let them creep right into my soul while I wasn’t looking.
Alice had changed that. Instead of sitting there not daring to talk to me, too frightened of the situation or too angry to converse with me, she’d gone out of her way to worm her way right into my mind. And my heart.
And at some point in the last four hours, I’d fallen for her. I hadn’t even noticed it happening, but now that we were here, I couldn’t deny that it had.
Which meant that I absolutely, positively couldn’t turn her over to men who might hurt her. Hell, even if I’d known they weren’t going to do anything to her, I wouldn’t have let her out of my sight. She’d suddenly become someone I needed—with every ounce of my being—to protect.
“Shit,” I breathed out, my heart and brain racing in equal time as I tried to figure out how this had happened—and what the hell I was going to do about it.
I glanced at the clock on the dashboard, doing some quick and somewhat frantic calculations in my head. Those guys were going to be here within the next five minutes, and that gave us almost no time to get the hell out of here—or even prepare some sort of plan. Shit, shit, shit.
I brought the van screeching to a halt, whirled the steering wheel in the other direction, and hit the gas, my foot jamming it down almost to the floor. The wheels spun on the vehicle, sending up smoke behind us, and the thing squealed almost out of control, skidding to the right and then the left as the tires tried to find purchase on the old asphalt.
Next to me, Alice scrabbled to stay in the seat, muttering a string of curses as the action threw her back and forth.
“Put your seatbelt back on!” I shouted, realizing suddenly that at some point during the drive she’d taken it off. “Stay in that seat!”
“What the hell are you doing?” she shouted back. “Are you trying to get us killed or something?”
“The exact opposite of that, actually,” I muttered, finally getting control of the van and sending it shooting forward—and back toward the exit. “I’m trying to get us the hell out of here.”
“What—”
She had barely started her next question when another car came pulling casually into the very driveway I was heading toward, cutting us off smartly, and I jerked the wheel to the side again, trying to avoid them.
“Shit, shit, shit,” I muttered, jamming down on the gas pedal again in an attempt to get us the hell out of that driveway and to the other side of the parking lot, stat.
Because I recognized the car that had just come into the parking lot. It was the one I’d been told to look out for. The one that held the bad guys.
The one that I’d decided thirty seconds ago to avoid at all costs. And the one that now had us essentially trapped in this damn parking lot.
It also didn’t take a whole lot of brainpower to figure out what they were going to do now that they’d arrived to the meeting spot and found me doing donuts in the parking lot, trying to get away. I knew they had guns, and I knew they weren’t going to be shy about using them.
Which meant we were in really big trouble. And I mean epic trouble, like the kind of trouble action heroes get into in movies.
The problem being, of course, that I was no action hero. And this wasn’t a movie with stunt guys to do all the dangerous stuff and a director to yell ‘cut’ if things started to go wrong.
I was just trying to figure out whether I could jump one of the curbs at the back of the lot to get us out of there, and whether this van could actually outrun the old sedan my clients—ex-clients now, I supposed—were driving, when they actually started shooting at us.
“Well, that was quick,” I said, spinning the wheel again and shooting us toward the other side of the parking lot.
Alice finished buckling her seatbelt and grabbed for the handle on the door. “Jack, I don’t know what the hell is going on here, but if you’re serious about getting us out of here, then I’d suggest you do it sooner rather than later.”
“What do you think I’m doing?” I shouted, trying desperately to get my brain to work faster. Because she was right. This van wasn’t