Miles Read online

  He saw her gaze tallying him up and nodded. “Sure, you could try going at me,” he said. “Others have. But I can tell you right now, it won’t do any good.” He lifted one hand and punched it into the palm of his other hand. Immediately his biceps and triceps bounced up and down his arm.

  “I’m not strong enough,” she said with a nod. “But you still haven’t told me anything about why I’m here.” She rubbed her temple.

  Then he laughed. “You couldn’t even get the bands off.”

  She looked at them. “No, they’re very tight. Same as on my ankles.”

  “I’ve had a couple women get free of them,” he said with a sneer. “I had to perfect my bonds.”

  “A couple women?”

  “Yep. Women. All kinds and sizes.” But he said it with such a flippant manner that she didn’t know if she could believe him or not.

  “And this person who’s coming to see me, are you selling me to him?” She hated to voice the thoughts in the back of her mind, but she didn’t know how else to get answers.

  His gaze sharpened. “Baby,” he said, “depends if he likes what he sees.”

  “I was afraid of that,” she said with a nod. Then she rotated her neck ever-so-slowly, trying to work out the kinks and the stress, but her jaw had locked down so much that, as she clenched her teeth together, it was damn-near impossible to loosen it up.

  “Better look your prettiest,” he said. “And you need to behave.”

  “Or else?” she asked, desperately trying to keep the defiance back but hearing a note of it enter anyway.

  He narrowed his gaze. “A little bit of spirit is fine. Most guys like that. But don’t even think that a lot of defiance will do you any good. I don’t have a problem blackening your eyes or breaking your nose or slamming that jaw off-kilter. The buyer won’t be terribly happy, but he’ll understand. Particularly if I’m tuning you up for his use.”

  At his words, all the color fled from her skin, and she nodded. “Like I said, I’m no match for you.”

  “Remember that,” he said. “Now somebody’s coming in to take that bag away. I can’t have you like that when the buyer comes to check you over.”

  She swallowed. “Check me over?” And that grin of his made her skin crawl.

  “Well, the guy has to see what he’s buying, doesn’t he?” And, with that, he stepped out and closed the door hard.

  She swallowed and could feel the tears in her eyes. Check her over. That meant strip her down for some guy to view her like a piece of meat. Disgust once again rolled through her. But this time, the sense of having to do something, even if she died in the process, came with it. She didn’t want to be here for some guy to paw her over like a product he was checking to see if good enough.

  She immediately went to working on her ankles, getting one long foot and narrow ankle through one loop of her bindings. With that off, she got her other foot loose too. She quickly opened up the binding so that she had something to use for her own benefit now. And then, knowing it would hurt like shit, she positioned herself so she could remove her catheter. Taking a deep breath, she let her breath out and pulled the catheter straight out. She took several deep breaths afterward and then stood back up.

  With it now in the sink, at least her bladder was empty, and she was capable of walking around freely, except for her damn hand bindings. She had to get them off too. Using the same trick that she’d used for her feet, she got one hand loose, then the next. Now she had a second tie to do something else with. She quickly went to work on the bed, tying her bindings to the frame, and then got one of the windows open. She only had the bed frame to tie her escape rope on.

  She knotted the thin summer blanket, hoping it was long enough to at least get her down one of these three stories. And, with that tied to the bindings already secured on the bed frame—which happened to be at the window, thank God—she stripped off the bed’s sheets and tied them together as well. She needed some way to get fully down the three stories, and she didn’t have many options.

  She wished she could cut or rip the sheets into strips, but she had no real time to do that and didn’t want to make the noise either. One of the sheets was ripped though, and she studied it for a moment and then quietly ripped it all the way down, then tied the pieces together and threw her makeshift rope outside. That would at least get her down one more floor.

  The more she did, the more she panicked she became that her kidnapper and the damn buyer would return before she was done.

  If she had to fall twenty feet, it might break an ankle, and she couldn’t do a lot about that, but she’d do what she could. Besides, she only had so many options and wouldn’t lie here and be some bloody guy’s gift. Or purchase. That was the worst thing, just knowing that this was happening to her soon, and she could do only so much to stop it. But she’d do her damnedest.

  And, with that, and nothing useable left except for the mattress, she looked at it and smiled. Then she grabbed it and threw it out the window, knowing that that would alert anybody on watch below, but it would hopefully give her something soft to land on. As soon as it fell, she immediately heard the pounding of feet beyond her door. And so, hanging on to the sheet, she jumped out the window and climbed down.

  There had to be a way to get to the bottom and a way to save her ass from all this. From the looks of her kidnapper, he could just as easily yank the sheets and her right back up and through the window with no problem. This escape plan of hers was just too stupid to even contemplate as possible, but it was what she had.

  As soon as she climbed along the blanket to the sheet, she heard shouting above. She immediately slid as fast as she could, going all the way down. And, when she ran out of sheets, she dropped to the ground. Luckily she hit the mattress, but she rolled, jumped up and headed around the corner as fast as she could. For all she knew, her captor was already here on the ground, outside, waiting for her. And that would be too damn bad. She would do the best she could, and, if it was not quite enough, she’d deal with it. But she’d go down trying.

  She whipped around the corner, and, as soon as she got there, she raced forward, only to slam up against a vehicle. She hit the front of the hood, rolled up the windshield and bounced off the rooftop, even as people around her screamed and yelled. And then she raced to her feet, limping and struggling as she tried to get away.

  When two people came to her, one a woman, Vanessa screamed, “Help me! Help me! They kidnapped me and were keeping me prisoner up there.”

  And she pointed to where the sheet and blanket were being lifted up over the windowsill again. And that’s the last thing she remembered, as she put her weight down on her foot, and the pain shrieked up her spine. If she hadn’t broken her ankle, she had damn-near done a good job of it, hurting it one way or another. She’d be lucky if she survived one more step. But then she saw her captor on the street. She pointed him out and said, “That’s him. There! He’s the man who kidnapped me.”

  He took one look, pointing his finger at her, and said, “I’ll be back,” then bolted.

  Vanessa tried to go after him, seeing where he went, when the pain rocketed up her leg, and she went down, smacking her head on the concrete. And that was it. Darkness took her over.

  Miles’s phone rang as they raced toward their interview. He answered it and said, “Yeah, what’s up?”

  “Disturbance at,” and he was given an intersection, which Miles immediately punched into the car’s GPS, and then Nico pulled the vehicle into a U-turn in the middle of the street with screeching tires all around them. The caller continued, “A woman just escaped, saying she’d been kidnapped. She’s hurt, but she got herself out. An ambulance is at the scene right now, and we think it’s her.”

  “Her?”

  “Vanessa,” the voice said. “You need to get there fast. A crowd has gathered, and it’s chaos.”

  “We’re on the way,” Miles said. “Be there in five.”

  “Faster than that,” Nico said.
r />   Miles put down his phone and looked at Nico. “Well, remember what I said about how Vanessa needs to be aware and paying attention and to stand on her own two feet? It looks like she did this rescue job all on her own,” he said with a proud smile.

  Nico nodded and returned his smile, then called the police station, canceling their two interviews and asking for a plainclothes detective to follow both interviewees until further notice and hung up.

  As they reached the scene, the ambulance pulled away.

  Nico asked Miles, “Do you want to follow her to the hospital or get details from the scene?”

  “I want both,” he said. “Drop me off here, and you go after the ambulance.” Then he quickly approached a few people and asked them for details. The gist of it was, she’d climbed out a window, dropped onto a mattress on the ground and then got hit by a car but got back up again. As she was leaving, her captor came after her. Miles didn’t hear anything new or different as the cops took official statements. On that note, Miles headed toward the hospital on foot, taking another fifteen minutes to get there.

  As he walked in through the front doors, he texted Nico and asked where he was.

  The answer came back immediately. Emergency.

  Miles joined him there and asked, “Any idea how badly hurt she is?”

  “Not so bad that she has to stay much longer than maybe overnight, yet not so good that she can be alone,” Nico said quietly. “The blow from the vehicle hit her pretty severely. She’s got abrasions and bruising all along her lower abdomen. She’s badly bruised her ribs but they aren’t broken. And her ankle? We don’t know if it’s broken or just sprained at this point in time.”

  “From the jump out of the window?”

  “It’s possible. Or from the car hitting her? I don’t think anybody really knows yet. She’s unconscious.”

  “That’s not good,” Miles said. “Head injury?”

  “They don’t know. None of the bystanders could say, and, when the emergency personnel arrived on scene, Vanessa came around, but she couldn’t say either. She passed out almost immediately as soon as they started working on her.”

  “Which means it’s likely a concussion,” Miles said with a nod. “Can I see her?”

  “She’s already in a private hospital room, probably awaiting tests or the results. They’re not letting anybody in right at the moment,” Nico said, pointing at her room.

  Miles snorted at that and, when he stepped inside, found one nurse at Vanessa’s side.

  “Only family is allowed here,” the nurse said.

  He walked straight to Vanessa on the hospital bed and picked up her hand, then immediately held it against his cheek. “And fiancés,” he whispered. God, he hated to see the flaxen look to her skin. Her expression was not a calm stillness but instead an almost stirred sense of being in a panic mode underneath. He cupped her cheek and whispered, “It’s okay now. You’ll be just fine.” He leaned over and kissed her gently, brushing the hair off her freckles, knowing this was real, not some act.

  Then he turned to the nurse, glared and barked, “How bad is it?”

  She smiled at him. “Not so bad. She’ll survive. She took quite a blow.”

  “She’s incredibly resilient,” he said, squeezing Vanessa’s fingers lightly. He glanced at her ankle and frowned. He could see the swelling already evident. “I don’t like to look of that,” he muttered. The alignment was good, but it was pretty well black and blue already.

  “No, but considering some of her other injuries,” the nurse said, “the ankle will heal fast enough.”

  “Do we have X-rays back yet?”

  “No, not yet,” she said. “We just got her back from X-ray though, so at least she can rest undisturbed for now. We’re waiting on the results.”

  He pulled up a chair and sat, then dropped his forehead to her arm and held his position while the nurse left. At that point, he lifted his head and stared at the beautiful woman on the bed, then whispered, “That was an incredibly brave and very risky thing you just did. And I’m so grateful you did it.” He knew she would be as well, if and when she ever woke up, but, at the moment, she was struggling. She was unconscious and showing no signs of coming back. Or, at least, he didn’t think so.

  But then she opened her eyes, looked at him and asked, “Who the hell are you?”

  He grinned at her and whispered, “For now I’m your fiancé.”

  She shook her head, her eyes diamond hard. “I don’t have one,” she said. “And I’ve had enough of strange men determining who and what I am in life to them.”

  He nodded and whispered, “Special Ops. Came here to rescue you, only to find out you had rescued yourself.”

  Hearing that, her demeanor changed a bit. That or it could be the meds she was on too.

  “No,” she said, struggling, her eyes closing on her. “He said he’d come after me. I’m not out of danger.” She gripped his hand hard. “Please don’t let him get me again.”

  Then her eyes closed, and she was out cold once more.

  Chapter 4

  Vanessa seemed to surface and awoke multiple times, and every time she had a terrible realization that she was still a prisoner because she was so caught up in her nightmares. When she finally woke and could get her wits about her, she glanced around, and she was in a different room entirely. Relief washed through her and almost flooded her senses to the point of tears.

  Immediately a voice beside her whispered, “It’s all right. You’re safe now. You’re in a hospital, and you’ll be okay.”

  At the voice, she frowned, turned and looked at a man she distantly remembered. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Miles,” he said. “I came looking for you, only to find out you had escaped by yourself.”

  And, with that, the rest of the pieces fell into place. She stared at the man who’d been with her before she had crashed the last time. “What the hell happened?”

  “We’re not exactly sure,” he admitted. “We’ll find out though.”

  “My kidnapper said a man, a buyer, was coming to check me over to ensure I was good enough.” She tried hard not to let the pain and fear come through her voice, but she could still hear it in her tone. She gave a small head shake and then cried out as the pain slammed up against her skull.

  He placed his hand on her cheek to steady her. “It seems you tied the sheets together and dropped out of a three-story window onto a mattress, and then you got up and ran away,” he said gently, “but a car hit you. You hit the front end, rolled up onto the windshield and then collapsed on the concrete. You may have some head trauma to go along with the ankle and a few bruised ribs and some very bruised innards.”

  She stared at him, her mind still fitting the new pieces of information into place. What she thought she’d known fell into disarray, but then slowly the pieces were picked up and put into the right place again. “I had to get out. He finally left me alone and told me that this person was coming.” Then her eyes widened. “But I saw him, the guy holding me,” she said, bolting upright and then crying out in agony, her body twisting in on itself.

  Miles stood and sat gently on the bed beside her. “You have to stop moving.”

  “Now you tell me,” she gasped out in pain. “Oh, my God, the pain.” Tears fell from her eyes.

  A nurse came in just then. “She woke up?”

  “Woke up and bolted up,” he said quietly. “Now she’s overcome with pain.”

  The nurse immediately walked over and adjusted the IV. “It’ll ease back in a few minutes,” she announced.

  Vanessa sobbed. She wanted them all to go away—well, maybe not this guy at her bedside—but, more than that, she wanted this horrible gut-wrenching pain to go away. She wanted to go back to the day she’d been in her apartment and just forget about going to a photo shoot. It didn’t matter that she’d made the arrangements for it. She never wanted to live with this new reality again.

  The nurse had been correct though, and, after a fe
w more moments, as the pain meds finally rolled through her bloodstream, she relaxed and quietly recovered from that excruciating pain. As she laid here, she heard the man whispering, “Just breathe. Take a long moment and just breathe. You’ll be fine. You’re safe. And I understand that he said he would come after you. And, when you’re feeling better, we’ll work on identifying who this man is.”

  She gave an almost imperceptible nod and said, “Okay. But not right now. Maybe not even today.”

  “It needs to be today,” he said, his voice firm. “The longer we postpone it, the easier it is for him to hide.”

  “He’s done this before,” she said. “Many times.”

  “All the more reason,” Miles said, “to make sure we stop him now. You don’t want to be looking over your shoulder every day of the rest of your life.”

  No, she certainly didn’t. And that sounded like an absolute nightmare. A life sentence of fear. “And what about the man who was coming to check me over?”

  “I’m sure that meeting has been called off,” he said. “But we do have men stationed outside the building where you escaped, while others are already inside and doing a search.”

  “Hopefully they know which room I was locked up in,” she said.

  “The last word I had was the entire apartment had been emptied. Including the bed and the sheets you used.”

  She shook her head. “But not the mattress,” she whispered, a note of triumph in her voice. Maybe she’d beaten him after all.

  He smiled down at her. “No, that’s been taken to forensics. If we can find other people’s DNA on it, that would be good.”

  “But there were sheets and a blanket,” she muttered. “So …”