Page 11 of Stolen By the Billionaire
Sarah inched toward her knife drawer, shouting, “You pointed a gun at me and held a knife to my throat! Those are not innocent actions!”
The man rolled up the sleeve of his olive camouflage shirt, baring his massive, light tan forearm. Cords of muscle wrapped around the lower half of his arm.
Melinda Johnson would have called that display of male flesh arm porn and probably tried to lick him.
Black ink trailed in five curving lines radiating from a point on his skin, peeking out from under his shirt sleeve cuff. The tattoo ink almost looked partitioned, like a long series of dashes.
The man picked up the giant machete.
“What the heck are you even doing?” Sarah grabbed the drawer knob and yanked it open, rattling her knives and other cooking utensils.
The man casually chopped at his forearm with the huge knife.
Sarah gasped and jumped back, bumping her bum against the kitchen counter because she expected to see the colossal knife slice his hand clean off at the wrist.
The blade bounced off his muscular flesh, not cutting into his skin in the slightest.
Was he an angel that his skin could repel a knife like that?
Or a fae prince?
Or an alien and his skin was blue under the camouflage paint on his face?
But she could see his arm and his skin there wasn’t blue, just lightly tattooed. That last one didn’t make sense, but neither did the machete bouncing off his arm instead of slicing his hand off. That was unnatural.
He said, “I ground the edge off it. It’s a movie prop or a spanking paddle at this point.”
Yeah, that was probably a better explanation.
But still! “You also pointed a gun at me!”
He dropped the knife on the table and unholstered his gun.
Sarah ducked.
The man held the gun up so she could see into the butt of the grip, which was hollow. “No magazine. It’s unloaded. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell your aunt about that.”
Awnt. He pronounced aunt like awnt, and his speech had a faint crispness that most people in Iowa didn’t share.
Why should she keep this guy’s secrets? Aunt Mary was family. This guy was some stranger who’d held a knife to her throat, even if it was a dull knife, but he had definitely threatened her life.
“So you scared the living heck out of me for absolutely no reason!” Sarah yelled, her hands shaking as she felt around in the knife drawer, but her fingertips encountered the springs of tongs, plastic handles of vegetable peelers, and zig-zag wires of potato mashers. Dammit, she needed to stab him, not peel him.
The man stood, secured his handgun in his hip holster, and snapped a strap over it. “I needed to send a message to your aunt.”
“That’s what texting is for.”
He looked toward the windows and doors, scanning. “I don’t think a Russian organized crime boss would respond well to a sternly worded text.”
Yes, right there, his teeth were a little more clenched than most people’s were. Was he—British?
“She’s not a crime boss,” Sarah told him. “She’s just my Aunt Mary. She’s always been around on the fringes of the family, but she’s not a criminal.”
The man watched her closely, his body frozen with his sleeve rolled halfway down. “Look, I don’t want to get in the middle of a family thing—”
“She told me that you were mistaking her for someone else. She’s not a Russian mobster or anything like that.”
The man frowned. “Is her middle name Varvara?”
