by Paula Graves
“Work time?” He crouched by the bedside table, grimacing as his old injury sent pain arcing from hip to hip. Finally locating the electrical outlet, he plugged in the surge protector strip and inserted the computer’s adapter cord into one of the strip’s slots.
“I need to find Endrex. I need to know if he’s a good guy or a bad guy, and if the sudden interest from armed goons means anything, I need to find out sooner rather than later. So if you don’t have anything helpful to add, just sit down, shut up and let me do my work.”
He sat on the other bed, closed his mouth and watched as she attached a phone to a small adapter and plugged it into the laptop. He had no idea what she was doing or why she was doing it. And she clearly felt no need to enlighten him.
How he could ever have mistaken Mallory for her softer, sweeter twin, he didn’t know.
* * *
HAVING THE KEYBOARD under her fingers again felt like downing a shot of whiskey, bracing her flagging spirits and calming her twitchy nerves. She didn’t bother with pulling out the flash drives that held most of her research notes—she’d resigned herself to letting Jack Drummond amuse himself playing bodyguard for the next little while, but she wasn’t ready to tell him all her secrets. She’d already shared so much more than she’d intended, damn his sexy hide.
Instead she went by memory, cruising through several places on the Net where she might run into Endrex or someone who knew him. She didn’t bother being subtle. By the time anyone could tunnel through all the layers of protection she’d set up to mask her identity and location, she’d be somewhere else posing as someone else.
Jack’s idea of trying to track back through her connections over the past few days wasn’t a bad one, though she’d never admit it aloud. She’d gotten into the habit of logging all her interactions with a program she’d written herself, and she’d dumped all the logs from all her machines onto one of the flash drives hidden in the lining of her jacket.
The question was, did she risk letting him see where she kept things hidden?
“Why’d you stop?” Jack asked.
She looked up at him, realizing she’d frozen in place as she was considering her options. She wasn’t used to having someone watch her at the computer.
“Just thinking,” she answered.
“About what?”
So much for shutting up. She shot him a pointed look. “About how to get away with murder.”
He grinned, and her stomach turned a disconcerting couple of somersaults. “You want me to make myself scarce for a while?”
“Would you?”
“I thought I’d see if I could find a fast-food place that’s open late. I’m starving.” He pushed to his feet and leaned toward her. “You hungry?”
His low, intimate tone sent electricity zinging through her. She tried to appear unaffected. “Yeah. A burrito or something. And a Mountain Dew. Big as you can buy—I need caffeine.”
He didn’t move right away, remaining close enough that she could have lifted her face toward his and been within inches of kissing. Finally he straightened and stepped back. “Burrito and a Mountain Dew. Got it. What if the taco joint’s not open?”
“Burger and a Coke. I don’t really care.” She shot him an exasperated look. “You’re taking a long time to make yourself scarce.”
“I’m reconsidering the wisdom of leaving you to your own devices.”
“Sometimes, cowboy, you just have to take a leap of faith.”
“I might find faith a little easier to come by if you hadn’t already tried to ditch me more than once.” He grabbed his jacket and shrugged it on as he headed out into the rainy night.
The room seemed bigger with Jack gone, but colder, too, as if the sheer force of him had filled the room with life and warmth. Mallory let her gaze wander to the door, wondering how long he’d be gone. Long enough to make another run for it?
He’s addictive. You know the type—so bad for you, but you just can’t resist one more taste. Mara’s soft words rang in Mallory’s memory. Her sister had been remarkably candid about the end of her relationship with Jack Drummond during their last, brief days together. She’d been past the humiliation stage, for the most part, and had settled into the sadder but wiser stage of a failed romance.
She’d been surprised by Jack’s admission that he and Mara had never been lovers, though knowing her sister, she shouldn’t have been. As Jack had said, Mara had lived by the rules. She wouldn’t have been easy to seduce, either; where their troubled childhood had made Mallory reckless and wild, it had left Mara cautious and self-contained.
For identical twins, she and Mara had been opposites in many ways.
But apparently they’d shared a taste for lanky, mule-headed cowboys. Who knew?
If she was going to hightail it out of here before Jack got back, she’d have to make her move now. Pack up the laptop and accessories, walk down to the motel office and raid the vending machines for snacks to tide her over until she reached her next destination.
Wherever that was.
But the drumbeat of rain on the motel parking lot outside had a lulling effect, making her eyes droop and her limbs grow rubbery. She settled back against the bed pillows and pulled the laptop across her thighs, wandering in and out of forums and chat rooms she knew Endrex might frequent as she tried to coax herself into getting into gear.
He’d be back soon. Her chance to leave would be gone for the night.
And still, she didn’t move.
Only the motel room door opening stirred her from her lethargy. A human silhouette filled the opening, blocking out the sound of the rain and the hint of light coming from the parking lot lamps. She couldn’t make out features, only a nebulous darkness that seemed to writhe with mysterious life.
She tried to speak, but her voice betrayed her. She tried to move, but she was immobile, as if her limbs had been nailed to the bed, holding her in place. Her heartbeat cranked higher, rolling like thunder in her ears.
The silhouette began to spread, filling the room like the impenetrable smoke that had overtaken the house where she’d left her sister’s body burning. But there was no acrid odor, and the air around her remained cool and clean. A buzzing roar filled her ears, and in that roar she heard a whisper of sound, barely there and yet somehow inescapable.
“I’m everywhere. And nowhere.” The relentless whisper flowed over her like a breeze, lifting the hairs on her skin. “And until you find me, you can’t stop me.”
Mallory woke with a start, her pulse still whooshing in her ears. Outside the motel room, the wind had risen, and lightning strafed the darkness, chased by ground-shaking booms of thunder.
Just a dream, she thought, trying to slow her breathing to normal.
But it wasn’t just a dream. Not really.
Her laptop screen had gone dark. She rubbed her fingertip against the touch pad, and the image reappeared. She stared at the screen for a moment, the world tilting sideways as she read the rectangular chat box that had appeared in the middle of her screen.
There was one terse sentence typed within the box.
You found me.
Chapter Nine
Jack figured there was a fifty-fifty chance that when he opened the door to the motel room, Mallory Jennings would be gone. Maybe more like sixty-forty, he amended as he put the room key in the lock and turned it.
Or seventy-thirty. He pushed the door open and braced himself, prepared to find the room empty.
Instead he found himself staring down the barrel of Mallory’s Smith & Wesson pistol.
He held up his hands, tightening his grip on the wet bag of food in one hand and the cardboard caddy holding their drinks in the other. “Don’t shoot. I come with a food offering.”
She released a gusty sigh and set the pistol on the bedside table. She looked rattled; he saw that as he closed the door behind him with his hip and approached the bed with no small amount of caution. “Burrito and Mountain Dew, as requested.” As he circled the b
ed, he kept his eye on her, not liking the pale shade of her complexion or the worry lines carved into her brow. “Has something happened?”
“I don’t know.”
He set the drinks caddy and the bag of food on the bedside table next to the Smith & Wesson pistol. “Does that really mean ‘I know what happened, but I’m not about to tell the idiot cowboy’?”
“No, it really means I don’t know.” She sat with her knees tucked up to her chest, the whole posture defensive. Her laptop computer sat closed on the bed next to her.
“Well, why don’t you tell me what you do know?” He opened the bag of food and pulled out three foil-wrapped burritos. “You didn’t say chicken, beef or bean, so I got one of each. I’ll eat the ones you don’t.”
“Bean is fine.” Her blue eyes slanted up to look at him. “That was thoughtful.”
“I’m not a complete ass.” He pulled the large cup of Mountain Dew from the caddy. “And this is as large as these fountain drinks come.”
“Perfect.” She put the straw he handed her in the cup and took a sip with a purr of pleasure that sent fire jolting straight to his groin.
He busied himself with his own food, trying to distract himself. What had they been talking about before her moans of pleasure drove his mind straight into the gutter? Oh, right. They’d been talking about whatever it was she didn’t know. “What did you do while I was gone that’s put you in such a state of confusion that you don’t know what happened?”
“The syntax of that question has put me in a state of confusion,” she muttered around bites of the burrito.
“I asked if something had happened. You said you didn’t know.”
She blew out a long breath, her brow creasing with frustration. “I stayed here instead of running out on you. Can’t that be my concession for the evening?”
“Oh, we’re going to keep score?” He put his own food back in the bag and leaned toward her. “Be careful with that, darlin’. Competition is one of my favorite things in the world. I do love to win.”
She made a face at him. “So do I.”
He was counting on it, he realized. It was why his blood was singing and his nerves were live wires. “What happened, Mallory?”
“Don’t call me that,” she said in a low voice. “For better or worse, I’m Mara now.”
“I can’t call you Mara. Sorry.” He sat back, his appetite gone. “How about MJ?”
Her lips curved slightly at the corners. “My mom used to call me that. My middle name’s Jean. She’d call Mara MC for Mara Caroline.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“We didn’t like to talk much about our mom.”
They were wandering pretty far off the topic of what had happened while he was gone that had left Mallory in such a troubled state, but his curiosity wouldn’t let him drag her back to the current situation, not if she was willing to share something of her childhood. Even Mara, who’d been far easier to talk to than her prickly sister, had never spoken about her past in any depth.
He knew that she and Mallory had grown up in Lubbock, a couple of hours south of Amarillo. Their parents were both gone by the time he met Mara, and she spoke of them as if they’d been gone a long time.
“Your mother died when you were both young?”
“We were ten,” Mallory said, her gaze directed toward the wall in front of her, though he could tell from the slightly misty expression in her eyes that she was seeing something from her past rather than the motel room’s textured wallpaper.
“My mom died when I was a baby.” He hadn’t meant to tell her that nugget of information about his own life. He’d never even told Mara about his childhood in Wyoming, and she’d never asked. He hadn’t thought to wonder why, he realized, too grateful that she wasn’t one of those women who liked to catalog a guy’s whole life history as part of the dating experience. But maybe Mara had had her own childhood secrets she’d wanted to stay hidden. “I don’t remember her. I just have some pictures.”
“I don’t know whether that makes you lucky or unlucky,” she said flatly, her voice devoid of emotion. But he didn’t miss the pain that etched tiny lines around the corners of her eyes. “Is it worse never knowing your mother? Or knowing her and losing her?”
He’d wondered the same thing for most of his life, until Emily died. At that point, he’d decided it was better that he hadn’t ever known his mother, because he hadn’t known what he was losing.
He missed Emily every single day of his life.
“How’d your mother die?” she asked.
“Car accident. What about yours?”
Her gaze snapped up to meet his. “My father killed her.”
A chill rolled through him. “Oh. God, that’s—”
“Horrible? Tragic?” She looked away. “Pathetic?”
“Mara never told me.”
“Like I said, we never talked about her.”
“Or your father.”
She wrapped up the half-eaten burrito and put it back in the bag that still sat on the bedside table. “What’s to talk about? He was a mean drunk and he beat her constantly. One day, he forgot to stop.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “Not your fault.”
“Who took you in afterward?”
“My aunt and uncle.” She didn’t elaborate, and Jack didn’t see the point of prying further.
He’d been lucky, he supposed, that he and Emily had had their father, even if the old man hadn’t exactly been the warm and fuzzy paternal sort. He’d kept them clothed and fed, made sure they got to school and did their homework. He’d even tried to find them a new mother a couple of times, but those relationships had never really worked out.
Jack had always figured the old man was just too hard to live with, but softhearted Emily seemed certain it was because their father’s ability to love anyone fully had died with their mother.
“You weren’t around, but I was,” she’d told him more than once. “With her, he used to laugh and sing and tell jokes. When she died, it was like she took part of him with her.”
Jack had never understood what his sister meant until she herself had died, taking a part of him with her as well.
Pushing aside the old memories, he braced his hands on his knees and pinned her with his most unwavering gaze. “Why were you so rattled when I came in, MJ?”
She blinked, clearly thrown by the change of topic. “I wasn’t rattled, exactly.” She looked as if she were going to argue further, but then her shoulders slumped and she stretched forward to pull her computer back onto her lap. Releasing a deep breath, she scooted over and opened the laptop, a sideways nod of her head inviting him to join her.
Ignoring an insistent tug of desire, he sat beside her and looked at the computer screen. She was on a Windows operating system, he noted with surprise. He’d known a rodeo clown, a total technology geek, who’d sworn any computer freak worth his salt always chose Linux, but maybe the guy had just been blowing air up his chaps.
On the laptop’s monitor screen, a couple of browser windows were open, and in front of them, a smaller window in the middle of the screen. On that smaller screen, there were three words typed in the otherwise empty box.
You found me.
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“I’m not sure.” She crossed her arms, rubbing her hands up and down them as if she were cold. But the heater in the motel room was working well enough; if anything, it was a little warmer than Jack liked.
“You’re looking for someone, and you get this message.” He waved his hand toward the message box. “What had you been doing when it came in?”
“Wandering the Net. Places I’d met this guy Endrex before, years ago.” She shrugged. “Half the sites are dead now, moved on to different places on the web or gone altogether. And I wasn’t even trying that hard to find him. Mostly just messing around, thinking while my fingers played.”
“You haven’t tried to answer him?”
“You think it’s a setup?”
“I think it might be,” she admitted. “Someone may be trying to lure me into a trap.”
“Or it might be the guy you’re looking for, trying to make contact.” He shifted so that he could look at her. She turned her head and met his gaze, and he realized she was genuinely torn about what to do. Until this moment, she’d seemed almost militantly decisive. It was odd to see her at a loss. “If you’re right about this guy, if he really is the key to keeping something very bad from happening, I think we have to take the chance.”
“We?” She arched one auburn eyebrow, but in her blue eyes he saw a flicker of relief. Maybe she wasn’t the tough girl loner she liked to pretend she was after all.
“I’m a bull rider who can no longer ride bulls.” He leaned his head a little closer to hers, lowering his voice. “I need a little excitement in my life again. Let’s take a chance here.”
“What kind of chance?” she whispered.
The air between them charged instantly, and the earlier tug of attraction he’d felt turned into a relentless tide. There was a part of him that was certain she’d shifted the tone of their conversation on purpose, to distract him from his goal of helping her find this mysterious Endrex person.
The other part of him didn’t give a damn what had motivated her. He just wanted to see how far she’d take her diversionary tactics.
All the way between the sheets?
He wrestled the reckless side into submission and eased back a few inches. “If there’s a chance that typing an answer in that box there can stop people from dying, then I think you should do it.”
Her gaze lingered on his mouth a breathtaking moment before it lifted to meet his. “There’s a chance of that,” she admitted. “There’s also a chance it can get us killed.”
“I’d call that an acceptable risk.”
Her eyes narrowed as she considered his words. “There’s that hero complex again.”