Better with You: Outback Skies, Book 4 by Lexxie Couper

bedroom window faced north. No direct sunlight regardless of the hour. So he was in the living room, and it was mid-morning…ish. Which meant he hadn’t been out that long. A couple of hours, maybe? Possibly not even that.
    He shifted, planting his feet on the carpet and pushing his shoulders into whatever the thing was behind him, testing its stability.
    The wooden thing moved. Inched forward under the pressure of his shoulders, taking his wrists—and due to the cuffs—his arms with it.
    Entertainment unit.
    She’d cuffed him to the entertainment unit via its steel leg.
    He couldn’t help but chuckle.
    Dani always had a way of making his life fucking difficult.
    He’d have to push the unit across the living room while handcuffed to it, incapable of lifting his butt any more than an inch off the floor as he did so, until it lodged against something immovable enough to angle it upward on its other set of legs, thus allowing him to slip the cuffs’ chain free of the metal.
    Once that was done…
    Well, getting out of cuffs, especially officially supplied cop cuffs, was a breeze.
    Planting his feet flat on the floor, ignoring the ache in his knees at being bent at such an extreme angle, he pushed backwards. The entertainment unit moved. A fraction.
    Charlie let out another chuckle. He was going to make her pay for this.
    Big time.
    When he caught up with her, he was going to show her just how unimpressed he was.
    The next twenty minutes—by his approximation, it was tricky, given he was blindfolded and couldn’t hear the clock in the kitchen ticking—he focused solely on moving the heavy piece of furniture.
    If he didn’t, if he allowed himself to ponder Dani’s actions, to dwell on the fact she’d deceived him, run away from him in an attempt to protect him from the director, he’d become furious.
    Charlie worked best when he wasn’t furious.
    When he was calm.
    Disconnected.
    When he found her, when she was safe the way he wanted her to be safe, when the director was taken care of and the threat to Dani’s life was done, that’s when he’d allow the man he’d become in his years out here to resurface.
    Heart steady, breath the same, he pushed his shoulders against the entertainment unit. Pictured it moving.
    His glutes, calves and quads screamed at him.
    It wasn’t the most energy-efficient, nor comfortable position for furniture relocation.
    It helped the carpet of his living room was close to threadbare.
    Mid-shove, the unit came to an abrupt halt with a dull thud, and Charlie couldn’t help but grin.
    Bingo.
    Game on.
    Wriggling his feet and butt into place, he wrapped his fingers as best as he could around the steel leg, braced his legs and pressed his shoulders as hard as he could to the side of the unit, and heaved upward.
    It took him two goes.
    A slither of anger shot through him.
    When this was over, he needed to up his work-out regime.
    The sound of crunching plasterboard and splintering wood told him the wall and the unit were not holding up well, a second before the television and everything else that had been sitting on the unit slid along its angled surface and slammed into the wall.
    Charlie had a brief moment to think, shit, that telly cost me a bloody fortune , and then he slid the cuffs’ chain free of the leg and staggered away from the angled piece of furniture.
    It crashed to the floor.
    Charlie didn’t pay it any attention.
    With a quick jump, he looped his cuffed wrists beneath his airborne feet, and whipped his blindfold from his face. He blinked at the light suddenly attacking his eyes.
    “Right,” he muttered, getting his bearings with a sweeping scan of the room, “let’s get—”
    His stare stopped at the bright yellow piece of paper held to the refrigerator door by a Wallaby Ridge fridge magnet.
    A piece of paper that hadn’t been there before.
    Wrists still cuffed, Charlie crossed to the kitchen. Past the counter.
    His mind wanted to remind him only a few hours ago,