Her Three Protectors [The Hot Millionaires #3] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting)

by Zara Chase

  “Shut up and get inside.”

  She was shoved so hard this time that she stumbled and almost fell. The boss caught her arm and saved her at the last moment. The room was about the size of a prison cell—pretty apt, given her current circumstances. There was a hospital-type examination bunk down one wall with a thin pillow and blanket, an uncomfortable-looking upright chair, and a door that led to a toilet. That was it. Absolutely no other furniture or cabinets with locks she could pass the time trying to pick. Perhaps this wasn’t a sick bay after all. In which case, Porcha didn’t want to think about what other purpose the room might serve.

  She took a second look around, just to take her mind off such unpleasant musings. The small window had sturdy-looking bars across it, and there was no other means of escape that she could see.

  “Make yourself comfortable, Mrs. Gonzalez,” said the goon, leering at her breasts as he cut her hands free.

  The boss was standing in the corridor, talking in a deferential tone to someone on the phone. Porcha caught some of what he was saying.

  “Yes, sir, she’s here now. No, no we definitely weren’t followed.” He listened. “Well, we were taken by surprise. We lost Pablo, and Luiz has a broken arm. We’re taking him to get it fixed right now.” He listened some more and then spoke again. “Yes, it was unfortunate. There were several of them that we didn’t know about, you see, and they jumped us.”

  Porcha raised a brow at him and smiled. The boss glowered right back at her, realizing when it was too late that he shouldn’t have let her hear his excuses. She’d sure as hell set Sanchez-Punto right when she saw him.

  “They got away I’m afraid, sir, but we managed to hold onto the woman. Right, okay then, we’ll do that.”

  “You’ll be spending the night here as our guest,” he told her, walking fully into the tiny room and making it feel pretty crowded. “Mr. Sanchez-Punto will come and see you first thing in the morning.”

  “Tell him not to put himself out on my account.”

  “She’s got a real smart mouth on her,” the goon said, raising a hand.

  “Leave her be!”

  “She needs to learn more respect.” He dropped his hand with obvious reluctance. “I hate mouthy women.”

  “Any chance of something to eat?” Porcha asked sweetly. “And some stuff to clean up my injuries.” She waved her arms about, giving them an up-close view of the caked blood on her forearms.

  “Let her fucking bleed to death,” the one she’d heard referred to as Raul grumbled.

  “Oh, I’m sure your boss’ll be pleased if you let that happen.” She rolled her eyes. “Moron!”

  “Raul will come back later with something.”

  Raul’s expression told her what he thought of that suggestion, and this time Porcha agreed with him. The last thing she wanted was quality one-on-one time with Raul. Then again, perhaps she did. He was a follower, not a leader. He was also a bully, and he was mad at her. Porcha sat on the edge of the bunk and waved her fingers at them as they left, turning several locks as they went.

  Fighting the reaction that had crept over her following the violence of the last few hours, Porcha wanted to curl up in a ball and let the world pass her by. But sleep was a luxury she couldn’t afford. She needed to prepare herself to fight back. If she couldn’t use Raul’s weaknesses to her advantage then she might as well cut her own throat right here and now, because one thing was certain. Even if she did possess the information this Sanchez-Punto wanted, the moment he got it out of her, she’d be dead.

  * * * *

  The guys arrived at South Beach half an hour ahead of schedule. They scoped the area out but couldn’t see anyone that didn’t look like they belonged. Skaters, dog walkers, babes in miniscule bikinis, posers, grifters, the loud music that accompanied cocktail hour—welcome to Miami.

  “It’s hard to be sure if anything’s off,” Beck complained. “Everyone down here dresses like a wannabe gangster.”

  “Except the real deal, presumably,” Adam suggested, mildly amused.

  As satisfied as they could be that the area was clean, Troy took a conspicuous table at the outdoor bar they’d agreed upon as a meeting place. Adam and Beck were situated within sight of Troy and could see in both directions down the street.

  “He’s here,” Adam said into his wrist mike ten minutes ahead of time. “Just three of them, far as I can make out.”

  “Let them get closer and then intercept,” Troy said. “Beck, stay on the other end of the street, just in case they have reinforcements coming that way.”

  “You got it.”

  “He’s limping quite badly,” Adam informed the others.

  Beck glowered. “Not as badly as he will be if he hurts Porcha.”

  “Okay, I see him,” Troy said. “Go introduce yourself, Adam.”

  A short time later, Adam joined Troy, the three newcomers in tow. Troy stood up as they approached, sizing them up. Woollard had been beaten pretty good, and quite recently. His face was a mass of bruises, and Adam had been right about the limp.

  “Woollard?”

  “Yes, and you are?”

  “Anderson. This is Cole.”

  “This is Kevin—”

  Troy quirked a brow. “Mrs. Gonzalez’s driver?”

  “One of them.” Woollard mangled his lips, as though he’d just been reminded of something unpleasant. “Mind if I sit down?”

  “Are we gonna play nice?” Troy asked, pinioning him with a hard gaze.

  “We’re unarmed,” Woollard said. “Search us if you don’t believe me.”

  “We’re not unarmed,” Troy replied, indicating the seat opposite him. “Come on in, Beck,” he said into his wrist. “You need to hear this.”

  “Damn right I do.”

  Beck joined them in seconds. Introductions dispensed with, they got down to business.

  “I assume Georgio sent you to protect Porcha.”

  “Did he?” Troy folded his arms over his chest, waiting to see what else Woollard had to say before he gave anything away.

  “Look, I don’t know what she’s told you about me, but you’ve probably got a distorted view. Believe it or not, I’m only trying to keep her alive.”

  “What happened to you?”

  “I was with Sal when they got him.” He indicated his battered face by waving a hand, also bruised, in front of it. “The rest of my body looks even worse, and I took a bullet in the thigh.”

  “But you got away and Sal didn’t?”

  “It wasn’t me they wanted.”

  “How do we know you didn’t kill Sal yourself, just so you could take over his operation and his wife?” Beck asked.

  Woollard levelled an incredulous expression on each of them in turn.

  “Why would I kill my own father?” he asked.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The goons had searched Porcha before they put her in the car. Her cell phone had been confiscated, but she had nothing else in her pockets for them to take. Raul, as she now knew him to be called—although she thought goon suited him better—had taken great delight in patting her down, but the fool had missed the lockpick and tiny device she’d shoved inside her bra. The ape was too busy feeling up the outside of her breasts to bother paying much attention to what was hidden in her cleavage.

  “Idiots!” she muttered as she retrieved her treasures from their hiding place and set to work on the first of the locks.

  “Damn!”

  She threw the pick across the room half an hour later, with nothing more to show for her efforts than sore fingertips and a couple of broken nails to add to her scraped arms and aching jaw. The locks were more complicated than the ones she’d practiced her fledgling skills on back at the house, and she didn’t have a prayer of cracking even one of them. She really should have insisted on taking the full course.

  Porcha refused to admit defeat. If she couldn’t open the locks from this side, she’d just have to wait until Raul came back and did so from his end.
But then what? She needed a weapon. He knew she could take care of herself, and even he would have the sense to keep well out of range. She searched the small room, but there was nothing that wasn’t nailed down that would help her. The bars on the window were firmly cemented in. The base of the bed was solid wood—no convenient springs for her to pry loose and fashion into weapons. The chair was flimsy plastic.

  Frustrated, but still refusing to play the part of victim, she tried the toilet. An ordinary, smelly toilet and a wash basin. This was hopeless! About to give up, she felt a surge of excitement when she tested the toilet-roll holder. It was old-fashioned heavy metal.

  And it was loose.

  “Thank you!” she cried aloud, setting to work on the screws with her other tool.

  It was painstaking work, but she had plenty of time and even more desperation to spur her on. It must have taken an hour, but eventually, with a cry of triumph, the metal fell away from the wall. She hefted it in her hand. If she could just take the guy by surprise, somehow catch him off guard, she might just be able to whack him with it. It wasn’t heavy or jagged enough to do much damage on its own, but if she just got him off balance for a moment or two, she could possibly break a few of his limbs before she made a run for it.

  But how to get him close enough to her to have a shot at it?

  “Dumb question, Porcha.”

  She rolled her eyes. He was a man, wasn’t he? She recalled the look in his horrible, piggy eyes when he patted her down, how he zeroed in on her tits when he cut her hands free. She almost chuckled as she threw off all her clothes.

  “It hardly seems fair,” she muttered as she placed her kit where it would be obvious if…when he opened the door. She left her bra and panties conspicuously on top on the pile, crawled under the blanket holding her precious weapon close to her side, and waited.

  * * * *

  “You’re Sal’s son?” Troy glared at Woollard, not believing a word of it.

  “Yep.”

  “Porcha didn’t mention it.”

  “She doesn’t know.”

  “What, Porcha didn’t know that her husband had a son older than she was?” Adam shared a sceptical look with the other two.

  “Excuse us if I find that hard to believe,” Beck chimed in.

  “My mother was a Brit, like Porcha. Sal obviously went for classy English women. They weren’t married, but Sal was mad about her, according to her, anyway. She fell pregnant about the same time she found out what Sal did for a living and what he was capable of, so she ran home to England and never saw him again.”

  “Did he know about you?”

  “Not until eight years ago when Mom died. She told me about him but made me promise not to get in touch. She was convinced he’d want to control me if he knew he had a son, so out of respect for her, I didn’t contact him until after she died.”

  “Did he believe you when you turned up on his doorstep claiming to be his long-lost son?”

  Woollard rolled his eyes. “What do you think? Anyway, I told him who my mom was, showed him my birth certificate, and explained that I’d taken my mother’s maiden name. It said ‘father unknown,’ but I think the dates got Sal thinking. Anyway, I offered to undergo DNA testing because I wanted to know for sure even if he didn’t. He agreed, and it was a match.”

  Beck threw him a dirty look. “That must have made you very proud.”

  “He took me under his wing after that,” Woollard said, shrugging off Beck’s sarcasm. “He grilled me for hours about Mom’s life after she left him, and he obviously didn’t like what he heard.”

  “My heart bleeds,” Adam muttered.

  “We didn’t have a lot, but Mom worked her butt off for what we did have, even though she could have made life a lot easier for herself if she’d wanted to. She was good looking, and tons of men were interested in her.” Woollard shared a perplexed look between them. “I never understood why she didn’t but always thought it was a case of once bitten and all that.”

  “Gonzalez never publicly acknowledged you,” Troy pointed out.

  “He didn’t want anyone to know our true relationship because he was paranoid about people close to him getting kidnapped, or worse.”

  “Why were you so keen to meet him if your mom felt the way she did about him?”

  “Like I said, Mom had standards. Unfortunately, that meant living in a rundown part of London and going without everything. Having a rich drug dealer for a father sounded quite sophisticated by comparison.” He sighed. “It was a while before I realized Mom was right about him. I kinda respected him, but I could see just what a control freak he actually was. She said all along that if he’d known about me, he never would have given up until he had me with him. Same with her. I’ve often thought that’s why he was so protective of Porcha. He’d lost the first love of his life. He wasn’t taking any chances with the second.”

  “Informative as all this is,” Troy said, actually believing it now, “we have more important things to worry about. Sanchez-Punto has Porcha.”

  “He thinks she knows where Sal’s latest shipment of stones is,” Woollard said. “Which is why I wanted to get hold of her before he did.”

  Troy raised an ironic brow. “You don’t know where the stones are either, I take it.”

  “No, but—”

  Beck fixed Woollard with a malevolent glare. “Sal loved her so much that he dropped her in it to save his own skin?”

  “I can’t even begin to think why he did that.” Woollard shook his head. “He had some odd perversions that probably made Porcha hate him as much as she once loved him, but one thing’s never been in doubt, at least not in my mind. He loved Porcha and would have died for her.”

  “Apparently not,” Adam said.

  “Kevin,” Troy said. “There’s one thing I don’t understand—”

  “Only one?”

  Troy silenced Beck with a wave of one hand. “Mrs. Gonzalez said you drove her back to the Jupiter house, saw a gunfight going on, and got right on out of there. What was that all about?”

  “That was me,” Woollard answered for him. “Sal went to Mexico to sell out his drugs business to a rival. He’d promised Porcha he’d get out when he married her and had gradually been doing just that, but these things take time. We were there to finalize everything in person.”

  “So why Jupiter’s answer to the OK Corral?”

  “I’m getting to that. His greatest rival, and enemy, was Sanchez-Punto. They have a long history. Anyway, Sal wouldn’t even think of selling to him, but he got word that Sal and I would be in Mexico City, and they were waiting for us. But they didn’t care about drugs—”

  “They wanted the diamonds,” Troy finished for him.

  “Right. They ambushed us, which was only possible because we’d been sold out by a person, or people, we trusted. Fernandez, the guy Sal did sell out to, got to us, but it was too late for Sal. He got me back to the States pronto so I could find out who’d turned on us. I was pretty badly bashed up, but I needed to be here, which is one of the reasons why I couldn’t come looking for Porcha right away. Anyway, we surprised the guards, and the two guilty parties opened the gates and tried to make a run for it.”

  “Which is what we almost drove in on,” Kevin added.

  “Unfortunately, we didn’t get them all,” Woollard said.

  “Let me guess.” Troy rubbed his jaw with one hand. “Your fellow driver, Kevin?”

  “Yeah,” Woollard said. “Trevor had been with Sal for twenty years, and the bastard did the dirty on us.” Woollard’s head shot up. “But how did you figure that out?”

  “They traced Kevin and Porcha to the hotel they checked into. I thought it was you, to be honest, and that you’d used a tracking device.” He shrugged. “Process of elimination.”

  “Yeah, well, I knew about the apartment in Tampa and stupidly sent Trevor to see if Porcha was there. He must have told his new best friends, but presumably, you got to her first.” Woollard breathed deeply.
“Thank God for that.”

  “Where will they be holding her?” Troy asked.

  “Almost certainly in his warehouse. He has one on the waterfront. Sanchez-Punto is an out-and-out family man, and he’d never take a hostage into his home and have his family exposed to the sordid side of his working life.”

  “He must have other properties.”

  “Yeah, but I still think the warehouse is where she’ll be, at least overnight.”

  “Let’s go,” Troy said.

  * * * *

  Incredible as it seemed, Porcha must have dozed. She’d waited several hours for Raul to return, not daring to get out of bed because sod’s law said he’d come back at the one time she wasn’t ready for him. Then, of all things, she fell asleep. Her life was on the line and she was sleeping?

  The sound of heavy footsteps on the tiled floor outside her prison woke her. Before she heard keys jangling in the locks she started moaning loud enough to wake the dead. The door opened just a couple of inches, and the barrel of a gun appeared round it.

  “Where are you, bitch?”

  “Argh, that hurts!”

  Porcha brought her knees up to her chest and hugged them with her battered arms, writhing and whimpering when she sensed that Raul’s head had now followed the gun barrel round the door.

  “What are you trying to pull now?”

  “I think I cracked a rib or something when you jumped me on the street.” She writhed a little more, deliberately letting the blanket slip from her shoulder to reveal the side of one breast. “It hurts so bad I couldn’t stand the restriction of clothing.”

  “I need you to stand up right now.”

  “Do I look like I can stand up? I’m in serious pain here. If you want me upright, you’ll have to help me.”

  “Why the hell should I?” But he’d taken a step into the room, leaving the door open behind him as he eyed up her naked breast. “You’re nothing but trouble.”