The sound of running feet came toward her. She looked over her shoulder and stopped, turning, her mouth set in a grim line. Two of the three men were coming down the road toward her in a straight line. Just be calm, she told herself. She was wearing a neat gray pantsuit with a white blouse, her hair was up in a French twist, and she lifted her chin to show that she wasn’t afraid of them. Feeling her chances of a physical defense waning rapidly as she saw the size and strength of the two men, her hand went nervously to the whistle in her pocketbook and brought it by her side.
“Hey, there, sweet thing,” one of the men called. “Got a flat? We’ll help you change it.”
The other man, a little taller, untidy, unshaved and frankly unpleasant-looking, grinned at her. “You bet we will!”
“I don’t have a spare, thank you all the same.”
“We’ll drive you home,” the tall one said.
She forced a smile. “No, thanks. I’ll enjoy the walk. Good night!”
She started to turn when they pounced. One knocked the whistle out of her hand and caught her arm behind her back, while the other one took her purse off her shoulder and went through it quickly. He pulled out her wallet, looked at everything in it, and finally took out a bill, dropping her self-defense spray with the purse.
“Ten lousy bucks,” he muttered, dropping the bag as he stuffed the bill into his pocket. “Pity Lopez don’t pay us better. This’ll buy us a couple of six-packs, though.”
“Let me go,” Sally said, incensed. She tried to bring her elbow back into the man’s stomach, as she’d seen an instructor on television do, but the man twisted her other arm so harshly that the pain stopped her dead.
The other man came right up to her and looked her up and down. “Not bad,” he rasped. “Quick, bring her over here, off the road,” he told the other man.
“Lopez won’t like this!” The man on the porch came toward them, yelling across the road. “You’ll draw attention to us!”
One of them made a rude remark. The third man went back up on the porch, his footsteps sounding unnaturally loud on the wood.
Sally was almost sick with fear, but she fought like a tigress. Her efforts to break free did no good. These men were bigger and stronger than she was, and they had her helpless. She couldn’t get to her whistle or spray and every kick, punch she tried was effectively blocked. It occurred to her that these men knew self-defense moves, too, and how to avoid them. Too late, she remembered what Eb had said to her about overconfidence. These men weren’t even drunk and they were too much for her.
Her heart beat wildly as she was dragged off the road to the thick grass at the roadside. She would struggle, she would fight, but she was no match for them. She knew she was in a lot of danger and it looked like there was no escape. Tears of impotent fury dripped from her eyes. Helpless while one of the men kept her immobilized, she remembered the sound of her own voice telling her aunt just a few weeks ago that she could handle anything. She’d been overconfident.
A sound buzzed in her head and at first she thought it was the prelude to a dead faint. It wasn’t. The sound was growing closer. It was a pickup truck. The headlights illuminated her truck on the roadside, but not the struggle that was going on near it.
It was as if the driver knew what was happening without seeing it. The truck whipped onto the shoulder and was cut off. A man got out, a tall man in a shepherd’s coat with a Stetson drawn over his brow. He walked straight toward the two men, who released Sally and turned to face the new threat. Eb!
“Car trouble?” a deep, gravelly voice asked sarcastically.
One of the men pulled a knife, and the other one approached the newcomer. “This ain’t none of your business,” the taller man said. “Get going.”
The newcomer put his hands on his lean hips and stood his ground. “In your dreams.”
“You’ll wish you had,” the taller of them replied harshly. He moved in with the knife close in at his side.
Sally stared in horror at Eb, who was inviting this lunatic to kill him! She knew from television how deadly a knife wound in the stomach could be. Hadn’t Eb told her that the best way to survive a knife fight was to never get in one in the first place, to run like hell? And now Eb was going to be killed and it was going to be all her fault for not taking his advice and getting that tire fixed…!
Eb moved unexpectedly, with the speed of a striking cobra. The man with the knife was suddenly writhing on the ground, holding his forearm and sobbing. The other man rushed forward, to be flipped right out into the highway. He got up and rushed again. This time he was met with a violent, sharp movement that sent him to the ground, and he didn’t get up.
Eb walked right over the unconscious man, ignoring the groaning man, and picked Sally up right off the ground in his arms. He carried her to his truck, balancing her on one powerful denim-covered thigh while he opened the passenger door and put her inside.
“My…purse,” she whispered, giving in to the shock and fear that she’d tried so hard to hide. She was shaking so hard her speech was slurred.
He closed the door, retrieved her purse and wallet from the ground, and handed it in through his open door. “What did they take, baby?” he asked in a soft, comforting tone.
“The tall one…took a ten-dollar bill,” she faltered, hating her own cowardice as she sobbed helplessly. “In his pocket…”
Eb retrieved it, tossed it to her and got in beside her.
“But those men,” she protested.
“Be still for a minute. It’s all right. They look worse than they are.” He took a cell phone from his pocket, opened it, and dialed. “Bill? Eb Scott. I left you a couple of assailants on the Simmons Mill Road just past Bell’s rental house. That’s right, the very one.” He glanced at Sally. “Not tonight. I’ll tell her to come see you in the morning.” There was a pause. “Nothing too bad; a couple of broken bones, that’s all, but you might send the ambulance anyway. Sure. Thanks, Bill.”
He powered down the phone and stuck it back into his jacket. “Fasten your seat belt. I’ll take you home and send one of my men out to fix the truck and drive it back for you.”
Her hands were shaking so badly that he had to do it for her. He turned on the light in the cab and looked at her intently. He saw the shock, the fear, the humiliation, the anger, all lying naked in her wide, shimmering gray eyes. Last, his eyes fell to her blouse, where the fabric was torn, and her simple cotton brassiere was showing. She was so upset that she didn’t even realize how much bare skin was on display.
He took off the long-sleeved chambray shirt he was wearing over his black T-shirt and put her into it, fastening the buttons with deft, quick hands over the ripped blouse. His face grew hard as he saw the evidence of her ordeal.
“I had a…a…whistle.” she choked. “I even remembered what you taught me about how to fight back…!”
He studied her solemnly. “I trained a company of recruits a few years ago,” he said evenly. “They’d had hand-to-hand combat training and they knew all the right moves to counter any sort of physical attack. There wasn’t one of them that I couldn’t drop in less than ten seconds.” His pale green eyes searched hers. “Even a martial artist can lose a match. It depends on the skill of his opponent and his ability to keep his head when the attack comes. I’ve seen karate instructors send advanced students running with nothing more dangerous than the yell, a sudden quick sound that paralyzes.”
“Those two men…they couldn’t…touch you,” she pointed out, amazed.
His pale eyes had an alien coldness that made her shiver. “I told you to get that damned tire fixed, Sally.”
She swallowed. Her pride was bruised almost beyond bearing. “I don’t take orders,” she said, trying to salvage