it the whole time. But he did not let on that he knew, keeping his speed steady, his eyes checking the locks.
Both back passenger doors were unlocked.
He cursed his stupidity. In Eliza, a locked car door was unheard of. In Vancouver, he’d made a concession to the big city by locking the one he’d gotten out of. The rest of them had slipped his mind.
And now he had an unwanted passenger.
What he wasn’t going to do was drive a psychopath, possibly armed, right up in front of Candy’s house in Eliza, where it might endanger Angelica and Candy’s own children.
He made a split-second decision.
Smoothly, he pulled off the road onto the shoulder. He stopped the vehicle but didn’t turn off the engine.
He eased his pocketknife out of his blue jeans pocket. Then with lightning swiftness, he hurled himself over the back seat, whipped the blanket off the person huddled under it on the floorboard.
Shock rippled through him.
The woman looking at him with huge green eyes and red hair that spiraled wildly in every direction was absolutely beautiful.
Of course, it was very dark in the back of the car. Maybe he was mistaken. He reached up and turned on the dome light.
She blinked, if anything, more beautiful in the brighter light than she had been before.
He sighed uneasily and slipped the knife into his pocket.
The animal terror went out of her eyes.
“I don’t suppose you’re a nanny, are you?” he asked dryly. No, he’d asked for a small helper. The way she was crammed into that space, small she was not. In fact, she seemed to be kind of stuck, so he took her wrist and helped her, none too gently, onto the seat beside him.
She had on a very tight gray skirt and it rode up a long slender leg as she settled herself beside him. She saw the direction of his gaze and yanked it down.
“A nanny?” she asked weakly. “Like Mary Poppins?”
“Hmmm,” he said.
“Que sera, sera?” she said hopefully.
“That’s Doris Day.”
“Damn,” she said.
Even with his limited experience in such matters, he could tell her skirt and jacket were very expensive. Her blouse, though it was smudged, looked like silk the way it clung to her generous curves. Her makeup was understated and subtle.
This was no hippie who’d slipped into his back seat to have a nap. It was more like a damsel in distress.
His specialty. Rescues.
“Who are you, and what are you doing in my car?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Better get started,” he said, folding his arms over his chest.
“Where are we?” she asked, looking out into the blackness with trepidation.
“How about if you answer my questions first?”
“Do you think we could answer questions after?”
“After what?”
“After you deliver me to the nearest washroom.” She actually had the gall to smile at him. It was dazzling. “urgent”
Chapter Two
Toni had woken up when the car stopped. There was no momentary sense of confusion. She knew precisely where she was and how she had come to be there. Not geographically, of course, though she could tell from the unmarred blackness in the vehicle they were no longer in Vancouver.
The absence of light and sound told her that.
Danger tingled in the air.
She pulled the blanket over her face, as if that would help her. She was trembling so much he would probably feel the vibration.
It occurred to her she no longer had anything to be grateful for.
She was in danger.
She hurt all over.
And she had to go to the bathroom.
She heard him fling himself into the back seat, and a split second later, he had yanked back the blanket. She found herself staring into the most amazing blue eyes she had ever seen.
She had been planning to scream, but somehow it just died in her throat. Even the small knife in his hand didn’t seem to be invoking terror.
He was gorgeous. Blazing blue eyes. A dark shock of jet-black hair, a face made more handsome by the curves and hollows of the night shadows, the shadowing of his own whiskers.
He was not plump.
Or balding.
He looked exactly the way he sounded. And smelted. Sexy.
And ferociously angry.
He pulled her onto the seat beside him, and she could feel the strength in his hands, see the breadth of his shoulders underneath a faded jean jacket.
This is the man I’m going to marry.
It was the most ridiculous thought she had ever had.
She didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know who he was. Her career had just started, really.
Madame Yeltsy had been very clear about her expectations when she’d made Toni a buyer. “You have to want success more than anything. You have to be prepared to sacrifice everything. Love, husband, children. You have a more important role—to bring joy to thousands of women by making fabulous fashions available to them.”
“I don’t suppose you’re a nanny, are you?”
His voice, deep and sensual, chased the voice of Madame Yeltsy right out of her head. Toni noticed there was a glimmer of humor around the edges of the words that didn’t show in the piercing blue of his eyes.
A nanny? Of course. Presumably, from the evidence of the car seat, the blanket and the bear, he had a child. And it followed, a wife. He might as well have kept that knife out because it felt like it had plunged straight into her heart.
It was that ring, she decided, that was making her think such foolish thoughts.
The shopkeeper had said it brought luck or happiness or some such thing. A husband. Babies.
Those thoughts, followed so closely by terror, had all jumbled up in her mind. She had probably been dreaming confused dreams when this man had leaped commando-style over the back of his seat and exposed her.
He did look like a commando,
