Wild Hawk (24 page)

“We’re not stopping?”

He made some noncommittal sound of acknowledgment that she had spoken.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” he muttered, still not even glancing at her. Then he made two quick turns, a left, then a right, until they were in a darker residential district. And nowhere near a restaurant of any kind. Kendall sat up straighter in the passenger seat.

Jason drove tensely, and Kendall suppressed the urge to question him further; he was obviously in no mood to answer. He drove down one quiet street of houses, then another, seeming to be looking for something.

Then he suddenly swerved, pulling the car in to a space next to the curb, then backing up so close to the front of a large pickup truck that she could have sworn she felt them touch, although there was plenty of room in front of them. He immediately turned off the headlights, but left the engine running and the steering wheel cranked hard to the left.

“Jason,” she began.

“Shh.”

There was something in the way he said it that made her subside into silence again. And a moment later she blinked when a pair of headlights flashed at the end of the street, through the windows of the big truck behind them. The truck that practically hid them from behind, she realized suddenly.

“Damn,” he said softly.

She didn’t like the way he’d said that. Nor what she thought he meant.

“Jason?”

He glanced at her, then confirmed her fear.

“We’re being followed.”

Chapter Seventeen

HE MUST HAVE been watching them at the motel, Jason thought, and pulled out right behind them. He hadn’t spotted it until they were almost to the restaurant, but it hadn’t taken long for him to be sure.

“It’s a dark blue sedan. Four-door. American,” he said, without looking at Kendall. “Know it?”

“Me?” She sounded startled. “No.”

“Sure?”

“Why would I—”

“I thought it might be your . . . friend, George.”

“No. He drives a little pickup. A white one with a red and white shell.”

“All right,” he said decisively as the sedan crept slowly down the street toward them.

He had to assume whoever it was wasn’t friendly. That he was probably even the man who had come so close to nudging Kendall into oblivion. His stomach knotted at the reminder of how close she’d come to death. Not, he insisted, for any reason other than he needed her to get this done, needed what she knew, needed the inside information she had to make sure this went down the right way.

The car came closer, almost even with them now. As he’d hoped, the driver didn’t seem to see them, concealed by the shadow of the big truck. As if instinctively, Kendall slunk lower in her seat.

“Now what?” she whispered.

She didn’t sound frightened, he thought. In fact, she sounded angry. He glanced at her. She
was
angry, he realized when he saw the tightness of her mouth, the stubborn tilt of her chin. Atta girl, he thought. Then squelched the reaction; he wasn’t sure he didn’t want her scared, and thus more vulnerable to his tactics. But he’d worry about that later.

“Now what?” he repeated as the sedan, just as he’d hoped, crept past them. Its brake lights came on suddenly, and Jason knew they’d been spotted at last. “Now we get the hell out of here.”

He threw the car in gear and flipped on the high-beam lights, sending out a blinding shaft of light, all in one continuous motion. He hit the gas, praying they had enough room. The tires squealed in protest. The gray coupe circled tightly, thanks to his having left the front wheels turned. The front fender cleared the rear of the sedan by an infinitesimal margin. He straightened the wheel and punched it. His last glance in the rearview mirror showed the bigger sedan struggling to get turned around on the narrow street.

He made so many turns so quickly he had only a vague idea of where they were. He didn’t care, as long as they were rid of their rear appendage. Eventually he slowed, proceeding at a more decorous pace that wasn’t punctuated with the telltale sounds of haste. He stopped periodically, rolling down the window to listen, but heard no sound of a vehicle approaching. There was the occasional car in the distance, but not close enough to make him take off again. He kept driving, turning, heading in a generally northwesterly direction.

Finally, as he pulled up at a stop sign, he gave Kendall a wry, sideways look. “You have any clue where we are?”

He saw her eyes gleam in the darkness as she shifted her gaze from the rear window to him. “You act like you do this all the time.”

“Some things are like riding a bicycle. You don’t forget.”

“You mean driving like a stuntman?”

“I mean running for your life.”

She didn’t speak for a long moment. When she finally did, it was to say only, “I think if you turn right here, we’ll end up on Mission Road. We can take that left, back to the main highway.”

He nodded, and made the turn. Then he glanced at her again. She was still peering out the back window, searching for any sign of the dark sedan.

“We can’t go back to the motel, you know,” he said.

Again she was quiet, then, quite evenly, “No, I suppose we can’t.”

She was a tough one, all right, he thought, not bothering to stifle his admiration this time. She’d been through a great deal in the past two days, but every time she’d come up fighting. Fighting him, fighting Alice, fighting this unknown, faceless assailant. If she’d been this tough with his father, no wonder the old man had come to rely on her.

“We’ll head north, and see what happens,” he said.

She nodded, silently. Her guess proved accurate, and they were soon out on the main highway. Twice he pulled off at an exit, waited for a few minutes, and then when no car followed them, got back on the highway.

“Sorry about dinner,” he said after the second exit and reentrance.

“I’ll survive.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “you will.”

She looked at him, then glanced backward once more. “Do you think we lost him?”

“I think so. But then that’s not the problem.”

“It’s not?”

He shook his head. “Losing him is easy. Staying lost is something else again.”

“The voice of experience?”

“Yeah.” He checked the mirrors again. “I learned that living on the streets in South Park after my mother was killed.” He gave her a sideways look. “They were looking all over for me, and I never went more than ten miles from the old apartment. Even snuck back in once, to get some stuff, before they closed it up and sold everything.”

“Is that how you lived? By just . . . staying lost?”

“That’s how you survived on the street,” he said. “Low profile. I tried to stay out of trouble, but I did a lot of . . . borderline stuff, and worse after I got back from Alaska. Until I ran into old man McKenna, who owned the diesel shop I used to work in as a kid. He gave me my job back. And let me sleep there at night until I had enough saved to rent a room. Not the greatest neighborhood, but it was a roof.”

“That must have been awful,” she said quietly.

“It wasn’t so bad. You knew what you were dealing with. You knew to always have an escape plan ready, and be a little faster or a little smarter than the other guy.”

“And a little suspicious?”

“A
lot
suspicious.”

She let out a small sigh. “You certainly haven’t forgotten that part.”

“No, I haven’t. And I’ve found I’m right more often than wrong.”

“Aaron used to say he trusted people. Trusted them to act in their own self-interest.”

It was so close to his own outlook that Jason, for the moment at least, gave up denying the similarity. Besides, he was presenting a new image to her, one of reluctant but definite interest in his father. So far it had worked, eliciting several pieces of information he’d promptly put to use in his phone calls this afternoon. He should be satisfied, he thought. But instead he was battling a nagging sense of discomfort whose cause he couldn’t pin down at the moment. And the weird sensation of half the time—more than half the time—forgetting that it all wasn’t real.

“I’ll bet he was rarely wrong,” he said at last.

“He was rarely cheated,” Kendall conceded, “but who knows how much more he might have achieved if he’d taken the risk of actually trusting people.”

“Or how much he might have lost by trusting the wrong one.”

She didn’t answer, but he thought he heard her let out a short, compressed breath. It hit him then, the irony of it, him defending Aaron Hawk’s actions while she criticized them.

They went along in silence, while he contemplated what to do next. He slowed as they neared the Sunridge city limits.

“Any ideas?” he asked at last.

“You seem to be the expert on running.”

He flicked a glance at her, wondering just how many levels of meaning there had been in those words. He knew there was more than one; Kendall was too complex for there not to be. But he chose to react only to the surface meaning, at least for now.

“I’ve got a notion or two.” Then, with another glance at her, “Are you all right? Or still sore?”

He heard her breath catch. Good, he thought. She was remembering, thinking of those hot, sensuous moments when they’d nearly careened out of control once more. Or she had, he amended hastily. He’d been in control the whole time.

Sure you were.

Great. He was talking to himself. And sarcastically. Next thing he knew, he’d be doing it out loud. He made himself check his surroundings, and saw the sign he’d been looking for, and slowed even more.

“I . . . I’m fine,” she said at last. “It’s barely noticeable now. And I took some aspirin a while ago.”

“Can you hang on for a while longer? Or do we need to find someplace to stop?”

That idea seemed to frighten her as being followed, possibly by the man who had nearly killed her, hadn’t. Jason wasn’t sure if he was happy with that response or not.

“I said I’m fine. Do whatever you want.” He heard her take in a quick breath. “I mean . . . your idea.”

“I didn’t think you meant anything else, Kendall,” he said softly. He pulled out of the traffic lane and turned into a small parking lot next to a three-story building. He put the car in park, and turned to look at her steadily. “I figure when you’re ready, you’ll let me know.”

He saw her eyes widen, and her lips part for another quick inhalation, as if she was having to remind herself to breathe.

“You’ll let me know,” he repeated, in a low, husky voice that, oddly, he didn’t have to work at all to produce. “You’ll look at me with those big eyes of yours, all hot and dark, you’ll wet those soft lips for me, and I’ll touch you, everywhere, until you’re begging me to stop and go on at the same time. And maybe, maybe if I get really lucky, you’ll want to touch me, like you did before, but didn’t have the nerve. And I’ll end up begging you, like I wanted to last night, but didn’t because I was afraid I’d scare you away.”

She looked away, quickly. He saw her hands move in her lap, her fingers lacing together as if she was trying to stop them from shaking. Or him from seeing them shake.

“It’s going to be . . . incredible, you know. You and me. Like nothing either one of us has ever felt before. We’re going to fly, Kendall. Right into the sun.”

It wasn’t until he tried to get out of the car, and found he had to lean against the roof for a moment to steady himself, that he realized that in his effort to seduce her with hot, dark promises, he’d wound up arousing himself once more to the point of pain. And he realized with a sense of uncomfortable shock, that he’d meant every word he’d said.

KENDALL DIDN’T care where he was going. All she cared about was that he’d left her alone for the moment. Left her alone, to try to recover some tiny bit of self-possession.

She had never been so off balance in her life. She’d known from the moment she realized her parents were never coming back that above all else she wanted to have something to depend on, something that could never leave her. And she wanted to do it by making something of herself, something that her parents would have been proud of.

She’d spent her life working to make it true. She’d always been so certain, of her goals, her talents, her direction, her sense of right and wrong, herself. She’d been certain enough to deal with Aaron on a level far beyond her years when she’d begun to work for him.

But all that certainty seemed to vanish in the presence of Aaron’s son.

As did her common sense, Kendall thought with wry self-deprecation. And as for what vanished when he touched her, when he kissed her . . .

She shivered, admitting that it was this, more than anything, that had her so confused. She’d dated, sporadically, over the years since college, but men her own age had seemed far too young, and the older ones all seemed to have their eye on her more as a conduit to Aaron than anything else. Anyone in between didn’t seem able to handle her dedication to her work that since Aaron had become ill had overtaken all else.

And none of them had ever made her feel anything like Jason did. None of them had ever set her on fire with a touch, made her want to do things she’d never even thought of, never even heard of. None of them.

God, she’d been so smug. She’d even smiled indulgently when Aaron had told her of the strength of his feelings for his Beth, and how he’d known the minute he’d seen her that she was the woman he’d been meant for. She’d been mildly amused at the thought of the indomitable Aaron Hawk succumbing so completely to anything.

And now here she was, spinning out of control, simply because when Aaron’s son touched her, she flared up like one of Hawk Propulsion’s jets. And she couldn’t fight it anymore. She was tired of fighting it. A crazy recklessness, unlike anything she, who had always been so meticulously careful in her life, had ever felt, welled up inside her. She didn’t
want
to fight it anymore.

Smothering a moan that was half pain, half longing, she buried her face in her hands. She was startled to find her cheeks wet; she hadn’t realized she was crying. She’d done more than her share of that in the past few weeks. More than she had since the day she’d been told her parents had died.

She felt the cool rush of air and realized Jason was back and had opened her door.

“Kendall? What’s wrong?”

She gulped in air, wiping swiftly at her cheeks, but she knew he’d seen. He was crouched beside her, and reached out to take her hands in his. He looked around quickly, as if expecting their grim companion to have somehow found them again.

“What is it?”

“I . . . nothing.”

“Nothing? You’re crying. You don’t cry for nothing.”

She supposed, in its way, that was a compliment. She fought for her composure, knowing she could never tell him the truth about what she’d been thinking. She’d seen that glint of ruthlessness too often in his eyes to want to give him that kind of knowledge. He had too much already. So she gave him a partial truth.

“I was just thinking. About Aaron.”

“Oh.”