Baby, I'm Yours

  With each uneventful moment that passed, however, her edgy nerves eased. The overlook was little more than two lanes that took a half loop off the interstate. One was designated as a parking lane and the only other vehicle parked in it aside from their bus was a minivan currently disgorging a family of five. The overlook area to the right contained a sanican and a small enclosed hut to the side of the parking lane—a waiting room for passengers catching the bus, and their reason for stopping.

  It was still hot at this elevation, but a cooling breeze flirted intermittently with the idea of offering relief. Overall, it was quiet, and peaceful, and, lulled from her constant vigilance, Catherine wandered from Sam’s side, drifting with the milling crowd toward the overlook.

  For several minutes she admired the view of the mountain range to the south, but eventually she began to feel hemmed in by the press of bodies and edged away. She strolled back toward the bus, taking her time and enjoying the freedom of being on her own, even if only for a moment.

  The car came at her out of nowhere. One minute she was alone in the lane as she headed for the bus, and in the next a sedan had appeared off the freeway. Moving much too fast, it roared straight at her.

  She froze in middle of the road, watching as a ton of steel bore down on her. Then a hand, age-spotted and crisscrossed with soft, ropy veins, reached out and gripped her wrist, hauling her out of harm’s way. The car blew past without stopping, missing her by a hairbreadth.

  She stood, breasts heaving as she struggled for breath, gazing blindly after the disappearing car. Then she turned to stare down into the face of a small-boned, white-haired old lady who was a good five inches shorter than she and so slender that it looked as if a stiff breeze might blow her away.

  “Damn teenagers.” Her rescuer released Catherine’s wrist and flapped a hand to disperse the swirl of grit that had been kicked up in the wake of the car’s high speed pass. “Oughtta have their licenses yanked for a stunt like that.”

  “My God, thank you,” Catherine said fervently as she finally gathered her wits about her. “You saved my life.” The woman’s words sank in then. “It was a teenager? You saw the driver?” She hadn’t caught so much as a glimpse, herself.

  “Not really, but who else drives like a bat out of hell like that?”

  Sam came tearing up, skidding to a halt in front of Catherine. He grabbed her by both shoulders. “Are you all right? Jesus, I just turned my head for one minute, and when I turned back a car was screaming down the road and someone said it only missed you by an inch.” She dived into his arms and he clamped them closed around her, holding her close. His stomach gave a nasty lurch.

  “Damn teenagers,” reiterated the little old lady pithily.

  Sam looked at her over the top of Catherine’s head. “Did you get their license number by any chance?”

  “Nope. Happened too fast.”

  “She saved my life, Sam,” Catherine muttered into his chest. “If it wasn’t for her, I’d be splattered all over the road.”

  “You have my thanks, ma’am.”

  “Hell.” The woman shrugged. “Anybody would’ve done the same.”

  “Maybe, but not just anybody did.” Sam looked her over. That air of fragility was clearly deceptive, and he grinned down at her. “You must be stronger than you look. Red’s a whole lot of woman for a little thing like you to be yanking out of the path of speeding cars.”

  She cocked an arm, causing a surprisingly sturdy bicep to leap to life. “Life of ranching, fifty years of cross-country skiing, and three days a week at World Gym since we sold the spread.”

  “For every one of which I give a heartfelt thanks.” Catherine twisted out of the comfort of Sam’s embrace and turned to her rescuer. She reached out to grasp the woman’s hands. “Thank you so much. I can never repay you.”

  “No payment needed, dearie. I’m glad I was there to help.”

  “Time to board, folks,” the bus driver called.

  Catherine thought about her near miss as the bus continued on its journey. In all likelihood her rescuer was correct to assume the driver was a teenager, someone young and inexperienced enough to panic at discovering he’d nearly hit another person.

  But Catherine didn’t like coincidences. And two brushes with death in a little over an hour struck her as very coincidental indeed.

  She had given it great deal of thought before this rest stop, and she’d come to the conclusion that the man who’d signed to her in the café today had to be Bobby LaBon. He fit Kaylee’s description, at any rate. Question was: was it true he’d been sent by her erstwhile two-timing twin, or was he part and parcel of the hit squad with Jimmy Chains?

  The latter idea wouldn’t quite jell. She couldn’t discount having seen the two men together, but a conspiracy theory would surely fly a little better had the Bobby-person actually finished arranging a place for them to meet, for she’d have done her utmost to be there.

  So, if Bobby wasn’t with Chains then, and Kaylee really had sent him, did that mean her sister had also been nearby? Had she come to rescue her?

  Catherine told herself it was self-defeating to get her hopes up. The sister she knew and loved had never exactly knocked herself out to get other people out of trouble.

  But a tiny kernel of hope nevertheless warmed her.

  She couldn’t seem to stick with any single emotion for long, however. An entire barrage of them kept bouncing back and forth, with first one attempting to attract her attention, then another. The most persistent was guilt.

  Catherine knew she had a responsibility to inform Sam of Chains’s attack. Like a puppy with a knotted rag, she’d been worrying the knowledge since they’d left Arabesque, and the incident with the car only served to reinforce it. She could gnaw on it and nose it around and search futilely for a loose end that would somehow magically unravel an alternate option, but the bottom line was clearly defined. She had no other choice—not when a similar attack could come from out of the blue, in any place, at any time.

  And perhaps already had.

  She dreaded the thought of getting into it with Sam, though. His lapse back into aloof silence said louder than words that his show of concern at the overlook had not been for her, so much as a desire to keep his investment intact. And he was so obstinately, determinedly blind in his view of her that she knew getting him to believe her would be an uphill battle.

  Nevertheless—she heaved a long-suffering sigh—there was no time like the present. She supposed.

  Sam felt it when Catherine turned toward him. She’d been squirming around in her seat since they’d got back on the bus, and all that motion was making him queasy. Without opening his eyes, he reached out and clamped his nearest hand over her thigh to hold her still. “Will you quit that?”

  “What?” she demanded acerbically. “Breathing?”

  “Works for me.” It was a knee-jerk response, but he didn’t want to spar with her. He just wanted her to quit wriggling. Cold sweat broke out on his forehead, pooled clammily on his chest and in his armpits, and a fresh wave of nausea rolled up his throat before mercifully receding. “Quit rockin’ around, dammit.”

  “I have something I have to tell you.” She plucked at his fingers where they gripped her bare thigh, and Sam removed his hand. For once the feel of her skin beneath his didn’t even register. She gave him an impatient nudge of the elbow, and he had to suck in a deep breath to combat another wave of sickness.

  “McKade, will you pay attention?” she demanded. “I said I’ve got something to say.”

  “And I’m sure every word that drips from your lips will be a pearl beyond price,” he agreed through his teeth. “But do you mind? Save it.” He was beginning to have a bad, bad feeling that eating that chicken at lunch had not been his greatest move of the day.

  “Trust me, I would like nothing better,” she snapped. “However, as time is of the essence…”

  “I said save it!” He opened his eyes and everything seemed too bright, the c
olors too garish. When the hell had Red’s dress taken on that sickening Pepto-Bismol hue? Swallowing hard, he glared at her. “I’m not in the mood, got it?”

  She acquiesced to the snarled warning with a full complement of her usual good grace. “Well, too damn bad, Bubba, because I’m not in the mood to be murdered in my sister’s stead!”

  He narrowed his eyes at her. “What the hell are you yammering about now?”

  “Jimmy Chains, the guy I told you about who killed that woman in Miami—which, you might recall, caused Kaylee to skip bail and brought us together—was in Arabesque today.”

  “Oh, for chrissake.” Like he really needed this shit on top of the way he was feeling. “And you expect me to just take your word for it, I suppose. Now that we’re a hundred miles down the road with no way for me to check out your story for myself. Next you’ll be telling me that was him in the car that nearly ran you down.”

  “I’ve been wondering about that myself.”

  He glared at her in disgust. “Man, you really do take me for one stupid son of a bitch, don’t you?”

  “Oh, I’ve never said you were stupid.”

  All right, he’d left himself wide-open for that one. Mopping cold sweat from his brow, he inquired sarcastically, “And just where did this Jimmy Chimp—”

  “Chains! Jimmy Chains.”

  “—Chains guy magically show himself? In Arabesque.” Sam had to swallow hard against an encroaching wave of nausea, and it fueled his anger. He was in no mood for her games. “What was he doing, lounging at a nearby table while we ate?”

  “No, he—”

  “You’re the only one who saw him, I imagine.”

  “As a matter of fact, an entire group of—”

  “And just supposing for a moment that I might be so gullible as to actually buy your bullshit story,” he interrupted once again, unwilling to subject himself to the tangle of fact and fiction he knew she’d weave with her glib tongue if he gave her half a chance, “what is it again that makes you think he wants to kill you? Aren’t we getting just a tad melodramatic?”

  She jerked rigidly upright with one enraged motion, and he nearly lost his lunch right then and there.

  “I don’t know,” she said furiously, “are we? I don’t find it particularly melodramatic to believe I might get killed when someone shoves a gun in my face. But then, that’s me. Perhaps for a big-time, fearless bounty boy like yourself, it’s merely your average, everyday occurrence.”

  Some still-functioning, logical corner of his mind tried to tell him there were tidbits of information in this conversation that were important, and he should be focusing his fast-dwindling resources on them. His pure gut reaction, however, got tangled in the contempt she invested in the words “bounty boy.” Hell, she might just as well have been saying baby molester.

  He thrust his face aggressively near hers, ignoring the renewed wash of sweat the movement caused him. “You think I enjoy being a bail enforcer?” he snarled. “You think I like spending my every waking hour in the company of thieves and lowlives?”

  “I think you revel in it. And my sister is not a lowlife! Neither is she a thief.”

  Cautiously, he pulled back far enough to make the insolent once-over he subjected her to that much more effective. “No, your sister sounds like a regular productive, law-abiding citizen. You on the other hand…”

  “Oh! You are such a prick!” Catherine gave his shoulder an indignant shove. The fact that it merely rocked him in his seat increased her frustration and fury. “Well, just suppose for one moment that I buy into your self-deluding fantasy that I’m Kaylee MacPherson. What the hell gives you the right to sneer at what she does for a liv…”

  She found herself talking to thin air. With a choked oath, he’d abruptly rolled from his seat and hotfooted it down the aisle to the back of the bus.

  Catherine’s mouth went slack and she slid over into his seat on the aisle, craning around its high back to see what on earth he was doing. As she watched he practically ripped the rest room’s door from its hinges before disappearing into its depths, and with a huff of exasperation she faced forward again.

  Well, for crying out loud. If that wasn’t just typical of him to be so rude. No “excuse me” for this guy. He had to use the facilities so he just hopped up and used it. It wouldn’t have killed him to have said something, but then that was probably the idea. She had been making a valid point and rather than admit she could be right, he’d taken a hike. She moved back into her own seat with a flounce and picked up her book.

  It was a highly entertaining one, so she barely glanced up when a man made his way down the aisle from the front of the bus sometime later. The conversation his approach elicited, on the other hand, caught her attention.

  “If you’re headed for the bathroom,” she heard someone behind her say, “you might as well save yourself the trip. There’s a guy been in it for nearly half an hour.”

  “Someone’s going to have to talk to the driver,” another voice chimed in. “From what I hear, it’s fast approaching critical stage for a couple of the ladies back there.”

  Catherine glanced at the unoccupied seat next to her and saw with a start that Sam had never returned. Reluctantly setting aside her novel, she moved over into his seat to peek once again around its back. The first thing she saw was the line that had formed outside the only rest room.

  Sam was not one of the people standing in it.

  She didn’t stop to question her sudden concern for his welfare; she simply acted upon it. She was out of her seat and down the aisle in an instant.

  “Please,” she queried of the first person she came upon in the line. “What’s going on?”

  “Some guy’s in there pukin’ his guts out,” a young man replied, and Catherine realized it was the same kid whose help she’d hoped to recruit this morning before Sam had blown her plan out of the water.

  Begging pardon over and over again, she worked her way to the front of the line and tapped on the rest room door. “Sam? Are you in there?”

  “Go away, Red.” An instant of dead silence followed those unencouraging words, and then the unmistakable sound of violent retching came through the door.

  “Oh, Sam,” she whispered. She turned to the people in line. “It must have been the chicken he ate at lunch. I thought it didn’t smell quite right.”

  They were sympathetic but had problems of their own, the most imperative of which involved a dire need for the rest room themselves.

  She turned back to the door. “Sam? A whole line of people are out here waiting to get in.”

  He surfaced from his misery long enough to utter a truly offensive suggestion as to what said people could do.

  “He doesn’t mean that,” she assured those near enough to hear, but she could see that with a few words Sam had completely destroyed the sympathy factor, and those waiting were rapidly losing patience. A few people farther down the line looked in the mood for an outright riot. “Perhaps I’d better talk to the driver.”

  Twenty minutes later the bus had parked in front of a run-down motor court in a small Wyoming town, and the driver was at the back of the bus, pounding on the door. “Sir! Please open up. I have to insist you free up the rest room. It’s the only one we’ve got, and your occupation of it has generated quite a need out here.”

  Sam lifted his head away from the door where it had been resting. “I can do that,” he agreed weakly. “But then I’m gonna be vomiting all over your nice clean bus.”

  “We got you an accommodation for the night, sir. Your wife collected your bags and she’s in the room now, waiting for you.”

  His wife? Sam rose shakily to his feet and rinsed out his mouth with water from the tiny sink. What in hell was this idiot talking about?

  Then it hit him and Sam swore. The deluded fool must be referring to Red.

  He pulled the door open and staggered out. “Where is she?” Stupid question. Probably six miles down the road by now.

 
“Right inside the room, sir. Here”—a beefy arm reached out to guide him—“Let me give you a hand.”

  “My wife…”

  “Is just fine. She must not have eaten whatever you did. She’s a fine, accommodating woman, sir. You’re a lucky man. Why, a lotta women would have made a fuss about being put off the bus, particularly at a place like this. Watch your step here, sir. But your wife said for me not to worry about it, that she’d make do just fine.”

  Sam would have curled his lip if he’d had the strength. He just bet she had—right before she’d boogied off down the road.

  “The cost,” he mumbled, but in truth at the moment he didn’t really give a shit. The nausea that had temporarily abated was beginning once again to make its presence felt.

  “Greyhound will take care of it, sir. Don’t you worry. Here, step up. And another. And here we are.”

  “Bathroom,” Sam mumbled. “Quick.”

  “Through here, Sam.”

  His head jerked up at the sound of Red’s voice. Those big green eyes of hers were soft with concern, but he didn’t fool himself into believing it was actually for him. It was an act for the driver’s benefit. Of course she wasn’t going to split with an audience around to see; he should have known that. She’d wait for the bus to leave.

  Nausea slammed into him hard, and he stumbled for the bathroom.

  Catherine thanked the bus driver and closed the door behind him. It was stifling in the tiny unit, the antique cooler in the window more proficient at producing noise than cooling the air. She could barely hear over its racket as the bus started up and pulled away. Mopping an arm across her forehead, she rummaged through her suitcase until she found shorts and an abbreviated top. She quickly changed, then went to render what assistance to Sam she could.

  She found him sitting on the floor with his back to the door, long legs crooked around the toilet and arms crossed over the rim of its bowl. He was the picture of exhaustion as he rested his forehead against his forearms.