Taken Hostage Read online

  ‘No. But this is my car.’ He motioned toward the Saturn.

  After exiting the Mustang himself, he walked around the front and opened Tiffany’s door for her. She was overcome by a sensation of déjà vu – she’d imagined him doing the same thing in her fantasy. Now, in their current situation, it seemed absurd.

  She stood uselessly as he tossed the pillowcase full of cash into the Saturn’s trunk and covered it up with the blankets and emergency roadside kit that were already stashed there. The ordinariness of her captor’s car and the contents of its trunk were intriguing. Who was this man, who apparently robbed banks after smoking on their steps and flirting with their tellers for half an hour? It wasn’t as if he could expect any of the plentiful witnesses to forget his face – it was only slightly too rugged to look like it belonged on the cover of GQ, or on a billboard in the city.

  What in the world was he planning to do next?

  Tiffany eyed the nearby woods speculatively. They were in the middle of the New York wilderness, half an hour from town. She had nowhere to run, and there was probably no one to hear her scream if she tried and he caught her. She dared a glance at her captor, who’d tucked the gun into the front waistband of his jeans. The bulge of the barrel beneath the denim reminded her of the similar protuberance she’d felt there when he’d pinned her against the Mustang in the bank parking lot. She no longer felt horrified by the memory – a fact that sent heat flooding into her face.

  Once he’d finished packing the Saturn he opened the passenger door. ‘Ladies first,’ he murmured in a tone she’d heard already in her fantasy.

  She sank into the passenger seat gladly, for her knees had begun to feel as if they might give out. ‘Where are we going?’ she asked as he turned his own set of keys in the ignition.

  ‘Far away,’ was all the reply he gave her.

  She couldn’t stop asking questions. Now that her fear was beginning to ebb, a strange curiosity seemed to be replacing it. ‘If this isn’t your house, why’d we come here?’

  ‘Because the owner leaves every morning for work at 7:15 and doesn’t come home until at least 5:45 in the evening. So it should be at least that long before they discover the abandoned Mustang and figure out that I’m driving something else. We’ll be long gone by then.’

  Tiffany noted his use of the word ‘we’ with a sudden rush of half-amazed, half-frightened anticipation. ‘You had this all planned out?’

  ‘Of course.’ He pulled the Saturn back out onto the road. ‘What’d you think, that I’m just some idiot who decided to rob a bank on the spur of the moment?’ He grinned at her, and she had to fight the sudden urge to grin back.

  She shrugged instead.

  He reached down, pulled out a hat from the small compartment on the driver’s side door and pushed it down on top of his head, hiding his hair.

  ‘Shouldn’t you make me lay down in the back seat or something?’ Tiffany asked. That was how the bad guys always did it on the crime dramas she liked to watch on TV.

  He looked away from the road for a moment, turning the full force of his gaze upon her. His eyes were intense, but one corner of his mouth was pulled up in an amused half-smile. ‘Do you really want me to?’ He spoke in the same husky voice that’d starred in her pre-abduction fantasy.

  She dropped her gaze, too abashed to maintain eye contact. What she saw when she looked down only deepened her embarrassment – though her kidnapper had removed the gun from his waistband, the fabric of his jeans was just as strained quite near where it had been.

  ****

  They drove into the night, stopping once for a necessary break in the thick woods that lined the country highway. Tiffany trampled over the undergrowth to find a place obscured from the view of any travelers to relieve her bladder. It was an awkward thing to do in the dark woods with her captor keeping guard only a few yards away, though he did stand resolutely facing the other direction. When they returned to the car, he surprised her with a cooler full of sandwiches and soda that had been waiting on the floor in the back. Clearly, he hadn’t been lying when he’d said he’d planned this all out. They drove on, and according to the dashboard clock, she fell asleep sometime after one in the morning.

  ****

  Tiffany awoke sometime in the darkness to the feel of insistent pressure between her legs. She stared down into her lap and saw that a large hand had already unbuttoned and unzipped her pants and was plunging down below the waistband of her pink cotton panties, stretching the fabric as the fingertips brushed the top of her clitoris, which was swollen to the point of aching. It throbbed against the invading touch, and she was unable to stifle a low moan.

  She looked, already knowing it was he who touched her, and saw her captor. His blue eyes reflected the moonlight that filtered in through the windshield, and they were fixed intently on her. He leaned in to kiss her when she met his gaze, thrusting his tongue past her readily parted lips and over her teeth. She kissed him back eagerly and arched her hips away from the seat so that he could reach deeper into her pants and feel the wetness that beckoned him…

  The car hit a particularly nasty bump in the road, and Tiffany’s eyes flew open. Sunlight streamed in through the windows, and she squinted against it. Her heart beat fiercely, and every inch of the skin between her legs throbbed, longing for the dreamed-of touch. Heated flooded her face as she stole a glance at her captor, whose hands were dry and planted firmly on the wheel.

  ‘Morning,’ he said.

  Her face aflame, she tried to squash down an irrational fear of him being able to read minds. ‘Morning,’ she mumbled back, hoping desperately that she didn’t sound as aroused as she felt.

  When she’d finally managed to compose herself, she rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and saw that the clock read 6:15 am. ‘Aren’t you tired?’ she asked her kidnapper, who had apparently driven through the night.

  ‘I got a couple hours of sleep,’ he replied.

  ‘What? When?’ She asked incredulously.

  He smiled the irresistible half-smile Tiffany was beginning to become familiar with. ‘I pulled over around two and slept for about three hours.’

  ‘I didn’t even notice.’ It was unnerving to know they’d spent three hours sleeping side by side. The memory of her forbidden dream surfaced again in her mind, sending a fresh surge of blood to the small but insistent organ between her legs. She shot a guilty glance at his fingertips. In her dream, they’d felt pleasantly rough against her inflamed flesh.

  He turned his attention back to the road, but not before she tore her gaze from his hands and noticed his eyes were bloodshot. Stubble was beginning to darken his jaw. He was clearly still exhausted. She couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for him, and a vision of him resting his head on her chest and closing his eyes flashed before her mind’s eye. She berated herself silently and immediately, but it did little good. Her chest had been bare in that brief fantasy, perhaps in a state of post-lovemaking. She resolved not to let herself think about it again. Indulging in such thoughts about a violent criminal wasn’t safe, wasn’t practical. And it wasn’t easy to give up. At least, not after that dream.

  ****

  ‘Do you think we could stop sometime soon?’ Tiffany asked. Her bladder had filled overnight and was protesting each time the car passed over even the smallest bump in the road. Besides that, the mountain air might help her to cool her head – her captor kept popping up inside of it, always in an inappropriate setting or position, despite her efforts not to expand on her unbidden fantasy.

  ‘Yeah,’ he replied, without removing his eyes from the road.

  She stared out the window. They were traveling down a mountain highway, surrounded by majestic pines, maples and other trees, all resplendent in their fresh spring greenery. There were open blossoms on some of the branches, unlike in New York, where they wouldn’t appear for at least another three weeks.

  ‘Where are we?’ she asked.

  ‘Tennessee.’

  ‘Tenness
ee? Really?’ She gazed at the generous foliage with renewed interest.

  ‘Yeah. The Smoky Mountains.’

  She gaped out the window. So this was Tennessee. She’d never been to the south before.

  He pulled over onto a gravel turn-around spot on the side of the road. ‘There are no restrooms.’

  That much was obvious. There wasn’t a building in sight. ‘That’s OK.’ She opened the passenger door herself. Her bladder was too full to have any qualms about going in the woods again.

  He swung out of the driver’s seat and stretched.

  She stepped into the forest, but not before she stole a look at his arms, bare beneath the sleeves of his T-shirt, and the narrow but tantalizing strip of muscled belly that was revealed as he raised them over his head.

  The sound of his voice caught her attention again. ‘I’ll wait right here,’ he said, leaning against a tree just far enough out of the way not to be seen by anyone from the road.

  Really?’

  ‘Yeah. There are a lot of bears in these mountains, so you’d better not go too far.’ He grinned at her.

  She picked her way to a private place, relieved not to have him within hearing distance and slightly wary of any bears – or worse, snakes – that might call the woods home.

  He was waiting where she’d left him when she returned.

  She made to step past him, toward the car, but he grabbed her wrist. She turned to face him. They were so close she had to tilt her head back to look up at him. His blue eyes met hers, locking them in a hold that seemed more real than the grip he had on her arm. ‘Want to go for a hike?’ he asked.

  Her heart skipped a beat, and then sped up dramatically, as if to make up for the lost time.

  He didn’t wait for an answer. He moved forward instead, maintaining his grip on her wrist. She trailed close behind him, filled with a strange combination of trepidation and excitement. Flash-fantasies peppered her mind in a rapid assault, and she stopped trying to hold them back, promising herself she’d resume her practicality momentarily.

  His palm was hot against the flesh of her forearm, and she remembered, not for the first time, the feel of him pressed against her. His heat had been faint then, masked by the barrier of their clothing. What would it be like to feel his cock pulsing against her again, in time with his heart, and maybe even hers too, with nothing between their skins? And his hand – where would it venture if it weren’t clenched around her wrist as solidly as a steel manacle?

  These thoughts warred with a sense of dread that was perhaps more appropriate, given the situation. Did he still have the gun?

  She hadn’t seen him without it since he’d robbed the bank. Was he taking her out into the forest to shoot her, where no one would see or hear? Was he going to ensure that there would be no one to tell the police what kind of car he was driving, or what direction he was headed in? Would her body be discovered by unsuspecting hikers, or by a bear?

  She broke into a sweat as she followed him, trampling undergrowth and small saplings. Though they’d seemed sensible back at the bank, her work heels were hardly suitable for the activity. She stumbled several times, while sticks and plants pricked her feet. She vacillated continually between the urge to break free and run, and the urge to seize her captor and do something that would have both shocked and filled Alicia and Cindy with livid jealousy.

  Finally, they stopped in a small clearing and the gunman released her wrist. She regretted the loss of contact and longed to reach out and touch him, to establish her own grip on him, for the first time. Instead, she reached down and pulled a twig from one of her battered shoes. ‘What are you going to do to me?’

  ‘That’s up to you,’ he replied.

  She arched an eyebrow, much as he had the day before – that seemed ages ago.

  ‘You have a choice.’

  ‘Well, what is it then?’ she asked, uncharacteristically blunt. She was panting slightly, and her wrinkled work clothes were now sweat-stained in places. Her feet were bleeding where they’d been pricked and scraped, and there were leaves stuck in her hair. On top of it all, she was hornier than she’d ever been, and it was all his fault. She was in no mood for playing games.

  ‘I can leave you here. You’ll find your way back to the road, but not before I do – not in those shoes anyway.’ She scowled at him. ‘Then you can wait at the turnaround and flag down a police car, or anybody who’ll let you use their cell phone,’ he continued.

  ‘Gee, thanks,’ she spat. She was glad he hadn’t mentioned shooting her, but she wasn’t about to remind him that was a possibility. ‘What’s my other option?’

  ‘You can come with me,’ he said, ‘not as my hostage, but my partner.’

  ‘What?’ His words sent her heart racing and her eyes bulging as she tried to comprehend the enormity and absurdity of his suggestion. Was he serious?

  ‘You heard me.’ He looked serious. His blue eyes glittered, daring her to ask again.

  Being kidnapped at gun point and held hostage for a day had taken its toll on Tiffany, and she did something she never would have imagined herself doing the day before. She drew back her hand and slapped him hard across the face, thinking of how he’d thrown her against the Mustang.

  He grunted. The palm of her hand burned as she drew it back to her side, but she refused to show any sign of pain. He had no such reservations, and raised a large hand to cradle his cheek. She smiled smugly, and regretted it almost immediately as she realized that she wanted to comfort him. For one brief second, she was tempted to pull down his head and hold it against her chest, as she’d imagined earlier. And then, she realized she wanted to hit him again.

  ‘Was that supposed to be an answer?’ he asked, rubbing his jaw. ‘If so, I think I’m going to need you to translate.’

  She glared at him. ‘You want me to come with you as your partner?’ she asked incredulously. ‘Like Bonnie and Clyde or something?’

  He shrugged. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous. Are you serious?’

  ‘Look,’ he said flatly. ‘There’s a reason I took you as my hostage instead of one of those bimbos you work with.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘Because you wanted to go. You wanted to get out of there. I could tell. And,’ he paused dramatically, ‘it seemed like there was a spark between us.’ He glared at her defiantly, daring her to deny his assertion.

  She didn’t. Instead, she stared back at him, open-mouthed in her surprise.

  ‘You don’t have to go back,’ he murmured, his voice softer than before.

  Her anger had slowly begun to seep away. Without it, her desire for him expanded and filled her to the extent that it scared her. What he was saying was crazy. But it was also true. She didn’t have to go back to her mundane life as a bank-teller in rural New York. She didn’t have to fill out another deposit ticket or listen to Alicia and Cindy’s incessant, shallow chatter ever again. She could leave all that behind and go with him, the impossibly handsome man she’d been fantasizing about since first seeing him on the bank steps. It wasn’t practical, but it was tempting.

  ‘I don’t have a gun.’ He pulled back the sides of his jacket to demonstrate his claim. His sides rose and fell steadily beneath the thin fabric of his T-shirt as he breathed. ‘I’ll walk away right now if you want me to,’ he said calmly. ‘I won’t hurt you.’

  She rushed forward and shoved her arms beneath the sides of his jacket before he had time to lower them. As she pressed herself against him her breasts flattened beneath her dampened shirt, compressed by his washboard stomach and hard chest. Several outraged voices of reason in the back of her head demanded to know exactly what she thought she was doing, but she ignored them, reaching up instead to grab the forelock of hair that’d fallen into his eyes again. It was surprisingly soft between her fingers. She pulled down on it, forcing his neck to bend and his mouth to meet hers.

  He responded as if he’d been expecting her reaction, or at le
ast hoping for it. His mouth tasted faintly of the sandwich and Coke that had constituted his last meal, but that had been hours ago, and he behaved ravenously. His tongue probed deep into the recess of her mouth, sliding hard against her own. She pushed back, and he withdrew. She brushed his lips with her tongue, preparing to push past them and give him a taste of his own medicine, but he stopped her by denting the soft flesh of her lower lip with his eye tooth.

  She exhaled sharply. It stung. No, it hurt. But not so much that she didn’t like it. Immobilized from the neck up by his bite, she resorted to exploring with her hands. She tucked a few fingers in the waistband of his jeans, where he’d kept his gun the day before.

  His fingers were at the neckline of her blouse, fumbling slightly over the small top button. She willed it to cooperate, anxiously anticipating his touch, but it resisted.

  He sighed in frustration, causing his tooth to burrow deeper into her lip. She gasped, a sound born of pain, or maybe pleasure – even she was unsure. He gripped either side of her collar and pulled, parting her stubborn blouse in a spray of buttons.

  ‘It was ruined anyway,’ he muttered as buttons skittered across the leaves below and disappeared.

  Finally released from both her shirt and his bite, Tiffany tasted blood. It dribbled from the small puncture wound he’d created in her soft flesh, reddening her lower lip.

  He pressed his mouth against hers, covering the wound and moving over it with surprising tenderness. ‘Sorry,’ he breathed.

  Her heart fluttered. She sighed against his lips and dipped her fingers deeper into his jeans. As their tips brushed against the smooth, rounded head of his cock, her core tightened in anticipation.

  He buried a hand in her hair, cradling the back of her head as his other hand pressed against her back, negotiating the hooked clasp of her bra. He defeated it quickly and her breasts sprang free. After finally ending their kiss, he drew back to look at her. She reluctantly pulled her fingers from his jeans so she could shake her bra completely off, and he groaned at the sight.

  Free of her bra, she turned her attention to the single brass button that gleamed above the tented fabric of his jeans, restraining him. It came undone easily, eager to be free of the strain, and she pinched the zipper between her thumb and forefinger.