Captive Heart by Mina Carter, J.William Mitchell Page A

how it had happened, he didn’t know. Somewhere between their desperate flight from the cabin and her hesitant seduction routine in the shower, he’d fallen head over heels for her.
    “I said it years ago, and I’ll say it again. Vann, you’re a moron.” Edge shook his head, then was silent for a moment as he contemplated. “I don’t want to risk following them right now. We could, but they’ve got heavier firepower, and there’s more of them.”
    The older man dug the keys out of his pocket and headed for a beat-up, red truck. “We can track them down and come up with a plan. I’ll call up some of my National Security pals and try to see if they can task a satellite to look for your girlfriend and her new pals.”
    Day frowned. “Okay, genius, how you going to accomplish that? Because last time I checked, satellite tracking still needed a phone or a device. And believe me, she’s got nothing on her.” His voice was smug. He had checked her. Several times. All over.
    Edge smacked him at the back of the head. “Get your mind out of the bedroom. We don’t need a tracker or a phone on your girlfriend, we just need to track the bad guys. We can pick up chatter from this area from cellphones from the cell towers. They gotta make a call sometime to their boss, right? Once they figure out which cellphones belong to the bad guys, my pals can lock on to them and give us a good picture of where they’re going. When they’re locked, it won’t matter if its pitch dark or if they turn off the phones. The satellite will track them wherever they go.”
    Day nodded, casting a look back at the Charger. Noting worth saving there, even if it hadn’t been stolen in the first place. Something Rollie hadn’t been happy about anyway. “Whatever it takes. I just gotta find her.”
    ***
    The first thing Rollie realized when she finally came to was that her neck ached like a son of a bitch. Even worse than the bump she’d gotten from being whacked by that douche of a fake FBI agent. Or maybe he was real but on someone else’s payroll. She really didn’t care.
    Her captors put her in a dark, dank room that seemed to be the basement of somewhere. If they had thrown in a few rats and some chains bolted to the walls, she could have sworn she was the heroine cheesy suspense flick. The only glory points to those disasters were the hero’s muscles and skill in killing underpaid and semi-skilled henchmen, and the leading lady’s ability to look vulnerable and wickedly hot in ridiculously skimpy attire. Rollie had always hated women like that.
    But she would have given anything for this to be a B movie. Even if she had to endure looking like a hysterical porn star just to make the hero look good, it would have meant Day would still be alive.
    She sat up from her slouch, and her abused muscles complained. She tried to rub her aching neck, but discovered she was cuffed to the chair.
    She closed her eyes for a moment to will away the spinning room but instead found herself reliving the few seconds in slow motion when the bullets had struck Day’s body and he fell to the ground in an unmoving heap.
    She snapped her eyes open and struggled to breathe. She wanted to stop the flow of tears, but she couldn’t. Then she didn’t bother. There wasn’t any point.
    “Oh, Day,” she whispered as grief threatened to overwhelm her. She loved him, and he was dead. All her life, she’d been looking for someone to love, waiting for this feeling of belonging and happiness. As soon as she’d found it, it was taken from her.
    She stared up at the ceiling. Her sobs were silent, only her ragged breaths indicating her heartbreak as tears spilled over from her unseeing eyes.
    And then slowly, as the tears fell and dried up, anger began to take their place. She had been born in the ugliest recesses of so-called civilized society, and she had fought for everything she ever had. She never knew her parents, and the only family she knew had been murdered.