Page 45 of Stolen By the Billionaire
Sarah’s head and shoulders slumped, defeated.
Oh, he hadn’t meant to do that. He liked the fire in this girl. “It’s just until I can settle this with your aunt. Seriously, treat staying here like a vacation.”
She was still frowning. “You keep saying that, and I keep telling you I don’t want a vacation. I can’t take a vacation.”
Yeah, she’d mentioned that before, but he’d taken care of the farm work for her. There were no other impediments that he knew of. “Come on over here. Let me take those zip ties off your wrists.”
Sarah punched one last, useless side kick at the immobile glass like a bucking mustang before she trudged back to the kitchen and turned her back to him.
For an instant, the late-day summer sunshine streaming through the glass windows surrounding the front courtyard darkly silhouetted Sarah’s hourglass curves just inches away from his hands.
In that moment, Sarah Nevaeh Bell wasn’t the target of his operation, but he was aware of her as a woman.
One inhale.
For one half of a breath, Blaze was jolted out of time.
In every other circumstance, when a woman had been standing in his house, sometimes with her hands bound behind her back, Blaze’s hands had traced her curves, his mouth had tasted her skin, and then his body had moved in hers.
He stepped forward, reaching for her, his skin feeling the whisper of his clothes and the pulse in his throat throbbing.
Blaze released the air in his lungs.
Time returned.
The day’s events coalesced around him, dropping him back into the moment.
The tension in his shoulders released, and Blaze rolled his shoulders to clear his head.
Sarah was still waiting for him to untie her.
He pried his utility tool open and held the plastic band away from her wrists. The nearness of the sharp steel to her fragile skin perturbed him, and he was careful to just barely chip away the plastic ties.
The plastic parted, and he did the same to the links around her upper arms.
Sarah turned around and glared at him, rubbing her wrists. Her eyes were the color of sparrows, reminding him of the tiny, jumpy, fiercely independent sprites who might scold you for getting too close as they hopped away.
Blaze raised his eyebrows at her. “Better?”
She scowled at him. “Better than when you tied me up, yes.”
Fair point. “I’m sorry I had to restrain you, but it seemed like the best option.”
She raised her dark eyebrows at him on her elfin little face. “And what were the other options?”
Blaze settled into commanding-officer mode, which he wore well. “The mission goal was to save your life, so I didn’t have many other options. Either I could convince you to come with me quietly, or I needed to relocate you forcibly.”
Sarah flicked her head back, a show of defiance. “Yeah, I thought so. You didn’t plan for anything else. Bringing zip ties with you means that you planned on kidnapping me by force.”
Frustration was an emotion Blaze was accustomed to and knew how to handle. “This wasn’t the way I’d planned the operation. If I’d have had longer to convince you or if you had come willingly, we might’ve stopped for a nice dinner in downtown Chicago on the way here. I didn’t want to bring you here by force.”
She was still glaring at him. “Then why did you?”
Blaze brushed his hand vaguely westward toward her farm in the next state over. “You saw those guys. They were going to kill you. Your house was not fortified to survive a standoff, so we couldn’t ride it out there. A couple little pieces of plastic, a car ride for a few hours, and now a vacation seemed like the better option than you dead in your own cornfield.”
“I don’t even know if they were really—”
“This argument again. We should just call Logan so he can explain to you why he told me to get you.”
