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Chapter Three

“Soooo on your list of first dates, where does this one rank?” I ask as my hands are roughly bound behind my back with a cable tie.

Dylan shifts his eyes over to me. He looks a bit stunned still, giving the bad guys ample time to put about five cable ties on him, which I take some offense to with my measly one. Clearly, they think I’m of little threat.

“What is happening?” Dylan asks.

“I actually don’t know,” I say as the bad guys (and gal) continue their bad guy routine of patting us down. The pat down I receive is thorough . I think I’ve had sex with less touching than I’m being subjected to in this instance as they check my armpits and the bottom of my feet looking for some mini morning star I might have stuffed between my toes. “Hey, guys. I’m wondering if I could have a detailed report on what’s happening here.”

“You could shut up,” a guy growls as he starts his pat down of Dylan. I wouldn’t mind volunteering to give him that pat down, but I feel like mentioning that might not help the situation immensely.

The “I’m a kidnapper” van chugs along through the city as I’m dragged back and tossed against the van wall. After they must deem Dylan weaponless and take his phone, they shove him down next to me before sitting with their guns and stoic stares. The one who told me to shut up looks like he spent half his life reading How to Be a Gangster for Dummies that he got in the discount bin, and he kind of looks like a weasel.

Gangsta Weasel watches us closely, eyes slit like he’s just waiting for us to fuck up.

“I’m going out on a limb and saying that this probably doesn’t have anything to do with the forensic science classes you teach?” I ask Dylan.

“Yeah, it was actually a school project to kidnap your professor,” he says, deadpan.

It makes me smile. It really does and I’m not sure what that says about me. “Good one.”

He’s giving me a look now. One that makes me feel like he possibly didn’t find it as funny as I did, but I’m not quite sure. “Does this have anything to do with robbing a house?”

“Number one, I did not rob a house. Fully.”

His eyebrow lifts at the F word. “Fully?”

“It’s…” I glance over at Gangsta Weasel who is far too enthralled with our date—the other two and the driver seem like they couldn’t care less about us.

Dylan seems to realize what I’m staring at because he leans into me in a way that stops Gangsta Weasel from seeing me. “So?”

I press into him to whisper. “A client hired me to retrieve some papers from her father who refused to hand them over. That’s it.”

“What kind of papers?”

“It was just identification. Birth certificate, social security card, that kind of stuff. Her dad wouldn’t give it to her. Looking into him, I never saw where he was part of a group of abductors.”

“What are you two doing?” Weasel asks, seeming displeased with the way Dylan is shielding me.

“Having a date, obviously,” I say. “Are you asking to join or something?”

His eyes narrow like he could possibly dislike the idea. “Just sit back and shut up.”

“Can I ask where we’re going?” I inquire, since I can’t see out the front window and kidnapper vans don’t seem to have back windows.

“You can shut up,” he repeats.

“What’s your name? I once read if you become friends with your kidnapper, they’re less likely to murder you. I shall tell you my life story. I am thirty years old. One time when I was five, I?—”

“Shut the fuck up,” he says.

So I go to the next thing that pops into my head. “In a zombie apocalypse, what do you bring to the table?”

Weasel stares at me, and I’m pretty sure he’s about to tie a bag over my head and see how long I can breathe when he goes, “I’m a damn good shot.”

The woman scoffs.

“What the fuck does that mean?” he asks her.

She looks back at him, her bob haircut bouncing. Really, it seems to be consuming her head. “Are you?”

“Better than you!”

“Are you?” she just repeats, and suddenly Weasel is getting offended.

“I’m a quick fucking draw too!”

“I heard you’re real quick, but not at drawing,” she says with a grin.

“You could solve this by a duel, right here, right now. We’ll place bets. I’m putting mine on Bob. Who are you betting on?” I ask Dylan.

“Which one’s Bob?” he asks.

“The lady,” I explain, not sure how he hasn’t put two and two together. He seems to after a moment.

“Um. Yeah, sure.”

Bob seems oddly displeased by her new moniker and I have a weird feeling she might shoot me instead, but I don’t get to find out because someone slaps a piece of duct tape over my mouth.

“God, he doesn’t ever shut up,” a man says before eyeing Dylan like he’s wondering if he needs to waste a strip on him too, but Dylan says not a peep. “You look like you could eat me; how the hell did these two idiots even get you down?”

I feel like that’s a very good question as well, but I can’t say anything about it with the way the tape refuses to give me the power of speech. Instead, the van rumbles on as I feel Dylan’s body brush against mine. I glance over at him and instead of appearing annoyed (like he has every reason to be), he gives me a reassuring look.

It makes me feel good… like maybe tonight isn’t going to end with my body in a ditch somewhere. Feeling a wee bit shitty about the situation, I want to apologize. This definitely wasn’t where I thought this date was going to go, but I swear I have the worst luck that gets me into shit like this.

But it’s even worse when I drag an unsuspecting victim in with me.

I bump my shoulder into him in the hope of giving him a wordless apology. He looks over at me and simply says, “It’ll be fine.”

God, I hope he’s right.

My entire life I’ve had a crazy knack for getting into places I’m not supposed to be. By twelve, I was breaking into cars, and by fourteen into houses.

I’m not proud of those moments and knew then (and definitely now) that what I was doing was wrong, very wrong.

Yet I still did them.

Honestly, the first time I got caught was at seventeen when I’d broken into some rich people’s house. I hadn’t realized they had a silent alarm, but about halfway through my scavenging, I got a bad feeling.

I’d been sent in with the task of retrieving what (to me) looked like a simple glass bird, but what I later found out was worth something crazy like a million dollars. The idiots literally had it sitting on a little display table, nothing around it, and pocketing it almost felt too easy until it wasn’t.

I was getting paid shit for the job—like a hundred bucks or something—but to a kid who was living on the streets doing what I could to get by, a hundred bucks for a job like that was A-OK.

Getting in was easy. They had one dog that buddied up to me after I had tossed him a ball over the fence every evening for a few days before my grand theft.

That German shepherd trotted beside me while chomping his ball as I wandered all over his house looking for the little birdie. I even threw the ball a couple of times for him as he made a mad dash through the huge house.

With the bird in my right pocket and a necklace I estimated was worth well more than the hundred I’d receive in my left, I realized something was wrong, and I needed to get out.

The moment I was through the door, I saw the officer. He shouted at me to stop and as panic hit me that I might get caught, there was also this weird thought of how ridiculously sexy he was. At seventeen, things rarely made sense. At least he was far enough back that I managed to slip past him.

In my panic, I raced back the way I’d gotten in, but what I wasn’t accounting for was that the dog would slip out with me. Which would have been fine if he hadn’t dropped his ball that started rolling down the hill into the traffic below.

He made it down unscathed but instead of grabbing the ball and dodging out of harm’s way, he decided a toss of victory was due while a truck headed toward him in the dark. I grabbed the damn dog by the collar and never knew how fast I could chuck ninety pounds until the threat of him getting splatted on the road was presented to me.

I tripped on the curb and rolled down onto the sidewalk where the officer caught sight of me. I was up and running as he shouted police nonsense after me, but in the end, I was no match for the bull of a man who grabbed my wrist and brought me to an epic halt.

That was the moment I met Officer Dylan Hach and fell head over heels even as he directed me toward the police car.

“Are you a stripper cop?” I had asked.

He merely grunted at me in response, which I felt was a pretty good answer.

Sadly, as I was trotted off to his cruiser, I realized that there’d be no stripping for me.

Well, at least not then. But if I can make it out of this alive and Dylan doesn’t hate me by the end of it, there might be. Because fucking hell… what a night this is becoming.