She was being quiet again. There was something eerily unnatural about that. “How are you holding up?” he asked her.
“I’ve been better,” she retorted angrily. And then, because he had asked and because he had saved her, at least to some degree, Pru grudgingly added, “I’ve also been worse.”
He thought he knew what she was referring to. Two seconds before he climbed in through her window. “The image of bondage comes to mind.”
“What about you?” she asked, then glanced down at his leg. The material she’d wrapped around it was discolored with blood. This was not good. “You need to have your leg looked at.”
“You’re taking care of that,” he told her glibly. He’d been trained to tough it out, to put his assignment first, his own needs last. There’d be time enough to see to his wound later.
“By someone with a medical degree,” Pru emphasized. She nodded at the wound. “That could get infected. Not a pretty sight.”
The sincerity of the comment surprised him. Joshua raised his gaze to hers for a split second before looking back at the pea soup before him. “You sound like you’ve seen it.”
“I have,” she replied. To avoid any probing looks, she turned her face forward again. “I’ve seen a lot of things I’d rather not have seen. Things that shouldn’t be,” she added under her breath.
He nodded, remembering what her dossier had said. “That would be your stint in the Red Cross.”
She hated the fact that he knew everything about her and she nothing about him. The few things he’d tossed to her could be a lie, a cover, while he somehow had gotten access to her whole life history.
“Is there anything about me you don’t know?” Pru wanted to know.
She saw the corner of his mouth curve. “I skimmed over the part about your dress and shoe size,” he told her glibly.
She doubted he’d skipped even that. He struck her as the kind of man who wasn’t satisfied until he had all the information at his disposal. “To maintain a little mystery?” she quipped.
The slight smile became a full-blown grin. She thought she detected a hint of a dimple in his cheek and tried not to stare. Dimples were endearing, this man was not.
Joshua maintained his expression despite the pain that kept wafting through him, ebbing and flowing and creating odd, electrical little moments where he could literally feel every hair on his head as if it were standing at attention.
“Exactly.” He paused, allowing his curiosity to get the better of him. There was nothing else to do but talk and this way, he could get to actually know her and use that to his advantage. “Why’d you do it?” When she looked at him quizzically, he clarified, “Why did you join the Red Cross?”
Why had she joined?
The question echoed in her head. It was something she’d felt she had to do, perhaps to even the balance sheet as her father went deeper and deeper into politics. Not that she actually thought her father was a bad man, he wasn’t. But she thought of politics as a less-than-clean undertaking. Politics always seemed to get in the way of getting anything necessary done. It was a game of greed where the winner took all and the loser was forever mired in poverty. Shackled to it.
But she had no intention of explaining herself to this man, or allowing him to try to analyze her motives. So she answered his question with a question of her own, putting him on the spot instead.
“Why did you become a secret agent man?”
Secret Agent Man. It was the title of an old sixties song and the thought of it made him smile. Life had gotten ever so much more complicated than it supposedly was in the sixties.
Or at least so people thought. But human nature being what it was, things had always been complicated on some level.
He shrugged as he made a careful right turn. “You might say I went into the family business.”
She took the most logical guess as to who he’d followed. “Father?”
It took everything he had not to laugh out loud. “No.”
All right, in this day and age, women served just as much as men. After all, Julia Child had been part of the OSS near the end of the Second World War. Though she couldn’t see him in this light, maybe Joshua was closer to his mother and had wanted to cull her favor. “Mother, then?”
He thought of the small, frail woman who these days had trouble deciding what to have for breakfast. Despite it all, he had a very soft spot in his heart for her. Unlike his father. “Wrong again.”
She threw up her hands. “The nanny who seduced you at sixteen.”
“Fifteen and she was my French teacher, not my nanny,” he informed her matter-of-factly, then grinned, remembering. “And I seduced her. But, no, none of the above.” He didn’t want her getting close to the truth. “Let’s just say it was a member of my family and let it go at that.” He turned the tables quickly to keep her from continuing. “Is that why you volunteered with the Red Cross? Because you were following someone’s footsteps?”
He knew for a fact that it wasn’t, but if he got her talking, maybe she’d forget about her own line of questioning. Besides, getting her to talk helped pass the time as he continued to drive carefully along the fog-devoured road.
Pru blew out a breath. It all seemed so long ago. Just before her father had become prime minister. “Not exactly. I’m atoning for the sins of the father, so to speak.”
And what the hell was that supposed to mean? “You really are hard to follow.”
From where she sat, it wasn’t hard at all. “That’s because you’re probably accustomed to women who have the brains of single-cell amoebas.”
A retort rose to his lips instantly, but he bit it back. “Why do you do that?”
“Do what?” she asked innocently.
She knew damn well what he meant, he thought. “Use insults to push people away.”
“Because if I shoved you physically,” she said sweetly, “it wouldn’t be good sportsmanship since you’re wounded.” And then she grew serious. “Which brings us full circle to the topic of getting that wound of yours looked at—and don’t start that play on words again.” She peered out through the windshield, seeing nothing more than she had a moment ago. Fog and more fog. “Isn’t there a hospital in this godforsaken area?” For all she could see, they could have been in the heart of a city or in the middle of the country. There was absolutely no indication, one way or another. “Or at least a pharmacy of some sort?”
He saw her point about the hospital, but not about the latter. “What good would that do?”
“Because, Secret Agent Man, pharmacies have disinfectants and bandages and sharp, pointy things I could use to get that bullet out.”
The very thought of the woman next to him, wielding a knife near his flesh, brought a cold shiver down his spine. But she was right. He had to get the wound taken care of, and soon, because it could become infected. And an infection, or worse, was most definitely not on his agenda.
He thought for a second, trying to visualize the map he’d studied before coming out here. “I think there’s a small hamlet around here somewhere.”
A hamlet. God, they were in Shakespeare country. “Where are we, anyway?”
“They took you deep into Haworth.”
Her eyes widened. He could almost hear it in her voice. “Haworth?” she echoed. That brought to mind moors and incredible desolation. “Just how long was I out?”
This was the first he’d heard that she’d been unconscious, but he could see how her abductors would prefer that. “Not being there, I wouldn’t know.”
“It was a rhetorical question,” Prudence snapped at him.
She was back in form, he thought. And then he tried to get her to expand on her story for his own information. “They struck you?”
“Yes,” she acknowledged grudgingly. It almost felt like a failing on her part, to have allowed that. “Out of anger, I’d imagine.”
Joshua pressed his lips together, knowing she wouldn’t have appreciated a grin just now. “You
’re really going to have to learn how not to set people off, Prudence,” he told her. “Just what did you say to the guy?”
“Nothing.”
“You had to have said something,” he insisted.
She shifted in her seat. “One of them hit me in the back of the head after I head-butted one of his partners.”
Joshua stopped driving and looked at her. Head-butting. Who would have thought? And then he laughed. “You really are something else.” He began to drive again. “What else did you do?”
“Nothing,” she insisted, then shrugged. “I bit another one of them.”
The woman was a regular wildcat. He was surprised they’d managed to kidnap her at all. “God, I’m glad you’re on my side.”
“Isn’t it the other way around? You were sent to be on my side,” she reminded him.
“Yes, I was.” And it was nice to know that Pru the Shrew could take care of herself if the occasion called for it.
She’d asked him before, but he hadn’t given her an answer she found satisfactory. “Why didn’t my father send in more people than just you?”
“We thought less harm would come to you if just one person was sent to quietly penetrate the premises where they were holding you rather than having an army overrun the place.”
She would have rather had the army, but she shrugged. “Makes sense, I guess,” she murmured.
“But you would have felt safer with an army.”
Now there he was wrong, she thought. Dead wrong. “I don’t ‘feel’ safe, Secret Agent Man. Ever. I’m a walking target and I know it.”
Well, if she felt that way, why was she behaving like a petulant child about it? “Then why don’t you let your father appoint a bodyguard?”
He might as well have been talking about prison. “Because I want to live my life, not have someone censoring my every move, telling me what I can or can’t do. And I like to jog alone,” she emphasized, “not with an overseer.”
“Well, that certainly worked out well for you.”
She frowned at the sarcasm in his voice. Frowned more at the fact that he was right.
“Shouldn’t you have found someplace by now? They call it Great Britain, but it’s really not that big a country,” she insisted.
And just as she made her demand, she saw what appeared to look like streetlights piercing the thick clouds up ahead.
Joshua gestured at the horizon. “Ask and ye shall receive.”
There he went, acting as if he was some kind of deity. “Took you long enough,” she muttered.
Joshua nodded in her direction as he drove toward the lights. “You’re welcome.”
The lights turned out to be those coming through the windows of another farmhouse. But this one was nothing like the one where she’d been held captive. This farmhouse was two-storied and looked very modern and well taken care of. It was more in keeping with something one of her father’s friends might have used as a vacation home to get away from the pressures of government work.
Pru looked at her wounded rescuer uncertainly. “Have you been driving around in circles?”
He knew what she was thinking. That somehow they’d happened upon another farmhouse in the cottage’s vicinity. But that wasn’t the case. Even in a fog, he had a keen sense of direction when it came to traveling. “No. Due south.”
She cocked her head, studying the building. “You’re sure?”
There was no hesitation in his voice, nor, surprisingly, any indication that he found her question insulting. “I’m sure.”
Pru found herself believing him. “All right then.” She put her hand on the door handle and tugged it open. The fine mist that had been falling was turning into rain again. “Wait here.”
“The hell I will,” he snapped. He was responsible for her. There was no way he was about to let her just waltz over to a house he hadn’t had time to scout out yet.
As he stumbled out of the truck, he looked down at his cell phone. Still no signal. Or maybe it had been damaged in the car wreck. He cursed under his breath.
Pru thought the choice words were aimed at her because she’d told him to stay in the truck. She gave him an exasperated look. “I bet you made your mother’s hair turn gray.”
His mother had been getting her hair color from a bottle with the aid of a hairstylist for as long as he could remember. “My father did that to her years before I had a chance.”
Until he’d broken out of his shell at the ripe age of fifteen, Joshua had tried to be a model son. It was his way of attempting to compensate for his father’s behavior. His mother took no notice and he watched her slowly slip into a fantasy world, choosing to ignore what was in front of her.
Prudence Hill would have had no patience with a woman like his mother, he thought.
Pru picked up something in his tone as they began to make their way to the front door. “Sounds like you and your father don’t get along.”
She was perceptive, he’d give her that. A little too perceptive. And damned annoying because of it. “Maybe you’d like to apply to the agency after I get you back.”
The look she gave him said she’d caught him in a lie. “I thought you said earlier that you didn’t belong to an agency.”
“No,” he corrected, “I said that I didn’t belong to any of the ones you mentioned. We’re here,” he pointed out.
“So we are.” Removing his arm from her shoulder, she took a breath and rang the bell. The first few bars of God Save the Queen chimed, disturbing the stillness of the night.
A few moments later, the front door opened and an older looking gentleman with tufts of white hair surrounding his perfectly round head like a halo looked them over in utter silence. Eyes as blue as cobalt washed over first her, then Joshua. Whatever conclusion he came to he kept to himself.
“My friend’s been hurt,” Pru told him, taking the initiative and talking quickly like a distraught woman. “I was wondering if perhaps you might be able to spare a few bandages, some peroxide—and a needle and thread,” she added for good measure.
The strange little man finally spoke, asking, “You a doctor?”
“Nurse,” she responded without blinking an eye. She could feel Joshua staring at her but she didn’t dare look in his direction.
The man pursed his lips, looking over the length of his visitor until his eyes came to rest on the wound. He pointed one slightly crooked finger at it. “What kind of a wound is that one?”
“A bad one,” Pru responded, then, her mind racing, she added, “He was gored by a goat. Made a neat, round hole in him, didn’t it?” she asked as if it was something to be pondered over and displayed.
White eyebrows drew together in a wiggly, perplexed line. “McCaffrey’s goat?”
Good, she’d taken a chance since this was farm country that someone had a goat. “He didn’t stop to introduce himself, I’m afraid,” she answered amiably, smiling at the man. “We were out for a drive this afternoon when we got lost.” She leaned in closer to the man. “You know how you gentlemen hate to ask for directions.”
“Wasn’t anyone to ask,” Joshua chimed in, playing along.
“There was when we started out,” she told him with a smile that was a tad too wide. Joshua had no idea what to make of it, but he was willing to follow her lead if it ultimately resulted in food and shelter.
There was the sound of shuffling in the background and the next moment, a rosy looking woman joined them, elbowing aside the old man who was half a head shorter than she was. She looked at her visitors with curiosity. “Who’s this, Alvin?”
Alvin’s voice lowered to a grudgingly subservient level. “I didn’t get a name.”
“Ophelia,” Prudence said, putting her hand out to the woman. “Ophelia Lawrence. And this is my husband—” she nodded toward Joshua “—James.”
“Husband?” the old man echoed. “I thought you said he was your friend.”
“He is.” Pru deliberately addressed her words to the woman. “Aren’t yo
u friends with your husband?”
“Dearie, I don’t even want to talk to my husband half the time, much less be friends with him. Step out of the way, Alvin,” she ordered, taking charge. “Can’t you see the young man’s hurt? Or is it your intent to have him bleed to death in our doorway?”
“No, no, of course not.” Alvin quickly backed out of the way.
“Well, help her,” his wife dictated. She made an exasperated face at her husband, then looked at her guest. “Honestly. Men. Don’t have the sense they were born with. Elizabeth Wakefield,” she added, and offered her hand.
“I’ve often thought that,” Pru agreed, shaking hands then sending a backward glance toward Joshua as the older man took her place and laced Joshua’s arm across his own bent shoulders.
Joshua offered the older man an encouraging smile as he allowed himself to be taken into the dimly lit house, hoping he wasn’t making a deadly mistake.
Chapter 8
The moment he was inside, Joshua looked around. The lights overhead were flickering like a flirtatious, overzealous femme fatale. The uneven light was distracting as he searched for the one thing he needed at the moment. Unable to locate it, he turned toward Alvin as the older man awkwardly lowered him onto a chair in the kitchen.
“Do you have a telephone?” Joshua asked.
It was Elizabeth who answered before her husband had a chance. “Yes, we’ve got one.”
Joshua wondered if the woman made no follow-up offer because she thought he was going to make a costly call. Wherever the phone was, it wasn’t in the kitchen. “Would you mind if I used it?”
To his surprise, Elizabeth chuckled, amused. “Well, I don’t mind, but you might.”
Joshua glanced toward Pru but she didn’t seem any more enlightened than he did. “Excuse me?”
Elizabeth crossed to a room just beyond the kitchen. From the sound of a medicine cabinet being closed, Joshua surmised it was the bathroom.
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