The car sprang forward with a powerful, throaty grumble under his foot, fishtailing and spitting up gravel in its wake. Flashy or not, this baby might come in handy yet. Something Jimmy Lazarus had perhaps foreseen? He glanced sideways at Kate.
"Your friends are making me rethink my trust philosophy, you know," he remarked.
"I wouldn't be too quick with a change of heart, if I were you." Kate stared out the side window. Her reflection's gaze met his surprise, and she lifted one shoulder in a shrug that seemed oddly defeated. Vulnerable. "Jimmy might have been right about the locals knowing where to find us, but that doesn't explain how they knew when we'd be there."
The cold of Jonas's skin seeped into his gut. Shit. She was right. If Lazarus had told the truth about not informing on them—and after that little display back there, he found it hard to believe the man had lied—then there was only one other who'd known the time of their rendezvous with the boat and wouldn’t avoid talking to a cop.
Dave Jennings.
Chapter 31
It turned out that the one thing their "rental" car didn't have was a working heater. Kate's shivers became uncontrollable shaking as they drove through the woods to the highway, tremors so intense that every muscle in her body screamed in agony. Jonas cursed and turned off the cold air blowing through the vents.
"We'll stop at a motel in Malone," he said. "It's about forty minutes from here. Are you okay for that long?"
Kate forced her rigid neck into a small nod, then she settled against the car door to watch the trees slide past. She wasn't okay. Far from it, in fact, but even if she could have unlocked her cold-spasmed jaw enough to tell Jonas so, there was no point. They had no dry clothes for her to change into, no blankets to wrap her in, and nowhere they could turn for help. She would just have to tough it out until Malone.
Surely she'd survive that long.
Even if she could no longer feel her extremities at all.
Damn.
Closing her eyes, she distracted herself with thoughts of the hot shower she'd take. She could almost feel the heat of the water sliding over her. Motels had an unlimited supply of hot water, right? She could stand under the shower for as long as she wanted. Or maybe she could take a bath instead. A long, leisurely soak in water as hot as she could stand. Water so hot it almost burned, turning her skin pink, its heat seeping into her bones...
Bliss.
How long had Jonas said it would take to get there? She frowned. She couldn't remember. Couldn't remember how long ago he'd said it, either. She thought about asking, but she was warmer now—markedly so—and she couldn’t seem to rouse herself enough for conversation.
Her frown deepened. Wait. Confusion. Apathy. Those were signs of something. Damned if she could remember what, however. Or why it mattered. Especially when all she wanted to do was sleep. With a sigh, she succumbed to the cottony softness waiting for her brain.
A hand shook her shoulder gently. Then not so gently. Then with annoying forcefulness. A voice called her name, too loud, too close.
"Kate! Damn it, wake up."
She surfaced into reluctant consciousness. "What?"
"Look at me, Kate," the voice demanded. A hand brushed back the hair from her forehead. She batted away the touch.
"Go 'way," she muttered.
"Open your eyes," the voice persisted. "Tell me how you feel."
"Tired."
"I know that. Can you be a bit more specific? Where are we? And what day is it?"
Jonas. It was Jonas talking. And not very nicely. Tears started to Kate's eyes. She blinked them back and sniffled. "Don't yell at me. I'm tired. And how the hell do I know where we are? You're the one who was driving!"
Jonas nodded. "Good. You're not completely out of it. Let's get you into bed and go from there. Sit tight while I get us a room, all right?"
He'd exited the car before her fuzzy brain kicked into gear enough to comprehend his last words. What room? And "Let's get you into bed"? As in one bed? Together? Why—
Wait. Hypothermia. That's what she was supposed to worry about. But she was warm now. Hot, even. Or was that one of the signs? Hell. She couldn't remember. Was that what Jonas meant? Her brain mulled over the problem for a few seconds, but it was no use. She really was too tired to care. Not about the bad guys, not about her career lying in ruins, and sadly, not even the idea of Jonas and bed in the same sentence...
As she slid back under the mantle of sleep, one final thought surfaced. What a waste.
* * *
Jonas slumped into the chair he'd placed beside the window overlooking the front of the motel, his attention divided between the parking lot entrance and Kate. Not that he had to worry about her any more. She slept peacefully now, her breathing deep and even, her body warm to the touch.
A far cry from this morning, when he'd held her curled against him in the double bed, her skin as cold as that of a corpse, her chill seeping into him until it became his own. For a while he had despaired of ever warming her—and cursed himself for his lack of vigilance.
He'd been cold too, damned cold, coming out of the river and staying in those wet clothes until they'd reached the motel. It hadn't occurred to him that Kate would fare so much worse, that the eighty or so pounds of disparity in their body weights could mean the difference between life and near death.
And she'd come very near death. Too near.
Jonas suppressed a shudder. He'd never been so relieved in all his life as when her skin had finally warmed to normal, an achievement that had taken almost eight hours. Eight hours of imprinting Kate on his own body. Every curve, every line, every hollow, every softness...
Indelibly.
He blew out a breath. He had to stop doing this to himself. At best, he'd go nuts if he kept thinking about her this way, and at worst, he'd get them both killed if he kept thinking with his anatomy rather than his brain.
A car pulled up on the darkening street outside, and Jonas wrenched his attention back to the present, his entire being on high alert. The car waited, then pulled away from the curb again in a wide arc, making a U-turn in a break in the traffic. It disappeared down the street. Another false alarm. The third in the last hour. He was getting jumpier by the minute. And no wonder, with all the time he'd had to go over their predicament.
As soon as Kate's body temperature had returned to normal, he'd left the bed and taken up this post, from which he could monitor both her and the street outside. That had been at noon. Roughly—he glanced at the digital clock beside the bed—seven hours ago.
Plenty of time for thinking about Kate's little bombshell.
Because ever since she'd linked her partner to a possible set-up, the details and possibilities had been bouncing around his brain until he felt like a pinball machine dangerously close to tilt. But nowhere near an answer.
No matter how he looked at it, he couldn't find a solid link to Dave Jennings. Ramirez and Lewis had shown up at Kate's apartment long before Jennings had known of Jonas’s existence in her life. And if Jennings was involved, he'd had plenty of opportunity to either nail Jonas himself at the club in Ottawa, or tip someone off when they'd left the city. He sure as hell wouldn't have turned over his vehicle, bank account, and weapon to someone he wanted dead—nor would he have warned Kate to get off the bridge.
Jonas sighed. On the other hand, as Kate said, the only way Ramirez and Lewis could have known their exact rendezvous time at the river was through her call to her partner. So if Jennings hadn't passed it on to them himself, there remained only one other conclusion—and it wasn't much prettier than the first.
Someone had tapped Jennings’s phone.
Staring out the window, Jonas rubbed a hand along his jaw. To get a phone tap in Canada, an ATF agent would need to have a Canadian contact. Another cop—or cops. Most likely someone in the RCMP. But who? And how had Ramirez and Lewis convinced them? Had they needed to convince them, or were they somehow involved? Wearily, his mind skittered sideways at the last tho
ught. He didn't have enough intact synapses to sort through that theory. Not right now. Not on his own. He glanced over at the lump of covers on the bed.
Wake up, Kate.
The irony of wanting to discuss a situation with a partner didn't escape him.
He rubbed a hand over his face again, this time grimacing at the prickle of three days' growth along his jaw. The rub became a scratch. This was why he didn't grow a beard. The itch was enough to drive him insane.
Still, if he could hang tough past the discomfort stage, he might have a disguise of sorts. Add a pair of sunglasses and a baseball cap...
On the other side of the room, the shadowy pile of blankets on the bed stirred and moaned. A pale, slender arm appeared from under the covers, trying to push them away.
She was awake.
Casting a last glance over the parking lot and street outside, Jonas climbed to his feet and stretched. Dusk was descending, and streetlights had begun to blink on, casting pools of light onto the handful of cars that passed beneath them. No one turned into the motel lot. He turned toward the bed and Kate. God, he was stiff. Neither his leg nor his side had taken well to their nighttime swim, and sitting all day hadn't helped. He didn't imagine Kate's shoulder had fared much better.
The two of them made a fine pair.
He reached the bedside table and switched on the lamp. Dazed cat's eyes blinked up at him from a face almost as white as the pillow on which Kate lay. The shadows cast by her lashes emphasized the bluish circles under her eyes, and blonde curls stuck out every which way in the most bizarre hairstyle Jonas had ever seen. She looked lost, fragile, and utterly beautiful.
Ignoring the shock of desire that kicked him square in the solar plexus, he hid behind a half-smile. "Morning, stranger."
The golden eyes blinked, then moved past him to sweep over the room.
"It's dark."
"It's just after seven p.m. You've been pretty out of it."
Kate was silent for a moment. Then a peculiar look crossed her pale features. "I have no clothes on."
“You don’t know the half of it,” he muttered. “But at least you didn't need a sponge bath."
Well, that certainly put some color back into her cheeks.
Taking pity on her, he moved back to the window, his eyes scanning the street and lot quickly. Still nothing, but for how long? He swung back to Kate.
"How are you feeling?"
"Like I swam the St. Lawrence at the end of October." She pulled a face. "But I'll live. We should get going."
"Do you feel up to traveling?"
Her mouth twisted, and she sighed. "Do I have a choice?"
She wrapped the sheet around herself and struggled to sit up. Jonas gathered up her clothes from where he'd hung them over various furnishings to dry them out. He carried them to the bed. His heart contracted in his chest.
Even after her marathon sleep, she still looked tired. He had no business taking her on the road yet. She belonged right here, right in that bed, for at least another day. His gaze trailed over the haphazard curls, touched on eyes still hazy with sleep, and fell to devastatingly bare shoulders gleaming in the lamplight. Heat slammed into him, low and heavy, startling him into a cough.
On the other hand, maybe getting back on the road was best.
For both of them.
"I'll wait outside," he said, averting his eyes. "Let me know when you're ready."
Chapter 32
Kate popped the last French fry into her mouth, then scrounged in the paper bag for a napkin. Sitting back again with a sigh of contentment, she caught Jonas's amused, sidelong look in the headlights of a passing vehicle.
"What?"
"I think that's the most I've seen you eat since I met you."
Was it any wonder? The way her stomach tied itself in intricate little knots in his presence was enough to put any girl off her food. It was also one of those things she was probably wiser not to mention.
"I told you I was hungry," she said instead. It had also been easier to concentrate on her food than to try to hold a conversation with the man she'd just slept naked with, conscious or otherwise. Jonas may have only been following standard protocol for the treatment of hypothermia, but she still doubted she'd ever fully recover from the idea.
A half-full French fry bag appeared under her nose.
"Would you like the rest of mine?"
Kate hesitated. She would, actually. But it seemed rude to take his dinner away from him. She shook her head, but the rumble of her stomach belied her refusal.
Jonas deposited the bag in her lap and returned his hand to the steering wheel. "I insist."
She took a fry. "Thank you."
"How are you feeling now?"
A reference to how she'd almost passed out at his feet when she'd first stood up from the bed.
"Better for food."
"Good enough to discuss how Ramirez and Lewis keep finding us so quickly?"
The half-chewed fry in Kate's mouth turned to sawdust, and she had to force herself to swallow it. As inevitable as the discussion might be, she would have liked to postpone it just a little longer. There was a camaraderie to riding through the dark and sharing French fries with Jonas that she was loath to give up. A companionableness she wanted to cling to.
Especially in the face of what was to come.
She shot a glance at the man beside her. The dashboard lights illuminated the hard set of his jaw. She looked away. Regrettably, Jonas took her silence for agreement.
"I don't think it's just my bureau in on this, Kate."
Betrayal churned in her gut. Tightened her voice. "Nothing new about that idea. I'm the one who connected Dave to them in the first place, remember?"
She still couldn't believe her longtime friend and partner could have—
A hand settled over her own as it clenched the napkin.
"It’s not Jennings. At least, not directly."
She frowned. "I don't get it."
"I think they may have tapped his phone, but I don't think he knows anything about it."
Cold trickled through her veins. "You think someone else in the RCMP is involved?"
"When I was checking those files in Jersey, I did a bit of snooping around some of our other offices, too. New York City, Detroit, Chicago. There's a high rate of bad deals in this part of the country."
Which happened to be rather near her own part of the neighboring country.
"Just what kind of bad deals are we talking about?" she asked. "Dealers getting off? Agents taking bribes?"
Silence. A darkened gas station slipped past on the passenger side, closed for the night. The empty stretch of secondary highway unwound before them. Jonas cleared his throat.
"The kind of bad deals where arms go missing and dealers end up dead," he said. "I think agents are dealing arms, Kate. And cops, too."
With a trembling hand, Kate moved the bag of fries off her lap onto the console. Her stomach rolled around the hamburger and fries she’d fed it as denial reared in her. Agents dealing arms? Conspiring with cops on her own side of the border? Her own colleagues? Impossible, she wanted to say. No way in hell.
But she didn’t believe that, did she?
"How many?" she asked instead. "How big is this thing?"
"I don't know. A lot. The way things have stayed buried this long...the way they’re tracking us..." Jonas slammed the heel of one hand against the steering wheel, and the car swerved across the middle line. He made a visible effort at self-control, and the vehicle straightened out again. "I don’t know how big, Kate. I don’t know anything anymore."
“If you're right," she said, "We can’t do this alone.”
Jonas pulled onto the shoulder of the road and turned to face her, his eyes hidden in the shadows. “You’re right,” he said. “We can’t. Not as cops, anyway.”
Her jaw dropped. “Excuse me?”
"This changes things, Kate. It's not just Ramirez and Lewis gunning for me—for us—anymore, and the clos
er we get to Jersey, the worse it’ll get.”
“What are you suggesting?”
Jonas shook his head. “It doesn’t matter, because you’re not going to be a part of it.” He reached across the car, sweeping his hand feather-light across her cheek. His voice dropped to a rumble. “This is my battle, Kate Dexter. And it’s time you bowed out so that I can fight it my way."
“Your way how?” Kate made herself ignore the ache that stirred in her breast at his touch.
His reply was evasive. “I didn’t make the rules,” he said. “They did.”
She batted away the distraction of his hand. “Exactly what is that supposed to mean? What are you planning to do?”
In the glow from the dashboard, his jaw flexed. “Whatever I have to do to get my life back.”
His intent slammed into her gut like a fist.
He wouldn’t. He couldn’t.
“No,” she said, and his shadowed gaze flicked back to her. She shook her head in emphasis. “No way, Burke. You’re a cop, and I am damned if I'm going to sit back and watch you trash what’s left of your life. I'm sorry you stumbled into a hornet's nest, I'm sorry you got shot, and I'm sorry you don't think you can trust anyone. But that does not give you carte blanche to lower yourself to the level of the likes of Ramirez and Lewis and whoever else is involved in this—this”—she waved a hand—“whatever this mess is. And it doesn’t give you the right to take the easy way out.”
“The easy way?” Jonas gave a bark of laughter that held no amusement. "You really don't get it, do you? I stopped being a cop when they left me for dead, and you stopped being one when you didn't call the OPP after you picked me up off that road. You're aiding and abetting a suspected felon, Kate. That makes you an accomplice, not a cop. Going after them on their terms isn’t the easy way out, it’s the only way."
"Bull. I might not be a cop for a living anymore, but it's still who I am. Just like it's who you are." Kate folded her arms and jutted out her chin. “I’m not leaving, Jonas. We find another way. Together.”
Shadow of Doubt Page 17
