“I’m here to mess the place up.” His voice was pure annoyance. A put-out bear of a man. “And I get to take whatever I want while I’m at it. Those are my orders. If he’s out of town, so much the better.”
“G-go ahead, I’ll…just wait outside.” She took another step, wondering if he could see that she was shaking like a leaf. Forty-nine more steps…
He shook his big head. “Don’t even bother. We both know I’m not going to let you go until I’m done here and long gone, so I’ll repeat myself. This way.”
Step forty-eight-
“Goddammit.” He lumbered after her.
Whirling, she ordered her feet to move. Forty-seven, forty-six- An arm hooked around her neck, hauling her back against a rock-hard body, withholding her inherent right to breathe. She opened her mouth to scream, but he slapped a hand against her mouth and nose-she definitely wasn’t breathing any time soon. Lifting her off her feet, he started walking.
Spots danced in front of her eyes. Out of pure desperation for air, she reached back and grabbed a handful of his hair.
“Ouch! Holy shit, lady!” He gripped her wrist and jerked it down, squeezing her neck at the same time.
Her head was going to pop right off. The spots blossomed into full Technicolor, and now she had an aching wrist to go with them as he dragged her along, back through the kitchen. Her life passed in front of her eyes; her mom and dad, her sister and brother, her cute little apartment where she cooked, read, lived…and then without warning he let go of her and shoved.
She landed on a hard tile floor and spent a moment on her hands and knees concentrating on dragging air into her lungs. A door slammed and she jerked her head up. It was nearly dark outside now and there wasn’t a light on in the small room she found herself in, which was maybe eight feet by eight feet. But there did appear to be a floodlight right outside the very small window on the far wall. Thank goodness for timers, she thought, and tried not to panic. Unlike the rest of the house, this room was gray and bare. The only piece of furniture in the place was a narrow cot-
Oh God. A narrow cot that was filled with the prone body of a man wearing nothing but black knit boxers. Long, sleek and powerful, there wasn’t an inch of excess on him. Even in the meager light she could see he was sinewy, lean and hard, and she took him all in, including the myriad of interesting scars like the long, jagged one on his right pec, and another small puckered one-like a bullet wound?-low on his flat, corrugated belly.
Still breathing like a misused racehorse, still shaky, she stared at him as he groaned, slowly sat up and blinked.
So did she, because he was the spitting image of her boss-the forty-nine-year-old, gorgeous Eddie Ledger-only younger and far more serious than she’d ever seen the perpetually smiling Eddie-
He staggered to his feet and put a hand to the back of his head, then pulled it away and stared at his fingers, which came away sticky with…she blinked in the dim light. Blood. Oh God. She really didn’t do well with blood-
“Who are you?” he demanded.
Given the force of his voice, he wasn’t mortally injured. And given the incredible sharpness of his eyes and body, he wasn’t the type to be easily laid flat. She stood there uneasily, not sure who were the good guys and who were the bad. But this man, this six-foot-tall, lean, mean, nearly naked fighting machine looked so much like her boss…
His laser, light-blue eyes looked her over, then met her gaze, and she swallowed hard. Had she really thought he looked like Eddie? Maybe the dark, spiky hair, the see-through eyes, the lean, shadowed jaw were the same, but even though she’d never seen Eddie nearly naked, she doubted he had such a hard, muscled, sleek look to him. He’d certainly never looked so intense, so unsmiling, so utterly edgy and terrifying in the month she’d been working for him.
Suddenly her last job, doing payroll for a local YMCA, didn’t seem so bad. If only they hadn’t had to reduce their staff, if only she hadn’t been the low person on the totem pole, if only…
“Who are you?” he repeated in that low, husky voice that would have resembled Eddie’s, if it didn’t have all the fury in it.
“T-Tessa Delacantro.” For the second time in a few minutes, she backed to a door. The handle hit her fingers and she jerked at it, but it didn’t budge.
“It’s locked, and like everything else in the house, it’s the best money can buy so it can’t be broken,” Eddie’s evil twin said.
She tried it again anyway, still eyeing him carefully. How many times had her sister told her ninety-nine percent of all men were scum? Not that she’d ever listened.
If she ever got out of here, she’d listen to Carolyn. Always.
He had one hand propped up against the wall as he contemplated her with an enigmatic expression that was probably supposed to be polite, not terrifying.
But he didn’t have the facial features for polite, not with those shocking light eyes and harsh frown. “What are you doing here?”
She tried not to stare, but it wasn’t every day she was so up close and personal to a nearly naked man while shaking in fear. In fact, she was hardly ever this close to a nearly naked man, scared or otherwise. “I’m watching the house for the weekend,” she said. “But…Eddie?”
A short, rough laugh escaped him at that, a sound that had nothing to do with mirth. “No.”
Her heart was flinging itself against her ribs so hard it was amazing they hadn’t all cracked. “Um…” She swallowed hard. “Eddie’s brother? Eddie’s…twin brother?”
His go-to-hell eyes frosted over. “No. I’m Reilly.” Body taut with tension, arms crossed now-which delineated his hard contours in interesting ways, not that she was noticing-he let out a breath. “His son.”
Eddie had told her he had a son, but by the indulgent smile on his face when he’d mentioned him, Tessa had imagined a little boy, certainly someone far younger than thirtyish and not quite so mind-bogglingly magnificent. “But-” She let out a sound of pure confusion and eyed the window. The place had been built on a hill, and naturally, she was hillside and at least forty feet up.
She looked at Reilly again. His stance implied strength and an innate confidence she could only dream of. There was no doubt, this man was in complete control of himself, even injured and half-naked.
Apparently unconcerned with that nakedness, he moved toward her. She flinched back against the door, but he kept coming, and took the hand she’d unconsciously held to her still-raw and aching throat.
Slowly but inexorably he pulled her hand up and stared at what he’d exposed.
Impossibly, his eyes hardened even more. “They hurt you, too.” He ran a finger over her skin then lifted his gaze to hers. “You were to watch the house for Eddie?”
“Yes.”
He made a rough sound. “That figures.”
“Figures how?”
“He favors the young and innocent.”
The words “young and innocent” came out as if those were the most irritating traits a person could have. How many times had she been told she looked ten years younger than her twenty-six? Plenty. So she looked young, big deal. Did people always have to use the word innocent when describing her?
She really resented the hell out of that.
“You interrupted them,” he guessed, and grimaced with what actually might have been concern. Then he took her other hand as well, the one she’d been cradling to her belly because her wrist still hurt, and turned it over to expose the mottled bruising already appearing there. He lifted his gaze and held hers for a long moment. “Where else did they get you?”
“Nowhere.”
Still holding her wrist, he looked her over thoroughly, and she let him because she didn’t feel up to doing anything else.