Kidnapped / I Got You Babe Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Excerpt

  Kidnapped?

  Dear Reader

  Books by Jacqueline Diamond

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  I Got You, Babe

  Dear Reader

  Books by Bonnie Tucker

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  Copyright

  Kidnapped?

  If you are going to distract a gangster, you must take advantage of any opening.

  So Melanie tightened her grip on Hal’s neck, feeling a delicious thrill at being held so elegantly by a deadly killer who shuddered when she blew in his ear. Then she pressed her lips against his. His mouth was hard and hot.

  Before she could make a strategic duck, the man did not have to maneuver far to progress from kissing her mouth to trailing his tongue down her throat.

  She had to admire the Iceman’s grace. With the litheness of a dancer, he shifted her position so her body arched toward him.

  No wonder he had been able to land three wives. He had probably consummated their marriages while still kneeling with a ring in his hand.

  But this was not what Melanie had had in mind. She’d planned to give him the slip!

  I Got You, Babe

  There was no doubt Nick had changed, matured.

  Potent virility had replaced his boyish handsomeness. There was only a faint trace of the youthful guilelessness that had so attracted her to him in the first place. Nick had grown into a rugged, virile man. All muscle and radiating heat. The air crackling around him was worldly and experienced, not naive.

  His dark brown hair still came below the collar, and even though he had brushed it back off his face, strands fell across his forehead. His eyes, though, hadn’t changed at all. They were still the very deepest blue and, against his tanned skin, very intense.

  If Diana ever had any doubt before why she had been so caught up in a memory, she had none now. Nick Logan radiated potent male sexuality. She had been caught in his web when she had been sixteen, more deeply entrenched at eighteen, and now at twenty-four, had no desire to escape. She wouldn’t doubt that other women had felt the same way and were hanging off him everywhere he went. Like the one hanging off his arm.

  The little girl.

  Little girl?

  Nick’s baby? No. Yes.

  Kidnapped?

  Jacqueline Diamond

  Dear Reader,

  Although I used to be a news reporter like my heroine, I never managed to get swept away to a mysterious island by the most feared hitman in Las Vegas.

  However, during a break in the Watergate hearings, I did hide my camera in my knitting bag and sneak onto a private island off Newport Beach, California, where I waylaid H. R. Haldeman, who was trying to take a nap.

  As I tried to pull out my camera and got it tangled in my knitting, he said politely, “Sorry, but if I talk to you, I’d have to talk to all the other reporters.”

  Well, it didn’t exactly count as a scoop. But considering that I was several thousand miles from Washington and therefore at a distinct disadvantage compared to Woodward and Bernstein, I think I deserve some credit.

  Books by Jacqueline Diamond

  HARLEQUIN LOVE & LAUGHTER

  11-PUNCHLINE

  32-SANDRA AND THE SCOUNDREL

  HARLEQUIN AMERICAN ROMANCE

  642-ONE HUSBAND TOO MANY

  645-DEAR LONELY IN L.A…

  674-MILLION-DOLLAR MOMMY

  687-DADDY WARLOCK

  763-LET’S MAKE A BABY

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  1

  HAL “THE ICEMAN” Smothers was given to grand romantic gestures.

  So far they had netted him three wives—now of the ex variety—as well as one broken arm and a lawsuit. There was also an interesting scar on his left shoulder where a certain object of his affections had put a bullet through it

  She had been the wrong woman for him. He could see that now.

  They had all been the wrong woman. But this time, he would not fail.

  Until now, true love had passed him by. But if he had to wrestle Cupid to the ground and blacken both of his eyes, Hal intended to nail the little pest once and for all.

  “So,” Hal said one morning in September while playing golf with Louie “the Swamp Fox” Palmetto. “If you wanted to take a lady someplace from which she could not easily escape, where would that be?”

  Louie, a sharp-toothed man with the worst complexion Hal had ever seen, even on a gangster, was a good man to ask this because he owned his own fleet of airplanes. His planes were renowned worldwide for their ability to fly below radar.

  “I dunno,” he said, positioning his ball on the tee. “Would this lady be a certain socialite of our mutual acquaintance?”

  “Certainly not!” Hal squinted into the sunlight charbroiling Las Vegas. The sun was particularly close because they were standing on top of a twenty-seven-story building. “The socialite that you have mentioned is someone I hold in high regard and would never abduct. However, she has asked me to remove a certain obstacle from her path, and I have agreed.”

  “As a sign of your affection?” hazarded Louie, who knew Hal and his romantic gestures all too well.

  “In a manner of speaking.” Hal hated to admit to anyone, even the Swamp Fox, the depth of his appreciation for Margarita “Rita” Samovar, the aforementioned socialite.

  At thirty-six, Hal wanted a wife and, especially, children, more than he had ever wanted anything, even to be completely accepted as a member of Chester “Grampa” Orion’s crime family. And the wife he wanted was Rita.

  It was neither her raven-dark hair nor her intermittent British accent that appealed to him. There were two deciding factors.

  One, she had a three-year-old son from a former marriage. This proved that Rita was not only fertile but willing to temporarily dislocate her figure, which had not been true of his previous wives.

  Hal told his friends that he wanted children because you can’t trust anyone the way you can trust family. The truth was, he found kids fascinating and funny, and he could hardly wait to get down on the floor and play with them.

  Also in Rita’s favor was that she had recently come into several substantial inheritances. Hal did not need her money, as he had managed to amass a large personal fortune in spite of being mostly an honest businessman. However, it meant she should have no need to sue him for an outrageous amount if, by some grave miscarriage of Cupid, they became uncoupled.

  The only people who had ever robbed the Iceman and gotten away with it were his three ex-wives. This was beginning to hurt Hal’s reputation.

  If another woman pulled the same stunt, he might be forced to remove her from the visible world. Therefore, he
must choose a wealthy woman who need not risk such a fate.

  The Swamp Fox paused in the middle of lining up his swing and eyed Hal dubiously. “Let me see if I understand this. To win Rita’s gratitude, you are prepared to kidnap some other dame and stash her away?”

  Put that way, it did sound odd. What Rita had actually said about Melanie Mulcahy was, “You want to impress me? Get rid of her.”

  Hal had been shocked by this. To tell a fellow called the Iceman to get rid of somebody could be interpreted as meaning in the permanent sense. This was not a ladylike request.

  On the other hand, Rita was a social butterfly who raised money for Rescue the Whales. She was entitled to a weakness or two.

  Besides, according to Rita, this Melanie person was a writer of some sort, press releases or poetry or something, who earned extra income from the whaling industry for disrupting Rescue the Whales charity events. A person like that deserved to be stopped.

  “Yes, you understand correctly,” he said. “Where would you recommend that I take her?”

  “Anywhere but Paraiso de Los Falsarios,” said the Swamp Fox, naming an island that belonged to their mutual acquaintance Arthur “Drop Dead” Cimarosa. The island’s name was Spanish for Crooks’ Paradise.

  “Why is that?”

  “Rita’s whale-watching cruise will be passing off-shore,” said Louie. “Although this blockage persona would not actually be thrown into her path, it is possible that Rita might glimpse her from the boat and be offended.”

  “I will take this advice under advisement,” said Hal, and ducked as his friend finally stopped procrastinating and gave the ball a gut-crunching whack.

  It was much too hard a whack for a ball being hit atop a twenty-seven-story hotel-casino belonging to Chester “Grampa” Orion.

  Grampa, who had had a fixation on privacy ever since he caught the FBI trying to bug his bathroom, had built himself this private golf course three years ago. For safety purposes, he’d initially tried using whiffle balls, but the building had a distressing habit of swaying, not to mention that, at this altitude, the balls blew up and hit Grampa in the mouth.

  At long last he’d reached the conclusion that the only possible means of scoring a hole in one with a whiffle ball on top of a skyscraper was to play on an unusually calm day with the assistance of an earthquake that rolled east to west. Grampa switched to real golf balls.

  A high mesh fence managed to snare most, but not all, of them. The general public remained unaware of the situation, but the valets at Grampa’s Emporium had taken to wearing football helmets in the hotel colors of black and blue.

  The ball arched skyward, clearing the mesh fence by a good six inches, and curved down toward the parking lot in a brilliant arc.

  “Four to one it gets a Lexus,” said the Swamp Fox as they hurried to the fence.

  Hal had also seen that there were a large number of these cars in the parking lot today. “I am not taking your odds,” he said.

  “Too bad,” said the Swamp Fox as they reached the fence. Each grabbed a pair of binoculars, which were hung there for the entertainment of golfers, and focused on the lot below.

  Louie got his adjusted first. “I am glad you did not take that bet. I got one car jockey and a woman in a red beret.”

  Ricochets were rare but not unknown. Few were so foolish as to bet on them.

  Although the valet’s helmet must have deflected most of the force of the ball, the woman in the red hat lay sprawled on the pavement as if disinclined to move. This provided Hal with the opportunity to reflect on the fact that he had agreed to golf with Louie here today because he was watching for this very woman.

  Melanie Mulcahy, according to his sources, had been scheduled to meet someone downstairs for brunch half an hour ago. The red beret was her trademark.

  Apparently she had been stood up or her date had given offense, because she was leaving earlier than he had expected. Hal would have volunteered to teach a lesson in manners to this unknown, rude luncheon companion, but the fortuitous coincidence of Melanie Mulcahy being knocked into the twilight zone had just solved a key problem for him.

  “Gotta go,” he told Louie.

  His companion watched Hal’s tall, sturdy figure stride toward the elevator. He smiled to himself, even hummed a little something from Evita about money rolling in.

  After the elevator went down, Grampa Orion strolled from his penthouse apartment. He was a large man with small eyes, thick eyebrows and a roseate nose. At eightyfive, Grampa moved with a jaunty step, ever ready to dance the tango or dodge flying lead.

  “Well?” he asked the Swamp Fox. “Do you think he suspects anything?”

  Louie shook his head. “Not a chance, Grampa. The man is too smitten with this dame Rita. Also, I warned him away from Paraiso, so we do not have to worry about him showing up there.”

  “Good,” said Grampa, picking up a pair of binoculars and peering at the crowd gathering in the parking lot below. “We would not want the Iceman to lose his temper with us, now, would we?”

  MELANIE MULCAHY AWOKE with such a headache. Keeping her eyes shut, she sniffed the air, but detected neither smoke nor gunpowder.

  If what had hit her was a bomb, it had gone off some time ago. By now, the entire war might be over.

  “Did I miss another one?” she asked.

  “Another what?” asked a deep baritone that was probably male. She thought about looking, but decided she wasn’t quite ready to let light crash into her eyes.

  “War. Bomb. Whatever.”

  “Golf ball,” said the voice.

  “In the middle of Las Vegas?” Now that she thought about it, Melanie recalled that she had just been stood up by a source. This particular individual, the owner of a pawnshop, had claimed to have information about a series of jewel heists at charity events that Melanie was investigating.

  The last she could remember, she had been crossing the parking lot outside Grampa’s Emporium, which wasn’t near any golf course. And then…blackness.

  Vaguely, she had the impression that someone had roused her, poked her and taken her blood pressure, and that she must have gone back to sleep.

  But why was this room rumbling and quivering as if about to perform an unroomlike act, such as moving? Perhaps, she thought, she was not lying in a room but in a vehicle.

  “Where am I?” demanded Melanie, and did two foolish things. She opened her eyes, then sat up.

  Fireworks sputtered and spat directly into her brain. Melanie’s head throbbed all the way down to the base of her skull.

  Some merciful soul clapped a bag of ice over her forehead and eased her so that she was propped against the arm of a couch. “I hate this,” she said.

  “You will need at least a week for rest and recuperation. Do you feel nauseated?”

  “Should I?”

  “Only if you have a concussion. But the doctor did not think so.”

  “The doctor?” She blinked, trying to make out the man sitting beside her on the couch. At first she thought her vision had blurred, and then she realized the room was jolting again.

  It was a narrow, rectangular room, plushly but stiffly furnished with a velour couch, a corner desk and several velvet chairs bolted to the floor. The walls were covered with dark red paper embossed with roses, heavy drapes blocked the windows and a small bar had been built into one corner. The place reminded her of an old time railroad car, but there was no passenger-rail service to Las Vegas anymore.

  “The house doctor at Grampa’s Emporium inspected you,” said her companion, answering a question Melanie had almost forgotten asking.

  “How long ago?” she asked.

  “A couple of hours,” said the man.

  “You haven’t answered my first question,” she said. “Where am I?”

  “In the care of someone who wishes to preserve you from a dangerous situation,” said the man she now recognized as the most feared mobster in Las Vegas.

  Hal “the Iceman” Smothers.
Via the grapevine, Melanie knew that he had a spotless reputation. This meant that every one of his victims had disappeared without leaving so much as a spot.

  Since retiring from the thug-disposal profession, he had built the Ice Palace Hotel, an establishment whose revenue per square foot exceeded that of any other casino in Las Vegas. He was obviously operating a front, but no one had been able to figure out for what.

  It was a situation fraught with possibilities. Melanie might have to change her plans. Besides, at the moment, she couldn’t remember what her plans were.

  Shifting the bag of ice to shore up the side of her head, which was threatening to blow out, she did her best to assess this gangster who was regarding her with such tender concern.

  He was strongly built, even muscular, which might be expected in a former hit man. She knew the guy to be in his mid-thirties, not very old for having achieved such distinction, although being only twenty-eight herself, she considered he was getting up there.

  The weird thing was that, from this angle, he didn’t look half-bad. He had a full head of brown hair and matching brown eyes. His face was squarish with a thin white scar above the right eyebrow and an indentation in the left cheek that might have been another scar or maybe a confused dimple.

  Her attention kept returning to those powerful shoulders, which looked constrained beneath his silk jacket, and that broad chest, and the little twist to his hips that indicated he knew how to dance. Given his propensity for winning wives, he must be a pretty good lover, although he obviously wasn’t such hot stuff as a husband.