She turned to gaze out the dark window, sat up a little straighter and tugged on her seat belt as if it was too right.
“You can see why that was a bad idea now, can’t you?”
She said nothing.
“I was still alert enough to hear those guys, to sense something was wrong, but with my cock buried in you, who knows?” He was deliberately graphic. “So, you do see the lesson there, right?”
“Stick to foreplay?”
“Stick to business.”
She nodded. As much as he hated to hurt her feelings, he had to make certain she understood. Sure, he may have crossed the line a bit, but she had to do her part to keep him on the right side of it. Snuggling up to him in bed, as she had back at the motel, wasn’t the way to do it.
“So, you have to stop flirting and coming on to me.”
She snapped her head to the side to look at him accusingly and he knew that he had said the exact wrong thing.
“Me? I think it was Donny shoving his erection into my behind back at the convenience store.”
“That was for show. But when we’re alone, it has to be just business.”
“I’ll try to contain my disappointment.”
“Look, I tried to be nice before, but now—”
“You were being nice by making out with me at the hotel? Gee, thanks. I’m much obliged!”
He didn’t mean it like that, of course, but maybe it was better she thought he was an asshole. It wasn’t much of a stretch for him, anyway. He didn’t know what it was about her that had him trying to act any differently. He had to get back on track.
“Whatever. I’ll keep my dick away from you and you keep those sweet breasts in your nice sturdy bra, got it?” His foot seemed to be getting heavier on the acceleration pedal the deeper they weighed into this subject. He let up on it a bit. All he needed was for a cop to stop them for speeding.
“For your information, I need a sturdy bra or else I’d be jiggling around all the time.”
“We’d hate to see that,” he muttered.
“You’re the one who keeps making sexual comments!”
“Because you keep giving me an opening.”
“I was just stating a fact.”
“Well, I wear a big jockstrap, but you don’t see me making reference to it.”
“No need to. I remember.”
“Like that. Just like that kind of thing.”
“What?” she asked innocently.
He turned his concentration back to the road, and what the hell he should do next about this fucked-up mission, exactly as it should be.
If anyone had told Veronica that she’d be on the run for her life on her twenty-seventh birthday—which at some point after midnight she realized it was—she wouldn’t have believed them. But there it was.
They stopped only to get gas around dawn and to switch license plates again. Most of the ride had been in silence, just the Sirius to break the monotony of the road. Despite his ignorance of John Denver, Jonathon didn’t seem to mind country music. He kept a steady drone of it emitting from the radio, never even changing the channel. At the gas station, he offered to get breakfast in the attached diner, but she declined stonily and when they got back in the car, her fatigue got the best of her and she slept, using her parka as a blanket. How he continued to drive, she had no idea.
She jerked awake into what looked like twilight as Jonathon pulled into a gravel lot behind a two-story wooden structure. Home of the Winsome Cowboy, the sign on the back of it announced. She was surprised she’d slept so well. Or, for that matter, that they could drive so long on a tank of gas. Was it possible he’d stopped and she hadn’t awoken? Maybe. She still felt bone-tired.
“Where are we?” she asked, her voice sounding rusty and sleep-laden even to her own ears.
“Wyoming. I have to get something to eat. It’s been too long.” As if he was some machine that needed fuel as surely as the car did. His tolerance for sleep deprivation must be pretty high, considering he’d gotten none of it for the last twenty-four hours at the very least.
“Leave it,” he said when she went for the computer bag. “We won’t be long.”
She nodded and got out of the car, looking around as they walked to the front. Like a lot of Western towns, this Wyoming one had only one of everything. One grocery store. One laundromat. One bar. And what it had was tired. Chipped painting on the signs. Concrete more like rubble on the sidewalks. A boarded-up window here and there.
Jonathon took her arm and led her into the Winsome Cowboy, which turned out to be a Western-style bar with a motel on the top floor. The cacophony of pool cues hitting balls and karaoke being experimented with in the back of the room hit them both head-on. She blinked at the smoky, reddish light of the interior of the bar as he steered her into a booth, sitting opposite, and grabbed the menu. He didn’t even take off his leather jacket. She shrugged out of her parka and hung it on a coat rack on the side of the booth.
A busty, made-up waitress with brassy blonde extensions sashayed her tight jeans over to take their order.
“Hey, sugar, you need something?”
The question was not directed at Veronica, but rather at her too-handsome secret agent man who the waitress was treating to an up close and personal view of her ample and barely concealed cleavage. No sturdy bra for her. The display left Veronica unaccountably annoyed.
Pursing her lips, she snapped, “I’ll take a beer. Coors.”
Jonathon arched one eyebrow as if to question that choice.
“And a whiskey chaser,” she added for good measure, even though she and whiskey were, to put it mildly, not acquainted. Maybe it would help with this knot in her stomach and this aching, well, fear, she guessed. Not that he would understand about that.
He ordered two burgers, one of which was for her presumably, and a soda, not looking at his new admirer. When she left, he said, “You have to eat something, but I’m not sure you should be drinking.”
“I’m not sure you could stop me.” She watched Jonathon scanning the bar. In this light, she couldn’t even tell if he looked tired. His mouth was tight and he had that same hyper-aware carriage, straight spine, slightly tense, but he looked no worse for wear.
Whereas Veronica, despite her hours of snoozing on the road, felt as if she’d been run over in it instead. The sleep hadn’t rejuvenated her. More like it made her even more incredulous, and resentful, at her precarious situation. She couldn’t remember any dreams from her sleep, but they were probably nightmares. Or maybe not, since her waking life was doing fine on that score. Dr. Veronica Barrett, boring enough to drive a North Dakota university professor to elope with a stripper, was being chased and shot at by some unknown forces and dictated to by a hot, all of a sudden uptight man.
“Is there a game plan here?” she asked sullenly.
He smiled. “Not one we’ll be discussing in a bar.”
“I only heard the ‘not one’ part of that.”
She gazed around the large smoky room, noticing that she seemed to have picked up an admirer herself. A tall, lean, twentyish guy, complete with cowboy hat over his shoulder-length brown hair, paused over his pool cue to flash a sexy smile her way. She looked away, so paranoid by the danger she was in that she couldn’t even appreciate a little masculine attention.
From a stranger, anyway.
The masculine attention she’d received from the man opposite her, brief though it had been, had been welcome indeed. In fact, Jonathon Vale’s easy way, his hot kisses, his very solid, sweet reassurances had just been beginning to make Veronica feel like she might actually get out of this fiasco, when he’d sprung that obnoxious speech on her in the car. If she had felt like she was bonding with him when he was being ‘nice’ to her, having him order her to stay away from him on the romance front was accomplishing the opposite effect.
Hell hath no fury and all that crap.
She should just drop it. She should.
But when he’d accused her of
coming on to him and distracting him from his work, the betrayal she had felt wound that knot in her stomach even tighter. She was just an unwelcome distraction, was she? Well, she was a fucking human being. A scared-stiff human being, not a super-human, racing through the woods, helicopter-piloting machine.
As the remnants of sleep faded, the remnants of their last conversation settled in on her again. She stared at him, though he didn’t appear to notice. What a jerk! Lecturing her for flirting with him.
An automaton. That was what Jonathon Vale was. She remembered a line from some long-ago comedy. Don’t they have feelings on the planet you come from? Didn’t your alien masters teach you about that before they sent you down here?
She should whip that one out, but he wouldn’t get it, anyway.
“Do you even watch movies?” she continued her imaginary conversation.
He stopped scanning the bar and glanced back at her. “Where did that come from?”
But he didn’t answer.
Aha! she almost said. The only movies he had probably ever seen were Navy Seal training films.
She fumed as the waitress brought the drinks, setting them down in such a way as to enable her to flash an oblivious Jonathon again. The speed with which Veronica downed the whiskey, skipping the beer altogether, and ordered another seemed to surprise her companion. Well, it surprised her, too, but by the third whiskey, she was getting the hang of it. They ate in silence, or at least Jonathon did, although she didn’t touch the burger he nudged to her side of the table.
A distraction, was she?
The cowboy passed by their table on his way to the restroom and this time she flashed him a smile back.
Hell, it was her twenty-seventh birthday, wasn’t it?
* * * *
In addition to a bar and laundromat, another thing the little Wyoming town had one of was a sheriff’s station. Two-roomed, chipped paint like the rest of the town, but fully functioning, day and night. Ron Metzlan was dozing there beneath his cowboy hat, feet up on his much-nicked desk, when his secretary came in.
“Sheriff,” she said. “It’s Ed Collins on the line, over there from the Winsome Cowboy.”
He tipped his hat back and glared at her and the telephone receiver she held out to him. What the hell did he have a secretary for if it wasn’t to screen his calls? And Mary Delaney was horrible at that, so timid she was afraid to even ask callers what they wanted. She couldn’t wait to hand every call right over to him.
He sighed. “Yeah. So, what?”
“He wants to talk to you.”
As if he couldn’t figure that out for himself. “About?” he prompted.
She looked at the phone as if it was a live snake and he snatched it from her in disgust and planted his boots on the ground. “Shit, Mary, if you don’t— Never mind! What is it, Ed?” he growled into the phone.
Ed Collins was a young, full of himself cowboy who Ron had little time for in the normal course of things. But the whelp kept his eyes open and on occasion could be useful. And Ron needed every source of information he could for his latest off-the-record project.
Hell, that bank account of his couldn’t grow itself, now could it?
The request had come in an email a few hours ago from a contact who knew better than to email a man of the law. It didn’t look so good. If that particular gentleman needed something from Ron, he knew he should just arrange to bump into him or something at the diner or call him from an untraceable cell phone and get whatever he needed out that way. Then make the bank deposit anonymously, as always. An email, even one deleted immediately, never went away.
But he wasn’t in a position to be giving advice to this man. Or the fellow might call someone about Ron someday.
“Hey, Sheriff. You know that couple you were asking me about? The one you said there was some kind of reward for?”
“Yeah, what about it? You seen ’em?”
Ed hesitated and Ron took the opportunity to signal to Mary to get him some damn coffee. It was the least she could do.
“Well? You seen ’em or not, Ed?”
“What do you want them for? They skip out on bond or something? Or you just want the guy or what?”
“What the fuck do you care?” Ron snapped.
Mary handed him a cup of coffee, a tremulous smile on her doughy face. The brew was hot, but black again. Could that moron not remember he took cream? Shit, sometimes he thought his secretary had that pre-Alzhym-whatever-it-was-called.
If she wasn’t his sister-in-law, he would’ve fired her ample ass long ago.
“I just, ah, don’t want to be a snitch, Sheriff.”
“Fine. Nobody’s going to arrest them.”
That much was true, anyway.
“They’re just wanted for questioning,” he lied.
Whatever this gentleman wanted the couple for, it wasn’t anything as benign as questioning. Ron was sure it wasn’t even that particular gentleman who wanted them, but that he was one of a hundred, maybe even a thousand, other contacts who were reaching out in order to track these folks down. But it was worth ten grand to Ron, a hundred bucks of which he’d pass along to Ed, if Ed gave him a tip on it.
“The girl’s awful pretty, Ron.”
“Jesus, Ed, you ever gonna think with something other than your dick? You want the hundred or not?”
“They’re here. Eating dinner.”
“Okay, then.”
Ron hung up and dialed the untraceable cell phone number provided in the email. “Hey,” he said when the cell was answered. “They’re at the Winsome Cowboy.”
His secretary walked past his desk, laying a stack of forms on the side of it. He turned his back on her as the voice gave him his instructions, worth another ten thou if he was successful, and Ron hung up.
“These are for you to sign, Sheriff.” Mary indicated the pile of paper.
He sipped his coffee and thought of the definitely off-the-record project he’d just gotten. This one was a little trickier than keeping his eyes open for the couple. This required the next step.
He fingered the side holster he never took off.
But, hell, he wasn’t going to carry out a hit in his own town. And it was supposed to get done now, as quick as possible. Apparently, this couple didn’t stay put for long.
Mary still stood there.
“I ain’t going to sign them now! Stop hovering over me.”
Mary skittered away.
“And close the damn door to my office!”
When she had, he picked up the phone, his regular line, and called that asshole he’d almost busted on a drug charge last week, but then let go, thinking he could use somebody like that owing him a favor. The junkie had had some kind of fancy-pantsie commando training in the army—before they’d kicked him out—and would do anything for the money for another fix of opioids. The little shit had damned near beat his teenage wife to death when she had tried to keep some grocery money for herself.
As if that weren’t one hell of a stupid reason to beat a woman!
Hell, Ron only did it when he had a damn good reason.
Like her sassing him or something.
Yeah, that junkie. That was who he’d send.
* * * *
Jonathon pushed his plate away just as one of Veronica’s favorite songs—written a few decades before she was born, but a perennial favorite—wafted from the jukebox, with no obnoxious patron to take the microphone to sing along to it.
“Come on. Let’s go.” He stood, throwing some bills on the table.
Veronica stayed seated, closing her eyes and humming along with the tune about a lonely girl waiting in port for her sea captain lover. “Brandy, you’re a fine girl,” she murmured along with the lyrics.
Her eyes snapped open when she realized in embarrassment that she had been singing aloud. The glow of the whiskey certainly must be dampening her inhibitions. The sight of Jonathon in front of her didn’t do much to revive them, either, even with that closed look on this
face.
“What do you say, girl?”
She turned at the voice. The admiring cowboy she’d seen earlier, without his pool cue now, was slouching against a nearby booth, watching her. “Go on and get up there to that mike!” he encouraged.
Jonathon frowned at the suggestion, but then put on his ‘Donny’ face, pulling her hand until she was forced to get up from the booth. “Sorry, friend. I got better things in mind for this little lady than having her do karaoke for you all.”
“I wish,” she muttered.
But as Veronica stood, some combination of Jonathon going to hug her for show and her going to plaster her body against his—just for the fun of it—had them in an embrace that shot off flares in her overtaxed nervous system and turned her on like a light switch. Oh, yeah, those three, or was it four, glasses of whiskey were doing a thing or two to her inhibitions. And it felt good. Really good. Almost like her body was thinking for her, suspecting it might not have much longer on this Earth, and wanted to make the most of it.
She had never felt like that before. She had mixed her chemicals and checked her gauges and racked up her PhDs, not worrying about immediate gratification. She was always in a rush, sure, but not because she thought she wouldn’t be there pretty soon. Only because she wanted to, as Mattie always teased, get her Nobel Prize as soon as she could.
She should have been thinking about how brief life was, something she’d learned early on from the death of her parents and never should have forgotten.
Carpe diem!
She put her head on Jonathon’s shoulder with a sigh and wrapped her arms around his lean waist, underneath his jacket, swaying against him.
He caressed her hips and leaned down to kiss her, at the last second allowing her to see the all-business expression on his face. The kiss, for all it was meant to get rid of the cowboy, left a little to be desired. Especially since she remembered Jonathon Vale’s unfeigned kisses.
He pulled back. “Let’s go, honey.”
She stood still. “You can do better than that, Donny,” she taunted. “After all, don’t forget—it’s my birthday.”
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