The Dangerous Thief (Stolen Hearts #3)(14)

He could only wear it long enough to find who he needed to find, but it was almost impossible to aim with any accuracy with it. Which was why he chose the shotgun instead of the rifle. Thanks to the buckshot rounds, he didn’t need to aim super accurately to make a hell of an impact. The downside was that with the shotgun he needed to get closer than the rifle.

He’d have to make it work. Thanks to the cameras being down, he couldn’t know exactly where the guys were coming from, but he had home field advantage. He knew the terrain and he knew what he would do if he were invading. He hooked up a flash bomb to the front door so if someone came in, they would be blinded and he would be able to tell from wherever else he was on the property.

From there, he crawled out the back window so he could do a quick run-through of the perimeter, looking for any evidence of enemies approaching. If it were daylight, he’d be able to have this sorted in seconds, but he was limited by the darkness and the fact that he didn’t want to venture more than a few yards from the house.

If he needed to get to Willa, he wanted to be able to reach her in seconds.

He was just rounding the corner of the back of the house when he saw the first guy. He was crouching behind one of the sparse bushes. During the day, the thin coverage would’ve been useless, but at night, shadows tended to blend together. He didn’t have anything to muffle the sound of the shotgun, but he was going to have to take his chances at alerting everyone nearby to his presence. He brought up the shotgun, took the best aim possible and fired once, twice, three times. The intruder went down on the first shot, but buckshot wasn’t always immediately fatal and he needed whoever this was to never get back up again.

As soon as he finished with the third shot, he retreated to the corner of the house and crouched down. He wanted to check on the status of the man he’d just shot, but if he went out there, he’d be exposed. If there was more than one guy, which was practically a guarantee, hopefully the shots would draw them out and he could take care of them.

Except there wasn’t anyone who came up to check on the downed man. The wall next to James’s head exploded as a bullet slammed right next to him and a crack echoed through the night air.

James dropped to the ground, rolled away and got to running. Considering he was already exposed, he was going to give them a moving target. He paused for half a second, long enough to fire off a shot with the shotgun. He only had one shell left before he’d have to switch to the handgun, but while the guy was ducking, he’d have more time to regain cover.

He ran away from the house. He didn’t want to leave Willa, but he had the attention of these guys now. If there was going to be a firefight, he wanted it to happen as far from her as possible. She was in a bulletproof room, but he didn’t want to take any more chances than necessary.

He made it over the closest thing to a hill on the property and went flat. It was just enough coverage that the guy would have to get close to take a shot. And once he was close, James could take him out.

And as he sat and waited, only one thought went through his head. He hoped like hell that there were only two guys.





Willa pushed back against the wall and slid to the ground as she waited for the next gunshot. Her fear that had bordered on unbearable before had now skyrocketed as the shots rang out.

She didn’t know what was happening or who was firing and the not knowing was driving her crazy. She had a lot of faith in James’s abilities, but he couldn’t fight off a bullet. She just had to hope he was the one doing the firing.

The silence stretched on as she waited for something, anything, to let her know what was going on. Damn it. If they got through this, she was hooking James up with a walkie-talkie, pager, cell phone, or anything that would allow her to keep in touch with him. This wait-and-see method just wasn’t going to work.

But before she could mentally debate with herself about whether pagers even existed anymore, a boom echoed through the house. Through the crack at the bottom of the door, she saw a bright flash. She frowned and pushed farther back against the wall. What the hell was that? Another explosion? A gunshot? What would cause that much light?

Nothing good, she was guessing. She tried to contain her nerves as the silence once again set in, but then the silence was gone. It wasn’t a gunshot or explosion that terrified her this time. It was the slow and steady footsteps. Those creaking boards she was so familiar with now sent tremors of terror through her.

She’d only been here a day, but that was long enough to know that James never made any noise when he moved. Whoever was inside the house, it wasn’t James.

She knew that there was some hostile presence in the house, and unless James got there in the next few minutes, she was on her own. He told her this was the safest space in the house, but she had a feeling that door wouldn’t hold out forever.

Willa tried to push herself up, but her knees shook and she decided that maybe crawling would be better. She made her way to the closet where he’d kept the guns and pulled it open and pushed the clothes aside.

The selection of weapons was more than intimidating, but before she wimped out, the sound of someone twisting the door handle gave her added motivation to get out of her comfort zone. The door was locked, but who knew what tricks the bastard had up his sleeve?

She pulled the smallest gun she saw. Smaller was more manageable, right? Damn it, she wished she knew more about guns. She kept the barrel aimed away from her as she tried to figure out what to do. She saw something that looked like a safety and flicked it, but instead the clip fell out of the butt. With shaking hands, she picked up the clip and let out a sigh of relief when she saw there were bullets in it. She didn’t know the first thing about loading a weapon, so that was one thing she didn’t have to worry about. She pushed the clip back inside and settled the gun in her hand. She tried to get used to the weight of it and thought about what she knew about guns.