“My hands are free now. I won’t be taken without a fight this time.”
“He’s the one who had the gun earlier. What if he still has it on him?”
Instead of answering, Donovan bent his head closer to her wrist. Even with his hands free—though the cuff still dangled from his right wrist—and with her in front of him, he couldn’t immediately free her. Chloe was beginning to worry that this was taking too long, that the dark man would return and catch them.
She kept picturing him holding that gun to Donovan’s head while Donovan had been unconscious and vulnerable. She’d had no doubt then that he would pull the trigger if she refused to cooperate, just as she had little doubt that he would shoot them now if he caught them trying to escape—no matter how solicitous of her welfare he’d pretended to be earlier.
Of the three men who had ambushed them, she’d gotten the impression that the small, dark man hadn’t been in charge, but he’d been the most dangerous.
“Maybe you had better go without me,” she urged in a whisper, as if their captor had his ear pressed to the other side of the door. “You can bring the police back…”
“I’m not going anywhere without you.” Donovan’s tone was pure steel, making it clear that he expected no argument.
She might have argued anyway, had the lock not given way at that moment. Relief flooded through her when he removed the cuff from her wrist. She shook her hand vigorously. The bracelet hadn’t been overly tight, but just being restrained had made it feel as though it were squeezing her.
“Okay?” Donovan asked.
“Yes. Thank you. What do we do now?”
Donovan slid off the bed, his movements steady now, and reached a hand out to Chloe. “We get the hell out of here.”
His fingers closed firmly around Chloe’s when she took his hand and climbed as silently as possible off the bed. The bed frame creaked when she moved off it, causing her heart to stop for a moment, but Donovan was already moving toward the window. Their stockinged feet made no sound on the wooden floor.
“Damn it.”
Chloe had been looking anxiously over her shoulder toward the door. Donovan’s mutter brought her head back around. “What? Is the window locked?”
“Nailed shut. There’s no way I’ll get it open without being heard.”
She bit her lip, swallowed, then asked quietly, “Now what?”
In a seemingly automatic gesture, he reached out to run the knuckles of his left hand along her jaw line. “I’m still going to get you out of here.”
The brief but oddly intimate contact caught her off guard, causing her to freeze for a moment. Motioning her to stay where she was, Donovan moved silently across the room to the door. With his left hand resting on the doorknob, he listened through the wood for a moment, then tried the knob. It wasn’t locked.
“They weren’t expecting us to get free,” he murmured.
“So what do we do?” Her voice was barely loud enough to reach her own ears.
Holding up his left hand in a silencing gesture, he opened the door a bit wider and peek
ed carefully out. The handcuff still dangled from his right wrist, but he tried to keep it quiet.
Holding her breath, Chloe tiptoed a bit closer to him, peering over his shoulder into the short, dark hallway outside the room. A gleam of light at the far end indicated where their captor waited. She heard the faint strains of music coming from that direction. A radio, perhaps?
She imagined him sitting in the main room, reading and listening, patiently killing time until his cohorts rejoined him. And then what?
Donovan must have heard something she didn’t. He eased the door closed again and put a hand on her forearm. “Back to the bed,” he murmured. “Get in the same position you were in before.”
“But…”
“Hurry.” He almost pushed her back to the bed. Once she was kneeling there, he handed her the closed cuff he had removed from her right wrist. “Hold this at your side,” he ordered. “Keep your arm down, as if you’re still wearing the cuff.”
He was already stretching into the position he’d been in earlier, flat on his back, hands above his head, gripping the empty end of his own cuffs so that it wasn’t immediately apparent that he wasn’t restrained.
Chloe heard footsteps coming down the hallway now. “What do you want me to do?” she whispered, her heart in her throat.
“Just stay out of my way.”