Guilty Pleasures

He realized she had his wallet. She flipped it open and stared at his driver’s license, counted his money then put it back inside, then counted two credit cards, one issued through Lazarus for business, along with his most recent hunting license.

“Bounty hunter?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Independent?”

“Associated.”

“Out of where?”

“Colorado Springs.”

She raised her brows at that and tossed his wallet onto a desktop.

“I just got in a little while ago.” He offered up a sarcastic smile. “But of course you know that.”

She was watching him closely. “Army … ranger, I’m guessing.”

He raised a brow. “Target on.”

“Must really piss you off that you’re sitting on the floor of my warehouse in your own restraints.”

“You have no idea.”

She moved toward the corner of what looked like an office, the windows giving a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree view of what had once been a factory floor. He peeled his gaze from her primo behind and looked through the open door. A few of the die machines were still in place, dusty and dry. He made out the now covered Camaro and just beyond that, his gun.

He winced again.

Oh, this was so not going anywhere on his trip report.

He also saw that her art medium of choice seemed to be metal sculptures.

Positioned around the open area closest to them were at least three of what he’d guess were works in progress, one of them towering nearly to the warehouse ceiling and resembling a robotlike Greek statue, the others considerably shorter, perhaps too new to show what they’d ultimately end up representing. Two thigh-high piles of scrap metal lay just on the other side of them. Welder’s gear of full mask, goggles and gloves were nearby, along with an industrial-size blowtorch as well as a smaller one.

He glanced back at her, easily imagining her wearing the full mask and working with red-hot fire.

“How about you?” he asked.

“Me, what?” She rifled through drawers looking for something.

“Ex-military?”

She hesitated. “No.”

He guessed that wasn’t entirely true. But surely, information of that nature would have been listed on her sheet. Going after a soft-around-the-middle civilian was a much different job than pitting wits against someone with the same training.

He allowed his gaze to take her in, from her toned arms, her full breasts, flat abs and an ass you could probably bounce a quarter off. Military or not, she’d obviously had training. And not of the fluffy Zumba variety, either. The fact that she had gotten one over on him was evidence of that.

Again, it was something that should have been on her stat sheet.

Mara appeared exasperated as she slammed shut the drawer of a metal desk then propped her hands on her hips. She looked toward the areas that allowed a view outside.

“You alone?” she asked.

“You expect me to answer that?”

She smiled, reminding him of a predatory creature capable of taking a bite out of him. More like the bobcat he’d compared her to when he’d first seen her photos.

The fact that the idea excited him? Probably should have been of greater concern than it was.

His cell phone rang, the chime “MMMBop” by Hanson chosen by Julie herself.

Damn.

Mara stared at him, then at his front jeans pocket.

“Someone important?”

“No.”

She leaned forward and fished the phone out. “Julie? With a heart? Looks important to me.”

He didn’t say anything. For reasons he preferred not to delve into just then, he just hoped she wouldn’t answer it.

She didn’t.

He let out the breath he was holding.

Her amused expression told him she’d caught his reaction. “I think you’re lying to me.” She waved the cell at him. “How do you suppose Miss Julie-with-a-Heart would feel about your kissing another girl?”

“I don’t have to suppose. It would piss her off.”

She smiled then tossed the phone to the desk to lie next to his wallet. “I figure I have another five minutes, tops, before you break that restraint,” she said. “Which means I’ve got two minutes to get something else. Be right back.”

He watched her leave the office and climb a set of dark, steel stairs to a catwalk he guessed must lead to her upstairs apartment.

Damn.

She was right. It would take him at least another few minutes to free himself.

She was back in one.

She planted one of the old boots she wore between his legs, nudged his knees farther apart and then moved what he guessed was a steel toe closer to his family jewels than he was comfortable with. She leaned over so she could secure the pair of police-issue steel handcuffs she’d brought down.

Aw, hell.

As irritated as he was growing, he couldn’t help but peer down the front of her shirt as she worked, her breasts swaying ever so slightly in a shiny, black bra, a thin, glistening sheen of sweat on her smooth skin from her recent efforts. She smelled of something sweet and sexy that made his mouth water in a way that would only further piss off “Julie-with-a-Heart.”

What was he talking about? It was pissing him off. The last thing he wanted was to feel attracted to a woman who had taken him hostage when he was supposed to be hauling her in instead.

She finished then stepped back, taking what appeared to be a toaster pastry from where she’d been holding it between her lips and chewing silently. She held it out toward him. “Bite?”

“What are you planning to do?” he asked, ignoring her question.

“Now? In the immediate future?” She waved the pastry. “Eat this.”

He had to admit, she wasn’t boring.

Although he’d much prefer it if their roles were reversed.

“And after that?”

Her chewing slowed and she used a pinkie to swipe a crumb from the corner of her mouth. “Sleep.”

Sleep …

The word wound around his mind even as he watched her toe a bedroll she’d brought down along with the restraints and what appeared to be documents of some sort folded and stashed in a small, blue plastic bag he sometimes saw newspapers delivered in. She popped the last of the pastry into her mouth and opened the sleeping bag, stuffing the documents inside before stretching out on top of it. It was only then he recognized the signs of fatigue: the dark smudges under her green eyes, the paleness of her skin, the lethargic lag of her movements.

Hell, if this was what she was like at half speed, he’d hate to see her at full.

She’d positioned the bedroll so it was far enough away that he couldn’t reach her, but between him and the door, close enough that if he awkwardly tried to escape, he’d have to step over her.

He eyed the open door.

She looked up abruptly then reached to slam the door. There was no mistaking the auto lock that clicked home.

Swell.

“How long you plan to be out?” he asked.

“As long as my body dictates. Try anything stupid and …”

He hadn’t realized she’d brought a gun down with her.

Oh, wait: she hadn’t. That was his gun.

Damn.

It was going to take him a while to live down this one. Not that he planned on telling anyone. No. But it was going to take a while for him to get over this.

The sound of her soft snores a moment later told him she was out like a light.

Jon drew in a deep breath and felt around his own restraints.

The way he saw it, all he had to do was wait until she decided what to do next before he figured out his next move.

He could only hope that hers didn’t include putting the muzzle of his own gun to his head and shooting, much the way she had assassinated the good prosecutor she was wanted for murdering….

3

“I’M HENRY THE EIGHTH.”

Mara fought against the irritating words determined to yank her from a solid sleep.

He sang the words louder, apparently convinced she hadn’t heard him the first time.

She put her hands over her ears and moaned.

No, no, no …

“Oh, hi,” her annoying hostage said. “Sorry … am I bothering you?”

She cracked open an eyelid and glared at him, noting how close the 9 mm was … and how easy it would be to do away with the annoyance.

“By the way?” he said, his long, denim-covered legs casually crossed at the ankles of his cowboy boots, looking as though he was there by choice and not by force … and appearing a little too cheerful for her liking. “You already know from reading my license, but we haven’t been properly introduced. My name is Jonathon Reece, Jon to my friends. But I’ll let you call me that if you want …”

She glanced at her watch. She’d only been asleep for a couple of hours. She reached for the gun and dragged it closer to her side.

“I’m thinking it’s been a while since you’ve gotten any decent sleep, huh? Actually, I’m guessing it’s been nearly forty hours. You know, the time that prosecutor bit it …”

She squinted at him, sorely tempted to pull the trigger.

“That’s a long time to go without rest. It messes with the system, big-time. Throws you off your game.”

Groaning aloud, she rolled smoothly to her feet, taking the gun with her.

“Hey, a movie song isn’t grounds for execution in most states.”

She opened a drawer, looking to grab something she saw in there earlier. “What movie song?”

“The one I was singing. You know, from Ghost? Patrick Swayze sang it to get Whoopi Goldberg to help him. Just call me Swayze Crazy. Isn’t that how the saying goes?”

“I wouldn’t know. Never saw the movie. As for the song, it was written in the early 1900s, and popularized by Herman and the Hermits in the mid-’60s, a long time before the movie in question.”

“Wow. You’re smart.”

The more he talked, the more her trigger finger itched.

She found what she was looking for and made her way back to him.

“Did you learn that in school? That song bit?” he asked.

“No. My father liked to pretend he lived in a time period other than the one he was in. Either that or he was stuck in the wrong time. I don’t know which.”

“What are you going to—”

She slapped a stretch of duct tape across his sexily infuriating mouth. Then just to be sure, she secured another in the shape of an X.

She looked into his eyes, the deep shade of blowtorch-blue, with lashes that were somehow too thick to be on a man, yet were ridiculously attractive.

Damn, but he was hot.

She licked her lips, momentarily recalling how it had felt to have them pressed against his. Her kiss had been a completely diversionary tactic, she told herself. If she revisited the naughty thoughts she’d originally had of him at the airport … well, that was between her and her bedroll.

His expression was altogether too suggestive. Could he be thinking along the same line?

She cleared her throat and sat back on her heels.

“Oh, and there is more to that song,” she said. “It goes …” She quoted him the full lyrics. “Just so you’ll know the next time you choose to annoy someone.”

If she didn’t know better, she’d say he was grinning at her through the tape.

She cocked her head, her gaze drawn to his mouth. She picked up a red sharpie from a nearby tabletop, uncapped it then drew another X over the tape.

There. A reminder of what was off-limits.

Trouble was? She was having a hard time not thinking X marked the spot.

Yes, he kissed that well.

She gave a mental eye roll, checked his restraints—both still firmly in place—then stretched back across the sleeping bag.

She stared at the grimy windows on the other side of the office.

While her attraction to Reece was purely physical, she needed to remind herself that it was another man who had put her in the position she was in now.

She’d been sixteen, had just lost her father, was living with an emotionally unstable and distant mother … and militia member Gerald Butler had smiled that devastating smile at her, offering her what she thought was everything she’d ever need.

She supposed that had been true … for a time. Two years, to be exact. It had taken her that long to figure out that the group and its ideals weren’t any better than the organized government against which they rebelled.

And that the man with whom she’d fallen in love didn’t know the true meaning of the word.

Of course, she understood how young she’d been then, emotionally as well as in years. And she was happy to say it had been a good long while since she’d actually thought about that time in her life.

Until now.

Until she’d been plucked out of Butler’s files and set up for murder.

Oh, she’d read the news that Gerald had been arrested some time ago for charges that ranged from crimes against the federal government to murder. But she’d barely given the news piece a cursory glance and a heart pang before closing the paper and then lighting her welding torch, returning to her artwork, something that never betrayed her, never lied to her, was always there for her.

If she’d worked for twenty hours straight in order to cleanse thoughts and memories of Butler from her mind before finally collapsing into a dreamless sleep … well, that was between her and the sculpture she’d been working on.

Now, she cleared her throat and rubbed her nose. It was one thing to know someone you loved had never really loved you. Quite another to be set up for murder for reasons she knew benefited him.

“You know, you didn’t ask if I did it …” she said quietly to Reece, her body already beginning to succumb to sleep again. “Just saying. If it were me, it would have been the first question I asked.”

He didn’t respond. Not that he could.

“See you in a while, Reece. Don’t try anything stupid …”

HOURS LATER, JON CURSED himself for not keeping a metal handcuff key in the secret pocket sewn inside the waist of his jeans. Then again, he hadn’t expected to need one.

He did, however, have a small pocket knife and had long since taken it out and freed himself from the plastic restraints, which were tighter then the metal ones. He’d blindly tried to pick the metal lock with the blade, only to cut himself on the pad of his thumb. He felt the blood drip from his fingers, but knew it wasn’t anything serious. It did, however, convince him to stop trying to pick the lock for a while, lest he accidentally hit a vein.

At one point, he’d drifted off to sleep himself, leaning against the metal pole he was tied to. While Mara had switched off the ringer to his phone, she’d left it on Vibrate. And he’d listened as it buzzed almost nonstop where it sat on the desk.

Julie, no doubt.

Damn.

He’d like to say his reaction was because he was afraid she was worried about him. Instead, he was more concerned his cell battery would go dead.

He leaned his head against the pole and cursed.

Julie …

What wasn’t there to like? She was blonde, sexy as hell and a kindergarten teacher. All those girl-next-door qualities that brought guys sniffing.

Just when had things started to take a bad turn?

He couldn’t really say. They’d dated for two years before moving in together and from the get-go, he’d joked about her control-freak tendencies. He’d found them cute. Sometimes, he’d even enjoyed it when she got grumpy about one thing or another, usually connected with some imagined infraction. And she was adorable. Her sexy pout was the stuff of which dreams were made.

Then he’d left his safe employment as an insurance salesman—a job that bored him all to hell—to take the position with Lazarus….

To say Julie wasn’t pleased would be an understatement.

“Come on, honey,” he’d pleaded with her for the umpteenth time when he’d left on his first assignment with a Lazarus team to search for a missing girl in Florida. “Just look at this as an opportunity for you to get in some important ‘you’ time….”

“I don’t need ‘me’ time. I need you,” she’d said. “Besides, how am I supposed to get ‘me’ time when I’m completely responsible for Brutus?”

Brutus was the puggle they’d adopted from an animal shelter. He’d been Jon’s surprise to her one Christmas morning.

Oh, she’d been surprised, all right. Shocked was more the word. And unhappy.

She never let an opportunity pass to pitch a bitch fit. “See, we could take a teacup Chihuahua anywhere we wanted to go. We wouldn’t have to worry about imposing on friends,” she’d said when he’d arranged a weekend trip to Catalina. “And there would be much less dog dirt to clean up….”

Of course, what had he been thinking? “Julie” time was all the time.

He grimaced.

When had her pouting become irritating?

The phone vibrated again.

Was it him, or did it seem weaker somehow?

Double damn.

Mara’s leg jerked.

He glanced at her. She hadn’t moved the entire time she’d been asleep. And he was sure she was sleeping. He could tell by her deep, even breathing and soft snores, the latter probably because she’d gone so long without quality shut-eye.

Still, the fact that she could sleep at all, given what was going on, was remarkable in and of itself.

Definitely military.

Or some sort of similar training.

He found his gaze trailing over her, appreciating her form. Where Julie was long-limbed and … well, elegant, Mara was toned and compact. Not that she was short. He guessed the two women were the same height. But where Julie rocked a pair of high-heeled shoes, he guessed Mara would look awkward in them.

And the opposite applied in the case of cowboy boots. At least true ones.

He looked at where Mara still wore her short, black combat boots. Suddenly, he could picture her as a child, the victim of schoolyard teasing: “Your mama wears combat boots.”

Likely Mara would have cocked a hand on her hip and said, “Well, that would make her more capable than yours, now, wouldn’t it?”

Julie, on the other hand, would have been horrified at the mere thought.

And so would her Stepford Wife mother.

Jon’s gaze traveled up the back of Mara’s jeans to where her bottom was rounded and pert, then to the small of her back where her T-shirt had ridden up a bit, revealing a stretch of firm flesh.

He swallowed. Hard.

Which seemed to be the word of the minute, because he found a certain area of his anatomy growing noticeably harder.

He caught sight of a tattoo on the back of her left shoulder where she’d rolled up the sleeve. He squinted, trying to make it out. A bird’s wing? Angel? He couldn’t tell. There wasn’t enough visible.

He heard sound outside.

Jon moved his head so he could see the warehouse interior. The sun slanted low, creating dingy, golden shafts of light against the gritty floor between him and the car some seventy-five feet away. He made out the shape of someone looking in the vehicle-access-door window much the same way he had hours before.

Competition for the bounty?

Made sense.

Then again, the Feds could be making another pass.

The sound of the individual trying the door echoed in the room.

Shit.

He heard the quiet dragging of something metallic across the floor. He realized Mara’s breathing was no longer deep and even. She had moved only her arm and was now pulling his 9 mm closer to her side.

Wow …

She slowly turned to look at him, nodding in the direction of the visitor outside the building. “With you?”

He shook his head.

The figure moved from the window. A moment later, Jon made out the sound of quiet footsteps on the stairs leading to her apartment.

Mara was on her feet in a flash, stuffing the blue plastic bag he’d seen her holding earlier inside the front waistband of her jeans and covering it with her shirt, then checking the ammo in the gun: he knew it was a full sixteen rounds. She stuffed that into her waistband, as well.

She stopped to look at him.

For a moment, he suspected she might leave him there. And he could tell she was giving it serious consideration.

Then she said, “If he’s not with you, then I can trust you’re not going to make any noise, right?”

He gave her a long look.

She yanked the tape from his mouth and then headed for the door.

“The hands?”

She came back, leaned over him much as she had earlier with the same tantalizing view. He heard the teeth give, but when she straightened a moment later, he found his hands were still restrained … only now without the post involved.

She stared at the question on his face. “You won’t be needing them. Now up, soldier. I know you know how to move with your hands tied behind your back.”

He thought about making a smart-ass comment, but she was already through the door and ripping the tarp from the car.

He got up and began following her, then backtracked to get his cell and wallet from the desk, stuffing each into back jeans pockets. Then he spotted a click-top pen. Bingo. He palmed it and stuffed it inside the waistband of his jeans before joining her.

She climbed inside the car and reached to open the passenger’s door for him. He awkwardly got inside and was trying to figure out a way to close it with his foot when she reached across him, her breasts brushing against his thighs, to close it for him.

Then she reached behind him, taking his cell from his pocket and tossing it to the dash.

He had to give her credit; she didn’t miss a trick.

Which made him feel a little less bad about being taken hostage by her.

A little.

“The doors?” he asked.

She gave him a long look. “Blocked from the outside. The bastard parked on the other side.”

“Then how are we going to get out—?”

The engine started and the car was in gear before he could utter the next word. His neck jerked as she sped in Reverse, the old car’s monster engine roaring in his ears.

She reached across him and yanked the seat belt across his lap, shoving the latch into his hands behind his back before doing her own.

“Hold on,” she said, smiling in his direction.

She pressed a button on the visor. Even as he awkwardly secured his seat belt, he looked over his shoulder, watching as another door, this one a garage type, lifted some fifty yards behind them on the opposite warehouse wall.

“It’s not going to make it up in time,” he said over the engine’s growl.

“It’ll make it.”

Twenty yards … ten … five …

The top of the car hit the bottom of the door, but it didn’t slow them down.

She hit the brakes on the other side and did a one-eighty.

“Oops,” she said.

He couldn’t help shaking his head, amused.

The car was barely straight before she shoved the stick into Drive, roaring off before the guy in her apartment had any idea what hit him.

Or maybe not.

Jon stared back at a large man in faded, full-out desert military gear rounding the side of the warehouse a hundred yards away. Only, he didn’t look like anyone he’d ever served with. This guy had long blond hair tied back and a full beard. And his weapon was Russian, more specifically an AK-47.

Definitely not something an American soldier would be toting.

Militia? Or military-loving mercenary?

That meant their visitors numbered at least two: the one on the stairs and this one.

He caught Mara’s glance as she looked away from the same sight. She didn’t appear surprised. But if he was expecting any kind of explanation, he was sadly disappointed.

Jon shifted in the seat and worked on getting the click-top pen out of the waistband of his jeans, the spring of which he planned to use to pick his handcuffs….

4

AFTER TEN MINUTES, Mara slowed her speed on the mostly deserted roads for which she’d opted, checking her mirrors every few seconds for signs she’d been followed. She hadn’t been.