“Gabe? It’s Frank Templeton.” The man’s voice was frantic and hardly more than a ragged whisper.
“Frank?” Gabe repeated. “How’d you get this number?”
“Jinx. I called him and convinced him that I’d talk to only you.”
Gabe didn’t know what to think about that. He hoped Jinx hadn’t made a mistake by doing that. Of course, he did need to speak to Frank. He just hadn’t expected it to happen over the phone. “Where are you?”
“I’d rather not say. I just want to make sure you’ll be at the house tomorrow night?”
“I’ll be there.” Hopefully alone while Leigh waited in the truck. The only other person who knew about that meeting was Jinx, and Gabe wanted to keep things that way.
“Good. I have to talk to you. Listen, I can’t stay on the line long, but you need to find Leigh. She’s in a lot of danger.”
Gabe certainly didn’t need anyone to tell him that, but he played along, not wanting to send Frank deeper into hiding. “Why do you say that?”
“I don’t have all the details, but I should have it worked out by tomorrow night. If you find Leigh by then, bring her with you so I can talk to her about that disk we found two years ago. I think that’s what started all of this. And Gabe? Don’t trust anyone on the task force. That’s why I’ve been on the run. Somebody’s out to kill me and maybe Leigh, too.”
Oh, yeah. Definitely. But he wasn’t sure that threat was coming from the task force. “Why would someone want to kill you?”
“I don’t know. A cover-up maybe. I think it has something to do with those confiscated weapons that should have been destroyed and weren’t. I have to go, Gabe.”
Just like that, the line went dead. Gabe wasn’t sure if the man had hung up voluntarily or if someone had cut his phone line. Either way, he obviously wouldn’t get a chance to ask Frank a few more questions.
“Was that Frank Templeton?” Leigh asked.
“Yes. He’s alive, but he sounds like a man who knows that he’s in a whole lot of danger.” Gabe turned off the phone and tossed it back in the gym bag. He couldn’t waste any more time. He lifted Leigh’s foot into his lap and continued to check the bandage for the transmitter.
Leigh leaned forward and looked into the gauze layers as well. “We’re still meeting him tomorrow night, right?”
“Yeah.” Hell or high water wouldn’t stop that meeting. It would be dangerous, no doubt about it, but he didn’t see another way around it. Frank probably wouldn’t want to relay sensitive information over the phone. “This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but Frank said you were in danger and that I shouldn’t let you out of my sight.”
Gabe figured that was advice he would most certainly take. It might significantly improve Leigh’s chances of getting out of this situation alive.
Hurrying up his search, he continued to go through the bandage. He didn’t find the transmitter until he got to the last of the gauzy layers. Just the sight of it made him curse. It was a chilling, hard reminder that he’d been stupid and that stupidity just might cost them everything.
Using the tip of his little finger, Gabe lifted out the tiny transmitter and inspected it. Too bad he couldn’t send the device to the crime lab to have it checked out, but there wasn’t time for that. In fact, there wasn’t much time for him to do anything. He tossed it out the window and quickly started the truck.
“We have to put some distance between us and that thing,” he let Leigh know.
He didn’t waste another precious second either. He pulled away from the gas station and sped up. Thanks to his lapse in judgment, he’d have to cover their tracks before he could even think about heading to Grand Valley. Gabe sure as heck didn’t want anyone following them there.
“You mean I’ve been running around with that transmitter in my bandage this whole time?” She pressed down the edges of the tape that held the gauze strips in place. “Who put it there? And who had access to me before I regained consciousness?”
“Too many people,” Gabe provided.
“Who?” she persisted.
“Well, the doctor and the technician who did your MRI.” Gabe took a deep breath. “And a couple of times Jinx and Teresa were with you, too.”
He was sure Leigh would have had an opinion about that. But she didn’t have time to voice it. All hell broke loose.
A bullet came crashing through the back window.
Chapter Eight
“Get down!” Gabe’s voice echoed through the truck.
Leigh did as he said, dropping to the floor in a split second, but she had no intentions of staying down. Memory or no memory, she still had her instincts, and her instincts for survival were pretty strong. She certainly wasn’t going to give up without a fight. She latched onto her gun and came up prepared to fire.
“Damn it, Leigh. I said get down.”
Another bullet skipped off the roof of the truck, gashing through the metal. “Why? So you can be the sole target for whoever’s trying to kill us? I’m not an invalid, so don’t go all macho on me now.”
She ignored his profanity-laced objection and stretched her hand toward the door. She rolled the window halfway down, all the while trying to stay low in the seat.
Leigh didn’t know exactly what she planned to do, but she thought she might try shooting at the car tires. Using the small sliding window on the back was out—it had become a webby sheet of fractured safety glass when the bullet slammed into it. It was a chilling reminder of how close Gabe and she had come to getting killed.
“Climb over here and drive,” Gabe snarled. “I’ll return fire.”
Leigh wanted to argue with that order, but she didn’t want to try to win an argument at the cost of dying. It would only take one of those bullets to do either one of them in. Besides, she didn’t even know if she was a good shot.
Gabe was.
He’d proven that back at the clinic.
Changing places was easier said than done, and they no doubt made clear targets while trying to do that. At Gabe’s direction, she maneuvered her body across his, and he tried to slip beneath hers. They did all that while he kept his foot on the accelerator and while Leigh steered.
“Under different circumstances, I might consider this foreplay,” he mumbled.
“You probably consider breathing foreplay,” Leigh countered in a mumble of her own.
Gabe made a sound, part laughter, part frustration, all nerves.
There was another sputter of bullets. One of them took out a chunk of the mirror on the driver’s side. Once Gabe was out of the way, Leigh floored the accelerator, watching the speedometer quickly go over eighty. The older-model truck probably wouldn’t do much more than that, but she continued to press, knowing she had to put some distance between them and that car.
Gabe plundered through the gym bag and retrieved the extra magazines of ammunition. They were right where Leigh had placed them only minutes earlier. It wasn’t quite an arsenal, but they could probably hold their own.
For a while anyway.
She glanced in what was left of the side mirror as Gabe aimed the gun out the window and fired several shots. Since they all appeared to be direct hits, and since the car windows didn’t shatter, she guessed that the glass was bulletproof.
Sweet heaven. The gunmen had truly come prepared for a shoot-out.
“For God’s sakes, Leigh, keep your head low,” Gabe yelled when he glanced over at her.
“That’s what I’m trying to do.” She slid as deep in the seat as she could and took the truck around a sharp curve in the road. “Can’t you shoot out their tires or something?” she asked impatiently.
“That’s what I had in mind,” Gabe said with equal impatience.
The barrel of a gun snaked out of the front passenger’s window and rattled off more bullets. Gabe returned fire, and one of the bullets hit his opponent’s weapon, sending a spark from metal colliding with metal.
Without hesitating, Gabe sent several rounds slight
ly farther to the right, and even with the distance between the vehicles, Leigh could see that he’d hit the gunman’s shooting arm.
Gabe didn’t let up. With the one gunman at least partially out of commission, Gabe leaned out the window and sent a barrage of bullets into the other vehicle. He must have hit something, or caused enough distraction, because the blue sedan clipped the ditch, the right tires dipping into some sloshy mud.
The driver swerved, trying to maneuver the car back onto the road. He wasn’t successful. Gabe aimed his pistol at the tires and fired. And fired. And fired. The rubber on the tires disintegrated, unraveling until the driver had no choice but to grind to a stop.
Leigh didn’t waste any time. She sped away, praying those men wouldn’t get themselves out of that ditch anytime soon.
“Any sign they had backup?” She was almost afraid to hear Gabe’s answer. The last thing she wanted was to go another round with yet another set of gunmen. Her whole body was a tangle of nerves and adrenaline.
“No. I think they were alone.” But that obviously didn’t make Gabe let down his guard. He kept his weapon aimed and his attention focused on the road.
“They must have found us by using that transmitter,” she said more to herself than Gabe. “Or else Teresa somehow traced the call—”
“Teresa didn’t put this attempted hit together.”
“But you were just talking to her on the phone,” Leigh pointed out. In fact, it appeared to her that Teresa was the most likely suspect.
“She wouldn’t have had time to trace the call and dispatch someone that fast. These guys were right on our tail all along. My guess is they would have gotten to us even sooner if they hadn’t had to navigate their way around these country roads. No. They had their orders long before I made that call to Teresa. That stop we made at the gas station just gave them time to catch up with us.”
Gabe had obviously given it plenty of thought. Good. Maybe that meant he had a plan to put an end to this. Leigh didn’t want to play hide-and-seek any longer with people who wanted her dead.
“Where to now?” she asked when she saw the sign for the approaching westbound interstate. It was the direction they needed to go to get to Frank Templeton in Grand Valley, but it would put them out in the open on a major highway.
Gabe never even hesitated. “We can’t take the interstate, and we need to get off this road, especially since they know what vehicle we’re in.”
He turned around in the seat and reached out the still-lowered window to give his mirror an adjustment—probably so he could still do a visual check in case anyone else followed them. It was a reminder that even though she’d put some miles between the gunmen and them, they weren’t out of immediate danger yet.
“So, where do we go if not to Grand Valley?” Leigh asked.
Again, he didn’t hesitate. “I thought about the cabin back in the bayou.”
It took her a moment to figure out what he meant. “You mean the place that Jinx owns?”
He nodded. “It might be safe there.”
Safe, yes, in many ways. But Leigh remembered what Gabe had said about that cabin.
It was the place where they’d spent their honeymoon.
That shouldn’t have bothered her. After all, this time they certainly wouldn’t be going there to do honeymoonish things. They would be going there to get away from the gunmen. Still, there was something about the idea that made her pulse start to race again.
Leigh prayed it was racing because of the potential danger and nothing else.
“There’s just one problem with going all the way out to Jinx’s cabin,” Gabe continued. “Tomorrow, we’d have a lot of miles to cover to get back to Grand Valley. Of course, we don’t have to be there until midnight.”
But it would mean a lot of extra time on the roads. Besides, for reasons Leigh didn’t want to explore, she didn’t think it was a good idea to spend the night there alone with Gabe. “Is there anyplace else we could go—a place that wouldn’t involve Jinx?”
Or Jinx’s knowledge of their whereabouts. Now, that was something Leigh didn’t mind exploring. She really didn’t want anyone to know where they were, but especially Jinx and Teresa Walters. If they went to his cabin, he might very well find out they were there.
“There is a place. A house.” Gabe paused. Then he shrugged. “It’s about fifty miles north of Houston. It’s not that far from Grand Valley.”
Houston. That got her full attention. There was a tiny flutter in her heart. A warm tingle worked its way from that flutter all the way to her stomach. “So, what is this place—an FBI safe house?”
“It’s the house where I grew up.”
The flutter got significantly worse. His home. “Your family will be there?” she asked hesitantly.
He shook his head. “My folks moved to Brownsville a few years back so they could help take care of my grandparents. I’ve got a brother, Reese, who’s in the air force stationed over in Florida. My sister, Maria, is married and lives in Sacramento.” He took a deep breath. “Dad talks about selling the ranch, but he just hasn’t gotten around to it.”
Yet more pieces of her past that she didn’t remember—she had in-laws. Apparently lots of them. Gabe’s family. Leigh had been so preoccupied with various aspects of her own life that she hadn’t thought to ask Gabe about his.
“So, we’re both from Texas,” she commented. “Then, how did we end up in New Orleans?”
He gathered up the extra ammunition and returned it to the gym bag. “We were both assigned there five years ago.”
And that’s where they’d obviously met. Fallen in love. Married. And then had fallen out of love.
Or something.
She glanced at him. He was still in a vigilant mode with his attention on the side mirror. She’d seen him like this before, of course. At the clinic and again that morning when Jinx came walking up to them in the bayou. But there was something about his formidable expression that made her go back for a second look.
And a third.
It was probably a weird hormonal reaction, but there was something appealing about that wariness. But Gabe didn’t especially need to be on alert to be considered attractive. He was, well, hot. No doubt about it. It wasn’t difficult for her to see why she’d been attracted to him in the first place.
Leigh cleared her throat. Best to put those kind of thoughts aside. Far, far aside. “How long will it take us to get to the house?”
“About four or five hours. We’ll take the back roads so I can make sure no one is following us.”
Of course, he’d want to make sure of that. She wanted the same thing. She also wanted her heart rate to go back to normal, but it didn’t seem as if that would happen in the next couple of hours. Leigh couldn’t blame that entirely on the gunmen. It had plenty to do with that ill-timed, stupid kissing session that had gone on in the truck right before the bullets started flying.
Knowing she shouldn’t put it off, Leigh broached the difficult subject. “We have to talk about that kiss—”
“Yeah, we do,” he interrupted. “It shouldn’t have happened.”
She hadn’t expected him to agree with her. Well, maybe she had. No one with a fully functioning brain could have thought that was a good thing for them to be kissing with all the danger lurking about. But she hadn’t expected Gabe to voice that agreement so easily. After all, he was the one who’d started it.
Technically.
Admittedly, there was nothing technical about her participation.
“I’m sorry I let things go that far,” she added. “I mean, it was just a physical response. And everything is all muddled up in my head.” God, she was rambling. Why did her nerves suddenly feel so close to the surface? “I just didn’t want you to read anything into it. Because I didn’t.”
He made a sound that could have meant nothing. Or anything. “Be honest, Leigh. Do you really think you could have done something to stop that kiss?”
Not that one, specifical
ly. The heat of the moment had taken hold of her and hadn’t been especially receptive to letting go. That didn’t mean she would let the heat take over again. It was just a matter of her not letting herself get caught off guard.
Leigh took a deep breath, hoping it would help her come up with an answer to his question. It didn’t. She settled for the easiest way out. “This isn’t the right time for us to work out our personal problems, okay?”
“And you think by saying it, all of this heat simmering between us will just go away?” Gabe didn’t wait for her to answer. “It won’t, you know. Personal problems or not, it was there the first time we laid eyes on each other.”
“Maybe, but even you should be able to see the logic in us not acting on this…heat.”
“Of course I do,” Gabe readily agreed. He scrubbed his hand over his face. “Look, I don’t want to get involved again with you either.”
That was exactly what she wanted to hear, but it made her throat turn to dust. She didn’t even attempt to say anything. Leigh just kept driving while Gabe continued.
“When you left two years ago, I promised I’d never let myself care for you again.” He mumbled something in Spanish under his breath. Definitely profanity. Leigh understood most of it, and it wasn’t mild. “That’s a promise I will keep. My job is to stop those gunmen from hurting you and find out who’s behind these attacks. That’s all.”
“Yes,” she agreed, a little alarmed that he sounded so adamant. And angry. She was just a job to him. Leigh had known that all along, but it was a shock to hear it spelled out for her. A few ill-timed kisses certainly wouldn’t have changed that.
As if he’d declared war on it, Gabe checked the magazine in his gun. “Those vows that you threw away two years ago will just have to stay where you threw them because I don’t intend to go there again, understand?”
All right. So, that was a little more honesty than she’d expected. Or wanted. “Then we agree. We shouldn’t get involved again.”
“Yeah, we agree.”
For what it was worth, it seemed they’d reached a compromise. Sort of. But since his jaw muscles were battling each other, Leigh guessed that it wasn’t an amicable one for him.
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