by Obsession
He lifted his head and looked at her. Straight into her eyes. Just like that. No warning at all. Boom, and she was pinioned by a pair of not-so-mild blue eyes. Taken by surprise, she blinked at him, alarmed.
“We need to talk,” he said, and rolled with her so that she was on top with their legs all tangled up. As the cool air hit her back, she saw that she was totally uncovered, slightly sweaty, and liable to get very cold very soon.
She also had her arms around his neck.
“I need …” she began, hoping to ward off the discussionshe could see was coming by using the ever-handy excuse of running to the restroom. But before she could get another word out she was interrupted by something sharp that stabbed cruelly into her back.
She shrieked.
26
“What the hell?” Nick grabbed her arms as she convulsed on top of him, alarm plain in his face.
Apparently startled by the commotion, the pale shadow that was Muffy bounced with all the grace of a rhino from the small of Jenna’s back to the mattress, where she curled up, not a foot from Nick’s elbow, wrappingher furry tail around herself and staring at the startledhumans with big eyes that shone with obvious disfavor.
“Jesus Christ, that scared the life out of me.” Nick sank back down with a sigh of relief, pulling a pillow that hoveredprecariously near the edge of the mattress under his head. Now that the attacker had been identified as the cat, all Nick’s attention was on Jenna, who had rolled off him during those first frenetic seconds and was at that moment both rubbing her abused back and sliding off the bed with the intention of going for the towel.
“Scared you?” Supremely conscious of his gaze on her naked backside, she turned sideways and bent her knees in an effort to pick up the towel as gracefully as she could, doing her best not to give him any too-explicitviews in the process. “She jumped on my back. With her claws out.”
“Bad kitty,” Nick said, not very severely. Then, “Wait a minute. Where are you going?”
Wrapping the towel around herself, Jenna felt marginallymore in control. The sex had been great: earth-shattering,mind-blowing, pick your superlative. The realization that she was in love with him? Not so much. He’d said he was crazy about her, but what did that mean, exactly? Men said all kinds of things when they were trying to get a woman into bed. It did not necessarilymean the same thing as love. Anyway, letting him know that she was in love with him put all kinds of power in his hands, power that she wasn’t sure she was ready to give him. Of course, she had stupidly blurted it out.
She was pretty sure that’s what he wanted to talk about. And she didn’t want to, not until she had time to get used to the idea herself. Until she got used to being herself again, with all the details firmly settled in her mind.
“To the bath—” room, she started to say, turning to look at him. But the sight of him lying stretched out on the bed with one arm bent beneath his head, stark naked and totally at ease with it, while he stroked the cat was so arresting that she broke off. The man was hot, no doubt about it. And he was also clearly an animal lover. Muffy was looking as blissed-out as a furry Buddha,with her eyes listing at half-mast and a contented cat smile on her face. It was impossible to be sure over the hum of the air-conditioning, but Jenna was ready to swear that Muffy was purring. Ridiculous as it was, Jenna felt what was almost a pang of jealousy. Muffy had never looked at her like that. Then her brows contractedas reality hit. “Wait a minute. That’s not my cat.”
“No,” Nick agreed, scratching Muffy’s ears. If there was a kitty Nirvana, Muffy appeared to have reached it.
“That’s Katharine’s cat. The real Katharine.”
“Yeah.”
“No wonder …” Jenna said, then stopped as Nick frowned suddenly and shifted his gaze to Muffy. His fingerswere buried in the thick ruff of hair under her chin. When they emerged, they were grasping the plastic ID tag Jenna had discovered previously.
“Jesus Christ.” Nick stared at the plastic rectangle like he’d found gold. “I think it’s a thumb drive. What the hell is a thumb drive doing around the neck of this cat?”
“No clue.” Jenna stared at the thing in Nick’s hand, too.
Muffy, tethered, was starting to look perturbed. Her tail twitched, her eyes widened, and she pulled her head back. As Nick slipped her collar over her head, she gave him an affronted look. Standing up, shaking her head, she stalked to the end of the bed and curled up again with her back to them. Clearly, Nick had fallen out of favor.
Nick sat up, swung his legs over the side, switched on the lamp beside the bed, and stared down at the gray plastic rectangle dangling from the pale blue leather collar. It had been secured to the metal ID loop with an O-ring. It was obvious that someone had put it there deliberately.
“She hid this thing on the cat,” Nick said, picking it up to look at it more closely. “Katharine. I don’t know what’s on it, but that’s a hell of a hiding place, I have to say. This is something she doesn’t want anybody to find.”
Jenna frowned. “Maybe that’s what they were lookingfor. The men who broke into my house. They didn’t find what they were after in the safe, remember. That other guy came back the next day.”
Nick’s eyes met hers for a pregnant instant. “Maybe it is.”
There was a rising excitement in his face. He carefullyput the collar down on the bedside table and stood up, reaching for his clothes. He, she was interested to note, made no effort to search for a flattering angle as he bent over. Not that he appeared to have an unflatteringone. The guy was all sleek muscle and smooth flesh.
“There’s one way to find out.” He stepped into his boxers, pulled them up, and then did the same with his pants. “I have a laptop in my car. We’ll just plug that baby in and see what’s there.”
“What do you think is on it?”
“No idea.” He zipped his pants, pulled on his T-shirt, and stuck his feet in his shoes without bothering with socks. “But knowing Katharine, I’ll be real interested to find out.” He headed for the door. “I’ll be right back.”
A jolt of anxiety struck her. She followed him with her eyes. “Promise?”
“Oh, yeah.”
Then he was gone. She heard him walk down the hall and through the living room, heard the door open and close, heard the faint click of the lock. Then it occurred to her that this was a wonderful opportunity to get dressed. She thought of the pants and T-shirt she had discarded in the bathroom, realized that if the rest of her had been covered with blood they probably had been, too, and shuddered. Wait—Nick had said he had bought her some things—did he mean clothes? Openingthe closet door, she found a Macy’s bag on the floor. In the Macy’s bag were two sets of silky underwear and bras, two pairs of khaki shorts, two T-shirts, and a pair of flip-flops. Choosing a flimsy white panty and bra, a pair of khaki shorts, and a navy T-shirt, she took them into the bathroom with her. She had just finished washing and putting on her new underwear and was in the process of pulling up the shorts when she heard Nick come back into the apartment.
She could tell from the sound of his footsteps that he was moving fast.
“Jenna,” he called, not too loudly. There was an urgencyin his voice, though, that had her hurrying to unlockthe door even as she fastened her shorts.
“Here,” she said unnecessarily as she opened it. He was already in the bedroom, striding toward the bathroomdoor, and clearly saw her. His eyes swiftly scanned her. Her eyes, however, didn’t move. As soon as she saw him, they fixed on the big silver gun in his hand.
“We’ve got to go. Right now.” He brushed past her into the bathroom, grabbed the navy T-shirt from the towel rack where it waited, and thrust it at her while she said, “What? What’s wrong?”
“They’ve found us. They were around the Blazer, looking through it. If they don’t know exactly which apartment we’re in, it won’t take them long to find out. Come on.”
She had pulled the T-shirt over her head while he was speaking. Having her heart po
und was actually starting to feel familiar, she thought as he caught her arm and started hustling her toward the door. Ditto with the dry mouth and the cramping stomach.
“Wait a minute.” He stopped dead in the bedroom, turned to look directly at her feet, and frowned direly. “I thought so. Shoes.”
She had forgotten that she was barefoot.
“Right.” She ran for the bag, pulled out the flip-flops, and thrust her feet into them. Remembering, she spared a swift glance for the bedside table. Except for the lamp, it was empty. “You got the thumb drive, right?”
“Oh, yeah. Let’s go.”
This time he caught her hand, and together they rushed toward the door. Once there, he made her wait as he listened cautiously at the panel.
“Okay,” he whispered, and quietly opened the door.
Muffy immediately darted past them into the hall, meowing loudly and waving her fluffy tail.
“Shit,” Nick said, casting a narrow-eyed glance at the cat as he paused to close and lock the door behind them. “What are you doing?”
This was directed at Jenna, who had recovered from the mini heart attack the cat’s unexpected rush past her ankles had given her and was doing her best to capture a recalcitrant Muffy.
“We can’t just leave her out here.”
“The hell we can’t.”
He grabbed her hand again, casting a hunted glance at the elevator while pulling her toward the door beneaththe exit sign. Presumably, it opened onto stairs, which they needed to take because, she saw with horror as she followed Nick’s glance, someone was coming up in the elevator. The little circular light above the elevatorlit up over floor two as she looked at it.
Under the circumstances, in this sleepy little building in the middle of the night, she felt pretty confident that the occupants of that elevator were the bad guys. She and Nick had at best a few seconds to escape.
Her heart lurched. Her breath caught. If it hadn’t been for Nick, for his solid presence and his strong hand holding hers and, not incidentally, his gun, she probably would have died of fright on the spot. At the thought of finding herself in Ed’s hands again, she broke out in a cold sweat.
It didn’t matter that she wasn’t Katharine. He would kill her just the same.
They had just made it into the narrow, dimly lit stairwelland the door was closing behind them when Jenna heard the slight grinding sound that announced the arrivalof the elevator.
Followed almost immediately by a loud meow that made Jenna jump and gasp, and that drowned out everything else.
Muffy streaked by them, racing down the steps.
“Damned cat,” Nick said, and Jenna got the impressionthat this time he had jumped, too.
There were no sounds, no sounds at all, behind them as they fled in Muffy’s wake down the hot, musty-smellingstaircase. This struck her as ominous, although she couldn’t have said precisely why.
“I don’t hear anything,” she whispered. “If that was them, shouldn’t they be knocking on the door, or knockingdown the door, or something?”
Nick snorted. “They don’t have to knock down doors. If they want in, they’re in. Which means they’re probablysearching the place by now. When they don’t find us, you can bet your bottom dollar they’ll be checking these stairs.”
With that cheery bit of information, they reached the bottom of the steps. Muffy was there before them, standing in front of the door, waiting with waving tail to go out.
The landing was small, and the cat had nowhere to go. Jenna scooped her up.
“What are you doing?” Nick asked over his shoulder as he opened the door a cautious crack and peered out.
“If she follows us, and they spot her, they’ll know which way we went.” There was that, and also the fact that Jenna couldn’t bear to turn Muffy out into this unknownneighborhood and leave her. No food, no water, dogs—she was pretty sure that Muffy wouldn’t cope well with any of those. She wasn’t a street kind of cat. Anyway, Muffy might not belong to her, but she felt responsiblefor her just the same.
“Fine. Here, give her to me.” Nick either accepted her logic or didn’t want to waste time arguing, because he scooped Muffy out of her arms, tucked the cat under his arm like a football, and opened the door wide. “Run as fast as you can to that building over there and go around the left side. Don’t stop for anything, understand?”
Jenna looked at the building he indicated—it was anotherboxy apartment building very similar to the one they were in that faced the next street over, so that what she was looking at was its square brick back—nodded, and took off running toward it. It wasn’t far, perhaps two hundred yards, but, with the security light above the door and the more distant glow of the lights from variousparking lots, she felt hideously exposed as she darted through shadows and shifting patches of illumination.The uneven terrain made footing tricky. The small slap of her flip-flops hitting the ground sounded hideously loud in her ears. A sideways glance showed her the parking lot in which they had left Nick’s car. She couldn’t see the Blazer itself—the angle wasn’t right for that—but, ominously, she could see three big, black Suburbans parked in a neat row right at the edge of the lot. They hadn’t been there earlier, and just spotting them made her heart pound like a kettledrum.
There wasn’t much doubt who they belonged to.
Dodging around a child’s half-full wading pool, which she had nearly, and disastrously, missed seeing in her preoccupation with the Suburbans, she made it around the corner of the building and stopped, panting, to wait for Nick. He was right behind her, gun in one hand, Muffy, eyes narrowed and tail waving, under his arm.
Even as Jenna looked in his direction, she saw, beyondhim, the small rectangle that was the door they had just exited through fill with light as it was pulled open from the inside. Four men in suits spilled out, lookingaround wildly.
She didn’t doubt for a second who—or, rather, what—they were.
Sucking in air, unable to speak, she grabbed Nick’s arm and drew him deeper into the shadows beside the building. Seeing her expression, he glanced back, too.
“Yeah,” he said, and his voice was grim. “I didn’t think it would take them long. Let’s go.”
Sticking to the shadows as much as possible, they ran across that street, through another backyard, along the back of a long row of buildings that might have been town houses, then across another street and through another set of backyards. Her heart pounded and her pulse raced, first from fear and then from fear mixed with exhaustion. Her legs started getting shaky. She had trouble catching her breath. Finally, she got a stitch in her side. If she hadn’t known, as surely as she knew anything, that the search was on for them, she wouldn’t have been able to keep going. At last, just when she thought she was going to have to stop, Nick stopped instead.
They were standing at the edge of a small, dark parkinglot.
“What now?” she wheezed, bending double with her hands on her knees, gasping for breath and battling the stitch in her side.
“We get wheels.”
“As in we call a taxi?”
“As in I steal us a car.”
“You can do that?”
“Darlin’, I got mad skills.” He thrust Muffy at her. “Here, take this.”
Muffy was heavy and hairy and didn’t look at all happy with the situation, but she seemed to recognize the seedy, run-down nature of the neighborhood just as surely as Jenna did, and have enough sense to know that she didn’t want any part of it. Neither did Jenna, actually,but there they both were anyway, with no choice in the matter at all. Casting nervous glances around— there were no security lights in this parking lot, and the only illumination came from the full moon overhead and the quick slash of headlights from a passing car— she saw nothing but a warren of brick buildings with only a few lighted windows, none nearby. They were in the midst of a large apartment complex. This was one of many parking lots. If anyone besides Nick, who was peering through the windshield of a car not too far a
way, was around, she couldn’t see them in the dark.
Not that that made her feel any better, particularly.
A moment later, a car pulled up beside her, making her jump. The passenger door swung open from the inside.No interior light came on. The car remained as dark as pitch.
“Hop in,” Nick said.
Peering across the front seat—it was a bench seat, no fancy bucket seats for this ride—Jenna confirmed that it was indeed Nick behind the wheel, and got in. As she closed the door, Nick drove toward the entrance to the lot and Muffy vaulted for the backseat. Jenna let her tired arms sag for a moment in relief, then reached for her seat belt. There wasn’t one. Or at least, if there was, she couldn’t find it.
“It’s probably lost under the seat,” Nick said, having observed her fruitless hunt. “This is a 1972 Ford Fair-lane.Seat belts weren’t that popular back then. Hot-wiringcars only works on really old ones.”
“Good to know.” She was already looking at so many possible ways to die that driving around without a seat belt was the least of her worries. They were on the street now, heading west. A tall chain-link fence and a shadowybasketball court and another long row of apartmentsflashed past her window. They came to a cross street, and as he stopped at the stop sign, another car drove through the intersection in front of them. She gave it an anxious glance.
“We’re safe now, right?” she asked, as he accelerated through the intersection in turn.
“Reasonably, I think. Whoever that was back there is searching for us big time, I guarantee it, but since they’ve got my car, they probably think we’re still on foot. That buys us some time.”
“What do you mean, ‘whoever that was back there’? Weren’t those Ed’s men?”
“Probably. I just can’t figure out how they found us.” He turned down another street, a little better lit, and Jenna realized they were headed for the expressway.
“They’re CIA. They can find anything,” Jenna said. The thought made her shiver, and she cast another worriedlook around. They were nearing the on-ramp for the Beltway, and the overhead lights illuminated the insideof the car. As a result, she felt hideously exposed. There was more traffic, lots of vehicles, in fact, as they merged onto the expressway, but none of them seemed particularly threatening. Still, when an eighteen-wheelerzoomed past, rattling the old car right down to the frame, she jumped a little.