An Heiress on His Doorstep
Auteur
Teresa Southwick
Lezers
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Hoofdstukken
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Chapter One
September 15, 2004
Jordan Bishop said goodbye to terror and went straight to furious. Being kidnapped was not the way she’d planned to start her first vacation in two years.
She looked at the guy who’d abducted her. He was hardly more than a kid, an average-looking young man. Average height, average looks and average brown hair. They’d been waiting on this deserted road for what felt like hours, and he’d refused to tell her why. Jordan was fed up.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” she said.
He glanced over at her from the driver’s seat. “Do you see one, sweetheart?” His voice was rife with sarcasm.
That does it, she thought.
She pressed her legs together. “I wonder how this leather seat would hold up in the event of an unfortunate accident.”
That wiped the sarcastic expression off his face. “You gotta go in the bushes.”
“Any port in a storm,” she replied.
She’d been terrified when he’d grabbed her, expecting to be assaulted or murdered any second. But that feeling faded when he kept driving. After stopping, he hadn’t made a single threatening move. It felt like he was waiting for something. And she didn’t intend to be around when the wait was over.
He got out of the car and walked around to her side, opening the door with his keys in his hand. He unlocked the cuff hooked to the passenger handhold above her head. The other cuff was attached to her wrist. When he glanced away to put his keys back in his pocket, she swiveled in her seat and kicked out as hard as she could with both legs, making him stumble backward. If she’d known she would be in this mess, she’d have dressed more appropriately. Now was no time to worry about her tight skirt. At least it was short, giving her some maneuverability.
While the creep was getting his footing, Jordan jumped out of the SUV. She winced when a small rock dug into her bare heel. She’d lost one of her pumps when he’d first grabbed her.
He grinned. “Nice try.”
“I thought so.”
As he started toward her, she braced for her next move. She was about to find out if all those self-defense classes were worth the price. When he put his hands on her upper arms, she jabbed the three-inch spike heel of her remaining pump into his instep. He cried out, but before he could react, she raised her knee and rammed it into his groin. He grunted in pain and doubled over wheezing, then dropped to the ground groaning. This was the part where she was supposed to run like hell.
But where? Even if she knew which way to run, she was out in the sticks, with no sign of civilization in sight. She had to get the keys, but she didn’t want to get in too close to him. Even though he was still rolling around and groaning. But how long did it take a man to recover from a knee to the groin?
“Bishop’s not paying me enough for this,” he muttered to himself.
Bishop? He couldn’t have said what she thought she’d heard. “What did you say? Who’s paying you?” she demanded.
He glared at her. “Your father.”
“My father? I don’t believe you.”
“I couldn’t make up something this weird,” he said, sitting up. “He hired me to kidnap you.”
“Why?”
“It’s a setup. To find you a man.”
“You?” she asked, shocked.
“No. And I resent your implication and your tone.”
She didn’t give a rat’s behind what he resented. “Look, buster, my patience is wearing thin. You scared me out of my wits, you handcuffed me.” She held up her wrist with the dangling metal still attached. “And you made me lose my shoe. It was my favorite pair and very expensive.”
“You’re an heiress. You can afford it. Bill your father.”
“That’s not the point. And none of your business. Start talking. I want the facts, from the beginning.”
He held his head in his hands. “Your father has the perfect guy for you. Sir Galahad is due here any minute to waltz in for the rescue. You know, be your hero. After that you’re supposed to fall for him and get married. Happy ever after and all that crap. It’s the truth. I swear.”
“I don’t believe this,” she said, throwing up her hands.
But the statement was rhetorical, because the more she thought about it, the more she did believe him. It would certainly explain why her father had been so insistent that she have lunch with him today. The kidnapper knew where to find her because her father had set her up. “So when was this guy supposed to be here?”
“An hour ago.”
“Figures. Apparently Daddy picks heroes as well as he picks kidnappers.”
“It’s my first kidnapping and not my sphere of expertise,” he said defensively.
“So where did my father find you? Thugs-R-Us?”
“Very funny. I work part-time at Bishop, Inc. while I go to college.”
He wasn’t very tall, about five-six or five-seven to her five foot one. But he was beefy. If he hadn’t surprised her when she’d been leaving her father’s office, her self-defense moves would have been more effective. They wouldn’t have been effective just now if he’d been a professional kidnapper. Why had he done it?
“Did you need the money? Is that why you agreed to this ridiculous Machiavellian farce?”
“I bet you think I don’t know what that means.” He looked up at her, his eyes narrowed. “It’s hard to say no to your father. And he’s my boss.”
“You should get another boss.” She couldn’t get another father.
“No kidding.”
She tried not to feel sorry for him, but he really did look pathetic sitting in the dirt at the side of the road. Speaking of which, she hadn’t seen another car come along the whole time they’d been here. What the heck was her father thinking? Rage expanded inside her.
“So who’s the tardy Prince Charming my father is trying to hook me up with this time?”
“Didn’t get his name.”
“And no way to contact him,” she guessed.
“Nope.”
She was twenty-four-and-a-half years old. Her father had pretty much ignored her for the first twenty-four. But he’d changed in the last six months. Right after his heart attack when she’d been in New Orleans for her birthday. A near-death experience gives you a different perspective he’d said. From her perspective, he was acting just plain weird. His explanation was that he wouldn’t be around forever, and he wanted to see her settled and secure before he kicked the bucket.
At first she’d thought the change was really sweet and had high hopes of finally building a relationship with him. But he’d gone after this the way he’d built his business—with single-minded determination. He’d started small, with a casual introduction to a man of his choice, then dinner for three, then dinner for three where only she and the man showed up. Then a weekend away for her and her dad. But dad had been conspicuously absent. It was just her and Harman Bishop’s current front-runner for her affections.
And the problem was escalating. Last week he’d given Clark Caldwell, a guy she’d broken up with, the key to her apartment to arrange a romantic dinner for two. Her dad wasn’t the subtle type. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. Another day, another guy. No regard for consequences or whom he steamrolled. He’d been butting into her life no matter how often or how vehemently she told him to stop.
But this was the last straw. How stupid did he think she was? And what kind of clown was he trying to set her up with? What kind of man would go along with this? Scratch that. She so didn’t want to know.
The guy groaned as he stood up, then without warning grabbed her. “Okay. Back in the car.”
“No way,” she said, pulling hard to try and free her arm.
“I gotta take you back to your dad.”
The thought of the man who’d set this series of events in motion generated a red-hot haze of fury. She grabbed his right ear and yanked.
“Ow,” he cried, dropping his hand from her arm. “Look, lady,” he pleaded, “I only got half the money. If I don’t—”
“Tell it to someone who cares.” In a strictly reflex action, she raised her knee again.
“Okay, okay, you win.”
She backed away and looked around. They were on a farm-to-market road somewhere in Texas, and she couldn’t be more specific because this idiot had driven her around for hours. On either side of the two-lane road, rolling hills stretched as far as the eye could see. No stores, no houses, no phones. And she’d dropped her purse with the cell phone inside when she’d been abducted.
Behind her she heard her father’s lackey mutter something like “not enough money in the world to put up with this crap.” No kidding. When she got ahold of her father, she was going to give him a piece of her mind. Of course, she’d done that many times in the past, and still he’d pulled a stunt like this. She had to think of some way to stop him, to convince him not to interfere in her life.
She took a step, and a pebble bit into her heel again. “Ouch,” she said, looking down.
Then she heard the SUV engine roar to life. Spinning around, she watched the big tires throw up dirt and rocks as it screeched onto the road.
The car stopped beside her. “Your hero should be here any minute.” Then the window went up, and her abductor drove away.
At first she was too stunned to move. Then she was too angry to think straight.
“That damn thug-in-training should be grounded for the rest of his natural born days,” she ranted, limping in a circle.
“Harman Bishop is going to rue the day he messed with me,” she sputtered. “An accident of DNA does not give him carte blanche to commandeer my life.”
Jordan stood by the side of the road, one shoe off, one shoe on, the handcuff still dangling from her wrist. She looked toward the west. She knew it was west because the sun was descending in the sky and would soon disappear behind the rolling hills on the horizon. In the distance, she saw a car coming from the direction her kidnapper had gone. Was this her hero?
The vehicle, a very pricey luxury model, stopped in front of her. The door opened, and a man got out. He was tall, muscular and looked to be in his early thirties, just exactly the age her father would have chosen. As he moved toward her she noticed his confident, sort of predatory walk. She noticed he was late, too.
When he stopped in front of her, she saw that his eyes were hidden behind aviator sunglasses. His head dipped slightly as he looked down to her shoeless foot. “Did you lose your glass slipper, Cinderella?”
So Mr. Wonderful was playing dumb. “Are you my prince here to see if the shoe fits?”
“I’m here to see if you need help. Car trouble?”
“Not exactly.”
He frowned as he looked around the empty road. “How did you get here?”
She started to raise her arm, and the handcuff jangled at the end of her wrist. “I—I think I was kidnapped,” she said.
Was it technically a kidnapping when one’s own father was behind it? How could he do this to her? And how could this guy go along with it? What was in it for him? Most people sent a card when they wanted to reach out and touch someone. Her father picked a hell of a way to say he cared. And did he really? He hadn’t even hired a competent kidnapper. He got an amateur, a guy she could take with weeny moves, and now this winner. Men, she thought disgusted.
He continued to stare at her when she didn’t answer right away. “You think you were kidnapped? That’s a new one,” he mumbled. “Don’t you remember?”
Remember? He was taking the playing dumb thing to a new high, or low as the case may be. What if she couldn’t remember? That would make his life difficult, and she liked the idea of that. She embraced the saying “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” What if she gave this bozo enough lemonade to drown in?
“Who are you?” he asked.
He knew good and well who she was. Okay. That did it. Scaring the stuffing out of a girl then playing dumb was not the way to win a fiancée and influence people. She was going to make this as difficult as possible for him. She plastered a confused expression on her face, and it didn’t require Drama 101 to pull it off. She really was confused by the events of the past few hours.
With the handcuff dangling in front of her, she rubbed her fingertips over her forehead. “I—I can’t remember.”
He gave her a doubtful look. “You’re not going to faint, are you?”
Why not? she thought. She needed a ride; this guy needed a lesson. She made herself go limp and dropped like a stone.
