by Linda Turner
He ran a teasing finger down her nose. “Brat. One of these days, you’re going to pay for all that sass.”
Not the least intimidated by the threat, she only grinned. “One can only hope. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go find a salesman.”
An hour later, Priscilla was running out of questions to ask Kevin Richards, the salesman who’d approached her the moment she’d walked onto the car lot. What she knew about cars could fit in a thimble, and it was obvious. To his credit, though, Kevin Richards was being incredibly patient. Not once did he roll his eyes whenever she asked something a first grader should have known.
Searching her brain for something else to ask, she suddenly saw Donovan step out of the dealership office and shake hands with a salesman who smiled and handed him a set of keys. That was her cue to leave.
“You’ve been very kind,” she told Kevin, “and I feel really awful that I’ve taken up so much of your time. But I really don’t see anything my husband would like.”
“But this is Motor Trend’s truck of the year,” he said, frowning. “I’m sure your husband would love it. Why don’t you call him and see if he can come in? I’d be happy to talk to him.”
“Oh, he doesn’t like to deal with salesmen,” she said quickly, smiling like a woman whose only goal in life was to make her man’s life easier. “That’s why he has me. I’ll talk to him, though,” she promised, “and tell him about the Ford. If he’s interested, I’ll come back and see what kind of price you can give us.”
From his quick scowl, Kevin obviously didn’t like that suggestion at all, but he managed to hang on to his temper. “It would be better if your husband would come in himself, but if he won’t, I guess there’s not much we can do about it.” Reaching into his coat pocket, he handed her his card. “I work Tuesday through Sunday. If your husband decides he wants to see one of the trucks, I’ll talk to my manager about driving it over to your house.”
“That’s a great idea! I’ll be in touch.”
He’d already walked away, and with a sigh of relief, she left the dealership behind and started walking down the street. Cars whizzed past, and for an instant, from out of nowhere, fear spiraled through her. She was so close to the street, she thought, shaken. Anyone driving by could snatch her into a car without even slowing down.
Where was Donovan? Was he already in their prearranged spot? What if she missed him? What if—
Suddenly realizing what she was doing, she stiffened. She had to stop this! Donovan wouldn’t miss her or, for that matter, let anything happen to her. Right now, he was probably watching her every move. If she needed him, he’d be there for her in a matter of seconds.
The pounding of her heart eased just at the thought that he was nearby. Later, she knew she would have to deal with the knowledge that he made her feel safe in a way that no man ever had; but for the moment, she had other things to worry about…like meeting Donovan at the appointed spot. Picking up her pace, she turned right at the next corner.
Donovan was nowhere in sight.
Her heart sank. “Oh, no!”
“Need a ride, lady?”
Startled, she whirled to her right to discover Donovan parked in a bay of a self-serve car wash. Parked in full view of the street, but not the least bit noticeable, the dark-green Chevy he’d bought didn’t draw a single glance from the occasional driver who turned down the side street.
“Thank God!” she said in relief. “You scared me to death! I thought you’d be parked at the curb waiting for me.”
“This was safer,” he told her as she hurried over to the car and slipped into the passenger seat. “Did you have any problems?”
“No, I just felt so exposed. Do you think anyone at the car lot suspected we were together?”
“Not at all. I don’t know what story you told that salesman, but whatever it was, he looked completely frustrated with you.”
She grinned. “I pretended I was looking at trucks for my husband. Of course, I don’t know a thing about trucks, and it was obvious. He never lost his patience, but he was so frustrated, he wanted to pull his hair out. When I saw you were about to leave, I told him I couldn’t buy anything without talking to my husband first. He couldn’t get rid of me fast enough,” she said.
“Good,” he said, pleased. “If your kidnappers do find a way to trace us, all your salesman will be able to tell them is a married lady came in to look at trucks for her husband. He didn’t see where you came from or where you went.”
“Thank God!” she said. “So where do we go from here?”
“Los Angeles,” he said promptly, heading north. “It’s a good place to get lost in.”
Relieved—and feeling safe for the first time in what seemed like months—Priscilla leaned back in her seat and watched as he maneuvered through the traffic with the skill of a race car driver. She knew Los Angeles was straight up the interstate from San Diego, but when Donovan didn’t even take the interstate, she wasn’t really surprised. If there was one thing she’d learned over the course of the last few days, it was that he very seldom did the expected.
Curious, she asked, “How did you become a bounty hunter and learn to track bad guys? That’s not a line of work many people go into. How did you learn all the tricks of the trade?”
He grinned. “Are you asking if I learned from personal experience?”
Startled, she blushed. “I didn’t mean—”
“I was a cop, sweetheart. I learned just about everything I needed to know from the scum I arrested on the streets.”
“And now you work for yourself? Why? I don’t know how much you make, but I would think that you’d make more—and have a heck of a lot more benefits—if you worked for the police department. Not that it’s any of my business,” she added quickly. “I’m not trying to be nosy or anything. I’m just curious.”
Donovan hesitated. He didn’t normally talk about his past, but they were going to be spending weeks together before she could go home. She had a right to know who she was on the run with.
“I never had much use for rules—”
A grin kicked up one corner of her mouth. “No kidding? Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Smart ass,” he said and chuckled. “Do you want to hear this or not?”
“Sorry,” she said, fighting a smile. “Proceed, please.”
“As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted,” he drawled, “I never had much use for rules, but I played by the book. My arrests were always clean. I made sure of it.”
“And?”
Sobering, he said, “Johnny Sanchez was my best friend on the force. We went to high school together and joined the force the same day.”
Her eyes searching his, she frowned. “Why do I have the feeling that he wasn’t as ethical as you were?”
“He was on the take,” he said bluntly.
“On the take?” Her eyes widened. “You mean he was taking bribes?”
His gaze shifting between the road ahead of them and the rearview mirror, he nodded grimly. “He wasn’t the only one. Several detectives were doing the same thing.”
“What did you do?”
“I was furious,” he replied. “I had a meeting with Johnny and raked his butt over the coals. I warned him I was going to turn him and the others in if he didn’t go to the chief.”
“And did he?”
Just thinking about Johnny and his betrayal had a muscle ticking in his jaw. “No.”
“So you went to the chief.”
It wasn’t a question, but a statement, and he appreciated the fact that she realized he was the kind of man who kept his word. Except that he hadn’t had a chance to do that when it came to Johnny. “Johnny and his buddies framed me before I could do anything,” he retorted. “They planted drugs in my car, then had one of their buddies on the force stop me the next morning as I was driving into work.”
“Oh, my God!” she gasped. “What happened?”
“I was charged with possession and arrested.”
Five years had passed since then, but the memory still had the power to enrage him. “I spent a year in prison.”
“Are you serious? But you were set up! Surely someone at the police station must have listened to you.”
“Oh, sure,” he said bitterly. “They listened, for all the good it did me. Planting evidence without leaving any prints is a piece of cake for a bunch of rogue cops. And with no evidence against them, it came down to my word against theirs. Most of them were all detectives with impeccable reputations. I followed the rules, but I’d always been a rebel and everyone knew it. I didn’t have a prayer’s chance in hell.”
“So they just got away with it?” she said incredulously.
“No, though there were some dark nights when I was in prison when I thought they were going to.” He didn’t tell her about the rage that had engulfed him at those times, or the need for revenge that had come close to stealing his soul. It had taken a lot of work on his part, but he’d locked those emotions away in the deepest part of his brain, and he didn’t plan to ever go there again. “I didn’t know at the time that one of the other detectives on the force who was clean believed me. He worked with Johnny and his partners in crime and began secretly gathering evidence against them. When he had enough, he went to the chief without anyone knowing it, and they were all arrested.”
“So you were released?”
“Only when Johnny copped a plea and finally told the truth,” he muttered. “He didn’t do it out of any concern for me. He was just saving his own ass.”
“What a slimeball,” she seethed. “He was your friend. My God, you went to school together! How could he let you just rot in prison without coming forward right from the very beginning?”
“Money,” he said simply. “You’d be surprised what people will do to get their hands on it. Though I don’t have to tell you that,” he added. “Look what the good folks in Willow Bend are doing to you and your family to get the ranch. According to Buck, they’ve tried to burn you out, shoot you, kidnap you—they even put rattlesnakes in your beds!”
“They’re sociopaths,” she said. “They have to be to even consider doing something like that. Of course, they don’t think they’re ever going to get caught. After a year in prison, it can’t be much consolation to you, but at least your friend Johnny and the others paid for what they did.”
Donovan didn’t have the heart to tell her they were already out on the streets. Johnny only got six months, and the others, three years. Justice, he thought sarcastically, was a wonderful thing.
“So is that why you didn’t go back to the force?” Priscilla asked as he again took an unexpected turn to make sure they weren’t being followed. “Surely, they would have taken you back.”
“I didn’t want to go back,” he said flatly. “I moved to Chicago and applied there, but when they did a background search and discovered I’d turned in fellow cops, no one wanted to work with me.”
“That’s ridiculous!” she snapped. “You were the good guy.”
He smiled at her vehemence. “Why, Prissy, I didn’t know you cared.”
“Stuff it,” she growled. “This is about right and wrong, and you did the right thing. How could anyone find fault with that?”
“There’s an unwritten code—”
“Bite me,” she spat out. “You were a police officer enforcing the law.”
“Maybe that works in the movies and fairy tales, but not in the real world. And things turned out all right, anyway,” he explained. “I went into business for myself and became a bounty hunter. I travel all over the world, I don’t have to play by the rules anymore and I still get to catch the bad guys. Life doesn’t get any better than that.”
Another woman might have been fooled by his devil-may-care attitude, but Priscilla could still see the flash of bitterness in his eyes when he’d spoken of Johnny and the detectives who had nearly destroyed his life. She couldn’t blame him for being disillusioned and cynical. Who wouldn’t be?
“You don’t get tired of the traveling?” she asked curiously. “Of sleeping in a different bed every other night? Of being in a strange town every time you turn around?”
He shrugged. “Sometimes. But every job has its drawbacks. It has its perks, too.”
What perks? she wanted to ask. There couldn’t be a woman in his life…well, not just one special one, anyway. How could there be? His job took him all over the world, and he didn’t stay anywhere very long before he moved on. What woman would put up with that?
Still, she knew there must have been one at one time. Donovan was the kind of man women were attracted to. She knew from personal observation that he couldn’t walk down the street without drawing the eye of every female in sight. Surely, at least one woman must have tried to tie him down. And he must have been tempted. What happened? Why weren’t they together?
Suddenly realizing where her thoughts had wandered, she stiffened. What was wrong with her? Whether or not there was a woman in Donovan’s life had nothing to do with her. He was her bodyguard, hired to keep her safe until she could go home to the ranch in a few weeks. Once she no longer needed him to keep her safe, he would move on to his next job, and she’d probably never see him again.
Wasn’t that what she wanted? To be free of the fear that dodged her every step, to be in charge of her life again, to be able to go anywhere she wanted alone?
The answer didn’t come nearly as quickly as she would have liked. Confused, stunned by the sudden twinge in the region of her heart, she was mortified to discover that she was on the verge of tears. Blinking furiously, she glanced away and stared blindly out the window. She had to get a grip, she told herself fiercely. Whatever she was feeling for him was nothing more than a result of the fact that they were practically living in each other’s pocket. Once this was all over and she could put some space between them, she’d be fine.
And if you believe that one, a voice drawled in her head, then get your sketches ready because the Queen wants you to design a new wardrobe for her! Idiot. Get real.
“You all right?”
Lost in her musings, she almost laughed. All right? Not hardly. “I’m fine,” she lied. Suddenly realizing they’d reached the outskirts of Los Angeles while she was brooding over her thoughts, she managed. “Where do we go from here?”
“Since there’s no way in hell we’re going back to my apartment, we’ve got to get some clothes,” he replied. “Then we look for work.”
Finding clothes was easy enough—they stopped at a second-hand shop and bought just about everything they needed. Finding work that Donovan approved of, however, was something else entirely. There were plenty of places advertising for help, but Donovan passed them all by for one reason or another. Then, just when Priscilla was beginning to wonder if they were going to drive all the way to San Francisco before they stopped, he found just what he was apparently looking for…a small, old-fashioned diner next door to an old travel court that looked like it had been there since the forties.
Pleased, he pulled around to the rear of the diner and parked, making sure they were out of sight of anyone driving past on the road. “This should do nicely,” he told her. “These kind of places don’t do background checks—or ask too many questions, for that matter. Let’s go check it out.”
The diner was packed…and a madhouse. Tables needed to be cleaned, customers waited impatiently for someone to take their orders and the old man working the grill looked like he was ready to pull his hair out as he shouted at the one waitress he had to pick up the orders he’d just completed and be quick about it. She only shot him a hostile look and moved at her own pace.
The situation looked far from ideal to Priscilla, but Donovan took one look at the place and grinned. “This is a sure thing if I ever saw it.” Raising his voice over the din of the jukebox and customers demanding to know when their order was going to be ready, he told the old man, “You look like you could use some help, and we’re looking for work.”
“You
found it,” the old man rasped as he flipped hamburgers on the grill. “Grab an apron from the back and one of you get back here and either flip burgers or start three orders of chicken-fried steak. The other can help Janie before all my customers walk out.”
“You cook,” Donovan told Priscilla. “I’ll wait tables.”
Horrified, she said, “Oh, no. Desserts are my thing, not chicken-fried steak. I don’t even know what it is.”
“Your education is sadly lacking,” he teased, “but we’ll have to do something about that later.” Handing her an apron, he grinned. “Go wait tables, sweetheart. I’ve got some steaks to cook.”
Just that easily, they both had jobs.
Chapter 9
Priscilla had never waited tables in her life, but as she moved through the diner taking orders, cleaning tables, refilling coffee cups and iced tea glasses, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had so much fun.
Oh, she made more than a few mistakes, mixed up some orders and even dropped a bowl of chicken and dumplings, though not, thankfully, on a customer. She’d thought she was history then, but Harry Thomas, the old man who hired her and Donovan and owned the diner, only rolled his eyes and dished up another bowl of dumplings. That was hours ago, and she hadn’t dropped another dish since. She was, she thought with satisfaction, getting the hang of this.
“Hey, Miss Sunshine,” Donovan teased her as the last two customers left and Mr. Thomas locked the door behind them. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you’ve done this before.”
Pleased, she grinned. “I did all right, didn’t I?”
“Except for the chicken and dumplings,” Mr. Thomas said dryly. “And the plates and coffee cups you chipped when you cleaned tables. Oh, yeah, and the sugar you put in the salt shaker—”
“Hey, they were both white!” she said, when she saw the twinkle gleaming in his faded blue eyes. “I was in a hurry and forgot what was what. Thank God I didn’t grab the flour by mistake.”
“Good point.” He chuckled. He added gruffly, “Did I say thank you? An hour before you two walked in, my cook and head waitress walked out and left me high and dry. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t come in when you had.”