The mob eventually spit him out at the back of the lines. Shuddering, he slapped and brushed at himself, trying to dislodge the germ-infested filth from his hands, his arms, his hair. Then he made himself desist, knowing that he didn’t have time for this now. As much as he detested the multitude of close-packed bodies, he was exposed out here in the open, so he wove through the more loosely packed crowds at the back of the gathering, working his way toward the parking lot.
He briefly considered trying another entrance, knowing from experience that some security employees were more diligent than others. But he decided against it.
He had been given a sign, and an intelligent man only ignored one of those at his own peril. Clearly it was time to withdraw to somewhere safer and reevaluate the situation. But cold anger filled him.
Priscilla Jayne didn’t know who she was dealing with, and she had better beware. Because he had God on his side.
And she had just bought herself more trouble than she could imagine.
CHAPTER TWENTY
And on the music front, a little birdie tells me there’s a sudden spate of heightened security at Priscilla Jayne concerts.
—“Dishing With Charley” columnist Charlene Baines, Nashville News Today
RUBBER BURNED. BRAKES SCREAMED. And Jared went from a sound sleep to crashing against the imitation-leather folding curtain of his sleeping berth when the bus tipped to an inexplicable forty-five degree angle. Opening his eyes to the pitch-dark night, he heard a thump out in the hall between the berths, followed by a spate of creative cursing. But before he had time to worry about anyone else’s safety the bus slammed down on all four tires and he was thrown back against the cubicle’s outside wall. The sound of air brakes from another vehicle shrieked past and P.J. and Nell’s raised voices exploded in an anxious babble of high-pitched confusion behind their stateroom door. He unsnapped the flap and shoved it back.
Eddie was sprawled out across the hallway floor, buck naked and cussing a blue streak as he simultaneously rubbed one flank and checked his elbow. Hank was swearing, as well, as he clutched at the half-opened accordion curtain with one hand, his abdominal muscles standing out in stark relief as he hauled his upper body back into his berth.
The stateroom door burst open and the women tumbled out.
“Shit!” Lurching up onto the hip he’d been nursing, Eddie reached into his berth and snatched out a cowboy hat, which he whipped over his lap.
It made Jared realize that he himself was standing there in nothing but his boxers and he grabbed a pair of jeans from his own compartment. Pulling them on, he gave first P.J. then the rest of her crew a swift assessment. “Everyone okay?”
The general consensus was that they were and he nodded. “Good. Let’s find out what the hell happened. Marvin!” It suddenly registered that P.J. wore only a skimpy white tank top and bikini panties and Nell had on an almost see-through baby-doll nightie. “You two might want to grab your robes,” he said. “And, Eddie, trade your hat for a pair of jeans. Marvin!” Looking toward the front of the bus he saw that the driver wasn’t behind the wheel. “Where the hell did he go?”
He strode up the aisle past the galley to the front, where he saw the door standing open. Jumping down to the bottom step, he leaned out into the night. A barely visible but steady drizzle misted his bare shoulders and he shivered. “Marvin?” God, what time was it, anyway? He felt as if he’d slept for hours, yet when he glanced at his watch he saw that not even two had passed since he’d gone to bed.
Masculine voices laced with frustration rose and fell on the other side of a shallow ditch that ran a short distance alongside the road—a trench that Jared abruptly realized their bus now straddled. He leaned out the door. “Marvin, that you?”
“Yeah, I’m here, Mr. Hamilton.”
Locating the driver in the black-on-black shadow cast by the bus, he was just in time to see Marvin stumble away from the back end, lean over and be sick. When he straightened a moment later a burly man who had been standing in even deeper shadow stepped out to give him a companionable thump on the back. Jared saw the tail end of a semi across the road and assumed he was its driver.
Taking in the rain-slicked roads, he climbed down to help Marvin back onto the bus, shivering anew at the damp ground beneath the soles of his feet. “You okay?”
“Yes…no…I’m not sure. How about everyone else?”
“Shaken but unharmed. Come on, it’s wet out here.” He turned to the trucker. “You, too, sir. Come in out of the rain.” He offered his hand. “I’m Jared Hamilton.”
“Red Conroy.” The man shook hands with a firm, hard grip and followed them onto the bus.
P.J. and posse, dressed in jeans and T-shirts, crowded the galley. When he brought the two drivers within the circle of light from a lamp someone had turned on he saw that Marvin was roughly the color of his once-crisp white shirt. “You don’t look so hot. Did you hit your head?”
“No, sir.”
“You have any other injuries that might need attention?”
“No.”
“Then you want to tell me what went down here tonight?”
“Yes, what happened?” P.J. asked, stepping forward to touch gentle fingertips to the driver’s shoulders as he leaned forward, gripping his knees with white-knuckled hands, his head hanging. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yeah, I’m just rattled,” he said shakily and slowly straightened. “I’ve been a driver for twenty-three years and until today I’ve never had a ticket, much less an accident.”
“Was it the rain?” Jared asked.
“That might have contributed to it. A shower blew up out of nowhere and the highway’s slippery.” But he cut himself off, shaking his head.
“The roads are slick,” the trucker named Red agreed. “But it was that crazy-ass driver in the black pickup who caused this.”
Marvin nodded. “Yeah. The rain wouldn’t have made a lick of difference if not for that damn reckless yahoo playing games with me.”
Jared’s instincts started quivering like bird dogs on point. “What yahoo is that?” he asked in a carefully neutral voice.
“You mind if I sit down?”
“Damn, Marvin, of course not. I should have gotten you settled sooner.” He turned to the trucker, who had no doubt gotten his handle from his receding crop of gingery curls. “You, too, Mr. Conroy. Grab a seat.”
“Call me Red,” the trucker invited as he moved to accept one of the captain’s chairs Jared indicated.
Marvin collapsed onto the other one and hugged himself as if he were cold. He looked shell-shocked. “About twenty minutes ago a car came roaring up on my tail,” he said. “Until then, except for the occasional trucker like Red here hauling their loads back up north, I’d had the road pretty much to myself.”
Hank, who had disappeared for a moment, returned with towels, which he handed to Marvin and Red. He tossed the last one to Jared. Nell handed the drivers each a steaming cup of coffee.
The bus’s AC had gone off when the engine was shut down and Marvin had clearly had more things on his mind than to turn on the backup generator. It was growing muggy, but he hugged his towel around his shoulders like a shawl before cradling his mug in both hands. “The guy flashed his lights like he wanted to pass me, so I moved to the edge of the shoulder and he went roaring by. I figured he’d be nothing but a red taillight in the distance before long.” He buried his nose in the cup, took a cautious sip.
“But he wasn’t?”
“No, sir.” Marvin looked up at him. “Right away he slows down to under thirty miles an hour. But when I started to pull into the passing lane, he punched it. I tried to pass him anyway for a coupla minutes, but anytime it looked like I had a shot at getting by he moved in front of me. Short of ramming him, there wasn’t much I could do to stop him from blocking my way. So I dropped back. But the leg to Houston is a long one and I couldn’t afford to have the hour and forty-five minutes it oughtta take to reach I-20 tur
n into almost four. So I pulled out into the passing lane again.”
“And I’m guessing he punched it once more.”
“Yes, sir. But I put the pedal to the metal this time and held it there, thinking maybe I could power past him, since he was driving an older model pickup that looked like it’d seen better days. I also kinda hoped he’d get tired of screwing around and just let me by. So there we were, roarin’ down the highway side by side…until I saw Red’s semi headed toward us.”
“Oh, my god,” P.J. breathed and gave his shoulder a squeeze.
“He was still a good ways away,” he assured her, reaching up to give her hand a fatherly pat. “You’ve probably noticed for yourself how far down the road you can see in this area.” Then he looked over at Jared. “I had a cushion of several miles before I had to worry about that rig turning into a problem, so I started edging toward the other driver, hoping he’d get a clue about the law of tonnage and get the hell out of my way. But he didn’t budge and I’ve had ‘safety first’ drummed into my head from the day I got my first car, so I had to concede the road to him and drop back.”
The driver’s eyes held a vestige of the shock he must have felt at the time. “Except he dropped back, too. He wouldn’t let me pass him and he wouldn’t let me fall back, and that rig was starting to get a little too close for comfort. Red obviously thought so, too, because his air horn started wailing.”
“I thought at first Marvin musta been drinking or something, the way that bus was all over the road. But when I slowed down I could see that asshole in the pickup truck—beg pardon, ladies—wasn’t allowing him to get back in his lane.”
“I was about to bail into the oil field on Red’s side of the road but—” Stumbling to a halt, Marvin brought fisted hands up and ground the heels into his temples.
“But the sonovabitch swerved at him,” Red said, picking up the narrative when it became clear Marvin needed a minute. “Swerved right the hell at the side of the bus.”
“And I was so surprised that I swerved too hard myself to avoid him.”
“Anyone woulda,” Red assured him. “Dodging the crap that sumbitch was hurling gives a whole new meaning to defensive driving.”
“No, I really did overcorrect. Plus I was sure I’d caught his bumper, which probably gave my wheels that final boost off the ground. But when I got off the bus half expecting to find him flipped on the side of the road there was nothing there. So now I don’t know, maybe I just thought I hooked him. And I’m sorry, Miz Morgan, Mr. Hamilton.” Coffee sloshed in his cup and he gripped it tighter in a blatant attempt to stop his hands from trembling. “But it happened so fast. For a few seconds there I thought I was gonna roll it for sure.”
“You didn’t, though, and no one was hurt,” Jared assured him evenly. Someone could have been though. They all could have been smeared on the highway and he was pretty sure he knew who was responsible.
It sure as hell wasn’t Marvin, who hadn’t signed on for any of this shit. “Did you get a license number?”
“Yes, sir. Considering how much time I spent behind that Ford, I had what seemed like hours to memorize it.” He rattled off the number, then gave Jared a level look. “It was an Iowa plate.”
“I’M SORRY ABOUT THE ROOM.” Jared leaned against the hotel room’s doorjamb and watched P.J. set out toiletries on the bathroom counter.
“Yeah?” She looked up from arranging a bewildering array of makeup. “Why’s that?”
He scratched his thumbnail beneath his lower lip, thinking she looked like she was about fifteen years old with her hair pulled up in that high bouncy ponytail. “Well, it’s not exactly a suite at the Teatro, is it? Or even a particularly great standard room.” And she deserved better.
“Yeah, pretty damn inefficient of you not to know this was a big conference week in Houston,” she said sternly. Then she slugged him in the arm. “C’mon! You got Marvin through his interview with the cops, poured whiskey down his throat to cure his shakes and drove the bus to Abilene yourself while he slept it off. You got the rest of us on a flight to Houston so he can take his time driving here and got us all rooms in this perfectly fine hotel.”
“Which rates maybe two stars, and then only if you squint real hard.”
“Hey, that’s a star and a half more than anywhere I stayed before this Priscilla Jayne thing started taking on a life of its own. But we were talking about you—about how cool under pressure you are. And about how you’re my hero. In fact—” Abandoning her unpacking, she crossed over to him and reached for the fastenings on the button-down pinstriped shirt he wore with his jeans. “I think you deserve a little reward for all your hard work.”
He’d been steeling himself to put a little more distance between them, not less. In the past twelve and a half hours he’d managed to put up a good front for P.J. and her crew. It sure as hell hadn’t stopped him, however, from thinking almost nonstop about what could have happened during that whole bus-being-run-off-the-road debacle.
And the possibilities of what might have been scared the bejesus out of him. The sheriff in the small town where they’d reported the incident promised to run the plates, but Jared didn’t need confirmation to know Luther Menks was behind the run-in. There weren’t enough coincidences in the world for it to be otherwise.
The mere fact that Menks would pit his ratty old pickup truck against a megaton bus was scarier ’n hell. No one could accurately predict how another driver would react, but the first scenario to occur to a rational man would involve being run off the road himself.
That seemed to be the point though, didn’t it? Menks wasn’t rational. And now the damn tabloids had published a picture guaranteed to splash fuel on the fire if Menks read that sort of trash. It had actually been an innocent moment—just Jared giving Peej a steadying hand off the bus when her own hands were full. But the photographer had managed to shoot it in such a way that he seemed to be hovering over her like a lover. Then the paper had given it a screaming headline to ensure everyone thought the two of them were fucking like rabbits.
Imagine what they could have done with the truth. The thought made him laugh without humor.
He hoped like hell Menks didn’t read the tabloids. The tenor of the notes the guy had sent P.J. suggested he was about as far from the type to do so as a person could get, which just might be the only break they’d catch in this mess. Publications of that nature were probably too secular for Menks’s taste.
It was more likely, in fact, that he’d believe he had God on his side—those same notes certainly put it within the realm of possibility. But that merely upped the psycho factor and made the situation hairier yet, because it meant Menks had no brakes in place to slow himself down. And given the danger that kind of fanaticism presented to Peej, the last thing she needed was to be personally involved with her security specialist. Not only did it lack all semblance of professionalism on his part—something that used to actually mean something to him—but it put her at even greater risk than she already was.
Yet even knowing all that he still found himself saying, “Reward, huh?” and picking her up by the hips to carry her out into the bedroom.
Laughing, she wrapped her legs around his waist, hooked her arms around his neck and pulled herself up to take a bite of his bottom lip. Shuddering with arousal, he started making a mental list of all the moves he needed to put on her before he could allow himself to lose himself in her sweet body.
But when he dumped her on the bed and reached for her little yellow cotton top with every intention of stripping her bare, she slapped his hands away. Giving him a stern look, she scooted to sit against the headboard. “You first.”
“Huh?”
“You. First. It’s a simple concept, Hamilton. Get naked.”
Was she crazy? How was he supposed to stay in command if he wasn’t wearing a stitch? Because feeling her skin against his before he’d taken care of her at least once was just asking to shoot his control all to hell and gone.
“Uh-uh.” The authoritative crossing-guard palm she thrust at him from the end of her rigidly held arm stopped him in his tracks. “There’s no first about it. Strip, Mister.”
Damn. “Okay, okay.” His mind spinning through possible ways around the situation, he backed off the bed and made a slow production out of shedding his shirt, then peeling down his pants.
“Yee-haw.” Fanning herself, she gave him a crooked smile. “That little bump and grind would probably earn you a ten-dollar tip at Chippendale’s. Too bad my purse is clear across the room or I’d tuck one in your waistband myself. Lose the boxers, J.”
He pushed them down his hips and kicked free. “What time is sound check? Look, maybe we shouldn’t be starting something we don’t really have time to fin—” Yeah, right. Glancing down at himself, he shut up. Like she was going to believe he couldn’t find the time to squeeze in a little tussle among the sheets when his dick was pointed at her like a compass needle at magnetic north.
“Oh, trust me, we have plenty of time.” Pushing away from the headboard, she rolled up onto her knees and made her way to him across the mattress. “All we have to do is cut out ninety percent of my orgasms. I think I can survive on one.” She reached for him. “Just this once.”
Oh, shit, she’d caught on to that? And did she also know why he concentrated so fiercely on her pleasure—had she guessed that he was afraid to get lost in his own? No, wrong word—he wasn’t afraid of anything. It merely didn’t pay.
All thought fled his mind at the feel of her hand wrapping around his sex, and the breath he sucked in was so sharp and sudden he damn near strangled on it. But mother of God. Her fingers clamped his hard-on, and she squeezed her fist all the way down to its root. Then slid it up. Then down again.
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