Escapade

by Lisa Marie Rice

  To strangle women?

  No, don’t think like that. She couldn’t panic. She had to think her way out of this.

  “Why —” Elle’s voice gave out. She wanted so badly to be nonchalant but terror closed her throat. “Why am I here? What do you want with me?”

  Her voice shook.

  Why was she here, a prisoner of this man? So he could rape her, strangle her, torture her? Leave her rotting body in this apartment where no one could hear her screams as she died?

  “I hate that look,” he said, frowning. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “So you say.” She swallowed. That small bottle of water seemed like an hour ago. She wanted to ask for more water but didn’t know if — if he’d let her go to the bathroom. Having to pee in her pants was too horrific a thought. She’d rather go thirsty.

  “Yes.” He nodded sharply. “I do.”

  Elle cocked her head, watching him carefully. She wasn’t a keen observer of people. Mostly she lived inside her own head. So maybe she was way off base here. But … he didn’t seem like a maniac or a torturer or rapist or murderer. Surely psychopaths gave off … vibes. Or something. Surely the agitation in their minds would be reflected in their bodies.

  This man was utterly still and utterly relaxed. And though she had no idea if she was reading him right, she didn’t get violent vibes from him.

  Of course, the maids might find her headless body two days from now because Elle had no sense how to judge people, except for academically. Never in her life had she had to gauge whether someone might be a violent monster and strangle her to death.

  “What’s your name?” she blurted. And then immediately wondered — was that a smart thing to ask? Maybe if she knew his name and survived the ordeal, he’d kill her anyway because she knew who he was.

  On the other hand, in the thrillers she’d read, kidnappees tried to establish a relationship with the kidnapper, the theory being that if he knew she liked her steak rare, that would humanize her and he’d be less eager to whack her.

  She tensed her wrists. The cloths tying them were soft but well-knotted. But if she could ever get him to release her she could … what? There was a very handsome brass lamp. Maybe she could grab it and brain him with it. On the marble-topped kitchen counter was a plate and a wine glass with some wine still in it. Could she rush to grab it, smash it on the counter and go for the jugular?

  “My name is Bennett Cameron,” he said easily. “And I’m an expert in close protection.”

  He was watching her very carefully and sighed at her blank look. “I’m a bodyguard.”

  Elle’s mind stuttered. This was the last thing she was expecting. A bodyguard?

  “Okay, now pay attention.” He straightened a little, reached for something and Elle’s heart jumped into her throat. But he was only reaching for a laptop. Which showed how terrified and drug-addled she was, because she usually noticed IT before she noticed people. “I’m going to show you something. Something that should reassure you. After which I will release you from your bonds and I would be very grateful if you didn’t lunge for the brass lamp or the glass on the counter because believe me, I’m faster than you. And bigger and stronger, too, while we’re at it. Now I know you’re smarter than me, but we’re in a very Darwinian situation right now, and your smarts aren’t going to be very useful. Are we clear?”

  Elle sat breathing for a moment, trying to sort out what he was telling her. He was saying that he’d show her something after which he’d let her go and she’d understand it was … what? All a big misunderstanding? She was here, in this strange room, tied up after he’d drugged her, but it wasn’t the way it looked? On the other hand, he also told her not to try anything because he was bigger and faster than she was and he’d win.

  It wasn’t often that Elle found herself in a pissing contest with a man where the winning attribute was strength not intelligence. But this was one of those times and she didn’t stand a chance against his muscle.

  “Elle?”

  She looked up at him, miserable.

  He closed his eyes briefly and sighed. “Damn. Don’t look at me like that. Come on, watch this and then we’ll talk.”

  “And you’ll release me from my bonds,” she whispered.

  “Yes. And then I’ll release you from your bonds.”

  “Okay.” Her mouth was dry. She had no idea what kind of video he was going to show her. Maybe it was of some other victim? What had happened to them? Something so awful she’d relinquish all thoughts of fighting back? “Let’s — let’s see.”

  He put the laptop on his lap, turned it around so the screen faced her and pressed play.

  “Hello darling.” Elle’s eyes opened wide. That was her father! Her father sitting on a chair she didn’t recognize in a room she didn’t recognize. He looked a thousand years old, paper white, with huge dark bags under his eyes. “There’s a problem.”

  Bennett didn’t watch the video, he watched her. He knew what the video said, he’d been listening via Skype when it was recorded, directing what was said. There was no information given in the video other than what was necessary to reassure Clifford Ricks’s daughter. Bennett had made sure of that. Ricks had been sick with worry and though he was normally very tight-fisted with information — he basically sold information after all — he’d started blabbing. He’d given his location, his plans and basically painted a target on his back. Bennett had had him turn the video recording function off and start over, three times.

  The end result was scary for a daughter, but there was nothing in it that Ricks’s enemies could use.

  As she listened to her father, Elle’s face turned as white as his and her eyes grew impossibly huge. Her hands were shaking and her breathing was fast. She was a little shocky. But Bennett didn’t try to reassure her. Long experience taught him that cocky principals got themselves into messes. He’d taken a bullet once for a principal who didn’t take the danger seriously. The more frightened they were, the more they followed his orders and didn’t take risks.

  This was serious shit and she had to take it seriously.

  It was a real pity that he had to scare this beautiful and super smart woman, but it was for her own good. The threat was real and the more deeply she understood that, the better her chances of survival.

  “Honey,” Ricks was saying, “I’m … having some difficulties.”

  Well, that was putting it mildly. He’d lost ten million dollars of the Russian Mafiya’s money. Poof! Up in smoke.

  But Clifford Ricks was a money man and to some degree he was therefore a bullshitter. The words ‘I fucked up, badly’ wouldn’t leave his mouth. Couldn’t. A lifetime of talking prospects up made him incapable of expressing the brutal truth.

  “I have some very bad people hunting me and I’m afraid they are hunting you, too.”

  Bennett tapped a key that stopped the video, at a moment that made Ricks look almost insane. Everything in his face drooped—jowls, cheeks, mouth. Usually freshly barbered, his face was covered in white scruff, his hair stuck out in white clumps, his eyebrows and nose hairs needed clipping. And he was dripping with perspiration, though Bennett knew that wherever Ricks was, it would be climate-controlled.

  Ricks had spent a lifetime drowning in comfort. Possible impending death and possible torture of his only child wouldn’t change that.

  Bennett waited for Elle’s eyes to turn to him. Her reflexes were slow. She was having trouble processing this. This was not an abstract math problem, this was life at its rawest.

  Bennett hated this, just hated it. Fuck Ricks for plunging this brainy, beautiful young woman into his crazy mess that could turn violent at any moment.

  “Elle?” He kept his voice low, gentle. Finally, her face turned toward him, eyes tracking a second later.

  “Y-yes?”

  “You have to pay attention to this part. It’s important.” She swallowed and jerked her head up and down.

  “Focus, now,” he said quietly. T
his to a woman who kept three dense pages of math formulae in her head. He’d seen it. She was nothing but focus, except for something like this, completely outside her wheelhouse.

  He pressed a key and the video picked up where it had been stopped.

  “I invested some money on behalf of … some Russian gentlemen.” Yeah, gentlemen, Bennett thought sourly. Russian mob is more like it. The Lipovs were no gentlemen. They were more like feral animals. “They had a considerable sum they wanted to invest and I saw a good deal in airlines and air transport.”

  “Airlines! Air transport!” She gasped, turned to Bennett.

  He stopped the video.

  “Yeah. This was two weeks before the two volcanos erupted.” All air transport worldwide had been closed down for ten days, as two volcanos erupted within 24 hours of each other, spewing uncounted tons of ash into the air. One in Iceland, one in Hawaii. Airlines and air transport companies took a huge hit. Many had gone bankrupt.

  Bennett turned the video back on.

  Ricks huffed out a wheezing breath. “As you know, Elle, air transport of goods and passengers came to a grinding halt,” Ricks said on the screen. “And there were huge secondary effects on the market. The Dow Jones lost two thousand points, the Nasdaq lost a third of its value and the FTS and the Nikkei lost half theirs.”

  “That’s a lot of money,” Bennett said while they listened to Ricks wheezing on the video.

  She shot him a No shit, Sherlock look.

  “I lost something like eight hundred million dollars in a few days.” Ricks wiped sweat out of his eyes. “With a — with a normal, institutional investor, I could explain. I have explained it to most of my clients. I’ve taken a big hit but it’s force majeure. An act of God. And I can make that money back for them during the course of a year. Maybe two, at the most. But these people …” His face trembled, jowls shaking. “These people are totally unreasonable.”

  Elle nodded to Bennett to stop the recording and turned to him. “Who are they, these investors?”

  Bennett’s jaw clenched. Your father’s amazing greed got away from him and he accepted money from the worst people on earth. What the fuck was he thinking? But he couldn’t say that. It wouldn’t help anyone. However, much as he didn’t want to bad-mouth Ricks in front of his daughter, she had to understand the danger she was in. He said what he could.

  “I suspect that he didn’t recognize the investors for what they were. Front men for the Russian Mafiya.” He looked her straight in her intensely blue eyes. “They are very bad people.”

  Her face was frozen. She nodded and he pressed play again.

  “Today they shot the head of my accounting department.” Ricks swallowed heavily. Bennett had been a little surprised when Ricks said that for the video. What he didn’t tell his daughter was that Ford Atkins, his CFO, had been taken to a field in New Jersey and staked out. As a camera recorded every little detail, an off-camera gun shot out Atkins’ kneecaps, shot his hands and his elbows. The camera was unwavering in its focus while Atkins took two hours to die. “They want their money back or they will —” he stopped, sweat pouring off him. “They will hurt you,” he continued hoarsely. “And they will hurt me.”

  The mobsters wouldn’t kill Ricks because he was their only hope of getting their money back, but they could and were making his life hell. But if they got their hands on Elle, they would definitely hurt her. And send Ricks the video in 4K hi-def.

  They didn’t fuck around.

  Ricks was lucky he was in Paris when the threat came, Elle was in Oxford and Bennett was at his company’s headquarters in London. Made things easier. If Elle had been in Boston, Bennett wouldn’t have made it to her in time. She could be screaming in agony this very minute if fate hadn’t made them all geographically close.

  Ricks swallowed heavily, the wattles in his neck quivering. “I called in a company we’ve been doing business with for a long time. I’ve asked the head of the company, Bennett Cameron —” here Ricks clicked something off screen and an old photo of Bennett appeared. It was taken from his company’s website which was very spare with information. “So when this man comes for you, go with him, honey. I am being protected by my men but I insisted that Bennett himself protect you. I also insisted that he not tell me where he is taking you. I have no idea where you are, but I know you’ll be safe with him.”

  The camera of his laptop stayed on his face for a full minute as he sat and breathed heavily and sweated. Finally, in a corner of the screen, his mottled, shaking hand reached out and the camera winked off.

  There was dead silence. Bennett let her work her way through this. Elle Castle was a highly intelligent young woman but this must have seemed like a message from another planet to her.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t another planet, it was this one, planet Earth. A deadly, violent place where people did awful things. Always had. Always would.

  She went deep inside herself for a couple of minutes. Her eyes were unfocused and she was completely still. When she looked up at him again, he spoke.

  “We good? You’re not going to try to bash my head in or bite me or break a glass on my face?”

  “We’re good.” Her voice was calm. Bennett had to admire her. She was shocked and frightened and probably still a little afraid of him — though he’d done his best to make sure she understood he meant her no harm — but she kept her dignity. She lifted her wrists a little off the arms of the chair. He’d deliberately left the restraints a little loose. Anyone else and he’d have tied them with plasticuffs so tightly they’d cut off circulation. But not her. She just needed to be immobilized until he could show her the video and explain. She lifted her wrists again. “Can you cut me loose?”

  “Of course.” Bennett reached down to his boot and slid out his sweet little Gerber Mark 2, which he kept razor sharp. Before she even had a chance to wince, he’d sliced through the cloth and freed her. He hadn’t looked at her wrists while doing it — he had excellent peripheral vision — but watched her eyes.

  In combat, you watched the eyes.

  If by any chance she was thinking of escaping, this would be the moment. He was ready to block any movement, though he hated the idea of hurting her in any way.

  He spared an angry thought for her fucking dad, though, whose greed had put her in this position. Where she had to be kidnapped to save her from violent monsters. What dad would do that?

  Nothing showed on his face, though. Nothing ever showed on Bennett’s face that he didn’t want there.

  The instant her wrists were free, Bennett lifted his hands and sat back. There was nothing she could hurt him with within reach, but if she wanted to slap him, he’d just take it. He’d taken worse.

  But she didn’t slap him. She merely sat quietly, rubbing her wrists, watching him. “We good?” he asked again.

  She nodded, that shiny blue-black mass of hair sliding forward then shifting back. He had a sudden urge to touch her hair, just to see if it was as cool as it looked. It looked like midnight on a moonless night. And, since he was thinking about forbidden gestures, he’d like to outline that gorgeous face with a fingertip, and trace the contours of her mouth. It was the kind actresses went to a plastic surgeon for, only hers was 100% natural. Lips pillowy, soft, with a little crease in the bottom lip.

  A mouth made for kissing.

  Whoa.

  This was a principal, for fuck’s sake. A client. Or rather, her father was the client, but still. Bennett never had any trouble at all keeping his personal feelings separate from the job, but this woman pushed all his buttons.

  Super smart and competent, right now she was looking lost and scared and, well, lonely. And he’d been the one to do that to her.

  Fuck Ricks, he thought for the billionth time.

  “So, I have a few service announcements,” he said.

  “Okay.” She cocked her head and directed that amazing gaze at him, listening carefully.

  “First of all, we’re going to be here a while, s
o there are some arrangements to be made.”

  She blinked. “How long?”

  Bennett shrugged. “I have no idea. Quite literally. This lasts until your father says his problems are over.” And God knew when that would be. The guy had to make up a shortfall of ten million dollars when he’d probably lost a billion or two between his own money and his clients’ money. Even for a financial genius, that had to take time.

  She exhaled. “What if it takes months? Years?”

  “Then we’ll be here months. Years.” Though Bennett didn’t think it would take that long. Ricks would die of a heart attack if nothing else. “There’s nothing you or I can do about that. And if you’re thinking of eventually running away, I wouldn’t if I were you.” He hesitated a moment, then let her have it. “These guys want leverage over your father, want it in the worst way. I guess they think he’s holding out on them and that if they had you as a hostage, he would just hand over what he owes them. The thing is —these people are ruthless. I’m sure your father had no idea who they really were when he accepted the contract. Mobsters tend to use more civilized front men so your father wouldn’t have known how brutal the guys with the money are.”

  She leaned forward a little. “If they’re so brutal, then surely they will go after my father? Grab him, try to squeeze him.”

  Bennett nodded sharply. “Good thinking, only you’re missing some information.”

  She gave a half smile. “I’m sure I’m missing a lot of information. I know nothing of my father’s business. Just as I know nothing of his life.”

  It occurred to Bennett how stupid Ricks was. Not only in keeping a woman like Elle, a woman any father would be incredibly proud of, out of his life, but also by not inviting her into his business. A genius-level daughter steeped in math would be a hedge fund owner’s dream.