Captive Star. Nora Roberts

enormous back. She used her fists, pounding the sides of his face as he spun wildly and struggled to grab her.

      “Hold him still!” Jack shouted. “Damn it, just hold him for a minute!”

      Spotting an opening, he grabbed what was left of a table leg and rushed in. He checked his first swing as the duo spun like a mad two-headed top. If he followed through, he might have cracked the back of M.J.’s head open like a melon.

      “I said hold him still!”

      “You want me to paint a bull’s-eye on his face while I’m at it?” With a guttural snarl, she hooked her arms around the man’s throat, clamped her thighs like a vise around his wide steel beam of a torso and screamed, “Hit him, for God’s sake. Stop dancing around and hit him.”

      Jack cocked back like a batter with two strikes already on his record and swung full out. The table leg splintered like a toothpick, blood gushed like water in a fountain. M.J. had just enough time to jump clear as the man toppled like a redwood.

      She stayed on her hands and knees a minute, gasping for air. “What’s going on? What the hell’s going on?”

      “No time to worry about it.” Self-preservation on his mind, Jack grabbed her hand, hauled her to her feet. “This type doesn’t usually travel alone. Let’s go.”

      “Go?” She snagged the strap of her purse as he pulled her toward the door. “Where?”

      “Away. He’s going to be mean when he wakes up, and if he’s got a friend, we’re not going to be so lucky next time.”

      “Lucky, my butt.” But she was running with him, driven by a pure instinct that matched Jack’s. “You son of a bitch. You come busting into my place, push me around, wreck my home, nearly get me shot.”

      “I saved your butt.”

      “I saved yours!” She shouted it at him, cursing viciously as they thudded down the stairs. “And when I get a minute to catch my breath, I’m going to take you apart, piece by piece.”

      They rounded the landing and nearly ran over one of her neighbors. The woman, with helmet hair and bunny slippers, cowered, back against the wall, hands pressed to her deeply rouged cheeks.

      “M.J., what in the world—? Were those gunshots?”

      “Mrs. Weathers—”

      “No time.” Jack all but jerked her off her feet as he headed down the next flight.

      “Don’t you shout at me, you jerk. I’m making you pay for every grape that got smashed, every lamp, every—”

      “Yeah, yeah, I get the picture. Where’s the back door?” When M.J. pointed down the corridor, he gave a nod and they both slid outside, then around the corner of the building. Screened by some bushes in the front, Jack darted a gaze up and down the street. There was a windowless van less than half a block down, and a small, chicken-faced man in a bad suit dancing beside it. “Stay low,” Jack ordered, thankful he’d parked right out front as they ran down the walkway and he all but threw M.J. into the front seat of his car.

      “My God, what the hell is this?” She shoved at the can she’d sat on, kicked at the wrappers littering the floor, then joined them when Jack put a hand behind her head and shoved.

      “Low!” he repeated in a snarl, and gunned the engine. The faint ping told him the man with the chicken face was using the silenced automatic he’d pulled out.

      Jack’s car screamed away from the curb, and he two-wheeled it around the corner and shot down the street like a rocket. Tossed like eggs in a broken carton, M.J. rapped her head on the dash, cursed, and struggled to balance herself as Jack maneuvered the huge boat of a car down side streets.

      “What the hell are you doing?”

      “Saving your butt again, sugar.” His eyes flicked to the rearview as he took a hard, tire-squealing right turn. A couple of kids riding bikes on the sidewalk lifted their fists and cheered the maneuver. In instant reaction, Jack flashed a grin.

      “Slow this junk heap down.” M.J. had to crawl back onto the seat and clutch the chicken stick for balance. “And let me out before you run over some kid walking his dog.”

      “I’m not going to run over anybody, and you’re staying put.” He spared her a quick glance. “In case you didn’t notice, the guy with the van was shooting at us. And as soon as I make sure we’ve lost him and find someplace quiet to hole up, you’re going to tell me what the hell’s going on.”

      “I don’t know what’s going on.”

      He shot her a look. “That’s bull.”

      Because he was sure it was, he took a chance. He swung to the curb again, reached under his seat and came up with spare cuffs. Before she could do more than blink, he had her locked by the wrist to the door handle. No way was she skipping out on him until he knew why he’d just been tossed around by a three-hundred-pound gorilla.

      To block out her shouting, and her increasingly imaginative threats and curses, Jack turned up his stereo and drowned her out.

      Chapter 2

      At the very first opportunity, she was going to kill him. Brutally, M.J. decided. Mercilessly. Two hours before this, she’d been happy, free, wandering around the grocery store like any normal person on a Saturday, squeezing tomatoes. True, she’d been weighed down with curiosity about what she carried in the bottom of her purse, but she’d been sure Bailey had a good reason—and a logical explanation—for sending it to her.

      Bailey James always had good reasons and logical explanations for everything. That was only one of the aspects about her that M.J. loved.

      But now she was worried—worried that the package Bailey had shipped to her by courier the day before was not only at the bottom of her purse, but also at the bottom of her current situation.

      She preferred blaming Jack Dakota.

      He’d pushed his way into her apartment and attacked her. Okay, so maybe she’d attacked first, but it was a natural reaction when some jerk tried to muscle you. At least it was M.J.’s natural reaction. She was an ace student in the school of punch first, ask questions later.

      It was humiliating that he’d been able to take her down. She had a lot of notches on her fifth-degree black belt, and she didn’t like to lose a match.

      But she’d pay him back for that later.

      All she knew for certain was that he seemed to be at the root of it all. Because of him, her apartment was wrecked, her things tossed every which way. Now they’d gone, leaving the front door open, the lock broken. She didn’t form close attachments to things, but that wasn’t the point. They were her things, and thanks to him, she was going to have to waste time shopping for replacements.

      Which was almost as bad as having some gunwielding punk the size of Texas busting down her door, having to run for her life from her own home, and being shot at.

      But all of that, all of it, paled next to one infuriating fact—she was handcuffed to the door handle of an Oldsmobile.

      Jack Dakota had to die for that.

      Who the hell was he? she asked herself. Bounty hunter, excellent hand-to-hand fighter, slob—she added as she pushed candy wrappers and paper cups around with her foot—and nerveless driver. Under different circumstances, she’d have been impressed by the way he handled the tank of a car, swinging it around curves, screaming around corners, whipping it through yellow lights and zipping onto the Washington Beltway like the leader in a Grand Prix event.

      If he’d walked into her bar, she’d have looked twice, she admitted grudgingly. Running a pub in a major city meant more than being able to mix drinks and work the books. It meant being able to size people up quickly, tell the troublemakers from the lonely hearts. And know how to deal with both.

      She’d