Page 6 of Stolen By the Billionaire
But the squeak couldn’t be from a person in her house. Muffintop had been born a barn cat before Sarah had taken her into the house at half-grown. If a stranger had walked in, Muffy would have spun her wheels on the kitchen’s wooden floor as she peeled out, smashing into wooden chairs and cabinets and knocking things over as she skittered away in a panic. Sarah would have heard the racket. That nervous beast was a better alarm system than a bunch of lasers and sensors.
Weird.
On her phone, the Zoom link was still spinning, waiting for Jack Marble to pick up, even though he was three minutes late already.
Sarah could have sworn a footstep tapped the hollow wooden floor right outside the door of her studio.
None of her guns were in her studio room, and drapes covered the windows that she’d have to fight her way through to jump out.
Also, her studio was on the second floor. It was a long way down to the hard ground outside.
Sweat misted Sarah’s body under her psychic’s robes.
But jeez. She lived in the middle of nowhere in Nowhere, Iowa. No one was around to break into her house.
The Zoom link on her phone was still spinning, waiting for Jack Marble to pick up, and then the phone blinked bright light as the Zoom connected for the call.
The screen unblurred, and a very white office came into view.
Sunlight streamed through tall glass windows behind the person sitting at a desk.
A woman, middle-aged with a severe blond bun, leaned into the camera and frowned. She asked, “Sarah?”
Sarah blinked at her phone and pushed her glittering turban back. “Aunt Mary?”
The door smashed open.
A man stormed in. Green camouflage paint striped across his face except for his pale, ice-water blue eyes, and he pointed a handgun at Sarah as he marched into the room, tilting his head to stare down the sights at her.
3
Go Time
Blaze
For weeks, Blaze Robinson had stalked Sarah Bell.
As with every operation, if you failed to plan, you planned to fail.
Blaze’s meticulous plans never failed.
Finding Sarah Bell had taken him a few days on the computer. Once Blaze confirmed she was Mary Varvara Bell’s niece, finalizing his plan had taken only a couple more.
Damn, he wished there’d been another way to get Mary Varvara Bell off his back. The coming interaction with Sarah weighed on him. Sarah had done nothing to deserve it other than being related to a Russian mafia queen.
Mary Varvara Bell just had no other pain points. Her niece was her only weak spot.
Once he’d gotten to Iowa, he surveilled her from the cornfields outside her house, tracking her, sleeping under his ghillie suit, and watching her with only periodic breaks in a hotel room over in the nearby town of West Liberty to cleanse his body and his soul with a shower and a few hours of volunteer work on his phone.
Blaze settled on the hotel’s sagging bed, the glass screen of his phone chilling his ear and jaw joint as the speaker rang in his ear.
“Vets in Crisis admin line,” a man answered.
“This is Lieutenant Commander Blaze Robinson. I have an hour or so,” Blaze said, shifting on the creaking bed to get more comfortable.
“Thank you for your service, Lieutenant Commander Robinson. Hold for our next caller.”
But for those few hours’ sojourns, Blaze continued reconnaissance in Sarah Bell’s cornfield, watching her patterns, evaluating her chores, and watching the sun trace an arc through the turquoise Iowa sky.
