and all they stood for. She crouched, took a breath and reached down for the trunk. The moment she had her hands on the tree, arms reached around her, caught her wrists and yanked them behind her back. She rose up fast, throwing her head back to try to come in contact with her attacker’s head. He grunted when she smashed into his chest, but he had already secured her wrists with zip ties.
“How many times did I tell you to look around? You forgot all my training, babe.”
Furious, and more than a little scared, she spun around and tried to kick him the moment he let her go. She had forgotten, damn him. He blocked the kick hard, numbing her leg when he defended himself by striking down on her shin to deflect the blow. She tried again, and he blocked a second time with equal power.
The breath hissed out of her lungs and she bent forward as far as she could, drawing her hands up as high as possible, intending to slam them back down as she came upright fast in order to break the zip ties. He’d taught her that as well. Before she could straighten, his hand was on her back, holding her down.
“Breezy, you’d better calm down before you get hurt.”
Her breath hissed out of her lungs. “Go to hell, Steele. You have no right to lay one finger on me.”
“That’s not exactly true, sweetheart, and you know it,” he said.
“I’m not part of your club. I’m not part of your life in any way. Just get the hell away from me.”
He didn’t let her up, his palm pressing her down while he texted one-handed. “You always were a smart little thing. I looked at the tapes we had of your ride.” He sounded derisive. “Babe. Really. You’re driving a shit truck. It’s a rust bucket if I ever saw one. There was no way it could have gotten that far ahead of us, even if we were a minute or two behind, which the prospects were. That meant it was a process of elimination on which road you’d turned off onto. I also remembered you as being extremely patient when you needed to be. That meant you were going to hide out until nightfall. It gave me plenty of time to track you down.”
“Let me up.”
“Ask nice.”
For one moment, she was afraid she might spontaneously combust—and not in a good way. She stayed quiet. He had to let her up sometime.
“I’m not real happy with you.”
Staying quiet went right out the window at the bite in his voice. “I really don’t care whether you’re happy or not. Let. Me. Up.”
“You ask nice. You don’t want to play hardball with me, Breezy, because you won’t win. Not when I’m this pissed. Didn’t have much to do when I found the truck but wait for you to wake up, so I read the fuckin’ letter.”
Her heart jerked hard. Fear shot through her and she went very still, no longer resisting or struggling to get free. If anything, she tried to make herself smaller, frozen like a little mouse with a big predator about to pounce.
“I read that fuckin’ letter eighteen times, Breezy. Eighteen. I showed some restraint by not going near the truck because I might have strangled you. I still might.”
His palm moved up her back to settle slowly around the nape of her neck, his long fingers curling around either side of her throat. “You get how really fuckin’ pissed I am with you?”
“You get how I really fucking don’t care?” she spat back. Let him kill her. She was dead anyway. “You threw me out, Steele. I begged you to let me stay with you. It was humiliating, and I still did it. Then I begged you to go with me when it was obvious you wanted me gone. You made it abundantly clear that I was nothing to you. A whore for the club that kept you warm at night. I can repeat verbatim what you said to me if you’d like. So don’t get all self-righteous on me.”
The fingers tightened, digging into her throat. The thumb pressed into her chin. His other hand bunched her hair in his fist and slowly pulled her to a standing position. She stared up at his set features. He was even more gorgeous than she remembered, and she dreamt of him every night. Every night. That made her a masochist.