in a coma. They’d had a couple of really good talks. She’d talked. He listened very sweetly, even when she’d berated him for having concealed his true identity. She’d also run some ideas by him about the future and her plans to raise her son. His silent support had been much appreciated.
At the moment, he was eyeing the steering wheel as if he were considering grabbing it.
“Don’t make me go for the eject button,” she warned.
He folded his arms in front of him, the tight look on his face betraying just how little he appreciated her sense of humor. Odd how for the last nine months, she’d been thinking about him as a dashing foreigner who’d been all fun and games. Better put that down to hormonal brain damage.
“If you want to do something, put some clothes on. I have a bag of my father’s old things in the back.” She’d planned to drop it off at the Salvation Army on her way to her doctor’s appointment today.
He reached back and pulled the bag forward, selected a dark shirt and a pair of jeans, then shoved the rest back.
“The jeans will probably be too big in the waist. There are a couple of belts in the bottom of the bag.” She kept her gaze straight ahead as he dressed—jeans on bare bottom. Completely straight ahead. As if her life depended on it. Which it did.
The temperature in the car rose a few degrees. She cursed her peripheral vision. She so didn’t need any more tantalizing images of Amir in her brain. At the speed she was driving, it simply wasn’t safe.
He turned fully toward her when he was done, bracing himself on the dashboard with his right hand. “I’m going to ask you some questions. Do not be offended.”
She let out a slow breath. “That’s not a good start, is it?”
He scowled some more. Where did he get that? She didn’t remember him scowling once during the two days they’d spent together in the Emerald Suite. He’d been fun-loving, curious and imaginative. Very imaginative.
“Did you have anything to do with that limousine exploding?”
Her hands tightened on the steering wheel. “No.”
“Did you know who I was back when we first met?”
“No. And I wish I still didn’t know.” His royal background only complicated things.
He paused before his next question. “Do you want me dead?”
Oh, for heaven’s sake. “I spent the last month of my life taking care of you.” She glared at him for a second. She couldn’t afford to take her eyes off the road longer than that. “Do I want you back in Jamala? Oh, yes. Dead? No. And that’s an insult, by the way.” She glanced into the rearview mirror. Their pursuers were even closer now than the last time she’d checked.
“I need to know without a doubt—”
“Could you not accuse me of attempted murder in the middle of a high-speed, armed chase? It’s the first time I’m doing something like this.”
He muttered something under his breath. Sounded like he was once again lamenting the fact that he wasn’t sitting behind the wheel.
And she didn’t say anything back. She was a doctor. She was used to dealing with the U.S. health-care system. She was used to disrespect. She was used to frustration. She was just going to treat him as a difficult patient or a snotty health-insurance representative. She was going to take the high road if it killed her.
She kept her focus on the road as miles whizzed by. Her game was to put as many cars between her SUV and the black van as possible. All the hand-eye coordination and quick reflexes she’d gained practicing general surgery now came in pretty handy.
“I’m going to trust you,” he said out of the blue, just as she passed a tractor-trailer.
“Whoopee.”
“Do you mock me?” He sounded startled.
She wanted to beat her head against the steering wheel. “I wouldn’t dare.” First he asked her to marry him; then he decided to trust her? She almost pointed out the insanity of that, before she realized that he hadn’t actually asked her to marry him. He’d told her.
She gritted her teeth, while he seemed to have fallen into regal, disdainful silence. The black van was still following them, but at least their pursuers were no longer shooting. A definite improvement.
“Why did they find me now?” he asked after a while. “Why not before? They had four weeks to track me down.”
She hadn’t had time to think about that yet. She considered his question as she took the next exit, heading for Dumont, hoping to lose her pursuers in a maze of narrow streets and alleys.
“I made some calls yesterday,” she confessed. It was the only possible link she could come up with. “This baby could come any minute. You couldn’t be left alone at the cabin while I went into the hospital to give birth. You needed someone to run the medical equipment.”
He thought that over. “How did you get all that equipment together with short notice?”
“My father recently passed away from cancer. He wanted to die at the cabin, so I had everything set up for him.” Including two generators, plus the sun panels on the roof. “He had a twenty-four-hour nurse, and I went out there every day after my shift ended.” Her father had desperately tried to hang on long enough to meet his grandson.
Moisture gathered in her eyes. She blinked it away. “With the funeral and all, I hadn’t had a chance to call for pickup yet when you showed up.” It hadn’t been an easy summer.
“I’m sorry about your father.” His tone was subdued.
She nodded, driving as fast as she could while still keeping control of the vehicle.
“You made sure your father was taken care of. Then you cared for me. You are an extraordinary woman.”
Probably trying to butter her up for something. But when she glanced over, she saw only surprise on his face. Which irked her. “Did you think I would abandon my father at the end of his life? Or that I would leave the father of my child bleeding on the road?”
“I was giving you a compliment. We didn’t have sufficient time to fully discover each other before. Many things about you are new to me. I’m looking forward to getting to know you better.” He looked surprised at that, too, as if the words coming out of his mouth were a revelation to him.
They were finally in Dumont and she took the first bigger road to the left, heading for a more densely populated area where enough smaller streets crisscrossed each other for a car to disappear.
“You can be part of your son’s life without us having anything to do with each other.” She didn’t like the idea of sharing her baby—it hadn’t been the way she’d planned things—but, fine, he had the right, and her child would want to know his father. She could be flexible. To a point. “Once he’s old enough to be in school, he could go to Jamala for a week each summer.”
“My son will not grow up in a broken home,” he said in a tone he must have used for royal decrees, authoritative and final.
How did they get back to the subject of marriage again? “Let’s talk about something else before my blood pressure sends us hurtling into a phone pole, okay?”
“Do you have problems with your blood pressure? You said the pregnancy was going well,” he accused her.
“No problems whatsoever before you woke up.” She gritted her teeth. He got to her like no other, pushing all the wrong buttons.
Funny how nine months ago he’d been pushing all the right ones. And then some. She bit her lip. She so needed to stop thinking about those insane two days.
She glanced at the rearview mirror. No black van in sight. She careened into a back alley and slowed, surveyed the row of back doors,