LOW PRESSURE

by BROWN SANDRA

  The night air was thick and cloying, which didn’t improve his mood. Contrary to what he’d told her, he did care what her old man had said about him. Not that he gave a shit about his opinion, but he did care about Bellamy’s. It was directly after her visit with her father that she’d become aloof and untouchable, so he’d said or done something that had raised red flags of caution against Dent Carter.

  Feeling truculent, he made his way across the parking lot, which, at this time of night, was only about a quarter full. He pulled his keys from his jeans pocket and had nearly reached his car when he sensed a shift in the sultry air, a sudden motion behind him.

  Even before he fully registered these sensations, he was propelled against the side of his Vette, where he landed hard. A strong hand clamped the back of his head, banging his face down onto the roof of the car with enough force to split skin.

  Hot breath filled his ear. “She’s some high-toned pussy, isn’t she, flyboy? Too bad she’s gonna die.”

  Dent tried to raise his head, tried to dislodge his attacker, but he was as solid as a bale of hay. And even as Dent assessed the situation and realized that he was in real trouble, he felt the prick of a sharp blade at the base of his spine. He ceased struggling.

  “Good thinking. That’s eight inches of double-edged, razor-sharp steel. You might hear the pop when it punctures your spine. Probably be the last thing you hear.”

  “What do you want?” Dent asked, trying to buy time while he figured out a way to break the man’s hold.

  “Is she good? Slippery and tight?” Leaning forward, he licked the side of Dent’s face from chin to eyebrow. “Never can tell about these rich girls, can you? One thing I know, she’s gonna die bloody.”

  Dent, fueled by rage and disgust, kicked backward and caught the guy’s kneecap with the heel of his boot. He grunted and fell back, but only a step. Dent took advantage. He spun around and jabbed his elbow into the guy’s face, then landed a blow to his gut. But it was like hitting a slab of beef and only served to enrage the man, who swiped at him with the blade.

  Dent saved himself from being eviscerated by spinning around at the last possible second. The knife cut a wide arc across the small of his back. Instinctually, he reached back. The knife bit into the back of his hand and sliced into his knuckles.

  “Dent!”

  He heard Bellamy’s shout, heard her footsteps as she ran toward them. “No!” he shouted. “Stay away.”

  But she kept coming and, when she reached him, he pushed her hard to the ground. “He’s got a knife.”

  “He’s gone.” She came quickly to her feet and closed the distance between them. “You’re bleeding!”

  “Hey! What’s going on?”

  “I saw him. That asshole shoved the woman to the ground.”

  Diners, having noticed the commotion from inside, were pouring out of the exit and rushing toward them. Dent looked around, but his attacker had vanished. “Get us the hell out of here,” he said to Bellamy, straining the words through gritted teeth.

  God bless her. She didn’t do that female thing. She didn’t ask questions, didn’t demand an explanation, didn’t scream or screech or upbraid him for putting her in this situation. No, she just placed her arm around his bloody waist and half carried him to the passenger side of the Vette. She opened the door and helped him into the seat.

  Then she grabbed the ignition key from him, slammed the door, and ran around the hood. She called out to the well-meaning bystanders. “I’m okay. A misunderstanding. That’s all.” Then she got into the driver’s seat and started the motor.

  “Can you drive a six-speed?”

  By way of answer, she wheeled out of the parking lot and by the time she fishtailed into traffic, she was already in third gear.

  “Did you see him?” Dent asked.

  “Only a blur as he ran away. Was he robbing you?”

  “No.” He craned his neck around to look out the back window. “Do you see a pickup in the rearview mirror?”

  She glanced into it. “I can’t tell. Only headlights. Would he be following us?”

  “I don’t know. Drive in circles.”

  “I’ll take you to the hospital.”

  “No.”

  She whipped her head around and looked at him. “But you’re bleeding. All over.”

  “Yeah, onto my leather upholstery. What about you?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I pushed you down. I was—”

  “I know. You wanted me out of the way of him. Scraped palms, but otherwise I’m okay. Better than you.”

  Unleashing a stream of profanity, Dent popped all the buttons on his shirt and used the tail of it to scrub the side of his face, which was still damp with saliva.

  “Where should we go?” Bellamy asked.

  “For now, just drive.”

  She did, with concentration and surprising skill, weaving in and out of traffic adroitly but not recklessly enough to attract the notice of a traffic cop. After ten minutes and a switch from one freeway to another, she whipped across two lanes of traffic to make an exit, and when she brought the car to a jarring stop at the bottom of the ramp, they were the only car in sight.

  With her hands keeping a white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel, she turned her head and looked at him, her question clear although unspoken.

  “I think I was introduced to our redneck friend with the souped-up truck.”

  Ray was furious.

  His ears echoed with a sound as irritating as a buzz saw. Maybe he was hearing his blood as it surged through his veins. His heart was pumping hard and fast with fury and frustration.

  He’d come this close to opening up Dent Carter’s belly. This close. The charmed bastard had narrowly escaped, thanks to her and her cry of alarm, which had drawn the attention of people inside the restaurant.

  Carter had been bleeding, but not enough to kill him. Ray could’ve finished him off. But he hadn’t waited this long to get revenge for his brother only to mess up in the final moments.

  So he’d run before anyone could get a good look at him. He’d run the two blocks to where he’d left his truck, then he’d gotten the hell out of the vicinity. Not out of cowardice, mind you, but from caution.

  “Know when to fish and when to cut bait,” Allen had told him.

  But the night’s efforts weren’t entirely wasted. He’d drawn blood. He’d left the pair of them with a lot to think about, and that was satisfying. They’d be worried now, wouldn’t they? He liked imagining them puzzling over who he was and living in dread of when he would strike again.

  For weeks, he’d been trailing her like a glorified bloodhound. Sick of that, he’d decided earlier today to attack at the very next opportunity. But he’d lost track of them. All day he’d driven back and forth between her place and Carter’s, but they hadn’t surfaced.

  But sooner or later, Carter always wound up at that crappy airfield, so, around dark, Ray had positioned his truck where it couldn’t be seen from the highway and had watched the road leading off it to the airstrip.

  Was he smart or what? Because, sure enough, around ten o’clock, the red Corvette had come speeding up to the highway. Keeping a safe distance from it, Ray had followed it to the IHOP. Through the windows he’d watched them eat. And, forty minutes later, when Dent came out alone, Ray, disbelieving his good luck, had seized the opportunity.

  No, Carter wasn’t dead. But Ray had gotten his message across. As of tonight, he hadn’t just changed the rules of play. He’d changed the whole fucking game.

  Chapter 14

  It’s a dump.”

  Dent went into his apartment ahead of Bellamy, switched on the overhead light, then moved immediately to the bed and pulled the bedspread up over the rumpled sheets and pillows.

  Two pillows, she noted. Each bearing the imprint of a head.

  “I’m going to shower off the blood so we can see what’s what. Make yourself at home.” He grabbed a pair of shorts from a chest of drawers
, then went into the bathroom and closed the door.

  On the way here, they had stopped at a convenience store. Its stock of first-aid items had been limited, but she’d bought one of everything, not knowing what she would need to tend his wounds.

  Now she placed the sack of purchases on the dining table in the kitchen alcove and sat down in one of the two chairs, then took a look around. He hadn’t exaggerated. The apartment was a dump. Being one large room, the areas of it were distinguished only by the flooring. The sleeping area had a different color carpet from the living area. The patch of kitchen was covered in vinyl tiles. Only the bathroom was separated by a door.

  Except for the unmade bed, it was basically neat. But the meager furnishings looked like cheap rental pieces with chipped veneers and stringy upholstery. The faucet in the kitchen sink dripped with loud and regular ploinks, and the fabric panels that passed for draperies hung limply on crooked rods. There were no pictures on the walls. No books, or even shelves in which to place books or keepsakes.

  It was a sad place, indicative of a solitary life.

  Even sadder was that the only difference between this place and her condo in New York was the quality of the furnishings. Hers had been purchased through a decorator and had been costly. They were tasteful and pleasing to the eye.

  But they held no memories or sentiment for her. Anyone could have owned them. They didn’t represent a home. They were as lacking in personality as the chair in which she sat here in Dent’s dismal kitchen.

  The comparison made her feel even more despondent than she already was.

  He came out of the bathroom wearing only the boxers he’d taken in with him. He was drying his wet hair with one towel and pressing another to the small of his back. There were two places on his face where the skin was split. Those cuts had been left to bleed. He’d wrapped a washcloth around his injured hand.

  “How long have you lived here?” she asked.

  “Two years, give or take. Since I had to sell my house. When I left the airline, I could no longer sustain the lifestyle to which I had become accustomed. Housing market was crap. I took a beating on the sale, but I had no choice.”

  “Savings?”

  “Everything went into the down payment on my plane.”

  With the towel he’d used on his hair, he dabbed at the bleeding gash on his cheekbone just below his right eye. “I hope you don’t faint at the sight of blood. The son of a bitch made me a goddamn sieve.”

  “We should have called the police.”

  “We’d have made the front page of tomorrow’s Statesman. The witnesses saw me push you to the ground. I’d have probably been arrested, held while questioned, and by the time it was sorted out, we’d be news just because of who we are.”

  He was right, of course, which is why she’d let him talk her out of seeking emergency treatment for him. Her father lay dying; Olivia was hanging on to her fortitude by a thread. They didn’t need to open the newspaper tomorrow and read about their daughter’s involvement in an assault-and-battery in the parking lot of a twenty-four-hour pancake house.

  “Would you know him if you saw him again?” she asked.

  “Heavy bastard. Solid. Left arm is covered in a tattoo. A snake with fangs dripping venom. You said the guy in the pickup had a heavily tattooed left arm that was propped in the open window. Putting one and one together . . .” He left her to do the math.

  During the drive here, he had related to her the details of the attack. “Except I’m skipping the dirty parts.”

  “Dirty parts?”

  “Nasty things he said about you.”

  Most alarming, he’d told her what his attacker had threatened to do. Now she said, “He wants to kill us.”

  “That’s what the man said.”

  “But why? Who could he be?”

  “I’m thinking. I’m also still leaking.”

  “Oh, sorry.” She motioned him over to the table, where she remained seated. “Turn around.”

  He presented her with his back. The shorts were riding low on his hips, revealing an oozing red line like a wide smile across the small of his back.

  “Dent, you should go to an emergency room.”

  He peered over his shoulder, trying to assess the damage himself. “I doubt they’d believe I cut myself shaving.”

  “You could claim it was an accident.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” she said throwing up her hands, her voice breaking with frustration.

  He turned around to face her and tipped her chin up. “Hey, you reacted with nerves of steel, then drove like Mario Andretti. You’re not going to crack under pressure now, are you?”

  She lifted her chin off the perch of his fingertips and, placing her hands on his hip bones, turned him around none too gently. She emptied the contents of the sack onto the table and uncapped an ominous-looking brown glass bottle. “I hope this antiseptic burns like hell.”

  It must have because he hissed and cursed as she applied it. To distract him, she passed a cotton ball doused with the liquid up to him. “Dab that on your face and hand. How is it?”

  He unwound the washcloth and took a look. “The cuts aren’t deep. Fingers will probably be stiff in the morning, but he could have cut them off.”

  She shivered. “That’s the least of it. But why give you warning? In the time he took to issue those threats, he could have killed you.”

  “Disappointed?”

  “I’m serious,” she said, speaking up to him when he looked down at her from over his shoulder.

  “Maybe he was afraid that somebody was watching from inside the restaurant. Or he’s more bluff than bite. Or he’s a psycho who’s lost his powers of reason. It’s anybody’s guess until we know who he is and why he has it in for us.” He checked her progress. “About finished?”

  “It’s not bleeding as much.”

  “Because you damn near cauterized it with that stuff.”

  She unrolled a length of gauze and gently tapped it into place over the wound. “Turn,” she said. He made three revolutions while she wound the gauze around his middle, then placed vertical strips of adhesive tape at intervals to secure it.

  “You’re getting hair caught in that tape.”

  “I’m trying not to, but I can’t see what I’m doing if you don’t move your hands.” He did, and she pressed a final strip inches away from the silky stripe of hair that bisected his abdomen and disappeared into the waistband of his shorts. With affected detachment, she said briskly, “There. Done.”

  But when she tipped her head back and looked into his face, the intensity with which he was looking down at her stopped her breath. In a voice that was low and husky and suggestive, he said, “As long as you’re in that neighborhood, anything else you want to do . . .”

  Moving slowly, he reached out and traced the shape of her lower lip with the pad of his thumb, then brushed aside her hair and gently rubbed her earlobe between his fingers. Desire blossomed in her lower body and brought a whimper to her throat that she was powerless to contain.

  While working on his back, she’d tried to remain indifferent to the shape of his buttocks beneath the thin cloth of his shorts, but now the temptation to put her arms around him and test the firmness of those taut muscles against her palms was almost too powerful to withstand.

  She wanted to say To hell with everything and lean forward, nuzzle that enticing ribbon of hair, then follow it with her lips down to his sex that was so seductively close it made her weak with yearning. To take Dent into her mouth, to taste him . . .

  Another sound issued from her, but when she moved, it wasn’t to put her hands on him, or to kiss the skin that smelled of soap and man, of Dent. Instead she pushed his caressing hand aside, stood up, and edged round him.

  “Don’t be cute, Dent. This is hardly the time—”

  Whatever else she was going to say—and later she couldn’t remember—was left unspoken. He reached for her as she made to go past him
, pulled her to him, and closed his hand around her jaw to tilt her face up. “You grew up to be a hell of a woman, Bellamy. The way you worked that gear shift was a major turn-on.”

  If last night’s kiss had been a flirtatious invitation to misbehave, this one was a lesson in mastery. It was possessive, carnal, and dominating to a degree that alarmed her. Not that she feared him. She feared her susceptibility to him, feared the forbidden wish that he would do to her at least some of what his kisses portended.

  But she resisted being completely drawn in, and, sensing that, he raised his head and released his hold on her face, but only in order to slide his hand down over her breast. He plumped it and tugged gently on her nipple with his fingertips as he nudged the vee of her thighs with his erection.

  “Let yourself think about something else for a little while,” he coaxed, whisking his lips across hers. “Relax and have some fun for a change.”

  Then he captured her mouth again. Relax? Impossible. Not when her body was urging her to draw him in, to partner with his tongue. She wanted to drive her fingers up into his hair and hold his head steady while she lost herself in his intoxicating kiss.

  Instead, she forced herself to do nothing, to respond with neither ardor nor aversion. She willed herself to go perfectly still and react to nothing.

  Quick to realize that he was the only one engaged, he angled his head back and searched her face.

  “Daddy said you would try to get the last laugh on us by sleeping with me.”

  He let go of her immediately. “Oh, that’s what Daddy said. That explains the deep-freeze treatment.”

  The gashes on his face had reopened and were bleeding, making him appear even more dangerously angry when he stalked to the closet and reached inside to yank a pair of jeans off a hanger. He pulled them on with abrupt, jerky motions, but when he tried to button them, he helplessly raised his hands to his sides. “This could take a while.”

  Bellamy flushed hotly, but not from embarrassment. She gestured toward the rumpled bed. “Did you really expect me to get into bed with you when you haven’t even changed the sheets from the last one?”