Authors: Penny McCall
He climbed off, removed his helmet, and met her eyes. She felt the connection all the way to her toes. Actually, it lodged at some strategic places in between, places that were already missing the bike’s stimulating vibration. But her toes were definitely feeling it, too. Or maybe they’d just gone numb and it was only the pins and needles of returning circulation.
She needed some food and downtime. And to get off the damned bike. As soon as she’d planted both oversized boots on the potholed pavement, Jack flipped her the drive-thru bag. She practically staggered under the weight of it.
“Feels like there’s enough here to feed an army.”
“That’s Jack, a one-man army.” Harley appeared out of the darkness behind them, from the escort motorcycle Aubrey had forgotten about. “But I figure he might just have met an enemy he can’t exterminate.”
Aubrey digested that a moment and decided to take it as a compliment. “Thanks.”
Harley nodded. She took Jack’s helmet and secured it on the second bike, did the same with Aubrey’s on the bike they’d just climbed off. And without another word, she swung her leg over the seat, gunned the motor, and the two cycles took off leaving them alone, at the crack of dawn, in a cutthroat neighborhood of a strange city. On foot again.
Jack set off walking without looking back, clearly expecting her to follow. He really should have known better after four days, she thought, smiling. She trotted enough to catch up so she could walk beside him.
“I hope we’re not going very far, because these boots are too big and I don’t want to get a blister.”
“Quiet.”
Aubrey sighed, shifting the food bag. She should have known that would catch Jack’s attention. He stopped and took it from her, pulled out something that smelled like heaven, unwrapped it, and bit in.
“Can I have one of those?”
“No vegetables on it,” Jack mumbled around a mouthful of food, “unless you count the peppers. You eat one of these and your skinny arteries will block up and you’ll drop dead.”
“I don’t care.” Aubrey snatched the sack, dug out a loaded breakfast burrito and took a huge bite. “Oh my God,” she moaned, “this is amazing.”
“Can’t you do anything without making noise?”
“No.” Aubrey fielded the look he sent her, completely aware of where his gutter brain had taken him. She handed him the bag back. And when he took it and jammed his hand inside to dig out another burrito, she said, “Quiet.”
Jack’s only response was to pick up the pace.
“Why can’t we stop here?” Aubrey asked when he bypassed the driveway of a motel that stretched lengthwise back from the road, individual outside entrances in front, an alley in back. It was called the Short Stop. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out why.
“I wouldn’t think this fleabag place lived up to your standards.”
“I don’t care if it has real fleas. I’m getting horizontal and I’m staying that way for the next twelve hours. And I’m doing it alone.”
“All I want is sleep,” Jack assured her sourly. He turned down the narrow alley behind the motel and went all the way to the end unit. When he crouched over the doorknob, Aubrey crowded up close behind him.
“If you’re going to give me a hard time about breaking in, you can save it.”
“I was going to offer to help. I could use the practice. But what happens if they rent this room to someone else for the night?”
“In this neighborhood they rent by the hour.”
“That makes the place so much more appealing.” The door swung open. The cloud of warm stale air, despite being uninviting, was at least reassuring.
“Nobody’s stayed here in a while,” Jack said, “but if anybody shows up at the door, we can claim it was a mistake and take off when they go back to the office to straighten it out.”
Or demand another room. That’s what Aubrey would have done. If they were paying for it.
Unfortunately, their needs came under the heading of “any port in a storm.” This port had carpeting so old it was worn through in places, and the original color probably wasn’t dirt gray. There was no table, no chair, no television and no phone. What there was was a bed, and it had seen a lot of action. Judging by the dips and sags, not a lot of that action had involved sleep.
“Can I get rid of the leather?” she asked.
“It kind of goes with the place,” Jack said.
“It doesn’t go with me.”
He shrugged. “Get rid of whatever you want. No, not that light,” he said when she reached for the lamp by the door. He dropped the food bag on the end of the bed, went to the bathroom door, and flipped that switch, giving the room a soft glow that wouldn’t be visible through the heavy, lined curtains, unless someone looked really close.
“We should talk this thing through,” he said, “but frankly I’m too tired.”
“For once we agree on something.”
“Good, get in bed.”
Aubrey took another look at the bed with its dingy spread and decided she wasn’t tired enough to risk it. “I’ll take the floor.”
Jack picked her up and dumped her on the bed. She didn’t bounce, not a good omen for her chances of spending a comfortable night. And then there was Jack, looming over her with a red nose and eyes just this side of black, the pain of a headache brewing behind them.
“You look like hell, Jack.”
“I’ve spent the last four days with Satan,” he said. He rested one hand on the bed at her side, then a knee. Then he flipped her over onto her belly.
It took some real effort not to laugh. Jack thought he was menacing, and sure there was a bit of fear. But it was the kind of fear that spiked her pulse and gave her a nice little rush, all the while she knew she was absolutely safe.
Until Jack pulled Harley’s switchblade and raised it above her. Aubrey scrambled for the edge of the bed. Jack planted a hand on her butt and slashed down. She shrieked, slamming her arms over her head. There was a tug at her waist, but no pain. Then a tug at each thigh and calf, and his weight disappeared.
She looked up, cautiously, saw Jack flip the knife closed and stick it into his back pocket.
“You wanted to get rid of the leather,” he said, circling the bed and sitting down to pull off his boots.
Aubrey sat up. The chaps stayed down, looking like the truncated lower half of a murder victim. Her heart rate mirrored her posture, shooting up without there being any fear involved—okay, there was fear, but it was the good kind of fear. The stimulating kind. “Dammit, Jack.”
“You swore.”
“Being around you has made me understand the attraction of it.” She stood, unzipped her jeans.
“What are you doing?”
“That’s kind of obvious, isn’t it? I can’t sleep in jeans.”
“You take them off, neither one of us will be sleeping.” His voice had dropped into the back of his throat, his breath was shallow, his eyes were glued to her zipper.
Flattering, Aubrey thought, that she could put him in that state just by unzipping her jeans. But there was no need to cover all the reasons sex with Jack would be a bad idea. The only thing she needed to remind herself was that recrimination lasted a lot longer than an orgasm.
“You need to learn some control, Jack.”
Before she finished the sentence he was around the bed and had her up against the wall, his knee between her thighs and his mouth a breath away from hers. “Control?” he said, eyes dark and angry on hers. “Remember the motorcycle?” He dropped his mouth to her neck, and that mouth was hot. So were his words. “The vibration of the motor,” he said, his voice a rasp of sound, his lips a rasp of heat against her skin, “the way it brought you to the brink and kept you there, mile after mile after mile.”
Her breath wheezed out and her stomach went hollow, her brain flashing back to the ride from Charlotte. Somehow her T-shirt was up around her armpits and his mouth was at her breast, just touching the lace, which wasn’t doing her a whole lot of good. She leaned forward, encouragingly, but he didn’t take the hint.
He kissed her instead, which was progress, even if it felt like just another tease. There was no hard chest smashed up against hers, no big, rough hands touching her in interesting places, even his thigh was gone. He didn’t put his body into that kiss, but it was a pretty good replacement for the motorcycle, getting her all revved up, with the promise of more than an erotic dream. If having his tongue in her mouth was that good, she could only imagine what it would be like when he was inside her—“Hey.”
He’d ended the kiss; now he took a step back. And grinned.
“That’s it? You kiss me like that and then . . . nothing? What is that, Jack?”
“Control,” he said. “You might want to try it.”
“I can control myself,” she said, her eyes drifting down to the front of his jeans, sporting the kind of bulge clothing manufacturers had in mind when they designed blue jeans for men. “For instance, I bet I can get through the whole night without thinking about that knife in your back pocket.”
That wiped the smile off his face. “We need to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice.”
She zipped her jeans back up, pushed away from the wall, and lay down on the bed. There was some satisfaction in the way Jack hesitated before he took the other side. Unfortunately, it was the only kind of satisfaction she was going to get.
She was lying on her left side, looking at a stucco wall festooned with dust and cobwebs. If she’d been in her own bedroom, there’d be white bead board on that wall—cobweb-free—and an armoire. If she’d been in her own bedroom the rest of her bed would’ve been empty. The last man who’d done a sleepover at her house was Tom Cavendish, and that was over a year ago, before . . .
It all came crashing back, the car chases, the shooting, the motorcycle. Jack.
He must have been really tired because he slept like the dead, right down to the corpselike silence. Trained himself to be as quiet while unconscious as he was the rest of the time, Aubrey decided. It should have made getting back to sleep easy, but it weirded her out.
It didn’t help that he was draped over her like two hundred pounds of dead weight. Made it pretty difficult to convince herself that this was all a nightmare, and if she could just get back to sleep she’d wake up and discover she was in her own bed, alone, instead of a cheesy motel in Atlanta, Georgia, with a man who gave new meaning to the word “chauvinist.” And “pigheaded.” And “unforgettable.” Not that she’d ever stood a chance of forgetting the last five days.
Sometimes she hated her memory as much as Jack did. It ensured that she got invited to just about every party in Washington while leaving her a social outcast. She felt like the bearded lady at the circus sideshow, entertaining to spend a bit of time with, but not a gene pool the average man wanted to dip into. And now the damn memory had dragged her into
this
?
Tears of self-pity burned her eyes and a lump of anger lodged in the pit her stomach. What had she done to deserve this? she wondered. She was a good person, a hard worker, friendly to people, dogs, and law clerks.
Okay, so her life was boring and uneventful, no family to speak of, no close friends, a job that nearly put her into a coma most days. So she’d wished for something or someone to come along and liven things up. But not a death threat. Not Jack Mitchell.
Not this growing feeling of sympathy with him!
Sure, she argued for form’s sake. She couldn’t have him getting the idea that she appreciated getting dragged out of her life and nearly exploded out of her home. Her job and her house were all she had. She didn’t think Jack was dumb, though, they were just operating under incompatible philosophies. Aubrey was comfortable with that. The scary thing was that she’d begun to think he was right about Pablo Corona.
Corona might be a drug kingpin, but he wasn’t all that different from the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. No one got to that level of success, honest or dishonest, by making mistakes. If Corona had information labeling her a threat to his organization, chances were good that she was a threat. And if Corona had taken out a contract on her life, then Jack Mitchell had stood in front of her, in the path of death, more than once in the last five days.
Aubrey only wished she knew what his real motivation was.
He claimed to be doing this for himself. That part she believed. What she had a hard time buying was Jack, driving aimlessly around waiting for her to remember some tidbit of information out of the millions of things she’d heard and read over the past whenever. She couldn’t be Jack’s only hope. He had to have some plan in mind. They weren’t just going to wander around, ducking hit men forever like some strange scenario that should be accompanied with a voice-over by Rod Serling.
When she heard the faint tinkling notes of the
Twilight Zone
theme, it took her a few seconds to realize it wasn’t background music for the current strangeness. It was her cell phone, muffled by the backpack.
She tried to ease out from under Jack’s arm and leg, but the mattress thwarted her. She’d managed not to think about the amount—or the type—of usage that accounted for the drastic sag in the middle. But each time she moved the thing creaked and groaned like, well, like one of its usual patrons giving it her all.
She was thinking the path to freedom might involve grease and a pry bar, but somehow she managed to escape the bed with a minimum of sound effects, and without the need for an explanation, since Jack was still doing his corpse imitation. She grabbed her backpack and raced into the bathroom, fumbling her phone out while she closed the door.
“Hello?” she whispered.
“Aubrey?”
“Tom! How . . . When—”
“I’ve been trying to reach you for days. I’ve been worried sick about you.”
Aubrey rolled her eyes, but at least the familiarity of Tom’s complaining made her brain stop spinning. “I’m okay. For the moment.”
“I can barely hear you. Can you speak up?”
“No. Hold on.” She eased the door open a crack, sure she’d heard a noise from the other room. Jack was still sleeping in the same awkward position she’d left him, half slumped over on his stomach in the trough in the middle of the mattress. She shut the door and put the phone up to her ear again. “Jack—”
“You’re still together? Where is he?”
“In bed—”
“You’re sleeping with him?”
Aubrey snorted. “Who’s slept?”
“Oh.”
“Tom. People are trying to kill us. We’re not sleeping because we’re busy running for our lives!”
“Okay, okay, keep it down.”
Aubrey lowered her voice again and reminded herself that none of that was Tom’s fault. Except the jealousy. “My Focus is in the middle of a river. I spent the night outside. In the woods. Sex is the last thing on my mind.” Even if her body frequently had other ideas—especially lately. “This is the first time there’s actually been a bed.”
“I get it.”
She didn’t believe that for a second. Tom had a one-track mind. But she’d made her point. “Jack told me Corona had my cell phone cancelled.”
“So that’s what happened,” Tom said. “When I couldn’t get through I called the phone company and they told me your phone had been cut off—”
“Tom.”
“—and only you could have service restarted. I used the congressman’s name—”
“Tom.”
“—and managed to get your phone turned back on. It took me a couple days longer than it would’ve taken him—”
“Tom! Could we focus on me?”
“Oh. Right.”
She could all but see his face fall, and it gave her a moment of guilt, but it was mild guilt and she got over it pretty fast. So Tom’s feelings were hurt; her life was in danger. She won . . . sort of. “Did the congressman find out anything about my situation?”
“You need to get away from Mitchell,” Tom said.
“We’ve covered this ground before. How am I supposed to do that? He took all my money, and he has friends everywhere, and—”
“And he’s a mole, working for Corona.”
“I already know that.” Because Jack had told her.
“Listen to me, Aubrey. Mitchell was assigned to infiltrate Corona’s organization so he could work from the inside. Somewhere along the way he changed sides and began working for Corona.”
She didn’t say anything, which would have made Jack happy. For Tom it was the same as disagreeing with him.
“You don’t believe me, do you?”
“I know what you’re saying is the truth, Tom, but Jack has been protecting me from Corona’s hit men.”
“Yeah, but is he protecting you to save your life, or so he can take you to Corona himself? Delivering you would cement his place in Corona’s organization, Aubrey, whether he’s working for him or for the government.”
“Are you saying . . . do you mean that at best Jack is willing to sacrifice me if it brings him closer to shutting Corona down?”
“It’s a possibility that has to be considered. There’s no telling how many others could be saved by putting Corona out of business, and a lot them would be kids.”
It was a possibility that made her nauseous. She collapsed onto the toilet, hoping like heck she didn’t need to employ it for other uses because her legs were pretty wobbly. But then, those other uses would have her on her knees anyway.
“You need to get away from him.”
“Getting away isn’t the problem. Staying away is. No matter what I do, I can’t get far enough fast enough to keep him from catching up to me.”
“Where are you?” he asked.
“Atlanta.”
“Perfect. Do you remember when we were there?”
“Yes.” And there was a mental picture, complete with sound effects, that she could have lived without.
“Can you get to the bus station?” Tom asked. “There should be a phone book in the room—”
“There’s not even a phone.”
“They’ll have one at the office. Just rip the page out and take it with you.”
“I don’t think I’ll have a problem remembering it, Tom.” Getting there would be another story.
“Oh. Right, sure.”
“What good will the bus station do me anyway? Jack took all my money.”
“There’ll be a ticket waiting for you.”
“Do you think that’s smart? Won’t they be watching the bus station?”
“They’ll be looking for a man and woman traveling together. Try to change your appearance. Put your hair up or something, wrap a towel around your waist, stuff cotton balls in your cheeks.” Tom Cavendish, master of disguise.
She’d done her best to avoid it, but Aubrey looked in the mirror. Tom wouldn’t recognize her if he saw her. Tom would be shocked, and she didn’t mean the thong and the leather chaps. Her hair was a mess of curly frizz, her makeup was smeared, and she looked as tired as she felt. But it wasn’t any of those things, either. It was inside. She wasn’t the same woman she’d been a few days ago. The changes were almost too numerable to list. And not all of them were good.
“You need to get moving,” Tom said, startling her back to the need to deal with the situation and lament its effects later. “I’d come for you if I could . . .”
“Thanks, Tom, but it would only put you in danger, and there’s no point in that.”
“You know I’d do anything for you.”
Aubrey sighed. “I know.” She hoped she didn’t have to take him up on that offer again. She was already going to owe him for the bus ticket. And she’d have to do some fast talking to get him to accept money.
Aubrey left the biker leathers behind, including the boots. She had a feeling shoes that fit and were made for running might be her best option. Running could definitely be in her immediate future, considering what she’d seen of the neighborhood.
She gathered her backpack and jacket, stuffing the phone in her back pocket in case Tom called her again. Then she took a deep breath and tiptoed toward the door, eyes on Jack the entire way. She made it across the room without witnessing so much as a big toe wiggle. From what she could tell Jack was barely breathing.
The person she was having trouble with was herself. She eased the door open and stepped out onto the concrete stoop. But when she tried to shut the door, her arm refused to cooperate, and her brain wasn’t doing anything to solve the problem. Her brain couldn’t seem to pick a thought and stick with it.
She’d been wanting to go back to D.C. from the start; she knew it was the right step to take, but closing that door between her and Jack seemed kind of final. Part of it was probably self-defense; it was easy to be brave with Jack there to back her up—or stand in front of her.
But what if Jack was right about everything? What if she was walking right into the hit men’s hands, and the next time she saw D.C. would be never? Maybe she should stick with Jack.
Surprisingly, her brain wasn’t alone in that opinion. Other parts of her wanted to stay with Jack, and not just the horny ones. She was feeling something for him. It wasn’t exasperation, and it wasn’t desire, and it wasn’t gratitude. And since she wasn’t ready to give it a name, she decided not to dwell on it. Jack wouldn’t let his feelings—if they ever crept above his waist—affect his decisions. Neither could she.
She had a plan, and the means to carry it out, thanks to Tom. All she had to do was believe in herself.
She pulled the door shut, quietly but firmly, then headed around behind the place like they’d done last night. Sure, she had to battle back a small panic attack, but she was on her way. She approached the office as though she were coming in from the road. Innocent, not a woman who’d spent most of the day squatting illegally in the end unit.
She could have saved herself the trouble. There was no attendant in the office. He was probably off having dinner. Or maybe a quickie. There was a phone book, however. It was old, and it had fallen victim to people without her mnemonic skills, but Aubrey didn’t figure they’d moved the bus station in the last few years. She found its address, and the motel’s, and a map on a page about chiropractors that showed both locations, not very far apart.
But when she turned for the door, there it was again, that pesky hesitation, the little voice in her head that kept second-guessing her decision. She rolled her eyes and hefted her backpack. She only had to walk a few blocks to Memorial Drive and catch a city bus to the Greyhound terminal. There was a weak moment when she channeled Jack, jeering at her for hanging a neon target on her back, but she only balled her jacket around her backpack, took a deep breath and barged through the office door before she had time for any more mental ping-ponging.