another quick glance and caught her watching him with an unnerving intensity, her still-startled gaze unabashedly holding his, her pale green eyes locking onto his own, as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
He didn’t blame her. He was a mess. He knew it and had made a point of not spending too much time trying to imagine what had happened to him before he’d woken up in Souk’s prison laboratory.
Jungle girl Jane had to be imagining plenty.
Looking back out the windshield, he tightened his hands on the wheel and shifted down into second gear to make a turn southwest on Blake. Forget getting a few miles between him and Steele Street. He was taking her straight to the Quick Mart.
“Don’t worry,” he said, putting the car back up into third after rounding the turn. “I’m dropping you off at the next block.”
“I-I’m not worried.” Her voice came from the other side of the car, a little shaky but clear.
Right. Not worried. Just scared half senseless. Well, it wasn’t going to last much longer. He could see the Quick Mart up ahead on the right. There was traffic filling all three lanes of Blake, but none of the cars he’d seen at Steele Street were on his ass yet, and that was good. It wouldn’t take them long, though. The drop needed to happen fast, and he needed to get the hell on his way to the Star Motel, a dump up on the north end of Denver, his and Jack’s rally point.
With a smooth turn of the steering wheel, he sidled Corinna up to the curb in front of the convenience store.
“Get out” was the order—clean, simple, direct, with absolutely no room for misunderstanding.
“No” was her answer.
Which set him back a bit.
No?
What the hell did that mean?
“Get out of the car,” he said, elaborating a little, in case in all the confusion of the last few minutes, she was still struggling with shock.
“No,” she repeated, her voice even clearer than before.
His hands inadvertently tightened on the wheel. He didn’t have time for this. He really didn’t. He flicked his gaze up to the rearview mirror and, when it came back to her, found himself staring down the barrel of a Bersa Thunder .380.
“Turn off the car,” she said. “W-we’re staying here. W-we’re going to wait for Hawkins.”
Good girl. She had a plan, and a gun to back it up. He was impressed, but not with the plan and not with the .380. To his way of thinking, when it came to pistols, even hothouse-gorgeous, long-legged, slinky brunettes wearing a minidress should be carrying a .45, just because that’s the way things ought to be. But she’d drawn down on him, and done it damn fast, which pretty much put her in the driver’s seat for the next couple of nanoseconds, no matter where his butt was sitting, and he was impressed as hell.
He liked tough girls, even if she wasn’t tough enough to take him on.
In a move so smooth she couldn’t have seen it coming, even if he’d told her what he was going to do, he took her gun the same way he’d taken her knife. A lot of guys could have done it, but not a lot of guys could have done it without hurting her.
He didn’t want to hurt her.
But he did want her out of his car. He checked the gun’s safety, put it in his jacket pocket, and then looked up into the rearview mirror again.
“You’re running out of—” Oh, hell. The green Challenger had just turned the corner, two blocks back.
He spun the wheel and popped Corinna’s clutch, getting back into traffic, and when he saw the gold GTO pulling up to the corner at Wynkoop and 15th ahead of him, he had only two words for Jane.
“Buckle up.”
CHAPTER NINE
Jack had spent four long days and three even longer nights up on the roof of the Bruso-Campbell Building formulating his plan, testing it out in his mind, going over it and over it, until he’d had all the kinks worked out—all the kinks, except this one.
Geezus. He wouldn’t have had the balls for this kink, even if he had dreamed it up. Or maybe fantasized was the more accurate word, because, baby, this was as close to his favorite forbidden fantasy as he’d ever gotten, the fantasy that made him glad Con couldn’t read his mind, the one where he was plastered up against Scout, hip to groin, her long legs