M.L. Gamble - Trust With Your Life

His grip on her arm tightened and he waved the gun in her face. “Shh. I don’t want you waking anyone, understand?”

When he drew closer to her, Molly realized with a shock that she had memorized his features from their last meeting. Up close she saw deep fatigue lines in his face. But it was the same firm chin, the same aggressively curved nose, the same pale eyebrows, silky above eyes a clear sea blue. He had a tiny, uneven cleft in his chin, which she did not remember. He was as tanned as when she saw him months ago, as if he worked outdoors, and his teeth glimmered white in the light from the security lamp next to her front door.

“I understand. But don’t you see how ridiculous this is for me? I can’t let you in my house. I’m afraid,” she added, the very real sentiment coming out without her thinking it.

“Yeah, well, I’m sorry about that. But I’m not standing out here in the open with you. Now get going!”

He pushed her, and she took a few steps toward her door. “Look, I live alone. But I don’t have any money in the house. Why not take my purse and the keys and my car and go. I don’t have anything else of value inside.” She heard the plea in her voice and felt tears welling. She thought the man looked regretful for a moment, but his expression changed quickly.

“Go. Now, Molly, I don’t want to shoot you.”

“How nice you remember my name,” she couldn’t help retorting.

“Don’t flatter yourself. I didn’t, but we’ve got mutual friends who reminded me.”

For the first time, Molly considered screaming, despite the folly of it amid these thick-walled, high-windowed units that were touted for their soundproof qualities. But she knew it would get her killed, as well as possibly some of her neighbors. The man released her and she walked toward the door, prompting the lizards who lived in the bushes to do their usual rustling through the ivy. The noise made the man next to her tense, but it was a comfort to Molly.

Molly’s neighbor above, Jerry, was never home during the week. She considered going up to the wrong door in the hopes of alerting someone but discarded that notion as the man’s gun pressed into her back. Though she wasn’t crazy about most of her neighbors, she didn’t dislike anyone enough to risk getting them killed.

Molly turned the key in the dead bolt, then in the lock, and suddenly she and the man were inside. He rested for a moment while his eyes grew accustomed to the dark. Neither of them made a move to turn on the light, but enough of it poured in from the twelve-foot wall of windows on the opposite side of the living room for him to see the layout.

Molly stared at her comfy chairs, the shawls to drape over legs in cool evenings, the pillows her friends had made, and felt none of the joy she usually did. Her big splurge items since she’d bought the town house were pictures. She loved art, and the walls held a few lovely paintings. The man didn’t seem too interested in any of it, though.

“So where’s the tea?”

“Why don’t you tell me what’s going on and what you want with me?”

“I need something to drink, that’s why,” he replied. He gestured with the gun. “Why don’t you pour?”

Molly moved to the left, and he followed through the archway into her kitchen. Large by the area’s standards, it held cupboards floor to ceiling, a center work island with a stove, and a pass-through to the dining room on the opposite side of the wall.

She was more scared than she ever imagined a person could be. She had no idea what was going to happen next, and the suspense was making her dizzy with fear.

“What kind of tea?” she whispered in a ragged voice.

“Kind?” he asked.

“I have Lipton, decaf orange spice and Earl Grey.” Her hand rested on the canister and her eyes met his. She saw then how dry his lips were; the bottom one was cracked and bleeding at the corner. He was still pointing the gun at her, but for the first time she felt her terror recede a degree.

He didn’t seem the type to shoot a woman at close range, or at any range, really. He looked exhausted, frightened and, unless Molly was completely wrong, in pain.

“Lipton will be fine, doll. Two sugars and milk.”

Molly snapped on the flame under the teakettle. “I don’t have milk.” She did have, but she didn’t feel hospitable.

Disappointment flashed across his face, and she thought how stupid this scene was. Here she was with a stranger, acting like some domestic couple, discussing what was needed at the grocer’s. Just then he groaned and rested his hands on the tiled counter of the cooking island.

Molly stood two feet away from him and for the first time noticed how badly bruised he was. He seemed to have some kind of bandages on his neck, below his collar.

She moved around the counter toward her front door but stopped when his head snapped up. The stare he gave her now was one of a man clearly in pain, and his knuckles were white around the grip of the gun. “Stand still, damn you. I don’t want to hurt you.”

Carefully she put her hands into her skirt pockets, hoping the bolt of fear that rammed through her arm muscles didn’t show when her fingers made contact with the gun secreted there. “I’m not going anywhere. What’s wrong with you? Have you been shot?”

“Don’t concern yourself with me, doll. I’m fine.”

She nodded at the keys lying on the counter. “Why don’t you just take my car and go? Lock me in a closet or something.”

“I can’t go anywhere yet. I need you to help me get this thing off.” He held up his arm with the handcuffs dangling.

“That’s why you kidnapped me?”

The man’s eyes went blank and suddenly he raised the gun and pointed it directly at her throat. “No. That’s not why. I know you, from before. Why don’t you talk for a minute? Tell me how you know Fred Brooker. Did he send you to get me tonight?”

“What are you talking about?” she replied, taking a step backward. “I told you the night we met that I work for the phone company. I was in his office on business. I never even met the man. So why would he send me to get you?” Molly stopped talking and leaned against the counter. “And how would he know you were going to be in a wreck tonight?”

The man didn’t seem to be listening to her. He was gazing off over her shoulder. It gave her the creeps, and a fresh wave of anxiety that he might be on drugs crashed over her. “Look, you can’t stay here. I’ve got to go to work this morning. I’ve got a big job to supervise in San Clemente. If I don’t show up, my crew will be here looking for me. So will my boss.”

The man caressed the trigger with the pad of his thumb. “Supervise?”

“Like I just told you, I’m with the phone company. I’m a manager. We’re putting in a new system at the administrative offices of Green Grocery Stores today, and I’m in charge.” Molly blinked, trying desperately to remember if he’d locked the door behind her. She decided he hadn’t. “So have your tea and I’ll take a shot at the handcuff, but then I want you to leave.”

He flinched when she said the word “shot.” He lowered the gun a few inches.

“I know you must be scared, Molly,” he replied in what in other circumstances would be an apologetic tone. The stranger’s glance rested for a moment on Molly’s face. “I’m sorry I’m frightening you. It seems, however, that it can’t be helped.”

The teakettle began to wail.

When the man turned his eyes toward the noise, Molly pulled the gun from her pocket as if she had practiced the move for years. “Throw that gun down and move over against the wall.”

The man’s face registered no surprise, which scared Molly worse than if he’d cursed at her. “Well, now, that changes things, doesn’t it, doll?” He placed the gun on the counter, then reached both hands behind his head, grimacing slightly when his fingers touched his neck.

Molly’s hands were sweating and her arm ached from the weight of the gun, or from the tenseness of her grasp. The kettle’s screams were full volume now, and the hot steam escaping from its mouth began to fill the cool room like fog.

Her plan was to direct him to her bedroom, which could be locked from either side of the door. After she locked him in, she could call the police. Which meant she had to get him to walk about thirty feet out of the kitchen, across the foyer and down the hall. “I want you to walk out of the kitchen and turn left.”

His eyes flickered toward the dark hallway. “To your bedroom, Molly? I’d go there at your invite even without the gun.”

“Very funny. Just walk.” Her voice was too loud and she glared at the still-wailing kettle.

He made no move.

Nausea churned her stomach, and her skin began to turn clammy from all the steam. Could I just shoot him? Molly asked herself. She was too nervous to look down at the gun to see if it had anything like a safety on it. A knot of pain was throbbing in her shoulder blade.

“Start walking, you creep, or I’ll hurt you.” The insulting word zapped out of her mouth, surprising Molly and the man both. He made a noise deep in his throat, and a dangerous glint came into his eyes.

All at once he lunged, hurling the red-hot teakettle off the stove directly at Molly, a shout of pure animal anger erupting from his throat. She banged her body against the cabinet to duck the kettle, then turned and ran for the front door. He tackled her and grabbed the gun before she got three feet.

They rolled on the floor while Molly clawed and screamed, kicked and cussed at him, remembering most of her self-defense moves but executing none of them with any effectiveness.

Even injured, his six-foot-three, two-hundred-and-twenty-pound frame found no match in a woman almost a foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter. They smashed into the foyer table and onto the floor, where Molly felt his body all over her. His hands were so quick she couldn’t get a blow in. She kept yelling, though, and he moved a knee over her arm and covered her mouth with his hand.

“Shut up, damn you. Shut up!”

Molly looked him right in the eye, then used every ounce of strength to bite his hand. He didn’t yell, but he did slap her head back against the floor, sending her sliding into a fuzzy pit of pain and unconsciousness.

Alec Steele stood in Molly Jakes’s kitchen berating himself for allowing a bad situation to get so much further out of hand. He never should have abducted her; he should have walked off the freeway and found another car.

But seeing her had given him such a start. He couldn’t believe it was the same attractive woman he had last seen on the night he had stood on Fred Brooker’s boat and watched as the businessman shot and killed another human being.

Alec had thought of her several times in the months between that night and this, especially when he was alone on his boat, the Strewth, in the blue-green waters off Australia’s coast. He had even planned to look her up when he was in the area, having kept the business card she had snapped down so primly on Fred Brooker’s desk.

Could it be a coincidence that she was here? In a city of millions, what the hell had she been doing leaning beside the corpse of a man who had tried to kill him?

With a shiver, Alec threw down four aspirin tablets and took a long swallow of water. The single handcuff pinged against the glass and he frowned. It was time to check and make sure Molly Jakes was recovering from that bonk on the head he had given her.

As well as to find out if she was as innocent as those warm brown eyes made her seem.