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Priscilla took one look at it and sighed in relief. Lightning quick, she flipped the dead bolt and jerked open the door. “Come in—”
She didn’t have time to say another word, let alone scream, as two masked men with guns rushed through the door and grabbed her. Gasping, she tried to scream…only to have duct tape slapped over her mouth. Frantic, she clawed at the tape, but they were ready for her. In the next instant, her wrists were taped together, then her ankles. Trussed up like a turkey, there was nothing she could do as they picked her up and laid her on the floor. Before she could even begin to guess their intentions, they rolled her up in the living room rug.
Just that easily, fear took on a new name. Terror.
When Donovan Jones caught his secretary on the phone with her boyfriend for the fifth time in two days, he was in no mood to cut her any slack. He’d already warned her numerous times that she was there to work, not visit with her lover, and she’d completely ignored him. She was the third secretary he’d hired in three weeks…and the third one who seemed to think she could do whatever the hell she wanted. She was wrong.
“You’re fired,” he growled. And leaning across the desk, he pushed the disconnect button on the phone.
Sputtering, she surged up out of her chair in anger. “What the hell?!”
Not the least bit impressed with her indignation, he growled, “Get your purse and get out. Now! I’ll put your paycheck in the mail tomorrow.”
He didn’t give her time to argue but simply grabbed her purse from where she insisted on leaving it on top of a file cabinet and strode over to the door. Jerking it open, he waited. She was so furious, steam was practically coming out of her ears. Cursing, she jerked her purse out of his hand and stormed out, slamming the door so hard that she nearly knocked it off its hinges.
“Good riddance,” he muttered. “I don’t need you anyway. I can find my own files.”
But when he stalked over to the filing cabinet, the file he needed for a meeting he had scheduled in fifteen minutes wasn’t where it should have been. Swearing, he went through the entire drawer to make sure it hadn’t been misfiled, but it was nowhere to be found.
Which meant, he thought grimly as his gaze landed on the secretary’s desk, it had to be somewhere in the mountain of paperwork that completely covered the top of the desk. She’d been there a week, he thought, irritated. What the hell had she been doing? He’d been on a case and had to leave the office in her hands. Apparently, she hadn’t done a damn thing except talk on the phone to her boyfriend.
Next time, he told himself, he was going to avoid the young chicks like the plague and hire a little, old, gray-haired grandmother instead. Someone who would appreciate the job, he decided, and not take advantage of the fact that he was hardly ever in the office. Someone who—
When the outer office door suddenly opened behind him, he stiffened. If the little witch had come back to plead for her job, she could forget it, he thought. She was history. Pivoting sharply, ready to tell her just that, he found himself confronting a stranger, instead.
Frowning—had he forgotten an appointment?—he lifted a dark brow. “May I help you?”
“I’m looking for Donovan Jones.”
“You found him,” he retorted. “But I’m in a hell of a rush. I’ve got an appointment across town in fifteen minutes, and I’m going to be late as it is. Leave your name and number,” he said, pushing a steno pad across the desk to him, “and I’ll call you the first chance I get.”
“No,” the man said in the clipped regal way that only the British could do. “I need your help now.”
Donovan wasn’t a man who men often said no to. Straightening, he studied the hard look of determination in his visitor’s eyes and the set of his jaw and recognized desperation when he saw it. “What’s your story?” he demanded.
“I’m Buck Wyatt,” he said. “I need you to find my sister.”
Surprised, Donovan blinked. “I’m a bounty hunter, Mr. Wyatt. Is there a bounty out on your sister?”
“No. She’s been kidnapped.”
“How do you know that? Have you received a ransom demand?”
His mouth compressed in a flat line. “No. There won’t be any ransom note. I already know what the kidnappers want.”
Donovan knew he shouldn’t have asked. He hadn’t been lying about his meeting. He was going to be late, and it was important, dammit! But there was something in the fury in Buck Wyatt’s eyes, something in the cold, controlled outrage in his voice that Donovan knew he wasn’t going to be able to walk away from.
Resigned—and more than a little annoyed with his own curiosity—he motioned for Wyatt to pull up a chair. “You’ve got ten minutes,” he said. “Make it good, because after that I am going to my meeting.”
He didn’t have to tell him twice. Too restless to take a seat, Buck Wyatt stood, instead…and paced. “My three sisters and I inherited a ranch in Colorado eleven months ago from an American cousin we didn’t know we had,” he said stiffly. “One of the stipulations of her will was that one of us had to be at the ranch at all times for a period of one year. There was no restriction on how many single nights we could be absent from the ranch, but if no member of the family is present for two nights running, the ranch goes to an unnamed heir.”
Donovan lifted a brow at that. “How many people know about that little stipulation?”
“I would imagine just about everyone in the state of Colorado.”
Donovan whistled softly. “And no one’s run you off yet? You and your sisters must be damn tough.”
A muscle clenched in Buck’s jaw. “So far, we’ve managed to weather one attack after another…as long as they were against the ranch. Now they’ve gone after Priscilla a continent away.”
“And you’re sure your sister’s kidnapping is related to the ranch? When’s the year up?”
“Next month.”
Donovan frowned. That changed things. “Are you even sure that she’s really been kidnapped? What’s her history? Is she the type to stage this kind of thing?”
“God, no! She’s the baby of the family and damn stubborn sometimes about getting her way,” he admitted honestly, “which is why she’s in London to begin with. When she insisted on coming back to close up her apartment, we talked about her accident and how she could be walking right back into the same kind of danger as before, but she intended to be back in Colorado before anyone even knew she was gone. Obviously, that didn’t happen.”
“Whoa, back up,” Donovan said sharply. “What accident?”
Buck quickly told him about the hit-and-run driver who’d nearly killed her. “She spent the last two months at the ranch, recuperating, and during that time, there wasn’t a single attack against any of us because we were all together. Then, less than six hours after she arrives in London, someone grabs her.”
“But how do you know that for sure? Maybe she just decided to go visit some friends before she left.”
“She knew how important it was to get in and out as quickly as possible,” Buck argued. “According to the London police, her landlord found the door to her flat standing wide-open and she was nowhere to be found. She appeared to be packing when someone apparently talked their way into her apartment. There were signs of a struggle and she left her purse behind.”
Studying him through narrowed eyes, Donovan should have told him he couldn’t help him. It would have been the wise thing to do. He was up to his ears in cases and couldn’t even find the time to hire a decent secretary. He didn’t have room on his calendar for another case.
And even if he had, he silently acknowledged, Priscilla Wyatt was not the kind of woman he wanted to go looking for. He’d read between the lines of what her brother had said about her, and she was obviously headstrong and spoiled and determined to have her way. Kidnapping her back from her kidnappers sounded like a headache waiting to happen.
But she was a woman in trouble. And unless he totally missed the mark, Buck was right. Her kidnapper was, no doubt, planning to use her as the pawn that drew her family away from the ranch. He would hurt her if he had to. Time was running out on the Wyatts’s trial period, and whoever thought they were the unnamed heir had to be getting desperate. Priscilla Wyatt was in a hell of a mess…and in more danger than her family probably realized.
Silently swearing, Donovan pulled out his cell phone. Surprised, Buck Wyatt frowned. “What are you doing?”
“Canceling my appointment,” he retorted. “I’ll take the case.”
Over the course of the next hour, Donovan asked Buck every question he could think of about Priscilla, her flat, where she might go if she was able to escape her kidnappers, how gutsy she was, her strengths and weaknesses. She’d been kidnapped. Would she fight or dissolve in tears? Panic or use her head? If he was going to save her, he had to know how she would react under duress.
“She’ll use her head,” Buck assured him. “Initially, she’ll be scared out of her mind, but once she gets her fear under control, she’ll start looking for a way to escape. She’s smart,” he added, “and damn creative. She won’t take this lying down.”
“That’ll work in her favor as long as she doesn’t let her kidnapper know what’s going on in her head,” Donovan replied. “The more helpless she acts, the better chance she’ll have of taking the bastard by surprise. Has she ever taken any karate or self-defense classes?”
“No, not that I—”
His cell phone rang then, surprising them both. Scowling at the number on the face of the phone, he looked up sharply at Donovan. “It’s a private number.”
“It could be the kidnapper,” Donovan warned. “Don’t let him know you’re in London. And listen to background noises that might give you an indication of where he may be.”
His expression grave, Buck nodded, then flipped open his phone. “Hello?”
“You have forty-eight hours to leave the ranch for good…or your sister dies.”
“Who is this—”
Just that quickly, the line went dead. “He hung up,” Buck said in disgust, and repeated word for word what the caller had said. “There weren’t any background noises, and the bastard was definitely disguising his voice.”
“Give me your cell phone number,” Donovan told him. “I’ve got a friend who might be able to trace the caller’s location when he made the call. I’ll get back with you as soon as I know something.”
“I’m going with you.”
“The hell you are.”
“Priscilla is my sister, dammit! I have a right—”
“Then find yourself another bounty hunter,” he said curtly. “I work alone. If you really want to help your sister, go back to Colorado and help protect the rest of the family and your ranch. I’ll take care of Priscilla.”
“If she’s still alive.”
“Oh, she’s alive,” Donovan assured him. “She’s got forty-eight hours. After that, all bets are off.”
Chapter 2
The police had already gone through Priscilla’s flat with a fine-tooth comb and released the place back to her landlord. Thanks to a call from Buck Wyatt, Donovan was able to get a spare key. He took one step inside and knew that at least two people were involved in her kidnapping.
And they hadn’t taken her without a struggle.
Staring at the broken lamp and an overturned dining room chair, Donovan clenched his teeth on the sudden angry curse that rose to his tongue. Bastards. He didn’t know Priscilla, didn’t know any more about her than her brother had told him, but he knew all he needed to know. She might be spoiled and headstrong, but she was still an innocent woman who’d done nothing wrong except inherit a ranch from a distant relative she’d never met. She had, no doubt, been terrified when she realized that she’d opened her door to an enemy, but the lady had put up a fight. And it was that gumption that just might save her life.
The clock was ticking, and every instinct Donovan had urged him to hurry. Forty-eight hours would pass in the blink of an eye, and he was wasting precious time. But he knew from past cases that success depended on doing his homework. If he was going to find Priscilla Wyatt, he had to first know how her kidnappers had gotten her out of the apartment without someone noticing.
Walking over to the window that overlooked the street below, he frowned. The neighborhood that Priscilla lived in was in an older section of London that was a mix of well-known restaurants, popular pubs and shops at street level, with old-fashioned flats above. Considering that, Donovan doubted that the streets emptied before midnight. Which meant, he thought grimly, that Priscilla’s kidnappers hadn’t walked out of her flat with her like they were going out to dinner. So how the hell had they managed to get her out of her flat without anyone seeing them?
He turned to study the living room again, and only just then noticed what looked like a line of fine powder on the floor. Puzzled, he squatted down to examine it and realized that the powder was actually shattered glass from the lamp. And the reason it was in a neat line was because when the lamp broke, it had, apparently, shattered at the edge of a rug. A rug which was, he thought in growing fury, no longer there.
They’d rolled her up in a damn rug and carried her out like a dead body. He didn’t care how gutsy she was; she must have been scared out of her mind.
Livid, he promised himself he was going to make the bastards pay for this. But first he had to find them.
His lean face carved in stern lines, he exited the apartment and made sure he locked the dead bolt. Then he went to work.
The neighborhood was quaint and full of atmosphere. The kind of place women loved, Donovan acknowledged…and a bitch to search. With the restaurants and pubs open late, people came and went at all hours of the day and night. God knew how many of them lived in the area or witnessed Priscilla’s kidnapping without even knowing it.
Muttering a curse, he headed for the pub across the street. The bar had wide, paned windows that overlooked the street and Priscilla’s flat. Surely a waitress or bartender or one of the regulars must have seen something.
But when he went inside, he was met with nothing but one negative response after another. Frustrated, he moved to the restaurant next door, then the bookstore on the corner and every other business up and down both sides of the street for three blocks. And the answer was always the same. No one had seen two men or anyone else moving a rug.
Walking out of the pizzeria two doors down from Priscilla’s flat, he swore softly as he realized that darkness had fallen while he was canvassing the street and he still didn’t have any leads to go on. And time was running out for Priscilla Wyatt.
It wasn’t often that he was at his wit’s end, and it infuriated him. He was better than this! His competitors claimed he had the nose of a bloodhound. So who the hell had taken Priscilla Wyatt?
Scowling, he stared down the street and watched the crowded sidewalks begin to empty as friends met friends for drinks or dinner and disappeared inside. The twilight was deeper now, the darkness nearly complete, and he realized that this was just about the time Priscilla must have been kidnapped. No wonder no one had noticed her kidnapping. The only streetlights were on the distant corners, and the people who were on the street were hurrying to get where they were going, not paying attention to anything but their own business.
Caught up in his musings, it was several long moments before he noticed the woman coming toward him, walking her dog. He started to look past her, only to glance at her sharply. Had she come by at the same time yesterday? People generally walked their dogs at the same time every day, didn’t they? Could she have seen Priscilla’s kidnappers in the dark and not even realized it? If she walked by without anyone else seeing her, the police wouldn’t have questioned her because they had no idea she existed. Even now, twenty-four hours later, the woman probably didn’t know that a kidnapping had taken place.
Striding toward her, he eyed her dog warily. A Doberman. Great, he thought irritably. He was usually good with dogs, but Dobermans could be damn protective. The last one he’d tangled with had taken a bite out of his hide. He wasn’t going there again.
“Nice dog,” he told the woman as he drew closer. “Does he bite?”
“When I tell him to,” she shot back. Stopping in her tracks, she tightened her grip on the leash. Just that easily, the dog was on guard. His golden brown eyes focused unblinkingly on Donovan, he growled low in his throat, daring him to take so much as one more step toward him and his mistress.
“Look, I’m not a threat to you,” he told the woman. “I just need to ask you some questions. A woman was kidnapped here last night, and her family has hired me to find her.”
“I didn’t hear anything about a kidnapping,” she replied, eyeing him suspiciously.
“The police didn’t learn about it until late last night, and it didn’t make the news until this morning,” he explained.
Studying him, she frowned. “I was running late this morning,” she finally admitted. “I haven’t heard the news all day.”
“Did you, by any chance, happen to walk this way last night?”
She didn’t commit one way or the other. Instead, she just lifted a brow and said, “And if I did?”
“I’m not accusing you of anything,” he assured her. “I just need to know if you saw two men moving a rug out of the flat across the street.”
She didn’t say a word, but even in the darkness, he saw surprise flicker in her eyes. “So you did see something,” he said in satisfaction. “How many men were there? Two? Three? Did you get a look at them? What were they driving?” When she hesitated, he knew she didn’t want to get involved. It was too late for that. “There was a woman rolled up in that rug,” he said. “If the circumstances had been different, it could have been you. Are you really going to stand there and say nothing?”
For a moment, he thought she actually wasn’t going to answer him. Then tears misted her eyes. “I didn’t realize,” she whispered, horrified. “It just looked like a rolled up rug—”
“She’s still alive,” he told her quietly. “But only for forty-eight hours.”
“There were two men, both just a little taller than me. I didn’t get a good look at their faces, but they were both very thin, almost gaunt.”
“And their hair?”
“One was bald. And the other had a military cut. I think it was blonde.”
Donovan frowned. Military? That was a twist he hadn’t expected. “What were they driving?”
“A black van,” she answered promptly. “I didn’t get the plate number, but they didn’t go very far. Just over to Reynolds Street.”
Already trying to figure out how he was going to find two skinny, short bastards in a wrecked van, it was several seconds before her words registered. “What?” he said sharply. “How do you know that?”
“Because I saw the same van pulling out of an alley at Reynolds and Third when Precious and I were on our way home. Or at least I thought it was the same van,” she added. “The streetlight on the corner was out, so I couldn’t see very well.”
“Reynolds and Third? You’re sure?”
“Absolutely,” she said. “C’mon. I’ll show you. Though I don’t know what good it will do. The van pulled out of the alley and disappeared down the street.”
“That’s okay,” he replied. “It’s a place to start. Let’s go.”
