The Bodyguard: A BWWM Bad Body Romance(55)
...So why weren’t they doing anything?
As far as she could tell, neither man had made a move. They were still standing right by the door, waiting for her to finish her errand.
Juliet forced herself to take a deep breath. If her would-be protectors weren’t going to help her, she was going to have to help herself. As things currently stood, Blackjack and whoever he was with stood between her and the doorway. There was a possibility she could slip behind the shelves and make a beeline for the door, but running would draw obvious attention to her. She had no idea whether Blackjack would try to take her with Bosh and Crowley standing right there - but she didn’t want to take any chances.
She reached for her phone to text Crowley and realized, with no small amount of self-loathing, that she’d left the damned thing in the car.
All she could do was wait. Hopefully, Blackjack would get his cigarettes and leave with his crew. If she didn’t make a sound - didn’t emerge from behind the racks - maybe she’d just get lucky. Juliet began to work her way back towards the rear of the store in hopes that she could sneak into another aisle.
“Man, I need some grub. I’m gonna grab some stuff.” She didn’t recognize the voice of the man with Blackjack - must be newly hired muscle. But he was no friend of hers - and it sounded like he was headed straight for her.
“Hurry up. If we’re late I’m not letting Solomon rip me apart.”
At the mention of her ex’s name, Juliet jolted. Solomon. If they found her here, they would drag her back to him, and there was no telling what he’d do when he got her in his clutches. She couldn’t go back. She wouldn’t.
As heavy steps advanced towards her aisle, she crept further and further backwards - into what she hoped was shadow. Then, all at once, there he was. It wasn’t a face she recognized - heavily tattooed with dull blue eyes and a permanent frown - but she certainly didn’t want to know him any better.
Before she could make her next move, however, the man looked up. Their gazes caught then locked, before a positively salacious grin of triumph spread over his face.
Juliet didn’t even think before turning to run in the opposite direction. She rounded the end of the aisle as the man after her shouted Blackjack’s name. The four seconds it took her to dash around the rear of the store and head up the last aisle past Bosh and Crowley seemed to take an eternity. But just when her protectors were in sight, a gunshot sounded through the store. Juliet immediately dropped to the ground with a shriek of dismay.
This was getting insanely out of control so fast it made her head spin. Bosh leapt for the man after her, almost knocking her out of the way, and Blackjack sprang from the counter, his gun extended in Crowley’s direction. Thankfully, Crowley seemed to have wised up to the situation and beat him to the punch. He drew his weapon in about half the time to point it at Blackjack - there was no doubt that he’d won the draw.
But whereas Crowley had been taught to give a warning before he fired, Blackjack showed no such mercy. He fired four shots, and Crowley went down to the sound of Juliet’s scream of horror. While Bosh was tussling with the extra men behind her, Blackjack finally caught sight of her.
And Juliet’s heart stopped.
She hadn’t seen the man in months, but absolutely nothing had changed. Same wild hair and unhinged gaze - same rabid lust for violence. She wondered, for an instant, if he knew he’s just shot a FBI Agent - or if he even cared. And then Juliet realized there was absolutely no one left to protect her. With Bosh otherwise engaged and Crowley down, Blackjack had a straight shot for her - one he barely hesitated a moment before taking.
Juliet barely escaped his grip - but when she lunged backwards, the motion took her away from the door and back into the bowels of the store. She collided with a rack of cleaning bottles that crashed down over her before rolling away, heading back in the direction that she’d come.
“Get back here, you little bitch!” Another deafening report of gunfire had Juliet ducking as she raced back for the front of the store, slip-sliding in a puddle of cleaning solution. When she reached the front desk, she was surprised to see that her guardians and Solomon’s henchmen weren’t the only ones to have taken action. The dark skinned clerk behind the register had his own handgun, and pointed it past her as he hissed for her to get down.
Juliet didn’t dare hesitate. She dropped to the floor, her heart hammering, a moment before another few gunshots cut the air. She jumped at a metallic clatter a moment before the cashier slumped over the front counter, unresponsive.
Probably dead.
And then, all at once, Blackjack stood before her - not ten feet away. His gun was still smoking, and, for a brief moment, Juliet remembered just how brutal this man could be. He would murder everyone in the convenience store without hesitation, and then he would drag her away to face Solomon’s wrath. How many men had she watched Blackjack kill? How many women had he raped and terrorized?
Would she really let him drag her away again and consent to be the victim in her own story?
Like hell she would.
As Blackjack advanced, Juliet reached behind her blindly, hoping that whatever the cashier had dropped could somehow be of use to her. When her fingertips touched the cold handle of a revolver, her eyes widened.
She acted without thinking, self-preservation shoving any and all fear she might have had aside. When she raised the gun to fire, the expression on Blackjack’s face was priceless. In hindsight, Juliet supposed he had probably never expected her to be pointing a weapon at him. Maybe Solomon had ordered him to take her alive at any cost - or maybe he was too shocked to react the way he normally would. Either way, Juliet’s finger reached the trigger before his did, and when she fired, shockingly, she didn’t miss.