Pinups and Possibilities (6 page)

I followed the man with the piercing green eyes out to the parking lot. My hand was wrapped tightly around my suitcase handle, and my eyes were trained straight ahead.

I worked on not panicking, but the second he’d uttered Jayme’s name in conjunction with Cohen’s, a tight ball of fear formed in my stomach. As much as I was scared of facing Cohen myself, the thought of what he’d do to Jayme was much scarier.

I’ve got to protect him at all costs.

When the man stopped in front of his Mustang, I almost crashed into him. I managed not to, but I did stumble and drop my bag.

He turned around then, and pulled me against him, turned again, and pushed me up against the car. The evening air was barely cool, but the side panel of the Mustang was icy. I shivered, and I wriggled against the man involuntarily, trying to absorb some of his heat.

“You like that?” he asked softly.

“No,” I lied.

He ran his hands down my arms, paused at my hands, and then drew them over his shoulders.

“What are you doing?” I whispered.

“Giving your boss a show. He’s watching us from the door, right now.”

“He’s not.”

“He is. You planted this seed, babe. I’m just helping it grow.”

His hands found my waist without even fumbling. He exerted a soft pressure on my hips that made me gasp. I wanted to fight against the heat pooling in my belly. Or at least I wanted to
want
to fight. But all I really wanted was to give in. And I had an excuse. I needed my boss to believe the lie I’d told him.

Jayme. As backwards as it seems, you need to do this for him.

My captor leaned down, and I tilted up my head and closed my eyes. When he brought his fingers up to cup my face, the instinct to yield took over. I snaked my arms more tightly around his neck. His mouth came down on mine, tugging apart my lips with his teeth and pulling on the sensitive skin there. His tongue followed the searing trail left by his teeth before he pulled away. When he let me go, I had to suck in a much needed breath.

“I think that’s good enough,” he said into my hair.

Then he slid away from me to open the car door. He grabbed my arm and fixed me with an intense stare.

“If you’re not the person Cohen’s after, tell me now, and direct me to the real Jayme Duncan.”

I inhaled sharply and tried to compose myself. “He’s looking for me. But I’d prefer if you called me Polly.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Pin-up Polly?”

“That’s me.”

He gave me a sharp nod. “Fine. Have it your way, Polly. Get in.”

I picked up my suitcase and climbed in. By the time I buckled my seat belt, he was already behind the wheel and gazing at me coolly. He grabbed the suitcase from my lap, unzipped it and began rifling through it. He gave me a triumphant wink as he pulled out a cell phone and a thick wad of cash.

I tried to cover my dismay. I’d been saving that money for almost a year, careful to keep it out of the bank so Jayme and I could run at a moment’s notice. And now this man was tucking it into his black messenger bag, and even if—
no
,
when,
I corrected myself—I got away, I doubted I would ever see it again.

He slipped the key into the ignition, pulled to the edge of the parking lot, rolled down the window, and tossed the phone into the bushes before peeling out.

“Can’t have you using this to contact that nice boy you mentioned you have waiting at home for you. But I’ll hold on to this money for Cohen.”

“Great,” I muttered. “You’re a thief
and
a kidnapper.”

“Buckle up,” was all he replied.

He didn’t even glance my way as he pulled onto the road, travelling in the opposite direction I longed to be going.

I used the time to get control of my thoughts.

Cohen Blue.

The man’s cold, calculating stare threatened to fill my mind and I shoved it aside.

No.

For six long years I’d been preparing for the eventuality of getting caught. Now that it had actually happened, I couldn’t fall to pieces. I needed to focus on getting home to Jayme, and to maintaining calmness.

I took inventory of the things that worked in my favour. I was supposed to be working for several more hours. So it would be at least that long before Jayme would start to worry, and if I was really lucky, he’d be sleeping late and not even notice I was missing until well into the morning. And I had Misty on my side. Any other place, any other time, I would’ve had no one.

Stupid, stupid.

I’d definitely stayed too long in Trent Falls, lulled into a false sense of security because the town was small and the people were friendly. I should have known—no, I
did
know—that Cohen’s reach extended too far for me to escape so easily. If I’d been quicker and smarter, if I’d stuck to my plan of staying nowhere longer than six months, I would be safe at home at that moment. Albeit a different home, but a home nonetheless. Cohen’s enforcer admitted that he’d spent a lot of time searching for me.

I dug my own hole.

I looked over at the man while trying to pretend I wasn’t. His expression was dark. It marred what was otherwise a very handsome face. I’d been so caught up in the moment last night that I’d barely taken the time to really see what he looked like. Now, I allowed myself a brief, distracted moment to assess him.

He had a dark hair, tinged with early grey, and lashes that matched. His cheekbones were well defined and his brow was strong. At that moment, his jaw was stiff and his mouth was set in a frustrated line. I knew those lips were soft, though. They’d been gentle on my neck, and sweet on my ear. And on my mouth…I shivered in remembered pleasure.

Forget controlling your thoughts,
I chastised myself.
You need to control your body.

But my reaction was involuntary. It was the kind of response that
couldn’t
be controlled. When he kissed me beside the car, and I tried to pull away from him, my body had fought me to curve into him instead. It felt good and right to be pressed up against the man’s solid form.

Even now, watching the way his hands gripped the steering wheel tightly, possessively, made me ache to feel them on my body again. If it wasn’t for Jayme…

“Are you going to tell me what that was back there?”

His question yanked me back to reality.

“You’re the one who kissed me.” My face was burning.

“I’m not talking about that.”

“I don’t know what you mean then,” I replied curtly.

“You had an opportunity to save yourself. Or at least buy some time. All you had to do was tell your boss who I was.”

“I don’t
know
who you are.”

He ignored my snide reply. “Why didn’t you give me up?”

What
had
been going through my mind at the moment Ellis walked in? Panic. A need to protect Jayme. The sexy way my captor’s shirt hugged his chest. I couldn’t tell him any of that. So I went for a half-truth.

“I didn’t want Ellis to get hurt.”

“You thought I would hurt him?”

“You wouldn’t have?”

His hands flexed on the steering wheel and his frown deepened. “I’m not in the business of hurting people who don’t deserve it.”

“And who decides if they deserve it?” I scoffed. “You?”

“I find it’s usually pretty obvious.”

“I find it’s usually pretty subjective,” I countered. “Especially for Cohen Blue’s men. He doesn’t exactly employ the fairest judges.”

“No, he doesn’t. But that doesn’t mean I’m a thug.”

I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. I was familiar enough with Cohen’s hiring practices to be sure that
every
man who worked for him was a thug.

He glanced at me and read my expression. “You know him well?”

There was a hint of some underlying tension in his voice.

“Well enough,” I answered noncommittally.

He eyed me up and down. “You danced for him?”

“No!”

“Relax. It was a logical assumption.”

“Based on what?” I snapped.

The man’s eyes widened at my tone. “Based on what I know about him and what I know about you.”

“You don’t know anything about me. And I doubt you know as much about Cohen as I do.”

“You must’ve spent quite a bit of time with him, then. Cohen doesn’t let many people close to him.”

“I know him better than I’d like to, okay?”

“Is that right?”

His gaze flicked back to my face. It was curious and a bit too interested. I suddenly wanted to steer the conversation away from both Cohen and my home life, but the green-eyed man seemed determined to probe me about it.

“Let me ask you something else then…who’s more dangerous? Cohen? Or the man you’ve got at home?”

This time I recognized the tone. He was jealous. Or something like it.

That’s ridiculous. He’s just got something to prove.

“I thought we already decided not to have the size-doesn’t-matter conversation.” I managed to keep my tone light.

He laughed, and I tried not to be affected by the rich sound of it.

“Can we talk about something else? Anything but Cohen?” I asked.

“I thought we were talking about you, actually.”

“I want to talk about myself even less than I want to talk about your boss.”

“Fine. What’s your boyfriend like?”

Dammit.
I needed him to stop asking me questions.

“You don’t know when to stop, do you?”

He shrugged. “Dogging people helps me get the job done. Have you been dancing long?”

“You think that’s cute?”

“What?”

“Teasing me about what I do for work?”

“I wasn’t teasing.”

“Maybe not.”
But you’re not asking about my boyfriend anymore, either, and that’s my real goal.
“But just in case, I’ll answer your next set of questions in advance. Yes, I make good money. No, I’m really not a hooker, and yes, I realize that my body is a temple. Or has an expiry date. Or whatever it is that you think justifies telling me how to live my life.”

“I was just trying to be
nice.
” He sounded genuinely offended.

Perfect.

“By stealing my phone and my money and forcing me into a car against my will and then asking me personal questions about my life?”

My exaggerated defensiveness finally seemed to strike a nerve. He pressed the clutch and jammed the gearshift from fourth to third, accelerating more quickly than could possibly be safe.

“Honestly,
Polly
,” he said over the roar of the engine. “I’m not the one who ripped off Cohen Blue. I tend to pay my debts on time. I was trying to take it easy on you because you’re just a girl—”

“Just a girl?” I cut in.

He went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “But it’s clearly backfiring. So if you don’t mind, I’ll stop talking altogether and you can stop talking, too, and we’ll drive until I’m too tired to see, then we’ll have a rest and drive some more.”

I opened my mouth, but I didn’t get a chance to call him out for his tirade. He shifted the Mustang back up to fourth gear and cranked the stereo before I could say another word.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

For the past five miles or more, the girl—Polly, as she insisted on being called—had been crossing and uncrossing her legs every thirty seconds.

“Hmmm?”

She looked up at me as if she’d forgotten I was there. That irritated me even more than the repeated movements. I nodded toward her legs and she flushed.

“Sorry,” she muttered.

I sighed and very nearly reciprocated her apology. Then she did it again. I gritted my teeth. It wasn’t so much the shifting motion that was bothering me. I was sure as hell used to unruly passengers and had been subjected to far worse. Kicks in the shins. Kicks in the balls. Hell, once I’d even been kicked in the teeth. What was really getting to me was that with every recross, her dress hiked up a little further, exposing a tantalizing amount of leg. She pulled the hem down a few times, but it was already back to midthigh. I was having a hard time keeping my eyes on the road. It amazed me, really, that she could elicit such a visceral response in me. Especially since all it took was a little bit of unintentionally exposed leg.

From a girl you’ve already slept with,
I growled at myself.

She moved again, and the lacy bottom of her dress crept up another two inches.

“Stop that!”

She turned to glare at me. “I can’t.”

“Why the hell not?”

“If you must know, I have to pee. Badly.”

I narrowed my eyes at her. “I’m not stopping somewhere populated enough for you to make a run for it.”

“I wasn’t going to ask you to. I wouldn’t even have brought up the fact that I have to go if you weren’t so short-tempered about my discomfort.”

“Are you
trying
to set me off?” I demanded.

“No.”

Something in her expression made me think she was at least a little bit happy
about my agitated state, though. So I couldn’t resist an urge to knock the gleam out of her eye. I slammed on the brakes and swerved across two lanes to come to a crooked stop on the side of the dusty highway.

To her credit, Polly didn’t shriek as her seat belt flew open and she shot sideways, her bottom sliding across the centre console. To my
own
credit, I didn’t react as her dress flew up and half of her soft, perfectly formed ass landed in my lap. I only exhaled a little sharply as she lifted herself away, exposing the curve of her underwear.

“Make it quick,” I commanded. “And trust me when I say this is the last place you want to be stranded.”

I nodded at the dry expanse of sandy horizon. It was too dark to see much, but I knew it was dotted here and there with a few bushy plants and not much more.

“Tarantulas,” I whispered.

Polly gave me a dirty look. She didn’t comment as she let herself out of the Mustang. Her emphatic door slam said it all.

I turned away politely as her head dipped out of view, then grabbed my cell phone from the glovebox. I typed in a quick text to Cohen Blue.

En route. J. Duncan in hand.

There was a delay as the message took its time going through, then came the reply that made me grind my teeth.

Good work.

He sounded like he was patting a schoolboy on the head. Next, he’d be handing me a gold star and smacking my hand with a smiley-face stamp.

I flipped through the radio stations, irrationally frustrated that I couldn’t find a good song. I glanced out the window in Polly’s general direction. I could just see the top of her hair.

Why is she taking so long?

I strummed my fingers on the dashboard in time with a tune I didn’t know. When it ended and Polly still didn’t come back to the car, my impatience got the better of me. I swung open my door and hopped out.

“Pull up your underwear! I’m coming over there!”

I stalked to the other side of the Mustang just in time to see Polly stand up, stumble backward, and land on her backside with an “oomph”. She stared at me, guilt and worry mingling on her face.

What the hell?

She scooted away from my puzzled gaze. As she moved, a cell phone clattered across the ground. Her expression immediately made more sense. She reached for the phone, but I was faster.

In two quick steps my booted foot was on top of it. In one more I was crushing it.

“No!”

I whipped back to Polly. Her voice was full of pain, and so was her face. I ignored the tug on my heart when I spied unshed tears in her eyes.

“What did you tell them?”

“What did I tell who?”

I yanked her to her feet.

“The fucking cops!” I yelled.

“I didn’t call the police.”

“Right.”

She looked me straight in the face and shook her head. It annoyed me that I wanted to believe her. I broke eye contact first.

“If you hadn’t stomped on my phone, you could’ve checked,” she pointed out after a moment.

“Why didn’t you call them?”

“It didn’t seem important.”

I threw my hands up in exasperation. “Who
did
you call then?”

“If you hadn’t stomped on my phone,” she said again, this time with a raised eyebrow. “You could’ve checked that, too.”

I grabbed her by the wrist, and when she tried to pull away, I held on even tighter. I could feel her pulse racing through her arteries and throbbing against my fingers. She looked down at my hands. They were rough, calloused and tanned, and they stood out from her starkly fair skin. I rolled her arm over so I could stroke the tender spot between her palm and her wrist. She didn’t move, except to gasp when a trail of goosebumps followed my thumb along the line of her arm.

At the sound of air leaving her mouth, my eyes jerked up to take in the sight of her parted lips. They were still red from the make-up she’d worn during her performance.

What colour is under that deep, unnatural hue? It was too dark last night to tell for sure.

I had to know.

A compulsion.

It was the first time I’d ever been able to put an actual, physical sensation to the word.

It was almost overwhelming.

I took a step forward, closing the gap between us.
Almost
became
must
, and I reached up with my free hand. I was fully prepared to wipe away the lipstick so I could see what was underneath. Before I could, her own arm came up and pressed against my chest. Her palm was flat on my skin. I stiffened because I couldn’t stop myself.

Not on my skin,
I corrected myself.
On my shirt. There’s a whole layer of fabric between us.

I still had to fight off a flinch. When I shuffled my feet, her fingers slipped between the top two buttons, and suddenly her skin
was
touching mine.

My reaction wasn’t defensive, as I thought it would be. Instead, it felt good.

I told myself it was because it had been so long since I let anyone near that part of my body and all the suffering that went along with it, but the truth was that it was
her
.

I had to stifle a carnal moan that threatened to escape from somewhere deep within my throat.

Jesus.

Heat spread like wildfire from my chest to my groin. I closed my eyes and savoured the feeling. She twisted the top button out of its hole and traced her nails along my collarbone. I held myself very still. I was sure that if I allowed myself to respond, I’d have her pressed against the Mustang in thirty seconds or less. I’d pull that dress over her head. I’d push myself into those subtly enticing underwear and from there, I wouldn’t be able to control my actions anymore.

“Sixty dollars,” she breathed into my ear.

“Huh?”

“The going rate.”

“For what?”

“For a lap dance.”

My eyes flew open and I jerked away. She shrugged.

“In fact, eighty is the going rate at Tangerines,” she told me. “So sixty is a steal of a deal.”

I was tempted—for a very long second—to reach for my wallet so I could pull out three crisp twenties and then tuck them into her ample cleavage.

Just to see what she’d do,
I told myself.
Not because I need her in my lap.

Instead I sighed and stated coldly, “I don’t have to pay for it.”

She grinned, but the smile didn’t quite touch her eyes. “No. Quite the opposite.”

“What does that mean?”

“Oh, come on. Cohen more or less paid you to sleep with me.”

Her statement couldn’t have pissed me off more. “He sure as hell didn’t.”

“Tell yourself what you need to.”

My jaw tightened as I forced myself to head off the argument. “I distinctly recall taking away your cell phone.”

She shrugged again. “I happen to have a second one. Or I
did
have one until a minute ago.”

“Why?”

“One for business, one for pleasure.”

“Which one was which?” She didn’t answer my question, so I tried again. “Where was the second one hidden? Just for future reference.”

“Future reference? Are you planning on kidnapping another innocent woman sometime soon?”

“My employer never sends me after innocent women,” I replied.

“But he sends you after innocent
men?”
Polly countered.

“He never sends me after innocent people,” I amended.

“How can you be sure?” she wanted know.

“Because in the end…they all pay up.”

She snorted. “And I suppose I will, too?”

“Yes,” I said. “Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to get back in the car.”

“And if I do mind?”

“Then I’ve got some tricks up my sleeve. And all of them start with a roll of duct tape.”

She tilted her head to the side curiously and from the set of her mouth, I thought she might be trying to cover a laugh. I guided her back to the Mustang and depressed the lock emphatically before closing her door.

I turned to her once more before we moved off.

“Why
didn’t
you call for help?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Maybe you’re not the only one who feels the need to do things below board.”

“Not the words of an innocent woman,” I pointed out, then after a pause, added, “You were calling
him
weren’t you? The size-doesn’t-matter guy at home. Should I expect him to come after us?”

She smiled sadly and shook her head. “I just called a friend.”

I suppressed a surge of irrational jealousy. “You’re lying.”

“Why would I lie?”

Why would she?

Get a grip, Painter.

“What did you say to your friend?” I asked.

“That I was going to be late coming home from work.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Late?”

Her mouth set in a determined line. “Did you really think I was just going go back to Cohen without a fight?”

“Try to escape,” I warned grimly. “And I’ll crush more than your phone.”

I cranked the radio and pulled out onto the highway once more.