Fever

by Joan Swan

As she sank to a seat on the edge of the bed, she couldn’t help thinking how everything could change in an instant. How one person could make one decision and send multiple lives into a tailspin. And wonder how in the hell she was going to put it all back together.

  Or if it were even possible.

  NINE

  Something hit Alyssa’s leg. She startled to consciousness with a surge of fear, the type that burned her chest when she woke from the midst of a nightmare.

  “We have to go.” The male voice, familiar yet unknown, pushed another spurt of adrenaline into her chest.

  She lay frozen on her side, eyes open, staring at a blank, white wall, the room mostly dark but for a light drifting in from somewhere nearby. Where was she? Hospital? No. Apartment? No. Parents’ house? No.

  She rolled to her side and pain erupted from every part of her body—her ribs, her stomach, her shoulder, her left knee, her right hip—everything hurt. She winced. A groan ebbed from her throat.

  “You’re going to be sore for a few days.”

  The voice clicked in her memory and with it, a rush of emotion: anger, anxiety and fear. So much fear—for the present, for the future. And now that the incident had been on the news, her family jumped onto the list—specifically, her father.

  She eased onto her back, grimacing against the pain. Creek set a covered paper cup on the nightstand by her head. She didn’t have to look to know it was coffee. The rich scent filled her nose with each breath.

  “It’s not Starbucks,” he said, “but it’ll wake you up.”

  He pushed the key into the cuff at her wrist and clicked it open, then took her hand and rubbed warm, gentle fingers over the red lines digging into her skin. Instant relief trickled through her wrist, but there were other places that needed his touch more. She hurt so badly she could barely breathe.

  Alyssa unfastened his fingers from her wrist, pulled his hand to her side and pressed it flat over her wound. Heat gushed with an initial, almost painful burn, then immediately receded to a deep, soothing, pulsating wash of relief.

  “Oh, God, that feels good.” At her words, he pulled back. Alyssa tightened her hold and held him there. “Just another minute. Please.”

  His light eyes were intense as he stared down at her. His cheeks and jaw were covered with fresh stubble, outlining his full lips and highlighting the hollows beneath his cheekbones.

  She didn’t want to notice his looks, had been fighting the temptation since she’d first seen him in the exam room, but there was just no way to miss them. He was a handsome man, one with a very GQ look that could go rugged high-class or gangster sexy-chic. And with his humanity starting to show, she couldn’t discount his attractiveness as she had before.

  And it was even harder when the pain receded and the heat turned deeper, more sensual. It spread in various directions. Lit her up in a whole different way. And as a deep yearning bloomed low in her gut, she shifted her gaze from his mouth, back to his eyes, wondering ...

  Oh, yeah. He felt it, too. His lids had gone heavy, his eyes a little glassy. And with that edge of tension gone from his face, Alyssa glimpsed a window inside, that same sliver of vulnerability she’d seen when he’d been in the shower, looking broken and defeated.

  “Enough.” He twisted out of her grasp and made tracks to the opposite side of the room.

  Pain returned in the absence of his touch and she forced herself to sit up. “Where did you get coffee?”

  “The motel office.” He stuffed supplies back into the Walmart bags with jerky, irritated movements. “Get going. You’ve got five minutes to change. If you’re not ready, you go in what you’re wearing.”

  “Go where?”

  “Just get dressed.”

  “Leave me here. I’ll get home on my own.”

  “You’re not going home just yet.”

  “But you promised—” Alyssa cut off the ridiculous statement . “I’m not Hannah. Luke doesn’t want me. You don’t need me now.”

  “I need you just as much as I did before, only in a different way. And that promise was made to Hannah Svelt not Alyssa Foster.”

  “You don’t understand. I have to get back to the hospital. What I told you about competing for a job wasn’t a lie. I’ve already lost a lot of ground. They’re making their decision in just a couple weeks. I’ve been working toward this for years.” She waved a hand at the television, now dark and quiet. “And now I’m going to have to refute that rumor about being an accomplice in this whole stupid scheme.”

  He lifted a newspaper from the table and tossed it onto the bed beside her. “You’re going to have to do more than that.”

  She looked at the blaring front-page headline: SAN QUENTIN ESCAPE CONSPIRACY.

  She picked up the paper and read.

  Yesterday’s escape of two convicted killers from St. Jude’s Hospital in San Francisco was reportedly aided by an insider.

  Twenty-nine-year-old Dr. Alyssa Foster, a radiology fellow at St. Jude’s, was performing a routine study on Teague Creek, one of the prisoners, when guards say she gave him access to a pair of scissors, which he then used to hold Foster as a false hostage.

  “Oh, my God.” Her fingers curled into the edges of the paper.

  Creek subsequently subdued the officers, locked them in a room and escaped the facility with Dr. Foster and fellow inmate, Francis Sanders.

  “Come on.” He walked over and pulled her to her feet. Alyssa stood, but didn’t take her eyes off the paper.

  Creek and Sanders were both sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for particularly heinous murders. Creek was convicted of beating his girlfriend, a prosecutor for the Nevada County D.A.’s Office, Desiree Tapia, unconscious, then setting her on fire while she was still alive. For several months prior to the murder, Tapia had been investigating a serial arsonist. Investigators believe Creek, a former firefighter and paramedic with Nevada County Fire Protection, was that arsonist and that Tapia had uncovered his identity, leading to the attack.

  Alyssa’s stomach lurched. Her gaze blurred over the words. Her mind tried to absorb the information, rejected it, tried again. She skimmed the rest of the article, which confirmed the information Creek had told her about Taz’s crime and then read:

  Creek and Foster should be considered armed and dangerous. If you see either of these individuals—

  “They know we stole the U-Haul,” Creek said. “They found our fingerprints on the metal fence posts. We need to find another car, and we need to leave. Now.” He searched in one of the bags, and pulled out the sweatpants and T-shirt he’d picked up from Walmart the night before and tossed them at her. “Get dressed.”

  She stood and faced him. “I’m not going with you.”

  “We are not going through this again.”

  Alyssa looked back at the paper, ignoring his frustration. “This has to be some stupid reporter taking liberties to sensationalize the story.”

  Teague shot her a look from beneath heavy brows. “Did you miss the part that reads ‘guards say’?”

  “They wouldn’t—”

  “Don’t be so naïve. Honey, the only difference between guards and inmates is that guards carry a badge and a gun.”

  Alyssa dropped the paper and rolled her eyes. “Don’t even—”

  “Who the hell else told the media? You and I were the only other two people there.” Creek picked up the towel he’d dropped on the floor the night before and started wiping down every hard surface in the room. “A screwup like the one they made by leaving you alone with me will cost them their jobs. The young guy was a newbie. He’d have been instantly canned. Titus is a couple years away from retirement. He’d lose his pension. That guy is a bad seed.”

  “You’re saying Titus is a bad seed?” Alyssa lifted the paper. “You’re a ... You ...” She waved the paper, her stomach rolling with disgust. “Is that true? Did you really ... do that?”

  Creek paused in his cleaning streak to settle flat, emotionless eyes on her
. “You tell me, Alyssa. Did I?”

  She couldn’t fathom it, yet it was all in black and white in the paper, and he changed moods and personas like a psychopath.

  When she didn’t answer, he huffed a bitter laugh. “Another believer.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Eliminating fingerprints.”

  He tossed the towel aside and stalked toward her. Before she could move away, he lifted the bottom edge of her shirt and pulled up.

  Alyssa caught it just before he cleared her breasts. “Stop! Now what are you doing?”

  “If you’re not going to change yourself, I’m going to do it. We have to move.”

  She stepped back. “You move. I’m going back to fight this bull.”

  His expression changed with the twist of his mouth. “You know, somehow I knew that even after I explained how screwed you were, you’d insist on defying reality. So, I took the liberty of adding a little ... leverage ... to the picture.” He rested his hands at the waistband of his jeans. “I’ve transferred five grand from my credit card into your checking account. You can consider it restitution for the damage my rash stupidity has caused in your life, but I’m sure the authorities will see it a little differently.”

  Alyssa’s mouth dropped open. Her mind struggled to comprehend. “That just doesn’t make any sense. Why would you even go to the trouble—”

  “Because I can’t let you go yet. And I can’t spend all my time fighting you either.”

  She shook her head, not ready or willing to accept reality. “There’s no way you could have—”

  He picked up a thin billfold from the table—the same one she kept in the back pocket of her scrub pants. With a flourish, he pulled out the single blank check Alyssa kept there for emergencies and let it float to the bed. “I could, and I did.”

  Her brain remained a solid block of denial. “No. That’s not possible.”

  “You’ve obviously never had to take a cash advance off a credit card and deposit it into a checking account. All it takes is a phone call. They wire the money immediately, from my account to yours. We’re linked now, baby. Officially. Like it or not.”

  He was bluffing. He had to be bluffing. Because if he wasn’t, he’d just implicated her in this whole mess with hard evidence—the escape, the auto theft, the murder. “You can’t get access to my checking account.”

  “Not to withdraw money or transfer money out, no. But just about anyone can make deposits. Banks don’t inhibit the influx of money, only the outflow.”

  Her chest heaved with shallow, quick breaths. Sweat broke out on her neck and back. For the first time in her life, her mind stopped working. Completely.

  “I ... I need to call my dad.” If she could just talk to her dad, hear his voice, his reassurance, her world would right. “He’s bound to know about this by now, and he’s going to be worried sick. You can monitor the call. I just want to tell him I’m okay.”

  “Not going to happen.”

  “Please. He has a heart condition that’s aggravated by stress. I don’t want this to kill him, for God’s sake. Do you want another murder on your conscience?”

  “I like it much better when you don’t talk.” He pointed toward the bathroom. “Get. Changed. Now.”

  For once, the girl did what she was told, and even kept her mouth shut while she did it. Teague watched Alyssa turn on her heel, long black hair whipping over her shoulder, and stalk into the bathroom. Then she did exactly what he expected—she slammed the door, cutting off his view of that cute little ass.

  He could qualify her butt as a cute little ass now that she wasn’t Luke’s girlfriend. He could fully appreciate her beauty. Remember the feel of her amazing body. Imagine how they’d fit together.

  His rational mind knew it would never happen. His repressed male mind wrestled with its nemesis to complete a simple fantasy.

  He waited in front of the bathroom door until it swung open sixty seconds later. Alyssa stood there like a raging bull ready to charge, head dipped, brow furrowed, mouth tight. All she needed was a little steam pumping from her nostrils and a pawing foot to complete the picture. The thought almost made him grin. But it was the way she looked in those oversized sweats that finally turned his mouth up at the corners.

  “I’m glad you’re getting some pleasure out of this.” She chucked the bunched nightclothes at him.

  He caught the clothing and tossed it onto the bed. “It’s not all that bad.” He reached out and grabbed her left hand, now balled into a fist, and closed one cuff around her wrist. “Besides, you’d look good in a brown paper sack.”

  “I don’t get it. Why’d you bother transferring the money if you’re going to keep using these?”

  “You’ve got a thick skull and an impulsive nature. Not a great combo. I’m just giving the ramifications of the information time to get through.”

  “You’ve got the most annoying way of flipping between being complimentary and condescending.” She looked down at her hand, twisted her arm in the cuff, testing the fit. “I’m not the woman you want. I can’t help you. It’s obvious you’re not going to hurt me, so why keep me?”

  Hell, yeah, he wanted her, but in a whole different way than she meant. He clipped the other cuff to his own wrist, frowning. “What makes you think I won’t hurt you?”

  “We both know you would have already. Besides, I don’t know if you even could.”

  His gaze lifted to her face, searching for evidence of cunning, lies, ulterior motive. No one truly understood or accepted his abilities, including himself. The fact that she was intrigued instead of appalled touched a cold, rejected part of himself he’d closed off a long time ago. It had been years since anyone had believed in his humanity. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the time for her to see him as harmless.

  “Didn’t you read that article? Weren’t you there when I gutted Taz?” His stomach turned at the memory of sickening sensations—the knife piercing Taz’s skin, sinking into flesh, driving through muscle. “Maybe you’re not as smart as I thought you were.”

  He scooped up the Walmart bags and opened the door a couple inches to peer out. Streetlights glowed over the main road, clear of traffic. The shadowed parking lot beyond was quiet and empty but for a few cars and the U-Haul. He glanced up and down the walkway outside the room and found it clear.

  He turned and met Alyssa’s eyes, trying to ignore their soft almond shape and the long fringe of lashes. “Let me make one thing very clear: I am not going back to prison. Ever. I’ll die first. You may not believe I’m dangerous, but I’m also not backed into a corner at the moment. And you have a lot more to lose now. I can either explain that five grand away after this is over and clear your name or throw your life to the sharks. You choose.”

  She held his gaze without responding. She’d heard him, and that was all he needed to know. He pulled her alongside him as he stepped out.

  The motel was made up of two buildings, configured like an L. Their room was on the short end of the bottom leg. The office, closer to where the truck was parked, lay at the end of the longer section.

  Despite the gray light of dawn, Teague kept to the shadows of the building, dragging Alyssa behind him. As he traversed the corner where the two sections met, a door closed near the motel office. Teague pushed Alyssa into an opening between the buildings, home to an icemaker and vending machine, and peered around the siding. A woman shuffled to the edge of the parking lot, a bathrobe wrapped around her chubby figure, a cigarette between her fingers. It was the office manager he’d deliberately avoided when he’d picked up the coffee and newspaper earlier.

  “Great,” he muttered. “Right between us and the truck.”

  Alyssa leaned into him to see around the corner. “What is it?”

  Her warm breath bathed his ear, sliding down his neck. He nudged her back to put more distance between them and shushed her. Something wasn’t right. He could feel it in the way his scalp tingled and his shoulders tightened. In the way an uncomf
ortable pinch took up residence in his stomach. That was a sixth sense he’d developed in prison, unlike his lame, struggling pyrokinetics that had been chemically burned into him one terror-filled night.

  He couldn’t chance walking right by the woman, so he waited. It seemed like forever as the manager continued to stare out at the parking lot, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, the cigarette taking quick trips to her lips. In the distance, tires hummed on the asphalt, growing louder. The hair on Teague’s neck prickled.

  He scanned the length of the motel for another exit. If they went around the back and approached the truck from the opposite direction ...

  The drone of a car engine brought his gaze back to the parking lot. A police cruiser pulled in and coasted toward the manager, who waved it down.

  Dread settled in Teague’s gut. He gripped Alyssa’s hand and pulled her with him as he crossed the breezeway between buildings and peered out the other side. The neighborhood beyond was barren, the only inhabited building within sight another shacklike hotel half a mile down the road.

  Before he’d strategized a plan, another police car passed the hotel—this one with lights flashing, but no sirens.

  “Fuck.” Teague jumped back into the shadows and collided with Alyssa. A cry of surprise and pain rumbled from her mouth. Teague pressed her face into his shirt with a hand on the back of her head.

  The click of another door drew Teague’s attention. A man wandered out of his motel room with an ice bucket in one hand, the other rubbing at his eyes as if he’d just woken. The man stopped and looked toward the parking lot, squinting at the red-and-blue flashing lights.

  While he was distracted, Teague walked Alyssa back into the shadows alongside the vending machine. Her face was still pressed into his chest. Her breath, hot and fast against his T-shirt, filtered through the cotton and slid along his skin, making his mind blur around the edges.