Penny listened and heard the telltale snicker. The creep was actually laughing at her. Fury replaced fear, along with the firm conviction that she could handle the situation, no matter how out of hand it seemed to have gotten. Grateful that she was wearing her Western boots, she raised a foot to crunch the daylights out of his instep, only to find herself unceremoniously tossed over his shoulder.
“Next time, don’t pick on somebody bigger than you are, short stuff,” he advised as he plucked her apartment key from her hand and headed unerringly for her door.
How the devil had he known which apartment was hers? she wondered. Had he been stalking her? She’d read about stuff like that. In Los Angeles it happened to celebrities all the time. Usually, though, the person being stalked was someone famous or at least had a passing acquaintance with the stalker. She’d never seen this idiot before in her life. She surely would have remembered anyone with a voice that reeked of smoky sensuality and unbridled amusement—a combination she found particularly irksome under the circumstances.
Of course, given her humiliating, upside-down position with all the blood rushing to her brain, it was a strain remembering her own name. She did manage to recall a prayer or two. Unfortunately, she had a hunch she was going to need more than prayers to get out of this. Even more unfortunately, every single thing she’d learned in that self-defense class had suddenly flown out of her head.
She was, however, thinking clearly enough to make one firm decision. She knew absolutely that she was not under any circumstances going into her apartment with this man, even if that meant she had to scream her head off to catch the attention of her brand-new neighbors. Which, now that she thought about it, was what she should have been doing long ago, instead of trying to convince herself that she was in no danger.
She opened her mouth and let out a bloodcurdling yell that would have done Tarzan proud. It was greeted by an equally vocal string of obscenities from her captor and the satisfying sound of doors opening up and down the corridor. She followed up with one more ear-shattering scream, just to prove that she meant business.
“You little twit,” the man muttered, jamming the key into her lock and flinging open the door.
To her astonishment, he turned around, faced down all the neighbors and said, “Just a little lovers’ quarrel. Don’t mind us.”
It didn’t take much to imagine his smile and that amused, patronizing tone charming the daylights out of all of them. “It is not—” she screeched emphatically, only to have the words cut off by the slamming of the door behind them.
It took a supreme effort, but she convinced herself that no one could possibly be fooled by his lame remark, that even now police cars were speeding to her rescue.
Hopefully, he wouldn’t kill her before they arrived, she thought just as she was dumped in a sprawling heap onto the sofa. She glanced up. Indeed, the expression in his eyes was filled with murderous intent. For the first time she stopped being mad and started to get just the teensiest bit nervous.
Maybe Brandon and everyone else had been right to worry about whether she knew what she was getting herself into by moving to Boston. She found the unfamiliar flash of self-doubt extremely irritating. No, dammit! A twenty-five-year-old woman had every right to follow her own dreams. If that meant burying herself in a stuffy laboratory at Harvard while she pursued a thesis for her Ph.D in English, she couldn’t imagine why it was anyone else’s concern.
Some women preferred to concentrate on intellectual pursuits that might one day make a difference in society. Some women just weren’t cut out for romance. Look at her Aunt Kate. Well, that was a bad example. Aunt Kate had been a strong, independent, powerful lawyer. Now she carried a diaper bag in addition to her briefcase. Talk about ruining an image! Tough talk and baby talk were incompatible, it seemed to Penny. But the way Aunt Kate used to be…now there was a role model. Why couldn’t her mother and especially her grandfather, Brandon Halloran, see that she wasn’t burying herself in a lab because she was afraid of life?
Someday, though, they’d be proud of her when she was off in Sweden or Switzerland or wherever it was that they handed out the Nobel prizes. She hadn’t quite decided yet if she wanted the award to be for curing cancer or for literature. It occurred to her that quite possibly that was why her entire family was in such an uproar.
She could just imagine their reaction when they heard about some damnable man invading her apartment during her very first week in town. That thought gave her the bravado to launch another attack on the unsuspecting man, who was staring out the window, probably to make sure that the police weren’t rolling in before he finished up whatever mayhem he intended.
Without hesitating to consider the consequences of riling him further, she bounded across the room. She leaped up, looped her legs around his waist and one arm around his neck in what she thought was a fairly effective choke hold. To her astonishment and regret, he shook her off as if she were no more than a pesky nuisance.
“Do that again and we’re going to have one serious problem on our hands,” he warned.
He muttered something more under his breath. Penny’d always been taught that whispering in the presence of others was downright rude, but she was relatively certain that she should be glad in this instance that she hadn’t heard what he’d said. If the furious sparks in his eyes were anything to go by, she had a feeling he hadn’t been welcoming her to Boston.
Sam Roberts stared pensively out the window and tried to get a grip on his temper. He had grown up tough, always lashing out furiously and without thought. It had kept him in hot water most of his adolescence. Raised by his sister, he’d rebelled against everything. It sometimes astonished him that Dana had put up with all his garbage—defending him, bailing him out of trouble, loving him. For her sake, he’d finally learned to control the temper that was currently being put to an extreme test.
He struggled to stay calm as he considered the promise that had gotten him into this fix, a promise made to Brandon Halloran, the man who’d really turned his life around. Granddad Brandon had treated him with the kind of respect that a man felt compelled to earn. He owed the old man. So when Brandon had called a few days earlier and asked just one thing of him—that he look out for Penny Hayden—Sam had no choice but to agree, even though his last experience with the kid hadn’t ended so well.
The role of undercover cop-turned-babysitter didn’t appeal to him, but a debt was a debt. He was beginning to see why Brandon had thought the brat needed someone to watch out for her. Apparently she thought she was invincible. She’d scrapped with him as if she considered it an even match. She didn’t need a babysitter. She needed an armed guard.
Not that Sam entirely trusted Brandon’s motives. The old man had a habit of meddling in the lives of everyone he cared about. He’d even been making noises about it being about time that Sam found himself a woman to smooth out his remaining rough edges. What twenty-eight-year-old Sam had told him was succinct and hopefully threatening enough to snuff out any matchmaking ideas the old man might have had.
But this thing with Penny had surfaced a little too conveniently for his liking. He would do it, though, because he’d learned one important lesson from the Hallorans: families always stuck together—and the Hallorans had made him one of their own from the instant Jason Halloran had married his sister. Today was the first time in a long while that he’d regretted the family ties.
Unfortunately, at the moment he had an even bigger regret. He hadn’t noticed the precise instance when Penny’s supreme self-confidence had slipped away. He’d never meant to scare her to death. In fact, he had actually thought she’d recognized him. That smile of hers had certainly been friendly enough. Not until she’d attacked him had he gotten the message that she’d panicked, thinking that a stranger was about to harm her.
Dammit all, as a cop who dealt with crime victims all the time he should have had better sense. He could have calmed her with a word or two, just by the mention