was this time. After the pair of hoodlums had abandoned him, he’d dragged himself to a corner, where the janitor hadn’t seen him. The janitor had been a kid, really, more than happy to play his walkman too loud and do only the most perfuntory job.

  Then he’d passed in and out of consciousness a couple of times while planning his next move. Somehow the bad guys had known he was after them while he didn’t even know what he was investigating. He was following his instincts and his desire for revenge. No one could hurt Kelly as they had and not suffer for it.

  Now he used his military training to observe and analyze: the room was small and dark, with no window. Shelves against one wall held an assortment of junk.

  “You’re in the storeroom,” the woman said, answering his unspoken question.

  She refilled the glass and he drank the water down. He was thirsty. “What happened?” he asked.

  “You passed out from your wound. It looks like you lost a lot of blood. I cleaned out the cut. It didn’t look like any major arteries were severed, so I sewed you up.”

  She looked pleased at her words and he felt even worse. “You examined my wound and sewed it up? Are you a doctor?” he demanded.

  “Oh, no.” She smiled at him and patted his hand. “I read what to do in a book and then followed the steps. Just like Salma Hayak in Desperado. Plus I’d volunteered in a clinic where we saw a lot of knife wounds, so I kind of knew what to do.”

  “What?” Surprise made him try to sit up, which was a mistake. Pain attacked him and he collapsed back on the bed. Immediately, the woman was next to him, helping him settle back, moving the pillows to find him a comfortable position. Her small hands felt surprisingly strong on his shoulders. He noticed how pretty she was now that she wasn’t scared of him. Of course, she hadn’t been scared of him the entire time he’d pointed his gun at her last night, either. For one wild moment, he’d thought she’d been attracted to him, that she’d been imagining them together. That she’d been thinking about sex.

  If she had a brain in that pretty little head of hers she’d still be afraid of him.

  He trusted his instincts when it came to people, and his instincts were telling him thi
s woman intended him no harm. But clearly she was a nut. “You could have killed me,” he complained sourly. The woman thought she was the heroine of a bad movie. She’d performed surgery on him. Ignoring the fact that he hadn’t gotten any help for himself while knowing the wound was a bad one—he’d needed the time to get one step ahead of his opposition—he complained, “Why didn’t you call a doctor?”

  Her mouth tightened a little. He thought he saw anger in her eyes as she shifted slightly away from him. “I could phone a doctor now if you want. I thought that you might want to avoid the authorities, but if it’s all right with you I’ll get Dr. Jenkins.”

  “No.” He grabbed her hand to stop her exit, but the woman hadn’t moved.

  “I didn’t think so.” She held his hand with both of hers, looking down at his much larger fingers between her soft ones. Then she smiled, the anger gone, replaced by pleasure. Her brown eyes sparkled. She was certifiably insane. “You’re just like Harrison Ford in The Fugitive, aren’t you? A desperate man on the run. I knew I had to help you.”

  “Help me? Lady, you’re nuts. I could be anything.”

  “Are you going to hurt me?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so.” Still holding his hand, she smiled again and leaned forward as if sharing a secret. Her brown hair fell against his bare chest. “You see, I wished for you on Saturday night,” she confided, as if her words explained her bizarre behavior.

  He extricated his hand from hers. Yep, he was dealing with a total nutcase, all right. He needed to get out of here and call in. Get some help. Check in with Kelly and try to make her tell him what had happened to her. “What time is it now?”

  “It’s Monday morning. I’m about to open the store.”

  It couldn’t be thirty-six hours later! He was losing valuable time. The whole point to his desperate race to Abigail Milton, to risking his life, had been to win time and surprise. He’d managed to drag himself out of the warehouse and, with the money he always kept in his boot, he’d gotten himself back to the airport and the rental car that was still waiting for him. The amateurs had ambushed him at his car and never thought of getting rid of it.