Determination.
Drive.
And a hell of a dose of badass.
The man’s struggles to get away began to wane and I knew he was just minutes from losing consciousness.
I was so intent on Tucker and what he was doing that I hadn’t noticed Mr. Wallace Sr. approach me. Until he placed a gun to my head.
God. This was just not my day.
How many times could a girl be held at gunpoint before she went mad (or actually got shot)?
“If you want her to live, you better drop him,” Wallace said calmly.
Tucker released his prey and the man fell to ground, wheezing and desperately sucking in air.
“You got a problem with me,” Tucker said, “you come at me. You don’t threaten a woman.”
Geez, if I wasn’t tied to this chair, I would show him women could be badass too.
“You don’t threaten my woman,” he added, his gaze meeting mine for just seconds.
Okay, this wasn’t the time for romantic gestures, but that totally made my heart skip a beat. Maybe he was just acting. Maybe he was playing the part of Max. But Max had never called me his in the entire year we dated. Max had never taken a bullet for me either.
“If you had just died the night of the crash like you were supposed to, she never would have been involved,” Wallace Sr. said.
Tucker took several steps toward us. The hand holding the gun to my head wavered. “Stay where you are.”
“No.”
I glanced at Tucker, wondering what the hell he was thinking. He was baiting a man who was holding a gun to my head.
Hell-O… that qualified as a don’t piss off the crazy man moment.
“I’ll shoot her!” he said, jamming the gun a little bit harder into my head.
“When I was in Iraq, I learned some interesting things,” Tucker drawled. “Like how to sever a man’s spine, leaving him paralyzed but still able to feel.”
The gun against my head wobbled. Tucker took another step closer, prowling toward the man with a wild look in his focused eyes. If I didn’t know him, I would be frightened. The contrast of his pale skin against his dark, red-rimmed eyes was creepy. Added to the fact that he had blood literally all over him, he looked like a walking corpse.
“Do you know the kinds of pain I could inflict and you would only be able to lay there and feel it?”
“You’re lying,” Wallace Sr. said. I could tell he was shaken.
“Oh, I can assure you I’m not,” he replied. “And perhaps after I’m done using you as a live cadaver, I will put you in a car, drive you around at excessive speeds, and then crash it, leaving you to lie inside the crumpled metal while I douse the body in gasoline and then light it on fire. You won’t be able to run. But you’ll be able to feel the heat of the flames. You’ll be able to hear the groaning of the metal as the fire stalks you. And then when you start to burn, it will not only feel like the worst pain of your entire life, but you will smell the melting of your flesh.”
The picture that Tucker painted with those words would live in my nightmares for years to come.
“Who the hell are you?” Wallace Sr. whispered horror in his tone.
“I’m Max’s other half,” he growled.
And then he pounced.
27
Tucker
You know, I’m a laidback kind of guy. I like to drink beer, hang out with my buds, and take random girls home for casual sex (Yes, I use a condom; I’m not nasty). I’m slow to anger and even slower to put myself out there to care about anyone.
But when I get pissed. I get pissed.
And seeing Charlie with a gun to her head pissed me off.
She had to be the first person since high school to slip past my defenses and worm her way into my affection so damn fast. Not even Nathan had managed to become like family to me so quickly.
How the hell a bossy, uptight, schedule-oriented person like her could ever turn my head was completely beyond me.
But then I thought about her heart-shaped lips, her gold-fringed hazel eyes, and the little sounds she made whenever I put my lips upon her skin.
And her laugh… She had a really good laugh.
Being tasered was fuel to the fire, and as I sat tied to a chair, dripping blood all over the filthy concrete floor, and listening to Charlotte beg the men to let us go, I began to grow livid.
But even livid, I remained cool headed. The Marine Corps taught me a lot. Self-control, self-reliance, self-defense. It also taught me how to keep my mouth shut and use the element of surprise. Pretending to be unconscious, pretending to be weak… Well, that gave me an advantage.
It was also an advantage that these asswipes couldn’t tie a knot to save their damn lives.
Being tied up and thrown into the bottom of a pool in training taught me how to get out of a knot fast. Real fast.