dark strands of hair. The man was thirty-three years old…no, thirty-four…and he still hadn’t managed to completely grow up. Something else to hold against him.
What on earth was he involved in that would lead him, and her, here? Criminal activity, surely. No matter how much she had hated Del Wilder in years past, she’d never thought he might end up some kind of outlaw. Even in her worst moments, she’d thought better of him.
“Well?” she prodded.
“What?”
“Do something!”
He did. He smiled. Had she really once thought that smile irresistibly charming?
“Still painting, I see,” he said, nodding his chin.
Vic couldn’t do anything about the smudge of paint she knew marred her cheek. Yellow, carried there from a spot of paint on her hands just moments before the doorbell rang. “Yes,” she said simply.
Del’s eyes traveled from the paint on her cheek to her mouth, to her throat and slowly down the much-too-open V in the worn and paint-stained men’s dress shirt Vic wore. At the tip of the V his roving eyes stopped and lingered.
“Do you mind?” Vic asked in her frostiest voice, and the gaze drifted up once again to meet hers.
“How did they get you?” he asked in a low voice. “Please tell me you didn’t just open the door and invite them in.”
She didn’t want to remember, and she certainly didn’t want to talk about it. Almost unconsciously, she twitched her nose. She shifted her gaze to the window for a safer view. “I did have the sense to look through the peephole. They were dressed like delivery men,” she said.
“Two delivery men?” Del asked sharply. “That didn’t strike you as unusual?”
Vic shrugged and pursed her mouth. The last thing she needed was to be chastised by Del Wilder! “The box they were pushing on a dolly was quite large. I thought maybe it was very heavy and was too much for one person.” She looked Del in the eye again. “The box was for me. They…put me in it.”
He nodded, as if he’d already figured that out.
“Who are they?” she asked.
Del took a deep breath and shook his head. “Tripp and Holly Mayron. Drug dealers. Small-time, mostly. Can’t figure out what set them off.”
Competitors, she imagined, since he’d been so incensed at their lack of professional courtesy. Apparently there was no honor among thieves. Or drug dealers.
Vic’s anger faded, just a little. No matter how hard she tried to hate Del Wilder, she couldn’t quite get rid of that one little tender spot she still carried for him. “You shouldn’t have come here,” she said softly.
“I didn’t have any choice.”
Of course he’d had a choice. Not long after their arrival at this warehouse, the female half of the pair of kidnappers—Holly, she now knew—had dialed a number on the cell phone she’d taken from Vic’s entryway table. Until Del had shown up at the door, Vic had thought it was her father they were calling. They’d made Vic say her full name, nothing more, and then Tripp had twisted her arm until she’d cried out. Just once. Holly had told the person on the other end of the phone that he had an hour to get here. If he wasn’t here in sixty-one minutes, Victoria Lynn Archard Lowell would be painfully and decisively dead. Directions to this place had followed and less than an hour later Del had arrived.
“You had a choice,” she whispered.
After sixteen years, why would Del put his life on the line for her? They’d been together for a day or two less than a month, what seemed like a hundred years ago, thrilling and suffering through an intense teenage romance. It hadn’t worked out for them; of course it hadn’t. They came from different worlds, and the only thing that had drawn them together had been chemistry. That’s all. Some freak biological attraction. She’d told herself that a million times in the past sixteen years.
And here he was.
“Lowell, they said your name was,” Del said as he again tried to loosen the duct tape at his back. “Married?”
Her heart hitched. This was not a conversation she wanted to have with Del Wilder, whether they were about to die or not. “Yeah.” Not a lie, exactly, since she had been married.
“Kids?”
Oh, no. She couldn’t handle this. Not now, not ever. “A daughter.”
“Just the one?” His eyes no longer bored into hers, but instead were fixed over her shoulder as he concentrated on loosening the tape at his wrists.
Vic nodded. “What about you?” she asked quickly, hoping to change the subject. “Married? Kids?”
Del shook his head. “Nope.”
“Why not?”
Again his eyes came to hers. He didn’t answer. He was getting frustrated, and his frustration showed more and more on his face.
God, he had a fabulous face. Del had once been almost pretty, but the years had transformed his pretty face into something strikingly masculine and fascinating. She knew that face too well. She knew the distinct lines, the shape of the mouth, the blue of the eyes.
He turned his head toward the window and muttered something. She couldn’t decipher it all. There were a few obscenities, and something about shock. Did he think she was going to panic and go into shock? Did he think he would? No, he looked much too calm for that concern.
“I couldn’t see the timer on the…the bomb,” Vic said in a low voice. “Did you?”
Del nodded, once.
“How much time do we have?”
He hesitated. “We’ll be okay.”
She didn’t think so. She didn’t think they were going to be at all okay.
She had once loved Del Wilder so deeply and intensely that he had been her entire world. The love hadn’t lasted nearly as long as the anger, the disappointment, the heartbreak. Vic didn’t let herself expect anything from the people in her life, not anymore. She always ended up disappointed, but these days no one broke her heart. Del had been an important part of her life, long ago, but she didn’t owe him anything.
Or did she? If they were going to die here, did he deserve to know that he had a daughter?
Vic had always looked like an angel: flowing wavy hair caught somewhere between brown and gold, cat’s eyes of green and gold, lush lips just made for smiling and kissing. She wasn’t a girl anymore, she was a woman, nicely filled out and without the little bit of baby fat that had made her cheeks round and pink, years ago. She was leaner in the face today, shapelier everywhere else.
But of course Vic was not an angel and never had been. She was a mere mortal, with flaws all her own. Del took some comfort from the fact that she was currently sweating like a pig.
Where was Shock? He should have been here by now. Something had happened, something had delayed the planned rescue. They were going to have to get out of here themselves.
“Know what I remember about you?” he asked, smiling crookedly at Vic.
“What?” she asked, as if she really didn’t want to know. Smart girl.
“Your flexibility.”
She looked offended. “That’s what you remember?”
“You could twist your legs, turn your body, bend…”
“All right,” she snapped. “I get the picture. Know what I remember about you? I remember that you were nothing but trouble. I remember that you were the most stubborn, arrogant, possessive, egotistical…”
“Vic, this isn’t helping matters any.”
“And