Pursuit

by ROBARDS, KAREN

  “Mark.” The husky quality of the whisper stirred his blood.

  “Hmm.” Her skirt was riding up again. He could feel it, feel the cloth bunching up high on her thighs. He was reminded of how sexy her legs looked with the skirt riding up on them. Then he caught himself taking it further, trying to imagine what kind of underwear she wore. Granny panties? A bikini? A thong?

  No. He fought to banish the tantalizing images.

  “My left leg is cramping. I have to turn over.”

  She wriggled against him again, and he realized that what she was actually doing was trying to straighten her legs. With a wry inner grimace, he obligingly loosened his hold on her waist.

  She turned over, sighing with relief as she stretched out her leg.

  Discovering with some dismay that his body was acutely attuned to her now, he felt the small, soft globes of her breasts flattening against his chest, and tried to force his thoughts elsewhere—with, unfortunately, indifferent success, especially since the jolting of the truck kept bouncing her against him.

  “We need to come up with a plan,” she said, sliding her arm around his waist and squirming again, this time, he thought, to escape the ridges of the plastic bin that had to be cutting into her back. Her head was still on his arm, and he could feel the warm tickle of her breath against the underside of his chin. Glancing down, he saw that her face was turned up to his. The glasses made her look like a librarian, but when you looked past them you saw wide eyes the color of sweet tea, plus soft, full lips and creamy skin that he already knew was silky to the touch, and a tangle of chocolaty dark hair that looked damned sexy spilling across his arm.

  Her glasses were crooked again. He straightened them out for her in a gesture that even he recognized was really kind of tender, took in the sudden surprise in her eyes, and put his itching-to-wander hand right back where it belonged: flat on her back.

  “We ’ve got a plan.” If his voice was a little gruff, well, it was a small price to pay for exercising some self-control.

  “Oh, yeah? What?”

  “Survive.”

  He glanced away from her just to break the sexual tension, which as far as he could tell was all on his part. Dawn was breaking for real now, and the sky was slowly turning from deep purple to lavender. Visibility was improving by the minute, which under the circumstances wasn’t a good thing. Even so early in the morning, traffic was heavy. Mindful of the snarl of traffic that the expressways became during rush hour, a great many people were already heading in to work. A swaying eighteen-wheeler cast a shadow over the truck bed as it rumbled past. The breeze of its passing rattled the tarpaulin and sent a blast of exhaust-scented wind swirling beneath it. Even that was better than the smell of paint. Mark realized to his dismay that he was starting to feel faintly nauseated.

  The good news was, feeling sick to your stomach was a great way to get your mind off the woman in your arms. The bad news was, when you had a government-authorized death squad after you, wanting to barf could not be considered a plus.

  “Not funny.” Jess poked him in the ribs, which caused him to look back down at her. She was frowning censoriously at him. Either her stomach was stronger than his, or she was doing a better job of hiding what was going on with it. “I think the best thing to do is call Solomon from a pay phone the first chance we get.”

  Mark shook his head.

  “You can’t contact him again. They’ll be watching him now, and if you call him they’ll be on us like a duck on a june bug. See, they look for you where you’ve been. Rule number one of hiding out: You can’t contact anybody you’ve ever known. That’s how they find people.”

  He would have continued, but he needed air. Turning his head toward the opening and breathing deeply, he missed whatever she said in reply. All he knew was that it started with “But . . .”

  Of course she was going to argue with him: That, he was learning, was Jess. But he was feeling too queasy to listen. He tried concentrating on the horizon—which, unfortunately for him, was obscured by moving cars that wove in and out and emitted a hell of a lot of exhaust.

  “. . . has to be the President,” she said, her tone letting him know those were the concluding words of a lengthy statement.

  “What?” He glanced back down at her. “Sorry, I missed that.”

  She gave him an impatient look. “We’ve got to seriously consider that the President himself might be behind this. Lowell’s his Chief of Staff, and that ’s who phoned you to make sure we were both in the car right before it blew up. And who else could order the Secret Service around like this?”

  Mark knew he wasn’t quite hitting on all cylinders at the moment, but two things he was sure of even through the worsening waves of illness: David Cooper had loved his wife, and the Secret Service had never had a traitor.

  “Assumptions are dangerous things.” He spoke to himself as much as to her. “They can blind you to the truth. For example, just because Lowell called me right before my car blew up doesn’t mean he blew it up. Necessarily.”

  He had to break for air again before he could arrive at any more profound insights. Figuring out who was behind all this was a necessity, he knew, if they wanted to come out alive on the other side, but he just wasn’t up to mental gymnastics right now. At the very least he required fresh air and terra firma. A double line of vehicles all barreling in the same direction clogged the road behind them for as far as he could see. They were weaving in and out like the line down the middle was some kind of maypole. The truck driver was booking it now. The old truck rattled and banged and shook like a hoochie dancer.

  Jess said something he didn’t hear.

  Mark would have closed his eyes, but he had the feeling that doing so would prove fatal—to his stomach, not his life.

  Then, suddenly, thankfully, traffic started slowing down.

  The truck braked, lurched, and merged into the right lane, where other cars quickly joined it, and slowed to a crawl. An almost smooth crawl. As pleased as he was that they were now inching forward, Mark started to get a bad feeling that wasn’t centered in his stomach, which was actually a good thing because it was an indication that his stomach might be starting to settle down. The traffic tie-up probably wasn’t related to them at all, but still his thoughts ran along the lines of a driver with a cell phone reporting suspicious movement beneath a tarpaulin in the back of a pickup truck. Almost as bad would be a roadblock for drunk driver checks, or . . .

  “. . . something the matter? You’ve gone white as a sheet.” Jess’s whisper penetrated again at last, and he took a risk and looked down at her, pleased to discover that he no longer felt like upchucking the instant he inhaled paint smell. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  She was looking tired, anxious, and way too pale herself. With her face tilted toward his and her head resting on his upper arm, she was so close that he could have counted every tiny individual freckle on her nose and cheeks.

  “Nope.”

  Frowning, she looked more anxious still. “I don’t believe you. You haven’t been listening and you haven’t been talking. There has to be a reason.” She wet her lips and her body tensed. He could feel the hand that had been resting on his back clenching. “So what don’t I know? If there ’s something, please tell me. I don’t care what it is, I would just rather know.”

  Apprehension radiated from her like heat. Her eyes searched his, looking for some awful truth she seemed to suspect he was hiding.

  “Look, don’t worry about it.”

  “Mark, please.”

  His mouth twisted wryly.

  “The paint smell and the motion haven’t been bothering you at all?”

  “What?” Her frown deepened as she stared at him in incomprehension. Then her eyes lit up with sudden understanding. “Are you saying you’re carsick?”

  “No,” Mark said, revolted at the wimpy image that conjured up. “No, I am not saying that. I’m just saying that the paint smell was kind of getting to me
for a minute there.”

  “You’re carsick.” She grinned, then chuckled outright at the expression on his face.

  “Maybe.” Mark started to frown her down, but she looked so delighted, so bright-eyed and twinkly with amusement suddenly that he didn’t have the heart. Smiling a little sourly at her instead, he realized that it was the first time he had ever seen her laugh. “Funny, huh?”

  “Just a little.”

  Watching her enjoying the moment, he decided that making a fool of himself was worth it.

  “You know something? You’re beautiful when you laugh,” he told her, and when that made her quit laughing and look suddenly serious and self-conscious and kind of shy, he was so struck by the way she was looking at him that he leaned forward the required six inches and kissed her.

  23

  Mark was kissing her.

  Mark was kissing her.

  It took Jess’s stunned brain a second or two to absorb the fact, and by then her heart was pounding and her pulse was racing and her body had already caught fire. The warm, firm pressure of his mouth had caused her lips to part and her head to tilt so their mouths fit together perfectly, and the hand that wasn’t trapped between them slid sensuously up his back, reveling in the feel of the taut muscles beneath his shirt—and that was before she even truly realized what was happening.

  When she did, she went all light-headed and shivery inside. Closing her eyes, she kissed him back like he was the culmination of every erotic dream she’d ever had—which he was. Slanting her mouth across his, she took the previously gentle kiss to a whole new level, returning it with a heat and hunger that she’d never felt before, not even once in the whole twenty-eight years of her life.

  I want you so much. But she didn’t utter the shattering confession aloud. Instead, her body spoke for her, quaking and burning and yearning against him while her mouth explored his with a blistering urgency that made her bones dissolve. Her heart thumped so hard she could hear its fierce beat against her eardrums. Her blood turned to steam.

  He tasted, faintly, of coffee. It suddenly became her favorite flavor in the world. She absolutely could not get enough. Pressing herself against him, she discovered proof positive that he was turned on, too—and the knowledge made her wild.

  “Jesus God,” he muttered against her lips when he pulled back a moment later to grab a quick breath.

  “This is crazy.” She saw that his eyes were dark and hot.

  “So maybe crazy’s good.” His lips curved in the smallest of smiles, and then his mouth was on hers again. Sliding his hand around behind her nape, he shifted so that he was leaning over her. Pressing her head down into his hard-muscled triceps, he kissed her so expertly and so thoroughly that she forgot everything, the danger they were in, the rickety, rocking truck, the paint fumes and tarpaulin, all of it. Everything except Mark.

  She was kissing Mark.

  Dizzy at the knowledge, she wrapped her arms around his neck.

  She could feel the heat of him, the hard strength of his body against hers, the weight of his chest pressing against her breasts, their urgent, swelling response. Her bare toes curled. Her fingers threaded up through the short, crisp hair at the back of his head. Deep inside, her body tightened into an intense rhythmic throbbing that was the most delicious thing she had ever felt.

  I’m in love with Mark.

  The truck stopped with a jolt.

  It took a moment for that to register. Actually, it probably wouldn’t have registered at all if Mark hadn’t torn his mouth away from hers to, she presumed, check things out. For a moment she blinked up at him in befuddled incomprehension before she noticed that they were no longer moving. Although his mouth was still scant inches from hers, he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking out through the opening at the back of the tarpaulin. And his face was, just briefly, tinted blue.

  Revolving blue, she corrected herself, as the color came back, receded, and came back again in split-second rotations.

  Jess’s eyes widened, and with a quick indrawn breath she shifted so that she could look out.

  What she saw was a police car parked in the passing lane, an empty police car with the siren off. Its flashing blue lights were going strong, though, lighting up the still-grayish dawn. As the truck started moving again, she saw that another police car was parked in front of it, empty and silent, but with its strobe lights going as well. Jess never even considered that they might be there on account of her and Mark.

  What she thought, even before she saw the ambulance, before she saw the stretcher being lifted into its open rear doors with a white sheet covering the figure strapped to it, before she saw the crushed car that rested diagonally across the grassy median, was that there had been an accident.

  The line of traffic was being waved forward past the accident site when she learned that she was right. Only one car was involved, as far as she could tell.

  Jess barely saw the cop who was doing the waving, or the other police cars and the fire truck they rumbled past.

  Her attention was all on the crushed car.

  It was a blue Saturn. It was still too dark and the distance was too great to allow her to read the entire plate, but she was almost sure the first two letters were EG.

  The realization felt like a blow to her solar plexus.

  “Mark.”

  He was up on an elbow, looming above her, still taking in the scene. Even as the truck trundled clear of the accident site and started picking up speed again, she continued to stare back. Her heart beat in slow, thick strokes. The tinny taste of bile was bitter in her mouth.

  “Yeah.”

  “That was Marty Solomon’s car. The reporter.”

  “Yeah.” His tone told her he ’d already realized that.

  Jess took a deep breath. “You were right: They were listening to my calls. They got to him. They killed him. Because of me.”

  Her voice shook at the end.

  “Not because of you.” Mark lowered himself down beside her and pulled her into his arms. When her gaze continued to seek the tarpaulin’s opening in order to keep visual faith with that mangled car, drawn by guilt and shock and fear and a whole jumble of other churning emotions, he caught her chin and made her look at him instead. “Not because of you, do you hear? Because of whatever sick thing that ’s happening here. He ’s a victim just like Mrs. Cooper and the rest. Just like you.”

  Her eyes clung to his. He let go of her chin to stroke gentle fingers over her cheek.

  “You hear?”

  “Yes, okay, I know.” She tried to get a grip, but she was too shaken. “Oh my God, I talked to him just a little while ago. He was asleep. He ’d probably be waking up about now, getting ready to go into work. Instead he’s dead.”

  She was breathing way too fast and too shallowly, maybe getting close to hyperventilating, and she tried to consciously deepen her breathing and slow it down.

  “There ’s nothing we can do for him.” Mark’s jaw looked tight. His eyes were dark and hard in the uncertain light. “Except stay alive to figure this thing out, and bring these bastards down.”

  “I hate this.” Despite its fierceness, her voice was a mere breath of sound.

  “I know.”

  He pulled her close, wrapping his arms around her, silently offering what comfort he could. Resting her head against his chest, she soaked up his warmth and listened to the steady beat of his heart. Closing her eyes, clutching his shirt front with both hands and holding on as if for dear life, she tried to calm herself, to force her emotions back. I should never have called Solomon. That was the thought that kept running through her mind. But should’ves and would’ves and could’ves were wasted: What was done was done, and there was no undoing it. If she hadn’t overheard that “sugar,” she would probably be dead now, too. Or if she hadn’t leaped from Mark’s car, or if Mark hadn’t followed her to Davenport ’s office—there were a dozen ors. She—and Mark, too—could still die at any time. The killers on their trail were p
robably only a step or so behind. As she faced that, fear, cold and solid as a block of ice, settled in her stomach.

  I don’t want to die. I don’t want Mark to die. Especially not now that I’ve figured out I’m in love with him.

  The anguished thought was both ridiculous and true.

  For God’s sake, get a grip.

  Holding on to Mark as if one of them would vanish if she let go, she did her best. Finally, her natural determination asserted itself. If the key to her survival—and Mark’s—lay in identifying who was behind all this, then that was just exactly what she was going to try to do.

  Blocking out everything else, she started turning pieces of the puzzle over in her mind.

  By the time the truck rattled over the skeleton-like scaffolding of the 14th Street Bridge into D.C., she was feeling calmer. She also had a plan.

  “We need to check the phone records.” Loosening her hold on Mark’s shirt, resisting the urge to smooth out the wrinkles her desperate grip had made in the cloth, Jess tilted her head back to look up at him. If she felt self-conscious about the heated kiss they had so recently shared, well, she ’d be damned if she would show it. Hey, I kiss big, studly guys like you all the time. That was the attitude she needed to cultivate. If she ’d been stupid enough to fall head over heels for the hottest guy around, at least she was smart enough not to let him know it. Accordingly, the look she gave him was her lawyer look, businesslike and cool.

  “Phone records?” He frowned slightly as his eyes slid over her face.

  Jess nodded. “Mrs. Cooper’s, Davenport’s, maybe Harris Lowell’s. We should be able to tell from them where Mrs. Cooper was heading that night and who the others were talking to. Maybe that’ll give us a direction to start looking in.”

  “Great idea—except I’ve got a nasty feeling I’ve lost my clearance to access things like that.”