Her Alpha Saviors [The Hot Millionaires #2] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (24 page)

“Let’s be having you, now.”

“Certainly.”

She uncoiled her frame with one swift movement, at the same time bringing the sharpest rock down on the side of Patrick’s head with all the strength she could muster. He howled and a gush of blood spouted down his face, temporarily blinding him. Skye didn’t hang about to see what damage she’d done, instead making a dash for the path. But it was too slippery, the gap between the floor and the beginning of the path too great for her to be able to haul herself up to safety. She grabbed a scrappy tree root, praying it would take her weight, and used her feet against the rocky incline to slowly inch her way up.

A large hand grabbed her ankle just before she made the final few inches. She screamed as she tumbled backward and landed on her side on the rocky path with a heavy thud. Patrick stood over her, legs apart, wiping blood from his face, a murderous expression in his eye.

“I rather like you, Skye. This was never personal and I was gonna make this quick and easy,” he growled. “Now you’ll get what’s coming to you, and I might just enjoy taking my time. Get up!”

“I can’t,” she whined, her pretence at injury not altogether feigned.

“Get up or I’ll do it right here and now.”

“You might as well,” she said. “Why should I make it easy for you?”

“You can’t—” He stopped talking and cocked his head to one side. “What was that?”

“I didn’t hear anything,” Skye said, hope bursting through her like a sunray.

“It was a fucking engine!” He thought for a second or two and then pulled her roughly to her feet. “Come on.”

“Where are we going?” she asked, fearing that she already knew the answer.

“To the caves.”

“Why?” She was trembling, totally unable to hide her fear, not so much of dying but of entering those caves. That was how bad her claustrophobia actually was.

“’Cos that sounds like my fucking quad bike, so it can only be your bloody Yanks come to look for you. I don’t want you found yet.”

“But they’ll know you’re here,” she said with irrefutable logic.

“I’ll say I was looking for you.” He produced a flashlight from his voluminous pockets and shone it in front of her feet as he pushed her into the cave complex. “Come on, follow the light round to the right.”

“Won’t it seem odd if I’m found in the caves?” she asked, her voice commendably calm given the unmitigated fear that gripped her with every step she took further into the cave complex.

“That’s the clever bit,” he said, smirking. “When your guys finally figure out that they need to come down here, they’ll find me frantically searching. We’ll assume that when you regained consciousness you were disorientated and crawled into the caves. Everyone knows that it’s impossible to find your way out again.”

Yes, that was certainly true. Skye’s shaking hand made contact with her pocket. There was something there. The red marker pen she’d been using earlier. She slid it free and pinged the cap off. It fell to the ground and rolled away, any noise it made shielded by the sound of their boots on the rocky floor. She recalled telling Jay and Luke that the people who lived here during the war marked their way with chalk. She was clutching at straws but if by any chance they reached her before Patrick killed her, perhaps, just perhaps…

* * * *

Jay and Luke screeched to a halt in the same place they’d stopped on the horses two days previously.

“Over there.” Luke climbed off the bike and pointed to the horses grazing peacefully a short distance away.

“Where the hell are they then?” Jay asked, cutting the engine and shielding his eyes with his hand as he scanned the area.

They called her name repeatedly, not surprised when they received no reply.

“They have to be in the caves.” Jay headed for the path that led to them. “Look, this ground’s rock hard because it hasn’t rained for a while but there are scuff marks. Someone’s been down here recently.”

“If he’s harmed her I won’t be responsible for my actions,” Luke said through gritted teeth.

“You’ll have to join the queue.” Jay ground his jaw. “She must be terrified down there.”

“Then let’s go get her.”

They negotiated the path in the same way that Skye had, using their hands and slipping more than walking.

“Now what?” Luke asked.

They stood at the bottom, listening to nothing more suspicious than birdsong and the sound of the breeze rustling through the tall grass above their heads.

“The caves, I guess.”

“How will we know where to look? Skye said they’re a maze.”

“That doesn’t mean we ain’t gonna try,” Jay said, grim determination in his tone.

They were about to move into the complex when they heard footsteps approaching. Hastily they took cover and waited.

* * * *

“In here.”

Patrick pushed Skye into a small cave that branched off the main chamber. Just as well because her marker pen had already run dry. It was freezing in there, but that wasn’t what made her body tremble so violently. The walls were dripping with rank-smelling water, and the roof of the cave barely cleared her head, adding to her feeling of being buried alive. There were animal droppings all over the floor. Skye froze. She hated rodents almost as much as she feared confined spaces.

“Is this where you commit cold-blooded murder?” she asked, trying to keep the tremor out of her voice.

“Don’t try appealing to my better nature, love, ’cos I don’t have one.”

“I already got that part.”

“It’s your own damned fault. If you hadn’t been so stubbornly determined to hold on to The Fox, none of this would be necessary.”

“Does it make you feel less guilty, blaming the victim, I mean?”

“Perhaps it does. I really don’t want to do this but—” Patrick abruptly stopped talking and cocked his head to one side. “What was that?”

“My nosy Yanks coming to my rescue.” She crossed her fingers in the fervent hope that it really was. She hadn’t believed Patrick when he’d thought he heard the quad bike. She hadn’t heard anything herself, but since he thought Jay and Luke were here, she might as well perpetuate that myth. “I told them where I was going, and they probably wondered why I’ve been so long.”

“Shut up.”

He listened some more. Skye heard something, too, this time, and hope trickled through her solidified heart. Far-off voices perhaps?
Please let it be voices and not something echoing in the cave system.
What mattered was that Patrick thought someone was here and wouldn’t risk killing her until he was sure they were alone.

“Wait here while I check it out.”

“I wasn’t planning on going anywhere.”

“Too right you’re bloody not.” He stamped his foot down hard. “Of all the fucking times for strangers to come snooping.”

He grabbed hold of her and pulled a long length of baling twine from his pocket. He kept well clear of her legs, presumably anticipating that she might try and kick him in the balls. He bound her hands so tightly that she feared he might cut off the circulation, forced her onto the floor, pulled her legs up behind her until she bent her knees, and tied her ankles with the other end of the rope. Then he pulled a filthy handkerchief from his pocket and gagged her.

“You ought to enjoy this,” he said, leering at her, “given what you got up to with those two.” He grimaced at her from the doorway. “Don’t feel lonely now. I’ll be right back.”

* * * *

Jay held his breath as just one set of footsteps drew nearer. Were they too late? He made out Patrick’s outline approaching stealthily, keeping to the shadows and shining a dim torch directly on the ground in front of him. He kept looking around but wouldn’t see him and Luke in time to react.

Jay waited until he stepped into daylight, knowing it would take his eyes a moment to adjust, and then pounced. He’d had no time to discuss strategy with Luke, but Jay knew his buddy would back him up. This was no time for Queensbury rules. Jay aimed to bury his fist in the man’s jaw, and he indicated to Luke to stand on the opposite side, ready to catch him when he fell. They needed him conscious so he could tell them where he’d hidden Skye.

Except it didn’t go to plan. Patrick obviously saw them sooner than Jay had anticipated, dodged the punch at the last minute, and the blow landed on the side of his face. Before Jay could recover, Patrick landed a hefty blow of his own, so hard that Jay thought his eye had exploded. Too full of fear for Skye to worry about the pain, a heady rush of adrenaline helped him to move in on Patrick again, ready to slog it out. They were in the confined entry to the caves, and there wasn’t room for Luke to join the fray. Jay was now glad about that. He wanted this guy so badly that he wasn’t prepared to share.

The two men staggered sideways in a death clinch, neither gaining the upper hand. Patrick tried a few blows below the belt, but Jay sidestepped them, still flinching when one glanced across his genitalia. Jay didn’t lose his temper easily—he thought it a sign of weakness that clouded a man’s judgement—but on this occasion he gave it full rein. Storey had exploited Skye and her father and very likely killed the woman he loved, causing anger to overcome reason.

With a murderous growl Jay bore down on Storey, his rage empowering him. Storey must have seen something in his eyes that gave him pause. Instead of moving in for the easy kill that Jay’s momentary lapse occasioned him, he stepped backward and found himself up against a sheer rock face with nowhere else to go.

Jay didn’t hesitate. He pulled back his fist and planted it as hard as he could in the centre of Storey’s face. The sound of splintering bone was unnaturally loud as his adversary cried out and toppled over in slow motion. Luke wasn’t able to catch him, and he hit his head hard on a boulder when he fell.

“You’ll never find her without me,” he said, blood pouring from his skull as he lost consciousness.

“Is he dead?” Luke asked.

Jay, breathing heavily and covered in Storey’s blood, felt for a pulse. “Shit, yes he is.”

Wasting no more time on Patrick, Jay ran further into the caves, Luke right with him, and called Skye’s name. Both men listened anxiously but heard nothing except the echo of Jay’s voice and then silence.

“We are not going to lose her,” Jay said, gritting his teeth. “There has to be a way.”

Luke picked up Patrick’s torch and flashed it along the ground, looking for footprints—anything that would lend them a clue. Then he saw it and grinned with relief.

“She was using a red marker pen this morning,” he said, pointing to the fresh red marks on the rocky walls. “She must have still had it with her.”

They dashed along as fast as they could, following the marks until they ran out.

“Now what?” Luke spun on his heel in a huge cavern that had dozens of offshoots. “She could be anywhere. If we search every one, she could die long before we find her.” He grimaced. “If she isn’t dead already. It’s bloody freezing in here.”

“I know, but we have to…shush, did you hear that?”

Both men listened. A scraping sound came from their left, and they both dashed in that direction, calling her name and then listening to the responding scrapes.

“She has to be alive,” Jay said, trying to convince himself as much as Luke by saying the words aloud. “Nothing else would be making that sound.”

“Over that way.”

Both men burst into the cave where the sounds came from and stopped dead at the sight that greeted them. Skye lay trussed up on the ground, gagged, filthy dirty, covered in cuts and bruises, trembling like a leaf, but very much alive.

Both men crouched beside her, and Jay unfastened the gag.

“What kept you?” she asked and then burst into tears.

They worked quickly to remove the ropes that bound her. She was shaking so much that Jay thought she must have hypothermia.

“It’s okay,” he said, stripping off his jacket and wrapping her in it. He picked her up and cradled her in his arms, covering her dirty face with kisses as he tried to transfer some of his own body warmth to her.

“Where is he?” she asked in a croaked voice.

“Dead,” Luke said, satisfaction in his tone.

“If you hadn’t come—” She choked up and fresh tears made new tracks through the grime on her face.

“Shush, it’s okay. We wouldn’t have found you if you hadn’t made those marks on the wall and then kicked your bound feet against the loose stones in that cave. That was clear thinking.”

She managed a stifled smile. “More like desperation. I never thought you’d come, at least not in time.”

“Thank Luke for that.” Jay carried her rapidly toward fresh air with Luke lighting the way with the flashlight. “He found out what Councillor Talbot was up to. When we discovered you were out riding, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to put it all together.”

Skye reached out a hand and touched Luke’s arm. “Thanks, hero,” she said. “And you, too,” she added, smiling up at Jay. “You’re going to have a very black eye tomorrow.”

“Like I give a shit, just so long as you’re safe.”