Page 37 of Stolen By the Billionaire
He took his foot off the accelerator. The car coasted down to eighty. “Probably not.”
Sarah flopped forward, holding onto the door handle and panting.
“We had to get ahead of them,” he said.
“Yeah, I’ll bet.” She glanced out the back window and then slumped in her seat. “I’m Sarah Nevaeh Bell.”
He suppressed the sarcastic Yeah, I know that rose in his head and steered the car down the road in the morning sunlight. “Pleased to meet you, Sarah.”
“Do you really know Logan?”
Blaze retrieved his phone from the pocket of his camo trousers and set it in its cradle on the dashboard. “Phone, call Logan Bell.”
“Calling Logan Bell,” his phone replied in the usual female AI voice through the car’s speakers, and it started ringing.
“No!” Sarah jabbed the red dot on his phone’s screen.
“Logan can explain everything,” Blaze said.
“I just—” She looked out her car window and jiggled her knee. “I don’t want to talk to him.”
“He’s your brother.”
“He’s not,” Sarah said. “I’ve been trying to explain that to you. Where are you taking me?”
“My house in Chicago,” Blaze said, tightening his grip on the steering wheel. “You’ll be safe there.”
“Look, buddy, I appreciate the ride out of Dodge, but you can let me off at the I-80 truck stop up here. Dang, we got here fast. It usually takes me an hour to get this far east.”
“You can’t go back to your farm until we clear up this misunderstanding.”
“I’ll get a neighbor to come pick me up and stay with them. I can just lie low for a while.”
Mary Varvara Bell’s henchmen would quickly find her in the small town of Kalona. “I don’t think that’s safe.”
“Yeah, well, it’s my life and my livestock and my tarot card business. I can’t be gone that long.”
“I arranged it so you can,” Blaze said, keeping his voice steady and, he hoped, convincing.
“My neighbors can’t take care of the farm like I can, plus I can guarantee that they can’t read tarot cards, and it’s all my responsibility. I’m not even sure those dudes were after me, anyway. They kept talking about ‘the job,’ but they never mentioned my name. They never really pointed at me and said I was toast.”
And maybe she’d misunderstood them. She’d been riled up.
He said, “They were after you.”
“I don’t know. They could have been trying to find you,” she said, her voice rising. “Maybe they were following you, and that’s why they came to my farm. You said you’d been lying in my cornfield for a week. Maybe they got tired of waiting for you in Chicago and tracked you here.”
Seriously, the nerve of this girl. “No one tracked me.”
“Maybe they were just going to use me as bait to get to you, or maybe I just got in their way. You’re way more the kind of guy who might get on the wrong side of a mafia boss than I am. I’m just an Iowa farm girl with a side hustle as a fake psychic. You’re a special forces commando-mercenary and international man of mystery, ya know?”
“I wouldn’t describe myself that way,” Blaze said, frowning.
“As a matter of fact, when I was sitting in their car with my hands tied behind my back by you, they were still standing outside and looking around like they were waiting for someone else. You’d think if they’d already captured the person they wanted to kill, they’d just get on with it instead of standing around and fidgeting with their clothes and whatnot. I’ll bet they were after you.”
Blaze drove carefully, though his foot became heavier on the accelerator. “They were on your farm. They were looking for you.”
“You were on my farm,” she said. “They were following you.”
