She didn’t sound frightened, he thought. In fact, she sounded angry. He glanced at her. She was angry, he realized when he saw the tightness of her mouth, the stubborn tilt of her chin. Atta girl, he thought. Then squelched the reaction; he wasn’t sure he didn’t want her scared, and thus more vulnerable to his tactics. But he’d worry about that later.
“Now what?” he repeated as the sedan, just as he’d hoped, crept past them. Its brake lights came on suddenly, and Jason knew they’d been spotted at last. “Now we get the hell out of here.”
He threw the car in gear and flipped on the high-beam lights, sending out a blinding shaft of light, all in one continuous motion. He hit the gas, praying they had enough room. The tires squealed in protest. The gray coupe circled tightly, thanks to his having left the front wheels turned. The front fender cleared the rear of the sedan by an infinitesimal margin. He straightened the wheel and punched it. His last glance in the rearview mirror showed the bigger sedan struggling to get turned around on the narrow street.
He made so many turns so quickly he had only a vague idea of where they were. He didn’t care, as long as they were rid of their rear appendage. Eventually he slowed, proceeding at a more decorous pace that wasn’t punctuated with the telltale sounds of haste. He stopped periodically, rolling down the window to listen, but heard no sound of a vehicle approaching. There was the occasional car in the distance, but not close enough to make him take off again. He kept driving, turning, heading in a generally northwesterly direction.
Finally, as he pulled up at a stop sign, he gave Kendall a wry, sideways look. “You have any clue where we are?”
He saw her eyes gleam in the darkness as she shifted her gaze from the rear window to him. “You act like you do this all the time.”
“Some things are like riding a bicycle. You don’t forget.”
“You mean driving like a stuntman?”
“I mean running for your life.”
She didn’t speak for a long moment. When she finally did, it was to say only, “I think if you turn right here, we’ll end up on Mission Road. We can take that left, back to the main highway.”
He nodded, and made the turn. Then he glanced at her again. She was still peering out the back window, searching for any sign of the dark sedan.
“We can’t go back to the motel, you know,” he said.
Again she was quiet, then, quite evenly, “No, I suppose we can’t.”
She was a tough one, all right, he thought, not bothering to stifle his admiration this time. She’d been through a great deal in the past two days, but every time she’d come up fighting. Fighting him, fighting Alice, fighting this unknown, faceless assailant. If she’d been this tough with his father, no wonder the old man had come to rely on her.
“We’ll head north, and see what happens,” he said.
She nodded, silently. Her guess proved accurate, and they were soon out on the main highway. Twice he pulled off at an exit, waited for a few minutes, and then when no car followed them, got back on the highway.
“Sorry about dinner,” he said after the second exit and reentrance.
“I’ll survive.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “you will.”
She looked at him, then glanced backward once more. “Do you think we lost him?”
“I think so. But then that’s not the problem.”
“It’s not?”
He shook his head. “Losing him is easy. Staying lost is something else again.”
“The voice of experience?”
“Yeah.” He checked the mirrors again. “I learned that living on the streets in South Park after my mother was killed.” He gave her a sideways look. “They were looking all over for me, and I never went more than ten miles from the old apartment. Even snuck back in once, to get some stuff, before they closed it up and sold everything.”
“Is that how you lived? By just . . . staying lost?”
“That’s how you survived on the street,” he said. “Low profile. I tried to stay out of trouble, but I did a lot of . . . borderline stuff, and worse after I got back from Alaska. Until I ran into old man McKenna, who owned the diesel shop I used to work in as a kid. He gave me my job back. And let me sleep there at night until I had enough saved to rent a room. Not the greatest neighborhood, but it was a roof.”
“That must have been awful,” she said quietly.
“It wasn’t so bad. You knew what you were dealing with. You knew to always have an escape plan ready, and be a little faster or a little smarter than the other guy.”
“And a little suspicious?”
“A lot suspicious.”
She let out a small sigh. “You certainly haven’t forgotten that part.”
“No, I haven’t. And I’ve found I’m right more often than wrong.”
“Aaron used to say he trusted people. Trusted them to act in their own self-interest.”
It was so close to his own outlook that Jason, for the moment at least, gave up denying the similarity. Besides, he was presenting a new image to her, one of reluctant but definite interest in his father. So far it had worked, eliciting several pieces of information he’d promptly put to use in his phone calls this afternoon. He should be satisfied, he thought. But instead he was battling a nagging sense of discomfort whose cause he couldn’t pin down at the moment. And the weird sensation of half the time—more than half the time—forgetting that it all wasn’t real.
“I’ll bet he was rarely wrong,” he said at last.
“He was rarely cheated,” Kendall conceded, “but who knows how much more he might have achieved if he’d taken the risk of actually trusting people.”
“Or how much he might have lost by trusting the wrong one.”
She didn’t answer, but he thought he heard her let out a short, compressed breath. It hit him then, the irony of it, him defending Aaron Hawk’s actions while she criticized them.
They went along in silence, while he contemplated what to do next. He slowed as they neared the Sunridge city limits.
“Any ideas?” he asked at last.
“You seem to be the expert on running.”
He flicked a glance at her, wondering just how many levels of meaning there had been in those words. He knew there was more than one; Kendall was too complex for there not to be. But he chose to react only to the surface meaning, at least for now.
“I’ve got a notion or two.” Then, with another glance at her, “Are you all right? Or still sore?”
He heard her breath catch. Good, he thought. She was remembering, thinking of those hot, sensuous moments when they’d nearly careened out of control once more. Or she had, he amended hastily. He’d been in control the whole time.
Sure you were.
Great. He was talking to himself. And sarcastically. Next thing he knew, he’d be doing it out loud. He made himself check his surroundings, and saw the sign he’d been looking for, and slowed even more.
“I . . . I’m fine,” she said at last. “It’s barely noticeable now. And I took some aspirin a while ago.”
“Can you hang on for a while longer? Or do we need to find someplace to stop?”
That idea seemed to frighten her as being followed, possibly by the man who had nearly killed her, hadn’t. Jason wasn’t sure if he was happy with that response or not.
“I said I’m fine. Do whatever you want.” He heard her take in a quick breath. “I mean . . . your idea.”
“I didn’t think you meant anything else, Kendall,” he said softly. He pulled out of the traffic lane and turned into a small parking lot next to a three-story building. He put the car in park, and turned to look at her steadily. “I figure when you’re ready, you’ll let me know.”
He saw her eyes widen, and her lips part for another quick inhalation, a
s if she was having to remind herself to breathe.
“You’ll let me know,” he repeated, in a low, husky voice that, oddly, he didn’t have to work at all to produce. “You’ll look at me with those big eyes of yours, all hot and dark, you’ll wet those soft lips for me, and I’ll touch you, everywhere, until you’re begging me to stop and go on at the same time. And maybe, maybe if I get really lucky, you’ll want to touch me, like you did before, but didn’t have the nerve. And I’ll end up begging you, like I wanted to last night, but didn’t because I was afraid I’d scare you away.”
She looked away, quickly. He saw her hands move in her lap, her fingers lacing together as if she was trying to stop them from shaking. Or him from seeing them shake.
“It’s going to be . . . incredible, you know. You and me. Like nothing either one of us has ever felt before. We’re going to fly, Kendall. Right into the sun.”
It wasn’t until he tried to get out of the car, and found he had to lean against the roof for a moment to steady himself, that he realized that in his effort to seduce her with hot, dark promises, he’d wound up arousing himself once more to the point of pain. And he realized with a sense of uncomfortable shock, that he’d meant every word he’d said.
KENDALL DIDN’T care where he was going. All she cared about was that he’d left her alone for the moment. Left her alone, to try to recover some tiny bit of self-possession.
She had never been so off balance in her life. She’d known from the moment she realized her parents were never coming back that above all else she wanted to have something to depend on, something that could never leave her. And she wanted to do it by making something of herself, something that her parents would have been proud of.
She’d spent her life working to make it true. She’d always been so certain, of her goals, her talents, her direction, her sense of right and wrong, herself. She’d been certain enough to deal with Aaron on a level far beyond her years when she’d begun to work for him.
But all that certainty seemed to vanish in the presence of Aaron’s son.
As did her common sense, Kendall thought with wry self-deprecation. And as for what vanished when he touched her, when he kissed her . . .
She shivered, admitting that it was this, more than anything, that had her so confused. She’d dated, sporadically, over the years since college, but men her own age had seemed far too young, and the older ones all seemed to have their eye on her more as a conduit to Aaron than anything else. Anyone in between didn’t seem able to handle her dedication to her work that since Aaron had become ill had overtaken all else.
And none of them had ever made her feel anything like Jason did. None of them had ever set her on fire with a touch, made her want to do things she’d never even thought of, never even heard of. None of them.
God, she’d been so smug. She’d even smiled indulgently when Aaron had told her of the strength of his feelings for his Beth, and how he’d known the minute he’d seen her that she was the woman he’d been meant for. She’d been mildly amused at the thought of the indomitable Aaron Hawk succumbing so completely to anything.
And now here she was, spinning out of control, simply because when Aaron’s son touched her, she flared up like one of Hawk Propulsion’s jets. And she couldn’t fight it anymore. She was tired of fighting it. A crazy recklessness, unlike anything she, who had always been so meticulously careful in her life, had ever felt, welled up inside her. She didn’t want to fight it anymore.
Smothering a moan that was half pain, half longing, she buried her face in her hands. She was startled to find her cheeks wet; she hadn’t realized she was crying. She’d done more than her share of that in the past few weeks. More than she had since the day she’d been told her parents had died.
She felt the cool rush of air and realized Jason was back and had opened her door.
“Kendall? What’s wrong?”
She gulped in air, wiping swiftly at her cheeks, but she knew he’d seen. He was crouched beside her, and reached out to take her hands in his. He looked around quickly, as if expecting their grim companion to have somehow found them again.
“What is it?”
“I . . . nothing.”
“Nothing? You’re crying. You don’t cry for nothing.”
She supposed, in its way, that was a compliment. She fought for her composure, knowing she could never tell him the truth about what she’d been thinking. She’d seen that glint of ruthlessness too often in his eyes to want to give him that kind of knowledge. He had too much already. So she gave him a partial truth.
“I was just thinking. About Aaron.”
“Oh.”
“And your mother.”
He went very still. “What about my mother?”
“How much he loved her.”
She waited, braced for the inevitable denial. It didn’t come. No words did. She risked a glance at him, but his face was unreadable in the distorted shadows cast by the interior light of the car and the brighter streetlight behind him. But he hadn’t thrown it back at her this time. Was it possible? Had he really begun to . . . perhaps not to believe, but to at least consider the possibility?
“He told me on the day before he died,” she said, unable to pass up this chance, “how blind he’d been not to see that the price he would pay for maintaining his world was the only thing in it he loved. And that its loss had made the rest a hollow, desolate thing.”
Jason still said nothing, still didn’t move, just stayed crouched there beside the car, looking at her.
“You hoped he died hard, Jason. Well, he did. And that was the hardest part. He died knowing he’d thrown away the one thing that would have made all the difference. The one thing that would have made it all worth it. And in the end, he would have given it all away for the chance to tell your mother how sorry he was.”
“He was twenty years too late.”
Hope soared in Kendall. The words, the first he’d spoken, were typically Jason, harsh, caustic, but his voice hadn’t held the bitter tone she’d always heard when he spoke of his father.
“Aaron lost his Beth,” Kendall said softly, “and he didn’t live long enough to make things right for you. But I swear to you, Jason, if he had . . . if he had lived until we’d found you, he would have—”
“Not now.”
“I know you don’t want to hear that he—”
“Not now, Kendall. We have a bus to catch.”
She blinked, taken completely aback. “What?”
“We have a bus to catch. Grab everything out of the car and come on.”
“A . . . bus?”
Even as she said it, she heard the familiar sound of a big engine slowing to a stop and caught a whiff of the very recognizable diesel smell. She looked out to the street in time to see the huge vehicle halting at the curb. Automatically she lifted her gaze to the route sign atop the front windows. She blinked again, wondering if somehow Jason’s effect on her had slowed her thinking as it had speeded up everything else.
“We’re going to the airport?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I’m the expert runaway, remember? Just move it, honey.”
He stood up then, reaching behind her to grab his coat off the back seat. For a moment Kendall couldn’t move, all she could do was think of that endearment, delivered in such a casual tone that she told herself he could just as well have called her any number of other things. Some of them no doubt less than complimentary.
He grabbed her coat, the heavy shearling she’d brought to wear over her jeans and thin silk blouse, and backed away so she could get out of the car. She gave herself a sharp mental shake, picked up the book and the box of papers they had—fortuitously it now seemed—carted along, and got out of the car. And moments later found herself seated on a bus, some
place she hadn’t been in ten years.
It brought back memories, lots of them, and she couldn’t help smiling a little.
“Something funny?”
“No,” she said, “I was just remembering. In college this was the only way I got around, but I don’t think I’ve been on one since I graduated.”
Jason leaned back in his seat. She waited for some biting observation about Aaron seeing to that. She couldn’t deny it; Aaron had needed her mobile, he’d told her, and had made a car part of her contract. But nothing came. Jason’s new gentleness seemed to hold.
“In Seattle,” he said, “you can get just about anywhere by bus, and for not much money. I rode buses a lot, after my mother died. At night, anyway.”
At night? Why at night? Kendall wondered. “Buses to where?”
He shrugged. “Anywhere that took an hour or two, and was cheap. Didn’t matter. What mattered was that they were heated.”
Heated. Kendall felt a sudden tightness in her chest. His mother had been killed in October. A week to the day before his sixteenth birthday. And the beginning of a string of damp, chilly months in the Pacific Northwest.
“I got real good at it,” Jason said, as if he were chatting about the weather. As, she supposed, he was, indirectly. “I knew all the routes. I slept a lot of hours on those things.”
A sixteen-year-old kid, all alone, stowing away on a bus because it was the only way for him to stay warm. The image tightened her chest even more.
“And nobody ever . . . asked what you were doing?”
“I got caught, once. They had an undercover transit guy on the bus, looking for a pickpocket. He noticed I never got off.” His brows furrowed. “I had to kick him to get away from him. I didn’t dare ride the local runs anymore after that. I figured they’d be looking for me.”
“What did you do?”
“I stuck to the ferry boats, when I had the money.” She didn’t want to think about that, about what he had done to get enough money to survive. She said nothing as he went on. “They were a lot more expensive, and I didn’t dare try to sneak on, but . . . they were better.”
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