were against the ranch. Now they’ve gone after Priscilla a continent away.”
“And you’re sure your sister’s kidnapping is related to the ranch? When’s the year up?”
“Next month.”
Donovan frowned. That changed things. “Are you even sure that she’s really been kidnapped? What’s her history? Is she the type to stage this kind of thing?”
“God, no! She’s the baby of the family and damn stubborn sometimes about getting her way,” he admitted honestly, “which is why she’s in London to begin with. When she insisted on coming back to close up her apartment, we talked about her accident and how she could be walking right back into the same kind of danger as before, but she intended to be back in Colorado before anyone even knew she was gone. Obviously, that didn’t happen.”
“Whoa, back up,” Donovan said sharply. “What accident?”
Buck quickly told him about the hit-and-run driver who’d nearly killed her. “She spent the last two months at the ranch, recuperating, and during that time, there wasn’t a single attack against any of us because we were all together. Then, less than six hours after she arrives in London, someone grabs her.”
“But how do you know that for sure? Maybe she just decided to go visit some friends before she left.”
“She knew how important it was to get in and out as quickly as possible,” Buck argued. “According to the London police, her landlord found the door to her flat standing wide-open and she was nowhere to be found. She appeared to be packing when someone apparently talked their way into her apartment. There were signs of a struggle and she left her purse behind.”
Studying him through narrowed eyes, Donovan should have told him he couldn’t help him. It would have been the wise thing to do. He was up to his ears in cases and couldn’t even find the time to hire a decent secretary. He didn’t have room on his calendar for another case.
And even if he had, he silently acknowledged, Priscilla Wyatt was not the kind of woman he wanted to go looking for. He’d read between the lines of what her brother had said about her, and she was obviously headstrong and spoiled and determined to have her way. Kidnapping her back from her kidnappers sounded like a headache waiting to happen.
But she was a woman in trouble. And unless he totally missed the mark, Buck was right. Her kidnapper was, no doubt, planning to use her as the pawn that drew her family away from the ranch. He would hurt her if he had to. Time was running out on the Wyatts’s trial period, and whoever thought they were the unnamed heir had to be getting desperate. Priscilla Wyatt was in a hell of a mess…and in more danger than her family probably realized.
Silently swearing, Donovan pulled out his cell phone. Surprised, Buck Wyatt frowned. “What are you doing?”
“Canceling my appointment,” he retorted. “I’ll take the case.”
Over the course of the next hour, Donovan asked Buck every question he could think of about Priscilla, her flat, where she might go if she was able to escape her kidnappers, how gutsy she was, her strengths and weaknesses. She’d been kidnapped. Would she fight or dissolve in tears? Panic or use her head? If he was going to save her, he had to know how she would react under duress.
“She’ll use her head,” Buck assured him. “Initially, she’ll be scared out of her mind, but once she gets her fear under control, she’ll start looking for a way to escape. She’s smart,” he added, “and damn creative. She won’t take this lying down.”
“That’ll work in her favor as long as she doesn’t let her kidnapper know what’s going on in her head,” Donovan replied. “The more helpless she acts, the better chance she’ll have of taking the bastard by surprise. Has she ever taken any karate or self-defense classes?”
“No, not that I—”
His cell phone rang then, surprising them both. Scowling at the number on the face of the phone, he looked up sharply at Donovan. “It’s a private number.”
“It could be the kidnapper,” Donovan warned. “Don’t let him know you’re in London. And listen to background noises that might give you an indication of where he may be.”
His expression grave, Buck nodded, then flipped open his phone. “Hello?”
“You have forty-eight hours to leave the ranch for good…or your sister dies.”
“Who is this—”
Just that quickly, the line went dead. “He hung up,” Buck said in disgust, and repeated word for word what the caller had said. “There weren’t any background noises, and the bastard was definitely disguising his voice.”
“Give me your cell phone number,” Donovan told him. “I’ve got a friend who might be able to trace the caller’s location when he made the call. I’ll get back with you as soon as I know something.”
“I’m going with you.”
“The hell you are.”
“Priscilla is my sister, dammit! I have a right—”
“Then find yourself another bounty hunter,” he said curtly. “I work alone. If you really want to help your sister, go back to Colorado and help protect the rest of the family and your ranch. I’ll take care of Priscilla.”
“If she’s still alive.”
“Oh, she’s alive,” Donovan assured him. “She’s got forty-eight hours. After that, all bets are off.”
Chapter 2
The police had already gone through Priscilla’s flat with a fine-tooth comb and released the place back to her landlord. Thanks to a call from Buck Wyatt, Donovan was able to get a spare key. He took one step inside and knew that at least two people were involved in her kidnapping.
And they hadn’t taken her without a struggle.
Staring at the broken lamp and an overturned dining room chair, Donovan clenched his teeth on the sudden angry curse that rose to his tongue. Bastards. He didn’t know Priscilla, didn’t know any more about her than her brother had told him, but he knew all he needed to know. She might be spoiled and headstrong, but she was still an innocent woman who’d done nothing wrong except inherit a ranch from a distant relative she’d never met. She had, no doubt, been terrified when she realized that she’d opened her door to an enemy, but the lady had put up a fight. And it was that gumption that just might save her life.
The clock was ticking, and every instinct Donovan had urged him to hurry. Forty-eight hours would pass in the blink of an eye, and he was wasting precious time. But he knew from past cases that success depended on doing his homework. If he was going to find Priscilla Wyatt, he had to first know how her kidnappers had gotten her out of the apartment without someone noticing.
Walking over to the window that overlooked the street below, he frowned. The neighborhood that Priscilla lived in was in an older section of London that was a mix of well-known restaurants, popular pubs and shops at street level, with old-fashioned flats above. Considering that, Donovan doubted that the streets emptied before midnight. Which meant, he thought grimly, that Priscilla’s kidnappers hadn’t walked out of her flat with her like they were going out to dinner. So how the hell had they managed to get her out of her flat without anyone seeing them?
He turned to study the living room again, and only just then noticed what looked like a line of fine powder on the floor. Puzzled, he squatted down to examine it and realized that the powder was actually shattered glass from the lamp. And the reason it was in a neat line was because when the lamp broke, it had, apparently, shattered at the edge of a rug. A rug which was, he thought in growing fury, no longer there.
They’d rolled her up in a damn rug and carried her out like a dead body. He didn’t care how gutsy she was; she must have been scared out of her mind.
Livid, he promised