Sawyer

Still, Cassidy didn’t stop. In fact, she slammed her foot on the accelerator and threaded the truck through the sea of other vehicles. Not the best time to attempt something like this with all the partygoers around, but she hadn’t exactly had a choice.

She didn’t want to hurt Sawyer, but she couldn’t have him go to the kidnappers with her, either. Earlier, they’d warned her if she didn’t return alone, her brother would die. That couldn’t happen. She couldn’t lose Bennie.

The moment that she was in a small clearing, Cassidy jerked the steering wheel to the right to try to toss Sawyer off the back. It didn’t work. He held on, and it only made his glare a whole lot worse. Still, she tried again.

Again, no luck.

Sawyer held on, bouncing around on the metal surface of the truck bed. He managed to hang on to his gun, and she was afraid he might use it on her if he got the chance. He already hated her, and this certainly wasn’t going to make things better between them.

Cassidy sped across the driveway that coiled around the sprawling main house and the barns, and she finally reached the ranch road that would take her to the highway. She’d lied when she told Sawyer she didn’t know where the kidnappers were.

A necessary lie.

If he had learned their location, he’d just go in there with guns blazing, and Bennie would be caught in the middle of a firefight. Of course, that might still happen if she couldn’t ditch Sawyer before she made it to the abandoned building where they were holding her brother.

Cassidy tried again to toss him from the truck, but she failed that time, too. Sawyer not only held on, he made his way toward her. Inch by inch.

There was a small slider window that separated them. Not nearly big enough for him to crawl through, and it had a lock that would prevent anyone on the outside from opening it. Thank goodness. Still, that didn’t solve her problem of getting rid of him.

She was already going too fast, and as if fate and Mother Nature were working against her, the drizzle turned to a hard rain, making the road even more slick than it already was. Cassidy tried to focus on her driving. On ditching Sawyer. And getting this photo to the kidnappers.

But Sawyer obviously had other ideas about the ditching part.

He lifted his gun, took aim. Not at her. He aimed the barrel of his gun at the passenger’s window.

“No!” Cassidy shouted.

Too late.

He turned his head and fired, the shot blasting through not just both windows—the side and back—but the sound seemed to rip through her, too. Her heart slammed against her ribs, and she hit the brakes. Not the best idea she’d ever had, but it was hard to make a good decision with the pain from the noise crashing through her ears and head.

The truck tires fishtailed on the wet asphalt, slinging Sawyer and her around. Even though she was wearing her seat belt, her shoulder slammed so hard into her door that she swore she saw stars. She certainly lost her breath.

Unlike Sawyer.

The truck hadn’t even come to a full stop yet when he reached through the gaping hole in the safety glass on the passenger’s side and unlocked the door. Opened it. As if it were a routine maneuver for him, he slid from the truck bed and into the cab.

He put his gun to her head.

“You will tell me what’s going on now,” he growled. His glare was even worse, and the tendons in his neck corded.

“I’ve already told you all I know.” She tried to sound tough as nails, like him. And she failed miserably. She wasn’t tough. She was terrified, exhausted and just wanted this ordeal to end. “Now, get out.”

“Not gonna happen.”

There it was. That smart mouth that she used to think was funny and a complement to his bad-boy persona. It had been the very thing that had lured her to him. But his mouth and his tenacity weren’t much of a lure now. Nothing was.

Well, except for that brief slap of attraction she’d felt when she first saw him in the barn.

That slap might have to be a real one that she delivered to herself, because an attraction to Sawyer should be the last thing on her mind.

“They’ll kill Bennie if you’re with me,” she reminded him. Somehow, she got the truck moving again because like everything else, time wasn’t working in her favor.

He shook his head, cursed her again and slung the water off his face. It didn’t help. The rain coming in from the window just walloped him once more, soaking his jacket, white shirt and jeans. His hair, too. The drops of water slid off those dark brown strands and dripped onto his face.

“Who says they won’t just kill you when you give them the photo?” he asked. “You should have taken this to the cops and not tried to handle it yourself.”

“I didn’t go to the cops because they said they’d kill Bennie.”

“Kidnappers always say that,” he snapped. “And they always tell the mark to cooperate and that you’ll get your loved one back in one piece. Maybe you will, maybe you won’t. But they could just as easily put a bullet in you as Bennie.”

Obviously, he thought she was stupid.

“They won’t do that because I haven’t given them all the ransom money yet, that’s why. The other half won’t be transferred to their account until Bennie and I are away from the pick-up site. And I’m the only one with the bank account information. If they kill me, they don’t get the other half million.”

He mumbled something she didn’t catch. “You’re paying a million dollarsʼ ransom for your brother?”

“You’d do the same for your brother.”

“Yeah. Because he’s a good guy and not some low-life weasel. What’d Bennie do this time to get himself in this mess?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice cracked, and she could feel what little composure she had cracking, too. “At this point, it doesn’t matter. Bennie’s the only family I have, and I’ll give them every penny I own to get him back.”

And while a million wasn’t every penny she owned, it was close. It would wipe her out financially, but there was no way she could live with herself if she hadn’t agreed to the kidnappersʼ every demand.

Including that photo.

“Is the baby yours?” she asked. Cassidy took the turn too fast toward the town of Silver Creek, and the tires squealed on the road.

“I don’t know,” Sawyer said after several long moments. He slung off more water, swiveled in the seat and looked around.

“You don’t know if you had sex with a woman about ten months ago?” Cassidy pressed.

Yes, she sounded irked about that. And was. She’d always been attracted to the bad-boy types, but it never felt good to know that she was in a mountain-high pile of women that Sawyer had discarded.

Even if she’d contributed a lot to the reason he’d discarded her.

“There’s someone,” he admitted. “I’ll call her as soon as I’m finished with this. But I’m pretty sure if she’d gotten pregnant, she would have told me.” And he took out his phone. “I’m calling my cousin, the sheriff.”

“No!” Even though she had to take one of her hands off the steering wheel, Cassidy did it so she could grab his phone. “No cops. No anyone but me.”

He leaned in, a major violation of her personal space. So close she could smell wedding cake on his breath. “I’m going to the drop site with you. Close your mouth,” he added when she opened it. “Because arguing won’t help. You’re taking me to those kidnappers so I can find out why they want the photo. And why they took Bennie.”

Sawyer fired off a text message. Probably requesting backup that could make this mess a thousand times worse.

“I could stop the truck and refuse to go there,” she lied.

And the flat look Sawyer gave her with those blistering blue eyes let her know that he, too, knew she was lying.