As he watched, Kyle’s baseball cap came off, and Alyssa reacted.
Yeah, that’s right, sweet thing. It wasn’t him.
They were spending an awful lot of time and energy searching for him, when they should have been looking for Mary Lou and Haley.
Okay, it was definitely time to go, while Alyssa was still caught up asking Kyle all kinds of questions about Sam. He could practically hear the kid’s answers. Short hair styled and blown dry, clean shaven, dark pants and a white shirt with the collar open. Tweed sports jacket.
Sam had never owned a tweed sports jacket before, not in his entire life.
Kyle pointed down the street, toward the lot where Sam had left the car.
Good boy.
Of course, Sam didn’t own a tweed jacket anymore. It was now sitting, abandoned, in a shopping cart in aisle 14.
He headed for the rear of the store, toward the delivery bays that exited into the back parking lot, purposely taking the aisle that featured hair care products. He grabbed a bottle of goo or gel or what-the-fuck from the shelf and squeezed some into his hand as he walked. He set the bottle down on a shelf with some disposable diapers, rubbed his hands together, and used the goop to slick his hair down and back from his face.
He’d replaced the tweed with the dark suit jacket that matched the pants and put on a rather anemic-looking yellow tie with gray flecks. It was the opposite of a power tie. It was a “don’t notice me” tie.
When he caught sight of himself in a mirror, he realized that he could have walked out the front door. No way, not in a million years, would anyone recognize him.
Not even Alyssa Locke.
He wiped his hands clean on a dish towel as he crossed through house-wares, and then there he was, at the door marked “Employees only.”
He slowed down and stopped, pretending to look at a rack of little boys’ bathing suits as he made sure there was no one around to challenge him when he went through that door.
There were two shoppers nearby, one an elderly black woman in a housedress that didn’t cover her swollen ankles, and the other a woman or maybe even a short man in baggy jeans and an oversized shirt and a knit skull cap. They were together, talking about inflation, so Sam started toward the door, but then the androgynous one turned toward him, and—
Holy fuck, it was Alyssa Locke.
She’d handcuffed him to her before he could even tell his feet to run.
“Hey, Sam. Nice tie,” she said, then yanked him through that back door.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
The hallway was empty—Alyssa saw Sam take that in in one swift glance.
Right before he grabbed her and slammed her up against the concrete block wall.
She must’ve made a sound of pain, because the look on his face was almost comical. That is, if there was anything funny at all about more than two hundred pounds of angry Navy SEAL jamming his arm up underneath her throat, cutting off her air.
“I’m sorry. God, Lys, I’m so sorry,” he told her as he groped her, searching for her side arm.
The one she’d carefully locked in the trunk of her car before coming inside the store.
She tried turning her head aside so she could get some air. She flailed, hitting him as hard as she could, but he just moved his arm, pinning her more completely.
“I’m not going to bring you in, you fool,” she said, although it came out gasped and garbled.
He got the gist of it. “Damn right you’re not.”
“No, Sam—”
She really couldn’t breathe. His grip on her tightened, and she knew he was trying to make her black out from lack of air. Whereupon he’d search her for her keys, free himself from the cuffs, and, first making sure she was breathing again, take off for parts unknown.
And then she’d be back to talking to him on the phone.
His face was an inch from hers—the way he’d lifted her off the ground brought them nose to nose—and she stared into his eyes, shaking her head as much as she could, pleading with her eyes. Don’t do this.
She’d never seen him like this before. He was furious and terrified and remorseful as hell. It was not without possibility that he might actually start to cry. “I’m sorry,” he just kept saying. “Don’t make me hurt you. Alyssa, I don’t want to hurt you.…”
“Don’t—” she managed to gasp as she struggled to get free, or at least get a breath. Just one good breath …
So she could beg him to trust her.
So she could tell him she’d locked the keys to these cuffs in the trunk of her car as well. If she blacked out, then he’d be cuffed to dead weight.
Cuffed to …
Alyssa stopped fighting him—which wasn’t the easiest thing to do when her brain was sending “no air” panic signals to her body—and went limp.
Sam, however, was ready for her to do that—turning into a dead weight was a basic defense technique from Street Fighting 101—but he did have to adjust his grip on her, which loosened his hold on her arm.
It was the arm with which she was cuffed to him. Which meant she didn’t have the reach she needed to hit him in the eye—a blow that didn’t need a lot of force behind it to be painful as hell.
Instead, she tried for an elbow to his nose, and—whoa, what a lucky break—to avoid that, he brought his head down and closer to her. Which put his nose well out of range, but made it possible for her to throw her arm—leading with that same elbow—up and over Sam’s head. The cuffs and Sam’s arm followed, looping around his neck.
That put his own arm into an unnatural position, and now when she went limp, he had to back off fast and duck much farther forward in order to slip their arms back over his head. If he hadn’t, she would’ve wrenched his shoulder damn near out of its socket.
It was then, when he backed off like that, that he finally lost his hold on her.
And there was air. Glorious, wonderful air.
Alyssa took deep gasping breaths as she went down to the floor.
Or at least as close to the floor as she could get while handcuffed to Sam.
She went instantly into a floor fighting position, on her side, one leg bent beneath her, and used the full force of her other leg to kick at him. Hard. She aimed for his knee. He was expecting her to target his groin so she connected and heard him swear.
She kicked him again, but he was a fast learner, and she only managed to hit his thigh.
He grabbed her foot, yanking her off balance before he pulled up hard on the cuffs. He jerked her all the way up onto her feet, obviously expecting her to resist. But she didn’t. She pushed herself even farther forward, moving toward him instead of trying to back away.
It put him at a serious disadvantage, especially when she moved even closer—close enough to step between his legs and …
She hit him so hard with her knee that his feet left the floor. She herself was knocked off balance as the handcuffs dragged her forward and down with him, and she scrambled to stay on her feet.
He made a sound that was a mix of pain and despair, and God knows a hit to the balls like that would’ve put another man on the ground for good, whimpering in a fetal position, but Sam was back up and at her instantly, slamming her against that wall again.
But she was ready for him this time, and she tucked her head into him, grabbing him in as much of a bear hug as she could, with her one arm twisted and crushed between them.
She was winning, she realized—if this could even remotely be called winning—because he was trying his damnedest not to hurt her.
He could have smashed her head against the wall. He could have broken her arm with very little effort. He could have slapped her or punched her or kicked her to the ground a dozen different times.
But he didn’t. And he wouldn’t.
She was fighting him as hard and as dirty as she could, and he was being careful.
“I’m not going to turn you in,” she told him again, talking directly to his armpit. All she
had to do to stay in this fight was keep him away from her throat. “If I was, my backup would be here by now—twenty FBI agents cleaning this floor with your fancy suit!”
He was breathing hard, each exhale moving her hair, as he pinned her there, as he went through her pockets, searching for her keys.
“Like they did to your friend across the street,” she told him. Once Sam found what he was looking for, he was going to wrestle her to the ground, sit on her, and unlock the cuffs. Except the only keys she was carrying were her car keys and the key to her lockbox in the trunk.
He was going to be very disappointed.
She couldn’t move with the full weight of his body against hers, the wall grinding into her backbone. He’d protected himself against another kick to the groin by pushing himself between her legs. She could kick the backs of his legs with her heels, but she couldn’t get up enough force that way to do anything but annoy him.
“Forty-eight hours,” she persisted as he attempted to get into the front left pocket of her jeans, as she tried to make it as difficult as possible for him to do so. “We have forty-eight hours to find Mary Lou and Haley, and you’re wasting time!”
Someone was coming.
Sam heard it at the same time she did. A door opening. Voices. Two or three of them. Young women, girls, from the sound of it, heading toward them, about to turn the corner and see …
Alyssa wrapped her legs around Sam and lifted her head.
She could taste his surprise as she kissed him.
Kissed him? Hell, she ate him alive. She soul-sucked him so hard, it made those kisses they’d shared in the back of her car seem staid by comparison.
It took him maybe three one-hundreths of a second to catch on and to kiss her back, making it look as if they’d ducked through the “Employees Only” door to grab a semipublic quickie.
Alyssa heard the girls giggling, felt them hurry past, felt Sam hard between her legs as he ground himself against her, as she tasted blood.…
God, at some point in their struggle, she’d hit him so hard he’d cut his lip on his own teeth.
He didn’t seem to care. He didn’t seem to notice that the girls had gone out the door, that he and Alyssa were alone once more.
He just kept kissing her.
She tried to pull back, but he wouldn’t let her go.
“Stop,” she said into his mouth. “Sam—”
It was hard as hell to talk with his tongue in her mouth. Doubly hard because part of her didn’t really want him to remove it.
“Please,” she said, but it probably sounded as if she were begging for more, because he kissed her even more deeply, but slower now. Sweetly.
Oh, dear God …
She could feel his heart pounding, or maybe that was hers because the rhythmic way he was rubbing himself against her was enough to make her …
Oh, but heavenly Father, if she did, then he’d know that it had been years since she’d … since they’d …
“Stop,” she said, but of course he didn’t since she hadn’t actually managed to say it aloud.
So she bit him.
Not very hard.
But certainly hard enough to get his attention.
“Shit!”
“Stop,” Alyssa ordered him, even though he already had. He was still pressed against her, though, which made her want to scream. “I kissed you so they wouldn’t see that we were fighting, so they wouldn’t call the police. But they just might call security, and if the rent-a-cops find us here, cuffed together like this …”
But he didn’t move. He just stared at her as she looked back at him, at the graceful shape of his mouth, at the smooth, clean lines of his cheeks, at his eyes—startlingly blue eyes he’d kept too often hidden behind all of his hair, or beneath the brim of one of his infernal and always present baseball caps.
“Now,” she said, trying to sound as if her heart wasn’t about to pound out of her chest, as if her body wasn’t screaming for them to finish what they’d started, “will you please trust me enough to put me down and walk out of here with me? My car’s just outside.
“I’m here alone,” she continued, knowing that if he was still able to stand after that kick she’d given him, then he had a significant amount of adrenaline charging through his system. It was enough to make everything harder—including his ability to comprehend what she was saying. So she brought it down to the bottom line again. “I’m not here to turn you in. I made a deal with you, even though you were right about Max. Even though he didn’t mean it. But I did. We have forty-eight hours to find Haley. Let’s stop dicking around and go and do it.”
Sam smiled at that—perhaps it was a poor choice of words.
Damn, he was handsome with his hair cut short and his entire face showing. Some women might not agree because there was nothing pretty about this man. His good looks were rugged and he had a smile that was loaded with testosterone. He had the kind of big, lean, man-sized face that was going to get craggier as he got older. But he’d be just as handsome, possibly even more so, at seventy than he was right now.
The suit he had on was not expensive, but it fit as if it had been tailored to his rangy frame. Or at least it had before he’d ripped out the sleeve.
When Alyssa had first spotted him in the store, she’d looked past him. He was so completely the anti-Sam, right down to the shiny black dress shoes.
The embarrassing truth was, she never would have recognized him if she hadn’t had sex with him. In the shower. Hungover and sick as a dog from a night of heavy drinking, handcuffed to Sam with the key temporarily lost, stone cold sober and horrified that she’d slept with him the night before, she still hadn’t been able to keep herself from jumping him one last time.
Yes, it was because she’d seen him before with his hair wet and slicked back from his face almost exactly like this, that she’d realized it was indeed Sam Starrett inside that business suit.
“What can I do to make you trust me?” she asked, well aware that he still hadn’t released her.
“Kiss me again,” he said.
“Look, Starrett, this is serious. I didn’t kiss you because I wanted to.” Liar. “I also didn’t kiss you because I’m trying to play you. I’m done with that. No more games. It’s honesty time. I’m not helping you because I want us to have sex again, because I don’t.” Liar. “Nothing’s changed between us. I’m helping you because your reasons for wanting to find Haley first and put her someplace safe are good ones. I’m helping you because despite what he says now, Max did agree to this deal.”
Sam nodded, but he still didn’t let go of her. “Honesty time. Okay. I should probably tell you that if you don’t kiss me again, my adrenaline levels are going to drop. Enough so that my body is going to realize that you kicked me so hard that my balls are now lodged near my tonsils. And at that moment of realization, I will probably drop to my knees and start retching. Oh, Jesus.”
He let go of her, and she slid down him.
“In case you were offended,” he told her raggedly, “the hard-on didn’t really … have anything to do with you. At least not … at first. It’s a … male fighting … thing. But as long as … we’re being completely honest, I feel it’s fair to tell you that your making love to me … would go a long way toward making me trust you.” He sank to his knees and closed his eyes. “Oh, fuck.”
She wanted to sink down beside him, and close her eyes, too, weary from relief, but they had to keep moving. She looked around. There was a machine selling cans of cold soda a little farther down the hall.
“Of course … it’s entirely … possible I’ll never … have sex … or walk … again.”
“Do you have your wallet?” Alyssa asked.
“What, are you going to … rob me now, too? Right front pocket … pants.”
She fished for his wallet as gently as she could, took out a single. Put the wallet back in her own pocket. “Come on.” She reached under his arms and helped him to his feet. God, there was a lot of
him.
“I was serious … about the retching.”
“I know,” she said. “Let’s get you into the car. But first …”
She stopped at the soda machine and fed it Sam’s dollar. A can of soda clunked out. She handed it to him.
“Hey … I wanted … Dr. Pepper.”
“It’s an ice pack alternative, funnyman.”
A wave of hot air hit them as they went through another door and out into the blinding morning light.
There was no one out in the back lot. Alyssa watched as Sam made note of the fact that there were, indeed, no FBI agents staked out and waiting for them to appear.
She’d parked at the end of a row of employees’ cars and she led him in that direction.
“Can you hold off on the retching for just a little bit longer?” she asked.
It wasn’t a good sign that he didn’t speak, that he just nodded.
She held out her car keys to him. “I need you to get a couple of things out of the trunk.”
He nodded again. He was gritting his teeth, and she knew that he wanted nothing more than to curl up in a ball in the backseat for about twenty minutes. But, as usual, he was determined to be Superman, so he took her keys, and after about three tries, during which he started sweating all over again, he managed to unlock the trunk.
Alyssa purposely stood back, as far away from both him and the car as the handcuffs would allow.
“There’s another key on that ring,” she told him. “It’ll unlock the box that my side arm is stored in.”
Sam turned to look at her, surprise and wonder in his eyes. It almost canceled out the haze from his pain.
Almost.
“Thank you for trusting me,” she told him. Although it sure would have been easier if he’d trusted her before she damn near killed him. She gestured toward the trunk, toward her handgun. “This is about me, trusting you, in return.”
He understood. He unlocked the box and took out the weapon. Checking to make sure it was loaded, and then that the safety was on, he stashed it in his jacket pocket. “Thanks.” It came out as little more than a whisper.
Gone Too Far Page 32