Ella waited by the window in her store, her eyes scanning the parking lot, waiting for Daniel’s arrival. For the past two weeks, he’d picked her up every night after closing and drove her home. Every night, he would spent time teaching her self-defense, showing her moves and getting her to perfect them until he knew she could handle them on her own.
When he was satisfied with her efforts, they would have dinner and then…oh my. Yeah, she loved the time after dinner. It was filled with love and laughter and so much pleasure she often went cross-eyed just thinking about their nights together.
As much as he taught her during the evening, the nights were her favorite lessons. He would show her a world she hadn’t known existed. The man was so raw, so carnal and adventurous…he made her blush. And then scream with happiness. The man knew how to make a woman more than satisfied in bed!
Ella fanned herself as she thought about last night. And this morning. “Cool it down, Ella,” she whispered to herself.
“Are you talking to yourself again, Ella?” Debbie called from the back of the store. Debbie loved to tease Ella about her new beau and all the sighing, blushing and daydreaming that Ella seemed to be doing during the days lately. “He’ll be here soon,” her friend said, putting an arm around Ella’s shoulders.
“I know,” she replied, still looking out the window. He was always here, always with a smile as soon as he spotted her.
She loved him.
Her silly, schoolgirl fantasies and grown woman dreams were wrapped up in the prime bundle of tall, gorgeous man in the form of Detective Daniel Warner. She loved the way he held her at night, the way he would snatch samples of food while she cooked and the way he played with her cats, even though he grumbled about them.
He was sweet and kind and so wonderful, it made her heart ache with the love she felt for this man.
Unfortunately, she had absolutely no idea how he felt about her. She suspected that he felt something for her, maybe cared for her. But she doubted that he had the same depth of feelings that she experienced every time she saw him.
That was okay, she told herself. She wouldn’t pressure Daniel for more than he could give her. He was a good man and if things were to…
She was rationalizing her feelings when a big, black SUV pulled up on the street. The same SUV that…
“Oh no!” Ella groaned and pushed away from the window. “He’s not going to get away with that! No way!”
Debbie was pulling a sweater on over her short sleeved shirt when she looked up, just in time to see Ella sprinting down the street. “Oh no,” Debbie groaned when she peered out to see what had captured Ella’s attention.
The other shop owners were all pouring out of their stores as well, knowing that their little dragon woman was going to put herself in danger.
“Well, well, well,” Dan Morgan said as he stepped around the corner of his black truck. “If isn’t the lovely little Ella who thinks she can…” he stopped in mid-sentence when he noticed the other shop owners surrounding himself and his bodyguards. “What the hell are all of you doing here? Go back to your shops and I’ll deal with each of you later.”
Ella shook her head. “I don’t think we need your protection, Mr. Morgan. I think you should just head on back to wherever you came from.”
Dan Morgan hadn’t ruled his crime ring with fear and exploitation of weaker individuals by backing down. “I don’t think you understand what’s going on, little lady.”
Ella was trembling, but she moved closer. Not close enough that the shorter man could grab her. Daniel’s self-defense lessons were ringing in her mind. “I understand,” she told him. She’d been working on a plan for just this kind of confrontation. “Murray!” she called to the shop owner.
“On it, Ella!” he said and moved closer. “We’re not paying you, Morgan,” Murray announced, standing side by side next to Ella.
Morgan’s beady eyes glanced at the two people. “You’re not paying? You sure about that?”
Ella left her hands hanging loose around her waist. “Mr. Morgan, from what I can gather, you’ve told each shop owner that we need to pay you a specific amount. In return, you are offering us protection against…” she tilted her head slightly. “What would you be protecting us from?” she asked with what might be considered a sweet smile.
Morgan’s sneer was fast. “Protection from broken legs, my little beauty.” His eyes skimmed down her body. “Or other things that beautiful women need to not have happen in their lives.”
Ella tried to hide her fear but it was hard. “I believe you just threatened to rape me.” She turned to Brian and Joe. “Did you guys both hear him threaten to rape me?”
All the shop owners nodded their heads. “I heard it,” one of them called out.
Dan Morgan chuckled. “And you all know that I follow through on my promises, don’t I, Joe?” he asked, his eyes on Ella initially, then turned to the older man who owned the hardware store on the corner.
Joe’s face was pale, but he glared right back at the man. “You sure do. I think you should stop threatening us, Mr. Morgan. Might not be good for your health.”
Dan Morgan snickered. “I think you should just pay up or your wife might not be able to walk next time. What about that?”
Joe’s eyes didn’t waver. “I’m done paying you, Morgan. I can’t afford it any longer. Not to mention, Josie has cancer. She’d dying so you can’t really threaten her any longer. She’s in the hospital.”
Morgan’s eyes revealed his surprise.
“Shame on you for not knowing that,” Ella said, shifting on the balls of her feet. “We all knew that. We’ve all been bringing Joe and his kids meals and helping out in his store so that he can get to the hospital to visit his wife.” She shook her head. “Not very good protection, I’d say. How much were you paying him, Joe?” she asked.
“Two thousand dollars a month.”
“Do you feel you’ve gotten your money’s worth? Is your family feeling protected?” she asked, still staring at Dan Morgan with contempt in her eyes.
“Not so much,” Joe called back.
Morgan sneered. “Still need to protect those kids, don’t ya, Joe?”
The others all stiffened and shifted slightly closer. Ella glared right back. “I believe you just threatened the lives of Joe’s children. Murray?”
“Yeah, Ella?”
“Did you hear Mr. Dan Morgan threaten the lives of Joe’s children?”
“I sure did!” Murray said, crossing his arms over his beefy mid-section. “I heard it too,” someone called out. “I heard it,” another announced.
Ella continued to watch the man. “Sounds to me like you’re running an extortion enterprise, Mr. Morgan. Isn’t that illegal?” she asked with a smile.
Dan Morgan moved closer, his guards behind him reaching into their coats. “Yeah. I think you’re finally catching on, little girl!” He reached back with his hand. “Now get out of my way! I have business to do! I’ll deal with you later!”
After their last confrontation, Ella was fully prepared for what he did next. When he swung out, she grabbed his wrist, just like Daniel had trained her to do. With a flick of her wrist and the man’s own momentum, he was flat on his back, staring up at the sky with the hard cement under his head. “I don’t think I want you to slap me today, Daniel Morgan.”
She’d obviously knocked the man’s breath from his lungs with that fall.
Then things got really bad. There were shouts and calls from her left and right. She looked up, not sure what was going on. One moment, she had the man down on the sidewalk, the next moment, he was standing up, a knife to her throat while Jim, her Magnificent Detective Daniel and several uniformed police officers surrounded the crowd.
Ella could barely breathe but she wasn’t going to look at Daniel. If she did, she knew that she would panic because he would be worried about her. She had to keep calm, she knew what to do and how to handle this. Daniel had been thorough in her training and she wasn’t going to let him down now.
“Let her go, Morgan!” Daniel called out, badge showing and pistol pointed right at Morgan.
“Not gonna happen!” Morgan roared backwards. He could see that his bodyguards were now pinned to the ground by the other officers but his eyes shifted left and right, looking for an escape route.
“Let her go. There’s no way out of this.”
Ella tripped as Dan Morgan moved backwards, still holding a knife to her throat. She felt the blade prick against her skin and prayed that the knife hadn’t broken the skin. She wasn’t worried about the pain. She just didn’t want Daniel to worry about her.
“Daniel?” she called out to him.
“What?!” the man behind her snapped.
Ella almost laughed as she realized that the man of her dreams and the man of her nightmares had the same first name. “Not you, idiot!” she growled, her fingers clawing at his forearm. “Him!” she said and pointed briefly to her hero who was still not letting her out of his sight.
“Ah hell! Girl, don’t tell me that you’re in love with a cop!” Dan Morgan snarled.
“I am. And he’s in love with me, right?” she smiled to towards Daniel.
“Right you are, honey. But why don’t you be quiet Ella and let me handle this?” Dan was having a hard time not looking at Ella’s face. He knew she was probably scared out of her mind and he had to focus on the knife, on saving her life.
Ella laughed. The woman laughed!
Surely Daniel had misheard her. Surely his lovely, beautiful and very sweet Ella had not laughed while a crazy man held a knife to her throat.
“You’ve been so good to Rocket and Tummy, Daniel. I don’t want you to think our nights have been wasted.”
She could feel the man behind her sneer. “Oh, so you and the detective are friendly, eh? Good. Then this will hurt even…”
Ella closed her eyes, lifted her elbow and, without any warning, twisted the man’s thumb backwards. She didn’t stop. Not for anything. Even during his screams of pain, she continued to bend. And then, when the man was bent over, she pulled her foot back and…
Wham! As hard as she could.
With Dan Morgan whimpering on the sidewalk in a fetal position, Ella dusted off her hands and turned to face the man she loved. When he continued to just stare at her, his mouth hanging open and his gun hand looking a little less firm than before, she lifted her eyebrows in question. “Well? Are you going to cuff him or just stand there staring at me?”
Daniel jerked upright, still too stunned for a moment to do anything. But then he shifted into gear and moved forward, kicking the knife out of reach and grabbing the man’s hands, pulling them behind his back.
“We got him, didn’t we?” she asked, a hopeful grin on her face.
Daniel looked up at her, his hands shaking as he lifted the man to his feet then signaled to a uniformed officer to take over.
“Ella,” he groaned as soon as his hands were free. “Ella,” he whispered again when he pulled her into his arms. “Don’t you ever do anything like that again!” he whispered into her hair.
She wrapped her arms around his waist and that was all it took. Her bravado deserted her and she sank into the warmth and security of his arms. The trembling was more than she could bear and Daniel had to lift her into his arms, carrying her into Brian’s diner. With her on his lap, he just continued to hold her, soothing her with words, telling her that it was going to be okay.
The other shop owners moved into the diner, all of them beaming with relief that their Ella was okay, but also that the man had been caught. “You’re going to need this,” Murray said, handing a memory stick to Daniel.
He took it, looking at it strangely. “What’s this?”
Another men held out an SD card. “You’ll also need this,” he said.
Daniel took the card, palming both of them in his hand. “Okay. But what’s on these?”
The shop owners chuckled. “It was all her idea,” Murray said. “She had everything in place. I was in charge of recording the conversation while Marjorie snuck up into the abandoned apartment up above Joe’s place, videotaping the whole thing. We did both, just in case one or the other failed.”
Brian smacked his hands together. “And we were all supposed to come out as witnesses too. So you’ll need to get statements from everyone. We all heard his threats. We have it recorded and then we all saw him try to kidnap and kill Ella. What do we do now?”
Daniel stared at each of them over Ella’s head which was still tucked up close with her nose buried in his neck. “Um…,”
One of the officers walked in to the diner. “I think we have more,” the officer said to Daniel. “Remember the briefing this morning that a huge stockpile of weapons and cocaine was heading this way?”
Daniel’s heart thudded in his chest. “Yeah. Please don’t tell me that it’s in the guy’s truck.”
The officer nodded his head. “Oh yeah. It’s all in there. Money, drugs, weapons…the back of the SUV is packed up to the roof.” The officer paused with a huge grin on his face. “We can cite him for traffic violations as well.”
Daniel felt rather than heard Ella’s snort of laughter with that announcement. He tightened his arms around her though, since she was still trembling like a leaf in a hurricane. “Thanks guys. Jim will take your statements. I’m going to get Ella home and make sure she’s okay.”
The others immediately separated, giving him a pathway to get out of Brian’s diner.
It took Daniel only ten minutes to get her back to her apartment. He parked and then walked over to the passenger side door. After opening it, he lifted her right back into his arms. She was still trembling, but it wasn’t as bad as before.
When they were in her apartment, her nose buried in his neck again, he sighed, relieved that she was in his arms and whole, but he was still angry with her. Unfortunately, he couldn’t yell at her because…well, because.
“You okay?” he asked, moving his hand up and down her back.
“Yes. It’s over, right? He can’t come out and threaten any of us again, right?”
Daniel thought over the evidence she’d gathered on the man. “Yeah. I think it’s pretty safe to say that the man is going away for a while. Drugs, weapons, tax evasion from all the money in his truck, extortion, kidnapping, attempted murder…”
Ella pressed herself closer to him. “Don’t forget the traffic tickets,” she reminded him.
Daniel laughed softly. “Right. We can’t forget those.”
He felt her warm breath sigh against his neck. “I knew you would get there in time Daniel,” she told him.
Her arms were relaxing, telling him that she was recovering. “I’ll always be there for you, honey.”
“But you know what this means, right?”
She pulled back and looked at him. “What does it mean, love?”
She leaned into him again. “You don’t really mean that, do you? It’s okay if you don’t love me. I understand.”
Daniel laughed, not sure he was following this conversation well enough. Of course, after the scare of seeing Ella’s beautiful neck with a knife to it, he wasn’t sure of anything at the moment. He might never recover from seeing that!
“You don’t love me, Daniel. And that’s okay.”
He sighed and tightened his arms around her for a moment. “I love you, Ella. I love you so much that it hurts. And if you ever do anything that stupid again, I’m going to lock you in a room where I know you’ll be protected forever.”
Ella laughed, feeling his words pierce right through to her own heart. “I love you too,” she whispered and kissed his neck.
“I love you, Ella.”
She looked up into his wonderful, blue eyes. “I did all the moves exactly right, didn’t I?”
Daniel shuddered, thinking of his fear when she started to move, that knife so close to her skin, her neck…important arteries. “You did everything right, Ella.”
“You know what this means, then.”
Daniel shook his head. “That you’re going to marry me?”
She froze. “Marry you?” she whispered.
Daniel reached into his pocket, not easy since she was sitting on his lap. When his hand emerged, a diamond ring was pressed between his fingers. “Marry me, Ella. I want you for the rest of my life. I want to grow old with you, but after today, that might be sooner than I’d thought.”
Ella couldn’t believe how beautiful the ring was! “Daniel! This isn’t…I wasn’t...”
He kissed her gently. “Just say that you’ll be my wife.”
“Yes!” she gasped and threw her arms around his neck, hugging him against her as the tears slowly fell down her cheeks.
“Oh!” she gushed when she pulled back and looked at the ring again. “Does this mean you’re going to teach me to shoot a gun?” she asked hopefully.
Daniel groaned, kissing her so that she couldn’t ask any more questions.