I take it.”
“Sort of.” Laura sat up straighter, tugging her hemline down and her bodice up. “Sam’s a nice name, actually. You should use it in the phone book instead of those silly initials.”
“I’ll take that into consideration.”
He stepped on the gas, and Laura was pretty sure she saw his fingers tighten on the steering wheel and his mouth shape a tiny, impatient sneer. Oh, great. Her big Saint Bernard was turning out to be as irritable as a cocker spaniel. She sighed. This wasn’t going to work.
“Look, maybe we should just forget…”
Sam Zachary spoke the exact words, at that exact moment, in the same frustrated tone of voice. A quick little grin telegraphed across his lips before he stiffened them again.
“I really do need some help,” Laura said quietly, looking down while she traced a beaded daisy on her handbag, not daring to look at him because she didn’t know whether or not she was going to dissolve into tears again. For someone who had barely shed a tear in the past decade, she was certainly making up for it now.
“I know,” he answered just as quietly. “That’s why I’m taking you someplace where you’ll be safe.”
Safe. That was all she wanted to be just then. Safe from rotten Artie Hammerman.
Laura tilted her head back and closed her eyes, one of which had begun to throb painfully. Maybe it was all her fault. Maybe if she hadn’t accepted Artie’s first, surprising gift, none of this would have happened. But nobody had given her flowers since her senior prom, and suddenly, three weeks ago, there was her landlord’s bullnecked, muscle-bound son, dressed in a checked suit with foot wide lapels and a tie as wide as the Mississippi River, angling a huge box of long-stemmed, deep red American Beauties through the front door of her shop.
“Oh, Artie,” she’d exclaimed. “For me? They’re beautiful. But why?”
Her next mistake was accepting his dopey shrug and big gooey smile as a satisfactory answer.
Then came the candy. She didn’t even know they made heart-shaped boxes that big! Or bottles of Chanel No. 5 that were so enormous they had to be picked up with two hands.
After the perfume arrived, she got nervous and put in a call to the Hammer himself. But Art Hammerman, Sr., had brushed off her concerns about his son.
“Don’t worry about it,” he’d told her in that Don Corleone voice of his. “Indulge the kid.”
But then the car came. A white convertible with red leather seats and the biggest red bow that Laura had ever seen. That had been early this morning, just before Artie knelt before her and opened the little hinged purple box with the big diamond ring nestled inside it.
Then, when she told him he had to take it back, Artie had pushed her, then pulled her, then finally punched her, all the while bellowing “If I can’t have you, Laura, then nobody else can, either.”
Well, nobody else wanted her. But that wasn’t exactly the point. And nobody, by God, had ever hit her. Ever.
“What’d I do wrong?” she muttered now, dragging her fingers through her hair. “I really, really don’t deserve this.”
“People rarely do, Miss McNeal.”
She’d almost forgotten that Zachary, S. U. was sitting barely two feet away, his eyes safely glued to the road, his hands at a steady ten and two on the wheel. “Excuse me?”
“I said people rarely get what they deserve. Good, bad or indifferent.”
Great, Laura thought. He was a philosopher, too.
“Well, they should,” she answered irritably.
They were crossing the two-lane Tri-County Bridge just then. The river glittered below in the summer sun. Laura looked back. The steel-and-glass towers of the city were diminishing fast. Ahead of them, on both sides of the ribbon of road, stretched green fields, broken only by an occasional farmhouse and a dull red barn.
It suddenly occurred to Laura that it might be prudent to ask Sam Zachary just where he was taking her. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. What if she had escaped rotten Artie Hammerman only to be abducted by a guy who sat in a crummy little office just waiting for innocent victims to come along? What if the S really stood for Serial, as in killer?
Laura swallowed hard. Then the U was obviously for Uh-oh.
She glanced to her left. Sam Zachary didn’t look like a sociopath or a menace to society. He didn’t even look dangerous. He looked…well…sincere. Even sweet. All this despite the fact that he also looked strong as an ox.
His thigh muscles bunched just under the faded denim of his jeans. His navy polo shirt curved across a barrel of a chest and the short sleeves showed off his tanned, muscular arms. The sweetness, though, was in the little upward curve of his mouth and the deep crinkles at the outer corners of his eyes. Actually, he was a very good-looking man.
But so was Ted Bundy.
“Do you have a license or anything?” she asked, breaking their silence.
Those lips tilted up a little bit more. “Good time to ask.” He shifted in the seat, stretching out a long left leg, and produced a worn leather wallet from his back pocket.
“Here,” he said, tossing it onto her lap.
Laura breathed a little easier after she opened it and saw not only his driver’s license but a pretty official-looking license from the State Board of Private Investigators. Zachary, Samuel Ulysses was thirty-three, six foot three, and weighed two hundred and fifteen pounds. She already knew he had medium brown hair, although the card failed to mention that it was slightly sun-streaked, and that his brown eyes held an incredible warmth while they crinkled at the corners.
“Satisfied?” he asked, holding out an open hand for the return of his wallet.
Laura closed it and plopped it in his palm. “I guess so.” Relieved was more like it, she thought. “Now I should probably ask where you’re taking me.”
No sooner were the words out of her mouth than he slowed the truck and hit the turn signal. “We’re almost there,” he said, turning the big Blazer left onto a shaded and narrow gravel road.
Laura’s first thought was that this was probably the rural equivalent of a dark, deserted alley, that proverbial place where you never wanted to meet anybody, but before she was able to feel properly hysterical, she found herself quite overwhelmed by the beauty of the scene.
Big trees along both sides of the road formed a green, sun-dappled canopy high overhead, and through the trees to her right Laura could see a pasture brightly carpeted with wildflowers where horses and cows were grazing contentedly. A white wooden fence ran along the edge of the road, and birds—blue ones and red ones and black ones with red-spotted wings—perched atop every other fence post as if they’d been hired by a landscaper for decorating duty.
“This is lovely,” she said, opening the window all the way and sticking her head out to take in a deep breath of the fresh, clean country air. “I haven’t been out here in years. I’m pretty much a city girl.”
She
