Nightingale Way: An Eternity Springs Novel (39 page)

She wanted it.

Savannah gripped the railing and swung one leg and then the other over it. Without loosening her hold on the iron rail, she started to sink to her knees, planning to stretch for the bag while keeping herself safely anchored to the ground.

Two things happened simultaneously. When the breeze scooped up the bag and sent it scooting toward the edge of the rock, Savannah reacted instinctively, lunging toward it.

And something clamped around her wrist.

Savannah let out a startled scream and time seemed to slow to a crawl. Her gaze remained locked on the bag as it skittered over the edge of the boulder even when the vice around her arm yanked her backward.

She banged into the railing and pain shot from her hip. Then, she felt herself lifted and thrown backward in a fireman’s carry. Her breath whooshed out as her diaphragm hit a broad, hard shoulder. For a moment Savannah was too stunned to struggle, too shocked to be afraid, but then a flashback to events when she was fifteen burst into her mind.

She’d been picking wildflowers in a high meadow above her grandmother’s homestead when a big, burly, smelly mountain man emerged from the trees. The ratty jumpsuit he wore identified him as a prisoner, most likely someone who had walked off a road crew. He
grabbed her and carried her off toward the trees, his talk nasty and promising rape.

Then, she’d used her intellect and her knowledge of the mountain to escape him before any real harm could be done her. Now, she didn’t know the mountain, but she still had her brain, and she’d learned a whole new set of survival skills during the past eight years. She could fight dirty when necessary.

The question remained whether or not this would be an instance of “necessary.” Only a handful of seconds had passed since he’d grabbed her up and begun toting her away from Lover’s Leap.

Away from the bag that still held some of her grandmother’s ashes and teetered precariously on the edge of the rock.

Just when she gathered herself to struggle, she felt her captor lean forward. Her body began to slip. Her butt landed hard on top of the picnic bench and she looked up into a pair of aviator sunglasses.

He stood well over six feet tall in a spread-legged, aggressive stance, wearing faded jeans and an unbuttoned blue-plaid flannel shirt over a tight white T-shirt. Reaching up, he lifted the sunglasses off a straight blade of a nose to reveal piercing blue eyes. But it wasn’t his movie-star good looks with those mesmerizing eyes, chiseled cheekbones, and sexy, five-o’clock shadow that made her mouth go dry.

The gun holstered at his waist managed that.