The Duke's Covert Mission

What was that gas pump doing in the middle of the parking lot?

Ellie rubbed at her temple. Why was she standing in the middle of an empty parking lot?

“Driver?” Ellie turned, but he had disappeared around the front of the car. She followed him, her uneasiness swelling to outright suspicion. “Did we need to stop for gas?”

When she rounded the front fender, Ellie screamed. A huge, hulking mountain of a man materialized from the shadows. With her hand at her throat she backed away. “Driver!”

The giant wore black from head to toe, including the stocking mask that covered his face. Black-gloved hands the size of bear traps reached for her.

“Stay away from me!” Ellie screamed, then spun around to run, but smacked into the belly of a second man. “No!”

Stocky, and more than a foot shorter than the giant, this one wore the same faceless outfit. He grabbed her by the shoulders and shoved her back. “Load her up,” he ordered.

She slammed into the wall of the giant. His arms closed around her like a vise, trapping her hands at her sides. The short man stuffed a pungent cloth into her mouth, muffling her cry for help. The big man slapped his hand over the gag and picked her up. Ellie gasped for air, but the sting of chemicals burned her sinuses and brought tears to her eyes. The short man jogged ahead of them to a black car hidden in the shadows beside the gas station.

Actions drilled into her long ago by an overprotective big brother kicked in. She twisted and jerked and jabbed the heel of her silver sandal into her attacker’s shin.

He cursed and her small victory thrilled her, giving her a rush of adrenaline and the strength to pry herself from his grasp. Ellie landed hard on her knees on the concrete. But as the pain jolted through her bones all the way to her skull, she pulled the gag from her mouth and screamed.

“Stop her!”

Ellie tried to crawl, and her legs and petticoats tangled with the giant’s feet and he tripped. He crashed to the ground and she dodged to the side.

She didn’t get far. Her head was swimming. It was too dark. It was happening too fast.

Raw with fear, Ellie slapped at the hands that lifted her. The words were vile, the touches rough. A third man got out of the car and opened the trunk.

Ellie twisted, fought, struggled for air and begged for her life before they dumped her in. She landed beside a bundle of black laundry. She clawed at it to right herself, but succeeded only in rolling the bundle over and revealing a cold, colorless face with blank, staring eyes.

Ellie screamed.

But Paulo Giovanni, the Carradignes’ chauffeur, never heard her.

“Shut her up!”

She didn’t understand. Crazy observations floated through her blurring vision. Ski masks in June. Big man. Little man. Dead man.

Something sharp pricked her shoulder, and she yelped between sobs. A numbing sensation turned her limbs to jelly and her brain to mush.

By the time the trunk lid closed above her and she slumped into the inescapable darkness, she could think of only one thing.

She’d never gotten her dance.

Chapter One

The cold woke her.

Ellie stirred on her hard bed and pushed her eyes open to a squint. But her eyelids felt like leaded curtains clinging to her dried-out contacts. She rolled onto her side, and something gritty scratched her cheek.

She turned away from the discomfort and shivered. Her head throbbed at that slightest of movement, and a carpet of goose bumps prickled the skin on her bare arms. Instinctively she wrapped her arms around herself, huddling for warmth in the dank, musty air. Her fingertips rasped against the nubby cloth she was wrapped in.

Her red dress. Cinderella. Three men in masks.

Paulo’s dead eyes.

Each image blipped into her clouded brain and brought her to a new level of awareness.

“Oh, God.”

She’d been kidnapped.

A silent scream rasped through her lungs.

She placed her palms on the cold, concrete floor beneath her and shoved herself up to a sitting position. She shut her eyes against the pinball effect of marbles bouncing off the inside of her skull. Once the marbles stopped rolling and the pain eased into the dull throb of a mere headache, she opened her eyes and scanned her surroundings.

She was in a basement. A rusted furnace sat in the far corner, a flight of open-backed wooden stairs disappeared into the exposed ceiling joists above her, and a pair of small windows were set high on the cinder-block walls that entombed her.

She’d figured out the where and the what. What she didn’t understand was the why.

Ellie Standish didn’t get kidnapped.

She followed the rules and minded her manners and took care of other people. She didn’t make enemies.

Why?

She was a plain, unremarkable woman.

Woman.

For one hideous, horrible second she thought… She ran her hands down her body. She’d been unconscious. Had they…?

She brought a hand to her chest and forced herself to exhale.

Bruised and sore. Scared out of her mind. But not violated.

Ellie sat where she was and simply breathed for several minutes, muting the urge to panic.

When she could think halfway rationally again, her shy-woman’s mind took over. It had always been her way to take stock of a situation before speaking or acting. If she had a plan, if she knew her way around a place or people, she was less likely to freeze up, more likely to act on her natural human instincts.

So much for her night on the town. Morning had come, or maybe it was afternoon, she couldn’t pinpoint an exact time from the sunlight filtering through the greasy windowpanes.

Her Cinderella dress had been transformed into rags during the night. The skirt was torn at the waist seam, and a palm-size smudge dirtied one hip. A two-foot length of lace trim dangled like a tail from her petticoats. One of the shoulder straps had been ripped from the bodice, leaving it up to the gown’s stiff boning and tight fit to keep her decently covered. She tugged at the dipping neckline and let her arm rest there, in a gesture of self-defense rather than an attempt to find any real warmth. As her fingers drifted up to her neck, she clutched at the bare skin there.

The ruby choker.

Gone.

She touched her bare earlobes. The diamond drop earrings.