Total pages in book: 138
Estimated words: 139147 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 139147 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
On instinct, I looked back to the house and froze yet again.
I saw a shadow moving through the hall across the door of the bathroom, headed toward the back bedroom.
“Shit!” I hissed.
I sprinted back to the dining room window and didn’t bother crouching.
I looked right in.
I was correct about that shadow.
He wasn’t in his recliner anymore.
He was headed to her.
“No, no, no, no, no,” I chanted, panic creeping in, attempting to take a firm grip.
To force it out (because that would paralyze me too, and no way could I let that happen), acting fast, even though I was not able to think as fast, I had to go with it.
I went to the patio door and knocked, loud.
And I kept doing it until he showed at the door.
Okay, good.
Or, also, bad.
What the heck did I do now?
The door was made of glass.
Through it, he looked at me.
He looked at the patio beyond me.
He looked at me again.
And I looked at him.
On the wrong side of middle age, my guess, closer to sixty than forty. His shoulders were broad. His hair was thin. He had a little gut. He needed a shave. And he had to be four or five inches taller than me.
I had a stun gun and thirty years less than him.
But he could probably take me.
Expressions chased themselves across his face. Shady. Incredulous. And regrettably, he ended on angry.
He opened the door and demanded, “Who are you and what are you doing on my back patio?”
“Hi!” I exclaimed. “I’m so sorry.” I pointed to the badge on my chest. “I work for Puppy Patrol?” I told him in a question, like he could confirm I did. I didn’t wait for his confirmation, I babbled on. “And I was walking one of your neighbor’s dogs. He slipped the leash and ran off. I’m trying to find him. He’s a little Chihuahua. I’m freaked! He’d be a snack for coyotes.”
“We don’t have coyotes in the city,” he informed me.
“Yes, we do,” I contradicted. And we did. I had a Puppy Patrol client (actually, it was a Kitty Krew client, same company, brown uniform, whole different ball of wax) who’d learned that the hard way. “They come down from the mountains and in from the desert, easy pickin’s for people who let their cats go outside and stuff.”
RIP Gaia.
“How did you get in my backyard?”
“Your gate was unlatched,” I lied. “And I could swear I saw little Bruiser dash in here from the alley.”
He leaned out to look toward his gate.
I leaned back, my hand moving toward my pocket and my stun gun.
When he looked back at me, I knew he saw through my story.
And it was on.
I didn’t have time for the stun gun. Not now.
He lunged.
I tried to evade.
He caught me anyway and pulled me right inside.
Totally knew he could take me.
Damn it!
We grappled.
I went for the gonads with my knee and hit his inner thigh.
This caused him not to let me go, but instead grab my hair and pull, hard.
Jerk!
I went for the instep, slamming down on it with my foot, and that was better. He yelped, his hold loosened, I ripped myself away from him (pulling my own hair, because his grip hadn’t loosened that much, ouch!), and I yanked out the stun gun.
He recovered too quickly, nabbed me, and even if I knew he could take me, I was still surprised at his strength when he wrenched me around at the same time throwing me down to the floor with such force, I hit the tile and skidded several feet. My head then struck a corner of his kitchen cabinet.
Worse than the hair pulling. Seriously.
While I blinked the stars out of my eyes, he came after me, reached down to grab me again, and I remembered I had my stun gun in my hand.
I turned it on, heard it crackling, his attention went to it, and ill-advisedly in our current positioning, I touched it to him.
He went inert, then dropped, all two hundred some-odd pounds of him landing square on top of me.
“Oof,” I grunted.
Fuck! I thought.
I dropped the stun gun to try to shift him off, when my breath that had just come back stopped because he was suddenly flying through the air.
He landed on his back several feet away from me, his head cracking against the tile with a sickening sound.
But I didn’t have any attention to give him.
I didn’t because there were two men standing over me, and these two dudes could totally take me. I didn’t know who they were. They might be associates of the bad guy. But they were so gorgeous, for a split second, all I could think was that I’d be okay with that (the them taking me part, that was).
One was tall, very tall, with black hair, green eyes and an age range of thirty-five to a very fit, healthy-living, great-genes forty-five. He also looked familiar, but I couldn’t place it in my current predicament. And last, he’d had some goodness injected in him from, my guess, a Pacific Islander parent.