“You want to get your hands off me?” His hands were already on their way back up to her shoulders. She realized he was slowly chafing her arms in an effort to warm her. Didn’t matter. The last thing she wanted was to feel any kind of attraction to him.
“Sorry.” He lifted both hands in the air. “Didn’t realize you were untouchable.”
“Well, now you know.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.”
“You do that.”
Hands on the wheel, guiding the boat through the darkness edging the moonlight in an effort to avoid detection, Mick couldn’t help glancing toward shore. Uncle Nicco’s estate was lit up as bright as Vegas. Every window, every outbuilding, every walkway, bush and tree now glowed brilliant white. A full-scale search was clearly underway, but as far as she could see, the stretch of snow leading from the tennis courts to the boathouse was empty. For now.
“So you want to tell me why you’re helping me escape?” he asked.
“I like you?”
He laughed. “Your name’s Mick, right?”
She was surprised he knew her name, until she remembered how many times the guys had shouted it out. He would have to have been slow on the uptake indeed not to have eventually realized that when they’d yelled “Mick” they’d been referring to her.
“Yes. And yours is …?” she asked craftily, hoping he’d assume that, because she was helping him escape, they were now friends. Just in case his picture or fingerprints or whatever weren’t in any law enforcement database. Just in case he should manage to elude her before she could bring him in. Which she wasn’t intending to allow, but, as tonight’s adventures so far illustrated, stuff happens.
“Whatever you want it to be.”
Okay, maybe he wasn’t totally stupid. “Fine. I’ll just call you Ali.”
“Ali?”
“As in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.”
“Cute.”
“Look! The boat! He’s stealing the boat!” The shout from shore was thinned by distance but still perfectly comprehensible. Glancing around, Mick saw tiny dark figures racing through the snow toward the edge of the lake.
“Shit,” the thief muttered, echoing Mick’s sentiments exactly.
“Stop him!”
“Shoot him!”
Pop. Pop. Pop.
Gunshots. The sound was unmistakable. Mick’s heart lodged in her throat.
“Get down!” she yelled. Following her own instructions, she ducked low over the wheel and grabbed at the throttles. Was the boat too far away to be hit? She didn’t know. Distances over water could be deceptive.
Pop. Pop. Thunk. Pop.
It took Mick a second to register that the sound like a palm smacking the wooden strut near her head was actually a bullet slamming into it. The hair stood up on the back of her neck. Clearly nobody was worried about accidentally shooting her. Or, more likely, they just assumed the thief was driving the boat and were aiming at the pilot’s seat, where they assumed he would be.
Yikes!
“Whoa.” The thief crouched beside her seat. “That was close. Another inch or so and …”
He didn’t need to spell it out. She got it. “Hang on.”
Now that the need for subterfuge was past, Mick slammed the throttles forward and gunned the engine. The thief grabbed onto the edge of her seat for balance as the Playtime skipped like a stone across the surface of the water. As more gunfire peppered the air, he stood up, balanced a hip against the back of her seat, and returned fire in a quick burst.
The explosions of sound so close at hand made her jump. Her head jerked around so that she could see him. “Stop that!”
“What? They’re shooting at us.”
“There is no ‘us.’ Anyway, I don’t care. Stop it.”
“Whose side are you on?”
“Give me my damn gun.”
“I don’t think so.”
But he didn’t fire any more shots even though the return barrage from shore exploded like firecrackers on the Fourth of July. Bright bursts from the nozzles blinked on and off like hyperactive fireflies. No more bullets hit the boat, which raced away as fast as Mick could make it go, fast enough so that the bow came up and sheets of water blew past them in twin showers of fine white spray. The windshield and half roof over their heads kept them dry and protected them from the brunt of the weather, but the wind howled past, and within minutes the cockpit became as cold as the inside of a freezer.
Now I know how an ice cube feels, Mick thought, shivering. Shifting so that she was sitting cross-legged in the wide seat, she tucked her poor frozen feet beneath her flannel-clad thighs. As far as keeping herself warm was concerned, it was the best she could do.
Hanging grimly on to the wheel, she willed herself to ignore the biting cold. Now that they were gunning it, waves slammed into the hull, making the boat heave and dip like an airplane in turbulence. With his hand gripping the back of her seat not far from her left shoulder, the thief held on and braced his legs apart for balance, but he didn’t speak. In front of her, the lake was so dark that it blended seamlessly into the night. The distinctive-to-Lake-Erie smell of carp on the wind was strong. For a moment it brought to mind a kaleidoscope of happier occasions, summer nights when she and Angela and a group of their friends had stayed out on the water on this boat until nearly dawn. With a pang, she realized those days were probably over.
Life as she knew it was probably over.
If only, instead of going to investigate that sound, she had headed back to bed!
“They’re really pissed,” observed the man at her shoulder, who, she discovered with a glance around, was watching the action on the shore. She looked, too: the guys now milled around the edge of the lake in a loose knot. The shooting had stopped. Mick watched one lower his weapon and shake his fist at them, signifying, she hoped, that he felt the boat was now out of range. It was impossible to know who it was. “Good call stealing Marino’s boat, by the way.”
“If I was robbing a house, I’d make sure I at least had Getaway Plan B,” she told him acidly. “You know, in case my partner left without me.”
“Winging it’s more my style. And Jel—my partner had no choice.”
“Oh, I’m not supposed to know his name? Guess what, babe: I’ve got you. I don’t need small potatoes stuff like a name.”
“More like, I’ve got you. I’m the one with the gun, remember?”
“It’s my damn gun. I want it back.”
“Tough.”
Mick huffed to show what she thought of that, then tensed as, from her periphery vision, she watched the guys on shore turn and run toward the boathouse in a group, leaving one man behind to, presumably, keep watch on the Playtime. If she had to guess, she’d assume the intent of the others was to give chase via the runabout and the Jet Skis.
Thank God I took the keys.
Then a corollary thought reared its ugly head: Of course there have to be duplicates.
But she didn’t know where they were kept, and she could only hope the guys were equally ignorant.
“You sure you got all the keys?” the thief asked, having apparently followed the same mental path she had taken.
“No.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“We’re winging it, remember?”
She glanced back. Uncle Nicco’s place was now no more than a small sliver of light glowing on the shore. They were too far from it to see anything that might be happening with the guys, which was good, because that meant the guys could probably no longer see them. And, the farther away they got, the safer she felt. The very expensive houses near Uncle Nicco’s estate that they were at that moment speeding past were all lit up by security lights, too. Large, multistoried, gated and fenced, complete with swimming pools and elaborate landscaping, the houses took on a fairy-tale quality when viewed from the lake, as she had noted before. This was an area of over-the-top McMansions owned by the newly rich, most of whom firmly believed that more was more. Com
paratively modest neighborhoods flanked the big houses, and as the Playtime sped along the curve of the lake past them, the light reaching the boat from shore dwindled because the amount of security lighting dwindled. Electricity was expensive, and in these difficult times, people who worked hard for their money—like her—had learned to be frugal. Likewise, the city considered outdoor security lighting expendable, so even most of the streetlights in these quiet residential neighborhoods were currently nonoperational. The residential areas, in turn, gave way to industrial complexes, most of which had gone broke and closed down. After those came large tracts of forest, fields and undeveloped wetlands. Once they got that far, the lighting from shore would be nonexistent.
Probably they needed to dock before that. But where? Frantically she started reviewing possibilities.
“Here.”
Mick jumped as her thoughts were interrupted by something heavy dropped, without warning, onto her shoulders.
Chapter
6
“What …?”
It was only as Mick felt it settle around her that she realized that what had just dropped onto her shoulders was his coat. Up until that moment, she’d been doing her best to tune out how cold she really was, but obviously her shivering had been noticed. He hadn’t touched her again—she had to give him that—but he clearly hadn’t been prepared to simply let the matter go. Her immediate instinct was to reject the coat—as a general rule, she accepted favors from no one—but then she felt the heat radiating from the garment to her skin and simply could not. She was dressed for bed, not the great outdoors on an icy night. The truth was she was so cold that she ached with it, freezing from her head to her poor bare toes, probably flirting with frostbite in a dozen places. She wouldn’t be functional for much longer if she didn’t protect herself from the elements. With that in mind, she accepted the gift, sliding her arms into the sleeves, buttoning up the buttons with fingers that shook. The coat was too big, big enough to wrap around her twice, but it was so warm.
She glanced back at him. He was looking out through the windshield, but as he felt her glance, his eyes met hers. “Thank you” stuck in her throat. When the words finally emerged, they were stiff.
“You’re welcome.”
For a moment neither of them said anything else. Pushing the too-long sleeves up her arms so that her hands were free to grip the wheel, glancing at him again out of the corner of her eye, Mick realized that he was no longer holding on: his hip was braced against the side of her seat and his feet were planted apart for balance, while his arms were folded over his chest. Since she now had his coat, leaving him facing the elements in what looked like a black, long-sleeved thermal tee, she presumed his arms were folded like that for warmth.
So maybe in some respects he was a nice guy. That didn’t make him any less of a criminal. At least with him the situation was black and white. Him she would feel no compunction whatsoever about bringing in.
Except he had seen the pictures, too, which made him even more of a target for Uncle Nicco than she was.
Mick’s breath escaped in a little defeated sigh. Oh, Lord, why had she had to sleepwalk on this of all nights? And when she’d woken up, why hadn’t she just gone back to bed?
“If you go down in the cabin …” Mick indicated the door to her left; shoulder height, it was part of the woodwork that made up the front of the cockpit below the windshield. Now that she had been reminded of how cold she was, not even his coat could stop her from shivering, or her teeth from chattering. Her feet were so numb that they didn’t even tingle anymore, which was not a good sign. Her fingers already once again felt like claws frozen to the wheel. He had to be freezing, too, and she owed him for the coat. “There are clothes in a closet beside the head. Sweatshirts, I know, rain jackets, maybe some boat shoes. I need shoes, at the minimum, and you need something so you don’t freeze.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were worried about me.”
“Good thing you know better, then, isn’t it? The cabin’s down there.” She pointed.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
By the time he disappeared from view, Mick, thinking furiously, had almost forgotten she’d sent him below, or why.
Time was of the essence. If one thing was more certain than anything else, it was that Uncle Nicco’s crew, galvanized by the thought of his reaction to their failure so far, would be giving chase just as quickly as they could get something organized. Ergo, she and the thief needed to get off the lake.
Lake Erie was huge, and the chance of hitting something was small enough for her to risk keeping the lights off as they skimmed along, although the potential for catastrophe was there. Right now, the water was so cold that death by hypothermia within just a few minutes was a given if something should happen to the boat and they had to go into the water. Fortunately, the Playtime was entirely seaworthy—and anyway, her plan was to put in at the first available dock. That dock nevertheless had to be far enough away to make it unlikely that the spot would be found for a while. Although she had to face the near certainty that somebody on Uncle Nicco’s security team would figure out that the Playtime had to make landfall sooner or later, and that therefore welcoming committees would be positioned with all speed at various docks along the shore, she thought she could safely count on that taking a little time to arrange. The key was to pick a place that Uncle Nicco’s guys weren’t likely to think of. Her best course of action would be to summon reinforcements from the ranks of her fellows in Precinct Thirteen to be on hand to meet the Playtime when she took her in. They could take immediate custody of the thief, which would perform the dual function of serving justice and protecting him from Uncle Nicco’s guys, and if any of Uncle Nicco’s guys showed up, the police could provide her with protection, too, at least temporarily, at least until they had gotten everything she knew from her. But she knew how the system worked: sooner or later she was going to be out there on her own, just swinging in the wind.
Having seen the pictures, the thief could not be expected to keep quiet about what he knew. Maybe he would use them, trading what he knew to make a deal with prosecutors. If he played his cards right, he might even end up with little or no jail time. Although it was possible he would be safer in jail.
Where, if what she and the thief knew made its way to law enforcement, Uncle Nicco and his associates would eventually land.
At which juncture the thief would definitely not be safer in jail.
The tangled web into which she had fallen had endless threads, and Mick was getting a headache trying to work out each and every way things could go. The whole situation was a fiasco, and at the moment she was just too cold to think it through. Her jaw ached from being clenched in an attempt to keep her teeth from chattering. Her fingers were numb, and her nose felt like it had been carved out of ice. One thing she knew for sure was that it was way, way too cold to be out on the lake.
Unfortunately, her problems were big enough so that the cold was the least of them. And that was sad.
“Anything interesting happen while I was below?” The thief emerged from the cabin to drop a bundle of clothing on the mate’s seat beside her. Mick gave a little shiver of anticipation at the sight. The cold might not have been the most important of her problems, but it was miserable. More clothes would definitely help.
“No. So what did you find?” She tried not to sound too eager.
“Stick out your foot.”
“What? Why?” Taken aback, she regarded him with caution. Moonlight allowed her to see him fairly well: as she had observed before, he was handsome. Good looking enough, actually, that she would have noticed him instantly in any kind of social setting. With the hard planes and angles of his face accentuated by moonlight and the merest hint of stubble shadowing his jaw, he had a dark and dangerous look to him that under other circumstances she definitely would have found appealing. Given the vagaries of the moonlight, she couldn’t determine the color of his eyes, but they glinted
at her under thick, straight black brows. The long-sleeved tee he wore was snug-fitting, and it confirmed what she already knew about his build: he was tall and lean, but it was a taut, muscular leanness. His shoulders, chest and arms were sculpted and solid. Even his narrow hips and long legs reinforced the impression she’d gotten of athleticism and strength.
A military background, maybe? With some degree of hand-to-hand combat training, although he wasn’t in her league.
“I’ve got socks.” He held up a pair of white tube socks tantalizingly, and she practically melted in her seat. “So like I said, stick out your foot. Or you could let me take the wheel and put them on yourself.”
Mick wasn’t about to surrender control of the boat, but she wasn’t turning her back on those wonderful socks, either. Making a quick choice, she stuck out her left foot. Grasping her ankle, he leaned back against the console for balance, rested her heel against his thigh, then worked the sock on over her toes, with the quick competence of a man who’d done such a thing before. The soft cotton felt so wonderfully, blessedly warm as it rolled over her foot that she was immediately distracted from the electric tingle that raced over her skin in the wake of his hands, and how firm and muscular his thigh felt beneath her heel.
“You shouldn’t run around barefoot. It’s cold out.” Pushing her pants leg out of the way, he pulled the sock up her bare calf almost to her knee, his fingers trailing heat wherever they touched. The shiver of awareness she felt at the contact was her body’s automatic and instinctive response to his sheer masculine good looks, she told herself, and was easily dismissed when she remembered who he was and how she had come to be in his company in the first place.
Their eyes met. Mick was suddenly glad of the darkness. At least if she couldn’t read what was in his, he couldn’t read what was in hers.
Sleepwalker Page 7