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  A blindfold dropped over her eyes.

  "What are you doing?" she whispered.

  Her answer was two powerful arms. He hooked one under her knees, scooped her up like an accident victim, and began to carry her toward the gated entrance of the pool area. Screaming was a distant thought, but it would have taken far more concentration than she possessed. She was vibrating uncontrollably, all through her being, like a quaking, terrified newborn. She felt as if she'd been reduced to that, embryonic terror. By the time he'd settled her on the ground, she'd lost her bearings altogether.

  Ignoring her muffled cries, he began to roll her up bodily in something. A rug, she realized. He was rolling her up in an area rug! No, this couldn't be happening! She was caught between laughter and sobs, on the ragged edges of hysteria, and that one line kept playing through her mind, a frantic attempt to deny the insanity that seemed to have overtaken her.

  This can't be happening.

  She felt herself being hoisted high into the air and draped over his shoulder in a fireman's carry. She was on her way to the dry cleaners apparently. Or at least that's how it would look to the neighbors! A gasp burned in her throat, and suddenly in the midst of all the chaos that was short-circuiting her mental processes, one thing made perfect sense. His jumpsuit. It was the uniform of the service industries.

  She fought the urge to dissolve in laughter, a chorus of thin, hysterical sobs. She was losing it, and she had to find something to cling to, some thread of reality, no matter how slender. At least she wasn't claustrophobic. She could be thankful for that much, though it didn't make it any easier to breathe as he loaded her into the back of a vehicle she imagined was some kind of van. The weight of the carpet had rendered her completely immobile, and the summer heat made it suffocatingly hot in her mummified state. Apparently he didn't care if she smothered. She didn't even want to think about what condition her still-wet toenails were in.

  Hysteria bubbled anew as she imagined the tabloids: "Fashion model found dead in bizarre sexual asphyxiation ritual. Carpet fuzz adhered to her body with shocking-pink nail polish. "

  She forced her thoughts to the route the van was taking as it roared away from the Featherstone enclave. They were supposed to be going east toward the freeway that would take them into the San Gabriel Mountains, but it seemed as if the kidnapper had turned the other way. She assumed it was him driving because she could hear him speaking on what must have been a car phone. He was telling someone that he didn't like the feel of things.

  "Something's gone wrong, " he said. "I'm not going to take the rug to the cleaners as planned. I'll be in touch. "

  The rug? That had to be her. Apparently he'd changed his mind about taking her to the cabin that was supposed to be their destination. He was on his way somewhere else. If that was the case, her fiancé might never find them! And what had he meant by that first reference: Something's gone wrong.

  Gus fought to draw some air into her lungs, but a cold, crushing weight was pressing against her chest. The kidnapping had seemed like a brilliant idea when she'd thought of it, the perfect way to get control of what should have been rightfully hers in any event—the substantial trust fund her stepfather had left her. It wasn't the money that mattered, it had never been that. It was what she planned to do with it.

  But now a man was dead or wounded, she didn't know which, and she could barely conceive of either possibility. A shudder swept her, bringing another even more immediate concern. She was going to pass out. The white dots dancing behind her eyelids and the dizzying sickness that washed over her told her she would soon be unable to defend herself in any way. Within moments she would be in the most vulnerable state possible and at the mercy of a man capable of killing without conscience,

  If there was any emotion Gus loathed more than fear, it was that one, vulnerability. Her stepchild status in the Featherstone family had exposed her to some terrifying and very inventive abuse by her stepbrother and stepsister. She'd had to armor herself emotionally to survive. She hadn't been able to fight her older siblings, so she'd fought instead to get control of her crippling fears. When she finally triumphed, she'd felt the first startled animal awareness of her own power, the first glimmer of what life could be like for the unafraid. Now it felt as if she were about to be stripped of that vital control, stripped of everything.

  Panic squeezed the last breath out of her. It sucked her deeper into the purple waves that were crashing over her. As the undercurrent tugged her down into its infernal funnel, her oxygen-deprived brain betrayed her totally, jumping from one grotesque image to another. Her stepbrother and stepsister were standing over her open grave, and her five-year-old stepniece was sobbing. Bridget! Gus had told the child she would be away for a few days on a photo shoot, knowing the family would shield her from news of the kidnapping. But she could hardly bear to think what would happen to the little girl if she died, the neglect, the emotional isolation. They would probably send her away to school to get her out from under foot.

  Gus tried to cry out, but she didn't have the strength.

  Her last thought as she went under was of him, the executioner in the black jumpsuit. If he truly was a necrophiliac, if he liked having sex with dead women, what would he do to her while she was unconscious?

  Chapter 2

  Gus stirred awake to the low whine of a powerful engine and the silken glide of tires on what seemed to be a highway paved with glass. The purring motion was hypnotic. It lulled her for a moment, but when she opened her eyes to total darkness, the shock of it brought her hurtling back to consciousness. A deep breath kept panic at bay long enough for her to clear her thought processes and assess her situation.

  She was still blindfolded and restrained with tape, her feet now as well as her hands, but she was no longer in the back of the van or rolled up in a rug. She'd been propped up on the seat of the cab, and something heavy had been thrown over her. The blindfold forced her to rely on other senses, but from what she could tell, the heaviness was covering all of her, including her head, and it had the feel of a canvas tarpauline.

  Her shoulder joints throbbed from the pressure of having been forced into an unnatural position, and her wrists burned. An icy draft swirled around her bare feet, and with so many signals flooding her, she nearly missed the most important one. Another kind of pain was radiating up the inside of her wrist, a tiny arrow of distress, sharp yet persistent. It was different than the burning, more like a needle prick. She squeezed her fist and felt a stabbing sensation that made her gasp. The manicure scissors! She was still clutching them.

  It was slow, painstaking work, but within moments, laboring under the concealment of the tarp, she had cut through one band of tape and was working on another. Her progress was hampered by the fear of giving herself away. If the kidnapper was concentrating on the road, perhaps he wouldn't notice the tarp moving. Please let him be on automatic pilot, she thought, wishing upon him that altered state of highway hypnosis that often overtakes drivers on straightaways.

  Her incantation held out long enough for her to cut through the second band and discover a third. A moan welled hotly in her throat. She'd thought she was done! Worse, if she didn't hurry she'd be in a heap on the floor of the cab before she could get her wrists free. Her bound limbs had robbed her of leverage, and she was inching down the slick leatherette seat with every little scooch of movement.

  She continued doggedly, electrician's tape the scourge of her very existence. He couldn't have used rope? No, he had to be cute. Exploding guns, area rugs, duct tape? This wasn't just a quest for freedom on her part, not anymore, it was a vendetta against modern criminal science. She was going to cut herself loose or die trying.

  The scissors jabbed her inner wrist as the van veered to the right. Swallowing a cry of pain, she swayed toward the kidnapper, then toppled to her side as they came to a tire-shredding stop. He must have pulled onto the shoulder, she realized. She could feel the vehicle quivering beneath her and smell the stench of burnt
rubber, but they weren't moving and he was strangely silent.

  "When you get your hands free, " he said finally, his voice low and weary. "Would you let me know?"

  "Why?"

  "So I can knock you cold to make sure you don't escape. "

  She let out a sigh that was wild with frustration and then heaved herself upward, trying to get back into some reasonable facsimile of a sitting position. Nothing worked, including pushing off from the floorboards, and finally he put a stop to her thrashing. He gripped her by the shoulders and pushed her upright, much as he would have a fallen telephone pole.

  She hated having to accept his help. Worse, in all the commotion the tarp seemed to have dropped off her, leaving her exposed, and the blindfold had slipped down just enough to cover her nose and cut off her air.

  She settled back with an exasperated sigh. "Could you at least take this blindfold off so I can breathe?"

  "I could," he allowed, "but then I'd have to kill you. "

  "Oh, funny, " she mumbled, but the word stuck in her throat. It was hardly an idle threat considering what he'd already done. She had been trying desperately not to think about the guard. She didn't want to get sucked back into the horror of what had happened, nor did she want to think about the fact that she might have been an unwitting accessory to murder.

  He flipped the tarp up around her shoulders, covering her, then pulled the van back onto the road. The car radio blared on next, startling her as he skipped rapidly from one station to another, apparently searching for news of the kidnapping, but never stopping long enough for her to hear any details. Finally he caught a female commentator in the middle of a report.

  "One badly shaken security guard was taken to the hospital, " the woman was saying, "where he was treated for a dislocated jaw and severe shock. He reported to the police that the kidnapper tricked him with an exploding gun and rendered him unconscious with a tranquilizer bullet. A spokesman for the LAPD reports that the tranquilizer gun used is a highly controversial weapon. It's a brand-new device, still in the research and development stages, and not yet available, even to law enforcement.... "

  The commentator went on, but Gus didn't hear another word.

  A tranquilizer gun? He hadn't killed the guard? A man wasn't dead and she wasn't an accessory? The relief that swept her barely lasted long enough for her to acknowledge it. Her shock at the news was too great. She couldn't believe he'd allowed her to think he'd killed the man in cold blood. She'd been reduced to a sobbing, pleading, gibbering idiot when two words would have calmed her. Tranquilizer gun. That's all he would have had to say. The bastard.

  He'd made her stammer he'd frightened her so badly! The slight speech impediment was one of the legacies of her childhood terrors. She'd had to teach herself to speak all over again in order to conceal it. It mattered little to her now that her breathy, hesitant manner had become part of her trademark style and was one of the more endearing qualities of her public personality. All she could think about was the way he'd humiliated her.

  "How could you d-d-do that?" Her fury spiked when she couldn't quite master the word. She wrenched at the remaining strands of tape binding her wrists, pulled one of her hands free, and jerked down her blindfold.

  It didn't occur to Gus that her question was absurdly rhetorical, not for one blinking second. It didn't even occur to her that she was taking a terrible risk. She might have her sight back, but her moral outrage and her passion for justice had blinded her to the fact that she was dealing with a killer, a man capable of almost anything.

  "How could you let me think he was dead?" she demanded, struggling to untie the wretched blindfold and rid herself of it altogether. "What kind of monster are you?"

  "What the hell are you doing?" The van veered into the other lane as he threw out a hand to block her from whatever she might be about to do.

  Gus didn't have a chance to do anything besides grab for the dashboard to steady herself. They were all over the road! Fortunately the highway was deserted as he got control of the vehicle and pulled it to the shoulder. It was also lucky the windows were up, because the dust that swirled up from the tires enveloped them like a mushroom cloud.

  Once they'd come to a complete stop, and Gus had caught her breath, she hazarded a glance at him. She found herself blinking into his slitty-eyed glare, and as the icy warning in his eyes registered, it hit her like a thunderbolt what she'd done. She had looked upon the wizard. The hostage had seen her captor's face and now he was going to kill her.

  "I didn't see anything!" she cried, wrenching around the other way. She hadn't, certainly not enough to identify him. But she doubted he was going to take her word for it.

  "I should have let you smother in that rug, " he said, his breath rasping softly with the declaration. "Back where you were. On the seat. Facedown. Now. "

  Gus knew better than to fight him. She released an unsteady sigh as she allowed him to reclaim her shoulders and put her back where she'd been. She assumed he was going to knock her cold enough to give her a lasting case of amnesia. Instead, he produced something that must have been a knife, bent over her body and began to cut away the rest of the electrician's tape. When he was done, her hands and feet were free, she'd been relieved of the manicure scissors, and her blindfold was a thing of the past.

  She rubbed her tender wrists and wiggled her bare feet to get the blood flowing. Thanking him didn't seem appropriate given that he'd tied her up in the first place and his next move might be cold-blooded murder. During the one or two minutes she'd spent at Vassar, before she'd bailed out of college to seek her fortunes elsewhere, she'd come to the conclusion that there were two kinds of male intelligence— frontal and animal. Blends were a rarity. Most guys were either computers with legs or testosterone-fueled power tools, and this guy was definitely Door Number Two. It didn't seem possible that somewhere in his primitive response system lurked a truly humanitarian impulse. But she could hope.

  Gooseflesh rippled her thighs, reminding her that the tarp had fallen to the floor and she was wearing a bikini. She gathered it up and covered herself, careful not to look at him, even though she sensed he was looking at her. He was there in her periphery, a dark energy field, and she could feel the weight of his appraisal. But she didn't sense the same heated interest she was used to from the opposite sex. There was a coldness to his observation, as if he had little use for women like her, beautiful or otherwise, naked or otherwise.

  Women like her? she thought. What did that mean?

  His van was a black Chevy Blazer, and as he pulled it back onto the highway, she realized they were somewhere in the desert. The rolling, salmon-colored hills in the distance were surprisingly beautiful, yet there was nothing in between but miles and miles of scorched clay, studded with spiny cacti and blue-gray sagebrush. It looked like a desolate outpost on the moon.

  If this was the Mojave, and she suspected it was, temperatures routinely soared to one hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. She'd read somewhere that Death Valley was the hottest place on earth during the summer, and this was dead-center July. He'd chosen well, she realized with a growing sense of despair. The infernal heat and total isolation would make escape impossible.

  Rippling gooseflesh prompted her to pull the tarp tighter around her. The van's air-conditioning was blowing like a gale, which explained the draft on her feet. But she couldn't blame her sudden desire to tremble on that, and she was reluctant to call it fear, simply because she loathed the emotion above all others, and she didn't want to give him that much credit.

  Still, her trembling hands wouldn't let her deny that something was very wrong as the Chevy Blazer peeled down the lonely highway toward oblivion, leaving black tracks on the asphalt and civilization in the dust. It was shock, she told herself. It had to be that. She was suffering shock.

  "Where are we going?" she asked him, staring out the window. She had just discovered that the tarp was actually a man's huge raincoat, and since it was conveniently insid
e-out, she'd tucked her hands into the pockets, not wanting to expose her unsteadiness.

  "To a spa in the desert." His monotone turned faintly sardonic as he added, "You'll love it. "

  As they sped down the road, a solution occurred to Gus. She might be able to buy him off by offering him more money than he'd been promised. Since everyone would think she'd been kidnapped anyway, it was possible she and Rob could still follow through with their plans. It would be risky. She was close to grabbing the brass ring and reluctant to do anything to jeopardize that, but the kidnapping scheme had already gone awry.

  She curled her fingers into her palms. "If I made it worth your while, would you let me go?"

  "What makes you think you've got anything worth my while?"

  Subtle he wasn't. "I was talking about money."

  "I know. I wasn't. "

  "Then what do want?" She felt a twinge of pain beneath her breast as she sank deeper into the coat. Absently she wondered if she'd sprained something or cracked a rib.

  "Not that either, " he assured her.

  The edge in his voice made her turn, and at the very moment she did, he settled back in the seat and did the same thing. She met his eyes briefly, sharply. She'd only meant to glance at him, just a tilt of her chin to catch his expression, but something happened when he looked her way, something that so rarely happened to Gus, she couldn't remember the last time.

  He blew her off!

  Clearly in no hurry, he held her startled gaze with the precision of a surgical laser, freezing her alive with the wintry coldness she'd sensed. Seeming satisfied that he'd found nothing of interest, he checked out the rest of her, dismissed her with a slanted eyebrow, and turned back to the road.

  She was too astonished to be insulted. Still, he'd done it so contemptuously, she felt as if he'd cut her off at the knees and left her bleeding. Who was this guy? No man had ever looked at her that way.