“Someone is going to have more than a feeling in his gut if I find he’s harmed Corbin,” I muttered. The rest of the ride was in silence, Holder confining himself to consulting the GPS unit on his Palm Pilot and giving me occasional directions.
“Game plan?” Holder asked, breaking the quiet as he directed me down a street. “His house should be the third one on the left.”
“The game plan is we go in, rescue Corbin, and call the police to haul Paul’s ass to jail.” I pulled into the driveway of a typical sixties housing tract rambler, staring at the blank windows for a moment as if they’d give me a clue to Corbin’s well-being.
“So in other words, no game plan.”
“Just that big ole can of whoop ass you mentioned earlier,” I answered, snatching the scimitar off the backseat. “Ready?”
He twirled his scimitar and saluted me with it. “Aye, aye, Captain. Lead on.”
“You know, I find it refreshing that you don’t want to take charge and try to protect me or any of that sexist crap,” I said as we marched up to the front door.
“I’ve been married far too long to have any false impressions as to the supposed frailty of females,” he answered with a slight smile. “My wife has a black belt. She can kick my ass all the way to Cleveland and back.”
“I like her already. Damn. Door’s locked.”
“You didn’t even knock,” he said, a slightly shocked look on his face.
“You don’t knock on the door of a kidnapper’s house,” I argued as I followed stepping-stones around to a wooden fence that surrounded the backyard. “Haven’t you ever watched Cops?”
“Wife won’t let me. She says it instills too many bad ideas of male dominance in my mind. Um. Amy, just playing devil’s advocate here. What if Corbin isn’t here? What if Paul isn’t the one moving Corbin’s money around?”
I opened the gate to the backyard, pausing to say over my shoulder, “Then I will apologize profusely to Paul and probably get charged with breaking and entering, which I won’t fight. But I don’t think that’s likely.”
“Nor do I, but I just felt like someone had to be the voice of reason here.”
“Shhhh. Eek!” A fat spaniel waddled out of a small dog-house on the edge of a cement patio, wagging its stubby tail like mad at me. I squatted down to give it a couple of quick pats, figuring it wouldn’t hurt to make friends with an animal that might send up an alarm, not that the old dog seemed to be the least bit inclined to bark. Holder paused to pat as well, then we ducked down under a couple of windows to sidle up to a set of French doors. I took a quick peek in the doors, then slid a cautious hand to try the handle, breathing a sigh of relief when the doors opened with a soft click. We found ourselves in a formal dining area.
“What now?” Holder whispered as we skirted the dining table.
I held up my hand to stop him, holding my breath to listen. The house seemed to be quiet, but it felt different from Corbin’s house. This house was not empty. I tiptoed to the opening to the hall, peeking quickly around it, then gesturing with the scimi for Holder to follow. The doors nearest me on either side of the hall were shut, but at the far end, one was tantalizingly half-open. I walked as silently as I could on the wood floor, taking a good, firm grip of my scimitar as I gently eased the door open.
The room had clearly been intended to be a master bedroom, but like Corbin’s atrium, this one was filled with computer equipment, the table directly across from the door holding an impressive array of computers. An empty computer chair sat pushed aside. On one of the computer monitors, a familiar financial screen was blinking slowly.
“Gotcha,” I said softly as I stepped into the room.
“Mmarfm?”
I spun around at the muffled voice, gasping at the sight of the bloodied man who lay bound and gagged, propped up against a metal filing cabinet. I ran to squat next to him, tossing down my sword in order to run my hands over him in an attempt to assess how badly he was injured. Holder was right behind me, doing a protective sweep with his scimi.
“Corbin! Don’t move, my darling. We’ll have you out of here in a second.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t count on that,” a familiar voice drawled from the doorway. I glanced over my shoulder to see a man who bore a faint resemblance to Bart leaning against the door frame. In his hand he held a gun. “You see, this time, I will win. And that means bye-bye Corbin.”
Chapter 29
Away to the cheating world go you,
Where pirates all are well-to-do;
But I’ll be true to the song I sing,
And live and die a Pirate King.
—Ibid, Act I
I am the first person to admit that there are times when my common sense takes a leap out the nearest window. This was one of those times. Rather than be concerned with the fact that Paul, a man who had absolutely no qualms about kidnapping, embezzling, and attacking people, stood before me handling a very deadly looking gun, I was furious over the fact that he had hurt Corbin.
“Just what the hell have you done to him?” I demanded to know, getting to my feet so I could stand in front of Paul, my hands on my hips, my jaw set in an aggressive manner. I prayed that Holder would realize that I was blocking Paul’s vision, and get Corbin’s hands untied. “What did you do, you bastard? Sneak up behind him like the dog you are and attack him when he was at his computer?”
Paul’s eyes lit with a fury that had me rethinking the wisdom of taunting a man with a gun, but I stuck to it, wanting to keep all of his attention focused on me rather than what Holder was doing. “Still the brash, foolish little spit-fire, I see,” Paul drawled in a fashion that left my palm itching to slap the smug look right off his face. “We’ll see how feisty you are after I’ve put a few holes in Corbin. As for your guess, it’s not quite accurate. I didn’t have to sneak up behind Corbin to crack him on the head. I arrived in his house a short while before he logged out of the game. If you two had stayed there a few minutes longer while I reinstalled my modifications, I wouldn’t have had to take such drastic actions, but I believe this will work out well after all.”
I deliberately closed my mind to the faint rustling noises behind me that indicated that Holder was removing Corbin’s bonds. It was vital that I keep Paul’s attention on me, keep him talking, until we could overpower him and beat the crap out of him. Or call the police, whichever came first (and I knew which one I wanted to come first). “So, this whole thing, your big elaborate plan with Bart and Renata—it was all about stealing Corbin’s money, not getting revenge by messing up his game?”
Paul laughed, an evil, nasty laugh like villains in the movies indulge in shortly before they order someone into a tankful of hungry sharks. “Don’t be stupid, Amy. Hasn’t dear Corbin told you how many years of my blood I’ve put into this game? Didn’t he tell you that I was the one who suggested bringing a simple Java script into virtual reality? Did he leave out the fact that I redefined VR in order to make it possible so that anyone running a home computer could access it? Did he neglect to tell you how many years of my life I spent making this dream, my dream, a reality, only to have it stolen from me by a man who saw only what he wanted to see? If no one told you this, then let me be the first—Corbin Monroe owes me. I’m not stealing anything. He owes me for all of his success. I’m only taking what is mine!”
He was yelling by the time he ended, making me take a step back despite my need to block his view of Corbin. A low grunt behind me, and a beloved voice put that need to an end, however.
“You were paid for your work on the VR environment, Paul. You seem to have conveniently forgotten that fact, as well as a few others including the very generous settlement that was made when you agreed to license the VR environment to us for the next ten years. You have been paid. We owe you nothing.”
I turned slightly to give Corbin a quick assessing glance, my mind taking a moment to adjust to the familiar image of the face that I had only before seen digitalized. He looked almost exactly th
e same as the Corbin I knew and loved—his face was a bit more gaunt, his jaw and chin covered in dark stubble, but his eyes were the same. Warm and bright despite his injuries, his gray-eyed gaze held mine for a moment before he moved to stand next to me. Blood streaked down his face from a stiff, matted section on the side of his head, but other than that, he seemed to be fine. Certainly the hand that took mine was strong and reassuring, his thumb stroking over the back of my hand in a manner that all but had me melting. He was Corbin, my Corbin, just the same as he had been as a pirate, and I wanted nothing more than to throw myself on him and cover his dear, adorable face with kisses.
“What do you think you’re going to do, Paul?” Holder asked, moving to my other side, neatly tossing a bit of cord that had been used to bind Corbin into a waiting trash can. “There are three of us and only one of you. You’re outnumbered, mate.”
“Oh, but this evens things up a bit, wouldn’t you say?” Paul answered, gesturing toward him with the gun. “As for what I’m going to do . . . I believe there will be a tragic three-way murder-suicide. Dear Corbin here is going to be distraught to the point of insanity when he finds out his lover here preferred Holder to him, and shoots both of them before blowing his own head off. I as mediator will have sadly failed in my attempt to reason with him, but I will serve as a sad witness to the tragedy that I could not stop.”
A chill ran down my spine at the sadistic light of enjoyment that glowed in his eyes. My fingers tightened around Corbin’s. He gave them an answering squeeze of reassurance. Just being in physical contact gave me a confidence that had been lacking the last few minutes.
“Sounds like something out of a movie of the week, but we’ll let that go. There is a major flaw in your reasoning, however,” I said.
“Oh?” Paul tipped his head to the side in a parody of curiosity. “And that would be what, Amy?”
“This is the first time I’ve ever met Corbin,” I said with a smile. “How on earth can we possibly be lovers if we’ve never met? Surely even the most gullible of police aren’t going to buy a story about a jealously raging Corbin when I am, in reality, a total stranger.”
Paul laughed again, and careful to keep the gun trained on all of us, sidestepped to the nearest computer. A couple of taps on the keyboard, and a video came up on the computer screen, showing a couple sitting naked on a bed.
“I know what it is. I researched all the food used here,” the man said, frowning at the woman as she held a bowl in front of her. “You’re going to eat now? I have the commute from hell, Amy. I don’t have a lot of time before I have to leave.”
The woman gave him a look that would have melted iron. “Oh, yes. I’m going to eat now.”
I gasped, not just at recognizing myself and Corbin on the computer screen, but at the horrible, skin-crawling knowledge that Paul had somehow used the program to watch us while we were making love. “You bastard! Stop it!” I yelled, moving forward to stop the computer. Corbin grabbed my arm and pulled me back as Paul leveled the gun at me.
“What’s wrong, dearie? Object to me making your little cyber-sex games with Corbin public? I’m afraid there’s no way to help that. It’s the proof I need to convince the police that not only did you have an intimate relationship with him, but also of his murderous intentions toward me.”
I looked at Corbin. “I want that hard drive reformatted the second the police grab Paul.”
“If not before,” Corbin agreed, his eyes twinkling at me.
“Are you doing what I think you’re doing?” Holder asked, trying to look around me at the screen. “Is that a fruit cobbler of some sort?”
“Holder!”
“Sorry,” he said, giving me an apologetic look. “My bad.”
“Extremely!” I agreed, glaring.
“If you three are finished, I’d like to get to the fun part where I kill you all,” Paul said, glancing at his watch. “I still have to transfer the funds from the Cayman Islands to my Swiss accounts, so if you don’t mind—”
“Now you’re the one being stupid,” Corbin told him. “You’re not killing any of us.”
“Oh, really?” Paul asked, looking amused. He pointed the gun at Corbin’s chest. “You seem to forget that I have the gun.”
“Yes, and I have this,” Corbin answered, pulling my scimitar out from where he had been holding it tight against his leg.
“Me, too,” Holder said, showing his. “Two against one, Paul.”
“Indeed,” Paul said, smiling. “Two swords against my Glock; how very frightening. Is anyone else here reliving that tragic moment on the sloop? It’s a remarkably similar situation, except, of course, that injuries here are not so easily ignored. That being so, I suppose I should follow the script and do something like this.”
He fired the gun at Corbin. I screamed and threw myself forward toward him, but Corbin yanked me backward, sending me crashing into the computer chair behind us as he lunged to the side. I was so involved with disentangling myself from the chair that I didn’t see what he was doing, but I heard Paul’s scream of rage and fury and smiled grimly to myself as I kicked the chair away from me. Corbin had skewered Paul’s right arm to the wall behind him, the gun dropped helplessly on the floor. Holder kicked it aside as he held the tip of his curved scimitar to Paul’s throat.
“Ha!” I yelled, getting to my feet to stalk forward. Blood was pouring out of Paul’s arm, but with Holder keeping the tip of his sword to Paul’s jugular, he clearly didn’t wish to tempt fate by trying to remove the sword in his arm. I got as close as I could and waved my hand toward Corbin. “We beat you again, you bastard! You missed him!”
“Er . . . sweetheart?” Corbin asked, slowly turning from where he had been facing Paul. His left hand was clutching his side . . . his blood-soaked side. “He didn’t actually miss me, I’m afraid.”
“Noooooooo,” I wailed, rushing to him, trying to pry off his hand to see his wound. “Goddamn it! It’s in the same spot where he shot you the last time! It’s never going to heal at this rate!”
Corbin started laughing, causing me to read him a little lecture about laughing while he was gushing blood from a gunshot wound, but I had to stop in order to call the paramedics and the police.
“Are you going to tell me it’s all mind over matter?” he asked ten minutes later as the paramedics loaded him into the aid unit. I didn’t release the hand I was holding, walking alongside him as he was carted out of the house. Behind us, police were hauling a bandaged Paul out to another ambulance. I ignored the obscenities he was screaming at us to focus on the only thing that mattered.
“Absolutely. You can do anything. You’re Black Corbin,” I said, allowing my love for him to fill my eyes.
“Excuse me, ma’am, but are you family?” one of the paramedics asked as I was about to climb into the back of the aid unit with Corbin. “I’m afraid only a family member is allowed to come with us.”
I opened my mouth to tell her what she could do with that ridiculous rule, but Corbin spoke before I could. “Yes, she’s family.” His eyes held mine for a minute, a wicked glint visible even through the pain dulling them. “She’s my wife.”
“I’m going to hold you to that, you know,” I whispered as I knelt beside him, brushing my lips over his in a quick kiss.
“Good. I was a bit worried that you wouldn’t like me in real life. I’m not nearly as exciting or dashing or any of those things that Black Corbin is,” he said, looking so endearingly unsure of himself that I ignored the paramedic attaching sensors to him to kiss him again.
“I love you, Corbin. I loved you in the game, and I love you out of it. It took a little bit for me to realize it, but now I know that I fell in love with your mind, not your body, and the real you, the you I love is the same no matter where it is. So stop worrying. You’re exactly the same person here that you were there—the perfect man for me, despite your penchant for getting yourself shot by ruthless programmers.”
He laughed, winced at the pain i
t caused, and pulled me down for another kiss. “And I knew you were the perfect woman for me the minute you beat me in that sword fight. If getting shot for you is what it takes to prove that I’d give my life for you, then so be it.”
“Don’t be so melodramatic, Corbin. I have many, many plans for you, and you’ll need to stay hale and hearty to satisfy them.” I was talking a lot more brave than I felt. Outside I joked lightly with Corbin all during the trip to the hospital, but on the inside, I was weeping, shrieking, and swearing eternal revenge on Paul if he had seriously harmed Corbin.
Luckily, I didn’t need to risk my own safety or sanity to seek revenge on Paul—the bullet that struck Corbin missed vital organs and exited without doing any major damage.
“Thank God,” Holder said as I burst into happy tears when the doctor came out of the emergency room to announce that Corbin was as fine as anyone could be who’d just been kidnapped, given a mild concussion, and shot in the side. “Now maybe you’ll stop making a list of all the things you’re going to do to Paul. I was getting worried when you started in with medieval tortures. It’s not easy to find an ironworker to melt lead for a really quality drawing and quartering anymore.”
“Can I take him home now?” I asked the doctor, focused on the only thing that mattered.
“Let’s give him an hour or two to make sure his vitals are stable, then, yes, he can go home.”
Home meant one thing to me—my home, something Corbin found out that afternoon when I pulled up outside my cute-but-uninspired little yellow and white house rather than his sprawling stuccoed beauty.
“You know, I have five bedrooms,” he said shortly thereafter, leaning forward slightly so I could stuff yet another pillow behind him. “More than enough room for everyone.”
“Wow. Do you have an indoor swimming pool? I’ve always wanted to have an indoor swimming pool,” Tara said from the doorway, where she’d been banished for getting in my way and bothering Corbin when he should be resting.