Authors: Linda Howard
And later, she’d had other worries. Would her mom’s boyfriend of the moment try to shove his hand between her legs when her mom’s back was turned? She’d tried, just once, telling her mother about it, only to be told that she was just like her fucking father and to stop lying. After that, she’d become an expert at avoiding her own home whenever any of the boyfriends were there, and to climb out her bedroom window in a flash if any of them showed up after she was already home. By the time she was twelve she was a master at evasion, at hiding, at getting away.
She’d gotten away, all right, but she’d never been free—until now.
The future stretched before her, not a future without worry or troubles, but a future undogged by Rafael and the fear that he’d found her. At first all she could focus on was the sense of freedom, the bone-deep relief that she wouldn’t have to spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder or offering herself up as bait to set a trap for Rafael.
By the time she showered and dragged her weary body to bed it was after three, but she couldn’t shut her mind off and go to sleep. Too much had happened in such a short length of time; she’d gone from the sheer terror and exhaustion of her struggle with Simon to bewilderment to lust to relief to joy, bouncing from point to point without enough time at any one reaction to even begin to absorb what each one meant to her life from now on.
She lay awake in the darkness, staring at the ceiling and reviewing everything that had happened from the time Simon first grabbed her. Other than her relief at being free of Rafael, Simon was uppermost on her mind.
He put her in a quandary, representing the most potent temptation that she could face. She would never be indifferent to him. If he crooked his finger at her and said “Come with me,” she had no confidence that she wouldn’t do exactly that—somehow she’d have to find the strength to resist him. He was a paid killer; hooking up with him wouldn’t, by any definition, be keeping to the straight and narrow. The hooking up wasn’t the problem, though she couldn’t even think of sex now with anything other than caution, because she’d screwed up so bad in that department before. He was the problem. Who and what he was, everything about him, was the problem.
She had the sudden thought that she should turn him over to the cops, and dread immediately knotted her stomach. She didn’t know if she could do that to him, even though it was the right thing to do. Then she realized that, not only did she not know any of the specifics and therefore couldn’t tell the cops anything that would be of use, what little she did know had taken place outside the country. She didn’t even know what country or countries he’d been in, though she supposed the authorities could find out just by looking at his passport, assuming he didn’t have more than one passport, which she was fairly certain he did. After all, he made a living slipping undetected in and out of countries.
He’d bulletproofed himself, she realized, at least as far as law enforcement in this country went. He was safe from arrest because there was no known crime that could be laid at his feet. Even if she could provide specifics, the cops would likely find no evidence that he’d been out of the country at that particular time.
Turning him in would accomplish exactly nothing. Tears of relief stung her eyes when she realized that. She didn’t want to turn him in; she didn’t want him to spend the rest of his life in prison. Maybe she should, but she wasn’t a saint, and she’d have to be to so totally ignore her own heart.
Further muddying the waters for her was the fact that, although murder was supposed to be the ultimate no-no, altogether he seemed like a far more decent human being than any of the scum her mother had dated. On the scale of badness, which weighed the heaviest, murder or abuse?
The law said murder. But, damn it, there were some people who didn’t deserve to live, and it stood to reason that if a drug lord hired Simon to kill someone, that someone was likely a rival drug lord. How could that be a bad thing? Anything that depleted their numbers had to be good for humanity. Was it bad because Simon made the kills for money rather than out of any notion of bettering the world by lowering its scum-to-human ratio? Motivation couldn’t be everything, because there were a lot of people who, with the best of intentions, did a world of harm.
This wasn’t something she was going to figure out in an hour, and she was too tired to keep worrying at the details. The good news was that she didn’t have to do anything right now. She didn’t have to decide anything about Simon, and she didn’t have to do anything about Rafael. She was free to—
Her thoughts hit a dead stop. Rafael.
So, just because she was safe, it was okay to let him continue as always, importing the drugs that wrecked people’s lives, the drugs that addicted and killed, and getting monstrously rich in the process? Just because she was safe, she had no obligation to do what she could to put an end to Rafael’s operation?
No. The answer in her gut was immediate and emphatic. She had more of an obligation than anyone else on earth, because she had lived off that money, benefited from it, and because she was in the unique position of not only knowing Rafael as well as she did, but she was the one person on earth whose presence would goad him into doing something stupid, something that could give the cops a solid charge to hang on him.
She had to do it. No matter what the risk, this was something she had to do.
Her thoughts circled back around to Simon. He now felt obligated to protect her, which could play hell with any plans she made to poke a figurative stick in Rafael’s eye. She didn’t want Simon involved in this; it was her debt, her obligation. How he would see the situation, however, was something else entirely.
Would he try to stop her? Beyond a doubt. Even worse, she suspected that he usually succeeded at whatever he set his mind to. She didn’t have to stretch her imagination at all to see him holding her captive somewhere, or whisking her out of the country so she couldn’t get to Rafael.
Same old song, different verse: she had to get away from him.
Reassured that she wouldn’t run, he’d relax his guard, she thought. Maybe not right away; he was wily and suspicious, and he might watch her from a distance for the next couple of days. So she’d hang around, make a few preparations, lull his suspicions until he felt safe in leaving. She had no way of knowing exactly when that would be, but he was human; he might be tougher and smarter than most, but he was still human, and he still had to eat and sleep and pee just like everyone else. He had to occasionally let his guard down. With luck, even if he was still hanging around, she could be on a plane and gone long before he realized she wasn’t there.
He’d be able to track her; so far, he’d seen through every move she made, every step she’d taken to change her appearance and identity. She had no hopes that he’d suddenly turn stupid and she’d suddenly turn into a talented escape artist, but all she needed was a couple of days’ head start, maybe not even that long, and she would be in New York.
She would contact the FBI. Rafael had to be under almost constant surveillance, and surely the feds were frustrated by their inability to put together a solid case against him. Surely the agent in charge would jump at the opportunity to use her in some way.
Once she was in the FBI’s hands, she would be beyond Simon’s reach.
WHEN HE GOT TO HIS HOTEL ROOM, SIMON BOOTED UP HIS laptop and checked her location, just to be certain he’d convinced her she was safe and she wasn’t already on the road running for what she thought was her life. Good—both the Explorer and her cell phone were where they were supposed to be, and stationary, so the odds were she was in bed. He set the program to send a message to his cell phone if the locators began moving, just in case she tried to pull a fast one.
He’d like to be there with her, but when he kissed her he’d felt a reserve on her part that said she wasn’t going down that road with him again, at least not yet. He didn’t like waiting, but he would—for a while, anyway. He’d raised patience to an art, honing it into a form of weapon as he outwaited both man and nature in the hunt for each target, but now that the veil of secrecy between him and Andie was down, his instincts told him to move fast and hard. She had gotten by in life by making herself pleasing to men, by submerging her own needs, her likes and dislikes, and mirroring back only what the man wanted to see. She needed time, yes, but she also needed to be wanted for herself. She needed to be courted, pursued, the tables turned; she needed a man to curry her favor.
Patience was just another form of persistence. Maybe that meant he was a bastard for not getting out of her life and leaving her alone, after all he’d done and all the pain he’d caused her. So what? He’d rather be a bastard and have her, than be a gentleman and let her get away.
If she hadn’t responded to him at all he’d have dealt with the loss and left her alone, but she’d been all but squirming in her chair, and he knew enough about women to know she’d been remembering how it had been between them. He knew enough about her, gleaned from the afternoon they’d spent together, to know how she looked when she was turned on. She wanted to be indifferent, but she wasn’t, any more than he was indifferent to her. He’d wanted to be; he’d wanted to forget her as soon as he walked away from her. For the first time in his life, that hadn’t happened. He dealt in reality, not in roses and wishes, and what was between them was real—unexplored, undeveloped, but real.
Reassured that she was staying put, at least for the time being, he got out his first-aid kit and carefully disinfected the bite wounds in his arm, then sprayed the area to numb it. The analgesic was only topical, but it took enough of the edge off the pain that putting in the stitches didn’t bother him. He’d had splinters that hurt worse. After he dabbed an antibiotic on top of the stitches, he slapped a couple of adhesive bandages over them, then carefully repacked the small kit, taking note of which supplies needed to be replenished. The first-aid kit went everywhere with him, and had possibly saved his life a couple of times. In the tropics, an open wound, no matter how minor, could fast become life-threatening.
Then, yawning, he popped a couple of ibuprofen before stripping off his clothes. Turning out the light, he sprawled across the bed. His phone would signal the arrival of a message, and wake him, if she decided to make a run for it, but he was fairly certain she wasn’t going anywhere tonight. If she had anything in mind, she’d probably try to fake him off by staying put for a few days. She was sneaky, but he was sneakier. He went to sleep knowing that, for now, things were under control.
ANDIE SLEPT LATE—big surprise there—and finally stumbled to the kitchen for coffee at half past eleven. She had a headache, maybe from the adrenaline crash, or maybe she just needed a dose of caffeine. She was usually out of bed around eight, giving her time to do her chores or errands before going to work, so she was about three hours past the time she usually had her first cup of coffee.
She took two aspirin, then took her coffee into the living room. Turning on the secondhand television she’d bought, she curled up in the corner of the sofa, at the moment not wanting to do anything more than sip her coffee and wait for the aspirin to start working on her headache. She watched a little of the noon news, enough to learn that more thunderstorms were expected that afternoon, then, despite the coffee, she nodded off again.
Two sharp raps on her front door woke her. Maybe it was the neighbors, she thought sourly, belatedly concerned enough by all the banging around last night to find out if she was all right. She could certainly hear them thumping around, so she knew they should have at least heard when she knocked the chair over. But had anyone checked to see if a burglar had broken in, or anything? If she’d heard the same noises from their side, she’d have at least beat on the wall and yelled to ask if everything was all right.
She paused before unlocking the door, raising a slat of the blinds and looking out. She found herself staring straight at Simon, because he stood square in front of the door. Her breath wooshed out of her lungs at the impact of his physical presence, sort of like looking out and finding a large wolf standing there. His gaze met hers through the glass, and he lifted his brows as if to say, Well?
Dismayed, she let the slat drop and stood there for a minute, trying to decide whether or not to open the door. She’d hoped he had already left town. What was he hanging around for? What else was there to say?
“You might as well open the door,” he said through the wood. “I’m not leaving.”
“So what else is new?” she grumbled, turning the lock and pulling the door open. He came in, a smile ghosting around his mouth. “What?” she demanded, pushing her sleep-mussed hair out of her face. She hadn’t even dragged a brush through it yet, and she didn’t care.
“I came to see if you wanted to go out for lunch. I guess not,” he said with a faint undertone of amusement.
Andie yawned and turned back to the sofa, pulling her legs up and tucking her bare feet under the cushions. She was still wearing her pajama bottoms and T-shirt, so, no, she wasn’t going out, for lunch or anything else. “I guess not,” she echoed, frowning at him. “I haven’t had breakfast yet. Thank you for asking. What do you want?”