Page 71 of Bedroom Therapy

“Damn you,” Amanda muttered to the empty room as she stared at the words he’d scrawled in masculine handwriting across the piece of notebook paper.

“Did you realize you wrote your coward’s note on the same paper you used to write that other letter—the one that led to a very erotic session in bed? When we both reached climax without touching each other.”

She walked to the window and looked out, but she couldn’t see him. Still, she began speaking to him again. “Doing that with you was very exciting. Partly because I’d never had a sexual encounter like that before. And partly because it was with you.”

She gulped. “I don’t think I could have done that with another man. Certainly not with someone I’d known for as short a time as I’ve known you.”

Her hands clenched and unclenched. “Damn you,” she said again. “You can’t duck away from me by going for a walk. I’ll still be here when you get back. Because this relationship is too important to give up the first time we hit a problem.”

She turned away from the table and saw that the message light on the phone was blinking. It was then that she remembered someone had called while she and Zach had been getting undressed.

She even remembered who it was. Beth. And her voice had sounded urgent.

Something was wrong, and now she should deal with it.

She had just reached for the machine when the door opened.

Her heart leaped, and she looked up eagerly. But it wasn’t Zach who walked inside. It was another man. A man whose face held a mixture of anger and triumph.

Instinctively she grabbed for the phone and started to dial 911. But she only got through the first two numbers before he knocked the receiver out of her hand. It clattered to the floor, sounding like thunder in the silence of the small room.

Amanda stood paralyzed by the end table, staring at the gun in the man’s hand.

“What do you want?”

Long seconds passed before he answered in a low, dangerous voice. “Don’t you know?”

Mutely, she shook her head.

He took a half step toward her. “Well, you’re going to find out. Come on.”

She didn’t move, couldn’t move.

He took another step closer, his eyes dark and menacing, the hand with the gun jerking as it pointed at her middle. “If you don’t want me to shoot you right now, turn around.”

She didn’t want her back to him, but she had no doubt that if she tried to make a run for it, he would do what he threatened. She turned. In the next moment, she gasped as she felt cold metal click over her wrists. Handcuffs.

He’d come prepared to restrain her.

When her hands were secured, he spun her around to face him.

“We’d better get going before lover boy comes back and I have to shoot him. You wouldn’t want to get him killed would you?”

Amanda’s gasp made the man grin. Then his fingers closed around her arm, and he was hurrying her out the door. Down the driveway she saw a white van.

Zach had told her a man with a white van had been hanging around her house. He’d broken in, but Zach had chased him away. Now he was back. Somehow he’d figured out where they were hiding.

She stumbled, thinking that if she fell to the ground, he’d have to carry her, and that might slow him down.

But he was apparently prepared for the maneuver.

“No you don’t,” he growled, jerking her up painfully by her arms and pulling her toward the vehicle. He was making no attempt to be gentle, and she knew that if she resisted, he’d likely yank her shoulder out of joint.

“No. Please. Let me go. What have I done to you?” she pleaded, hearing the terror in her own voice, and hating herself for being on the edge of hysteria.

“Not to me. To other people.”

‘What?”

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