Page 124 of Nanny for the SEALs

“I don’t remember the shoes. Look at these.” The man with bloodshot eyes ripped off my heels and held them up to my face. “You’re better than this. I don’t know why youwhoreyourself out like all the other actresses.”

He tossed the shoes out the back of the truck and closed the door. The entire truck trembled as he jogged up to the driver’s seat, started the engine, and began to drive.

No, please no, I thought as the truck lurched around a corner.

I was too terrified to do anything but sit there as the truck drove along for a few minutes. Which was good, because I couldn’t do anything even if I wanted to. Oscar stood a few feet away, staring hungrily at me like I was the prize fish he had finally caught.

Eventually, the food truck slowed, rounded a corner, and then came to a screeching stop. The other man—Ernesto—came marching down the back of the truck toward us.

“What did she say earlier?” he demanded in his accent. Definitely Australian.

“She thinks we work for someone named Cardamom,” Oscar replied. “She claims someone named Rogan is going to catch us.”

“Rogan?” Ernesto laughed bitterly, bloodshot eyes raking over my body. “She’s been whoring around, just like I said. Haven’t you,whore?”

I couldn’t answer with the rag in my mouth.

“She doesn’t know what she’s been doing,” Oscar pleaded. “Let me have some time with her, Ernesto. We canconvinceher.”

“No we can’t,” Ernesto spat.

Oscar shook his head in panic. “Two hours! Give me two hours with Amirah and I can make her love me! She’ll see that nobody loves her the way I do!”

As they argued back and forth, I felt my stomach twist into a knot.

These men didn’t work for Heimdall. They wereactualstalkers.

Everything was real.

48

Heather

Oscar and Ernesto argued for a minute about what to do. Oscar got his way—they were going to let me live.

For now.

Oh great,I thought to myself.I get to live long enough to feel pants-shitting terror.Lucky me.

We began driving again, faster than before. Chopped onions and tomatoes and other taco condiments slid off the counter and onto the food truck floor.

“We’re two hours from the compound,” Oscar told Ernesto. He was standing in the aisle up by the driver’s seat, swaying back and forth as Ernesto weaved in and out of traffic. “Then we can convince her to love us. You’ll see!”

“We should dump her before that,” Ernesto said calmly.Toocalmly. “Plenty of desert on the way. Never find the body.”

“Nooo! We need totalkto her! You’ll see! She’s perfect, so perfect, even with all the dust…”

The body. They wanted to dump my body. Which meant they were going to turn itintojust a body. Ernesto wanted to kill me.

Okay, so Oscar is the lesser of two evils. He just wanted me to love him. Or rather, he wantedAmirahto love him.

I wished I didn’t have the rag in my mouth. For one thing, it tasted like taco meat, which was making me queasy. For another, it was keeping me from telling them the truth. They wanted the real Amirah Pratt, not me! I was just a schmuck named Heather Hart! Nobody would kidnap her!

But of course, then they would probably just kill me. As long as they thought I was Amirah, they would keep me alive.

I take back what I said about the rag. I’m glad it prevented me from blurting out my true identity.

Oscar put his face very close to mine and gently stroked my cheek with his knuckle. “My beloved Amirah. I hate what they do to you on those movie sets. So much makeup. It doesn’t make you look like yourself. You don’tneedit.”

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