Chapter 2
"Get up."
She pried her eyes open reluctantly, unable to remember why she dreaded waking up. Then her shoulder was roughly shaken and she was reminded. Her eyes popped open. Coming to a half-sitting position, holding the blanket over her naked body, she shoved the disheveled hair out of her eyes and looked up into Lucas Greywolf's remote features.
It had taken her hours to fall asleep, hours in which she had lain there beside him listening to his rhythmic breathing, knowing that he was fast asleep. She had struggled to release her arm from the headboard until her entire body ached with the futile effort. Cursing him, she had finally surrendered and relaxed enough to get her eyes to close. After that, her body had taken over and she had fallen asleep.
"Get up," he repeated tersely. "And get dressed. We're leaving."
Both pairs of stockings, the one that had bound her to the headboard and the one that had bound her to the man, were lying across the foot of the bed. Sometime earlier he had freed her. Why hadn't she awakened then? Was his touch that deft and light? And now, too, she vaguely remembered being uncomfortably cold in the early morning hours. Had he covered her? It made her insides tremble to think so.
She was relieved to see that he was already dressed in the dusty clothes he had shed the previous night, before availing himself of her shower. The ripped-out sleeve of his shirt had been replaced by one of her own cotton bandannas to serve as his headband. His earring and neck chain were still there, gleaming against his bronzed skin. She could smell her shampoo in his raven-black hair.
No, she hadn't imagined him. Lucas Greywolf was very real and embodied everything that women had nightmares about … or dreamed of.
She snapped her mind back to attention. "Leaving? Where? I'm not going anywhere with you."
His dismissive air indicated just how much credence he placed in her protest. He opened her closet and began riffling through the hangers. Designer dresses and silk blouses were bypassed in favor of a pair of old jeans and a casual shirt. He tossed them across the bed toward her.
Bending at the waist, he examined several pairs of shoes before selecting a pair of low-heeled boots. He carried them toward the bed and dropped them on the floor. "You can either dress yourself or—" he paused while his light gray eyes traveled over her form beneath the covers "—I can dress you. Either way, we leave here in five minutes."
His stance was bold: thighs widespread, chest out, chin high. Arrogance was stamped all over his classic American face. Self-confidence emanated from him like the musky scent of his skin.
Meekly yielding to such raw audacity was untenable to Aislinn Andrews.
"Why can't you just leave me here?"
"Stupid question, Aislinn, and unworthy of you."
She conceded that. As soon as he was out of sight, she'd run screaming down the street until somebody heard her. The authorities would be on his trail before he got to the city limits.
"You're my insurance policy. Every jailbreaker worth his salt takes a hostage." He took a step closer to her. "And my patience with my hostage is wearing thin. Get your butt out of that damn bed!" he thundered.
Though it galled, she prudently obeyed, dragging the covers with her. "At least have the decency to turn your back while I dress."
One of his brows, sleek and black and shaped like an inverted V arched slightly. "You're asking a noble gesture from an Indian?"
"I have no racial prejudices."
He looked at her tumbled blond hair and smirked with derision. "No, I don't suppose you do, because I doubt if you even knew we were out there." Then he turned on his heel and left the room.
She took umbrage at the insult and angrily pulled on the clothes he had selected. She had found a bra and a pair of panties in the piles of clothes he had left on the floor after vandalizing her drawers the night before.
As soon as she had snapped the jeans on, she rushed toward the window and opened the shutters. She reached for the lock and twisted it open, but a hard brown arm came around from behind her. Strong fingers formed a vise around her wrist.
"I'm getting tired of these little games, Aislinn."
"And I'm getting tired of you manhandling me," she cried, trying to wrest her arm free. He let go of her only after he had relocked the window and closed the shutters. Resentfully, she massaged the circulation back into her wrist as she glared up at him. She had always despised bullies.
"Listen, lady, if I didn't need you as protection to get where I'm going, I wouldn't give you the time of day. So don't flatter yourself." He spun her around and, placing his hand in the small of her back, gave her a hefty shove. "Get going."
He led her into the kitchen where he picked up a Thermos and a grocery sack.
"I see you made yourself right at home," she said snidely. Inwardly she was cursing herself for sleeping so soundly. She might have made good her escape through the bedroom window while he was brewing coffee and looting her pantry.
"Where we're going, you'll be glad to have the provisions."
"And where is that?"
"Where the other half lives."
He didn't expand on that, but, with his hand securely around her upper arm, he led Aislinn into the garage. After opening the passenger door of her car, he shoved her inside, then went around and slid behind the steering wheel. He placed the Thermos and grocery sack on the seat between them. Reaching beneath the seat for the lever, he adjusted the seat back as far as it would go to accommodate his long legs. Using the electronic transmitter that always lay on her dashboard, he raised the garage door. Once he had backed the car out, he closed the door the same way. At the end of her street, he skillfully maneuvered her car into the flow of traffic on the boulevard.
"How long will I be gone?" she asked. Her question was casual and out of keeping with her busy eyes.
He didn't stay close to another car long enough for her to make eye contact with either the driver or passengers. There were no police cars in sight. Greywolf was driving carefully and well within the speed limit. He was no fool.
Nor was he talkative. He offered no answer to her question. "I'll be missed, you know. I have a business to run. When I don't show up for work, people will start looking for me."
"Pour me a cup of coffee."
Her mouth fell open at the imperious way he issued orders, as though he were the big bad brave and she his squaw. "Go to hell."
"Pour me a cup of coffee."
Had he shouted at her, flown into a fit of temper, she might have met him nose to nose. But the words left his mouth quietly, like serpents slithering from a cave. They sent chills down her spine. He hadn't hurt her so far, but he was a dangerous man. The kitchen knife was still tucked into his waistband. One look into the hard gray eyes that left the road long enough to nail her to the car seat convinced her that he was an enemy to be reckoned with.
She found two Styrofoam cups in the sack he had brought with them. Carefully she poured him half a cup of steaming, fragrant coffee from the Thermos and passed it to him. He didn't thank her, but sipped from the cup, squinting his eyes against the vapor that rose out of it.
Without asking his permission, she poured another cup for herself before recapping the Thermos. She stared down into the coffee as she rolled the cup between her palms and tried to imagine what his plans for her were. She was concentrating so hard that she jumped when he suddenly spoke.
"What kind of business?"
"What?"
"You said you have a business to run."
"Oh, a photography studio."
"You take pictures?"
"Yes, portraits basically. Brides. Babies. Graduates. That kind of thing."
If he understood, approved, or disapproved, he kept it a secret. His chiseled profile revealed nothing. Granted, her work was nothing to get excited about, she thought with an inward sigh.
When she had graduated from college with a journalism degree, she had had aspirations to set the world on fire with her provocative photojournalism, to travel the globe capturing flame, famine and flood on film. She had wanted to evoke intense emotions such as anger, love and pity with each photograph.
But her parents had had vastly different plans for their only child. Willard Andrews was a prominent businessman in Scottsdale. His wife, Eleanor, was a society queen bee. Their daughter was expected to do the "suitable" thing, that being to amuse herself with suitable projects until she decided to marry a suitable young man. There were any number of clubs she could join, any number of committees she could chair. Charity work was permissible, so long as it didn't entail getting personally involved.
A career, especially one as gritty as traveling to remote parts of the world to take pictures of things too horrid to discuss at dinner parties, certainly didn't fit into her parents' plans for her. After months of endless argument, they finally wore her down and she bowed to their will.
As a concession, her father bankrolled a photography studio where Aislinn could take vapid portraits of her parents' friends and their offspring. It wasn't a bad occupation; it was just a far cry from the meaningful work she had always wanted to do.
She wondered what her parents would say now if they could see her in the company of Lucas Greywolf and she was unable to withhold a laugh that bubbled up from her throat.
"Do you find the situation amusing?" he asked.
"Not at all amusing," she replied, becoming serious again. "Why don't you let me go?"
"I didn't intend to take a hostage. I intended to eat your food, avail myself of your house for a few hours' rest, and then leave. But you came in and caught me plundering your kitchen. Now I have no choice but to take you with me." He glanced at her before adding, "Actually I do have a choice, but I'm no murderer. At least not yet."
She suddenly lost her desire for the coffee. Instead the acrid taste of fear filled her mouth. "Do you plan to kill me?"
"Not unless you give me no choice."
"I'll fight you every step of the way."
"In that case we might have difficulties."
"Then I wish you'd go ahead and do it. The anticipation you're putting me through is cruel."
"So is prison."
"What did you expect?"
"I've learned to expect little."
"It's certainly not my fault you went to prison. You commit a crime, you pay for it."
"And just what was my 'crime'?"
"I … I don't recall. Something to do with—"
"I organized a demonstration at the courthouse in Phoenix. It resulted in violence, injury to police officers and damages to federal property." He said it in a way that made her think he wasn't confessing, but only quoting verbatim what he'd heard repeated numerous times. "But I think my real crime was being born an Indian."
"That's ridiculous. You have no one to blame for your misfortune but yourself, Mr. Greywolf."
His tight grin was mirthless. "I believe the judge said something to that effect when he sentenced me."
They lapsed into a silence that lasted until she ventured to ask, "How long have you been in prison?"
"Thirty-four months."
"And how long did you have to go?"
"Three months."
"Three months!" She was dismayed. "You escaped when you only had three months left on your sentence?"
His eyes sliced across the front seat of the car toward her. "I told you there is something I have to do and nothing is going to stop me."
"But if they catch you—"
"They'll catch me."
"Then why are you doing this?"
"I told you I had to."