Page 73 of The Heiress

I had to force my brain to process, to keep up.Feet. Running.I stopped and put my hand on his shoulder, kicking them off. I was good on the balls of my feet and could probably sprint in these babies without a problem, but I knew for a fact that I could run in bare feet. “Let’s go.”

The man who stopped our dance stayed right with us and I could hear him on the phone telling someone where we were headed. My stomach began to churn from the combination of surprise, adrenaline, and nerves. Was it really necessary to chase me like this?

And if that was the case, if people were so hungry for this kind of news, what did my future look like? Was I now tabloid fodder? Six months from now would there be cover stories about how I was pregnant with alien babies (because I had been abducted by aliens and that was why I wasreallymissing all these years.)

Oh God. No.This couldn’t be my future.

But as we approached the hotel it was clear my worries were founded. A massive crowd stood outside The Sapphire with cell phones at the ready. There were some with more sophisticated equipment and I assumed they were reporters.

“Shit.” Jace snarled at the crowd.

“What do we do?”

We were sandwiched between the crowd following us from the park and the crowd in front of the hotel. If we kept going to some other location the crowds would just follow us. We could try to get to the car and drive, but they’d probably follow us then too.

Jace’s lips twitched and then his hand tightened on my hip. “We’re going through them. We just have to get into the hotel. We can hole up in our room while we arrange for added security.”

And then he was pushing me across the street right at the crowd. As we stepped up onto the sidewalk Jace pulled me fully against his body and pressed my head down, away from the cameras. I was scared. I admit it. Jace’s confidence was the only thing that kept complete panic at bay. He muscled his way through the crowd the way only a six-foot-four man made of muscle could.

“It’s her! She’s here!”

I saw the flashes, felt the crush around me. Someone grabbed at me. Jace used his weight to push them away.

“Back off,” I felt him say. The crowd was too loud for me to really hear much of anything.

Then someone wrapped their hands up in my dress and pulledhard.I gasped at the sudden change in direction, pain ripping across my chest.

I’m going to die.

The thought flashed through my mind so fast. As fast as the hands that stopped the inevitable. There was asmackand a shove and suddenly I was alone, standing right in front of the automatic door of the hotel, watching as Jace disarmed a man with a precision I’d only seen in movies about the military.What the actual fuck?

Which was more perplexing? That someone had agunor that Jace moved like he was trained to do that? It was a hell of a lot more than reaction, like with the knife. He had better moves than the cop standing agape beside me.

Jace shoved the gun at him and then grabbed me. Inside the hotel we were safe. Police buzzed in the lobby and the moment they saw us, they surrounded us.

“Samantha Rossi? Jace Malone?”

“Yes,” Jace growled while I nodded. I felt like a half-drowned cat. You know, the sad looking, soaking wet kind? I wasn’t wet, but I was covered in sweat. I probably had those big sad eyes too. I felt like they were never going to close again. I could still feel the stranger’s hands on me.

An armed police officer who appeared to be the man in charge approached us. “We’re here to keep the crowd under control.”

“And where the hell were you outside? She could have been killed!” Jace had no issues getting right in the man’s face and pointing an accusing finger at his chest.

“Why would someone want to kill her?” His eyes went round.

“How the hell should I know? Why don’t you ask the fucker I just disarmed outside?”

Officer James—I finally found and read his name on his vest—glanced outside at the cops cuffing a man on the ground.

But Jace wasn’t done. “She’s about to be the second richest woman in the country, the second most powerful, behind her mother. Of course she’s a goddamned target.”

It was clear Officer James thought this was just a slightly complicated crowd out to see the return of a missing child. A feel good story. He hadn’t grasped the magnitude of Victoria Roark taking her place on the throne of one of the most powerful companies in the hemisphere. “We’ll get this crowd taken care of immediately.”

26

Acalm fell over me. I woke up feeling like I’d run a marathon. Drained and hollowed out. Like I should probably spend the day in bed sleeping. But I also felt at peace. The truth was out and from here I could begin moving forward.

The world was fuzzy as I was escorted from the hotel by a full security detail. The car I rode to the airport in was armored.

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