“My duffel took the bullet. It knocked me down and winded me, but I’m not shot.”
He wasn’t sure he believed her. In fact, he was beginning to wonder if he could believe a single thing she’d said to him since they ran into each other at the diner a few hours earlier.
“Who was shooting at us?”
“Us?” She looked at him from beneath the tangled fringe of her auburn bangs, wide-eyed and rattled.
“I’m pretty sure there’s a bullet hole in my truck, so yeah. Us.”
“I don’t know.”
She was lying. At least, she wasn’t telling the whole truth. Maybe she didn’t know exactly who’d ambushed her in her cabin or who had started taking potshots at them from the woods.
But she had a theory, one she had no intention of sharing. He could hear the secret hiding in her voice.
Fine. He could table his curiosity a little longer, while they got as far away from the gun-wielding maniac in the woods. But as soon as they found a safe place to stop and regroup, he was going to ask a lot more questions.
And she was damn well going to answer them.
* * *
BY THE TIME they reached the point where the lakefront road ended in a T intersection with another highway, the rain that had been threatening all afternoon hit with a vengeance, pelting the truck and limiting visibility to a few dozen yards. The highway at this end of the lakefront road was the main artery leading from Purgatory to the little mountain hamlet of Poe Creek about fifteen miles north.
Like Purgatory, Poe Creek had never managed to become a tourist destination as so many little towns in the Smokies had, but its close proximity to the mountains as well as a main road to Douglas Lake ensured that there were a handful of hotels and motels in the area, including several small, cheap places where a few bucks could get the night clerk to look the other way when you rented a room with cash and no identification.
She directed Jack to head north, shifting her duffel bag to her lap and setting the backpack on the floorboard at her feet. She took time to buckle her seat belt—the last thing she needed was the Tennessee Highway Patrol to flag them down for breaking the state’s seat-belt law. “Can you belt yourself while driving?” she asked.
Jack shot her an incredulous look. “A little busy trying to see ten feet in front of the truck at the moment.”
“Hand me the buckle and I’ll do it for you.” She knew, in the greater scheme of things, seat-belt safety laws were way down on the list of things she needed to worry about at the moment, but doing something—anything—that would restore a sense of control was a good thing in her book.
Jack passed the seat belt across his lap and shoulder, and she took the buckle he held out to her, pulling it down into place and connecting it with the latch at his hip. Her fingers brushed his thigh as she finished, making the skin of her knuckles tingle where they’d touched the denim-clad warmth of his muscular leg.
She pulled her hand back into her lap and grabbed the duffel bag, inspecting the hole that had ripped through one end of the sturdy canvas.
“Are you sure you weren’t hit?” Jack shot another worried glance her way.
“Positive.” She made herself look away from his dark eyes, a little unnerved by the attention. She’d spent most of the past few years of her life cultivating an aura of invisibility, making herself as unobtrusive and unremarkable as possible—a complete turnaround from her first twenty-three years of life, when all she’d craved was attention and she’d gone out of her way to find spectacular, outrageous ways to make it happen.
She’d learned the hard way that the wrong kind of attention could be downright deadly.
“Where are we going?” Jack asked.
She didn’t like the way he used the word we, as if he thought he was any part of what she had planned. For all she knew, he was involved in this whole mess she’d managed to land herself in the middle of. How could she be sure that he just happened to be there, picking up his truck, at the moment she tried to make her escape and ran into another camouflage-clad man on a mission, this time carrying a rifle?
She couldn’t be sure it was the same man who’d accosted her on the porch of her cabin. Neither could she be certain he wasn’t.
In short, she didn’t know who was after her. Or why.
Though the “why” part of the equation was pretty limited. Either it was the project she’d been working on for Alexander Quinn that had drawn unwanted attention to her, or it was something from her past rising to bite her again. Either way, she had to get as far away from Purgatory as she could, as fast as she could.
And she had to do it flying under the radar, which meant the last thing she needed slowing her down was a cowboy with no idea who she was or what kind of unholy mess he was swaggering into.
“Not going to answer?” he asked, sounding incredulous.
“Just go until I tell you to stop.”
The look in his dark eyes should have given her plenty of warning, but she still found herself slamming forward into her seat belt as he whipped the truck onto the shoulder of the road and put it into Park.
“I realize that I owe you money and an apology for the things I did, but that goes only so far.” Jack spoke in a low, twangy growl that reminded her of a week she’d spent in Wyoming when she was just eighteen, partying with frat boys who’d taken her along for their spring break trip out West. She hadn’t even been attending the university where frat boys had been students; they’d picked her up at the little diner where she’d been working part-time as a waitress and brought her along for the ride.
That she hadn’t been left raped or dead in Jackson was a miracle; sure, the frat boys had tired of her quickly when she wasn’t willing to be shared around the group, but at least they hadn’t forced her to do anything. They’d just abandoned her to find her own way back to school in Massachusetts, and thanks to a very nice cattle rancher and his wife, she’d managed to scrape up enough cash for the bus ride home.
The cattleman had spoken in the same low, slow Western drawl that Jack had just used, with the same dark tone of sad disapproval. She felt herself folding in on herself, like one of those hard-shelled armadillos she used to watch amble across the backyard of her childhood home.
“I don’t know where we’re going,” she answered.
“And you’re not going to tell me who we’re running from.”
“I don’t know that, either.”
Neither of her answers was a complete lie. She wasn’t sure where he’d be going once she ditched him. And she wasn’t sure whether the man who’d accosted her that afternoon was the same man who’d shot at her tonight, or what his exact reason for targeting her might be.
So many reasons came to mind.
“We should get back on the road,” she said after Jack sat silent for another long moment. “We’re sitting ducks on this shoulder.”
“Which brings me back to the question, where are we going?”
“Poe Creek,” she answered.
“And that’s where?”
“North on this highway.”
His lips thinned to a grim line as he put the truck in drive and eased back onto the highway. “I wish I’d just taken your advice and given that seven grand to charity.”
“Not too late,” she muttered.
“You know damn well it is too late, Mara.”
His words fell into a thick, tense silence broken only by engine noise, the squeak of the windshield wipers and the relentless drumbeat of rain on the roof of