Desert Ice Daddy by Marton, Dana (pocket ebook reader .TXT) 📕

Christopher shifted in his sleep again. Which was when she spotted the rope around his right ankle. He was tied to some pipe that ran along the wall behind his back. He was trapped.

Chapter Nine

Taylor hated, absolutely hated, letting her son out of her sight, but she had to get Akeem. So she pushed away and scurried after him, making as little noise as possible.

“He’s here,” she whispered when she caught up with him at the top of the stairway.

“You’ve seen him?” He mouthed the words as his gaze settled on her for a second before going back to scanning the area.

“Back there.”

“Guards?”

“Can’t tell. He’s—” She swallowed. “Tied up.” But he looked unharmed, and that infused her heart with new hope.

“Looking okay?”

She nodded, and tears threatened to spill again. Every atom of her body was pulling her back to that hole in the wall. “Sleeping.”

“We’ll get him. I swear,” he said just as someone stepped into the stairway below them.

Boots pounded up the metal steps.

All she could think of was that they could not get caught this close to Christopher. It would be so incredibly unfair.

Akeem pulled her into the cover of a rusty column that only protected them from one side, and gently pressed his index finger against her lips. Then his body to hers. Close then closer, so that the two of them would take up as little space as possible.

AKEEM WAS AWARE OF many things at once: Taylor pressed tight against him, the tangled jumble of his feelings for her and the growing danger that surrounded them.

He felt that hard resolution rise up in him. He didn’t like what was to come, but he would do it anyway.

The four years spent in the desert with his grandfather had brought him face-to-face with his warrior heritage and not all of it had been pleasant. Some parts had been downright shocking.

He had seen his grandfather kill. He would be hard-pressed to forget the two-hundred-year-old sword that had chopped off the head of a tribesman who’d been caught transporting drugs through tribal land. He also knew that his grandfather would have killed his mother if she hadn’t escaped to the U.S. Would have considered it an honor killing and the righteous thing to do since the girl was found carrying a child before being wed.

He’d seen his grandfather cut off the hand of a thief, and order the caning of a young boy for some minor sin. He’d seen his grandfather in battle, bathed in the blood of his enemies.

In the same battle where Akeem had first killed at the age of sixteen. And had wondered how much of that ruthless wildness ran in his own blood. He had sworn never to shed his humanity on that level again, an oath he had broken already, and in front of Taylor.

He had wanted to be a better man than that for her. He wanted to be all that was good and civilized. But he would do whatever he needed to do to keep her and her son safe. He would kill again and again if he had to. He would die if he had to. He would make a deal with the very devil.

And he might have to do that soon. As in right now.

Someone was coming up the stairs.

Akeem shoved his gun into his waistband, positioned himself and waited until the guy passed him. When he lunged, he made sure that his right arm would go around the windpipe. A sharp, yanking move up and back would crush it. He didn’t let up on the pressure, held tight as the man struggled, held while the guy kicked out, clawing Akeem’s arm, held as those furiously kicking legs went slack.

He wouldn’t look at Taylor as he held the man a few seconds longer to make sure that he was finished, then dragged him to the empty oil barrel under the turn of the stairs and dumped him inside, covered him with an oily rag he found on the floor.

“Show me where you saw Christopher,” he said, still not looking at her, because he didn’t want to see the revulsion that must sit plainly on her face.

She’d seen him kill three times within as many hours, commit the worst violence. And he had a suspicion that she had barely escaped from a rough and violent marriage. Would she think that he was exactly the kind of man she was escaping from? He hated the thought of that, yet couldn’t be a hundred percent sure that she wouldn’t be right thinking it of him, and worse. He wasn’t sure if he could stand having her be afraid of him.

But she surprised him by stepping right up to him and moving into his arms, as if she weren’t afraid of him at all, as if she were seeking shelter in his embrace. For a moment, he wasn’t sure who was comforting whom. A couple of seconds passed before she moved away and visibly pulled herself together.

“This way,” she whispered.

They backtracked the way they had come, and he followed her, gun at the ready, until she came to crouch by one of the holes low on the wall. He would have known from the look on her face what she was looking at on the other side, even if she hadn’t already told him. The tenderness mixed with worry in her eyes was gut-wrenching.

He looked behind them one last time before he crouched next to her to assess the situation at hand.

Christopher slept like the four-year-old that he was, mouth hanging open, oblivious to the world. His face was smudged, his blond hair sticking up every which way. Akeem registered the rope on his ankle and the red mark that it had rubbed on his skin, and his jaw tightened.

From his vantage point, he couldn’t tell if there were any other people in the room with the boy. Nor could he see an entry on the