Packing Heat (17 page)

She’d done all the reconnoitering she could from a distance, but she took a moment to familiarize herself with the building itself and its immediate environs.

The sheriff’s office had once been a storefront. Through the wide, street-facing windows she saw a long counter with a guy around her age in uniform behind it. She gave it a moment or two, but she saw no other signs of life. The deputy didn’t talk to anyone else, and since he’d answered the phone, she figured it was a safe bet there wasn’t a receptionist on duty at the moment.

She stepped through the door and paused just inside, surprised when she spied Cole on a bench in the corner, handcuffed. He jerked upright when he saw her, which got the deputy’s attention and gave her a few precious seconds to hide her own reaction, which consisted mostly of elation that she didn’t have to spring him from a jail cell. Heck, she thought, managing not to pump a fist in the air, she might actually pull this off.

“Can I help you?”

Harmony stepped up to the counter, flashing her FBI badge in the deputy’s face. She looked the part, too, wearing her blue dress and jacket. And her guns. “Agent Smith,” she said, using a false name that was close to her own in case he’d gotten a better look at her ID than she’d intended. “I’m here to collect a prisoner. Paperwork is on its way.”

“Um, the sheriff is out to lunch right now. He told me not to ...”

Harmony took off her dark glasses and leaned in close. His eyes dropped to her cleavage, and his sentence trailed off. Cole’s cuffs rattled, but she didn’t spare him a glance.

“I know Mike Kovaleski called you,” she said, making it a confidence. “Just between you and me, he’s a real pain in the neck when it comes to interagency cooperation. Always worried the FBI isn’t getting the credit it should. There’s really no paperwork necessary in this case since there aren’t any local warrants. He’s only wanted by the FBI, so you can just turn him over to me, one law enforcement officer to another.”

“I, uh . . .”

She leaned both elbows on the counter and took a deep breath, making the most of what she had. “I’ll just take him into custody and walk him out quietly. It’s best that way.”

Cole did some more rattling, which broke the deputy’s fascination with her god-given endowments. He looked over and so did she, chagrined to find Cole scowling at the deputy, hands straining at the cuffs.

“What about those other two agents?” the deputy said.

Harmony glared at Cole for another second, giving her head the slightest shake. He was still pissed off for some reason she couldn’t fathom, but he subsided to a low simmer.

“The other two agents called me,” she said. She leaned in again, sharing more secrets.

His gaze didn’t budge off her face this time, though, and his eyes were narrowed. Not good. “Your voice sounds kind of familiar,” he said. “And now that I think about it, you look familiar, too. Have we met before?”

“It’s possible. I’ve been stationed in this area for some time, and I make it a point to attend the policemen’s charity ball every year.”

“Nope, that’s not it.”

He looked around the office, puzzled, searching for something to jog his memory. By the time he’d finished turning in a slow circle, his gaze ended up on the phone. And recognition dawned. When he lifted his gaze to Harmony again, she had her gun pointed at him.

His eyes crossed on the tiny black hole at the end of the barrel.

“Hands,” she said.

He lifted them about shoulder high, his left hand dangerously close to temptation.

“Away from the radio,” she ordered, meaning the small personal communication device he wore on his shoulder.

The deputy moved his hands out to the sides, but they were still in Wyatt Earp quick-draw range.

“Don’t,” she said, seeing in his eyes that he was considering it.

“You won’t shoot me.”

“You really don’t want to—”

She moved the gun a couple inches to the right and squeezed off a shot.

“—dare her not to shoot you,” Cole finished.

“Yeah,” the deputy said, “I’m getting that.”

“Men,” Harmony muttered. “You’d think after millions of years of evolution you’d stop thinking of the half of the species that can push out a seven-pound human being through a ten-centimeter opening as the ‘softer sex.’ ”

She went around the counter and secured the deputy to one of the metal supports holding up the counter, using a spare set of cuffs she found on a shelf. Then she retrieved the key from his pocket and unlocked Cole.

“Nice jailbreak, Mata Hari,” he said.

“Can we talk about my methods later? The sheriff is going to be back any moment.”

That was all the urging Cole needed. He snagged the envelope holding his personal effects off the counter and followed her outside, halting abruptly when he got a load of the Ford GT, a black wedge that was barely waist high on him, sitting at the curb just out of sight of the windows.

“I talked to Mike,” she said, “told him the whole story. I won’t say he’s behind us a hundred percent, but he arranged for a car.”

“That isn’t a car, it’s a wet dream.”

“Thanks for the visual. Get in.”

“I’m driving.”

“I left you alone for ten minutes; you got arrested.”

Cole simply lifted her up by the armpits and moved her aside, angling into the driver’s seat. He was already revving the engine before she made it around the car, and he had it in gear and moving before she’d completely folded herself into the passenger seat. A glance at the speedometer told her they were going close to sixty by the time she got her door closed and her seat belt buckled.

“This is a small town,” she pointed out.

“Tell them,” Cole said, eyes on the rearview.

She looked over her shoulder and saw a black sedan right on their rear bumper, a gun just appearing out the passenger-side window. “Treacher’s agents.”

“Yeah,” Cole said. “I don’t think having a traffic accident is our biggest worry at the moment.”

He gave the GT a bit more gas and it leapt ahead, the leather-covered wheel thrumming lightly under his hands, vibrating with the leashed power of 550 horses. Harmony’s handler couldn’t have picked a better car if he’d talked to Cole first. If he’d never run afoul of Victor Treacher, and if he’d sold his system and gotten rich, as he’d planned, he’d have one of these in his garage.

“They were probably watching the sheriff’s office,” Harmony said, “waiting to see if I got you out of there.”

“Yeah, and now we’re going to die.”

“You should’ve let me drive.”

“No way.”

“In need of a little redemption because you let yourself get caught?”

“Oh, yeah,” Cole said, choosing not to tell her exactly who’d caught him. He checked the mirror; Treacher’s guys hadn’t caught up yet, and he wasn’t going to give them a chance. “There’s no way they can outrun this car. It tops out at over two hundred miles per hour.”

“They’ll only find us again,” Harmony said.

“What happened to the eternal optimist?”

“You want optimism? I’m positive they’ll find us again.”

Cole shrugged. “Maybe we should take them out permanently this time.”

That stopped her, but not for long. “We can’t kill two FBI agents, even if they aren’t exactly working in the best interest of the Bureau . . .” She put her hand on his arm. “I have an idea.” She turned on the GPS and brought up a map of their immediate surroundings. “Take the next left,” she said. “Don’t lose those guys.”

A shot rang out. “And keep out of gunshot range,” Cole said before she could. Irrationally, it was concern for the car that made him say it. “What’s the plan?”

“There’s a fair-sized town about fifty miles straight along this road.”

“Won’t it have a fair-sized police force?”

“That would be my guess. But they won’t be able to outrun this car, either.”

Cole grinned. He couldn’t help himself. He wasn’t passing up a chance to tweak his nose at any law enforcement agency. “Neither will Treacher’s pet agents.”

“I’ve driven some of the cars the FBI calls company vehicles,” Harmony said. “That one’s a step above, but that’s really not saying much.”

“So what next?”

“Next we call the local authorities and let them know there are two very irresponsible drivers on their way into town.” And that’s exactly what she did, calling Mike directly after and letting him know what she was up to. “All you have to do is keep us out of custody,” she said to Cole, “and hope they’re not that lucky.”

“They’re FBI agents. Even if they get arrested nothing will happen to them.”

“Except they’ll be making a one-way trip back to Washington, D.C. They’re not exactly on a sanctioned mission. Hell, they’re not even agents. Treacher will have a lot of explaining to do. Mike will make sure of it.”

The inner workings of the FBI had never made much sense to Cole, so he didn’t ask any more questions, just punched the GT up to about eighty miles an hour. The government-issue sedan kept pace, even when Cole blew by two black-and-whites sitting on either shoulder of the road about two miles outside of town.

The police cruisers swung out behind the agents’ sedan, lights flashing and sirens blaring. One of them stayed behind, and the other blasted around it to take up a position on the GT’s back bumper. Cole just smiled and hit the gas. The GT shot forward. The cruiser didn’t even attempt to stay with them. It slowed, making a wide turn that left it sitting across both lanes of the road.

The last thing Cole saw was the government sedan bracketed by the two police cars. He slowed down to about sixty, bypassing the town and keeping to little-used roads, following Harmony’s instructions and trying to keep a low profile in the GT.

“That was fun,” Harmony said.

Cole glanced over at her. She’d been half-turned during the short car chase, watching the feds out the back window. Now she’d relaxed into her seat, head back, her face alight with laughter.

“I told you I wouldn’t let you go back to jail,” she said.

That pissed Cole off, although he knew it was irrational he didn’t stop to ask himself why he was burning. “You put me in that position to begin with.”

“How do you figure? I was three hundred miles away when you got arrested.”

“Exactly.”

“And as soon as I found out, I put my own ass on the line to get you out.”

“It wasn’t just your ass.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Cole pulled the GT into a narrow dirt road, more a path than anything else, that led into an unharvested wheat field edged by trees. “You let that deputy drool all over you,” he said, jamming the car into park when he was sure it couldn’t be seen from the main road.

Harmony turned sideways to face him, arms crossed, her mood notching down to his level. “I didn’t want him to focus on my face,” she shot back. “I was on TV, too, you know.”

“It worked. He wasn’t looking at your face.”

“Until you turned into Mr. Hyde and broke his concentration.”

“Concentration? Nice euphemism. Good thing he didn’t know about the thigh holster. He’d have concentrated you right there on the counter.”

“You mean this?”

She hiked up her skirt to show the leather holster, and the heat in Cole turned from anger to lust in the space of a heartbeat. Or maybe it had been lust all along, mixed with jealousy, he admitted before he dove at her. She met him halfway, the kiss wild, almost a continuation of their argument with both of them trying to come out the winner.

She pulled back and met his eyes, and then they were both out of the car and heading around it, meeting at the hood on the passenger side because Cole’s legs were longer. He thought his need was more extreme, too, but Harmony stripped off her jacket and shoulder holster, slipped out of her panties, and leaned back against the hood of the car wearing nothing but a wisp of blue dress and that band of leather around her thigh.

“This is only adrenaline,” she said, apparently mistaking his hesitation for something it wasn’t. “Danger gets you wired, and once the danger is over, you need a place to work it off.”

“I’m just taking a moment to enjoy the scenery,” Cole said. He wasn’t talking about the countryside.

She must look like an ad in one of those car magazines, Harmony realized. And judging by Cole’s ability to spout the GT’s specs at a moment’s notice, he had to have seen his share of half-naked women draped over prime automotive machinery. She wasn’t quite sure how she felt about that.

Cole took a step forward and put his hands on her thighs, his touch like fire on her sensitized skin, and she knew exactly how she felt about it. Like the foreplay was over. She popped the snap on his jeans, and he pushed them down along with his boxers.

His hands moved up, curling around her bare bottom and pulling her toward him as he drove forward and surged inside her, hot and hard and deep, touching some part of her that sent pleasure rippling outward in waves so strong she thought she saw the air shimmer around them. She felt a fumbling at her neck and then her breasts were free, and his mouth was there, taking in one throbbing crest and working it as his body moved within hers.