Tall, Dark and Lethal (4 page)

“I wouldn’t have taken the car if it did. We could have been tracked through that.”

“Do you always think of everything?” She sounded more annoyed than impressed.

And why in hell would that bother him? He wasn’t trying to impress her. He just wanted to make sure that nothing bad happened to her, especially not because of his questionable past.

“I try.” He flashed her a grin as he caught a familiar sight through the window.

Joey’s place hadn’t changed, except for a new tin roof. It was still just a shack for a weekend of beer drinking and fishing. Heaven.

“This is it?” she asked when he slowed. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Home sweet home.”

“I’ll sleep in the car, if it’s all the same to you. You go in, figure out what’s going on, come out when you have it, and then we go home.”

“We have to get rid of the car.”

Pause. “Can’t we just take off the license plate? Or cover it with something?”

“There’s a chance that it might have LoJack.” Technology worked both ways—sometimes it made life easier; sometimes it made life harder.

She closed her eyes for a moment. “Okay.”

Not that he needed her approval or permission. The decisions would be made by him on this mission. Maybe she didn’t fully grasp that yet. She would.

He drove the car to a small train station just as the train to Baltimore pulled in. Inspired by a sudden idea, he bought two tickets for the next train to New York from a ticket agent, and then called a tow truck from the public phone. He told the guy to tow the car to the Baltimore harbor parking lot and drop it off there.

If it had LoJack, the cops would follow it there. If any witnesses remembered the towing service’s name and the cops asked the guy where the pickup had been, they’d go to the train station and talk to the ticket agent, who would say he’d bought two tickets to New York. The cops would think he and Bailey had sent the car to Baltimore as a decoy and then gotten on the train to New York. That would make sense—her brother was there. He was sure the cops and Agent Rubliczky would make that assumption.
If
they connected Cade and Bailey to the stolen car at all. He felt reasonably safe to spend a few days at Joey’s camp.

“And how are we going to get around?” she asked as the tow truck disappeared in the distance with a good chunk of his cash.

They were in the middle of nowhere. Next to the station was a garish gift-shop tent with “Final Sale” and “Everything $5” written all over it. He could see the lake glistening in the distance, could smell the water from here. The beach was a short walk away. People lay out on the sand and on boats. The path to the beach was clear; everyone who’d gotten off the train had already made their way down.

“We’ll have ourselves a lovely stroll.” He scanned the main road, which was just a few hundred feet from the station. “Or not,” he said as a police cruiser appeared and took the damn turnoff. If the Land Rover was discovered missing shortly after he’d taken it, if it did have LoJack…. He glanced toward the lake, which was blue and brilliant and inviting. “How about a swim?”

Her eyes went wide as she took a step back from him. “I can’t swim.”

“At all?” Everybody knew how to swim. Who didn’t know how to swim? A woman whose middle name was Trouble, that was who.

Annoyance filled her blue-violet eyes. “I work at a garden center. I don’t need to know how to swim. The biggest body of water I ever see is the indoor lily pond.”

“Take it easy,” he said under his breath, taking stock of their situation.

His bag was slung over his shoulder, covering the gun tucked into his waistband at the small of his back. Bailey carried the canvas bag with the clothes and food. With a little help, they could look like tourists.

Thank God for the obligatory souvenir tent. He grabbed a My Fish Is Bigger Than Yours baseball hat with fake blond hair attached for her and a pair of dorky-looking sunglasses for himself along with two cheap fishing poles. He paid for them, and they headed straight for the path that led to the lake.

They would blend in with the people sunning and fishing on the shore unless the cops came in for a closer look, in which case they’d just have to keep moving.

Another cop car suddenly pulled in. To continue toward the lake would mean passing right by the police officer. But they had already started out on the path. To turn abruptly around would look suspicious.

He stopped, sneaked his arms around Bailey’s slim waist and turned her to him.

She was scared enough not to protest. Blue-violet eyes searched his face. Her mouth was set in a tight line of fear. “They are going to catch us, aren’t they? I don’t know if I should hope for that or keep running from it. I don’t know you—”

“I used to work for the Department of Homeland Security.”

Her eyes widened. “Kind of?”

He bit back a grin. Yeah, kind of. His group, the SDDU, was a top secret commando team used for black ops. The unit’s existence was known only to a select few, even at the highest reaches of government. Their leader, Colonel Wilson, reported directly to the secretary of Homeland Security.

“You’re safe with me. Relax.” He dipped his head as the cop got out of his car. The man was heading toward the train station, toward them. There was only one way he could think of to cover their faces.

“I’m going to kiss you,” he warned.

She looked too petrified to protest. Certainly too petrified to enjoy it. Too bad, because he planned on doing just that. He had stared at her full lips many times since he’d moved in, and had contemplated some serious lip-locking with his shrew of a neighbor. He could be annoyed with her and lust after her at the same time. The male mind was a marvel of biology, no mistake about it.

He brushed his lips over hers—full, sweet, soft—and swallowed a moan that began to bubble up inside his chest. No sense getting too worked up with a cop heading their way.

“It might help if you look like you’re into this,” he whispered against her mouth.

She relaxed marginally in his arms.

The cop was only a few feet from them and still coming.

Cade opened his mouth over hers. He was going to make this kiss look real—that was his last coherent thought.

Their lips were doing all the touching, but it was his groin that got all the heat. Funny how that worked. He had expected pleasure—she was a fine-looking woman with a body that would have made any healthy man sit up and take notice. But he hadn’t expected his breath to get caught in the middle of his chest. That didn’t usually happen.

He went on a pilgrimage across her lower lip first, then the top. He tasted her, licked at the seam of her lips, kissed the corners of her mouth. Amazing how much more attractive that mouth was when she wasn’t using it to yell at him, when he could feel its velvety softness against his own. He nuzzled her cheek, kissing her again and again.

His hand tightened on her waist, then slipped lower, one slow inch at a time. His mind was turning into mush—an interesting contrast to the definite hardening that was going on below. And she still hadn’t responded yet.

He reluctantly pulled away.

And he realized that the cop had not only passed by them but had gone into the station without him noticing. Not good.

She looked a little off balance, but not overwhelmed with pleasure and driving need. And even the off-balance thing could have been because of the cop.

That didn’t sit well with his self-esteem.

“Okay. Let’s go while we can,” she said.

Okay?

He badly wanted a rematch. A chance to prove to her that she wasn’t as immune to him as she thought, to kiss her until she begged for what he’d been about ready to beg for a moment ago. But he recognized the notion for what it was—a huge distraction from their mission and a danger to his concentration. Which meant that for the duration, he would not—could not—kiss or touch Bailey Preston again.

H
E WAS CRAZY
. J
UST
absolutely certifiable. Bailey stepped back, not daring to look at him.

He was also sexy, with a body to die for and lips that had mesmerized her without half trying. He’d made her head spin, but she was too far gone with nerves to respond to him. Thank God for small mercies. She took another step away from him, needing to put some space between them before the shock wore off and her knees gave way.

He was looking at her funny. He cleared his throat. “Yeah, we better get out of here.” Taking her hand, he headed toward the lake.

She didn’t pull away, even if the thought of spending time in that small shack with him seriously scared her. Now more than ever. Even if she was inclined to believe what he had said about the DHS. He’d clearly had some sort of training. She’d nearly asked if he had any sort of ID to back up his claim and then remembered the stack of fake IDs she’d seen in his bag. Even if he had something with DHS on it, it wouldn’t mean a thing.

“You said you used to work for the DHS?”

“Retired.”

He didn’t look old enough to be retired. He was pretty much the most virile man she’d ever known. Her doubts must have shown on her face.

“Due to injury,” he said.

And she remembered the scars she’d seen on his back when he’d mowed the lawn sans T-shirt. She’d asked the first time she’d seen them. “Motorcycle accident,” he had said. Slid on his back, road scraped off his skin. No big deal.

Uh-huh. Tell me another one.

He held her gaze with those caramel eyes, fringed with thick, dark lashes, as if whether she believed him or not mattered.

And the weird thing was, she did. Because deep down, she couldn’t believe that he was an evil man. Annoying at times, yes. But he was also the guy who had climbed the roof in the middle of a thunderstorm to rescue Mrs. Kuzimo’s kitten. The guy who mowed her lawn every single time, without having been asked. “No big deal, I’m out here with this noise box, anyway,” he’d say. The guy who cleared the leaves from her gutters before she noticed they were plugged. The guy who…“Okay. You’re one of the good guys.”

“Let’s not go overboard.” But he was grinning.

Which drew her attention to his lips again.

“You kissed me.” The stunned thought that had been circling in the back of her head somehow slipped through her still-tingling lips.

He shrugged. The grin stayed. “No big deal. We’re kissing neighbors.”

If he could make light of it, so could she. “Is that like kissing cousins?”

His grin widened into a breathtaking spectacle of delicious lips and white teeth. His voice dropped to a suggestive, husky tone when he said, “It’s much, much better.”

Oh, my.

Her life was now officially completely out of control—not just what went on outside her, but what went on inside her as well. Which was the real scary part. She’d lost her mind. If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t be wishing that Cade would kiss her again.

She needed to change the subject.

“How long do you think we’ll be staying here?”

“I don’t want to stay too long in one place. I need to make some calls and I need a computer with an Internet connection. Might have to contact some old friends.” The grin slid off his face. “Not that I want to drag anyone else into this.”

They walked the upper edge of the beach, keeping their distance from the sun worshippers and everyone else.

“Do they have Internet around here?” Those fishing huts hadn’t looked too high tech.

“There’s bound to be an Internet café in town.”

“Haven’t seen a town.”

“It’s a few miles down the shore.”

“I guess we’ll be walking a lot.” She wished they could have kept the car. She felt safer in a vehicle, less exposed.

“Walking is good exercise.”

He didn’t seem to be too put out by their situation, as if he played the hiding-out game all the time. He probably did, now that she thought about it.

“Are you going to tell me any more about yourself?” She could have come up with a hundred questions or so without breaking a sweat.

“No.”

Through his shirt, she caught sight of the gun he’d tucked into his waistband. He was way out of her league. So far out, most likely, that she wasn’t even fully realizing yet how much trouble she was in.

“Would you have to kill me if you did? When they say that in movies, is that for real? Because I can stop pushing.”

He glanced at her sideways and grinned. He really was unfairly sexy. “Watch spy thrillers much?”

“Now and again.”

“I have no plans to hurt you.”

Which, she noted, was not the same as saying he
wasn’t
going to hurt her. Then again, he had told her before that he didn’t like making promises he couldn’t keep.

He must have read the doubt in her eyes. “I’m trying to protect you. I’m not sure if I’m one of the good guys exactly the way you mean it, but I do have some principles, such as they are.”

And she had to accept that was as much reassurance as she was going to get from the man. “I’ll just think of you as a kind of good guy with a gun and principles.” She had to put her faith in the benevolence of the universe.

He flashed another grin.

“God, I need to get out and meet new people,” she groaned.

They walked on in the sand, which went right in the toes of her sandals, so every few steps or so she had to hobble around to shake it out. But she knew that was the least of her problems.

“I have to get in touch with my brother. He’s going through a bad divorce.” Trampled on and broken-hearted. She’d warned him about the mass hysteria that greeting card companies and Hollywood scriptwriters called love. He’d been too far gone to listen. The least she could do now was to be there for him and for Zak. “He’ll be looking for me. I don’t want him worried. You have to let me make at least a quick call. And I do have a job. And a business.”

“Just not for a few more days.” He let her hand go once they were out of sight of the train station.

She flexed her fingers, then wrapped her arms around her chest, annoyed at herself for missing that connection. Whatever he said about wanting only to protect her, she had to remember just how little she really knew about him.