LITMIR.BIZ

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picked up the pieces. All but the one shard she’d covered with her sneaker and drew beneath her chair, leaving her foot over it.

      It had taken time and patience, patience when she wanted nothing more than to flee, but she’d counted off thirty minutes. Thirty minutes before she executed the second part of her plan. Rocking back and forth, she’d finally succeeded in tipping over her chair. When she crashed to the floor, she’d felt the impact reverberating in her teeth, not to mention through her shoulders.

      The crash had brought her kidnappers running, then cursing, then finally laughing at her. She assumed that they thought she was attempting to break the chair and then escape. They’d called her stupid and told her not to try anything like that again, then left. She hardly heard them, aware only of the shard of glass she’d secured and now held locked in her closed fist.

      The moment the door was closed, she went to work.

      It was slow, tedious and painful. Pru worked the shard like a tiny, jagged glass saw, drawing it back and forth across the thick hemp that held her prisoner, feeling a sticky trickle of blood at her wrist. She’d just managed to cut through the ropes when this miscreant had come through the window.

      A new face. Another one of the kidnappers?

      She wasn’t sure how many there were and only knew two by actual sight. His coming through the window made no sense, unless he didn’t want the others to know what he was doing.

      Every muscle in her body tensed.

      She pretended to still be bound as the stranger came toward her. The element of surprise was all she had.

      He put his finger to his lips, as if the dolt thought she could scream beneath the duct tape. If she could have screamed, she would have done so a long time ago. Loud and long.

      He crouched down beside her. He was going to rape her, she thought, banking down the surge of panic and turning it into fury. He damn well might try, but he was going to lose a few vital organs in the process.

      “This is going to hurt,” he warned her, taking the edge of the duct tape covering her mouth in his fingers. He yanked it quickly and a line of fiery pain zigzagged along her lips.

      The next second, she propelled herself forward, lunging at him. He wound up on the floor, flat on his back, with her on top of him, pinning him down.

      “This’ll hurt more,” she declared fiercely, her face inches from his.

      Her heart pounding wildly, Prudence began to scramble to her feet, intent on grabbing the weapon she’d seen go flying from his waistband. But he caught her wrists with his hands and held her to him. The length of his rock-hard body directly beneath hers registered on the outer perimeter of her consciousness. As did the heat from his bare chest.

      Stockholm syndrome, Stockholm syndrome, she warned herself. He was a lowlife, nothing else.

      A lowlife with a temper.

      “Are you out of your mind?” he hissed angrily.

      She squirmed and wriggled against him, trying to get free, alarmed at the sensations that were swiftly and dramatically telegraphing themselves through her body. Alarmed, too, at the rather sensual curve of his mouth as he looked up at her.

      Prudence gathered her indignation to her like an invisible, invincible cloak. She was not about to succumb to this. They were not going to keep her docile and inline with this cheap ploy. She didn’t care how hard his chest, or other parts of him for that matter, were.

      “If you think that I’m just going to lie here and let you attack me, you less than worthless sack of horse manure, then—”

      “Attack you?” he echoed incredulously, his hands still very tightly wrapped around her wrists where they would remain until he was confident that she wasn’t going to take a swing at him. “I’m here to rescue you.”

      For a moment, still sprawled out on top of him, Pru wavered. Rescue her? She was being rescued? Her father had actually managed to find where she was being held? The man deserved more credit than she’d been giving him lately.

      And then suspicion crept in between the lines.

      “Where are the others?” she wanted to know.

      “There are no others,” he told her.

      Her eyes widened. “You’re it?”

      “Yup. Lucky me,” the man commented dryly. “Now, not that I wouldn’t find this position interesting at any other time—” he opened his hands, releasing her wrists “—but I think that we’d better get the hell out of here before one of those Neanderthals comes to investigate the noise.”

      Pru scrambled to her feet, managing to have more than just marginal contact with all parts of him. “Just who the hell are you?” she demanded hotly, her cheeks burning.

      A smile twisted the man’s lips as he motioned her over to the same window he’d just used to get in. “At the moment,” he told her, “your savior.”

      Chapter 4

      If Pru was going to respond to the information this bare-chested, unmasked avenger had just flippantly tossed at her, the opportunity was snatched from her.

      She heard a noise behind her but before she could turn around to see what was happening, the man with the washboard abs was grabbing her by the wrist again and yanking her so that she was suddenly behind him. The snub-nosed weapon was in his hand so quickly, she didn’t even see where it had come from. All she knew was that it was there, being aimed at the man who had just walked into the bedroom.

      The next moment, the man had fallen to his knees, a single hole very neatly placed in the center of his forehead.

      Shock and wonder vibrated all through her. “You killed him,” she cried.

      “That’s the idea.” And then the stranger was pushing her toward the open window. “Let’s go!” he ordered in a voice that would have made a marine drill sergeant proud.

      Ever since she could remember, Pru had always hated being ordered around. Hated being rendered to the state of an inanimate object, thought unable to think for herself.

      But there was no arguing with the wisdom behind the soggy Adonis’s command.

      Later she’d take him to task for his irreverent manhandling of her. Right now, all she wanted to do was put an infinite amount of distance between herself and the men she knew in her heart were going to kill her whenever they decided that she’d ceased to be useful to them.

      Pru was drenched half a second after she’d exited through the window.

      The ground was soft and muddy, the sky completely covered with black, ominous clouds that were relentlessly draining themselves over the land. She was about to ask which way to run, assuming that this man had an escape plan mapped out, when he grabbed her wrist for a third time and, in a dead run, began to drag her in his wake. Prudence had no doubt that if she fell, this man would just drag her behind him in the mud like some broken, dysfunctional pull toy.

      She glared at the back of his soaked, dark head. If he was her rescuer, or her savior as he claimed, he certainly had never been to knight-in-shiningarmor school.

      Behind them, the rest of her kidnappers must have rushed into the back room, drawn by the sound of the single gunshot. Making an immediate assessment, they’d run to the window and began firing.

      Bullets were flying at them like lethal mosquitoes on steroids.

      “You should have used a silencer!” Prudence shouted at the back of her rescuer’s head, raising her voice to be heard above the gunfire, the thunder and whatever else nature in its perverse capriciousness had decided to throw at them.

      “I’ll have to remember that for next time,” he shouted back.

      They reached what must be his vehicle and Pru’s “savior” threw open the passenger door and shoved

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