Page 117 of Stolen By the Billionaire
Sarah
Sarah chided herself for being a fool as she stood quietly beside Blaze while he checked them into the Ritz-Carlton hotel.
While he was busy with the man behind the reception desk, that was her chance to escape.
She should have bolted for the front door and dodged into the night. She should have leaped over the high, honey-colored wooden desk and screeched at everyone that Blaze had abducted her and she was being held against her will.
Because he had kidnapped her.
Except he hadn’t.
Sort of.
Did her estranged brother, whom she hadn’t seen for fifteen years, really have the authority to tell someone to kidnap her?
Plus, those other men had come to her farm to kill her, and they were so homicidal that they’d also wanted to shoot her horse.
A horse.
For no reason.
Not to put the horse out of his suffering. Not because it was a danger. But just to kill a horse.
A horse was a noble animal. Majestic, even.
What kind of evil miscreant did you have to be to want to shoot a horse?
Blaze had saved Sarah and Charlie from them, and probably HowNow, too.
HowNow, a sweet, gentle cow who hardly ever kicked while being milked. How awful that those bozos probably would have shot her, too.
Sarah’s whole life was a lie. She hadn’t been the good girl who stayed. She’d been a part of the problem family who’d thrown Logan out, had thrown a child out into an Iowa winter night, and never checked on him nor spoken of him again except to complain about him or disparage him behind his back.
It might have been her who they’d tossed out.
It could have been anyone who wanted something different or hadn’t allowed their dreams to be trampled on.
She probably would have been, eventually.
While thoughts, recriminations, hypotheses, and alternate futures and pasts chased themselves in Sarah’s head like a horde of squalling, fighting cats, her gaze drifted over the reception area of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Cleveland, Ohio.
The grand lobby, undulating in shades of gold, gray, and slate blue, transfixed her. She’d seen pictures on the internet of high-falutin’ hotels, sure, but this was . . . lovely.
On the wall behind the desk where Blaze was chatting amiably with the clerk checking them in, enormous art installations that looked like cross-sectioned trees hung. The concentric rings were brilliant stripes of vermillion, sage, and indigo, and the saturated colors absorbed her attention.
She was probably exhausted to the point of delirium, but the art was so pretty.
Sarah had never been anyplace so fancy. Trailing her fingers over the velvet-upholstered chairs as they walked through the lobby was a transformative experience, the fabric softer than a kitten’s belly.
In the elevator, the night bellhop extolled the virtues of the nearby Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. “And the entrance looks like the glass pyramid of the Louvre Museum, the one in Paris, France, not Paris, Illinois.”
Like the one in Paris, France.
There was a nearby museum dedicated to rock and roll music, not that she had ever listened to any rock music, but it had an entrance like the Louvre Museum in Paris, France.
Cleveland was so exotic.
Sure, she’d been to Russia a few times as a kid, but those had been whirlwind trips from the Eastern Iowa Airport in Cedar Rapids. Then her father’s cousins picked them up in Moscow in their puttering cars, and they slept on the cement floor of a Soviet-era utilitarian bunker of an apartment building for a week until the return trip began.
