Page 39 of Stolen By the Billionaire
He inclined his head, conceding. “Good point.”
She pointed out the front windscreen. “Here’s another exit. Take this one. Take this one. This one.”
He kept driving on I-80, following the long asphalt path through the cornfields and swelling hills.
“Dang you,” she sighed.
“We’ll be at my house soon.”
“The proverbial second location, where the murderer does the murdering,” she muttered. “Well, to heck with this. To heck, I say.”
As Blaze drove serenely down the highway, Sarah reached over and yanked the steering wheel toward the ditch on the side of the highway.
He muscled the steering wheel to point the car back down the road and shoved Sarah back into her seat with one arm. “What the hell are you doing? Are you trying to get us killed?”
Luckily, his hands had been clamped around the steering wheel in displaced anger when she’d done that, and the wheel had barely moved. If he’d been driving over a hundred with his hands loose on the wheel when she’d grabbed it, pieces of them and the car would have littered the highway and cornfields for miles.
“I’m not getting kidnapped without a fight!” she yelled and flailed her legs, banging them on the underside of the car’s dash. Her fists pistoned below where he pinned her upper arms and chest to the seat with one forearm.
“You’re not in a fight! I’m saving you!” Blaze yelled as he drove the car off the highway at the next exit ramp, which mercifully ended in a stop sign and cornfields growing tall corn as far as his eyes could see in the glaring sunlight.
He ran around the back of the car to the passenger side, grabbing Sarah around her waist just as she emerged from the car door and started to run.
“Dang it, let me go!” she yelled as he swung her off her feet, holding onto her waist from behind.
Again, her body in his arms activated deeper parts of his brain. The physicality of fighting and the fighting becoming physical were too closely related.
Her legs kicked wildly, her boot heels battering his shins. In the chaos of the fight, Blaze dimly noted he would have bruises later.
He slammed her up against the car and fished in the side pockets of his pants for more zip ties. With the thin strips of plastic in his hand, he tied two together as handcuffs, locking them onto her wrists behind her back, and then four more to chain her upper arms together.
“You jerk!” she hollered. “Help! Help me! I’m being kidnapped!”
Crows cawed and fluttered like dark thoughts into the air.
Blaze kept one hand pressed against her back, pushing her against the side of the car as he crouched to bind her ankles together with the zip ties over her denim jeans and Western riding boots. Those, he cinched tight because the heavy fabric and leather would protect her circulation.
Last, he pulled a bungee cord from another pocket and attached the ersatz handcuffs to the ties on her ankles. He didn’t use a short cord to bow her backward, but a little tension between them would keep her securely bound.
Tying people up was a skill he learned during his special forces training because he would rather restrain an innocent bystander than shoot them. Still, like many of his Navy SEAL skills, binding people had interesting applications in the civilian world.
He was pressing her body up against the car with his, lying against her, her flesh and clothes soft under him. Feminine scents of baby powder and flowers trickled from her skin as she struggled, and he breathed the delicate hints as he held onto the roof of the car and slowly pushed himself away from her.
“Let me go. Oh, please, let me go,” she begged. “I’ll do anything you want. I’ll give you anything you want. I can sell the farm to give you money. The land is worth a lot. ConAgra has been trying to buy me out for years because I’m in a perfect little microbiome that gets exactly the median amount of rainfall and sunshine for the Midwest. I can pay anything you want.”
“Sarah, I don’t want your money,” he sighed.
“Then I’ll sign over the farm to you if you let me go.”
“I don’t want your farm. I’m trying to save your life. I just need you to come with me for a few days.”
He scooted her to the door and shoved her in, guiding the back of her head in like a police officer would so she didn’t bash her skull on the Vantage’s low roof. Once he made sure her limbs and phalanges were safely inside, he locked the door and closed it.
As he walked around to the driver’s side of the car, his shoes crunching on the pebbles and asphalt, warmth dripped down his left elbow.
He lifted his left arm to check, and sure enough, a bloody furrow cut his arm diagonally where Mary Varvara Bell’s asshole goons had creased him while he’d run around his car in Sarah’s cornfield.
That was inconvenient.
