It wasn’t like Iris Fortune was going anywhere.
It felt like Iris waited an hour before Mickey came to. That guy Pebbles, bigger than a Hummer, had cracked Mickey over the head with the butt of a gun. Iris tried to erase the picture her imagination had created of what would have happened if Pebbles had shot that gun instead. It made her sick to consider it. Mickey wasn’t kidding when he said these guys weren’t his friends. He must have come here for her.
So, was he a good guy? She wished she knew.
Mickey moaned, and his head moved slightly.
“Psst.” She still couldn’t move but, thankfully, those two thugs hadn’t replaced the gag. They’d knotted some cord around Mickey’s ankles, then bound his wrists behind his back and left him lying on his side. Some rescue. “Mickey, wake up.”
He attempted to lift his head, but it fell back against the floor.
Iris waited some more. Through the slatted blinds, slivers of the distant mountains stood silhouetted black against an indigo sky. It had to be going on ten o’clock by now. She gulped. She hated being this frightened, this out of control. Mickey-hell, even unconscious, Mickey was her only hope right now.
As if he heard her thoughts, he stirred again. This time he managed to lift his head nearly upright.
“Are you all right?” she whispered.
“Never better,” he muttered. He moved his shoulders as much as his bindings would allow and eased his head around as if to verify his neck still functioned. “Nothing broken. Pebbles has always been really good at taking me out without any permanent injury.”
“You say that like it’s a good thing that he knocks you out.”
“It beats the alternative.” With a minimum of fuss, he pulled himself into a sitting position then scooted his way toward her chair.
“Can you get us out of this?” Iris asked, her mouth dry.
“Yeah, don’t worry.”
“It’s hard not to worry. When that guy hit you, I thought they were going to kill us both.”
“Well, that’s still a possibility-”
“Don’t make jokes,” Iris whispered vehemently. She pursed her lips against the sob that threatened to escape. “I’m scared, Mickey. I told you I wasn’t cut out for this.”
He scooted the last two feet to her chair. “I know it’s scary, but I promise I won’t let anything happen to you.” He sounded dead sure of himself.
Iris looked down on him, wishing he could take her in his strong embrace. She desperately wanted to feel safe and, while Mickey might be a risk, he was a much safer risk than the other two guys. Only, she had no idea how he thought he was going to save her when he was sitting on the floor, his knees bent before him, his ankles tied with what looked like telephone cord, and his arms trussed behind him. “Do you have a plan?”
“Not exactly.”
“You mean you don’t have a pocketknife or something?”
“What do I look like, a Boy Scout?”
She snorted. “Hardly. A Boy Scout would be more trustworthy. He would have come better prepared.”
His eyes captured her. “Trustworthy? Prepared? Don’t kid yourself. A Boy Scout would have been practical enough not to come here alone. He would have waited for reinforcements. He would have kept you waiting.”
Her eyes welled again. “I have been waiting.”
“I came as fast as I could. As soon as I found out.” He scooched even closer, until she felt his warm breath on her bare thigh an inch below her skirt’s hem.
She watched him, wanted to touch him. Being tied left her at such a disadvantage. And yet, seeing Mickey in the same condition gave her this crazy sort of rush. This was exactly the sort of trap she was trying to avoid in life. There was something unknown, dangerous, thrilling about this encounter. She tried to remind herself her life could very well be at stake, but somehow, Mickey’s presence gave her much more hope than she’d had before.
And then her thigh tingled beneath his hot breath. A tug on the cords and a nip of his teeth followed. Her legs tensed as she gasped. “What are you doing?”
His stubbled jaw brushed her thigh, the sensation of scratchy heat sending jolts of desire up her spine. “Relax,” he whispered. “I’m trying to see if these cords are loose enough to free your legs.” He looked up at her, his eyes nearly black in the stripes of moonlight invading the dark room.
She gulped nervously. “What for?”
“So maybe you can get out of here.”
“Oh.” She felt oddly let down by his matter-of-fact answer. His teeth scraped against her thigh again as he tried to pull at the cords. Iris closed her eyes, blotting out her fears for the moment. Instead, she replaced them with wishes of a whole new kind-foolish, dreamy, not-in-this-lifetime kind of wishes.
Wishes that he would make love to her. Wishes that she could tangle her fingers in his dark hair and make this a very different encounter.
“Relax your thighs,” Mickey said. “Let me try this one more time.”
Iris nearly jumped out of the chair at the sensation of his hot, wet tongue sliding along her flesh and trying to work beneath the cord. She didn’t squeal, but her breathing became more labored.
Mickey squinted up at her. “Sorry, is this getting to you?” He bent his head and plucked at the cords with his teeth. But she was pretty sure she’d seen him smile.
“I don’t think this-” another gasp, “-is going to work.”
“Come on, give me a few minutes. We’re in a bedroom, it’s dark, we’re alone. Just pretend I’m making love to you.”
Iris held her breath. He hadn’t really said that. “Don’t joke about it, okay?”
“Who’s joking?” He lifted his face, his gaze roaming over her. “If this is my last night on this Earth, I sure as hell want to spend it with you.”
Trussed up as they were, Iris knew there was no way to fulfill either of their desires. And though she still didn’t believe him, she was grateful to pretend. “I want that, too, Mickey, but those guys could come in here any minute.”
“Forget those two. I could out-think them with my hands tied behind my back.” He grinned that careless, swashbuckling grin at her, almost making her believe him. “Now, where were we?” This time, his moist lips missed the cord entirely as he suckled her skin, teasing her flesh with his tongue.
Footfalls in the other room alerted Iris, and her whole body tensed, destroying the moment.
Mickey scooted away from her heated flesh. “Let me do the talking,” he whispered before Jock and Pebbles came through the door.
They stopped, silhouetted by the lights in the living room behind them, and Iris had to wonder if they did it for effect.
“I told you he’d be conscious by now,” Jock said as an aside to his partner.
“You want I should knock him out again?” asked Pebbles.
Jock waved the idea away as if it were a pesky gnat. “Nah, it’s time Mickey told us what’s really going on here. Maybe he and Miss Fortune here have got a plan.”
“I don’t even know why I’m tied up,” Mickey said.
“So you didn’t get those little gems you delivered this evening from her? Because they turned out to be first-class copies. Turner says the Boss is pissed.”
“Copies?” He turned wide eyes to Iris, and for a second he had her fooled that he hadn’t known they were copies. The liar.
“Where’d you get them made, Mick?” Jock pulled a gun from his waistband. “Turner wants to know.”
“I didn’t get them made. Who had time? Those are the stones I got from Cosmo.”
“Got ’em from a dead man, did you?”
A whole new level of numbness drained Iris’s body. Had these two thugs killed her father?
Pebbles nodded his bumpy bald head. “That’s true, Mickey. You told us yourself that you killed Cosmo and stuffed him in the trunk of your car.”