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“That isn’t going to happen, baby,” he assured her. “The bastard nearly killed you in Russia. Let it go now.”
She couldn’t let it go.
“You’re lucky.” Orion’s voice washed through her memories. “The right people want you alive, for the moment. Don’t make the same mistakes your family has made, little girl. Go home. I cross you again, and I’ll drink your blood for breakfast.”
The right people wanted her alive. People she hadn’t cared to associate with since she was eighteen years old. The right people, those with too much money and too much power. People who hired this man’s services and gave him his orders.
“I can’t let it go.”
She should have lied about it. She could have promised him the moon; what the hell difference would it make in the long run? She should give him what they wanted and bargain for her release and just fucking run.
She’d been running for more years than she could count. A few more surely wouldn’t make a difference.
“What does the drug do to you?” he asked as she felt his fingertips running down her arm.
She wanted to smile. Trent used to do that when he wanted information from her, that or her attention, or just to touch her. The backs of his fingers over her arm.
These weren’t Trent’s fingers, even though the sensation was the same. There was a fine webbing against his flesh, as though his fingers were scarred or had suffered some trauma. He touched her as Trent once had, though, causing her chest to tighten with pain.
Her handsome, courageous Trent.
The blindfold eased slowly from her eyes and she found herself staring into the storm-ridden grays of John Vincent’s. They were eyes that swirled with turbulence, with anger and desire, with lust.
He was rugged, rough. His face was sun-bronzed with creases at his eyes as though he had once laughed a lot but rarely did so now. His upper lip was a bit thin, his lower lip a bit full. They were kissable lips. Lips that would know their way around a woman’s body. Lips that knew how to kiss, how to caress.
“Are you going to let me go?” Bailey could feel her heart racing in her chest as he hunched in front of her, staring into her eyes as though he were trying to figure her out.
“I shouldn’t,” he whispered. “I should never have walked into this little trap.” She could sense the but in that sentence and would’ve loved to have known what he was thinking.
“What trap?” she asked, wondering at the swirl of emotions in his eyes.
“The Bailey Serborne trap.” He sighed. “Big ocean-green eyes and the face of an angel. A face that traps a man’s soul and never lets it free.”
He sounded serious. Bailey wanted to sneer, but she couldn’t work up the mockery, the sarcasm needed. It wouldn’t slip past the pain that pulled at her heart and left it aching.
“I know who you are,” she whispered. “You’re no more an arms broker than I am.”
He laid his fingers against her lips. “You never want to say that again. Don’t even think it. Don’t become a risk, Bailey, or I’ll never be able to protect you.”
She tilted her head to the side. “Since when did I become your responsibility?”
Familiarity flickered in his gaze, confusing her. He watched her as though he knew her, as though he had touched her, and for a moment she could actually feel that touch.
His lips thinned, holding back whatever he wanted to say as he rose to his feet and dug his hand into the snug pocket of his jeans. He pulled free a small penknife, opened it, then moved around her.
A second later he was curling her fingers around it.
“I can give you five minutes,” he told her. “There’s a car parked at the back door, the keys are in the ignition. Drive out slow and easy and keep driving, baby. If you’re taken again, I won’t be able to save you. I won’t be able to keep this from happening to you.”
She stared back at him as he moved around her, her fingers gripping the knife as she made a decision she couldn’t have imagined making.
“The information you wanted,” she whispered.
His eyes narrowed.
She gave him the brief details he needed, most importantly the location of Orion’s handler, information it had taken her years to track down. She would have known his voice in a heartbeat, but she wouldn’t hear it again. She described the handler’s voice as well as Orion’s quickly while she worked the knife through the ropes. She ran through the list of details she had, reciting the last one as the ropes fell away from her wrists.
She dropped the knife and moved. Jackknifing from the cot, she swiped his legs out from under him and sent him rolling before sprinting to the back door.
