Page 29 of Stolen By the Billionaire
“Turn Charlie and HowNow out to pasture through the back doors. You just have to make sure the front barn doors are closed and the back ones are open, and then open their stalls. If Charlie wanders out the front, he’ll come back when you whistle. HowNow is the problem child. She’ll just take off, and she’s an escape artist. I have to ride the fences on their pasture a couple of times a week because she will squeeze out of any opening if you give her half a chance. My neighbors are always calling me, telling me to come get my cow from their pasture again. They have big ol’ black and white Holsteins, so she stands out.”
The guy had already secured the barn’s front doors and opened the back while Sarah was talking, and then he let her animals out to pasture.
They didn’t need to be asked twice. Going out into the morning sunshine and sweet grass was the best part of their days, after their oats, of course. They clip-clopped right out of the barn and into the grass.
“I leave the back doors open in case they want to come back inside, in case it rains or they want to get out of the sun. It’s been hot lately,” she told him.
The man stood in front of where Sarah was tied to the post. “What else?”
Maybe Sarah could get this guy to do all her morning chores while she lollygagged before she escaped to the house, grabbed her varmint rifle, and escorted him off her property. “The garden needs to be watered and weeded.”
He frowned. “We don’t have time for that. It’s almost eight-thirty. That team should arrive within hours. We need to be long gone.”
Oh yeah, the “assassins” that Sarah’s aunt the historian had sent to rub her out, or some other vaguely obscene mafia term for murder. Sarah didn’t believe in the assassins any more than she believed in the dang Easter Bunny, but this guy was either suffering from psychotic PTSD or was a serial killer. “Yeah, the scary hired killers are probably at another one of my neighbors, asking directions again.”
And yet, maybe Sarah’s aunt had sent someone to save her. On the video call the day before, Aunt Mary had acted like she knew this guy.
Maybe she’d known he was dangerous.
Maybe Aunt Mary had called the police or the FBI, and they were on their way to save her and arrest this kidnapper who’d home-invasioned Sarah’s house.
Maybe this guy was trying to mess with Sarah’s mind and do a Stockholm Syndrome because the FBI was coming.
Well, Sarah wouldn’t stand for that. If someone was coming, they were probably from her aunt, and Sarah trusted her aunt.
“We need to leave,” the man said.
If he wanted to leave, then Sarah needed to stall. “We have to put that milk in the fridge in the house first.”
The guy unwrapped the nylon rope from around her arms and helped her stand, but he didn’t cut the zip ties binding her wrists behind her back. “Come on.”
“Fine,” she grumbled.
She walked as slowly as she could toward the house, stumbling over imaginary pebbles and stopping to stare at the cornfields every few steps.
“Come on,” the guy growled, finally taking her elbow and hustling her to the back door while he carried the milk pail with his other hand.
Sarah leaned against the counter. “The milk needs to be poured into the sterilized bottles, and then the bottles need to be put in the farm store coolers by the road.”
She talked slowly, trying to let minutes elapse instead of seconds.
“The milk needs to get out there,” she drawled. “If the milk’s not out there, people who stop to buy it might be suspicious and come looking for me. And then, they might—”
“Yeah, yeah,” the guy said. “I’m going to make a phone call. You be quiet, or else I’ll have to gag you, understood?”
Sarah nodded, intending not to be quiet at all. If he was going to make a phone call, she was going to scream bloody murder and definitely bloody kidnapping.
The man squinted at her. “Dammit. Upstairs.”
“What?”
He pointed to her staircase. “Upstairs, right now.”
Sarah stomped. The guy followed her up the stairs and tied her to her chair in her tarot card studio with more zip ties.
“Seriously, you are not,” Sarah growled at him.
He didn’t even flippin’ reply to her, and then he walked out.
