He’d killed two men tonight. He’d done it defending her, but he had two deaths on his hands, nonetheless. He was a warrior, it was part of what he did. Suzanne had no idea how many other men he’d killed, but something about the lethal air he carried with him like an aura told her that there had been others.
She was alone in a car with a man who could kill. Who had killed. Who—if her reading of his vigilance was correct—was perfectly prepared to kill again. She had only the faintest glimmerings of who and what he was, but he was something so far outside her normal life he might as well have been a Martian who had landed in a space ship.
Yet as removed from her as he was, he was the person she’d instinctively turned to in trouble. It was as if the sex they’d had—fast and furious and rough—had somehow forged a bond that was bone deep.
Modern-day sex was supposed to be light-hearted, with no consequences if you took precautions, though she winced at the thought that they hadn’t taken precautions. Still, this was the twenty-first century, and two unattached adults should have been able to have sex casually. Casual, mutually pleasing sex.
Sex with John had been nothing at all like that. It had been earth shattering, so intense she thought she would faint while climaxing. She’d barely slept since then and had hardly eaten. That wasn’t at all what modern sex was about. Modern sex was about flirting and keeping it cool.
Not something so primitive it seemed to have come from the dawn of mankind, where men clubbed women and dragged them to their lair, then protected them with bared teeth and claws.
Some primitive instinct told her that in calling John to come to her aid, she’d crossed a dangerous, invisible line. She’d given herself over to his care. She’d given herself over to him.
Something important had changed, some turning point in her life had come. She was too shocked, too scared to follow through the ramifications of everything that had happened, but one thing was clear. She was now in John Huntington’s hands. In the hands of a man she knew nothing about, save that he could kill. Easily and without remorse.
Suzanne looked at his hard profile and shivered.
A few seconds later, he pulled to the side of the road.
They had been traveling down it for over half an hour. It was deserted and unfamiliar. The last car they passed had been fifteen minutes ago. John got out, bent briefly over the front fender and then the back fender. In a minute or two, he was back behind the wheel, folding a soft beige blanket around her.
“There you go,” he said. The deep voice was low, almost gentle. Suzanne stared into his dark fathomless eyes for a long moment. Holding her gaze, he wiped her cheek with a clean handkerchief he took out of his pocket. It came away stained with blood. With a start of surprise, she realized that she’d been cut. By a shard spinning away from the wall, propelled by the force of the bullet. She hadn’t felt it up until now, probably shock had dulled her senses, but now her cheek stung.
Wonderful. If she could feel the sting of pain, it meant she was alive.
“Thank you,” she whispered, meaning more than for the blanket and the handkerchief. He nodded and started the engine. The heat was on full blast, but she huddled gratefully in the blanket, chilled to the bone from shock and sleeplessness. They drove on, endlessly.
Suzanne was quiet, lulled by the dark empty road. They started climbing and she stirred in the darkness.
“Where are we going?” she asked quietly.
John looked at her briefly then turned his attention back to the road.
“Where no one will ever find you,” he said.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Suzanne awoke with a jolt, dry-mouthed and dazed, as the Yukon took the last of a series of hairpin turns and rocked to a stop. She sat up, banging her elbow against the door, disoriented, pushing her hair out of her eyes. She had no idea how long she’d dozed or even what time it was. Her watch was back in the bedroom, together with her lost serenity and the broken bits of what had once been her life.
All gone.
She was too tired to think coherently, but she didn’t need logic to tell her that her entire existence had been ripped to shreds. Her home—her sanctuary, her refuge—was no longer safe. She’d had to abandon it in the middle of the night. Someone had come in the heart of the night to kill her and she had no idea who, and no idea why.
Until she knew, until she could be sure the nameless, faceless threat was gone, there was no going back.
Her life was shattered, wiped out in a few moments. There was no past, no future. However hard she tried, she couldn’t see beyond the next five minutes. There was only the here and the now.
She’d dozed fitfully in the Yukon, the result more of exhaustion and overload than sleepiness. Something inside her balked at the idea of giving herself over to the unconsciousness of deep sleep, so she’d drowsed off and on, half-drugged with fear and shock, completely adrift as John drove the Yukon over unfamiliar roads.
Where were they? She had no idea, except probably high in the mountains. They’d been climbing steadily for hours. The sky was the pearly gray of cold mornings; light enough to see by but not enough to allow perspective.
A shack lay a few yards ahead. A simple wooden structure, square and unwelcoming. John killed the engine, plunging them into an eerie silence.
John turned in his seat, wide shoulders blocking the view of the sky out his window. “We’re here.” His voice was low and calm.
He seemed so huge in the cab of the vehicle, one strong arm draped over the wheel, big hand dangling. She tried and failed to wipe the image of the intruder with John’s knife through his throat from her mind. The sprays of blood on the floor and the walls, the lingering smell of coppery blood and fetid death. The sound of the crackling glass as the sniper fell to his death with two bullets through his head and the wet thump as he landed. No matter how hard she tried, the sights and sounds stayed front and center of her mind, jarring, shocking.
John moved and the hairs on the nape of her neck rose, but he was only shifting to open the door. He jumped lightly down and came around to open her door. He reached for her, big hands up. She leaned forward, bracing her hands on his shoulders, feeling the banked strength there as he eased her down. Her feet touched the ground, but she kept her hands on him for a moment longer, anchoring herself to the only solid thing in a world gone suddenly insane.
They stared at each other, white breaths mingling in the cold morning air. He moved his head toward the shack. “Come on. It’s too cold to stay out here. We need to get you settled in.” He picked up her suitcase with one hand and took her elbow with the other.
Yes, they were in the mountains, she thought, as they tramped up the makeshift driveway full of loose gravel. The air felt thin and clean and brittle, laced with the unmistakable tang of miles and miles of uninterrupted pine trees. The few inches of snow on the ground looked like ice. They stepped up to a wooden porch. John opened the front door and gestured her inside.
Small, austere, unadorned. A sofa, two mismatched armchairs, a dining table, a small clean hearth, and a kitchenette. Bare wooden walls. Spare, cold, bleak. A musty smell permeated the shack.
“This way,” John said and opened a door. It gave onto a bedroom, as spare as the other room. Just a bed and a rocking chair. He dropped her suitcase on the floor and gestured to a door to the left. “Bathroom’s through there. I suggest you wash up and change into your nightgown. You must be tired and I think a few hours’ sleep in a bed would do you good. Come out when you’re ready. I’ll turn the heat on and make you some tea.”
He disappeared and Suzanne lifted her case onto the bed. Luckily, some instinct had made her pack two high-necked flannel nightgowns. They were warm and comfortable and above all, not revealing. She liked frilly sexy silk nightgowns, but now was definitely not the time for frills or silk. Or sex.