Chapter 6
CHAPTER 6
L ark watched a lot of crime dramas. Listened to several true crime podcasts. She’d always thought that if she was ever kidnapped, she’d know what to do.
Oh, how wrong she’d been.
She’d like to think her discombobulation was because of being shot at. And at seeing Sherry shoot someone. But she wasn’t sure that was it.
She’d trusted Bill. Let him into her house. Looked up his tattoo. Lusted after him in a big way. Now, here she was, being driven to parts unknown, for God knows what purpose.
This was surely further proof that her taste in men sucked ass. Like, huge amounts of ass.
The first man she’d been attracted to since Neal turned out to be a psycho. Made sense. She should just become a nun at this point.
If she survived this whole fiasco, of course.
Her kidnapper (she had been kidnapped, right?) let out a deep breath. “I know you have questions. You can ask them.”
Well, that was very kind of him. Maybe fate was taking pity on her by giving her a polite kidnapper. That didn’t usually happen to victims on Criminal Minds . She swallowed hard. “Where are you taking me?”
“My house is about an hour from here. It’s the only place I know I can keep you safe until we…get all this sorted.”
She twisted in her seat a little to face him. “Get all of what sorted, exactly? What the hell is going on?”
He side-eyed her. “The man with the gun? He accepted a hit. On you.”
He’d said that back at the shop. But everything Lark knew about assassins came from the John Wick franchise. So, she felt the need to clarify. “You’re saying someone hired an assassin to kill me?”
He looked relieved that she seemed to understand. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
She had no idea how he had the nerve to say that so calmly, as if it wasn’t the dumbest thing in the world. “I’m a florist.”
His dark brows drew together. “Yes. I’m aware.”
“Well, obviously you aren’t aware, because no one hires an assassin to take out a florist .”
“The assassin your boss just shot, the one who clearly said he was there for you , begs to differ.”
Lark rolled her eyes. Great. A sarcastic psycho. Just what she needed. “This is clearly some kind of mistake. Like a case of mistaken identity. That happens sometimes, right?”
He shrugged one giant shoulder. “Maybe. But not in this case. He was after you. He knew where you work, when you work, and who you work for. He did his research.”
Which brought her to her next question. “And how do you know all this?”
His wince was not very comforting. “That one’s more difficult to explain. It’ll be easier to show you once we get to my house.”
She cringed at the thought of being at this stranger’s house after everything she’d been through that day. “What are you going to do to me?”
This time he glanced over at her, shocked. “I’m going to protect you. Nothing else. I swear, Lark.”
“You’ll have to forgive me if I’m having trouble trusting you,” she said carefully, so as not to anger the huge, strange, possibly deranged man. “All I know about you is that you’re clearly not Bill from the power company.”
“No. My name is Ren. Ren Solace.”
Well, that was a start, she supposed. “What if I asked you to take me to the police instead of your house?”
“I wish I could trust them,” he said. “But I can’t. They can’t keep you safe. Not like I can.”
“Are you…military or something?”
He snorted. “No. I especially wouldn’t trust the military to keep you safe.”
And the weird hits just kept coming. Time to try a different tactic. She might be a shitty judge of character, but she could usually tell the truth from a lie with a direct question. So, she asked, “And if I go with you willingly, you promise, Ren , that you’re not going to do anything to hurt me?”
The look he gave her was the most open, sincere look anyone had ever given her. “I’d never hurt you, Lark. Never.”
Well, he wasn’t lying. He at least believed he’d never do anything to hurt her. That was s omething , she supposed.
She’d probably feel better about that knowledge if she wasn’t betting her life on it. But, here she was.
His house was…not what she’d expected.
First of all, it wasn’t some remote farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. It was a nice, two-story, mid-century modern home in a suburb full of other nice, two-story, mid-century modern homes. Clearly a place where you’d find happy, photogenic families, not giant, burly kidnappers with cool tattoos and a nipple piercing.
The only part of the picture that fit in Lark’s mind was that Ren’s house was on a cul-de-sac that hadn’t been built out, so he didn’t have any close neighbors. Which meant that if she screamed at the top of her lungs when she was in this house, she was sure no one would be able to hear her.
Not exactly a comforting thought in this scenario.
It was a really pretty lot, though. Lots of huge oak, maple, and pine trees, and what looked like a little creek running through the backyard. So, if she was murdered and buried here, at least her final resting place would be peaceful and scenic.
“Nice place,” she said. “Isolated.”
He pulled into the three-car garage, parked, and rubbed a hand over the back of his neck in a boyish gesture of discomfort that was completely at odds with his ruggedly masculine appearance. “I’m not good with…neighbors.”
“Shocking,” she said dryly.
Lark glanced out the truck window at the garage. It didn’t look like the garage of a serial killer or psycho. No heads in jars. No dangerously sharp tools that could be used for dismembering bodies. It was just a garage. Empty except for the truck and a lone shelving unit holding some weed killer, a package of paper towels, and a few bottles of motor oil.
She flinched when he opened her door. Damn it, she hadn’t even noticed that he’d gotten out of the car. This was how she’d ended up with a hit on her life, kidnapped by a mystery man, and whisked away to a remote location. She was just that damned unobservant.
He offered her a hand, but she ignored it, choosing to jump out instead. A short woman might’ve needed help climbing down from the giant truck, but she could manage it.
Except…she couldn’t. Because apparently, her foot had fallen asleep on the long car ride. The second she hit the ground, her leg gave out and she collapsed. She would’ve done a faceplant on Ren’s weirdly clean garage floor if he hadn’t grabbed her and hauled her up against his chest.
It was a really nice chest.
Which was not something she should notice in their current circumstance. Nor should she notice how good he smelled. Like sun-dried laundry and Ivory soap.
“You OK?” he asked, his lush-looking lips dangerously close to her own.
She cleared her throat. “I’m good. Foot fell asleep. It’s fine now, though.”
He seemed reluctant to let her go. Frankly, she was ashamed to admit she was reluctant to let go of him, too. But cuddling with her kidnapper couldn’t possibly be a good idea. So she straightened in his arms and took a very purposeful step out of his reach.
With a curt nod, he led her into the house.
If you put “house in the midwestern suburbs” into a search engine, this place would be the first image that popped up.
Open concept, beige walls, overstuffed, bulky couch, giant flatscreen TV above the stone fireplace, contractor-grade everything…it all screamed unoriginal. Boring. Cold.
Nothing at all like the man standing before her.
“You have a…nice home,” Lark said.
He glanced around as if he couldn’t see what she was seeing. “This isn’t the real house.”
Oh, Lord, he really was a lunatic, wasn’t he? “What do you mean it’s not the real house?”
Instead of answering, he walked over to the floor-to-ceiling bookcase beside the fireplace. It held an eclectic collection of books. Everything from Dr. Suess to Tolstoy was there. There were even a handful of romance novels. Interesting.
But his book collection was a lot less interesting than what happened next.
Ren tipped a copy of Oh, The Places You’ll Go toward him off the shelf, and like magic, the entire bookcase popped open, revealing a set of steps.
Steps that went down, not up.
He held a hand out to her. “Take my hand. There’s no light until we hit the bottom of the steps.”
Her heart started beating double time. She could barely take a breath as fear choked off her air supply. She shook her head violently. No way in hell was she going to let herself be dragged into a murder basement. “I’m not going down there.”
Ren’s brow furrowed, but realization seemed to dawn when he took in her near-hysterical state. He held his hands up in supplication. “I swear, there’s nothing down there that can hurt you.”
She let out a hysterical snort.
She saw it on his face the second he realized that he was the thing in the basement that could hurt her. “OK, fine, that’s not true,” he admitted. “But there’s nothing down there that will hurt you. Would you feel better if you had a weapon?”
“Duh!”
He looked so pleased to offer her comfort that she was instantly thrown off her game. She wondered if he was as good at throwing other people off their game as he was at throwing her off her game. Somehow, she doubted it.
But she didn’t have time to ponder that. She was too distracted by the giant stone he’d just removed from the hearth. Behind that stone, was a lever. And when he pulled the lever, the entire facade of the fireplace shifted to reveal a mini arsenal. Weaponry of all kinds was hanging neatly on the kind of pegboard normal people used in their garages for tools.
He yanked a wicked-looking hunting knife off the board and handed it to her. “That’s a good one,” he said when she hesitantly took it. “Nice balance. But if you’re going to use it, stab in and up—never down. You have a much better chance of disabling someone before they can overpower you that way.”
Lark frowned at him. “I’m guessing you could just take this from me whenever you want. Right?”
His expression was so crestfallen she almost felt bad for questioning him. He looked like he’d offered her a bouquet of roses and she’d turned her nose up at them and told him she was allergic. But he recovered quickly, turning back to his hidden arsenal. “Here’s some Mace,” he said, thrusting the canister into her other hand. “Just flip the top and spray. But make sure you’re downwind, or else it’ll hit you. And it’d be nearly impossible for me to take that from you before you were able to spray me in the face.”
This was, without a doubt, the strangest conversation she’d ever been a part of. “What about a gun?”
She expected an immediate no. Instead, his face lit up like they’d just found a common interest. “I have a really nice Smith & Wesson M&P 380 here. 9mm. Hardly any recoil.”
She had no idea how to use a gun. But he didn’t need to know that. So, she slid the knife under the back waistband of her jeans, tucked the canister of Mace under her armpit, and took the “really nice” gun from him.
“You feel better now?” he asked.
“I…don’t know.”
He scratched his head as he glanced back at his arsenal, then back at her. “What if my hands were cuffed? Would that help?”
Ren Solace was either the worst kidnapper in the world, or he actually was sincere in his vow to not hurt her. She looked him up and down, taking his measure. He certainly didn’t look like a guy who was bad at anything, other than communicating clearly. “Yeah, that’d help.”
He didn’t hesitate to grab a set of metal cuffs from the weapons hide-y hole and lock one of them around his thick wrist. She didn’t hesitate to wrap it around his other wrist and lock them together. It took an inordinate amount of control to ignore how sexy he looked handcuffed for her pleasure. Er, comfort. For her comfort .
Ren held up his cuffed hands. “Do you feel more comfortable now?”
Weirdly enough, she did. Surely, if he had any intention of hurting her, he wouldn’t hand her so many weapons and cuff his own hands…right? And he had, after all, saved her life back at the flower shop.
Lark sighed. “I do. Lead me to your murder basement, I guess.”
One corner of his mouth quirked up as he replaced the stone, covering up his hidden treasure trove of weaponry. “I promise you it’s not a murder basement. I’ll go down the stairs first. Just hang onto the back of my shirt so you don’t fall.”
The heat of his skin under her fingers wasn’t at all pleasant as she followed him down the steps. And she definitely wasn’t enjoying the flex of his back muscles. Because those would be weird things for her to think about in this scenario.
That was her story, and she was damn well sticking to it.