Taken Hostage (2 page)

They emerged from the vault, Tiffany still
clutched tightly against his chest while she held onto the bag of
money for dear life.

‘I’m leaving now,’ he announced to the bank
at large. ‘If anyone tries to stop me, I’ll shoot her. If anyone
calls the police, I’ll shoot her. If anyone follows us, I’ll blow
her brains out.’

He jerked Tiffany toward the door, and she
stumbled along across the floor tiles, helpless as several
customers stared after her, wide-eyed.

A middle-aged woman, one of the bank’s
regular customers, was huddled on the lobby floor. The gunman
stopped when they reached her, and the woman shook as his shadow
fell over her. ‘Give her your purse,’ he commanded. The woman dared
to stare up at him. ‘Now! Give her your purse!’ Clearly terrified,
she obeyed, and added the weight of her leather handbag to
Tiffany’s burden, forcing the strap into her hands before returning
to her balled-up position on the floor tiles.

Tiffany and her captor burst through the
doors and onto the brick staircase, where the stink of his
cigarette smoke still lingered in the air.

He pushed against her from behind, causing
her to stumble as they descended the steps. His hold around her
neck kept her from falling. She fought the urge to drop the money
and reach up to massage her aching throat. It would have been
impossible anyway, since his thick forearm easily filled the space
between her chin and collarbones.

They stopped at the red mustang. He slammed
Tiffany against its side and abandoned his hold around her neck,
keeping her pinned against the car with his body weight instead. He
was at least six feet tall, and well-muscled – a combination which
made him twice as heavy as Tiffany, who was relatively petite. The
position forced her to acknowledge something she’d been trying to
ignore since he’d first seized her in the vault – a hardness that
pressed against the small of her back, grinding slightly against
her each time he made even the smallest of movements.

She had a sudden vision of being raped in
front of her co-workers and customers in the parking lot, trapped
between the bank robber and the sports car he lusted for. The
thought was enough to send hot tears streaming from her eyes. They
trickled down her cheeks and dripped onto the glossy red paint of
the Mustang, forming little puddles. Her calm exterior had finally
cracked.

He ripped the purse out of her hands,
breaking one of her nails. She hadn’t realized she’d been clutching
it with all of her strength, bracing herself for the impending
assault. A jingling sound came from behind as he dug around in the
handbag, apparently in search of something. A moment later, he
swung the car door open.

He seized her arm and shoved her inside. She
collapsed onto the passenger seat, trembling with relief that she
was finally out from under his body.

He jumped into the driver’s seat and shoved
the key into the ignition. Though her vision was blurred by tears,
Tiffany could clearly see the chunky keychain that hung from the
keys. It was a plastic frame with a picture of a woman – the woman
whose purse the gunman had forced her to take – and her husband
standing in front of a waterfall, smiling. Clearly, the mustang had
been hers. The robber must have seen her drive up in it as he stood
on the steps, smoking.

The engine roared to life, and Tiffany’s head
bounced against the window as the gunman carelessly reversed the
car out of its parking space. She was thrown back into the seat as
he accelerated and tore out of the parking lot. The buildings that
blurred together as they raced by had been replaced by trees by the
time the wail of sirens began in the distance. Somebody had finally
called the police. She remembered his promise that he would ‘blow
her brains out’ and flinched.

He caught the movement from the corner of his
eye. ‘I’m not going to shoot you. I just said that to buy some
time.’ The dangerous edge was gone from his voice. How did he
manage to sound so calm? God, had he done this before?

A few tears were still making their way down
Tiffany’s face. She wiped them away with the back of her hand and
resolved not to let any more escape. It was OK. He wasn’t going to
shoot her. At least, not yet.

She risked a glance at the speedometer and
discovered that they were traveling at eighty-three miles per hour.
The speed limit was only fifty-five. She scrambled to fasten her
seatbelt and clutched the edges of the leather seat in a
death-grip, breaking another of her nails in the process.

Her nervous anticipation of a car wreck only
lasted so long. Eventually, sitting still and listening to the dull
roar of the engine while straining to hear police sirens that had
yet to catch up with them became maddening. She had to say
something. ‘You chose a really conspicuous getaway vehicle.’ It was
the first thing that came to mind, and she blurted it out.

He laughed. It was a surprisingly rich sound,
and for a second, it was almost as if they were back on the bank
steps again, making small talk. ‘It’s just a temp,’ he said. ‘It’s
fast – that’s what counts. I thought I’d have some fun throwing
them off my trail.’

As if on cue, he veered off of the road in a
spray of gravel, pulling into a private drive that was swallowed up
after the first few yards by tall, aged pines. It was a bumpy ride,
but it lasted for less than a minute. When he stopped, they were in
the driveway of a large log cabin, nestled in the secluded forest.
There was a dark blue Saturn in the driveway.

‘Is this your house?’ Tiffany asked,
bewildered. It was a beautiful building – not exactly how she
imagined a bank-robber’s den.

‘No. But this is my car.’ He motioned toward
the Saturn.

After exiting the Mustang himself, he walked
around the front and opened Tiffany’s door for her. She was
overcome by a sensation of déjà vu – she’d imagined him doing the
same thing in her fantasy. Now, in their current situation, it
seemed absurd.

She stood uselessly as he tossed the
pillowcase full of cash into the Saturn’s trunk and covered it up
with the blankets and emergency roadside kit that were already
stashed there. The ordinariness of her captor’s car and the
contents of its trunk were intriguing. Who was this man, who
apparently robbed banks after smoking on their steps and flirting
with their tellers for half an hour? It wasn’t as if he could
expect any of the plentiful witnesses to forget his face – it was
only slightly too rugged to look like it belonged on the cover of
GQ, or on a billboard in the city.

What in the world was he planning to do
next?

Tiffany eyed the nearby woods speculatively.
They were in the middle of the New York wilderness, half an hour
from town. She had nowhere to run, and there was probably no one to
hear her scream if she tried and he caught her. She dared a glance
at her captor, who’d tucked the gun into the front waistband of his
jeans. The bulge of the barrel beneath the denim reminded her of
the similar protuberance she’d felt there when he’d pinned her
against the Mustang in the bank parking lot. She no longer felt
horrified by the memory – a fact that sent heat flooding into her
face.

Once he’d finished packing the Saturn he
opened the passenger door. ‘Ladies first,’ he murmured in a tone
she’d heard already in her fantasy.

She sank into the passenger seat gladly, for
her knees had begun to feel as if they might give out. ‘Where are
we going?’ she asked as he turned his own set of keys in the
ignition.

‘Far away,’ was all the reply he gave
her.

She couldn’t stop asking questions. Now that
her fear was beginning to ebb, a strange curiosity seemed to be
replacing it. ‘If this isn’t your house, why’d we come here?’

‘Because the owner leaves every morning for
work at 7:15 and doesn’t come home until at least 5:45 in the
evening. So it should be at least that long before they discover
the abandoned Mustang and figure out that I’m driving something
else. We’ll be long gone by then.’

Tiffany noted his use of the word ‘we’ with a
sudden rush of half-amazed, half-frightened anticipation. ‘You had
this all planned out?’

‘Of course.’ He pulled the Saturn back out
onto the road. ‘What’d you think, that I’m just some idiot who
decided to rob a bank on the spur of the moment?’ He grinned at
her, and she had to fight the sudden urge to grin back.

She shrugged instead.

He reached down, pulled out a hat from the
small compartment on the driver’s side door and pushed it down on
top of his head, hiding his hair.

‘Shouldn’t you make me lay down in the back
seat or something?’ Tiffany asked. That was how the bad guys always
did it on the crime dramas she liked to watch on TV.

He looked away from the road for a moment,
turning the full force of his gaze upon her. His eyes were intense,
but one corner of his mouth was pulled up in an amused half-smile.
‘Do you really want me to?’ He spoke in the same husky voice that’d
starred in her pre-abduction fantasy.

She dropped her gaze, too abashed to maintain
eye contact. What she saw when she looked down only deepened her
embarrassment – though her kidnapper had removed the gun from his
waistband, the fabric of his jeans was just as strained quite near
where it had been.

****

They drove into the night, stopping once for
a necessary break in the thick woods that lined the country
highway. Tiffany trampled over the undergrowth to find a place
obscured from the view of any travelers to relieve her bladder. It
was an awkward thing to do in the dark woods with her captor
keeping guard only a few yards away, though he did stand resolutely
facing the other direction. When they returned to the car, he
surprised her with a cooler full of sandwiches and soda that had
been waiting on the floor in the back. Clearly, he hadn’t been
lying when he’d said he’d planned this all out. They drove on, and
according to the dashboard clock, she fell asleep sometime after
one in the morning.

****

Tiffany awoke sometime in the darkness to the
feel of insistent pressure between her legs. She stared down into
her lap and saw that a large hand had already unbuttoned and
unzipped her pants and was plunging down below the waistband of her
pink cotton panties, stretching the fabric as the fingertips
brushed the top of her clitoris, which was swollen to the point of
aching. It throbbed against the invading touch, and she was unable
to stifle a low moan.

She looked, already knowing it was he who
touched her, and saw her captor. His blue eyes reflected the
moonlight that filtered in through the windshield, and they were
fixed intently on her. He leaned in to kiss her when she met his
gaze, thrusting his tongue past her readily parted lips and over
her teeth. She kissed him back eagerly and arched her hips away
from the seat so that he could reach deeper into her pants and feel
the wetness that beckoned him…

The car hit a particularly nasty bump in the
road, and Tiffany’s eyes flew open. Sunlight streamed in through
the windows, and she squinted against it. Her heart beat fiercely,
and every inch of the skin between her legs throbbed, longing for
the dreamed-of touch. Heated flooded her face as she stole a glance
at her captor, whose hands were dry and planted firmly on the
wheel.

‘Morning,’ he said.

Her face aflame, she tried to squash down an
irrational fear of him being able to read minds. ‘Morning,’ she
mumbled back, hoping desperately that she didn’t sound as aroused
as she felt.

When she’d finally managed to compose
herself, she rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and saw that the
clock read 6:15 am. ‘Aren’t you tired?’ she asked her kidnapper,
who had apparently driven through the night.

‘I got a couple hours of sleep,’ he
replied.

‘What? When?’ She asked incredulously.

He smiled the irresistible half-smile Tiffany
was beginning to become familiar with. ‘I pulled over around two
and slept for about three hours.’

‘I didn’t even notice.’ It was unnerving to
know they’d spent three hours sleeping side by side. The memory of
her forbidden dream surfaced again in her mind, sending a fresh
surge of blood to the small but insistent organ between her legs.
She shot a guilty glance at his fingertips. In her dream, they’d
felt pleasantly rough against her inflamed flesh.

He turned his attention back to the road, but
not before she tore her gaze from his hands and noticed his eyes
were bloodshot. Stubble was beginning to darken his jaw. He was
clearly still exhausted. She couldn’t help but feel a little sorry
for him, and a vision of him resting his head on her chest and
closing his eyes flashed before her mind’s eye. She berated herself
silently and immediately, but it did little good. Her chest had
been bare in that brief fantasy, perhaps in a state of
post-lovemaking. She resolved not to let herself think about it
again. Indulging in such thoughts about a violent criminal wasn’t
safe, wasn’t
practical.
And it wasn’t easy to give up. At
least, not after that dream.

****

‘Do you think we could stop sometime soon?’
Tiffany asked. Her bladder had filled overnight and was protesting
each time the car passed over even the smallest bump in the road.
Besides that, the mountain air might help her to cool her head –
her captor kept popping up inside of it, always in an inappropriate
setting or position, despite her efforts not to expand on her
unbidden fantasy.

‘Yeah,’ he replied, without removing his eyes
from the road.

She stared out the window. They were
traveling down a mountain highway, surrounded by majestic pines,
maples and other trees, all resplendent in their fresh spring
greenery. There were open blossoms on some of the branches, unlike
in New York, where they wouldn’t appear for at least another three
weeks.