The car trunk was locked, of course.
“Where’s the key
, Jennings?” Lucas threw over his shoulder.
Jennings growled an obscenity, struggling futilely as Wade quickly and efficiently cuffed him. “Get them off my property, Davenport. You haven’t got a warrant. You’ve got no cause to search my place.”
Blake looked across the locked trunk to Lucas. “We can get into the trunk by taking out the back seat.”
The doors to the vehicle were locked, as well.
Wade had already patted Jennings down. “No keys in his pockets,” he reported.
Lucas looked around for something to break out the window. He found a tire iron in the storage space behind the seat of the orange sports car. A moment later, the sound of shattering glass echoed in the garage.
Lucas unlocked both back doors of Rachel’s car, allowing him and Blake to lean in and start tugging at the loops built into the top of the back bench seat. It was the kind that folded down to extend the trunk space, allowing long items such as golf clubs to be hauled in the car. The seat opened to reveal a body crammed tightly in a fetal position in the narrow trunk space.
Lucas’s heart nearly stopped. Rachel wasn’t moving. At that moment, he felt his world crash in pieces around him.
He knew then that there would be no going on without her. Not this time.
Blake was already reaching in to ease Rachel out of the narrow space. Forcing himself out of his sick paralysis, Lucas helped him.
Her low, muffled moan was the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard.
She was alive.
Very carefully, he and Blake pulled her out of the car and laid her on the garage floor. Her hands and feet were strapped tightly together with duct tape, preventing her from moving, and another strip of the heavy gray tape covered her mouth. Her eyes were huge, her expression one of shock. The ugly bruise on one side of her face gave evidence that she hadn’t gone into the trunk willingly.
Lucas and Blake knelt beside her. Lucas heard Wade talking to Sam Jennings, who’d gone very still and quiet, obviously realizing that he wouldn’t be able to get away unscathed now.
“Are you all right?” Lucas asked, looking deeply into Rachel’s dark, stunned eyes.
She nodded, a tear trickling down her right cheek.
“Let me get this off you, sweetheart,” Blake murmured, taking hold of one corner of the tape across her mouth. “I’ll be as gentle as I can.”
Satisfied now that Rachel was safe, Lucas started to rise. “Take care of her, Blake. I want to have a talk with her uncle.”
His fists itched to make Jennings pay for that bruise on Rachel’s face. For the fear in her eyes.
Reading his intentions in his face, Rachel made a muffled sound of distress, reaching for him with her bound hands.
He hesitated, his gaze locked with her pleading one. And then he sighed and took her hands in his. “All right. We’ll let the law take care of him,” he muttered reluctantly. “Let’s get rid of this tape.”
“Thank you,” she whispered as soon as Blake had freed her mouth.
Lucas cupped a hand behind her head and kissed her, mindful of the raw, bruised skin around her mouth, utterly heedless of his audience.
12
LUCAS WAS SITTING in his kitchen drinking coffee at five o’clock the next morning. He was trying to be quiet, since Emily, Wade, and Clay were all still sleeping. Lucas hadn’t slept more than an hour all night.
He’d been so badly shaken by how close he’d come to losing Rachel that he was just now breathing normally again.
He loved her now as deeply as he had fifteen years ago—more, since he loved now with the intensity and complexity of a man’s heart, not a boy’s. And he knew that the man’s heart was every bit as vulnerable as the boy’s had been.
Things were far from settled between them, he thought, sipping his cooling coffee. There were plenty of strikes still against them. Local gossip would fly fast and furious once word got out of Sam Jennings’s arrest. Would Rachel’s mother unfairly blame Lucas for striking the final blow to the Jennings family?