Rules of Protection (Tangled in Texas) (Volume 1) (8 page)

A sign pointed to the restrooms. “Excuse me, gentlemen. I’m going to go the ladies’ room.” I needed to throw up.

Jake rose, as if he were going to follow.

“No need to get up. I can plainly see where the bathrooms are,
sweetie
.” I made sure to add some syrup to my voice.

He set his jaw and gave me a one word warning. “Emily…”

“I’ll be right back. I promise.”

The quick glance he gave his watch told me he’d be timing me. I could feel his eyes burning into my back as I strolled away. Man, no trust at all in this fake relationship.

The bathrooms were down a short hallway on the opposite side of the restaurant. I kept an even pace, afraid if I hurried, Jake might think I was making a run for it and tackle me again. And I was tired of ending up on the floor.

The tidy bathroom smelled pleasantly sanitary. I got straight to business, then washed and dried my hands thoroughly. Though I had been in the bathroom only three or four minutes, I imagined Jake having a small panic attack as he waited for me to come back. The thought made me smile. I turned to leave, but instead let out a blood-curdling scream.

Seconds later, I heard Jake on the other side of the door. “Emily? Are you in there?” He tried the door, but the door locked from the inside.

“Oh, my God! Jake, help! Please!”

“Emily, open the door!”

“I can’t!”

“Damn it, Emily!” Jake pounded on the door. “What in the hell is going on in there? Open the door!”

I grabbed a weapon, but there wasn’t much to choose from in a bathroom. “He won’t let me!” I cried.

“Shit. Emily, I’m coming in.”

I heard a loud bang as he kicked the door in, splintering the wood. Jake and Junior stood in the doorway as it swung on its hinges. Jake rushed in, pointed his gun around the small bathroom, and saw me holed up in the corner by the sink, holding a toilet brush.

“Where is he?”

“Behind the door!”

Jake looked at me strangely but checked, anyway. He holstered his weapon, stomped his foot, and stormed out. Junior stepped in and peeked curiously behind the door.

He turned back, his face serious. “You’re damn lucky he didn’t kill you.”

“The big ass spider?”

“No. Jake. Of course, he still might once I tell him he owes me a new door.”

…

There were no clocks on the wall in the restaurant. It didn’t matter, though, because Texans seem to keep their own time. Guess it goes well with their lazy drawls. Jake hadn’t said two words since he’d walked out of the bathroom. We finished our meal in silence and left as quickly as possible.

The late afternoon sun had faded fast, and a dark, glittery curtain blanketed the sky. I watched out my window as a black wall of trees whizzed past.

“Still mad?”

He gave me a frosty look. “No.”

“You sure?”

“Not entirely.”

I sighed lightly. “I didn’t mean to—”

“You never mean to. That’s the problem. We need to establish some basic rules. You know, like never cry wolf.”

“Why are you so insistent about following rules all the time?”

Jake shrugged. “They keep people from doing stupid shit.”

I wasn’t sure, but I thought he was referring to me. “You mean like not warning someone before pretending she’s your girlfriend?”

His mouth twitched with a tiny smirk.

“Want to explain?” I asked.

Jake glanced at me. “Don’t freak out, okay? You and I are posing as a couple.”

“What?” I shrieked. “That’ll never work. Nobody’s going to buy that when all we do is fight.”

“Most couples argue.”

“Not like us.”

“We’ll say we’re passionate about each other. My uncle and aunt know the truth about you, but I don’t want anybody else to know. We’re staying in their guesthouse in the middle of the forest. It sounds better to say we’re a couple while visiting.”

“A guesthouse in the forest? Sounds fancy.”

“It’s got a pool.” He smiled as if I missed a private joke.

“Who all knows where we’ll be? FBI and U.S. Marshals?”

“No one. Last night, in the motel, I called Brockway while you washed up. I didn’t tell him where we were heading. He wasn’t happy about that, or that I disposed of the tracking device.”

“Why?”

“The Bureau doesn’t look kindly on disobedience. Or their agents stealing key witnesses.”

“You didn’t
steal
me. I didn’t have a choice but to go with you.” I smiled when he glanced over at me. “Okay, maybe it sounds like the same thing. But you protected me, which I thought was the whole point of witness protection.”

“My methods are unconventional. The FBI and the U.S. Marshals are not being supportive. Instead of winging it, they’d rather I had gone through the proper channels.”

“Yeah, but that almost got us killed.”

“True, but…never mind.”

“Tell me.” I waited, but he didn’t say anything. “Come on, Jake. You can’t start to say something and back down.”

“Brockway thinks my motives are strictly personal.”

That got my attention. “So is he right? Is this personal?” My heart surged at the thought.

“You can bet your ass it’s personal. Frankie Felts will pay for everything he’s done if I have to kill him myself. One day soon this will all be over.”

Not that I wanted him to kill anyone, but Jake’s words made me feel secure. He was serious about making Felts pay. “I hope so.”

“Emily, I know it’s hard to be isolated and cut loose from your own life. You feel caged in, but you don’t feel safe.” Jake glanced over at me. “Even after this ends, you’ll always be looking over your shoulder.”

“How do you know?”

“Because when I was younger,” he said, looking back at the road, “I was in your shoes.”

Chapter Six

Jake turned off the highway just past a sign marked
Liberty County, Texas
and veered onto a county road. “It’s not much farther to my uncle’s.”

I gave him an incredulous look. “What’d you say?”

“I said it’s not much farther—”

“No, not that. The other thing you said.”

Jake kept his eyes on the road. “What?”

“The part where you said you’d been in my shoes before.”

“It’s not important. I wanted you to know that I understand what you’re going through. I’ve been there. I know it’s not easy.”

“What happened? Why were you—”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Jake, you can’t say something like that and not tell me the rest of the story.”

“Just forget it.”

Quietly, I wondered what possibly could’ve happened to him that he would’ve needed witness protection when he was younger. The mystery was enough to drive my imagination wild. I let it go for the time being, but Jake had to know I wouldn’t give up until I found out more. You can’t dangle a carrot in front of this bunny’s nose unless you want me to run away with it.

But I let it drop. Temporarily.

I thought the county road would go on forever, but finally we came to an intersection in the shape of a T. The sign across the road read
Trinity River Flood Zone
. I looked over at Jake, but he was too busy turning left to notice.

“Flood zone?”

“Yeah, don’t worry. My uncle said the river’s down right now.”

“Where’s this forest you keep talking about? All I’m seeing is fields and pastures.”

“Just ahead, a few roads over, where the tree line starts.”

“Are you sure you know where you’re going?”

“Of course, I do. It’s easy. All I have to do is go left. It’s eight lefts to my uncle’s house.”

“If you go left eight times, we’d be going in circles.”

Jake laughed. “That only applies if you’re talking about a city block. This is the countryside. Trust me when I say you can take eight lefts and not end up crossing your own trail. Look at it like a spiral rather than a square, as if we’re circling our way into the forest.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

Jake crossed over some railroad tracks and veered left. There were more fields than houses, no streetlights, and the road got narrower by the minute. About five miles down, a fork in the road came into view, but Jake stayed left. At another stop sign, he swung another left, then continued down the road.

“See? Four lefts and we haven’t crossed ourselves yet.”

“Doesn’t mean we won’t,” I said doubtfully.

We slowed down as we crossed an old one-lane, barrel-style bridge, then picked up speed until we neared the next curve. As we rounded the sharp left curve, Jake slammed on his brakes as two white-tailed deer darted across the road before us. I clutched my chest and drew in a deep breath.

“Scared?”

“I thought they weren’t going to get across before you creamed one. Why don’t you drive slower, Mario Andretti? This isn’t a race, and I’m in no hurry to die.”

“Everyone drives like this back here,” he replied. “You’ll get used to it.”

“Please slow down. The trees are right at the edge of the road. I have enough people trying to kill me without the car reaching out to hug one.”

Begrudgingly, he did as I asked. A few more miles up the road, he curved to the right sharply, then took another left.

“You went right back there,” I said with a smug grin. “Guess it’s not all lefts.”

“Doesn’t count.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s a curve. No other way to go.”

“Yeah, but…”

“Doesn’t count,” Jake repeated.

“You always make up rules as you go along. Like you saying no family reunions, then heading to your uncle’s house.”

“Those were
your
rules, not mine.”

After the next left turn, I spied an old pickup truck sitting on the side of the road with its headlights shining on two men as they strolled out of the woods carrying a rope and a shovel. It was the first sign of life I’d seen in the last twenty minutes. The men reached the front of the truck and stood in the headlights as we passed. I craned my neck to get a better look.

One of them had no eye in his right socket, while the other stared straight at me and gave me a toothless snarl. They were filthy, as if they’d been rolling in dirt. It reminded me of something out of
Deliverance
.

“Jesus,” I told Jake, swallowing a knot in my throat. “What the hell were they doing out there at night?”

“No telling. Probably hunting.”

“With a rope and a shovel? I don’t think so.”

Jake grinned but didn’t take his eyes off the road. “After this turn, I have to slow down.

“No! Keep going.”

He chuckled. “Oh,
now
you want me to drive faster.”

“Well, I sure as hell don’t want you to slow down. Those creepy guys might be coming this way.”

“Emily, I have to. Bonnie walks this road after sundown, and she’s blacker than night. I wouldn’t want to hit her. I don’t know how many times we’ve all threatened to slap glow-in-the-dark stickers on her ass, but she won’t stay off the roads.”

“Jake, that’s a terrible thing to say about someone.”

He smirked at me. “Bonnie is Mr. Hensley’s cow.” Jake maneuvered the left turn, which landed us on a bumpy dirt road. “Look, I bet that’s her up ahead. You can barely see her.”

Sure enough, a shadowy blob moved in the darkness. As we neared, the black cow stopped eating from the overgrown weeds at the side of the road, turned its head to look back at us, and switched its tail from side to side like a cat. I grinned as Jake maneuvered the Explorer around the living roadblock.

“Where does Mr. Hensley live?”

“House on the right with all the floodlights. He locks Bonnie up in a barn on the backside of his property, but he’s never been able to keep her there.”

Mr. Hensley’s house was old, rickety, and neglected. Plagued with vines and rotting trim, it looked condemned—abandoned, at best. Large, orange-colored half-moons stained the sides of the house, and something resembling grass grew on the roof. I peered through the dark trying to see the barn, but the building I saw was too small for something as large as Bonnie.

“You’re kidding me, right? Tell me that wasn’t an outhouse.”

“Okay, it wasn’t an outhouse.”

I recognized his monotone for what it was. “Oh, Jesus! Where the hell have you taken me?”

“Calm down. Mr. Hensley’s an elderly man who prefers to live by simple means. Where we’re staying is more like the Hilton than Mr. Hensley’s.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. “Sorry, I thought…well, I’m not sure what I thought.”

“Almost there. Another mile up the road,” Jake told me.

I glanced over at his moonlit face and slanted an eyebrow. “Let me guess, it’s on the left?”

He answered me with his silence and a wide grin.

When we turned into a long driveway, I snapped back to reality and had my first inclination that something wasn’t right. A large wooden sign with faded black letters, which said
Miller’s Bird Farm,
leaned against the barbed wire fence at the end of the driveway.

Jake drove slowly up the drive, passing a workshop on the right, a vegetable garden on the left. He pulled up onto a large concrete pad next to an old blue pickup.

Two houses faced the concrete pad. A large white one before us—the main house, I assumed—sat high enough off the ground that you could drive a truck underneath it. The siding was unfinished, and the porch rails were likely to collapse any moment from the bowed and battered wood. Unlit Christmas lights hung from the eaves, though it was late March.

The much smaller guest house—something similar to a cottage—sat two steps off the ground, but wasn’t in any better condition. Someone had scraped the old paint, but never got around to repainting the siding. Or maybe they preferred the weathered look. I wasn’t sure, but regardless…
this
was the Hilton?

In that moment, all I knew was that Jake had brought me here under false pretenses, and I was pissed. Okay, it wasn’t really false pretenses. After all, Jake did say it was a perfect place to hide me out. Nobody in their right mind would look for me here. Of course, that’s only because I’d have to be out of mine to stay here.

He turned off the car and looked over at me. I gave him a menacing glare, hoping it filled him with as much dread as I’d felt when I realized where we’d be staying.

“Okay, Emily, I understand you’re upset, but I think—”

“Upset? That doesn’t begin to cover it, you…you…kidnapping asshole! You made it sound like we were going to be staying somewhere decent. Hell, I’d have settled for something livable. If you think I’m staying in that cardboard box, you can go get fucked.”

A muscle twitched in the side of his jaw. Tension built in his shoulders as he gripped the steering wheel with tightly clasped hands. He tried to control his temper, but failed miserably.

“Kidnapping? I can’t believe you’re going to start that crap again. You’re a royal pain in my ass. I’ve never met a woman this frustrating in my entire life. You’re a rude, unappreciative spoiled brat!”

“Why? Because I don’t want to spend my nights in low-income housing?” I asked with a sarcastic tone. “What’s next? Are we going to share a sleeping bag in a tent out in the woods?”

“Either you can stay here or take your chances with Frankie Felts,” Jake said matter-of-factly. “I’m offering you an alternative to death, but it’s up to you. If you want to leave, I’m not stopping you.”

A porch light flipped on upstairs and grabbed our attention. An older couple stepped out the front door and headed down the stairs.

“When you’re done with your tantrum, you can decide what you want to do,” Jake added. “All I ask is that you don’t be rude to my aunt and uncle. They’re good people.”

I served him a sweet smile. “I’m sure I’ll like them fine. It’s
you
I don’t like.”

“Good. I don’t like you, either,” Jake said angrily, opening his door to get out.

He knew I wouldn’t leave. Where else did I have to go? Nope, I was stuck with him, even after he called me all those names. The thing that bothered me most was that he meant them. Maybe I had reacted poorly to him misleading me, but he didn’t have to be so harsh. I let the hurt feelings percolate through my system, then pushed them away. Mental note: send the FBI hate mail for saddling me with Jake.

I ran my fingers through my flat, lifeless brown hair hoping to tease it into better condition, but it was no use. After traveling cross-country, it wasn’t going to look any better until I washed it. In fact, I wasn’t going to feel better at all until I took a long, hot shower. Of course, that’s assuming these people actually had hot water. My legs cramped, my back hurt, and my stiff muscles needed to stretch. Exhausted, I opened my door and stepped out slowly wearing cement shoes.

Jake shook his uncle’s hand firmly, gave him a pat on the back, and then gave his aunt a big hug, lifting her completely off the ground. They were happy to see each other, which sent a small twinge of jealousy through me. I hated to break up their reunion, but introductions were necessary.

“This is Emily Foster,” Jake said. “Emily, my Uncle Hank and Aunt Floss.”

His uncle stepped forward to shake my hand with a slight hobble in his gait. Hank was probably somewhere in his late sixties with a head full of wavy silver hair and a neatly trimmed beard to match. He was tall, but round in the middle under his denim overalls. My first thought was he’d make a handsome Santa Claus. My second thought was he’d make an even better Kenny Rogers.

“You got a lot of baggage?” Hank asked with a drawl.

I shrugged and smiled lightly. “Does emotional count?”

He chuckled under his breath. “Well, I’d say it does, but that’s not something I can carry for you, young lady. I’m sure it’s heavy, but you make sure you unpack that bag first,” Hank said, giving me a wink. I couldn’t help but love the man immediately.

Jake’s aunt wore a cotton dress like a potato sack over her petite, slender body, with gray hair wound firmly into a bun on the back of her head. She grabbed me and gave me a kiss on each cheek. “Nice to meet you, dear. Are you hungry? I could whip up something. You look like you could stand to gain a few pounds.”
Bless this woman!

“Thanks, but no, we stopped and ate.”

“Well, if you decide you want something, I stocked the guest house with a few snacks. Be sure to help yourself,” she said.

I nodded and smiled a thank you to her.
Great. Now I feel like such a douche after the way I acted toward Jake in the car.
They both were kind, and I couldn’t imagine it being that bad staying here, if only for a short while.

“I’m sure they’re both worn out,” Hank told his wife. “A shower would probably do wonders. I bet it’s been a long day.”

“You have no idea,” Jake said, tossing me an ugly look. Guess he was still mad. “We’ll get our showers and visit with you and Floss for a bit before turning in.”

Hank nodded. “Let me help with the bags.”

“It’s just one bag. We left in a hurry,” Jake explained. “Instead, why don’t you get a fire going? You got beer, right?”

“Does a bear shit in the woods?” Hank grinned at Jake as he and Floss walked toward the house.

Jake grabbed our suitcase from the back and motioned for me to follow him to the guesthouse twenty feet away. The thought of getting an actual shower put some pep into my step. As we got closer, something white lying on the small, darkened porch caught my attention.

“What’s that?”

“Dog. Don’t worry, he won’t bother you.” Jake stepped over him, but the animal never moved, never even lifted his head.

I stared at the dog closer. He had white fur, a few dark spots peppered over his floppy ears, and closed eyes. He didn’t seem to be breathing. “Is he dead?”

Jake shook his head. “Nah. He’s a lazy, old hound. You’ll have to step over, or you’re going to be there all night.”

“What’s his name?”

“Dog.”

“I know what he is…I asked you what his name—”