In This Together

Oh, that was it. He’d reached his tolerance for this bullshit.

“So, Daniel won’t respond to pressure tactics, huh? Well, I’d like to see him ignore this.” He opened his truck’s rigid cargo cover and, in one swift motion, he scooped the woman up and thrust her into the truck’s bed. He got the fleeting impression of her soft, womanly body against his, a photo-flash image of the look of surprise and hurt on her face.

And fear.

“Duck,” he said. Then he slammed the cargo cover down and locked it.

CHAPTER TWO

IT TOOK ELENA’S brain a few long, terrifying seconds to realize what had just happened. She’d been abducted. Kidnapped. That seemingly nice man, who moments earlier she had sympathized with, had just thrown her into the back of his truck like so much dirty laundry.

Her heart hammered in her ears and her breath came in quick, short gaps. Okay, okay. She had to calm down and think clearly. She had to take stock of her situation and then formulate a plan.

First off, was she injured? She knew from her freshman biology class at Saint Thomas University that adrenaline could mask pain, and judging from how fast her heart was beating, her body had been flooded with the stuff. But she didn’t think she was seriously injured. In fact, though Travis had practically thrown her into his truck, she distinctly remembered her head cushioned against his muscular forearm even as the rest of her landed with a thunk on the carpeted truck bed.

Her hip hurt. She felt around with her hand and realized she’d landed on a tool of some kind—a wrench, she decided, as she explored the cold steel item with her fingers. She shoved it out of the way.

Her prison was utterly dark. Although the vehicle was a pickup truck, it had a cargo cover. One made of granite, apparently, because it wouldn’t budge no matter how she kicked and shoved.

The truck was moving fast—at least it seemed that way. Travis took a corner on two wheels, and a slew of tools slid against Elena. She shoved them aside, irritated. “Hey, watch the driving,” she yelled.

“Doing the best I can,” he yelled back, his voice muffled but understandable.

Dios mío, he could hear her! She kicked against the cargo cover. “Let me out! You let me out of here right now!”

“Simmer down back there.”

“Hijo de puta!” she yelled, because she couldn’t think of anything else. “Daniel is going to kick your ass.”

He muttered something that sounded like, “I don’t doubt it.”

So the cargo cover didn’t come off. Maybe she could get the tailgate open? Didn’t modern vehicles have latches that could be worked from the inside? Granted, this truck was probably ten years old, but that counted as modern in her book. Her uncle Cesar still drove a 1976 Monte Carlo.

She felt around for a latch and found something near her elbow that was lumpy and bumpy, but no matter which way she pressed and squeezed, she couldn’t make any parts move.

She had to face it: she wasn’t escaping from the truck. She needed a new plan.

Travis was taking her someplace. Where? Before hiring her as his assistant, Daniel had required Elena to take a personal self-defense course for just this reason. He was a powerful man, and some people hated him and might try to get to him through her. Plus, she was an attractive woman, he’d said in a matter-of-fact, nonflirtatious way, and she needed to be able to fend off unwanted advances.

She’d been the worst student in the class. Her attempts to defend herself against her well-padded “attackers” had been pathetic. But she remembered her instructor stressing one thing: never let an assailant get you into his vehicle. If he did, your chances of survival diminished considerably.

That depressing thought wasn’t helpful. What if Travis was driving her to some isolated woods, where he intended to rape her, murder her and bury her in a shallow grave?

Her one chance was to fight back—before he tied her up with duct tape and put a plastic bag over her head and skinned her alive— Oh, Dios, she had to stop watching those true-crime shows. She absolutely refused to believe Travis was the skinning-alive type of guy. He was a man who loved his brother, and he’d done something out of desperation. She’d seen that in his eyes. She hadn’t seen the dead eyes of a psychopathic serial killer, right?

Still, she wouldn’t just meekly go along with whatever his plans were. She’d fight back. Her best weapon was surprise—and tears. She hated the idea of using tears to manipulate a man, but like it or not, she’d found that when she cried, men would bend over backward to do whatever it took to make her stop.

She was too terrified to actually cry right at that moment, but she could do a good job faking it. She started in with a few sniffles, a quiet sob or two; then she started bawling like a hungry calf.

“Hey. Hey, stop that!” Travis objected.

“I d-don’t w-want to d-die!”

“Did anyone say anything about dying?”

That was good news at least. “I’ll do whatever you say—just don’t hurt me.” She kept sniveling, though not quite as loudly as before. When he finally got to wherever he was taking her, he would expect to find a terrified, cowed, cooperative hostage. Her hand closed around the wrench. Was he in for a surprise.

* * *

ONCE TRAVIS WAS a couple of miles from Daniel Logan’s estate and on the freeway with a lot of other cars, he could breathe again. There were no red lights or sirens behind him.

He couldn’t believe what he’d just done. Had he lost his mind completely? Kidnapping was a felony. With his record, he would end up in prison for sure, and a good, long stint this time, in a state penitentiary. Not the cushy county lockup.

For a second he wavered. His brother wouldn’t want...Hell, no going back now. He’d done it. Might as well make it count for something.

He wasn’t sure his actions hadn’t been caught on video, but his car had been parked some distance from the gate, so he might have lucked out. Of course, Daniel would know soon enough that his pretty employee had been kidnapped. But Travis wanted to orchestrate exactly when and how Daniel found out. First, he had to stash Elena someplace where she couldn’t escape and where her screams for help wouldn’t be heard. He couldn’t take her home—that was the first place the police would look.

Travis thought about it for a few minutes until the perfect solution came to him. There was a house he’d recently started work on, a foreclosed property in a five-year-old gated community just off Bissonet in swanky Bellaire. The former owners had trashed the place before vacating—out of frustration and spite, he supposed. It had to be tough, losing your home and everything you put into it. The developer had hired Travis to fix it up before they put it on the market.

The house, on picturesquely named Marigold Circle, sat on a double lot in a cul-de-sac and backed up to a creek. There were no close neighbors. The walls were thick, the windows triple-glass thermals. You could set off a bomb inside and no one would hear. Anyway, this wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where people gave a crap what their neighbors did. Most people there didn’t even know their neighbors’ names.

Another advantage of this location was that it couldn’t be connected to Travis by any paper trail. He didn’t write anything down. His schedule, the address of the house, everything was in his head. He hadn’t yet received any written work orders. His client was logged into his phone, but so were a hundred other contacts the police would have to check out.

He only needed one day, maybe two. If this harebrained plan hadn’t worked by then, it wasn’t going to work at all. Either way, he’d be off to jail when it was over.

Travis had a passkey to get him through the neighborhood gate. He entered the back way, where there wasn’t a guard. The fewer people who saw him here, the better.

The trickiest part would be getting Elena from the truck to the house. The garage wasn’t accessible; the former owners had stripped the house of everything valuable that wasn’t nailed down, and some things that were, including the garage door opener. The door was too heavy to lift manually.

Travis pulled around to the back of the house. Elena had gone awfully quiet; he was worried about her. Though he’d tried not to be too rough with her when he’d grabbed her, he’d been in an awful hurry. What if she’d hit her head when he was driving so crazy, making all those sharp turns?

He got out and unlocked the hatch, then slowly opened it. “Elena?”

Suddenly something flew straight at his face. A crescent wrench? He tried to duck, but it whacked him on the forehead and he was stunned for a moment. Unfortunately, during that moment, his hostage rolled out of the truck, gained her feet and started running and screaming for help.

Travis was after her like a dog after a rabbit. She hadn’t gone five steps before he grabbed her and clamped a hand over her mouth.

“No, no, Elena, shhh!”

She tried to bite his hand as he dragged her toward the back door. God, she was all sharp elbows and heels and...and breasts. Yes, as he’d grappled with her, trying to get a more secure grip on her, he’d accidentally copped a feel. Nice. Let’s add sexual assault to the charges.

She grabbed on to the door frame as he tried to pull her inside. A brief tug-of-war ensued, but her muscles were no match for his and her grip gave way. They both tumbled into the hallway onto a damnably hard tile floor. He took the brunt of the fall.

“Would you just knock it off? You’re only making things worse for yourself.”

“I’m supposed to just let you kidnap me?”

He wanted to reassure her that she was in no danger, that he’d never harmed a woman in his life and he wasn’t about to start with her. But he resisted the temptation. He needed to keep her scared and cooperative.