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"I had no intention of breaking my ankles.” The chances of that happening were twenty percent at best, placing the odds firmly in my favor.
He shook his head, still laughing at me. “I’m not sure gravity would have been terribly concerned about your intentions. It’s pretty stubborn that way—you two would get along great.”
“I’m not stubborn; I’m tenacious. If you think I’m just going to—”
“Let’s go,perla,” he said, gesturing in a grand sweep toward the front door. “Your great escape will have to wait; I’m tired.”
“You expect me to just follow you back inside?”
He looked up at the window, then back to me. “Unless you’d rather climb back up?”
“Insufferable sod,” I muttered under my breath as I made my way back to the front door. Fortunately, there was no one in the foyer as we stepped inside this time. Less than fortunately, he led me right back upstairs to the suite of rooms that I had no doubt belonged to him.
He unlocked the door with an app on his phone and walked right in.
I watched him as he took in the condition in which I’d left his rooms, and I felt a moment of triumphant satisfaction, quickly snatched away when he didn’t bat an eyelash.
He strolled across the Aubusson rug to the mini bar in the far-left corner of the sitting area. The bed and walk-in closet were on the opposite side of the room where I’d wreaked the most havoc. I’d emptied bedside tables, dresser drawers, and one conspicuous black duffel bag that I rather wished I hadn’t opened. A bag I’d been quite hopeful would be filled with weapons or even old gym socks I could use to make my captor keel over. A bag that had, instead, been filled with every kind of erotic fetish implement known to man; cuffs and whips, blindfolds and clamps, vibrators and plugs.
“Here,” he said once he’d poured two glasses of Scotch and held one out to me.
In less than twenty-four hours, I’d been held at gunpoint in my own ER, witnessed a murder, been kidnapped, and each of my escape attempts had been thwarted—and those were only the highlights. If ever there was an appropriate time to get sloshed, that time had come.
But I hesitated. Alcohol depressed the central nervous system, leading to an overall decrease in brain function. Slower reflexes. Impaired judgment. Decreased coordination.
“No, thank you.”
He tipped back half his glass, then set it down on the bar. “You’re afraid you might forget how much you hate me and jump into bed with me, am I right?” He waggled his eyebrows in a way that was at the same time both comical and enticing. Neither of which I noticed, of course.
“I assure you, there’s no risk of that.”
“It’s one drink,perla. You saved a man’s life today; you’ve earned it.”
“I save lives everyday. And generally, those lives are worthy of being saved. I’m not sure I can say the same thing aboutthisday.”
He stopped talking. It felt like I’d overstepped some boundary, but I wasn’t going to apologize for it. Kidnappers and murderers were bad men. This was rudimentary knowledge, in my opinion.
He picked up his glass and finished off his drink. I stayed by the door. It was only during this lull in the conversation that I realized my body wasn’t shaking, my hands weren’t cold and clammy. My heart beat at a—relatively—even tempo.
I wasn’t afraid of him. At least, not in the same all-encompassing, primal manner in which I had been. I looked him over, searching for a change, for a difference, flitting back to his lips every few seconds to watch for movement.
“It must be exhausting,” he said on one of my passes over his face.
“What must be exhausting?”
“Constant vigilance,” he explained.
Was he trying to empathize with my role as kidnap-victim? If so, I don’t think he could fully appreciate it from his position as kidnapper—slightly different perspectives.
“The lip-reading, I mean. I know you’re deaf, Heidi, or at least mostly so.”
It felt like he’d cut me off at the ankles again.
“How did you know?” I forced the words out, oblivious to my volume.
He shook his head self-deprecatingly. “I didn’t. I don’t miss much, but I missed that.”
“Then how?” I was quite certain I hadn’t brought it up.
