The Hostage Bride Read Free

father as they hadleft the house had been deliberately planned. It had been organised by this man to coincide exactly with their appearance, to keep her father occupied just long enough to get her into the car…
    Dad!
    The word formed in her brain but she was too shocked, too stunned to be able to voice it. Instead she could only watch in despair as the car accelerated again, the distance between them increasing even more. Then with one last twist of the wheel they rounded a bend in the drive and the house and her father disappeared from sight.
    She was on her own, she realised fearfully. Completely on her own with this unnerving, frightening stranger.
    And it was when they turned left at the bottom of the drive, in the opposite direction to the way they should have headed for the church and her wedding that she really began to worry.

CHAPTER TWO
    â€˜J UST what do you think you’re doing?’
    Giving into panic was quite the wrong approach, Felicity told herself. Okay, so she had been badly thrown for a minute there, but really there was no need for that. This wasn’t the nightmare it seemed. No, there was simply some mistake, that was all.
    â€˜I said… Oh, can’t you just slow down a bit?’
    Had he even heard her? The solid, square set of his back seemed impervious as a brick wall and, with his face turned firmly in the direction they were travelling, his eyes on the road ahead, there was no way she could even read his expression or judge if she was getting through to him.
    â€˜You’re going the wrong way!’
    No response. Not even a flicker of a glance in her direction, not a turn of his head. If anything, his grip seemed to tighten on the steering wheel and the car engine roared again as the speedometer needle crept up.
    Scrabbling frantically, Felicity managed to inch the glass panel open just a little bit and lean forward with her face close against it, her mouth in the open space.
    â€˜I said, you’re going the wrong way.’
    She tried to make the words sound as clear and definite as possible. After all, she was forgetting that he wasn’t English—what was he? Spanish? Perhaps he just didn’t understand what she was saying. Perhaps the few sentences he had spoken had been the full extent of his English, for all that they had been spoken with such apparent ease.
    â€˜Listen to me! You’re…’
    Frantically she scrabbled about in her memory for thescattered remnants of the minimal Spanish she had picked up during a holiday there a couple of years ago.
    â€˜V-vaya—el camino malo,’ she managed, knowing it was far from grammatically correct but at least it expressed what she meant .
    Unbelievably, that beautifully shaped mouth twitched, twisting into a faint smile of mockery at her stumbling attempt at translation.
    â€˜Voy el camino correcto,’ he shot back at her. Then, confounding her foolish belief that he hadn’t understood a word she had been saying, he added sardonically, ‘I am on precisely the right road. It’s just not the direction you expected to be travelling in today.’
    And while she was still gaping in stunned disbelief he added curtly, ‘But wherever we’re going, if you’re sensible you’ll sit back and fasten your safety belt. Right now the way that you’re behaving is not only dangerous, it’s against the law and—’
    â€˜Against the law?’
    Felicity couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
    â€˜Against the law? You—you’re— abducting me —and you’re worried about breaking the law on seat belts ? Why, you…!’
    With a desperate effort she managed to push the dividing window open just a little bit more and get her hand through, banging her fingers down hard on his shoulder.
    â€˜Stop this car at once! Stop it, I say!’
    When he made no response but simply focused his dark-eyed gaze on the road ahead, she resorted to the