The Missing Maitland. Stella Bagwell

she’d collected herself, Larkin had rolled down the window and was about to make a fast ball out of the telephone.

      “No! You can’t!”

      Shrieking now, she threw her whole body at him. But her efforts were too little, too late. The telephone went flying out into the hot night.

      Yet even in defeat, Blossom continued to strike her fists against him. She wasn’t going down without a fight. Not by a long shot.

      It wasn’t until he had her confined in the tight circle of his arms that he realized she wasn’t just fighting him over a cellular phone. She was frightened and fighting for her life.

      “Blossom! Stop it!” he ordered. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

      She went instantly still, her body stiff and rigid in his arms, her breasts heaving against his chest.

      “Then—why don’t you—let me go?” she asked as she gulped in deep breaths of air.

      In the blink of an eye, his rigid features softened. “Because it’s too dangerous. I—have to take care of you now.”

      Confusion crumpled her features and then her body sagged against his. The contact was as startling as it was comforting. Instantly, she was acutely aware of his dark face hovering over hers, the hard expanse of his chest against her breasts, the utterly male scent of his skin and hair enveloping her in an erotic fog. His hands were hot on the flesh of her back, yet she welcomed the heat, the sizzling excitement his touch was bringing her.

      A fleeting recollection of something she’d read dashed through her mind. Something about fighting being closely akin to having sex. Well, at this very moment she believed the notion to be true. Her eyes were riveted to the curve of his lips while a strange need gripped her lower belly.

      “I—don’t—understand,” she whispered.

      “It isn’t necessary for you to understand, Blossom. Just trust me.”

      With each spoken word, his lips drew closer until finally Blossom realized that as far as she was concerned, common sense, fear or trust were no longer issues. She had to kiss this man or die from the wanting.

      Chapter Two

      He didn’t know how it had happened. One moment he’d been wrestling with her in an attempt to stop her flying fists. The next thing he knew her soft, warm lips were on his.

      Ribbons of heat radiated through both his shoulders, and slowly it dawned on him that the source was her fingers pressing gently into his flesh. Yet those two spots of warmth couldn’t begin to compare to the twin furnaces of her breasts thrust tightly against his chest. They were burning right through to his lungs, robbing him of his breath and his senses.

      The small part of his brain that was still working told him that this was how a man slipped and forgot the dangers stalking him. It shouted that if he wanted to get killed he should just keep on letting Blossom Woodward dally with his senses.

      The idea sent cold reality surging through him like an icy wave, and with it he found the strength to tear his mouth away from hers.

      “What in hell is going on here?” He barked the question in a hoarse voice.

      Blossom stared at him, her expression a mixture of dreamy bemusement and self-deprecation.

      “What’s the matter with you?” she snapped. Then, pushing out of his arms, she jumped back to her side of the seat and began to tug down the straight skirt that had ridden up along her thighs. “Haven’t you ever had a woman kiss you before?”

      “Not like that!”

      Blossom’s face flamed with embarrassed heat, but she still managed to meet his gaze directly. “I hope that’s a compliment.”

      He groaned loudly, then said several curse words she couldn’t have brought herself to say even if she’d been in a dark closet with no one around for three miles.

      “It means you’re crazy and so am I!” he yelled. “It means you could have just gotten us killed!”

      Jerking his head to the right, he squinted through the back windshield of the truck at the darkness beyond. He could see no lights anywhere, but that was hardly enough to make him happy. Anyone wanting to slip up on them could have turned out their headlights and walked right up to the truck door, stuck a gun to their heads and blown them away without either of them knowing what happened.

      Angry at himself more than her, he jerked the gear-shift into low and gunned the vehicle back onto the highway.

      Across from him, Blossom decided it was time she put on her seat belt. Escaping was not foremost in her thinking now. In fact, it wasn’t in her thoughts at all. She was too preoccupied with her own rash behavior and with trying to understand what had prompted her to initiate the kiss that had just taken place between them.

      Blossom silently groaned as the whole incident replayed in her mind. She had to admit she’d been giving Larkin more than just a kiss. She’d been making love to the man! As for him, she didn’t know what had been going on in his mind. But hers was still generating X-rated images.

      Had she totally lost her senses? she wondered helplessly. She had no idea who this man was or what he was up to. She did know that he was arrogant and insolent and he was holding her against her will.

      Yet she couldn’t stop the erotic thought that he’d also been holding her against his body as well, and she’d relished every second of the captivity. My word, she wasn’t just losing her mind, she was turning into her mother!

      Refusing to let that horrible notion remain in her head, she gave him a sidelong glance full of accusation and, God help her, appreciation.

      “I fully intend to make you reimburse me for the cellular phone. You shouldn’t have thrown it out the window!”

      He flipped on the turn signal and directed the truck onto a dirt road. Dust boiled in their wake as he once again stomped on the accelerator.

      “If I’d wanted to alert the police, I would have done so back in Austin,” he explained with an exaggerated patience that grated on Blossom. “But you’re smart enough to know that.”

      Darkness had completely fallen over the landscape, but in the arc of the headlights, she could see that the road they were traveling was carrying them deep into the woods, probably somewhere in the Pedernales park, she figured. She tried not to picture where they might be going or what tomorrow would bring. If she did, she would surely become hysterical, and that was a luxury she couldn’t afford at the moment.

      Peering at his profile, illuminated by the muted lights from the dash panel, Blossom asked, “Are you a cop?”

      “No.”

      “A criminal?”

      “No.”

      She took a deep breath and raked her disheveled hair back from her face with both hands. “A few moments ago, you implied that someone could or might be following us. Do you honestly think those goons with assault rifles wanted to kill you or me? Or both of us?”

      His jaws tightened. “When you can feel the wind off a bullet, that pretty much implies it was meant for you.”

      Blossom wasn’t convinced. “Look, I know I’m not the darling of Austin’s reporters. I realize people frown on what I do and how I do it. But that doesn’t mean they want to shoot me down. And as for you—well, to hear you tell it, you’re just a simple gardener. I doubt anyone would risk spending the rest of his life in prison just for the kick of taking out a groundskeeper.”

      “So you’ve got it all figured out. Guess you can put your speculations to rest now.”

      He was so smooth, so sarcastic, that she wanted to bash him over the head with something. Mainly her fist. But her knuckles were already sore from her earlier assault on him. Besides, she didn’t want to risk ending up in his arms again. The temptation—or