In This Together

“I tried that, remember?”

“You didn’t try hard enough, apparently. People fill that form out every day. Somehow, they manage to do it.”

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.

Somehow he regained his feet. Before she could wiggle out of his grasp he leaned down, placed his shoulder against her midsection and hoisted her up into a fireman’s hold.

She was still kicking and screaming, but her arms were flailing against his back where they couldn’t do much damage, and he had a firm arm around her legs. He also had an enticing view of her rounded bottom, but he felt guilty as hell about his attraction to a woman he was using in such an ill way.

What to do with her now? He didn’t want to tie her up. That seemed so unnecessarily cruel, so Snidely Whiplash. He needed to lock her up in a room with no windows, so she couldn’t escape or break a window and scream for help. The walk-in pantry could work. With a chair, and maybe a pillow and blanket, she wouldn’t be too uncomfortable. He carried her into the kitchen.

Damn it. One of the pantry doors was broken. Even if he latched it from the outside, Elena could probably collapse the door if she threw herself against it a few times. And what if she needed to go to the bathroom?

Then he had a thought. The master bath—it was huge. Luxurious. And it had no windows except the skylights, which were far too high for her to break.

Elena’s movements had all but stopped. “The blood is rushing to my head. Figure out where you’re going to put me and do it already.”

Hmm. She didn’t really sound that scared anymore. In fact, she sounded mad. Had she seen through him? Had she figured out he wouldn’t hurt her?

He carried her through the living room, where red paint stained the carpet and someone had defaced the marble fireplace with a hammer and chisel.

“What happened to this place?” Elena didn’t sound like a terrified hostage should.

He didn’t answer. He didn’t want to get chummy with the woman. He didn’t want to get to know her. If he started to see her as a person, rather than part of the system keeping his brother in prison, he would find it impossible to mistreat her like this.

“This isn’t your house, is it?” she tried again. “Hey, you know, this is really uncomfortable. Maybe you could let me walk. I won’t try to run again. Obviously, I can’t get away from you.”

She was trying to lull him into a false sense of security. He’d give her credit—she wasn’t stupid. He suspected the tears and hysteria had been calculated to manipulate him, too. Well, no dice. He wasn’t falling for it.

The master suite was down a short hallway off the living room. This was the first room Travis had worked on, and it was pretty much finished. He’d replaced several sections of the hardwood floor, which the former owners had gouged with an ax, and installed a new light fixture. The walls had required a gallon of paint to get rid of stains left by permanent markers. Now that he’d repainted it in the neutral off-white his client had requested, it didn’t look half-bad.

The bathroom was in pretty good shape, except for a chunk broken out of the sink, probably with a sledgehammer. Travis was going to try his hand at porcelain repair rather than replace the whole sink. He’d heard about a new product that produced amazing results.

Hell, why was he even thinking about that? He’d never get the chance to finish this job. He’d be in jail.

Travis set Elena down. She balled up her fist and hit him in the shoulder, rightfully pissed off. But as she shook off the pain in her own hand—it had probably hurt her more than it had hurt him—her face instantly transformed from anger to dismay.

“You’re bleeding!” She sounded horrified.

“What?”

“Look at your face!” She stood aside so he could go to the mirror and look, and damned if he didn’t almost do it. She would have slipped out the door right behind him.

Instead, he put his hand to his forehead and felt moisture. When he drew it back, his fingers were indeed covered with blood.

“Well, what do you expect when you throw a wrench at someone?” He realized now that his forehead still throbbed where the wrench had hit him.

“You are not making me feel one bit guilty. I would have hit you with a hundred wrenches if I’d had them.” She winced. “Does it hurt?”

“What do you think?” He caught his reflection in the glass shower enclosure; he did look like a horror movie victim. Revenge of the Wrench Throwers. He probably should clean the cut and patch it up. Lord only knew what sort of germs had been lurking on that wrench.

He joined Elena in the luxurious bathroom and closed the door. Then he sat down on the carpet with his back to the door. She would have to go through him to get out.

“How about you see if the people who used to live here left anything behind in the way of first-aid supplies.” The guy who’d hired Travis said the former owners had moved out in the middle of the night, taking whatever they could haul or carry that was valuable but leaving behind some cheap furnishings. Travis had already cleared out most of the furniture and sold it to a used furniture dealer.

So maybe the former owners had left something useful.

“You think I’m going to play nurse?” Elena huffed. “Think again.”

“You don’t have to play nurse. Just hand me the stuff. I’ll do it myself. The sooner you help me, the sooner I’ll leave you alone and go take care of business—the business that will get you released.”

“Fine.” She went to the linen cupboard first and found a clean washcloth, which she soaked with warm water and handed to him. “You can use that to clean off the blood, at least.”

He scrubbed his face and neck with the washcloth while she rummaged around in the cabinets and drawers. Then he gingerly dabbed at the cut. Now that his adrenaline had spent itself, he was feeling the pain. She’d really walloped him. He was lucky she hadn’t knocked him unconscious.

“If you find any aspirin,” he said, “I’ll start with that.”

“Aspirin will make you bleed more.” She handed him a bottle of Tylenol. “Try that.”

“Thanks.” He shook out a couple of the pills and swallowed them dry.

“I was going to get you some water. But I don’t see a glass.”

“It’s okay. What did you find? Any first-aid cream or bandages?” What he needed was stitches. The cut was still bleeding.

“Found some alcohol.”

Not what he was hoping for. That would burn like hellfire. But he supposed he better bite the bullet and use it if he didn’t want an infection.

“What else?”

“You’re in luck. Butterfly bandages.”

Except how was he supposed to apply them to himself?

She dumped everything she’d found on the floor beside him, including some cotton balls. Then she closed the lid on the toilet and sat down, her arms folded, pointedly ignoring him.

He started with the alcohol, soaking a cotton ball and swabbing the cut. He did his best to remain stoic, because his ego wouldn’t allow him to cry like a baby in front of a woman. But she had to hear his sharp intake of breath. It was like being branded.

“I hope it hurts terribly,” she said.

“It does. Thank you for your concern.”

She peeked at him out of the corner of her eye. “Good.” But she looked worried. And as he tried to apply a butterfly bandage, squeezing the cut closed with one hand and maneuvering the bandage with the other, she frowned at his ineptitude. The cut ran close to his hairline, making it even more difficult.

She stood up and took off her jacket. “Oh, for pity’s sake, just let me do it.”

He should have said no. Letting Elena get her hands on his injured self when she seemed to enjoy his pain wasn’t a logical move. But blood was dripping down his forehead and he wondered if the injury was more serious than he’d thought. And he certainly wasn’t having any luck himself. He’d already wrecked two of the four available butterflies.

Elena brought a box of tissues with her and knelt beside him. She used a wad of tissues to wipe away the blood, and then quickly, efficiently closed the cut with the butterflies.

“It’s not too bad, only about an inch long.” She sounded like a concerned nurse. “It’s not bleeding very much now. I’m going to put this big bandage on it, but you might want to apply pressure for a little longer.”

“Okay.”

She did as promised. She had surprisingly gentle hands. Her breasts were right at his eye level, and he studied them leisurely. Not overly large, but not small, either, they were about the size of large, ripe peaches. Her blue dress was fairly modest, not displaying much in the way of cleavage, but he could still see the outline of those luscious breasts. She smelled good, too, like cinnamon and nutmeg.

If he focused on the pleasant sights and scents of Elena, he found that his head didn’t hurt too much.

“I get the feeling you’ve patched up people before,” he said, hoping to get her talking. Her voice was pleasant, too—as long as she wasn’t yelling at him.

“When I was younger, I had to deal with lots of injuries. My dad and older brothers would come home from the sugarcane fields with scratches and cuts, and my mother and grandmother and I would get out the iodine.”

“Iodine. Now that stuff hurts.”

“It was what we had on hand.”

“Was this in Mexico?”

“No, idiot. Cuba. You can’t tell a Mexican accent from Cuban?” Then she rattled off something that he actually understood. He’d picked up some Spanish from working construction, and from when he was incarcerated, too.

“I might be ignorant, but I’m not a pig,” he said.

“So, you understand Spanish. Am I supposed to be impressed? There, your wretched head is fixed for now. I think you’ll live, unfortunately.”

Her tone sounded closer to teasing than hateful, which pleased him no end. God, he was stupid, looking for crumbs of good humor from a woman he’d kidnapped. He was stupid for being attracted to her, too, but no one had ever accused him of being smart.

He’d been an idiot to shove Elena into his truck. More than likely, his ploy would only succeed in landing him in prison and wouldn’t help Eric at all. But nothing else had worked. This plan was all he had, and he was determined to get as much out of it as he could.

As Elena gathered up the trash and threw it into a wastebasket, Travis pushed himself to his feet. His eyes swam for a moment, but then the world righted itself.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes. You can’t escape from here, and no one can hear you, so your best bet is to just stay calm. If your boss is a reasonable man, he’ll give me what I want, and I’ll let you go.”

“And if he doesn’t give you what you want? I doubt he will. Daniel doesn’t negotiate with people like you.”

“I’m willing to bet your welfare is important enough to him that he will.”

And if he doesn’t?

He would let her go anyway, of course. Then he would turn himself in and take his lumps.

CHAPTER THREE

“WAIT. CAN’T WE talk about—”

Travis slipped out the door and slammed it in her face. He couldn’t listen to her. He couldn’t look into those chocolate-brown eyes without feeling his resolve softening. It was time to contact Daniel Logan.

The bedroom was empty except for one straight-back chair in a corner. Travis remembered dragging it in there to stand on so he could open an air-conditioning vent. One of the chair’s slats was broken, which was why he hadn’t tried to sell it.

He could fix it; he hated throwing away perfectly good stuff that could be repaired and provide many more years of service.

The broken slat wouldn’t affect the use he put it to. He grabbed it and shoved it under the bathroom doorknob.

“Don’t leave me in here!” Elena screamed at him through the door. “Please, please, I can’t stand it.”

He turned resolutely and walked out the door.

He’d turned his cell phone off the minute he’d nabbed Elena so he couldn’t be located by the phone’s ping. He wasn’t sure how fast Daniel Logan could mobilize whatever people and resources he had, but probably pretty damn fast. The guy was powerful. Still, it was possible Elena hadn’t even been missed yet. If she had a lot of autonomy on the job, her absence might not be unusual.

Travis got in his truck and drove. He’d been driving for twenty minutes before he realized he should have gotten Daniel’s private number from Elena. The only number Travis had was for Project Justice. Well, that would have to do.

Once he was miles away from the repo’d house, in some nameless, nondescript neighborhood, he pulled over, got out his cell, turned it on, took a deep breath and dialed.

“Project Justice, how may I direct your call today?” The woman who answered had a tone of voice that didn’t match the polite words. She sounded like an older lady—probably that dragon who’d manned the front desk the time he’d dropped in at their offices, hoping to convince someone to listen to him.

Celeste, that was her name. “Good afternoon, Celeste. My name is Travis Riggs.” There was no point in trying to hide his identity. “Please listen carefully, as I’ll only say this once. I’ve kidnapped Daniel Logan’s assistant, Elena.”

“You did what?” Celeste shrieked.

God, the woman could shatter eardrums. “Please, don’t talk. Just listen. She’s safe and unhurt—for now. My demands are simple. Project Justice must take on the case of Eric Riggs, my brother, who was unjustly convicted of his wife’s murder. Have Daniel Logan personally call this number and leave a message, indicating that he agrees. Have him provide me with this detail—What piece of the victim’s jewelry went missing?—to convince me he really did investigate the case. When he does that, I will return Elena unharmed and turn myself in to the authorities. Do you understand?”

“Now, you listen here, young man. Daniel Logan doesn’t negotiate with—”

“Do you understand?”

There was a long pause before Celeste answered. “Perfectly.”

“I’ll check my messages in twenty-four hours.” He disconnected and turned off his phone. Despite the cool fall weather, he was sweating. He opened the window and cursed. Making that call had sickened him. But he had to keep thinking about Eric, sitting in that six-by-eight jail cell. And little MacKenzie, who was so traumatized by her mother’s death that she had withdrawn from the world. Now her father was gone, too.