Claimed by Jaymie Holland Read Free Book Online Page A

She
glanced at the other two men who looked at her with raw lust in
their eyes.
    Come back, Rick, she prayed
silently . Please come back.
    The man with the gun spoke to one of the
other two men. “Check the closet.” Scraggly-beard turned back to
Leslie. “The combination.”
    She paused for a moment, her mind suddenly
blank.
    “ The combination,” he shouted.
    It came to her and she rushed to get the
numbers out. “Five-five-zero-one.”
    The man with the gun nodded to one of the
other men, a thin man wearing a dirty white wife-beater T-shirt.
The man went to the bedroom, shoved the door open, and disappeared.
She heard the distinctive hard click of the lock and door
opening.
    The man shouted in Spanish from the bedroom,
“Much money and jewelry.”
    “Excellent.” The man with the gun approached
Leslie and her heart pounded impossibly faster. “Now we have
fun.”
    She felt exposed, vulnerable, and helpless.
Three men with at least one gun against her, a naked woman. They
were going to rape her. She could see it in their eyes. She’d never
been so scared in all her life.
    Scraggly-beard set the gun on an end table
and started to unzip his jeans
    Terror ripped through Leslie, giving her
strength. She shot her foot out and rammed her heel into his groin
as hard as she could.
    He screamed and dropped to his knees. The
other men grabbed her and she screamed. One of them slapped her so
hard that her mind spun. She tasted blood in her mouth and realized
her nose was bleeding. The other man grabbed her around the neck
from behind and pulled her up against him.
    “ You , I will kill,” scraggly-beard
said in English.
    At first, Leslie thought the man was talking
to her.
    Then Rick spoke in a deadly quiet voice. “I
am only going to tell you once. Let her go.”
    She looked up to see him standing in the
doorway to the suite. Fear for him rose up inside of her. What if
they shot him?
    The man she’d kneed in the balls had already
retrieved his gun from the end table and had it pointed at Rick.
The arm around her throat tightened.
    “You are not telling me anything,” the gunman
said to Rick. “Close the door. Then on your knees, hands behind
your head.” The man walked toward Rick, keeping his gun steady. “Or
she dies.”
    Rick looked calm as he got to his knees. He
showed no fear, no doubt. As if he was just biding his time.
    The man with the gun pressed it against
Rick’s forehead. “Get the handcuffs we found,” the scraggly-beard
said to the thin man without taking his eyes or gun off of Rick.
“Use those to cuff the gringo.”
    The third man kept his arm around her neck
while the thin one went to her bag and retrieved her police-issue
cuffs. The man with the cuffs walked behind Rick and knelt down to
cuff his wrists.
    What happened next was a blur. Rick snapped
his arm up and grabbed the barrel of the gun, pushing it away from
his face and ripping it out of scraggly-beard’s hand. The gun went
off and a lamp exploded as a bullet hit it. The man lost his hold
on the gun and it dropped on the floor beside them.
    With his opposite arm, Rick flipped the thin
man over his shoulder, wrapped his arm around the man’s neck, and
twisted. Leslie heard the sickening pop of bone as Rick snapped the
man’s neck then released him.
    In virtually the same motion, he brought
straggly-beard down, slamming the man’s head against the floor. The
man scrambled for the gun that was now beside him and grabbed it.
Rick wrenched it from his hand. He put a bullet through the man’s
skull.
    He surged to his feet, gun still in hand, and
started toward Leslie and the third man. He came to an abrupt
stop.
    “I’ll kill her!” The third man sounded shrill
as he tightened his arm around her neck, choking her. Then her
blood chilled as she felt the cold metal of a gun barrel pressed
against her temple. That was why Rick had gone still. “Put down the
gun.”
    “Don’t listen to him. He won’t kill me.”
Leslie clawed at his