Stacey Joy Netzel Boxed Set (33 page)

“I think you lost them.”

“You’re sure?”

“I don’t see any black cars.” Wherever they
were, there was substantially less traffic, so she was pretty
confident in her assessment.

He slowed the convertible a hair, enough so
the next turn didn’t throw her body against his; just close enough
for her accelerated breathing to catch another heady dose of his
scent. Citrus and spice, with a subtle musky base. Almost earthy.
She inhaled again before she could help herself.
Of course
Trent Tomlin would smell great.

Man, she had to get a grip. He’d kidnapped
her! As she pushed back into her own seat, his earlier words
finally registered on her short-circuited brain.

“What do you mean, you saved my life?”

After giving her a brief glimpse of her own
confused expression in his mirrored glasses, he returned his
attention to the road. “Grab me that baseball cap down by your
feet.”

Halli automatically leaned forward and swept
the floor with her hand. When she sat back with the navy blue cap,
she jerked away from his reaching hand. “You put my life in danger,
you didn’t save it. Because of you, I almost got shot.”

“Honey, because of me, you
didn’t
get
shot,” he retorted. “Did you really think you could record those
guys and get away with it?”

“What are you talking about?”

“They saw you across the water with your
camera.”

“I was filming the swans.”

He frowned at her like she’d grown a second
head. “Swans?”

“Yes,
swans.
You know, big white
birds with a long neck and—”

He braked sharply, and she was grateful for
the seatbelt that kept her forehead from connecting with the dash
as they came to a full stop.

“You weren’t videotaping the villa?”

“No. I saw it, even zoomed in on it,
but…”

She trailed off with a flash-vision of the
person bursting through the villa door. And the man staring at her
from the window. Were they the same person? Suddenly it dawned on
her why the window had looked odd. It hadn’t been shiny from the
sunlight glinting off the glass, but dark, as if the glass was no
longer there.

The fine hairs on the back of her neck
tingled. Trent Tomlin leaned closer, his dark head blocking out the
sun. The vision of the man in the window made Halli shrink back
against the passenger door.

“You didn’t see anything else?” Trent Tomlin
prompted.

Her hands trembled. She clasped them
together in her lap, absently fiddling with the Velcro adjuster on
his cap. After the past ten minutes and the sharp tension in his
voice, she was afraid to ask her next question, but forced the
words out anyway.

“What do you think I saw?”

He gave a brief glance behind them and
yanked up on the hand brake lever. His knuckles brushed along her
leg as he reached down into her space. She flinched in alarm, but
with her camera now fisted in his large hand, he simply resettled
into his seat. He powered it on and hit rewind.

Three seconds later he swore under his
breath. “You got another battery?”

“I left the case in the car.”
With Ben
and Rachel.

More swearing. He shoved the camera at her
and snatched his cap from her death grip. After settling it low
over his brow, he released the hand brake, shifted the idling car
back into gear and hit the gas.

Her head bounced off the headrest as the car
shot forward. Dumbfounded, she stared out the windshield.
Comprehension dawned and this time she purposely let her head thump
back as she squeezed her eyes shut in dismay.
Stupid idiot
.
She’d just missed a chance to escape. Movie star or not, apparent
rescue or not, she didn’t actually
know
the man. He could be
a serial killer for all she knew. Unlikely, sure, but only an hour
ago she’d have also said being abducted by him was unlikely.
Unlikely did not mean impossible.

What did seem impossible was getting back to
her family. The further he drove, the more lost she’d be. Because
even if she got away, she hadn’t seen any city name signs where
they’d pulled off the road and had no idea where they’d left her.
Her English/Italian dictionary also sat on the back seat of the
blue rental.

“Where are you going?” she asked after a
minute of silent berating.

“To my house.”

“Your house? Shouldn’t we go to the
police?”

“
La polizia
?”

His perfect Italian accent threw her for a
moment.

“No can do, sweetheart.”

“People shot at us! All we have to do is
show them your car.”

He maneuvered around a corner, their speed
sedate compared to earlier. “We can’t trust them.”

“We can’t trust the police?”

“Not here. Didn’t notice anyone rushing to
stop that chase, did you?”

True, the entire car chase hadn’t alerted a
single officer of the law, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t be
trusted.

She watched Trent from the corner of her
eye. His attention constantly shifted, as if he was keeping watch,
and she guessed there’d be no convincing him.

Then again, maybe
he
just didn’t want
to get caught. That thought didn’t make her feel any better.

“Take me to the US Embassy,” she said as
firmly as possible, like he didn’t have a choice.

“The embassy’s in Rome.”

Alarm undercut her bravado as she pictured
the map of Italy in her mind. “But that’s hours away.”

“There’s a Consulate General in Milan.”

“What’s that?”

“Basically the same thing as an
embassy.”

That’s right—she knew that. She just wasn’t
thinking straight with all that’d happened. A deep breath helped
quell her rising panic. Giving into her anxiety would get her
nowhere. One thing she did know, she didn’t want to go to back to
Milan without finding Ben and Rachel first. She wasn’t sure how
she’d find them, but she’d have to figure something out.
If
she could get out of this car and away from him.

“You know, you could just drop me off—”

“No.”

“It’s not like you need me for anything. I
didn’t see a thing, and I—”

“Until I see what you’ve got on that video,
you and I are best friends, honey.”

Her teeth ground together at his fake,
condescending southern drawl. “It’s Halli.”

His head turned, and despite the sunglasses,
she felt his gaze rake over the comfortable sweat pants and T-shirt
she’d worn for the long trans-Atlantic flight. “That’s your
name?”

“What else would it be? Look, you can have
the video. I don’t want it, there’s nothing on it that matters to
me.” She fumbled with the camera as she spoke, but her shaking
hands made it impossible to extract the small SD card. Tears stung
her eyes as frustration mounted. “Just take the whole thing and let
me go.”

She shoved it into his lap, hating that her
voice wobbled at the end. She’d saved six months to buy the camera,
but hopelessness is what made her composure crumble, not the stupid
camera. Before she made a complete fool of herself, she averted her
head and took a couple deep breaths to get control of her
nerves.

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

His quiet statement made it worse. She
clutched the travel purse angled under her right arm and around her
neck, aware the ripples of anxiety grew with each passing moment.
Bet Ben and Rachel hadn’t figured
this
into their
fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants plan. Heck, even she couldn’t have
planned for something like this. A tear slipped from her lashes and
out of nowhere, a laugh bubbled up. Was this what hysterical felt
like? Didn’t matter, she needed some sort of emotional release, and
more tears wouldn’t get her anywhere.

“Do you have a phone? Can I at least call my
brother and sister?”

To her surprise, he set her camera on the
console between them and then dug a phone from his pocket. Halli
grabbed it like a drowning person latching onto a life-preserver.
Shaking fingers forced her to start over twice before she got the
number right.

Please, answer, Ben. Please
.

Relief swelled when the call connected, but
instead of her brother’s voice, she got some strange recording in
Italian. She tried again with the same result. Biting back
frustration, she dialed a third time. This time, all she got was
dead air. Then a series of beeps sounded in her ear.

“The call won’t go through,” she said.

“Service is spotty around the lake,” Trent
informed her. “You can try again later.”

Tears threatened yet again as she slapped
the phone against his outstretched palm and leaned her head back
against the seat. “I planned this to be the trip of a lifetime.
Something to remember.”

His answering chuckle held a note of
disbelief. “Sweetheart, if you don’t remember this, whatever you
had planned didn’t stand a chance.”

“You
know
what I meant.”

“What, you’re not having fun?”

Halli jerked her head up and straightened in
her seat. “No, I’m not. Getting shot at and kidnapped wasn’t listed
anywhere on my itinerary.”
The planned one
or
the
windblown one
.

“It wasn’t?”

“Of course not,” she snapped, glaring at
him. “After we landed, right about now, in fact, we were supposed
to go right to the hotel to freshen up, then get something to eat
and tour the Villa Carlotta instead of listening to Ben’s bright
idea to stop for a quick look at the lake. Tomorrow after
breakfast, I wanted to visit a couple churches headed south and
around Como, and after lunch, we were going to explore the village
of Careno.” She ticked off each day on her fingers. “The next day I
planned a drive around the lake until we reached Mandello to see
the motorcycle museum—my brother’s a motorcycle nut. Then on
Wednesday…or was it Thursday?...no, Wednesday, we’re going to—”

She halted mid-sentence when his eyebrows
became visible above his sunglasses and underneath the bill of his
cap. Heat flooded her face as she lowered her hands to her lap.

“You were being sarcastic.”

He gave her a patronizing grin. “Yes.”

And the pathetic idiot that she was, she’d
given him a play by play. To avoid looking at him, she stared out
her side of the car and opposite the lake as he navigated south.
They were now driving around Lake Como, Italy, and she couldn’t
even enjoy the scenery.

Heck—alone with
Trent Tomlin
, and she
couldn’t enjoy the scenery. The man voted Most Sexy by women across
America not once, not twice, but
four
times. Most of her
female co-workers at PBS had agreed; any woman who didn’t fantasize
about Trent Tomlin was either blind, or a lesbian.

She snuck a quick peek from beneath her
lashes. Yeah, though he hadn’t been easily recognizable, he was
still hotter than ever with all that rough scruff.

She’d always loved his movies, especially
the Shain West ones that were an exciting cross between Indiana
Jones and Romancing the Stone, but set in the 1800’s. However,
things she’d heard on TV and read in the tabloids while standing in
line at the grocery store suggested he was an irresponsible,
incorrigible, work-a-little-party-too-hard Hollywood playboy.

She wasn’t naïve enough to believe
everything they printed, but a picture told a thousand words. Or
more accurately, a hundred pictures told a thousand words. The
beautiful co-stars, glamorous supermodels and semi-talented pop
singers who adorned his arm changed as often as his tie. So while
she may have fantasized about the image of the man like the rest of
America, it didn’t mean she respected him.

And, now that she’d been abducted by him,
she certainly didn’t like him.

“Where exactly is your house?” she finally
asked. They’d passed Brienno and Moltrasio, names she recognized
from the hours pouring over maps the past two years. Yet more miles
between her and her family.

“Torno.”

If only she hadn’t wasted so much of her
camera battery filming on the plane and in the airports. But she’d
wanted to catch every moment to remember later. Trip of a lifetime
and all that. Then the town name Trent had said registered and she
realized they’d be traveling through more populated areas as they
rounded one of the southern tips of the lake.

“Why don’t you just stop at an electronics
store and buy a battery?”

“Great idea, if you don’t take into account
that most of the shops close down between noon and three for the
traditional Italian
siesta,
and right now”—he glanced at his
watch—“it’s one-fifteen.”

Darn it, that’s right. She knew that, too,
and had even planned for the inconvenience—just not the rest of
this craziness.

“And,” he continued, “I can’t really drive
around town with bullet holes in my windshield, now can I?”

She wished he would. Maybe the police—
la
polizia,
she mimicked in her head—would stop them, and she
would be free. At this point, she acknowledged it wasn’t so much
that she was afraid of him, she just wanted things back to normal.
Back with Ben and Rachel. They would never believe what’d
happened—
she
wouldn’t believe it if it hadn’t happened to
her.

Come to think of it...what had he been doing
there? Halli snuck another glance toward his stern profile as they
passed the sign for Cernobbio. How did he know she’d been filming
and those guys would come after her? Were they really after
him?

Halli shifted in her seat to get a better
look at his face. “Why were you—”

“
Sonofabitch.”

She drew back, then followed his gaze to see
a large, dark blue SUV-type vehicle up ahead on the side of the
road. Two uniformed men stood at the rear, alongside the pavement.
One waved a red and white paddle and the other—Halli’s heart went
nuts all over again—had a very big, very scary-looking gun slung
around his neck and shoulders. The kind the bad guys used in the
movies.