Ruthless: Contemporary Military Romance (25 page)

Although she had grown up a lot since he had first met her, Matt had to smile as he thought of the woman Holly had become. When he had met her, she was a scared, lonely girl running away from her rich parents. Now she was a self-confident woman going after her dreams. Matt loved the girl, but it was the woman that he had fallen
in
love with. Holly was irresistible, and he couldn’t wait to get back to her and the life they were just starting in San Francisco.

First, however, he had celebrations to attend.

The lunch was a simple but happy affair. They ate at Becky’s favorite diner. They all ate with a wolf-like appetite, as if the good news had finally lifted some old tension from their bodies and their stomach had finally gotten unclenched for the first time in ages. Coming to think of it, Matt thought, that was probably the case.

He filled his sister and Joe in on the new details of his life. He told them about his intention to settle down in San Francisco, and they were very happy about the prospect of having someone in California to go visit regularly. He told them about finding Erik again after he had believed his friend to be lost forever, and they all marveled at the quirky way life worked sometimes. He told them about Erik’s cottage and the vineyard, and he told them about Erik’s proposal to give it all over to him and Holly.

“Are you going to say yes?” Becky asked. She was clearly trying to keep her question as neutral as possible so as not to influence his answer, but her amber eyes were sparkling with excitement.

“I think so,” Matt admitted after a moment.

Becky broke out into a wide, bright smile. “I think you should too.”

“It certainly sounds like a great opportunity,” Joe said. “If you don’t mind me saying, you and Holly would be fools to turn it down.”

Matt smiled. “I don’t mind you saying at all,” he said. “I feel the same way. Holly is very excited about the idea too.”

“I don’t blame her,” Becky said. “Speaking of Holly…”

Matt groaned. There was a smirk forming on his sister’s lips that he did not like at all. “What?” he asked with a long-suffering sigh.

“Are you thinking of marrying her?”

Matt almost choked on the beer bottle he was taking a sip from. “
What
?”

“I’m just saying,” Becky said, innocently, “You’re obviously madly in love with this girl, and you’re already making big plans. So, are you going to marry her?”

Matt swallowed convulsively. He had not thought about that. He thought about it now, and the idea didn’t seem so bad at all. Still, he didn’t think it was time to discuss it just yet. “I don’t know,” he said cautiously. “Maybe. Someday.”

“Ah.” Becky grinned. “You are
so
going to marry her.”

Matt groaned again.

Joe laughed. “Becky, leave the guy alone. He’ll ask her when he asks her.”

Matt glared at him but didn’t say anything. All of a sudden, he felt like asking her right now. If only she would return his calls.

CHAPTER FORTY ONE

There were many things that Holly hated, many things that annoyed her and got on her nerves or that simply rubbed her the wrong way. But being tied to a chair as Erik Schneider made a phone call to her father to tell him that he would be delivering her the next day surely topped the list.

Holly watched the man with burning gray eyes. She couldn’t believe he had found her so quickly. She couldn’t believe her bad, horrible luck. And to think that she had thought her and Matt were finally on their way to finding their place in the world…

Erik disconnected the call and turned to look at her. He crossed his arms over his chest and studied her carefully.

“You gave me a good chase for a while there, I’ll have to admit,” he said. “Better than anyone in your position has given me in quite some time.”

Holly felt her cheeks flush with anger. “So you’ve done this before?”

“Oh, yes.” He sat on the edge of the bed in the motel room she had rented. “You won’t believe how many spoiled brats such as yourself feel like fleeing their golden domes, and how much the parents are willing to pay for them to be returned home.”

“So that’s what you do now? Bring home runaway kids?” Holly snorted in disgust.

Erik shrugged. “Don’t knock it ‘till you’ve tried it,” he said. “It’s good money, and I need it. Or did you think the costs of a vineyard could be sustained with an army pension?”

“Your parents would be proud,” Holly taunted.

Erik’s sharp blue eyes flashed dangerously, and for a moment she feared she might have made a mistake and he might strike her, but he visibly pulled himself together and reined his anger in.

“Look, I don’t like this any more than you do,” he said after a moment. “But I don’t have much choice.”

Holly frowned, narrowing her eyes in suspicion. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I can’t keep a job,” Erik admitted. “My PTSD makes sure of that. I’m good at tracking down people; it’s what I did in the army. It’s what I do. I’m a tracker. So why not put that to good use?”

“Good use?” Holly stared at him incredulously. “Do you know what’s going to happen to me once you deliver me back to my daddy dearest?”

“Oh, I’m sure it’ll be quite horrible for you to manage to family wealth and live your rich life, will it?”

Holly clenched her jaw. She lifted her chin a fraction and impaled the man with her eyes, glad when she saw him flinch a little under her hard stare. “He’s going to marry me off to a guy named Timothy Sutherland.”

Erik stared at her. “He a violent man?”

“No,” Holly said after a moment. “He’s a good man,” she had to admit. “But I don’t love him.”

Infuriatingly enough, Erik just shrugged. “Could be worse, then.”

“I’m in love with Matt,” Holly said. “Matt, remember him? Your friend? Your ‘brother in arms’? Don’t you care about him at all?”

Erik glared warningly at her. “I care about him more than you’ll ever be able to understand,” he said. “But this isn’t about him. It doesn’t concern him.”

Holly stared at him. Did he really believe that? Could he really not see what it was that he was doing? Could he really not realize how bad he was hurting his friend? “‘It doesn’t concern him’?” she repeated, stunned. “In case you haven’t noticed, Matt loves me, too. We are planning a life together. You’re taking that away.”
You’re taking
me
away. Please, don’t take me away,
Holly thought desperately, but she wouldn’t be caught dead voicing those thoughts aloud.

Erik shook his head. “I’m sorry, Holly,” he said. “You’re a nice girl, but I can’t just let you go. I can’t lose this money.”

Holly looked at him. She could tell that he was genuinely sorry to have to do this, but the sincerity of his feelings only made her hate him all the more.

“How many lives have you ruined for your precious money?” she spat. “How many dreams have you crushed just so that you could keep producing your precious wine?”

“It’s not about the wine,” Erik said. “Don’t you see? It’s about my parents. I owe them. I owe it to them to make sure the place they called home keeps thriving.”

Holly shook her head in disdain. “You keep telling yourself whatever you need to sleep at night, Erik,” she said, holding his gaze firmly. “You’re betraying me. Worse than that, you’re betraying Matt. See how understanding he will be when he comes back and he can’t find me, and you tell him you’ve handled me back to my father.”

Erik snorted a little. He shook his head. “I’m not telling him that. He’d hate me.”

A cold sense of fear spread within Holly’s belly. “What are you going to tell him?” she asked quietly.

“I’m going to tell him you’ve changed your mind and that you’ve gone back to your family.”

Holly’s eyes widened. “You can’t tell him that! He’ll think I don’t love him anymore!”

“And isn’t that best for everybody?” Erik said. “He’ll get over you much faster if he thinks you’ve abandoned him.”

“Erik, please—”

“That’s enough, Holly,” Erik snapped. “I’m going to get some sleep now, and when I wake up, we’re going back to San Francisco. Your father is meeting us there. Don’t make me gag you,” he added when he saw that she was opening her mouth to protest. “I don’t want to hear another word from you until I wake.”

Holly snapped her mouth shut. She watched as Erik lay down on the mattress and turned his back to her. It was only a few minutes before he was asleep, the exhaustion from the chase having caught up with him.

Holly looked around frantically for something,
anything
that might help her cut through the bonds, but she knew even as she cast panicked glances all over the room that she would find nothing. She tugged at the thick rope, but of course it didn’t budge. She had not expected it to, either. Erik was an ex-military man who had served multiple tours on some of the hottest war zones on the planet. He would leave nothing to chance, and there was no way in hell his knots would be anything but iron strong.

Holly sighed dejectedly and sank against the back of the hard wooden chair. She was trapped. There really was no escaping this time. She was going back to the life she had run away from. She was going to marry someone she did not love. She was going to bear his children. She was going to manage a family business she had no interest in. She was going to spend the rest of her life trapped somewhere she didn’t want to be. She was going to die in the small town of Lincoln, Texas—the same town she had done all within her power to get as far away from as possible.

Tears came to blur her eyesight, and she forcefully pushed them back. Crying always gave her a splitting headache, and she knew she needed to stay sharp. She couldn’t believe this was the end of it all. She couldn’t believe she had come so far, only to be sent back now and for all of her efforts to be nullified.

She stared at Erik’s sleeping form, and she felt a surge of hate so strong that it almost overwhelmed her. She had been so stupid not to voice her doubts about the man to Matt. She had been so stupid to ignore her gut feeling that told her to get far away from this man as fast as she could. She had tried to respect Matt’s feelings and to honor the friendship he shared with Erik, and look where that had gotten her—tied to a chair in a motel room in the middle of nowhere.

But it was Erik’s intention not to tell Matt the truth that was really, truly killing her. She couldn’t think of anything worse than Matt believing she had willingly turned her back on him. Pretty much everyone had walked out on Matt at some point or another, from his heroin addict mother to the father who had abandoned him, to the brother who had killed himself with an overdose. Holly hated the thought of Matt adding her to that list. The list of people who had left him behind.

Holly tugged some more on the ropes, in an attempt that she knew would be vain. She could not believe this was really happening to her. It felt surreal, like something out of a bad novel. Instead, it was real life. She was
really
going to be shipped back to her father like she was nothing more than a parcel. It certainly felt like everyone thought she had the same will, too. Her father surely didn’t seem to think like whatever she might think or feel mattered squat.

Holly sat in that chair in the motel room, and she despaired. This was it. It was really over. She would never see Matt again. From then on, she would wake up next to a man she knew she could never learn to love.

***

Erik emerged from the fogs of sleep about three hours later. He sat bolt upright in bed, his skin clammy with the cold sweat brought on by nightmares. His sharp blue eyes had a dull look to them as he looked around the room with a lost expression on his face. Finally, after a few moments, he seemed to get his bearings back. He stared at Holly, who was watching him quietly from her chair. If he were at all embarrassed that she had witnessed his vulnerability, he didn’t show it.

He ran a hand across his face and stood. He disappeared into the bathroom, and when he emerged a few minutes later, he was as cool and confident as always.

“Let’s go, princess,” he said. He walked up to her and cut through the ropes with an army knife he kept in his boot.

Instinctively, Holly lashed out. Her punch connected with the man’s chin, making his head snap back, and she launched herself out of the chair and made a mad dash for the door. She had not taken three steps when she was knocked out from behind. She crashed to the floor, and everything was a blur as Erik bent down to grab her arm and hauled her up harshly. Things spun for a moment, and she didn’t have time to get her bearings back before the back of his hand collided with her cheek. Holly’s head snapped to the side and a burning pain flared up all over her face and head.

It was a few moments before her ears stopped ringing. She could taste blood on her tongue from where the slap had split her lip.

“Don’t you
ever
do that again,” Erik growled in her face. “I don’t take kindly to tricks. Is that understood?”

There was a wild light in his blue eyes, and Holly was suddenly very afraid. Unable to speak, she nodded vehemently.

“Good.” Erik tugged roughly at her arm and manhandled her out of the room and to his car, a beat-up ’94 Cherokee jeep. “Get in.” He pushed her into the passenger seat and secured her seat belt. “If you run, I won’t be so gentle. Got it?”

Again, Holly nodded. Her heart was slamming so hard against her ribcage that it actually hurt.

Erik climbed in behind the wheel and took off.

Holly watched as the landscape sped by the dirty windows of the car. She felt as helpless as she had never felt before in her life. She wanted to cry, but she still had enough pride that she refused to do it in front of
him
, the man who was taking her life away from her before it even got the chance to start.

She swallowed past the lump in her throat. Her voice was weak when she spoke, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that it was loud enough to be heard, and it was. “Matt will figure it out eventually, you know?” she said. “Maybe not right away. Maybe not after a month, or even a year. But he will, and he’ll hate you forever.”

“I don’t think so,” Erik said after a moment. “In fact, I think Matt will thank me.”

Holly frowned. This guy was a madman. She didn’t say anything and continued to stare out the window…

…And that was when she realized, they were not going to San Francisco. In fact, they were continuing on in the same direction she had been running. She turned her head sharply to look at Erik.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked, her voice cracking with fear. Just what on Earth was going on now?

Erik didn’t look away from the empty road ahead as he replied, “I’m taking you to the nearest airport.”

Holly stared at him. “I don’t understand. I thought my father was meeting us in San Francisco?”