Bounty Hunter’s Woman

by Linda Turner

  Alarmed by the direction of her thoughts, she told herself she was just letting her imagination run away with her. Buck wouldn’t have hired a criminal to find her. He would have done some research.

  But even as she tried to reassure herself she had nothing to worry about, she knew Buck hadn’t had any time to check out anyone. He’d flown to London as soon as the police had notified him of her kidnapping. And considering how quickly Donovan had found her, Buck must have hired him almost immediately. When would he have had time to do a background check?

  Her breath caught in her throat at the thought. How could she trust him? Even if he really was a bounty hunter, he hunted down people for money. His only loyalty was to whoever paid him. What if the devil who was after the ranch had discovered that Buck had hired him, then offered him more money to get rid of her? It would be so easy. All he had to do was pretend that he was taking her somewhere to protect her, then eliminate her when he was sure there was no one around to witness her murder. He could dump her body in the middle of nowhere. All he would have to tell Buck was that she’d gotten away from him, her kidnappers had caught her again, then dispose of her body. Just that easily, Donovan and the jackasses who had taken her captive would get away with murder, and no one would be the wiser.

  The coppery taste of fear in her mouth sickening her, she was afraid in a way she hadn’t been before. He wasn’t like the kidnappers who’d forced their way into her apartment last night. They’d been cold and threatening and more than a little sinister, and she readily admitted that they’d terrified her, but she’d recognized fairly quickly that they weren’t the brightest bulbs in the box. Donovan, on the other hand, was not the kind of man who suffered fools lightly. Sharp intelligence gleamed in his blue eyes, along with a steely determination that chilled her to the bone. When he smiled, he fairly oozed charm, but Priscilla knew better than to be taken in by the man’s good looks and crooked grin. He was dangerous, and the quicker she got away from him the better.

  He didn’t make it easy for her. He drove long into the night, leaving the fog of London—and, hopefully, her kidnappers—far behind. Still, he refused to stop in spite of the fact that she’d had nothing to eat since breakfast and was feeling nauseated. It wasn’t until she warned him that she was going to throw up if she didn’t get something in her stomach that he finally stopped at the next petrol station they came to.

  “This is the only stop we’re making between now and dawn,” he warned her as he took advantage of the stop to fill up the van with gas. Pulling out his wallet, he handed her some cash. “I suggest you get enough junk food to last you for the next twelve hours or so. Once the sun comes up, we’ll hole up somewhere for the rest of the day. You can whine all you want—we’re not leaving there until it’s dark tomorrow night, so get what you want to eat now.”

  “Just because I’m hungry doesn’t mean I’m a whiner. You’d be complaining too if you hadn’t eaten in sixteen hours.”

  “You’re a wuss,” he retorted. “You’re the baby of the family, aren’t you?” When she just looked at him, he grinned. “I knew it. I bet your parents carried you around on a feather pillow and gave little Miss Priss everything she wanted, didn’t they?”

  He couldn’t have been more wrong about her, but she had no intention of dignifying his accusations with an answer. Turning on her heel, she marched into the petrol station with her nose in the air.

  “Do you want me to get the food for you, baby?” he called after her. “I can feed it to you, too, if you want.”

  Walking across the parking lot to the petrol station, she gave him a rude hand gesture, which only drew a laugh from him. Obnoxious man, she thought, fighting to hold back a smile. She would not laugh! He might be irritatingly charming, but for all she knew, he was just another kidnapper working for whoever was after the Broken Arrow. And she was getting away from him just as soon as possible.

  Her chance came much quicker than she’d anticipated. When she walked into the petrol station and headed for the restroom, her breath caught in her throat at the sight of the alcove next to the restrooms that was the entrance to the station’s storage room. A sign above the doorway said Employees Only, but she hardly noticed. All she saw was the rear door at the far end of the storage room. It was standing wide open for the deliveryman, who was wheeling in boxes of supplies. Without a word to him or anyone else, she walked past him, slipped outside and disappeared into the darkness behind the rear of the building.

  Chapter 4

  Later, Donovan would have sworn that Priscilla couldn’t have been out of his sight for more than a minute or two. But when he went into the station to pay, she was nowhere to be found.

  “Dammit to hell!” Swearing, he knocked sharply on the door to the women’s restroom, but there was no response. When he glanced inside, the room was empty.

  “I’m going to kill her,” he muttered to himself, not bothering to ask the clerk where she’d gone. The answer was obvious. A deliveryman was busy restocking the snack aisle with fresh breads and cakes, and through the station’s storage room, he could see the back door to the building. It was standing wide open.

  Kicking himself for being seven kinds of a fool—and ever saying yes to Buck Wyatt—he ran out the door, promising himself he was going to hog-tie her when he got his hands on her again. Then he caught a glimpse of her—a dark shadow running down the street…just as a car came around the corner behind her. She never saw the driver speed up, never saw him send the vehicle racing right at her.

  He was going to hit her.

  Donovan wasn’t a man who was easily shaken, but momentarily, he stood rooted to the ground. Then he started running. “Priscilla!”

  Startled, she turned, and even in the dark, Donovan would have sworn she went white as a sheet when she saw the car shooting toward her like a bullet. She screamed and threw herself behind a tree. A split second later, the oncoming vehicle caught the edge of the tree, bounced off it and went careening across the street to slam into a Mini Cooper heading the opposite direction.

  Donovan didn’t wait to see more. Reaching Priscilla, he grabbed her. “C’mon!” he shouted. “We’ve got to get out of here. Now!”

  He didn’t have to tell her twice. Turning, she ran back to the van with him and threw herself inside like the devil himself was after her. The second Donovan slid behind the wheel, she hit the door locks.

  “I ought to turn you over my knee,” he snarled as he started the engine with a quick flick of his wrist and pulled out of the petrol station parking lot with squealing tires. “What the hell were you thinking? I told you you were safe with me. How many times do I have to say it? You even talked to Buck, for God’s sake!”

  Stung, she snapped, “Anyone can say anything. I heard what you said to that man who called you. You accused him of giving you up, of betraying you—”

  “He’s a snitch,” he cut in. “He’d just had a pint with a bastard I’d been tracking for over a year! I was afraid he’d told him I was after him.” Checking his rearview mirror, he took little comfort in the fact that there wasn’t a soul behind them. “How the hell did they find us?” he muttered half to himself.

  Seeing the direction of his gaze, she glanced sharply over her shoulder. “Are we being followed?”

  “No,” he retorted. “We weren’t before.”

  Surprised, she frowned. “Then how—”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. They couldn’t have staked out our route—I didn’t know where I was going until after I spoke to Buck. So how could they have known what direction we were going and already put thugs in place to intercept us?”

  “Surely they don’t have enough manpower to watch every road coming out of London,” she said, confused. “That would take dozens of men.”

  “It would take a hell of a lot more than that,” he said grimly. “And even then, they’d have to scour every road in London, which is, of course, impossible.”

  “Then how—”

&
nbsp; “They’ve got to be tracking us.” Swearing, he turned off the road abruptly and whipped behind a closed restaurant. Braking quickly, he threw the transmission into park and pushed open his door. “C’mon,” he told her, “there’s got to be a bug planted on the van somewhere. We’ve got to find it.”

  “A bug? But how—”

  “Someone must have planted it when it was parked in the alley behind your flat.”

  “But how? When?” Then she remembered the threats her captors had made just minutes before Donovan had burst into the apartment. “Oh, my God, my kidnappers were expecting someone,” she told him as she slipped out of the van and joined him. “He was late, and they kept telling me he was going to torture me and record my screams for my family. If he came in after I escaped, he would have seen the van in the alley.”

  “And assumed whoever left it there had something to do with your escape.”

  “But he didn’t know that for sure. So why didn’t he come looking for us?”

  “He did—that’s why he wasn’t at the van when we got back,” he replied. “And he didn’t have to be if he had it bugged. If he missed you in the fog, which he obviously did, all he had to do was track the van.”

  Horrified, she looked at the van like it was some kind of monster. “Where would he hide a bug? What does it look like?”

  “Tracking devices come in different shapes, but it’s small and it’s magnetic. So look under the fenders and bumpers—any place you could stick a magnet where it might not be noticed.”

  The restaurant they’d parked behind was closed and pitch black. The parking lot had lights, but they, too, were dark, and the closest available streetlight was nearly three blocks away. With no flashlight, they were left with no choice but to blindly run their hands over the vehicle in search of the tracking device that could have been anywhere.

  Priscilla had little experience with the nuts and bolts of a van or any other automobile, let alone a bug smaller than a walnut that could track them across England. She couldn’t find anything…or shake the feeling that they were being watched. Panic pulling at her, she glanced over her shoulder for the fifth time in less than a minute and had to fight the need to run. Was that eyes she saw in the darkness?

  “We need to get out of here!” she finally cried. “We’ve been here too long. They’re going to find us.”

  “Check the rear bumper one more time,” he told her. “The damn thing’s got to be here somewhere.”

  Frustrated, she did as he instructed, but only because he wouldn’t agree to leave until she did. “This is crazy! You’re going to get us killed—”

  At that moment, her fingers whisked over a metal disc that she hadn’t noticed before because she hadn’t reached completely under the middle of the bumper. Her pulse racing, she reached deep again, blindly examining the unknown object with her fingertips, looking for an edge she could slip a nail under. When she found it, the small piece of metal dropped into her hand.

  “Got it,” she said, and held it up triumphantly.

  “Good girl,” he exclaimed, pleased, as he examined it. “Now that we know what we’re dealing with, let’s get the hell out of here.”

  She expected him to throw the tracking device into the middle of the nearest field. Instead, he took it with them. Horrified, she watched as he casually dropped it into a cup holder on the console between the two front seats. “What are you doing? I thought you were going to get rid of it. It’s going to lead the kidnappers right to us!”

  Far from worried, he only grinned in the darkness. “Ye of little faith. Chill, sweetheart. I’ve got everything under control.”

  If she hadn’t been so worried, she would have laughed at the outrageous remark. Under control?! He was driving around with the bug that would lead her kidnappers right to them, and he wasn’t the least bit concerned. Was he mad? How could she possibly chill when there were men chasing them, men who knew where they were and wanted her dead?

  “That’s easy for you to say,” she began, only to frown when he suddenly did a U-turn in the middle of the road and pulled into a petrol station. “What are you doing? We already have petrol.”

  Pulling up next to the gas tank, where a truck loaded with restaurant supplies was also parked, he reached for the bug and shot her a quick grin. “Watch and learn.”

  Stepping from the van, he disappeared behind the restaurant supply truck. Anyone watching him would think that he was heading for the petrol station to prepay for his gas, but he was back almost immediately. And there was no sign of the tracking device.

  Priscilla immediately guessed what he had done and she was aghast. “How could you put it on that truck? That poor driver is totally innocent in all this. What’s he going to do when he’s chased down by the kidnappers?”

  “Tell them that the only time he stopped was to get gas,” he said simply, “and he never saw anyone stick a bug on his truck. By the time they figure out where the switch was made, we’ll be long gone.”

  “But what if they don’t believe him?” she argued. “They could threaten him.”

  “And risk bringing the police in on this? I don’t think so. Relax. You’re safe,” he assured her, and turned right as he pulled out of the station.

  Surprised, she frowned at the sight of London in the distance. “What are you doing? We’re going the wrong way. This takes us back to London!”

  “I know,” he confirmed. “We’re going back to your flat.”

  “What?!”

  “We don’t have any choice,” he explained. “Unless you have your passport with you…”

  “My passport? Oh, my God!”

  “Why don’t I like the sound of that? What’s wrong? Where’s your passport?”

  “The kidnappers threw it away so I wouldn’t be able to leave the country if I managed to escape from them. Now what do we do?”

  “Don’t panic,” he said quickly. “First things first. Are you sure they threw it away? Did you actually see them toss it?”

  She nodded. “They threw it in the Dumpster in the alley. What if it’s been emptied?”

  “Then we’ll deal with it,” he replied. “If we have to, we can use a fake passport, but I don’t want to risk that unless we’re absolutely forced to—which is why we’re going back to your flat.”

  Priscilla’s stomach turned over at the thought. “Why can’t we go to the police? Or Scotland Yard? If the authorities knew what was going on, surely they’d be able to get my passport for me and help me get out of the country.”

  “I wouldn’t advise that unless you know someone at the Yard you can trust with your life,” he said bluntly. “Whoever’s after you has a hell of a long reach. If they can hire thugs in England to try to kill you in a car accident, then kidnap you just hours after you return to England, they can hire anyone. Be careful who you trust.”

  She paled. He was right. Was she willing to take a chance going to the police? What if they refused to let her leave England? And then the press somehow got hold of the story? Her kidnappers would know where she was, and just the thought of that scared the hell out of her.

  Suddenly chilled to the bone, she shivered. “No,” she said huskily. “You’re right. I don’t want to take any more chances. Let’s go back to the flat.”

  Finding her passport, however, wasn’t as simple as showing up at Priscilla’s flat and digging through the Dumpster in the alley. Logic told Donovan that her kidnappers were long gone by now, but if they really did throw her passport in the Dumpster, they knew she’d have to come back for it. And when she did, someone would, in all likelihood, be watching.

  They wouldn’t, however, see Priscilla Wyatt. “We’re changing vehicles,” he said abruptly, and headed for one of the numerous car rentals near the airport. “If someone is watching your flat, they’ll be looking for the van—and you. We’ve got to make some changes.”

  An hour later, after they’d changed to a black Toyota Camry and Donovan made a quick stop at a drugstore that was ope
n all night, he took her to his office on the opposite side of town. When he managed to whisk her inside without a single soul seeing her, she should have been relieved. Instead, she couldn’t stop thinking about the “changes” Donovan intended to implement. Just what did he have in mind?

  She found out almost immediately when he retrieved a pair of scissors from the bag of mysterious items he’d bought at the drugstore. She took one look at them and dug in her heels. “If you think you’re going to cut my hair, you can think again, mister. It’s not happening.”

  He gave her a wounded look. “This isn’t my first rodeo, sweetheart. I’ve cut a woman’s hair before.”

  “And she lived to tell about it?”

  “Last I heard, she was still kicking.” He chuckled. “And, I might add, she’s still wearing her hair the way I cut it.”

  For a moment, Priscilla almost believed him. Then she saw the glint of mischief in his eyes. “You’re good,” she said with reluctant admiration. “Too good. I’ll keep my hair, thank you very much.”

  “It’ll grow back—”

  “Easy for you to say,” she cut in. “I don’t see you letting me cut yours.”

  Without a word, he held the scissors out to her.

  Surprised, she studied him suspiciously. “Are you serious?”

  “Like I said, sweet cakes, it grows back. Take your best shot. Do it right, and my own mother won’t recognize me.”

  It would serve him right if she took him at his word, she thought. But then again, he might do the same thing to her. Hesitating, she eyed him warily. “Is that what you’re going to do to me?”

  He grinned wickedly. “You’ll have to wait and find out. But I’ll give you this, though—if you don’t like it, you can pull out every hair on my body with tweezers and laugh when you do it.”

  Her lips twitched. “Don’t tempt me, Donovan. That just might make up for everything you’ve put me through.”