Page 3 of Puck

All four of the women saw me and recognized me, but I shot them a hard stare and shook my head as subtly as I could. None of them visibly reacted.

Tubby McTracksuit twisted in his seat and whacked me on the arm. “Gde Anton?”

I shrugged again and tried to look like I couldn’t give any less of a shit.

He honked the horn, waited a moment, and then honked again. “Yebat yego,” he muttered and shoved the vehicle into gear.

It couldn’t be this easy, could it? Nah. Probably not. Something was going to go wrong. It was just a matter of what, how bad, and when.

To review: I wished to fuck I had a cell phone, and I wished to fuck I spoke Russian. But as Grandpappy Lawson used to say, if wishes were fishes, I’d stink like fucking fish.

I stuffed one of the dead Russian’s cigarettes into my mouth and lit it with his lighter, and puffed a cloud of smoke at the ceiling, letting my eyes wander idly over the other passengers. I kept my expression neutral as I skipped over the women I knew. There was quite a broad spectrum represented here: Asians, blacks, Indians, Caucasians . . . and all of them were mighty fine looking women.

My gaze stopped, pretty much of its own accord, on a woman sitting two rows away from me across the aisle. She wasn’t the type of girl I hit on at a bar, let’s just start there. For one thing, she was probably taller than me, which normally didn’t work out too well. For another, she seemed . . . prim. Sweet. Aristocratic. She was sitting all upright and proper like we were at a black-tie dinner or some shit, her shoulders straight, her head high, knees together, hands on her lap, and her expression was closed, tight, and cold. I respected that, the fact that she could retain her decorum under these circumstances, probably knowing what her fate would be. Plus, she was just . . . delicate looking. Gorgeous as hell, but delicate. I didn’t mean frail, just . . . shit. I didn’t fucking know what I meant.

Maybe five ten or five eleven, tall for a woman, and an inch or two taller than my five nine. Long, thick, wavy, shimmery locks of glossy mahogany-brown hair—a shade that wasn’t quite auburn, but still had hints of red. It hung loosely around her slender face and thin shoulders, so thick, so much hair . . .I want to wrap that gorgeous hair around my fist and fuck her brains out from behind—that was the thought running through my head, and my dick responded in kind, stirring in my pants just thinking about it. Made me an asshole, but hey, I never claimed to be anything else.

Her face, though . . . she was truly, stunningly, classically beautiful. High, sharp cheekbones, cute as a button little nose, a wide mouth with plump lips—she could rival Julia Roberts in terms of mouth hotness. She was sitting across the aisle from me and on the outside, so I could see she had legs for goddamn days, sheathed in a sensible black knee-length skirt, power suit style. She had on a long-sleeved forest-green blouse, buttoned to a hot but still modest second button, enough to show a hint of cleavage but not enough to make mouths water. The skirt and blouse were rumpled, the worse for wear, yet she still looked put-together, in control, and hot as fuck. Her knees were pressed together, her feet tucked on an angle underneath her seat, and I could see a hint of sensible black heels. Her skin was creamy smooth and naturally golden tanned and was everything sweet and luscious.

She caught me staring, and her eyes met mine—hers were storm-cloud gray and utterly fearless. Scratch that, I saw a hint of nervousness, but she met my stare boldly, and didn’t look away. I couldn’t help it: I winked at her, shot her a brief, cocky grin. She rolled her eyes and looked away, barely suppressing a hiss of anger.

I glanced at Layla and saw she was trying not to laugh, having watched the exchange, both my blatant perusal of the girl and her reaction to my wink and smile. Layla knew me as well as anyone, and if anyone was going to keep calm in this situation, it was Layla Harris. That bitch had ice in her veins, and I knew for a fact she could hold down her end of a gun battle. I honestly felt a bit of relief, knowing I had Layla with me, because I knew I could rely on her to help me wreck shit when the time came to put down the hurt.

I’d let the cigarette dangle from my mouth, not really smoking it, more letting it sit there for show, to look the part. Then I took a drag, held it in my mouth as if inhaling, and spewed out the smoke. Knocked the ash free and rolled my shoulders, fiddled with the AK as if bored, glancing at the driver. He seemed oblivious, navigating us through some rundown suburban neighborhoods like you’d see outside any airport anywhere in the world, fading paint on aging buildings, trees lining the streets, and the occasional billboard—I wasn’t much on languages, but at least I could tell we were in a country that used Cyrillic, Russia probably. The sky was as gray as lead and heavy, the buildings around us low, squat, ugly blocks in every direction.

I kept watching, shifting now and again as Tubby drove for what seemed like at least thirty minutes, if not longer. Some of the women started dozing, despite themselves.

Not Layla, and not sexy Miss Ringlets, though. They were both wide-awake, alert, watching.

Ringlets especially. She tried to keep her gaze out the window, but it kept sliding back to me, and I wondered what she was thinking.

2: Sparkin’

Hewinkedat me. For real? Who even winks anymore? What was the wink supposed to mean? I felt his eyes on me, and it was fairly obvious what those jackasses were planning, but still. A wink? It wasn’t the kind of wink that saidI’m about to rape you, though. It was . . . almost friendly. Playful. What the hell?

I also noticed the way he glanced at the four women sitting together across the aisle from me. I wasn’t sure who knew whom, but it seemed some of them knew each other, and Mr. Short, Buff, Bald, and Bearded seemed to know the four women, although he did a passable impression of not recognizing them.

Can’t fool me, though.

I also noticed that the body language of all four of those women seemed to relax ever so slightly when they saw Beardy.

Another odd detail: Beardy had a messed up finger. Recent, from the looks of it, the middle finger of his left hand was gone from the middle knuckle, the stump looking scabbed and burned and messy, still oozing nastiness, although he seemed somewhat oblivious to it.

The more I looked at Beardy, the more out of place he seemed. He was wearing a black T-shirt with the sleeves cut off to create a muscle shirt, and the logo on the front was a bunch of angry red lines creating what was probably supposed to be lettering—a heavy metal band T-shirt. His pants were the kind of surplus military gear you could get from any surplus store anywhere in the States . . . but that was what was odd about it—did they have Army/Navy surplus stores in eastern Europe? He also had a full sleeve of tattoos on his right arm from shoulder to wrist, and a lot of the images were . . . uniquely Western, just put it that way. A pair of dice and playing cards, revolvers with the barrels crossed, a 1940s-style pinup girl, Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry, handcuffs, an M-16 with a US Army helmet hanging on it—a symbol for knowing someone killed in action . . . all über-masculine Americana tattoo images. A little out of place for a Russian gangster.

My street-sense was tingling.

Beardy caught me staring, then, and shot me another wink. I glared back at him as his eyes blatantly skimmed down my body, checking me out. Not much to see, buddy—you and your thug asshole buddies snatched me as I was leaving work, which meant they’d gotten conservative Colbie, the version of me who wore business-formal skirt suits at an office-appropriate knee-length and blouses that showed little to no cleavage. Had they snatched me an hour or so later, from my home, I’d probably be a lot less conservatively dressed. But I supposed I was glad for that. Conservative Colbie wore her skirt suits like armor; once I zipped that skirt up and buttoned the blouse, I put on my take-no-shit mentality. It was this mindset that had taken me from homeless drug-addicted orphan teenager to Harvard Business School graduate with a double minor in Chinese and Russian.

I knew the score here—I was on my way to being sold into the sex trade. But these jackasses really had no idea who they were dealing with, or what I’d been through, and what I was prepared to do in the name of self-preservation. I’d survived heroin addiction; I’d survived on the streets of New York as a teenage girl alone; I’d fought my way into Harvard on loans, grants, and scholarships, then graduatedsumma cum laude. I did all that on my own, no handouts, no ass kissing, no favors. After all that, I’d landed myself a job at one of the top import-export firms in the country.

And these assholes thought they could just nab me off the streets and sell me like a bag of dope? I didnotthink so.

I didn’t know how, but I was getting my ass back to New York, and if I had to break some heads back-alley-brawl style, I wouldn’t even feel bad.

Beardy, though. He was interesting. At first I’d just dismissed him as another gangbanger and hadn’t given him another thought. Then he’d shot me the wink and the smirk, and I’d noticed the tattoos and the looks the four women were giving him, and I took another look at him. And I realized he wasn’t exactly bad looking. Sure, he had that crazy goddamn beard, but it wasn’t a hobo beard, it was well groomed, brushed, maintained, shaped. It was a well-loved beard. Big, bushy, long as hell, but it suited him. Framed a strong jaw and an expressive mouth. The end hung to midchest. And his eyes, man, those eyes of his were . . . complicated. Dark brown, like chocolate and coffee, sharp and bright with intelligence, wary, alert, and piercing. Yet when he shot me that stupid wink, if I were a writer, I’d have said his eyes twinkled. He wasn’t a tall guy, but he was massive despite that. His arms alone gave my waist a run for its money in terms of width and breadth, and his chest and shoulders were equally as massive. It wasn’t fat, either—I saw the tendons and cords of muscle shifting and tensing as he moved, saw the bulge of his bicep when he reached up to scratch his scalp. He was brawny and powerful, and I found myself wondering about him, unable to stop stealing glances at him.

Bad timing for curiosity, though. I mean, kind of a dumb idea, wasn’t it? Getting hot for my kidnapper?