Page 53 of Stolen By the Billionaire
Sarah’s face warmed like she needed to fan herself.
Must be from the “Mexican” food.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll deep-fake your voice using your SnipSnap videos for data and call your friends to ensure Charlie and HowNow have been found.”
“But I won’t know if you really called if I don’t hear you,” she said. “You could just say you did.”
He nodded. “You can be in my office while I talk to them, but there’s a condition.”
“Yeah?” Sarah said, breathless. Charlie and HowNow had to be okay. She felt it, but she needed to know it. “I’ll do it. Whatever it is, I’ll do it.”
He leveled his gaze at her, his eyes steady on hers like he was looking into her soul. “You should hear the condition first.”
She blinked, nervous tremors starting in her stomach. “Okay?”
“I’ll have to tie you up.” His chin dropped while his gaze bored into hers, and his voice lowered to deep bass tones. “And I’m very good at tying people up.”
17
Ropes
Sarah
Sarah sat in a high-backed chair in Blaze Robinson’s office and held onto the chair’s arms like she might run away.
Blaze Robinson’s long black tee shirt, the only thing she wore, rode up and bared her knees to the cool air.
The chair hadn’t wiggled the littlest bit when she’d sat down on it, other than the give of the cushions under her bottom and against her spine. The back cushion didn’t cover the whole back of the chair, though, and she rested her skull against the wooden slats that extended higher than her head.
Most of the light in the dim room came from the pale blue glow of the wide wraparound monitor on the computer desk, another piece of furniture with clean lines, curved surfaces, and aluminum legs that looked like it might have been designed for a 1960s pew-pew science fiction movie set like the rest of the house.
Gray-orange dregs of the sunset painted the long, high window on the opposite wall but didn’t brighten the room much.
She waited in the dim room.
Her leg twitched, and then her heel tapped the dark wood floor.
His office was downstairs, which had startled Sarah when Blaze led her down the squared-off spiral staircase to the house’s lower level.
The top of the main staircase had been in the main hallway from the garage, but she hadn’t thought anything of it. Houses, even big, expensive ones, had basements. People needed to store things, and the Midwest spawned tornadoes.
But his house had another entire level underneath, doubling the size of his already huge house.
A house that size didn’t seem to need more of anything. The enormous garage plus the living room, dining area, and kitchen were at least three times the size of her whole farmhouse, and judging dimensions, there must be another quarter of the house opposite the kitchen that she’d assumed must be the bedrooms. She hadn’t considered that there might be a whole ’nother story underneath the main one.
But there was.
Five bedrooms, several bathrooms, a library, and Blaze’s office.
In the rooms underneath the living room upstairs, another wall of windows and glass sliders opened to wide steps leading out to the pool deck, the backyard, and the vastness of Lake Michigan. The entire back of the two-story house was glass.
Blaze had shown her into one of the bedrooms, one without a sliding glass door but just a wall-to-wall locked window, and handed her the long black tee shirt she now wore and a toiletry kit in a leather bag.
The bag must have been a counterfeit knockoff because its brand name was spelled wrong, Bvlgari with a v instead of a u, but it held a toothbrush and tasty mint toothpaste. The lotion was amazingly creamy.
“You just happened to have an emergency toiletries kit just sitting around?” she asked him, wondering just how dang often he kidnapped women for their own good.
He shrugged. “Sometimes, people need a place to stay for a few days. When I fly, I grab a few of the extra toiletries bags they hand out so I’m prepared.”
