Avenging Angel (10 page)

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.

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 so 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.

She went for quiet and normal, mostly because she didn’t think she could get past Henry’s secretary with a mysterious-sounding whisper. Mrs. Hunt had yet to accept the change in hierarchy brought about by Johanna’s addition to the firm.

“Henry, please,” she said when the office answered. “This is Johanna. It’s urgent.”

“One moment,” Mrs. Hunt responded after a slight, condemning hesitation.

Johanna closed her eyes and prayed for the old bat to put her through and for Henry to take the call. Henry was also having a little trouble adjusting to the new equal partner in his firm. She knew he preferred his mornings quiet and his clients in the afternoon. She knew he preferred tea at 10:00 A.M. rather than crisis. She knew he preferred her to be on time and the secretaries to be early, which of course Mrs. Hunt always was.

“You picked a hell of a morning to be late,” he said, coming on the line, and she knew he expected a damn good explanation, despite the fact that she owned half their partnership. “You wouldn’t believe what’s been going on here all—”

“I’m in Laramie, Henry,” she interrupted him. “The Colonial Inn Motel. I haven’t got much time. There’s a man, Dylan Jones, alias Dane Erickson. Check him out, inside out, upside down, and backward. I want to know everything about—”

“A man?” Henry repeated, his tone quickly changing. “You’re in a Laramie, Wyoming, motel room with a man?” He sounded incredulous, as well he would, given his long-standing interest in her total lack of a love life.

“It’s not what you’re thinking, Henry. I’m tied to the bed.”

What Henry said to that was unlike any combination of words she’d ever heard out of her staid partner’s mouth, even during their college years. It was more like what she was used to hearing out of Dylan Jones’s mouth.

“I don’t believe it.” Henry swore again, and she could practically see the pained expression come over his face and the way he rubbed the bridge of his nose under his glasses. “You meet some strange man with an alias, for crying out loud, and end up getting left alone in a motel room in the middle of God knows where, tied to the bed, and I’ve got bullet holes in the walls!”

“Bullet holes? What do you mean bullet holes?”

“I mean bullet holes, Jo-han-na. Like somebody went through here with an Uzi. The office was broken into last night. Trashed. There’s nothing left of your files and damn little left of mine.”

“My God.” She’d never dreamed Austin would go that far. That he would be so desperate.

“It’s got to be the James case,” Henry said. “And if that bastard thinks he can scare us off with—”

“Henry,” she interrupted.

“—strong-arm tactics and—”

“Henry.”

“—intimidation, he’s going to find out he’s messed with the wrong lawyer. I’ll put him six feet under so fast, it’ll make his head swim.”

“It’s not the James case, Henry,” she said in exasperation, then froze as the man on top of her moved in his sleep.

Dylan murmured something unintelligible and shifted the position of his free hand, sweeping it up from the juncture of her thighs to her right breast. Johanna held her breath until it hurt, then let it out all at once, trying to ignore his natural response to fondle what now filled his palm. The man was too crude for words. She wanted to hit him and didn’t dare. She had to get away from him, far away.

“What do you mean it’s not the James case?” Henry normally didn’t like being corrected, and his verbal attitude told her this morning was no different in that respect.

“It’s not James. It’s Austin Bridgeman,” she explained, whispering into the phone. “You must have read the papers this weekend. Morrow Warner, the company splashed all over yesterday’s front page with a senator in tow, is his, Bridgman’s, and I’m the attorney who put it together.”

“Bridgeman?” Henry repeated. “The man you worked for in Chicago? You’re going to have to speak up, Johanna.”

“I can’t.”

Henry swore again, then forcibly calmed himself. “Fine. Have it your way. Tell me where you are and I’ll call the police, get somebody in there to untie you.” He sounded like he didn’t believe what depths he was sinking to in the name of friendship.

“Don’t call the police, Henry.”

“Dammit, Johanna, haven’t you been listening to me? I can’t come up there myself this morning! My God. This is exactly what happens when you take up with some stranger because of some wild, hormonal deviation—”

“Henry.”

“—of lust arousing magnitude—”

“
Henry
. I am fully clothed and have been all night, so stop thinking what you’re thinking.”

“You should have called me, Johanna.”

“I did. I am. Right now.” Lord, she thought, had he always been this sanctimonious? “Henry, listen to me. I am not alone. The man who kidnapped me is—”

“Kidnapped?” Henry interrupted, his voice going cold.

“Yes. Get these names: Dylan Jones and Dane Erickson. He was Austin’s number-one bodyguard up until a couple of days ago. He says he kidnapped me to protect me from Austin.”