drawing closer. He looked around again. This was not the time to dawdle, but …
But his instincts were telling him to back up, go the other way. There was another way out of the alley about halfway down, where an opening in the tall fence led to a rough track that ran straight into the parking lots, loading docks, and service entrances for the businesses on the next street over, a concrete and corrugated steel wasteland.
The track is there. Everybody uses it.
The thought was clear and true, and he didn’t second-guess his plan any more than that. On his own, they’d never catch him.
Jane, who was now shaking like a leaf in her little high-heeled boots, was another story—but this wasn’t her fight, no matter what she’d done.
He pulled her back into the alley, up close to the wall where they couldn’t be seen.
“Give me your gun,” he said.
She gave one short shake of her head and clutched her zebra bag closer. “We already played this game.”
“No game,” he said. “I’m leaving, you’re staying, and I want to put my prints on the grip. Tell them I did all the shooting.”
“No.” She shook her head again. “I’m going with you.”
Which made no damn sense at all. He didn’t get it.
Jane Linden—who was she that she wouldn’t let him go? He could only think of one thing.
A third siren sounded off in the distance, drawing his attention to the street. Yeah, this was big for Denver, a fair amount of gunplay and, despite Rock’s previous yowling, what must look like a double homicide in the alley to whoever had called it in to the cops. In Ciudad del Este, it wouldn’t have made the morning news.
He turned back to her, his one idea pressing hard on him.
“Were we lovers?” he asked, a part of him wishing it was so, that the Wild Thing had once been his—and the hotness of her blush, the sudden startled starkness of her gaze told him it was true.
Geezus.
“I was a fool to leave you.” And it was time to leave her again. The cops were on the block. They’d be screeching to a halt any second now, and that was perfect timing. They wouldn’t catch him, but he wanted them to catch her, to take her in, get her off the streets for a while. By the time they let her go, he and Scout and Jack would be long gone, and this would all be over—at least in Denver.
“I want you to go with the cops,” he said. “Tell them anything you want about me, everything you know. There’s no reason to lie, and the more you can give them, the easier it’ll go on you. Now open your purse.”
After another moment’s hesitation, she did, and he reached in and quickly but firmly pressed his hand around the Bersa’s grip. Pulling his hand back out, he thought there should be something else, something he could say, but there wasn’t. No matter what they’d been, he didn’t know her now, and whatever happened, he was going to have to get out of the country and stay out. There really wasn’t anyplace for this to go and nothing for him to do except walk away.
And to give her a kiss.
One kiss for a wild thing on a wild night.
A bad idea, he silently admitted.
But irresistible.
Light from the police cars pulling up flashed into the alley, bright strobes of red and blue bathing the two of them in quick bursts of color. He raised his hand to her face, his thumb brushing across the softness of her cheek. If she wanted to run or turn away, that was her cue, her only chance.
But she didn’t turn away. She lifted her face, her eyes meeting his, her expression one of nerves and flat-out curiosity—and excitement. He could smell it on her, felt it in the sudden rise of warmth of her skin, heard it in the shallowness of her breath—and so he lowered his mouth and met her lips with his own.
Bad idea.
She melted into him, and it felt too good, tasted too good, of softness and sex, things he’d been too long without. The sigh of her breath into his mouth was sweet and unexpected and went all the way to his groin. Caught for a moment, he lingered, letting himself fall deeper into the pleasure of her kiss, the wonder of her mouth, its silkiness, and the intimacy of tracing her teeth with his tongue. Then