Clamping my jaw together to keep from cursing aloud, I tried her cell again, to no avail. Then I checked the texts again to make sure I had the right place. I did. Maybe she was lost, had told me the wrong convenience store. Before I could make a decision on what to do, my passenger’s-side door opened. Thank goodness. I figured her car was stuck somewhere out in this tempest and she’d had to hoof it to the store on foot. But instead of my sister’s blond hair and slight frame climbing in, a large wet man crawled inside and closed the door behind him. After an initial period of astonishment, a jolt of adrenaline rushed through me in a delayed reaction I would later shake my head at in befuddlement.

Cookie was right. I almost get killed in the most unlikely places.

I jumped to open my door, but long fingers that could easily be mistaken for a Vise-Grip locked around my arm. The fact that I knew the survival rate of abducted women spurred me into action. I fought him with a few well-placed punches while groping for the door handle. When he jerked me toward him, I raised my feet over the center console and kicked. But he bound my legs within a steel-like arm and pulled me underneath him.

A large hand muffled the screams I’d let rip as he pushed himself onto me. His weight caused the console to grind into my back painfully, but I still kicked and squirmed and used everything I’d learned in the two weeks I’d lasted in jujitsu. No way was I going to make this easy for him.

“Stop fighting me and I’ll let you up,” he said with a growl.

Oh, now he wants to negotiate. I began my struggles anew, clawing at him and kicking. A primal instinct had taken hold, and I no longer controlled my actions. He forced my head back, leaned into me, and the sickening feel of a cold sharp object against my throat stilled me instantly. My senses came rushing back at a dizzying speed, along with the chilling reality of my predicament.

“Don’t stop fighting me,” he added in a husky voice, “and I’ll slice your throat right here and now.”

For an endless minute the only thing I heard was my own labored breathing. The flood of adrenaline coursing through my veins shook me from head to toe. The man was soaking wet. Cold rain beaded off him and dripped onto my face.

Then something familiar registered in the back of my mind. The heat. Though his clothes and hair were soaking wet and bitterly cold, a heat radiated toward me and I blinked in utter astonishment.

He rested his forehead against mine as if catching his breath. Then he moved his hand from my mouth to the back of my neck and lifted me to a sitting position. My legs were still draped over the console when he straddled my hips—an amazing feat in the cramped space—and placed the weapon against my throat again.

Looming over me, he seemed larger than life. I recognized the prison uniform underneath a pair of work coveralls, filthy and torn.

“I won’t hurt you, Dutch.”

The sound of my name, the name he’d given me, sent an electric charge rushing through every molecule in my body.

I stared at him as a flash of lightning illuminated the confining space, and looked into the deep brown eyes of Reyes Farrow. The realization stunned me. He had escaped from a maximum-security prison. Things didn’t get much more surreal than that.

He was shaking with the cold, answering a question I’d asked myself of him earlier. Though his gaze was laced with desperation, his actions screamed otherwise. He seemed very much in control, and something other than desperation was driving him. A fierce determination fueled his every move. I didn’t doubt for a moment his willingness to kill me if need be. He was super pissed at me for binding him anyway.

“Take the Jeep,” I said, unable to believe I was actually scared of him. Of course, he’d always been the only thing I was afraid of growing up. I just didn’t know it was him until recently.

His eyes narrowed. He hovered over me, allowed his gaze to roam over my face. I wanted to turn away but found it impossible. The things we had done over the past few weeks. The things he was capable of. And now I was sitting here with a knife at my throat, placed there by the very man who could make me scream out his name in my sleep. “It’s yours,” I said. “Take it. I won’t call the police.”

“I have every intention of doing just that.”

Somehow, this was so different from any other encounter I’d had with him. Different because it was him, Reyes Alexander Farrow, Rey’aziel, the son of Satan in the flesh. Aside from that morning, I didn’t have experience with this part of him, with a beast capable of ripping a man to shreds between commercial breaks, if the stories Neil Gossett told me were any indication.

When a burst of lightning illuminated our surroundings again, he glanced at his watch. Only then did I realize his muscles were tense as if in pain. “We’re late,” he said tightly, the barest hint of a grin lifting one corner of his mouth. “What took you so long?”

I drew my brows together. “Late?”

His smile faltered and he ground his teeth, leaned forward, and placed his forehead against mine again. I realized he was hurt. He went limp against me for half a second, as though he’d lost consciousness. With a jerk, he forced himself to attention. He grabbed the steering wheel for balance, then refocused on me.

In my mind, history was repeating itself. That night so long ago, a teenage boy went limp from a violent blow. He raised his arms in a futile effort to fend off the attack. The image brought back feelings of empathy, of a blinding need to help him.

I fought it. This was no teenage boy. This was a man, a supernatural being, holding a knife to my throat. A man who had sat in prison for more than a decade, being molded, tempered, and hardened by the hatred and anger that procreated in such places. As if growing up in hell hadn’t fueled such malevolence enough. If he wasn’t incorrigible before going in, he was sure to be now. I couldn’t allow compassion to intervene, no matter our history. Nice boys didn’t use knives to get girls. Maybe he really was his father’s son.