they didn’t understand English.
Before, she’d liked knowing little of the Portuguese language, had reveled in the sense of anonymity. Now, her inability to communicate sent her heart hammering furiously against her ribs.
“Someone help me!”
“No, bella, no!” the stranger shouted, just as his hand clamped around her arm. She struggled against his grip, but he was too strong, and she couldn’t move.
“There’s a safe house not far from here,” he was saying, but she barely heard. Training kicked in, and in one fluid move she reached down to the strap around her ankle and came back up with her last line of defense. She’d never thought to need the hunting knife which once belonged to her maternal grandfather as anything more than a token to prove to her father she could take care of herself, but now…
She jutted the weapon toward the stranger. “Let go,” she said through clenched teeth.
Surprise registered in his dark eyes. “Bella—”
“You’re making a terrible mistake,” she warned, trying to twist her wrist free of his hand. Shallow breaths tore in and out of her. “Trust me when I say I’m not someone you want to mess with.”
“I know you’re scared,” he coaxed in a surprisingly gentle voice, “but you don’t need to be afraid of me. I’m not going to let anyone hurt you.”
She swallowed hard, fighting the lure of his words. Deception came in all shapes and sizes, she knew. Seduction made a perfect disguise. She looked at him standing there, the heat radiating from his body fighting with the chill in her blood. His black shirt was damp now, clinging to a powerful chest. In his hand, he still held his briefcase.
That was really a gun.
Cold fingers of certainty clawed at her. No matter how badly she wanted to believe him, the fear pounding through her refused to go away. He’d approached her with a hidden agenda. He’d been trying to coax her away with him, out of the public eye. He’d wanted her alone…like he had her now.
And somewhere by the ocean, Hawk lay bleeding, maybe dead.
The truth reverberated through the narrow alley as explosively as the gunfire in the marketplace. She’d always known life turned in a heartbeat, but nothing had prepared her for the abrupt transformation from seductive Casanova to machine-gun-toting commando. Nothing about him even looked the same here in this shadowy place. Everything was harder now. Darker.
“Lower your weapon,” the stranger warned. His gaze flicked to her fingers curled bloodlessly around the hilt of the knife. “Don’t make me force you.”
Because he would.
She didn’t stop to think any further. Knife in hand, she lunged.
The stranger swore hotly, dropping the briefcase and grabbing the blade before impact. Just as quickly he tossed the family heirloom to the ground and retrieved his briefcase.
Never once did his left hand leave her body.
“Are you out of your mind?” he growled incredulously.
She looked at the fingers closed around her wrist and realized she’d gravely underestimated him.
“What do you want with me?” she asked, not sure she really wanted to know, but determined to meet her fate with at least some modicum of dignity.
“I want to get you to safety.”
“You killed Hawk,” she accused in horror.
“I saved your life,” he corrected. “I almost took a bullet for you, damn it.”
There were worse things, Miranda knew, than death. “You shot at the police.”
His jaw tightened. “I shot at a known criminal, who just happened to be wearing a police uniform. He killed the man you call Hawk. If I wanted you dead, bella, you wouldn’t be standing here right now.”
There was a cool logic to the claim, but Miranda warned herself not to fall for his verbal skills once again. Her thoughts tumbled back to the scene by the ocean, the way Hawk had fallen that first time, then staggered to his knees. Shots had erupted only moments later. Which way had he fallen? she tried to remember. Toward the man in the police uniform, meaning the stranger had shot him? Or toward her, meaning—
“No,” she muttered. “No.”
For the first time since the shooting, the stranger’s face softened. His eyes didn’t look quite so ominous, and that mouth which had been a grim line returned to the almost sensuous fullness of before. Around her wrist, his fingers loosened.
“Look, bella,” he reasoned. “There’s nothing I can say that you’ll believe right now, but think about this. Someone who wanted to hurt you wouldn’t waste time coaxing. If that’s what I wanted, I’d have you over my shoulder and out of sight before you even realized I’d moved.”
Miranda cringed at the realization of how easy it would be for him to do just that. She could fight him—she would fight him—but kicking and thrashing would not overpower a man of hard muscle and brutal determination, a man who enjoyed a six-inch, hundred-pound advantage. A man who could shoot with a briefcase.
Toward her, she remembered abruptly. Hawk had fallen toward her. The shots that felled him had come from the opposite direction, not the tall man who looked at her through eyes burning like chips of black ice.
If I wanted you dead, you wouldn’t be standing here.
Her thoughts returned to those frenzied moments, but this time, she saw his actions through a different lens. When shots had sprayed the plaza, he’d shielded her with his body. When he’d told her to run, he’d covered her back. Even now, when she’d pulled a knife, he’d simply disarmed her, not using her weapon to teach her a lesson, as her father had warned an attacker would do.
Hawk had always chided her not to expect a kidnapper to politely ask permission. They would act first, consider damage later. Men who lived on the fringes of civility didn’t show restraint. This man did.
His actions almost seemed…protective.
“Look, I appreciate what you did back there,” she said, “but I’ve really got to go.” The rational side of her brain realized he was right; if he’d wanted to hurt her, he would have by now. But he held a briefcase that turned into a semiautomatic. That made him dangerous, her uneasy. “I need to contact the embassy in Lisbon.”
He frowned, but before he could speak, a nearby door flung open and a middle-aged woman with a baby on her hip stepped into the shadowy alley.
“Paulo?” she called, then continued speaking in Portuguese.
Miranda took advantage of the momentary distraction to break away and bolt down the alley. “I need your phone—”
She only made it two steps. “Bella, bella, bella,” the stranger murmured, taking her arm and drawing her against the hard planes of his body. His voice was drugging, his eyes liquid. “Mi dispiace,” he muttered, pressing the hand with the briefcase against her lower back.
