TALL, DARK AND TEXAN

by Jane Sullivan

  With a compulsion she couldn't quell, Wendy tiptoed over and pushed the door open just enough that she could see what was on the other side, and anxiety surged through her all over again.

  On a table lay three guns. She didn't know a derringer from an Uzi, but she certainly knew a firearm when she saw one.

  Then she looked up on the wall.

  At least forty photographs were stuck there. They appeared to be mug shots—mug shots of men who were mean and nasty looking, like particularly despicable serial killers. And through about half of the photos were big black Xs. He was marking them out, one by one, with a supersize Magic Marker, as if…

  As if he'd snuffed them.

  Then it struck her. He's a serial killer who kills serial killers. Did it get any badder than that?

  She quickly pulled the door closed and turned around. She could hear her captor knocking around in the other room, undoubtedly getting the torture chamber ready.

  She had to get out of there.

  Turning, she spied another door beside the refrigerator, one with as many locks as had been on the front door. He'd told her there wasn't a stairwell in the elevator landing. Maybe that door led to one. She hoped it did, anyway, because otherwise there was no getting out of this apartment.

  No. Not apartment. More like lair. Or hideout. Or fortress. Or covert base of operations. What in the hell did you call a place that looked more like a bunker than living quarters?

  A place she wanted to escape. Right now.

  She hurried toward the door, looking over her shoulder, watching for him to come out of the back room. As quietly as she could, she opened the first dead bolt, which made a hideous clanking noise. Then she unhooked a chain that had links as wide as her wrist. She was just about to push a heavy metal slide lock aside when she heard footsteps. Spinning around, she saw him walking toward her. With a quick, startled breath, she pressed her back against the door.

  "Where are you going?" he demanded.

  Fueled by sheer adrenaline, she wheeled back around, smacked the last lock and yanked the door open. Just as quickly, he took a few steps forward and grabbed her from behind, wrapping his arm around her waist and pulling her back as he shut the door again. She screamed, a hair-raising, penetrating scream that could easily have awakened any dead bodies he happened to have lying around. He slapped his hand over her mouth, shoving her scream all the way back into her throat. She tried to fight him, but he pressed his body hard to hers, pinning her against the door.

  "Will you cut it out?" he said. "You're not going anywhere!"

  She couldn't struggle anymore. With a ton of bone and muscle wrapped around her, she was completely at his mercy.

  "I'm going to take my hand away from your mouth," he said, his voice low and intense. "Are you going to scream?"

  She just stood there, terrified.

  "I asked you if you're going to scream," he said sharply.

  Finally she shook her head. He removed his hand slowly, and her breath came in sharp bursts that seemed to echo forever in the vast expanse of the warehouse.

  "If you're going to do this," she said in a hushed voice, "then do it now. Get it over with quickly. Please."

  He froze. "If I'm going to do what?"

  She closed her eyes. "Rape me. Kill me. Whatever … whatever it is you do."

  For a count of three, he stood motionless. "What did you say?"

  She didn't want to repeat it. She'd barely been able to get the words out the first time. "R-rape me. And kill—"

  Suddenly he let go of her. She spun around, her back pressed to the door, breathing hard. He'd retreated several paces, staring at her with disbelief. "What in the hell are you talking about?"

  She swallowed hard. "If you're not going to hurt me, then why are you trying to stop me from leaving?"

  "Why am I—?" He stopped short, staring at her as if she'd lost her mind. He pointed toward the window. "Is it thirty degrees out there? Sleeting?"

  She looked over at the ice still pattering the window. "Uh … yeah."

  "Are there lowlifes wandering the streets?"

  Clearly there were. One of them had made off with her car. "A few."

  "Do you have any idea at all where you are?"

  Hell, no. A global-positioning system couldn't have helped her out of here. She shrugged. "No. I guess I'm not completely sure."

  "Those are three real good reasons. One would have done just fine. But if you're still determined to leave," he said, his voice a low growl, "there's a police station about four miles west. Why don't you hike on down there and tell them there's a rapist on the loose?"

  She blinked with surprise, startled at this turn of events. Although he was rumbling with anger, she noticed that his dark eyes didn't seem nearly as evil as they had a few moments ago. Actually, they looked more sleepy than anything. And he'd made a couple of pretty good points about the weather and all those other things.

  Was it possible she could have leaped to a conclusion or two?

  "Okay," she said, shrugging weakly, "so maybe you're not a criminal."

  "Hell, no, I'm not!"

  She recoiled at his angry outburst. "Hey! What was I supposed to think? The abandoned warehouse, the guns, the mug shots, the big black Xs—"

  "You saw all that? What were you doing in there?"

  "I—" She stopped, then pointed to the cat on top of the fridge. "He opened the door. I just … I just kinda looked in."

  "You were snooping?"

  Her mouth fell open. "I was not snooping! I was just trying to find out what kind of fire I landed in when I fell out of the frying pan!"

  His eyebrows flew up. "Fire? Are you kidding? I bring you someplace warm where you can stay the night, then keep you from running back out there again like some kind of lunatic, and you call that a fire?"

  She opened her mouth to respond, then clamped it shut again. He was making more sense all the time.

  She nodded toward the other room. "What about the guns you have in there?"

  He glared at her. "Those weapons are for my job."

  "Your job?"

  "I'm a bail-enforcement agent."

  "Huh?"

  "Bounty hunter."

  Bounty hunter?

  It took a full ten seconds for the words to register in Wendy's mind, and when they did, relief swooped through her. The guns, the mug shots … okay. Maybe those made sense now. It still didn't explain the living accommodations and the half-eaten cat, but…

  "You go after criminals?" she asked him.

  "Yes."

  "Bad guys?"

  "Yes."

  She peered up at him. "Which means you can't be a bad guy … right?"

  "I already told you I'm not a bad guy!"

  She flinched. "Oh, come on! What else was I supposed to think? Don't you think that any sane woman would have come to the same conclusion I did? That you just might be a little dangerous?"

  "Dangerous?"

  "Yes! Will you look at yourself, for heaven's sake? You're big, you're scary looking, and I'm pretty sure you could bite the head right off somebody's shoulders if you wanted to. That doesn't give me a lot of warm fuzzies, you know."

  He blinked and, for a moment, looked surprised. Maybe even a little insulted. Then just as quickly, his expression melted back into the scowl he'd been wearing before.

  "Listen, sweetheart. It's late, I'm tired and I'm fresh out of warm fuzzies. Sleep on the sofa if you want, leave if you want. I don't give a damn."

  Taking a key from his pocket, he strode over to the door to the war room, pulled it shut and locked it. He disappeared down the hall, turning into what she guessed must be a bedroom.

  Then … silence.

  Wendy stood there, shivering, swearing she could hear the sound of his angry voice still echoing through the vast expanse of the warehouse loft. Well, she had news for him. He couldn't be fresh out of warm fuzzies, because he'd never had any to begin with. He'd scared the hell out of her, then acted as if it was her
fault.

  A bounty hunter. As if she would have guessed that? Ever?

  With a few deep, calming breaths, her heart rate slowly returned to normal. At least now she knew she'd live to be broke and homeless another day. And unless she committed a crime and jumped bail, her big, angry roommate probably wasn't going to be a threat. For tonight, at least, she had a place to stay that wasn't a cardboard box on the streets of downtown Dallas.

  Then she turned, and for the first time, she noticed two blankets and a pillow tossed on the sofa that hadn't been there before. She stared at them oddly for a moment, wondering where they'd come from.

  Then she knew. He had to have brought them out of the bedroom while she was trying to make her escape. She walked over and picked up one blanket, catching the scent of something soft and fresh. Drawing it to her nose, she inhaled. Fabric softener?

  Then she saw the shirt.

  Sticking out from beneath the pillow was a green flannel shirt. She held it in front of her. From the size of it, she knew it had to be his. She blinked at it dumbly for a moment before the reason he'd left it here finally dawned on her.

  He was giving her something dry to put on.

  She pulled the shirt against her nose and smelled the same fresh fabric softener. She could wrap herself in it three times over, but it felt so warm…

  He was trying to be nice, and she'd called him a criminal. A couple of different kinds of criminal, in fact.

  Suddenly she felt bad about that. No, he hadn't told her exactly who he was, but it had been cold and sleeting, and not knowing how long she'd been out there, maybe he'd just wanted to get her warm again as quickly as he could. The blankets and the flannel shirt attested to that.

  Now she felt worse than bad.

  She glanced toward the room he'd disappeared into, her stomach churning with regret. She thought about knocking on his door to say she was sorry, but with her rapist-murderer accusation still rattling around inside his head, she didn't think he'd want to hear anything from her right about now. Tomorrow morning might be a better time for apologies.

  She went over to the wall and flicked out the light. By the faint glow of a streetlamp coming in through metal casement windows, she scurried back to the sofa, quickly peeled off her wet clothes and slipped into the shirt. It hung all the way to her knees, but what a feeling. Warmth.

  She tossed the pillow at one end of the sofa, then spread out the blankets. She laid her wet clothes over a chair in the kitchen area and eased down on the sofa, tucking herself beneath the blankets.

  In spite of the weird situation, she found her thoughts drifting to the man in the other room. He might have been big and scary and all those other things, but as she played the past half hour over in her mind, she realized that a knight on a white horse couldn't have done a better job of rescuing her.

  Yes, she thought sleepily. She had to tell him she was sorry. He deserved it. And on the selfish side, an apology might keep him from kicking her out the door first thing tomorrow morning before she had a chance to get her bearings.

  Right now, her situation looked a little scary. Okay, a lot scary. She had no money, no car, no clothes. Nothing but the wallet in her pocket, which held maybe five bucks and zero credit cards. But she always landed on her feet, and this time wouldn't be any different. That was what she told herself, anyway, to keep from bursting into tears.

  You can't do this. You've hit a dead end. Go home.

  In the next instant, she slapped herself for that thought. She didn't care if she had one foot dangling over a cliff with a seventy-mile-per-hour tailwind, she was going to hang on by her fingernails if that was what it took. Aside from her once-a-year holiday trips to see her family, she had no intention of going back to obscurity again. She thought about the factory where she'd worked for four years alongside her parents, her eight siblings and just about every other resident of Glenover, Iowa. It was just what you did when you graduated from high school. A regular paycheck. Sick days. Job security. Yuck.

  She'd had bigger dreams.

  When she was a senior in high school, she'd starred in Glenover High's productions of Our Town and Bye, Bye Birdie, and for the first time in her life, she felt truly special. Raised in such a large family, the spotlight rarely made its way around to her, so those few magical nights had been intoxicating.

  For the next four years, the thrill of it stayed in the back of her mind, until finally she couldn't stand it any longer. She left behind the dreary, monotonous, unremarkable town where she'd been raised and headed for the bright lights of the New York stage, knowing in her heart that she was destined to become a star.

  Three years, six dead-end jobs and eighty-seven auditions later, she realized she'd made a small miscalculation. In New York, they expected superior craft and exceptional talent and years of paying dues, so actors built careers with the speed of glaciers melting. But in Hollywood…

  Now, there was a place where a person could shoot to superstardom overnight. Life was too short to wait around. Once the lightbulb had gone on and she'd realized the error in her thinking, she'd felt compelled to move on as quickly as she could, determined to make something happen now.

  Through a friend of a friend, she'd managed to hook up with an agent who'd promised he could get her the contacts she needed, and she knew how to make the most of them. Talent wasn't a list-topping requirement on the West Coast, so the fact that she was a pretty decent actress meant she was already ahead of the game. She had smarts, she had ambition and she had the right look. Or most of the right look, anyway. She could buy the rest of the appearance she needed just as soon as she found a way to get five thousand dollars back in her pocket again.

  Wendy settled back on the pillow and closed her eyes, feeling exhausted right down to her bones. All she needed was a good night's sleep, some morning light on her face and a cup of coffee past her lips. Once her brain was working, she could formulate a plan to get herself out of this mess and back on the road to Los Angeles, and everything would look rosy again. Her parents, her brothers, her sisters and every other resident of Glenover, Iowa, might be satisfied living as faceless human beings in nowhere jobs, but she'd never be content with that. She was going to make her mark in this world.

  No matter what she had to do.

  * * *

  Michael Wolfe lay in bed, staring through the darkness, trying to keep his anger in check. He'd been called a lot of things in his life by people with vocabularies that could blow a freight train off its tracks, but rapist and murderer hadn't been among them.

  He'd saved her, and this was what he got?

  If only he'd realized how soon the storm was going to hit, he never would have set out for that bar tonight in search of Feliz Mendoza, a burglar on bail who'd decided to skip his court appearance. He never would have gotten caught in plunging temperatures and a sleet storm. And he never would have happened upon a half-frozen woman looking beyond pathetic, her dark hair plastered against her head, her sweater wet and misshapen, shivering so hard she could barely speak.

  Given the fact that it was nearing midnight, sleet was pounding the city, the police station was four miles away and the women's shelter even farther, he'd brought her here. Then she'd shocked him by trying to run right back out into the same crappy situation he'd just rescued her from. Thirty more minutes on that freezing, deserted street without a coat could have put her in the hospital or worse, especially since there wasn't much of her to begin with.

  But it wasn't until he'd hauled her away from the door, wrapped his arms around her and pulled her against him, that he realized just how small and delicate she really was. Suddenly he'd felt as if he was holding something terribly fragile, and if he made one wrong move, he'd break her. She'd felt all soft and willowy and…

  He started to say warm, but she hadn't been warm in the least. She'd been a walking, talking, screaming ice cube.

  Look at you! You're big, you're scary looking, and I'm pretty sure you could bite the head right off s
omebody's shoulders if you wanted to. What was I supposed to think?

  Well, he had to admit that was nothing new. He'd been frightening people to death since he was thirteen years old, and now, at age thirty-one, the fear factor had only escalated. He was used to the world looking at him as if he ate little children and climbed tall buildings to swat at airplanes. And women certainly weren't exempt from that assessment. They all stopped dead in their tracks at the sight of him, and not because he was so damned good-looking. About the only women who didn't cross to the other side of the road when they saw him coming were those who were as tough as he was, who knew the streets, who'd seen far worse things in their lives than a man with a face like his.

  So why had this woman's reaction bothered him so much?

  Because she should have been thanking him for rescuing her instead of flattening herself against that door, breathing like a teenager in a horror flick and staring at him as if he was some kind of monster. That was why.

  He didn't need this. He didn't need a crazy, argumentative, thankless woman bugging the hell out of him, disturbing the peace and solitude he valued so much. He'd never brought a woman here and just the thought of her asleep in the other room right now unnerved him. This was his space, and he didn't share it with anyone.

  Come tomorrow morning, he intended to remedy the situation. The quicker he got her out of here and she became somebody else's problem, the better he was going to like it.

  * * *

  Chapter 3

  « ^ »

  Wendy woke the next morning to sunlight shining brightly through a row of metal casement windows. Rising on one elbow, she looked around, and for a moment she wasn't sure where she was. Then she glanced down at the huge flannel shirt she wore and it all came back to her.

  She slid out from beneath the covers and scurried to where she'd tossed her clothes over the chair last night. They were still cold and damp. Glancing at a clock in the kitchen, she saw it was nearly eleven o'clock. Had she really slept that long?

  Then she sensed a much more pressing problem.

  She'd once gotten caught in a New York cab in a snarl of traffic for over two and a half hours, but even then she hadn't had to pee as badly as she did right now. She adjusted the extra-extra-large shirt he'd given her until the neckline rested on her shoulders instead of halfway down her left arm and went in search of a bathroom. A minute later she reached a startling conclusion.