Heated Pursuit (Alpha Security #1)(80)
A smile ghosted over her lips…and froze. That tingle, the one she’d felt the moment she and Shay unloaded from the gate—the one that came with the ardent focus of someone’s attention—took root in the pit of her stomach. When she sensed it earlier, she blamed the paranoia on her long hours of travel and lack of sleep. But the prickle of awareness came back tenfold, turning her head and stopping at the man leaning against the far wall.
Elle did a double take. It wasn’t Trey. It couldn’t be. She’d left him back in Thailand without so much as her last name, much less her travel itinerary, yet every second her gaze stayed narrowed on the stranger across the room, her heart pattered a little faster.
Jeans encased his thighs perfectly. Not tight. Not baggy. No doubt if he turned around, the rear would look as impressive as the front. Both his face and his hair were disappointedly half hidden by a baseball cap and sunglasses, but they had the same strongly chiseled jaw and sexy blond scruff that made her want to throw every razor known to man straight into the garbage.
Even though he never looked away from his paper, his lips twitched almost as if sensing her visual appraisal. That smirk. Those lips. The tight stretch of a long-sleeved T over a chest wide enough to land an airplane. Elle nearly collapsed into an X-rated memory of how lips nearly identical to the stranger’s had pleasurably ripped away all her sensibilities only a scant few days ago.
Standing in the middle of a busy airport definitely wasn’t the time to give in to a never-ending mental replay of her time with Trey. When her turn came up at the counter, she gave them all the information they needed in the hopes of reconnecting with her suitcase, and then with a “Have a nice day” and her single carry-on, Elle bounced off the chest of another traveler.
On reflex, she reached out to steady her victim. “I’m so sorry.”
“Shut it,” a low voice snarled.
Oh, hell no. Exhaustion mixed with an insane need to shower off the last twenty-four hours made her head swivel to Mr. Attitude. Normally she would’ve taken a step back and gone on her merry way, a side effect of her upbringing. But she was eight hours past polite, and people who wore sunglasses indoors annoyed her to no end—unless they were sexily coy and leaning against a wall.
She narrowed her eyes, wishing him to squirm at least the smallest bit, but there wasn’t so much as a flicker of remorse. “It was an accident. I said I was sorry. There’s no need to be a jerk about it.”
“Actually, there is.” Mr. Attitude clamped a hand around her upper arm.
“Ow. Hey, watch it!” She tugged and he tightened his hold.
He leaned his large body way past her personal boundaries until his mouth brushed against her ear. Elle cringed.
“I told you to shut. The hell. Up.” He emphasized each word and punctuated it with a nudge to her ribs. It took a moment to register the cool steel as a gun. “If you so much as twitch, sputter, or look at anyone cross-eyed, I won’t hesitate to make this very bad for you.”
Elle forced bile back down her throat. Yeah, she had luck—bad luck that smelled worse than a skunk den. “I should probably warn you that I don’t have any money. Well, I have about ten dollars’ worth of Thai baht, but that’s about it. And maybe a fuzzy breath mint.”
“I don’t want your money, Miss Monroe.”
His grip tightened as he steered them away from anyone who would remotely care what was happening. And let’s face it: this was one of the busiest airports in the country. No one was going to notice one travel-ravaged blonde and a tank of a man, probably not even if she stripped down to her cotton undies and streaked through the terminal.
Her armed captor kept the barrel of the gun snug against her side as he directed them to the airport exit.
Elle’s heart went from a steady thunder to an apocalyptic roar when it finally sank in. Her name. He knew her name, knew she’d be returning to the states today. At this airport. Elle Monroe, certified trauma nurse, wasn’t exactly a hot commodity for kidnapping, which left only one other reason…and a desperate need to get away.
Elle whipped her head from side to side in hopes of catching someone’s eye, but everyone was too involved with their own travels. Even the station cop clear across the room seemed to be dealing with a minor scuffle between two passengers.
“So I’m your meal ticket, huh?” Elle kept talking, hoping someone would eventually catch on to her dilemma. “You obviously need me alive or you wouldn’t be going to all this trouble to get me out of here. I could scream bloody murder at the top of my lungs.”
“I wouldn’t recommend it. Not only could you get hurt in the process, but you could get a lot of innocent people hurt, too. You wouldn’t want that on your conscience, would you? And what about your friend? You don’t want anything to happen to Miss Chandler while she’s in the bathroom. And just so you know I’m not bluffing, it would be the bathroom directly across from the newspaper stand—the one with one working stall and a dripping faucet.”
Oh God. She wouldn’t jeopardize Shay’s safety or that of any other innocent bystanders, but she also couldn’t continue to let this man lead her straight into whatever hellish nightmare he had planned.
She needed to think. She needed her own plan. She needed—
Elle’s gaze snapped to the far wall where she’d last seen Mr. Tall, Ripped, and I-Can-Flick-a-Man-with-My-Fingers-and-Send-Him-Across-the-Room.