Page 134 of Stolen By the Billionaire
Her lips parted, and she blinked at him like he’d scored a grade-A headbutt to her frontal lobe.
He said, “But first, we need to go to New York to see what’s up with Logan.”
“Oh yeah. Okay. We should go,” she said.
He wished she was wearing some sort of frilly sundress that would spread over his hips instead of those oversized sweatpants. He’d rip her imagined lacy little panties right off her and bury himself inside, then let her ride him under the darkening sky until she cried out his name.
Maybe he would buy her something fluffy in New York and take advantage of it.
Then again, their hours were numbered. When they reached Logan’s Manhattan apartment and Blaze passed the responsibility for her safety over to her brother, all this might be over.
Or Logan might kill him.
Yeah, Blaze needed to remember that it was a distinct possibility that Logan might murder him for defiling his sister.
35
Logan, Part III
Blaze
The Aston Martin roared over the Pennsylvania highways and then dodged through New Jersey’s Friday evening traffic.
The diamond and ruby torrents of headlights rolled in opposite directions in the night ahead, streaming through the star-covered city blocks and leaping over the abysses of riverbeds.
Blaze helmed the beast, twitching the wheel with his left hand to thread them through the commuters and bennies toward Manhattan and Logan Bell’s apartment.
They would arrive too soon.
He hadn’t had enough time with her.
Sarah captured his right hand across the console, her cool fingers intertwined with his.
Half of him was an eagle trapped by its talons, beating the air with its wings, but Blaze’s heart still ticked with a killer’s metronome pulse. His training was to deliver packages and eliminate targets, both of which were people with families and communities and a soul that looked out of their eyes at the world, a fact he walled off from his psyche with iron.
But that was who Blaze was, and he wasn’t going to let anything happen to this woman, no matter what her goddamn brother thought about him.
The clock glowing on the Aston Martin’s dashboard screen showed four digits in the dark. Traffic was lighter than usual inside the white-tiled tube of the Lincoln Tunnel that roared with reverberating engines, which meant the cars and delivery trucks were packed like beads in a box rolling at sixty miles an hour.
Less than an hour later, Blaze curved the car around a corner of Central Park West, the street flanking the sunset side of Central Park, and drove past the trashy mirrorball of a hotel on the corner. Spotlights picked out the flutters of yellow bankruptcy tape that zombie-wrapped the derelict heap.
Streetlights lit the summer green expanse of Central Park on the other side of the street.
A text from Logan appeared on the car’s dashboard screen. You almost here?
The car asked Blaze if he’d like to reply, so he said, “Yes. We’ll arrive in just a few minutes.”
Logan’s text was timely.
Very timely.
His query was so spot-on that it set off an itch of alarm on the back of Blaze’s neck.
Connections snapped like static inside the thick skull of his head.
Blaze had shared his location with Logan in the early dark hours of Wednesday morning when Logan had phoned to demand Blaze drive back to Iowa and rescue Sarah from Mary Varvara Bell’s hitmen. He had called them torpedoes, an antiquated Italian mafia term for assassins, and he’d said they were en route to Sarah’s farm to murder Sarah so no one could exploit her to manipulate Mary Varvara Bell ever again.
Blaze had driven down I-80 like a demon out of Hell to get to Sarah before the cutthroats got there.
