Erin couldn’t help but give him a little smile. “I’d like to cut out Doreli’s heart for what he did to you,” she said softly.
“You have to get in line, honey.”
Lee shifted, rubbing the length of him up against her. Erin didn’t move, feeling the strength in the muscular body that brushed up against her. More than ever, she needed those strong arms around her, just as much as she needed to put her arms around him. But she couldn’t, and she knew he couldn’t, either, so she didn’t move.
“I wanted to tell you that it was stupid of me to leave without talking to you when you asked,” Erin began.
“What?” he asked. “Erin, that’s over and done with. Why bring it up now?”
“Because I’m sorry for all the wasted time, that’s why,” she said simply, still feeling as though she could get lost and be safe in those eyes. But then she’d always felt that way.
“But your reasons for leaving were justified,” he reminded her. “So forget it.” He brushed up against her again.
“Oh, don’t I know it,” Erin replied wryly. “What I didn’t know was the fact that leaving didn’t really change any of them. Leaving didn’t ease the loneliness or take away the worry.” She tossed a glance at Doreli in the front seat. When she saw he wasn’t watching them, she pulled and twisted against the rope that held her hands tied. “It only made them worse.
“Oh, I’ll be the first to admit,” she went on after a slight pause, “that I thought I was doing the right thing, but all I was really showing was my own selfishness.”
Doreli glanced over at them. Erin stopped struggling against the rope. Waiting a moment for him to turn and once again face the front, she then continued working at the binding on her wrists.
And she quietly continued with her confession. “After I left you, things didn’t get easier, only harder. It was like a vicious cycle. I poured myself into my job to try to find some satisfaction like I had when I was with you, only it wasn’t enough. So I would spend even longer hours at the job, but it still wasn’t enough. I was so lonely, I couldn’t stand it.”
“Lonely?” Lee prompted. “How could you be lonely? You were meeting so many new people, weren’t you?”
“Yes. But I was still the loneliest person on the face of the earth.” She paused and looked at him. “Because you weren’t there to share it with.”
Lee tensed again. Erin could feel it. She could see it in his expression. He was so easy for her to read sometimes. It was one of the things she loved so much about him. Easy at times, a complete mystery at others, making him so complex to her she wanted to spend the rest of her life studying him.
Too bad the rest of her life was nearly reaching its end.
“I should never have been so quick to leave,” she finished.
“You weren’t that quick, remember?” he asked. “You were with me at the hospital.”
“I should never have left to begin with,” she returned.
“But your unhappiness with me might only have gotten worse,” Lee offered quietly. “And sooner or later, you would have come to blame me for it. I’ve seen it happen to other guys I work with.”
Would she have? Erin had no idea. She only knew that she shouldn’t have left him, that she shouldn’t have wasted all that time she could have spent with him. And now she had no one to blame but herself. “No, leaving you was a bad decision. I began to question more and more if doing my job was the way I wanted to spend the rest of my life. When this Jenkins business came up, I had already decided to take a leave. I needed to take another look at myself.” The entire time Erin talked, she was working to loosen the rope that bound her.
“Quit that.”
Erin lifted her head to find Doreli watching her closely, looking again as though he would like nothing more than to devour her whole. Drawing on every ounce of courage she possessed, she stared at him hard, but at the same time, she quit fighting against the rope.
Doreli finally turned away.
“Are we going to get out of this?” she asked quietly. The last thing she wanted to do was give up. But, boy, their chances didn’t look good. And with every passing minute, she knew they were just that much closer to death. Granted, it was two against two, but her and Lee’s hands were tied and the gun Doreli held on them made things as unfair as they could get.
“We are if I have any say in it,” Lee said, causing her to wonder if he had something up his sleeve. Knowing Lee, he probably did. She was certain when he said, “Keep talking, Erin.”
“What?”
“Just keep talking.”
“What are you doing, Liam?” she whispered.
“Never mind. Just talk some more.”
“About what?” she asked, suddenly feeling at a loss for words. She had already emptied her heart to him.
“It doesn’t matter,” he muttered.
Doesn’t matter? It was enough to cause her to wonder if anything she’d said so far mattered. “Have you even listened to anything I’ve said?” she asked, feeling just a bit perturbed. Here she was thinking the end was so near. What was he doing? And what was he doing every time he rubbed against her?
Hard telling, but he wasn’t exactly listening to her, she suddenly realized. And he probably wasn’t going to listen much to whatever more she kept talking about, either.
“Of course I have. Tell me more about how lonely for me you’ve been,” he said.
“Why should I?” she whispered. “So you can feed your growing ego?” How could she have been so stupid to admit all those feelings, to put her heart on her sleeve, when he wasn’t even paying attention?
Lee looked squarely at her, making her feel naked and vulnerable, even more vulnerable than when Doreli pointed his gun at her. “Erin,” he said, “for nine months now, I felt as though I’ve done little more than try to keep from thinking about you.”
His admission shook her to her very core, letting her know that while she’d been letting go of her heart, taking the chance that he could take it and crush it in his bare hands, he really had been listening. True, she thought she could read him so easily. But she would have never known what he just told her. It was one of those mysterious aspects about him, she supposed. “Really?” she asked without thinking.
“Yes, really,” he confirmed. The tender expression that suddenly crossed his face reached right out and grabbed her heart.
“But what about when I came to the hospital?”
“It was too hard to talk to you. It’s why I never called you, even though I must have thought about doing it a million times. I was feeling as helpless as a baby sometimes because I couldn’t get up and get my own glass of water. I didn’t want you to see me that way. But the truth is, there hasn’t been one day go by that I didn’t want you or think of you or see something to remind me of you.”
“I feel the same way,” she whispered. “Night after night, I would lie awake, remembering what it was like to sleep next to you. Sometimes, I would wander around the house and try to come up with a good reason for even being there. I mean, the place should have felt like home. But it didn’t. Not like the home we shared. It was just a place to eat when I had to and sleep when I could.”
“That’s pretty much how our house became after you left.”
Erin searched his eyes, seeing the truth of his words in them. “It’s not our house,” she returned. “It’s your house.”
“It’s always been our house.”
“And you stayed there,” she added. Lee’s words seemed to hang in the air, just waiting for her to reach up and take them into her soul. She remembered the few days before, when she’d knocked on his front door. It hadn’t been at all as if she was coming to visit. It had been as though she was coming home and she had merely forgotten her key.
“I guess secretly I was just waiting for you to return. God knows I should have sold the place after the shooting. I sure didn’t need any extra stairs to climb. I can’t tell you how many times I slept on the couch to av
oid them,” Lee explained. “As well as to avoid our bed,” he murmured, keeping her gaze caught in the warmth of his.
Lifting her bound wrists, Erin reached over and placed a gentle hand on his arm.
“Oh, Liam, why did it have to take this to bring us back together?” she asked, feeling tears in her eyes again. Blinking against them, she was determined never to let Jimmy Doreli and that thug with him see her cry. It was bad enough that she had let tears fall when Doreli had hit Lee. And she hadn’t even been aware of those tears until she had Lee once again on his feet and moving.
“Fate works that way sometimes,” Lee simply replied.
“Well, we are not going to die. We’re not going to let Doreli kill us,” Erin vowed. “We just can’t. It’s as simple as that. Not now that the same fate has brought us back together again.”
Lee merely offered her a sad smile.
“You’re up to something, aren’t you?” she whispered.
“Just be ready for anything,” he warned.
Erin wasn’t sure whether it was the hard way he said the words or the way he continued to smile as he spoke them, but her heart picked up speed. “For what?”
“What are the two of you sweethearts talking about back there?” Doreli demanded, turning to them, cutting off any reply Lee might have been about to give her. “You wouldn’t be vowing endless love for all the eternity you’ll soon be spending together, now would you?”
“We were just discussing which one of us wants to kill you most,” Lee replied evenly. “Since we can’t decide, we’re probably going to have to flip a coin when the time comes to ending your pitiful life. You wouldn’t happen to have a quarter we could borrow, would you?”
“Oh, God, Liam...” Erin couldn’t believe Lee had just said those words to a man with a gun.
Doreli undid his seat belt with a snap and spun out of the seat, bending low to stalk into the back of the van, coming toward them like a panther on the prowl.
“Oh, boy,” Erin muttered under her breath. “Now you’ve done it.” She had complete confidence in Lee, complete trust, but seeing Jimmy Doreli approaching him with murder in his eyes and a gun in his hand, didn’t do much for one’s confidence.
Doreli ignored her, his attention glued solely on Lee. “I’ve had about enough of your smart mouth. I think I’ll just shoot you right here and now and toss you out into the nearest muddy ditch.”
“But then you’d either have to tell your keeper you didn’t do the job according to his specifications, or you’d have to lie. Which do you suppose would be worse when it comes to dealing with a man like Forest Burke?” Lee asked innocently.
Erin closed her eyes for a brief moment, thinking that to Lee it probably wasn’t going to make much difference. He was going to be dead either way. She wished she could think of a prayer—any prayer—but her mind drew a blank. All she could come up with was a mental please, God oh, please. The tiny hairs on the back of her neck were standing up, and a fear unlike any she’d ever felt in her life churned in the pit of her stomach.
Doreli drew closer, a look of pure hatred and uncontrolled anger in his dark, cold eyes. Erin thought it was a shame that his vicious expression was probably the last thing they’d ever see.
Her heart racing, her breath trapped in her throat, Erin began to work even harder at freeing her hands. Doreli had reached them, and whatever was going to happen was going to happen in the next second or two.
Erin didn’t want to be tied up when it did.
And it came even sooner than she expected.
One moment, Lee was sitting beside her. The next moment, he was on his feet, struggling with Doreli, fighting for control of Doreli’s gun.
The action took Doreli by surprise as much as it did Erin. Lee took advantage of the fact that Doreli was thrown off balance by his move. Smoothly, he swung Doreli around, trying to sweep him off his feet and get the gun out of his hand at the same time.
But Doreli nimbly avoided falling and made a graceful landing.
“He must have had dance lessons as a kid,” Erin muttered.
Doreli would have been able to keep his balance easily if Erin hadn’t stuck out her foot and tripped him. He fell to the floor near her, but the gun stayed in his hand.
Lee, still holding on, went down with him, and the struggled continued.
The driver gave the wheel a snappy jerk, causing the van to swerve. “Hey! What’s going on!” he yelled.
The sudden swerving was enough to toss Erin sideways. But she hardly had time to dwell on it because the man’s shout was lost in the loud crack that filled the van when Doreli’s gun went off. Erin screamed against the rush of air she felt and realized the bullet had gone right past her cheek and into the wall of the van. Thank heavens it hadn’t hit Lee or ricocheted, she thought briefly. She was too caught up in the fight between the two men to think much more about it.
The struggle was pretty well even. Doreli wasn’t as big or stocky as Lee, but he had the agility of a dancer, giving him the ability to slither like a snake out of any hold Lee could get on him. At one point, the two fighting men rolled over near her. Realizing the gun they fought over was pointed directly at her, Erin reached out with her tied hands and grasped a handful of Jimmy Doreli’s hair. In the same moment, Lee pulled him away, leaving Erin holding that handful.
Doreli cried out at the pain of being partially scalped. And the gun when off a second time in reaction. But since Lee had just pulled Doreli away, the gun was no longer pointed at her. The bullet went through the front passenger seat where Doreli had been sitting just moments before.
Lee ground out an oath when Doreli tried to kick him in his bad leg a second time. With that oath came an extra bit of strength needed to pop Doreli smack in the jaw with one fist while trying to get control of the gun with his other hand.
The blow left Doreli momentarily stunned. But the impact of it caused the gun to go off again. This time, the bullet found its mark in something other than the van, as it slammed into the back of the shoulder of the driver who had been yelling on and off over the two fighting men. The driver slumped over the wheel.
“Erin, try and grab the wheel!” Lee yelled as the van veered sharply again.
Erin managed to scramble to her feet, working her hands free of the last of the rope, ignoring the icy cold terror that had long ago settled in the pit of her stomach. But the fear was so strong, so paralyzing, she had to fight against the urge to simply lie down, curl into a ball and hide her face so that she didn’t have to watch anything that was happening. Now there was more than the threat of Doreli with a gun. There was the chance they could crash and die.
Erin reached the driver, grasped his shirt and pulled his unconscious body away from the wheel just in time to keep them from colliding head-on into an oncoming car. The blaring horn of the vehicle died away seconds later after it passed them. Still, it was a sound that seemed to freeze somewhere deep in her heart.
Leaving her feeling numb.
Oh, God, that had been so close. And it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. She had just had too much terror, too much life-threatening fear to face in the past few hours. It seemed as though her mind was beginning to simply shut down. She wanted to get her foot on the brake to stop the van, but the driver’s leg was in the way, his foot still pressing on the gas. Almost automatically, she threw the gearshift into neutral, so at least the van wasn’t rolling under engine power any longer.
And everything started happening in slow motion. Erin didn’t understand it. Even her own body wasn’t responding to the demands her brain sent it. When she’d been concentrating on the gearshift, they had once again swerved across the yellow line into oncoming traffic.
There was another vehicle—a pickup truck this time—coming right at them. Erin had time to notice that it was red, that there were two people in it. It amazed her how much time there seemed to be to see little details, like what make of truck it was and the fact that the man behind the wheel h
ad a beard. At the same time, Erin’s hands couldn’t seem to move fast enough. It was hard to get them to move at all, to steer the van out of the path of the truck.
They were going to hit one another.
There was even time for Erin to imagine herself flying through the windshield and landing in the cab of that truck. Distantly, she thought she heard Lee yell her name. Again she wanted to close her eyes to it, to not watch. At the same time, she couldn’t.
“Oh, Liam,” she said out loud, “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to leave you. Not now. Please, not now.”
That was all it took. Thinking of Lee was what she’d needed.
Suddenly, at the last moment, as though the two of them had been playing a game of chicken, Erin spun the wheel to the right, weaving the van away and out of the path of the pickup truck so sharply that it crossed the right lane and continued past the shoulder and off the highway. She felt the bumps, the roughness of the grassy terrain, more than she noticed it with her eyes. She found it was a lot like being on a roller coaster, and she simply rode along, not even bothering to try to steer, just following the track the van chose for itself.
She saw the trees directly ahead and merely watched in horror. Along with everything else, they were still going to crash. Gripping the wheel tightly enough to turn her knuckles white, she turned back toward the left.
For a moment, just a split second, feeling the van turn, seeing the trees sliding past out of their path, Erin felt a sense of relief. They weren’t going to crash after all.
But then she realized she’d turned too sharply this time. Combined with the fact their vehicle was top-heavy and the ground was uneven beneath them, the van spilled over, finally coming to rest on its side.
The unconscious driver slammed into the door beside him with a thud, and Erin couldn’t stop herself from falling onto him. The groan that escaped him was enough to tell her that Doreli’s bullet hadn’t killed him. Then the window on the door beneath him broke beneath the weight of the van, popping pieces of glass into the interior and filling the window with the high grass they’d just been driving on.
Crime Of The Heart Page 20
