Total pages in book: 59
Estimated words: 55109 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 276(@200wpm)___ 220(@250wpm)___ 184(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 55109 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 276(@200wpm)___ 220(@250wpm)___ 184(@300wpm)
“I know you’re a smart woman. I know you work in a laboratory. So I know you’re going to try to distract me with thoughts and ideas.”
“Heaven forbid,” I mutter under my breath. In my experience, men are particularly disdainful of thoughts and ideas when they come from a woman who they’d rather was on her back with her legs open.
“I’m going to put a couple of stitches in and then you can have pancakes.”
There’s a lilt to his tone that almost makes me feel as though he thinks he’s speaking to a child. He is looking for various ways to make me compliant. I’ve decided I’m going to let him fix my arm, and I’ve also decided I’m going to have the pancakes. I’m going to need the carbs when I run away from him, which I intend on doing very, very soon. I can’t allow him to take me out of the city. Once he does that the chances of escaping are much, much lower.
He has a medical kit ready. I’m a little surprised at how prepared he is given how chaotic he seems to be, but appearances can be deceptive.
“You’ll feel a small prick,” he says.
“That’s unfortunate, given I had no choice in the marriage.”
“Don’t make me laugh!”
I glance over at him and see him trying not to burst out laughing while holding an uncapped needle of anesthetic. Maybe it’s the needle that triggers me, maybe I just sense that opportunity has arisen and I might not get one like it again.
I run. I dash for the door of the suite, and as luck would have it, it’s already opening because room service is coming with breakfast. Pancakes fly around me, little saucers of pan-fried batter goodness filling the air as I dash past the elevators and to the stairs.
Cosmos
She is a lot faster than I thought she’d be. Nimble too. I’m impressed — but I cannot afford to let her get to the ground floor. The last thing the hotel needs is a bleeding, panicked girl rushing through the lobby. I’ve paid them to look the other way for a certain amount of shenanigans, but Elise is a pretty young lady and she will draw the attention of white knights, law enforcement, and Fleisch.
She’s skittering down those stairs dangerously fast. I vault the railing and land several feet down, but right in front of her. She lets out a hapless scream as I gather her up in my arms and run back up the stairs with her clutched firmly over my shoulder.
“Let me go! LET ME GO! I’M NOT YOUR WIFE!”
I have an impulse to lay my palm across her ass. She deserves a good spanking for not listening to me, but I know she’s just panicking and acting out. My brothers might lay into their women at first provocation, but my authority is not that fragile. I can control her easily. No need to thrash her. Not yet, anyway.
Getting her back into the room is easy, but it’s obvious that keeping her is going to be hard. She’s just as scared of me as she was of the Fleisch operative, more so now that I’ve hunted her down physically.
I lock the door, knowing that she has the same access to the lock that I do, and therefore if I take my eye off her for more than thirty seconds, she’s going to run again.
She looks at me with tears welling in her eyes. “Why are you doing this to me? I just want to go home.”
I thought her sleeping with me was some kind of biological agreement, but obviously she’s having second thoughts. The sun being up is not helping. Things that seem sensible in the dead of night are often revealed to be utter madness in the light of day.
“I’m not doing anything to you besides saving your life. Look. There’s evidence.”
I have a file, found at the Fleisch Laboratory. When I was sent to destroy those who trafficked sacred blood from England, I did a thorough job when it came to eliminating the local threats. I also went through their files and found her details listed in a plain manila folder with vicious intent.
I drop the file on the hotel table in front of her. “There,” I say. “Look.”
She flips the cover open and glances over the interior. There are several pictures of her taken outside her apartment and her work. There’s also an in-depth personal profile. Her age, twenty-five, her country of origin, the USA, her educational history, her family tree, and her current familial status, which is that of a practical orphan. In other words, she is the perfect target for Fleisch.
Her eyes widen. Finally, she might be starting to understand the danger she was in and how orchestrated the whole affair was.