Page 25 of Stolen By the Billionaire
“Same last name,” Sarah said, testing how much she could move in his arms.
Her heavy metal toolbox was just a few yards away.
“Bell is a common last name,” he said. “And I assumed you were third cousins or something.”
“Yeah, not as common as Williams or Smith, but it’s not rare.”
“It didn’t even occur to me that Logan might have a sister. He never talked about his family or where he’d been before we met in Switzerland.”
“Switzerland?” she asked, staying very still to pretend she’d given up. “What was he doing in Switzerland?”
“Logan’s grandfather, who was also your grandfather, sent him to a Swiss boarding school after he ran away from Iowa.”
Sarah’s father had sworn his parents were dead. “You knew my grandfather?”
“I met him when some friends and I stayed with Logan during school breaks. All of us were sort of orphans. We had nowhere else to go.”
Sarah let her voice drift, trying to sound wistful. “I never met my grandfather. What was he like?”
“We called Stanley Bell ‘The Malefactor,’ sort of like a ‘benefactor’ but the opposite. He was . . . evil, to put it in a word. He told us his version of how the world works, through bribery, coercion, blackmail, and violence. Then he loaned each of us money to start our lives. At first, I thought it was a general offer so that your brother would take the money if we all did, but the transaction bound us to him forever.”
“You didn’t have to take it,” she said.
“It was a zero-interest loan, and yeah, we had to. No one ever told Stanley Bell no. It put us in his debt. Taking the money ensured we couldn’t turn on him because his money was in our accounts. We were part of his organization. If he hadn’t died, we were getting to the point where we would have become useful to him.”
The man’s hold around Sarah’s arms and chest relaxed slightly.
Just enough.
Sarah dropped, slithering out of the man’s grip like a limp cat. When she was out of his grasp, she ran.
He chased her, a step behind. “Dammit, Sarah! I’m not trying to hurt you!”
She wasn’t trying to escape this time.
Sarah stooped to grab the handle of her homemade steel toolbox with sharp soldered corners and swung it hard through the air as high as she could reach, aiming for the man’s head.
9
Fighting Spirit
Blaze
The flat silver side of the metal toolbox flew straight at Blaze’s face.
He turned and ducked with an instinct born of thousands of hours of training, so it nailed his right shoulder instead of his head.
A swarm of needles infiltrated his arm as he spun, his other hand grabbing the toolbox and flinging it against the barn wall with a metallic crash and rattle.
Sarah Bell was scrambling away from him on the floor, her boots sliding on the straw.
Blaze launched himself at her and landed on her back, bracing his arms around her to keep from squashing the small woman under his overbuilt body like a bug.
She started throwing elbows.
Blaze admired her form and fighting spirit as he tucked her body under his and laid on her, using his much greater mass to immobilize her.
She screeched and writhed under his chest and between his thighs, her warm feminine flesh and clean scent flowing against his skin through the thin barrier of their clothes.
