Page 66 of Boxed In

Chapter 10

Olivia heard Luke pound down the steps. He grabbed her arm and was pulling her away from the door when the three men who had tried to steal the box ran up the walk.

She gasped when she saw who they were.

They’d found her and Luke again. Or rather, somehow Carl Peterbalm had found them. And the men had figured out who Carl was and started following him. It had been an excellent strategy because he’d led them to the right place.

One of the men grabbed the importer and spun him around. Carl gasped as the man threw him to the ground.

Another ran around to the back of the house. And the third one smashed the butt of his gun against the window glass. Luckily it was an old-fashioned storm window, so the metal only went through the outside pane.

To get to the inner one, the man had to reach through the jagged glass. When he tried, he cried out as he sliced the skin of his arm.

It all happened with lightning speed. Luke was almost as fast. He grabbed Olivia’s hand and hustled her back up the stairs.

As she ran, she managed to ask. “Why didn’t they shoot?”

“Maybe they don’t want to risk it in a residential neighborhood.”

“People will hear the glass breaking,” she managed to say.

“Not necessarily. These lots are big. That gives the Poisoned Ones privacy. I guess they think they’ve got us trapped—and they can grab the box and get out of here before the cops come.”

She was breathing hard as Luke dragged her down the hall to the computer room.

“We have to get the box to safety,” he told her as they ran.

“But how? Where?”

When they reached the upstairs office, Luke hit a key that deleted the Web site where he’d been communicating with the Moon Cult. Then, without going through the shutdown procedure, he pressed the power button and the screen went blank. She knew that could damage the computer. But they had much more urgent problems. From downstairs, they could hear sounds of breaking and entering.

Olivia looked wildly around. “What are we going to do? There’s no way out of here. Are you thinking we can climb into the attic?”

“No. They are trained to think of every hiding place inside the house. We have to disappear.”

Before turning her toward him, he set the box on the floor right beside them.

“We can hide. In the cave where I made love to you.”

She stared up at him, trying to take that in. “But. . .”

The protest was cut off when his mouth came down on hers, swallowing whatever she had been going to say.

He spoke against her lips, his voice low and urgent. “Focus on me, Olivia. It won’t work unless you and I are on the same wavelength.”

Oh sure. He wanted to make her hot—when murderers were closing in on them?

Still, she tried to do as he asked because she knew it was their last chance. Or—to put it another way—it was their best chance, if she believed they could do what they had done before.

But she didn’t have the same level of concentration as Luke. And the sounds of breaking glass and then the door slamming open were too much of a distraction.

“Stay with me, Olivia. Only me.”

Luke gathered her to him, his lips moving over hers, and as he did, she felt some kind of bubble form around them. Her eyes were open, and she could still see the room—but now she was looking at it through a gauze-covered lens.

As her vision changed, the sounds from the rest of the house receded into the background.

“Focus on me, Olivia. Remember how good we are together.”

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