“Or you as a man of ethics.”
“Ethics is a dodgy word in my line of work.” He had her by the arm and steered her toward the door. “Let’s go.”
Her thoughts whirred a mile a minute. Apparently, a sure-fire cure for intoxication was getting jumped by a bounty hunter. She felt a lot clearer now than when he’d first waltzed in with balloons and a hidden agenda. But sobering up wasn’t getting her any closer to finding a way out of this. Maybe she needed more time to think.
She dug her heels in at the bedroom door. “I suppose you’re right about the clothes,” she said. “I should probably put on a shirt before we go.”
He huffed out a sigh. “Pick something out. We might as well bring a jacket along too. It’ll be a lot colder once we leave sunny California.”
“How am I supposed to put a shirt on over these cuffs?” she asked, waggling her fingers behind her when he stopped her in front of the closet.
“Let me worry about that. Just hurry up.”
She rolled her eyes and nodded to the section of blouses on the far end. “That one. The short-sleeved pink sweater. My jacket is hanging out by the front door.”
He grabbed the sweater and they went out to the living room. There, he started the whole facedown-on-the-floor routine all over again. Once he’d straddled her ass, something she tried very hard not to dwell on, she heard him fiddling with the cuffs. The tension gave way, and then her arms were free. Sort of. The cuffs were still clamped around one wrist, and he held both hands in place with his.
“Easy while I get the shirt over your head,” he said. “Just relax.”
Sure, relax with a sexual maverick sitting on her back controlling her every movement. Something he did just as surely now as when he’d given her the ride of a lifetime on the table.
Her emotions were already churning in all sorts of varied and wild directions when the scene exploded into complete pandemonium. The front door crashed inward, and from her position on the floor, she saw two pairs of booted, male feet come charging in.
“Freeze! Don’t move!” voices shouted.
While Lydia did just that without even a conscious effort to obey, Nate did the opposite. He rolled off her back and wound up standing between her and the coffee table. She looked up and saw his hands were in the air. He was staring wide-eyed at the invaders, but he somehow seemed a lot more casual about it than she felt.
“It’s all right,” Nate called, and she glanced up to see that he had dropped his hands and was pointing toward the dining table. “I’m a bond agent with a fugitive in custody. The documentation is in that gray bag over there.”
“Get down!” one of the men said to him. “Get your fucking hands on top of your head.”
Lydia’s heart was drumming wildly in her chest as she lay there, frozen. Both men wore some kind of bulletproof vests with Bail Enforcement printed in yellow across the front. Both had badges around their necks that were similar to Nate’s. More important, both had guns pointed at her and Nate.
“I didn’t call for backup,” Nate said. “This is my arrest. Why are you here?”
“Get your damn hands back in the air where I can see them, Nate,” the larger and scarier man said. “I’m not going to say it again.”
Nate stiffened and gave him an odd look. He glanced down at her, and there was something weighted in his expression when their eyes met.
He raised his hands again. “Okay, I get it. Clearly the guy with the bigger weapon gets to be in charge. Let’s everyone just keep our heads cool.”
She wasn’t sure how, but she knew he was going to do something crazy about a split second before he made a move. With his foot, he lifted the coffee table, grabbed it, and in a smooth motion, hurled it at the two men. It hit one of them dead on, and a gunshot went off.
In a single beat of Lydia’s racing heart, Nate followed the table across the room. The pop of the gun was so much louder than she expected, rattling her skull and dulling the sounds of the scuffle between Nate and the man he’d just stunned the hell out of. Her hands flew over her ears as she fought to control the swell of panic.
Why the hell was he fighting these guys? Weren’t they all on the same side?
Lydia pushed herself upright on her knees as the second guy, a hard-looking blond who clearly meant business, came straight for her.
“Stay on the ground!” he shouted at her, the gun trained on her most unnervingly. She froze, but her eyes flicked over to where Nate flashed out with a punch that sent the other guy to the floor. He sprawled out on his back and stayed there.
What exactly possessed her in that moment, she wasn’t sure. Her mind was screaming at her to do exactly what the scary man with the gun told her. But the devil inside whispered that if she let him get a hold of her, it would be very, very bad.