Above Protection (Imperfect Heroes Book 1) (18 page)

Once we were in town, he drove a
little too fast down side streets and then down the main drag where
we’d been out shopping. His eyes continually looked between the
rearview mirror and the road ahead. He hadn’t said a word the whole
15 minutes, just drove.

“What now?” I asked when we came to a
red light. “Shouldn’t we be leaving town?”

He nodded and pulled a can of chew
from somewhere between the seats. When he opened it, he cursed when
he saw it was empty. I smiled a little to myself. He replaced the
lid and chucked it behind him with force.

“There’s a store, do you need to get
more? I’m also hungry.”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” he yelled,
smacking the steering wheel with his meaty hand.

His outburst startled me. “What’s
wrong, Duke? You’re scaring me.”

“Yes, we need to get out of town but
the agent told me to wait here, they were sending more agents for
backup. They’re going to transport you somewhere else. We’ve been
compromised, and I can no longer protect you. I’ve made that
clear…”

Tears glistened in my eyes. “But I
need you. You’ve kept me safe this far…”

He whipped his head in my direction
and anger was storming in his eyes again. “No, I haven’t! Don’t you
see that? We’ve been made! I failed you. I failed us. I’m fucked
and you’re fucked, and this whole situation is utterly
fucked!”

I shook my head and said, “Nothing
you’ve done has put me in danger. These guys after me are very
wealthy and have a lot of resources. I knew they’d catch up to me
eventually, but you know what always set me at ease?”

He just glared at me, his jaw pulsing,
his knuckles white around the steering wheel.

He didn’t answer, so I did. “You. You
protecting me. I feel safe with you, and I still do. Please don’t
leave me, Duke. I don’t trust anyone else. Just you.”

I released my seatbelt and leaned
over. Brushing my hand along his beard, I stared into his eyes.
“Please.”

He seemed to be defused or disarmed by
the gesture, so I climbed into his lap and straddled him so we were
face to face. “I need you. I loved last night. Please.”

He swallowed hard and slammed his
mouth onto mine. I groaned when his tongue went into my mouth and I
began grinding my hips into his until a car honked behind
us.

He didn’t move. I didn’t move. We
didn’t care – we couldn’t. I continued to kiss him with all the
gratitude I’d been storing up, and he continued to kiss me back
with all the passion and built-up frustration and anger he’d been
putting out. We needed each other in that moment, and I wasn’t sure
if it was just a temporary thing for him or not, but I knew for me,
it wasn’t. After last night, I’d fallen hard for him.

Shouting and honking continued and I
climbed off his lap so he could drive. He pulled into a local
convenience store gas station and parked around the back. Looking
around and then making sure the doors were locked, he looked at me.
His anger seemed to have been chiseled away by our kiss. At least
for now.

“Listen. I don’t want to leave you. I
have to. I’m already in the shit as it is at work. I can’t fuck up
again.”

I cocked my head in confusion. “What
do you mean?”

“Nothing. It’s nothing. Never mind.
Just know that they now have to reassign you to someone else. I
can’t do this.”

I grabbed his wrist tight and said,
“No, tell me what you mean. You’re in trouble at work?”

He nodded slowly and looked away.
“Nobody wants a witness protection assignment, Blondie. I do mean
nobody.”

I was starting to get angry, but I
couldn’t quite figure out why. “Why are you in trouble at work,
Duke?” I repeated.

He sighed, and stared out the
windshield. “Three excessive force charges.”

I snorted and threw a hand to my chest
to still my heart. “I’m utterly shocked!” My tone was laced with
flippancy.

“You don’t know jack shit, so do not
sit there and judge,” Mr. Stormy Eyes said.

I folded my arms across my chest.
“Okay. Do tell. I love a good cop story.”

Chapter 21

Duke

I stared in disbelief at her. She
seriously wanted to hear why I’d been assigned to her in the first
place? Fucking women. I’m gonna be single forever. She’s gonna hate
my ass when I’m done, but whatever. Fuck it. Being single ain’t so
bad.

Taking a deep breath, I rattled off
the three stories that had gotten me in hot water at work. I still
thought the charges were bullshit, but I was clearly in the
minority with that opinion. Once I was done, I waited quietly for
her to start screaming at me about what a hot-head Neanderthal I
was and how I deserved to be in trouble. Instead, she looked at me
with a smirk on her face.

“Seriously?” was all she came back
with.

“Look. I’ve been at this a while.
These criminals, they know nothing but violence and pain – and
sometimes you have to speak to them in the only language they
understand.”

She chuckled, that smirk still on her
face and said, “I agree.”

Well, I have not been shocked into
silence very often, but this was one of those times. When I finally
found my voice, I said, “Wait, what? You just said –”

“You didn’t let me finish,” she
smirked, “I was going to say… seriously? They put you on a
discipline detail for that? I don’t really see what you did wrong.
Sounds like all the douchebags deserved it.”

Holy motherfuck. I think my dick just
got hard. “You’re serious?”

She laughed. “Yes, I’m
serious. I work in a law firm. Do you know what kinds of scum I see
come through the doors every day? Losers who want to sue because
they break into a place with the intention of robbing it and then
get hurt while they’re
breaking the
law
. Or are crying police brutality
because they got pepper-sprayed or the cop dug his knee into the
guy’s back a little too hard after he’d just shot up a
neighborhood. Every day I would have to bite my tongue and just do
my job because my greedy bosses would take these clients just to
get rich. So I get where you’re coming from. The face-bashing into
the asphalt on the freeway was a bit much, but…”

I laughed. “Yeah, that one may have
been going too far.”

There was a tap on my
window and I jumped in surprise.
Holy
shit. I’m the worst agent ever.

A white guy in a crisp shirt, a red
tie, and black slacks was scowling at me. He opened a black badge
and pressed it flat against the window.

Special Agent Jack
Morris

Richmond Field
Office

I was relieved to see backup had
arrived. I looked past him to see his plain white government sedan
parked behind him, another male in the passenger seat. I shooed him
with my hand for him to back away from the car. He nodded and
turned to give me enough space to open the door so I could speak
with him. All of a sudden, he fell to the ground. I gasped when I
saw a young man wearing a black hoodie pulled up over his head and
blue jeans. He had a baseball bat in one hand and a gun in the
other.

Grinning wickedly, he tucked the gun
into his waistband and wound up the bat with the intention of
breaking my window. Rayanne screamed and I didn’t even think. I
ducked and slammed the car into reverse, almost hitting the guy.
Shoving the car into drive without even looking, I squealed out of
the parking lot of the small gas station and hit the main drag
without even stopping. I looked in my rearview mirror to see the
guy toss the bat and hop on some kind of red crotch-rocket
motorcycle and give chase.

“Dammit!” I yelled, flooring the gas
pedal.

Rayanne was breathing hard, her
fingers gripping her legging-pants. “Duke, that was Shane! That’s
Elmo’s son! What the hell is he doing? Oh, my God! That must be
who’s been threatening me!”

I nodded. “Yes, he’s wanted by the
feds for questioning,” I said, glancing in my mirror to see him on
his bike a ways behind me. My eyes bulged in their sockets when I
saw two more guys wearing hoodies on motorcycles. A normal civilian
wouldn’t notice, but I could clearly see they were carrying pieces
under their sweatshirts.

Fuck!

The light up ahead was red, but I ran
it and continued down the main street. In a last-minute decision, I
made a sharp right turn, practically taking it on two wheels. The
tires squealed in protest but I kept going. A big brown sign
indicating a state park at the corner where I’d turned didn’t go
unnoticed by me, but I didn’t care. I had to lose these
assholes.

I could hear their motorcycles
following me and I swore. I had to lose them. I took another sharp
right, and smoked down a small residential road. Why? Why did I
turn down here? That was not a good decision.

Shit. I have a gun. But they have
guns, too. I made another couple of turns and found myself at a
dead end – we were at the edge of a tall cliff that dropped off
into a lake surrounded by waterfalls. I slammed the car to a stop
but I could hear the motorcycles in the distance, but getting
closer. I readied myself for a firefight but there was just no way.
I was outmanned and outgunned.

An idea hit me. It was stupid, but I
didn’t see how I had any other choice. I put the car in park and
looked at Rayanne while I undid my belt buckle. “Take your pants
off!”

Her eyes bulged. “What? Now? We
can’t…”

“Take off your fucking pants.
Now!”

She nodded and kicked her little
ballet looking shoes off and pulled up the long black tank top she
wore. She slid her crazy patterned legging-things off and threw
them at me inside-out. I got out of the car and scooted the seat as
close to the steering wheel I could. I removed my belt and looped
it through the steering wheel, then secured the other end around
the metal bars that held the head-rest. Yanking her pants from the
seat, I tied one end around the other side of the steering wheel
and the other end of them around the other metal bar of the
head-rest.

She was staring in horror at me. “Get
out of the car and run as far and as fast as you can in that
direction,” I growled, pointing along the ledge of the cliff we’d
just been stopped at.

This time, she didn’t argue. She
slipped her shoes back on and nodded teary eyes at me and began to
run.

With the car still running, I
awkwardly half-sat in the car and then cranked the gas pedal. I
turned the cruise-control on, threw the car in drive, and jumped
out, snatching my gun from the seat before rolling out of the car
and into the dirt.

The small sports car squealed its
tires in a cloud of dust just as it went flying over the cliff. I
got up and ran to where Rayanne had taken off to just in time to
see the motorcycles round the corner. They screeched to a halt and
seemed frozen as they watched the small car careen over the cliff.
I ran ducking low, catching up to my victim as she was cowering
behind a large rock.

The waterfall at the bottom of the
cliff was so loud, I could barely hear anything. Grabbing Rayanne,
I hugged her to me as we hid behind the large boulder.

After a couple of seconds, I peered
around the rock to see three thugs in hoodies looking over the
cliff in disbelief.

“They jumped the cliff!” Shane said,
waving his handgun around carelessly. “Like Thelma and fucking
Louise! They went right over!”

Shane high-fived his buddies like the
idiot he was. I then noticed one of them was a female, the other a
white dude, but it was hard to get a description with their hoodies
up.

I then began ticking off my
options.

One, get up and just start shooting
and hope I could hit all three.

Two, stay here until they
left.

Three, wait for backup. Surely the
other agent had given chase after he’d seen his partner – Jack
Morris – get smacked with a baseball bat?

“What now?” Rayanne mouthed in my
face, her beautiful eyes wide with terror.

I shook my head for her to be quiet. I
still had the gun in my hand.

Peering around the rock once again,
all three heads were turned in our direction.

“What the fuck?” Shane said, heading
toward us.

It was then I noticed one of the
others carried some kind of sub-machine gun.

“Time to go,” I said, grabbing
Rayanne’s hand.

Then, the shooting started. I shot
back until my magazine was empty but I didn’t think I hit anyone. I
hadn’t really been aiming. It was called defensive shooting to keep
attackers at bay.

We ran a few feet and realized we were
out of land. I didn’t think. I just yelled “Jump!”

With her scream in my ear, we jumped,
hand-in-hand, feet-first off the cliff, falling about 30 feet down
into the icy cold water at the bottom.

Chapter 22

Rayanne

I gasped as my head emerged and hit
the surface, freezing cold water sputtering out of my mouth as I
breathed in deep, my lungs still burning. We’d not been able to
keep our hands clasped as we’d hit the water.