the bad guys, telling me exactly what was going on as it happened. Then she turned toward the cops who had stayed behind. And now those cops were the men I was concerned about. Because we had also been involved in that shoot-out.
And I also had a record that I didn’t necessarily want coming up in any searches.
To my surprise, though, Alice was running right toward them, and doing her very best combination act of a damsel in distress… and a woman who had spent the last ten years as the CEO of her very own company.
“We decided to take a weekend trip to Reno, from San Jose, and were going to try to find a hotel but it was the middle of the night, so we parked here to wait it out. And we were just sleeping when those men came tearing in and decided they were going to rob us,” she said, pointing in the direction of the fleeing kidnappers. “When we refused to give them what they wanted, they started firing on us.”
I squinted, trying to see through the haze that was starting to come over my eyes, and looked at the cops to see whether they were buying her story. They looked… suspicious.
“I see,” one of them said. “And you were… shooting back?”
She snorted as if this was the stupidest question ever. And in that snort, I heard something the cops probably didn’t hear.
The conviction that she was absolutely right, and that she had the situation totally under her control. It was quintessentially Alice. And yeah, I could say that after having only known her for something like twenty-four hours. Because those twenty-four hours had been a lifetime, when you came right down to it.
“Do you shoot back when someone starts shooting at you? Nevada is an open-carry state. We had guns on us, and we used them. I’m glad we had some means of self-defense, or we’d be dead already.”
She turned and cast a glance at me, and I saw then that her eyes weren’t nearly as calm as her tone of voice. She didn’t think she had the situation under control at all. I’d been wrong about that one.
Because her eyes were… panicked. Panicked like someone who had just shot someone for the first time. Panicked like she was suffering from the hangover that comes after an adrenaline rush. Her gaze shot to my shoulder, though, and I realized something else.
She was panicking because I was bleeding out.
And with that realization, my heart grew about thirty-five times bigger, and threatened to keep growing—except that it was causing the pain in my shoulder to get even worse. I tried to keep it in, but I groaned in pain, and I saw Alice’s face crumple, creasing with fear… and then get suddenly stronger again—right before she turned to the cops.
“Please,” she said, her voice suddenly more helpless. “He’s been hit, and I think it’s bad. You have to call an ambulance. I’ll answer whatever questions you need me to answer. Give you anything you need. Just get him to a hospital. Get him to someone who can save him. Now.”
I held on for long enough to marvel at the fact that she was literally giving herself up just to get me to a hospital. This woman who I had actually kidnapped—okay, fine, and then tried to save, but still—was putting herself in danger, just to try to get me help.
I felt my lips turning up at that, the smile of appreciation instinctive as I looked up at that gorgeous, strong, completely capable woman.
And then I closed my eyes and let the world fade to black.
Chapter 26
Alice
I wedged myself right into the ambulance after they loaded Jack up, not even bothering to look to the cops or the EMTs for permission.
Because as far as I was concerned, they weren’t allowed to have an opinion. I’d been kidnapped and driven through the desert in the middle of the night, fearing for my life the entire time, only to have my kidnapper turn out to be a freaking hero who decided to save me instead of turning me over. We’d hidden out in the middle of nowhere in an abandoned house, slept in a van, and gone through two shoot-outs together. We’d slept together multiple times and had sex once and, I thought, touched each other in ways that meant a whole lot more than some weekend fling in Reno.
At least, I knew I’d been touched more than I’d