grew slack from shock, her hands were free and striking out at him. He let go completely, scrambling back to get out of reach of the stinging slaps on his face, arms and chest.
With a man it would have been different. He would have decked him. But a woman? He might have been a hoodlum when he was younger, but he’d never hit a woman and never would. So his only recourse was to try to grab at her hands again, to capture them to stop the blows. Despite the fact that he was battling a blurred shadow, he got the suggestion of wild curls, slenderness and real strength.
He grabbed for her hands, but before he could make contact, he was blindsided by someone on his left, the impact sending him reeling to his right, his head and shoulder striking an ungiving wall. He ignored the jarring impact, spun around, scrambling to his feet and took a punch to his middle.
As he lurched backward, he heard what sounded like a kid’s voice screaming at him. “Hey, you jerk, you let her go!” And the owner of the voice was running at him again. “You stop hurting her!”
Kids and women, Matt thought at the same time he managed to catch the kid by his shoulders and hold on for dear life while he managed to evade most of the punches and kicks coming at him. Then the woman was there too, grabbing at him, jerking hard on his arm, still yelling, and the madness of the moment seemed to be suffocating him.
The screams echoed all around him until his own screams were mixed with them. “Stop it!” he yelled at the top of his lungs, then pushed the kid away from him. He felt the wall behind him, relieved that he wouldn’t be attacked from the rear. “That’s enough,” he yelled, “That’s enough! Stop. I give up.”
There was a sudden silence as Matt managed to make out the shape of the child to his right, then the woman, not more than three feet in front of him. Even in the shadows, he could see her standing with both hands up, but not in surrender. She looked ready to deliver a karate chop as she spoke at a thankfully reasonable level in a husky, very female voice, “You’d better not move. Not one move.”
“I’m not planning on it,” Matt muttered.
The kid moved and Matt turned to protect himself, but instead of another blow being delivered, the kid turned on the overhead lights. The flash of brightness blinded Matt for a moment. Then he finally saw his attackers.
Chapter Two
Matt saw the kid first, maybe eight or nine years old wearing baggy jeans, a hooded sweatshirt and grabbing a faded Yankees baseball cap from the floor. He put it on backwards over thick black hair that curled at the ends, and he watched Matt carefully with dark-brown eyes in a tanned face. Both hands came up in front of him, and both were balled into fists.
Then Matt saw the woman.
His first impression was a tangle of wild auburn curls around a stunningly beautiful face dominated by eyes that he could have sworn were a deep green. She was tall and slender with improbably long legs defined by tight jeans worn with suede boots and topped by a loose navy sweater. If she hadn’t looked so earnest and so unsettlingly beautiful, he would have laughed at her “karate” attack stance.
“Don’t…don’t you move at all,” she said, both hands up, long fingers pressed tightly together, no doubt ready to “chop” if they had to. She never looked away from Matt as she spoke to the boy. “Go and get help. Get security at the front desk.”
But the kid didn’t go anywhere. Instead, he came a bit closer, his dark-brown eyes narrowed on Matt and his hands still in tight fists. “What you up to, mister?” he asked. “You’re ripping the people off or what? You stealing stuff from this place, or you gonna hurt the lady?”
He had to be from the day care upstairs, but he didn’t look like the kids that had been coming in and out since Matt had been here. “No, I’m not ripping people off,” he said as he realized there was a tree in the room, right in the middle, an almost cartoon-like thing, with holes in it and branches that were chained to the ceiling with what looked like platforms on them. A real tree house, he thought as he looked back at the boy, then down at the floor and saw his briefcase.
“Sure,” the kid said with heavy sarcasm.
His briefcase had landed upside down against the wall by his feet. “Well, I’m not, and I’m not stealing and I’m not going to hurt—” He reached for the briefcase as he talked, but the kid moved faster than he did, kicking at the case, and sending it flying ten feet across the floor. It ended up near the strange-looking tree. “No, you don’t, mister!”
“Oh, come on. That’s my briefcase…what’s left of it,” he said, eyeing the heavy scuff mark on the side of the case.
“Can you prove it?” the kid asked.
He looked at the boy, then the woman. They hardly looked like a gang, but they were ganging up on him. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’m supposed to be here. The question is,” he said as the woman moved a bit closer and he could see that her eyes really were a deep, almost emerald green, “why are you two here?”
EVEN AS BRITTANY braced herself to do whatever it took to fend off this mountain of a man in front of her, she knew it wasn’t right. With the bright lights on, there was no furtive criminal in front of her, but a large man, dressed all in black, wearing clothes that weren’t cheap, and frowning at her and the kid as if they were aliens.
“We…we should get Security.” She glanced at the boy she hadn’t even known was in the complex until he joined in the attack. “Go and get help, please.”
“Yes, get Security,” the man said quickly in a deep voice.
“We don’t need no police in here,” the boy said as he glared at the man. “I can take care of him.” He moved a bit closer, his fists raised. “No problem.”
She would have laughed if the kid hadn’t seemed so serious and the man hadn’t seemed so angry. “No, you go and get help. I…I’ll…” She stumbled over her bravado as she looked back at the man. He was huge.
Dark eyes were on her, angry eyes in a sharply chiseled face. Sandy-blond hair, worn longer than was fashionable, was mussed, only adding to a strangely edgy feeling that the man seemed to radiate. Big? Shoot, he was a mountain and probably outweighed her by eighty or a hundred pounds. She remembered the feel of him against her, over her, controlling her and she inched back a bit, aware of how impossible it would be to control him.
All she’d seen was a flash, someone there, then there was impact, her body tangling with his, strength everywhere, and she’d had a flash of terror that she was being attacked, or even kidnapped. Her father had told her often enough when she was growing up that she had to take precautions against some nutcase thinking he could make money by kidnapping her. And she’d been told when you are attacked never to stop fighting. But it all seemed foolish now.
If the man hadn’t been off balance in the first place, she never would have been able to upset him, let alone keep him from doing whatever he wanted to do. But the longer she looked at him, she knew that nothing made sense. He was obviously color-challenged, but his clothes were expensive, as expensive as the black boots he wore with them. And the briefcase on the floor wouldn’t be carried by a thug.
“Security can figure this out,” she said, her voice lower now.
“No,” the kid said immediately.
But
