THE BRIDE WORE BLUE JEANS

by Mary Anne Wilson

  "Why?"

  He didn't see any reason to sugarcoat it in any way. "I beat a man up. And I didn't just knock a drunk over, either. I would have probably killed him if I hadn't been stopped."

  "Why would you—"

  "He was raping a woman." The blunt words hung in the warm air.

  "You found a man raping a woman?"

  "Yeah." He laughed, a humorless, bitter sound. "I've come to realize that I really do have a built-in stupidity response. I see someone in trouble and I end up getting involved. Sort of the way I have with you."

  "Why would you be arrested if that man was raping the woman?"

  "The man bought the woman off, and she said it was consensual, that I overreacted and…" He took a deep breath. "Let's just leave it that no one believed me and I ended up cutting a deal. My attorney, the diligent Mr. Gray, got them to reduce attempted murder charges to aggravated assault. He felt good that he got me off easy, that I only lost two years of my life for doing a good deed. Go figure."

  He didn't know what he expected when he finished talking, but it wasn't Annie to ask, "If it was happening again, what would you do?"

  He saw a turn out ahead and pulled the car off the road onto crushed gravel. When he stopped, he took a steadying breath, then turned to Annie. "Would you knock Raines down if you had it to do again?"

  "Yes, I probably would." Her green eyes were narrowed, but there wasn't the look of disgust or fear he expected to find there. She shook her head. "And so would you."

  "How do you know that?"

  "I know."

  "Lady, you hardly know me."

  "I've seen enough to know that you'd do the same thing. She was being raped, and you stepped in. You'd do it again." She shrugged, a fluttery movement of her slender shoulders. "Quint, look what you've done for me."

  "I tried to dump you out on the road," he pointed out.

  "You didn't."

  "I was going to drag you out of this car bodily."

  "You came back for me at the bus station. You didn't have to. You were in the clear, and you came back. I don't know much about being on parole, but I'm sure they wouldn't have just smiled and patted you on the head for helping me to get out of there."

  He studied her face, and he hoped against hope that she didn't have some gift to look into his soul. He wasn't at all sure what she'd find there. But he knew that she was the first person to ever make him feel as if he had one. And that made him more uneasy than having the cops coming after him. "Lady, don't make me a hero," he said gruffly.

  "I'm just thankful, that's all."

  "What about now?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "Do you want me to let you out here, or do you feel safe being in this car with me a while longer?"

  She fingered the can of soda she was holding but never looked away from him. Her mouth looked tight, and she spoke in a low voice. "I think I need to get away from you as soon as I possibly can."

  His chest tightened. He'd wanted it to be over, to snatch back his life before he'd found that Annie was working her way into it. But he hated her words as she uttered them. "Sure, I understand," he said, even if he didn't understand the pain the words were causing him.

  "No, you don't."

  "A felon's not the best traveling partner."

  "That's not it at all. I mean, the cops are after me. After everything you've done for me, I just can't let you get in any deeper. I had no idea what you were risking." Her smile was faint and unsteady. "I know you've got a built-in stupidity response, but I can stop this. I'm not going to let you get in trouble for me, so I'm going to get clear of you as soon as I can."

  It had been so long since anyone worried about him, that Quint didn't know exactly how to react. "I can take care of myself," he muttered.

  "I saw how you can take care of things at the diner. But I can't let you—"

  He looked right at her. "Annie, let's get one thing straight right now. No one tells me what I can or can't do. Right now, I'm heading west, and you're heading west. I'll drive you as long as it's viable."

  "But—"

  "No, that's it. My car. My rules."

  She bit her lip, but kept quiet.

  "All right. Let's get going," he said, and it took him until he was back on the highway building speed before he realized that he'd just reversed roles with Annie. Now he was talking her into staying with him, instead of she trying to talk him into staying with her.

  The whole world had gone crazy and he was at the front of the line. He didn't understand it, and he didn't try to. For now, he'd just accept the fact that Annie was still with him, and that having her there pushed back a loneliness he hadn't even known had invaded him until he met her.

  As he built up more speed, he checked in the rearview mirror and a painful burst of adrenaline surged through him. Back maybe a quarter of a mile or so, he saw a single car … a state trooper's car. And any hope that it wasn't after them died when the lights switched on at the same time the siren's wail cut through the air.

  Quint flashed a look at Annie, and she was twisting in the seat to look behind them. "Oh, no," she gasped, then her eyes met Quint's.

  The adrenaline rush from fear right then didn't compare to the rush of protectiveness he felt for this woman. Commitment had never been in his vocabulary, but in a single heartbeat, he knew he was in this for the long haul. As the state trooper's car began to gain on them, Quint called to Annie, "Hold on," and pressed the gas pedal.

  When Annie heard the siren, then turned and saw the flashing lights of the squad car coming after them, she'd thought it was all over. Until she looked at Quint. She heard him tell her to hold on and felt the car surge forward as he pressed the accelerator to the floor.

  Tires squealed on the hot asphalt, and Annie felt herself pushed back into the seat by the force of the acceleration. Insanity had gone into madness, and she knew she should tell him to stop, to get out of this before he was in any deeper than he was already. But one look at the man and she kept quiet. A muscle worked at his jaw and his hands gripped the steering wheel in a death grip. He wasn't going to give up, and now she knew the fear behind his determination.

  He was putting himself on the line, and she accepted his actions as a gift, the same way she was coming to accept the way she felt about the man himself. That last thought shocked her, and she looked at Quint again. Nothing seemed to matter, not the way they met, nor the way he tried to get rid of her, or his confession just moments ago. He'd burst into her life less than twenty-four hours ago, yet she knew that if she let herself feel anything beyond fear of the Raineses and impatience to get to Sammi, she could fall in love with this stranger.

  She closed her eyes against this admission, as if the simple act could stop the thoughts as easily as the sight of the man could make her heart race. It was stupidity, her own built-in stupidity response. Yet she couldn't get past that totally foreign sensation of belonging and feeling safe when he held her.

  Her thought process was shattered when she felt the car skid to the left and heard Quint mutter a harsh curse. She opened her eyes as the car skidded sideways on the highway, then caught traction and swung to the left onto a side road strewn with potholes. The acrid odor of burning rubber and the wail of sirens seemed to be everywhere, the makings of a chase in a grade B movie. But one look behind them, and Annie knew this wasn't make-believe.

  The police were real. Their threat was real, and so was this man close to her, no matter what his past had been. It took her a moment to realize that the police car was falling farther back, shrinking into a speck in the distance. And she lost sight of it completely when they took a corner so hard it threw her against the door. The car fishtailed, then straightened out and surged forward through a land of low hills and dried brush.

  She gripped the door handle so tightly her hand ached, and she turned to Quint. "This is crazy," she called out to him, partly acknowledging the insanity of her own scrambled feelings and partly acknowledging the insanity of him try
ing to outrun a police car.

  He cast her a quick look, his dark eyes narrowed in the brightness of the day. "Do we have another option?" he yelled over the rush of hot air and wailing sirens.

  She didn't have an option when it came to her feelings, but he certainly had an option to get out while the getting was good. "You can stop."

  She didn't realize how afraid she was that he might do that very thing, until he shook his head and built more speed on the potted road.

  "I think we're both in this too deep to do that," he said, his words almost snatched away before they could be heard in the rushing air. "I'm not going back to prison, and you sure as hell don't need to ever know what it is to be locked up like an animal."

  "Quint, this is my problem, not yours," she yelled at him, knowing the truth of the words as they formed. He was a stranger, a man pulled into this by fate and circumstances. A man who could end up back in prison for doing a good deed. "I can't let you—"

  He cut off her words with, "No one lets me do anything," then he looked back at the road and concentrated on his driving.

  She knew that Quint did what he wanted, when he wanted and how he wanted to do it. She just didn't know why he was doing this. And any answers she thought of, she pushed away. It was too dangerous to let her imagination fashion reasons that she wanted to hear. He was saving his own skin. Period.

  She looked away as Quint grimly negotiated pothole after pothole, and the powerful car didn't hesitate as the road began to climb. Higher hills appeared on both sides along with larger trees and more ground cover. They crested a hill, then went down into a lower area where the road forked right and left. The right branch headed down farther into a wide valley area, and the fork to the left cut into trees on a road that went up into the hills.

  When they got close, Quint down-shifted, swung the car to the left and for a second, Annie thought the car was on two wheels. It shuddered, then Quint had it under control. He pressed the gas, and they headed upward into a changing land with trees crowding the road. When Quint began to slow, Annie could see him scanning the area, then he jammed on his brakes and turned onto broken asphalt that cut between thick trees.

  The road went no more then a hundred yards before it came to an abrupt end in a washed-out area that looked as if it had been formed by a flash flood that had come out of the higher hills. A river of hard, swirl-cut sand washed through a basin strewn with rocks and tree parts. Then it disappeared to the south into more trees and rocks.

  Quint eased the car onto the baked sand, then went to the right, over to spreading trees and stopped under the low branches of a red-barked tree. He turned off the engine and twisted in the seat to look back at the opening they'd just come through. Annie could tell he was holding his breath the same way she was as the sound of the sirens came closer and closer.

  Then gradually, the sound began to fade off into the distance, and after what seemed an eternity, the sound was gone completely. The only noise was the low hum of insects in the hot air.

  Quint sank back in the seat, exhaling roughly as he ran a hand over his face. But he looked far from relieved. "Damn, I never saw them coming until they were there."

  "Neither did I," Annie said. She'd been too tied up in what Quint had been telling her, and trying to talk him into letting her leave him for his own good.

  "The last thing I expected to be doing right about now was out-running the cops."

  She sat back in the seat. "I should have made you let me out back there. Then even if they stopped you, it wouldn't matter."

  "You're forgetting your truck driver. I'm sure he's not about to forget his throbbing kneecap."

  "God, I'm so sorry," she breathed.

  "Would you stop that."

  She looked at him. "What?"

  "Feeling sorry for me."

  "It's not that. I just don't want you going back to … to that place."

  "Prison, Annie, prison."

  "And you just got out?"

  He leaned his head back on the seat and stared at the clear sky through the branches of the tree. Tension etched his face with deep brackets at his mouth and fanned lines at his narrowed eyes. "A few days ago."

  She swallowed hard, the idea of this man being locked up almost painful for her to think about. "Did you get your scar there?"

  "No, I got that just before they locked me up. I'm lucky I didn't lose my eye."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Stop that, I—"

  "I know, I know."

  "That's the past." His expression when he turned to look at her was still etched with tension that made her nerves tingle. "Now it's California or bust."

  If Annie could have turned back time, she would have. She would have never drawn Quint into this mess. She would have let him go to California and start his new life. The only problem with that was she would never have met him. And she was selfish enough to admit that she wouldn't have wanted to change that for a minute.

  She looked away from Quint and opened the glove compartment. She pulled out the map, opened it and held it out to Quint. "Where are we on this?"

  He took it from her and studied it, then pointed to a spot in northernmost Texas right by the New Mexico border. "Right about here," he said.

  She looked at it. "I didn't even know we'd gotten into Texas."

  "We're almost out of it. The New Mexico border's right up ahead."

  She couldn't see any towns of any size between where they were and well toward Taos. "What town's the closest to us?"

  He looked at it, then handed it back to her. "Taos."

  "No, I mean, a place where I can rent a car or—"

  "We can't take the chance of stopping in another Jarvis. This car stands out like a sore thumb in this country, and…" He looked at her so intently that she could feel her breathing start to constrict. "You don't just blend in either."

  He cut off any response from her by starting the car again, and circled it on the packed sand to head back to the road. "We need to get out of this place. If the cops have an ounce of intelligence, they'll be backtracking any time now."

  Quint eased back through the opening in the trees, cautiously looked out onto the road and turned off the motor again. He listened for a long time, then started the car and moved out onto the road to turn right and head upward again.

  "Quint?"

  He cast Annie a slanted glance. "What?"

  "You should have stopped back there."

  Quint regripped the steering wheel. The rush of adrenaline was tapering off, and the spontaneous decision he'd made to get the hell out of there when he spotted the trooper's car was starting to look like a form of slow suicide to him.

  Until he remembered the look on Annie's face. Then it made perfect sense. "They would have dragged me in on assault charges, parole violation, and probably something akin to accessory after the fact."

  "That's crazy. I forced you to take me with you. That's hardly being an accessory, and they couldn't press assault charges, not when they understood what that trucker was trying to do."

  "Just what was he trying to do when I broke in on the two of you?"

  "Well, he wasn't proposing marriage," she muttered. "My point is, I could tell them everything, and—"

  "You ran. You didn't even see the fight."

  "The truth is the truth. It's that simple." The truth hadn't ever helped him very much before, and right now, it wasn't going to help anyone. Nothing was simple, not anymore than it had been since he'd first set eyes on this woman. "The truth is I'm a convicted felon. That's sort of like being guilty until proven innocent. A parole violation can mean a straight year with no good time. I don't think talking would have cut it."

  "We could have tried."

  "Let me put this as simply as possible. I was saving my own skin back there, and you got pulled along in the process."

  "When we get to the next town, I don't care how big it is, you let me out."

  "Annie, that's suicide."

  "If you don't l
et me out, that's kidnapping."

  His burst of laughter startled her, and when she looked at Quint, she saw a man filled with humor, a man who looked younger and startlingly attractive.

  "This is starting to sound like that story where two bumbling crooks kidnap a kid, and by the time they're done, they're paying his family to take him back."

  "Well, there's no one willing to pay for my return," she said, then knew how wrong she was. And the laughter died.

  "Even with his money, he's not going to win," Quint said unexpectedly.

  "How can you be so sure?"

  Quint exhaled, then said, "Because I've seen you in action, lady."

  "I'm not going to go quietly, that's for sure," she said.

  "Good. Now we need to figure out a way for us to lay low for a while."

  She watched the way the sunlight being broken by the outspread branches of the trees that lined the road flashed across his face. "What?"

  "Translated from the common prison vernacular, to lay low means to find a place where we can get out of sight, stop and wait until we've got a chance to get past the law."

  "You mean we're just going to stop?"

  "That's the plan."

  "No, it's not," she said, sitting up straight in the seat. "We can't stop, not now. We have to keep going. We're almost in New Mexico. Then it's only—"

  "Didn't you hear me? The cops are going to be coming after us any minute now. I don't know about you, but I'm not up for another chase. Besides, we were damned lucky last time. We could have just as easily been cut off and caught."

  "Quint, just get to the next town."

  "And they'll be waiting. We'll walk into their open arms and it's all over."

  Now she wasn't only worrying about Sammi, but about Quint, too. And she felt as if she had the weight of the world on her shoulders. She didn't want either one to be hurt. "Then drop me on the outskirts, and—"

  He hit the brakes and brought the car to a skidding stop near the shoulder of the road. Then he turned his dark gaze on her. "Listen to me, and understand what I'm saying. We need to hide." He said each word slowly, carefully enunciating each syllable as if she were a two-year-old getting a lesson and emphasizing the we. "We can not be seen on the road or in town, or I go back to prison and you go to jail or back to good old Trevor. And I haven't come this far to let any of the above happen."