Just a Kiss Away Read Online Free PDF

from his own busted lip, Sam turned. Five other soldiers closed in from behind the woman. She, on the other hand, looked as if she was going to throw up.
    To hell with that, he thought, and took off toward the alley. He closed the distance, ignoring the crowd, pushing and shoving, until he was there. The eaves of the adobe cast the entrance to the alley in shadow. He rounded the corner, knowing he was finally safe.
    And then he heard her scream—the world could have heard that woman scream.
    Common sense told him to run even faster, far, far away. His conscience stopped him dead in his tracks. His calf throbbed, his hand hurt, and both pains should have warned him.
    She was trouble.
    The trouble screamed again, loud enough to crack a wall, high enough to shatter glass. He grimaced. He couldn’t leave her. She might be trouble, but she was also in trouble because she’d been seen with him.
    He moved back in the shadows and took a look. Two soldiers held her while another placed a deadly bolo to her chest. She had no color in her face. Yeah, she was in trouble, and though he’d threatened her in the same way, he wouldn’t have used the knife on her.
    These men would.

Chapter 3
     
    She was gonna throw up.
    But there wasn’t time. One moment she stood there with foreign soldiers yelling at her and a knife at her chest, and the next moment a huge hard arm clamped around her waist, lifted her, and slammed her horizontally onto a hard male hip. Instinctively she tried to wiggle free, but the iron grip of her captor kept her pinned to him with an arm as unyielding as a tree trunk. She knew the feel of that arm. The one-eyed man with the knife had come back.
    Her stomach lurched as he flung her around. He spun on one leg, the other hiked up to kick one of those gawdawful mean soldiers who kept threatening her. She gulped deep breaths of air. Grunts and moans and the hard slap of pounding fist against flesh echoed around them, but she couldn’t see anything except the blurred flying images of uniformed human figures hitting the ground.
    He stopped turning long enough for her to focus her eyes. A soldier flew past her line of vision. She started to scream but the man spun around again, kicking out at the next soldier. With each of his neck-whipping spins, she flopped around. Her hair reeled outward and her stomach upward. She wanted to scream, but her open mouth had the breath sucked from it and her skirt took up enough air to show the whole island her lacy ruffled drawers.
    Her limbs dangled like limp chicken necks. The lady in her locked her ankles, trying to salvage some scrap of dignity, and seeking some sense of equilibrium, she grabbed the man’s thigh. She discovered something. She had been wrong about his arm. His leg was the tree trunk.
    Around she went again, and he squeezed tighter, pushing the air from her lungs. Her head swam; her vision blurred. She shook her head to clear it.
    “Hold still, dammit!”
    She squirmed, trying to get free, and his knife handle pressed into her ribs.
    “I said hold the hell still! I’ve got you!” He kicked out at one of the fighting soldiers, and the ground suddenly rose. She slammed a hand over her mouth. She was gonna die, or vomit.
    She didn’t do either.
    The man took off at a full run with her still clamped under his arm and now bouncing on his hard hip. Her corseted ribs ached from each jarring stride, but it didn’t matter because just as this madman said, he had her again. She wondered why, and what he was gonna do with her. From what she’d seen of him under the wagon, she’d have bet the farm he’d killed before.
    Think! Look at him, she told herself, remembering a novel she’d once read. The heroine had looked her killer in the eye, and the villain hadn’t been able to go through with the killing. That one look had saved the woman’s life. At this point she’d try anything. She wiggled around, trying to look at him. A black eye patch and one dark brown