Alone With an Escort

by Angela Claire

  Boots marched back into the room and it was all she could see from her position on the floor until the same black-haired, green-eyed man who had shown up that afternoon and blown her whole existence apart leaned down and pulled her up gently. She had wanted him to blow her mind, but this wasn’t quite what she meant. She was going to kill Mattie for giving her a guy for her twenty-seventh birthday.

  He pulled her to her feet and she glanced toward the door.

  “We’re all clear,” he said.

  Nice to know she might actually have a twenty-seventh birthday and maybe even a twenty-eighth someday.

  She was going to kill Mattie, anyway. Even if her ‘birthday present’ wasn’t what was going on here—and she was rapidly suspecting it wasn’t since he’d called to cancel before all hell broke loose—at the very least the expectation of it had made her more blasé than she ever would have been about a strange man walking into her barn, no matter how gorgeous he was.

  “Who are you and what the hell is going on?” she gasped, letting her belated outrage make her feel a little more like herself. She yanked her elbow out of his grasp.

  “What is going on is we’re getting you out of here. Now. Right now.”

  “I told you I wasn’t going anywhere with you and I sure as hell am not going now!” She looked down at the dead man. There was probably another one outside. “We have to call the police. Find out who these men were and why they were, were, shooting at us.”

  “Do you have any rope?” he asked.

  “What does that have to do with anything?” The pitch of her voice was very near hysterical, a tone she tried never to adopt, not even with the tenure committee at the university, but at this moment she couldn’t care less.

  “It has to do with the fact that I’m going to haul you out of here like a sack of potatoes if you don’t come with me in two seconds, and it would probably be easier if I tied you up first. But I’ll make do if I have to.”

  She recoiled in horror. “You wouldn’t?”

  He reached for her and she jumped back, quicker than she knew she could, and held out her palms in that ‘stop’ gesture everybody made, which would actually stop very few guys, this particular one less than most undoubtedly. But he did stop.

  “Dr. Barrett, I should have tried harder to convince you of who I was when I first got here. I’m damn sorry about that. I misjudged the situation and I wasted time. Now, the presence of these guys”—he casually kicked the corpse and she flinched—“means we’re out of it. So, we have to go. My first priority is your safety, not your cooperation. Now, is there anything you could carry that you need for your research?”

  “I…there’s, I guess there’s my notes. And my computer, of course.”

  “Where are those?”

  She hesitated.

  “Now,” he snapped.

  Though he still had that massive gun in his hand, she didn’t expect him to use it against her. She didn’t know why. She just didn’t. But even though it was not ‘smoking’, it reminded her of the gravity of the situation. How could she have ever mistaken him for a man who made love for a living? He looked hard as nails now.

  I’ll figure all this out later. “They’re upstairs. I’ll get them.”

  “You go ahead and do that and I’ll torch the barn.”

  “What? ” Two steps forward, one step back.

  He turned to go, tossing over his shoulder. “Now. Go get your things and meet me outside.”

  He left her alone with just the corpse and her orders. She spared a glance at the body, a bearded man all in black, then went to the phone on the wall. What was she thinking, just blindly obeying some complete stranger? She’d call the police herself. She dialed nine-one-one and took in the silence on the other end. No voice answering the phone. No ringing. No dial tone at all. Those men must have cut the wire before they started shooting.

  She dropped the receiver. The lack of a phone line took the choice out of her hands. They were too far out for cell service. She could still send an email, assuming the data line hadn’t been cut as well, but she couldn’t be sure of an immediate response. For now, her pseudo-escort was right. She needed to get out of here.

  Stumbling out of the kitchen and up the stairs to the desk in her bedroom, she went right to the laptop and tapped on the keys to bring it out of hibernation. She could at the very least send an email before she left, even if she didn’t wait for the response, telling her assistant at the university, and maybe even Mattie what had happened and to call the police. But in a metaphor for her whole problem with the physical universe at this moment, the screen refused to come on.

  Goddamn battery. Even if she plugged it in right now, it would take the old relic a few minutes to fire up. She was reaching for the power cord when she saw the flames outside her window. Jesus, the man was serious. He was burning her barn! She grabbed her laptop and the power cord, along with the three notebooks detailing the results on her latest research, and ran downstairs. Yanking her parka off the coat hook, she switched off the lights in the kitchen. As if she shouldn’t waste power on a corpse or something. She shivered.

  Nope, she would think about it later.

  He was at the bottom of her porch steps waiting for her, the orange blaze of her barn behind him. She closed the door, refusing to look at the other body sprawled underneath her porch swing or the blood soaking through the snow all around her, and hurried toward the steps. At the last second, though, she lost her footing on the red soggy mess beneath her and started to slip.

  When she would have gone flat on her back, she was scooped up and saved from that ignominious fate by a pair of strong arms.

  How the hell had he moved so quickly to the top of the porch, picked her up before she could fall and not fallen himself despite his speed and the weight of her in his arms? Fighting her admiration for the grace and power of that, she assured herself he was probably just trying to save the computer.

  He held her to his chest, cradling her, his breath on her face so close she could feel its warmth in contrast to the cold air. His eyes were mesmerizing, a dark green with long black lashes. Ridiculously enough, she felt safe in his arms, bundled up against him, for just one second, until she reminded herself of, well, of everything.

  “Let me go.”

  He carried her down the stairs and set her upright then went back to his brisk business-like precision. “Is there anything related to your research still in the house?”

  She shook her head.

  “Good. Where’s your car? I didn’t see one in back.”

  “I don’t have one.”

  That at least seemed to ruffle this man’s calm. “No car? Christ, how the hell do you get up here?”

  “I walk down to the road and catch the bus.”

  He turned to go, grumbling that he was surprised a bus would even come up to whatever shit road was around here, and she shrugged into her parka, balancing her laptop and notebooks in her arms as she did so, then rushed to follow him.

  The snow was deep, almost to the top of her boots, and he was moving fast. She struggled to keep up with him and he paused, no more than two minutes or so into it.

  “Give me those.” He took her computer and notebooks without waiting for her to comply and set back on that relentless pace.

  Even without holding her stuff, she was panting with the effort to follow him and not fall far behind.

  “Let me know if you need me to carry you,” he yelled back over his shoulder.

  As if. It was bad enough he’d had to save her from falling on her ass on her own porch. She didn’t need to be carried. But all she shouted toward him was, “Where are we going?”

  He didn’t answer. In fact, for all his threat to tie her up and carry her, he didn’t even seem to be paying attention to whether she was behind him. A false impression, as it turned out, since the first time she stopped to rest, just sinking to her knees in the snow, he was next to her in two seconds flat.

  He crouched down. “O
ver my shoulder or piggyback?”

  She shot him a resentful stare. “Neither.”

  He stood. “Then get the hell up. You stop again, I’m not asking.”

  “You’re an asshole, you know that?” His back was already to her, trudging away, but saying it loud enough for him to hear made her feel better anyway. She got up and followed.

  She had no idea why this whatever-agency was even bothering to try to save her. Shit, she’d forgotten to look for that paperwork. Oh, what did it matter? She had bigger things to worry about.

  After what seemed like hours, but was a lot less, a huge black helicopter magically appeared in a clearing in front of them. At the sight of it, she stopped dead in her tracks. Oh, God, could this day get any worse?

  He sprinted ahead, making it to the helicopter and throwing her computer and books into some kind of storage bin behind the cockpit. Once she forced herself to move her feet, she joined him, quite a bit more slowly. He started the engine, the propellers making a grating sound as they woke up.

  She supposed it was pointless to ask, but she wanted to, anyway. “Do I have to get in this?” she shouted over the sound of the propellers.

  He put on some headphones, adjusted a dial and, without answering, reached down to yank her toward him, up and over his lap, depositing her in the passenger seat almost before she realized it. And it was like a sack of potatoes, just as he’d threatened.

  “Oh!”

  He handed her headphones and, because there was nothing else to do, she put them on. At least there was some kind of microphone thingy that connected her to him. She used it to complain, “I don’t like to fly.”

  He had the same microphone on his headphones. “Tough luck.”

  Then the helicopter was lifting up into the air, leaving the tall pine trees below looking like trinkets in a Monopoly game. She hadn’t shut her eyes to strangers shooting at her and corpses in her kitchen, but she would shut her eyes to this. And she did so, firmly.

  “Put on your seat belt,” she heard through her headphones and she didn’t even open her eyes to do that, grappling around instead and managing to accomplish the task, anyway.

  God, she hated flying. Not that she’d done much of it. But she hated even the thought of it.

  Flying was associated with the absolute worst day of her life—well, worst with the possible exception of today, depending on how the rest of the night went. So it was fitting she was up in the air in the midst of all this mayhem and confusion. She felt as frightened and disoriented as she had as a child, when her great-aunt Hazel had picked her up from her friend Suzy’s house and told her that her parents were not coming home. That they’d flown away in that big bird of a plane while she waved bye-bye and ‘ went right up to heaven’. Even at six years old, she hadn’t been comforted by the metaphor. She had felt chilly and nauseated and abandoned.

  Of course, when she’d gotten old enough to investigate, she learned her parents’ plane hadn’t been destined for heaven. It was helped along by a little negligence on the part of the mechanics’ union. One malfunctioning thruster, one lax safety check and the plane had crashed in a lonely Iowa cornfield.

  After that, no amount of statistics on the rarity of plane crashes compared to almost any other mode of transportation had convinced her to set foot in an airport. No jetting off abroad as a college student. No flying to conferences like other scientists. No trips to the Caribbean, as Mattie had wanted. She’d never boarded a plane, let alone a helicopter, since her parents’ accident. It was a bit of a handicap in her profession, but with the internet, she got around it. Her work had never suffered.

  But it looked like the mysterious ‘agency’ couldn’t have cared less about phobias. So here she was in a helicopter.

  She took a deep breath, a little surprised she was able to sit here and not jump out of the window or something. Forget about hypnotism. Maybe she had discovered a cure for a lifelong fear of flying on her own. Replace it with a bigger phobia. Fear of being shot at.

  She concentrated on the sound of the blades swirling around above them, as if she could will them to keep turning. The deep breaths helped, too. With the microphone, she supposed she could have filled the time with asking her pilot what the hell this was all about. But she’d rather do that on solid ground. She just hoped that was going to be soon. Very soon.

  After a while, he asked, “You really hate flying?”

  She nodded, eyes closed, even though she knew he couldn’t hear that through the headphones.

  “Why? It’s great. I love to fly.”

  “Yeah, you also seem to like to shoot guns and burn things and run marathons through foot-high snow,” she muttered. “I get the feeling we’re not exactly simpatico.”

  “I don’t know. I thought we got along pretty well back there at first.” The chuckle through her headphones tricked her into opening her eyes to shoot him a dirty look, but he didn’t notice and the brief glance reminded her of where she was, so she shut her eyes again. At least the sun was setting and it was almost dark out there now. Somehow, darkness would make it easier to pretend that they weren’t up in the clouds and defying gravity with the aid of only a frail, man-made engine that some drunk mechanic might have installed on a Friday afternoon.

  “Well, don’t worry about it, Doctor. We’re not going far. Not now, anyway.”

  “Where are you taking me?” she ventured, since he’d introduced the subject anyway. “Is this agency or whatever in Washington? Aren’t we going in the wrong direction for that?” Her two-second glance had assured her of that. They were heading toward the setting sun, west.

  “I was going to take you there, but I can’t now. Those guys got to your house too quickly. Something could be wrong.”

  Two corpses. Up in a helicopter with a man she didn’t know. Fleeing for her life, apparently.

  And something could be wrong?

  Her stomach dropped. Unfortunately, in time to the helicopter dropping. Subtly, but dropping.

  “What was that?”

  “I’m putting it down. There’s a field up ahead. Don’t worry. I know where I’m going.”

  Worry? Her worry? Why worry? She guffawed, speechless. A double PhD in English along with her chemistry degree and she still didn’t have the words to express how stupid she thought that sentiment was.

  The helicopter seemed to be falling out of the sky. She whimpered, hoping he couldn’t hear it through the microphone, and with one last jarring motion, they were on the ground again.

  “Smooth set-down,” he had the nerve to comment through the headphones as the sound of the propellers lessened.

  “Could have fooled me,” she mumbled under her breath.

  “It might not have been so scary if you’d opened your eyes.”

  She felt him take her headphones off and only then did she open them. To total and complete blackness beyond the windscreen of the now-landed helicopter.

  “This is your plan? We’re in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Not quite. There’s a hotel a few miles away. We can hike to it and this is far enough out that no one will find the helicopter.”

  Forget about the fact that even under ordinary circumstances she would not be up to his idea of a hike, but a hotel? “You’re taking me to a hotel? A plain old ordinary hotel? Shouldn’t there be, like, a secret hiding place or a safe house or something?”

  “The ordinary person underestimates how easy it is to lose yourself in modern small-town America, as long as you use cash and don’t have a tracker on you.”

  She didn’t have the strength to ask what a tracker was. She just hoped they didn’t have one.

  “Not that I’m saying you’re ordinary, Doc.” He flashed a grin at her.

  When she had first seen Agent Whatever-His-Name-Was, she had thought that she’d won the lottery in the looks department on her birthday present. Now she wanted to just pummel in his handsome face. She settled for shaking her head in disgust.

  He reached back fo
r her things, enclosing them in a satchel, and said, “Now, don’t get offended here and I’m not trying to be a jerk, but you do look beat. Let me carry you. You can get all women’s lib, or gender equality, or whatever you college-types call it, later on, okay?”

  Women’s lib? What a moron. Since she still was depending on him to stay alive for the time being, however, she neglected to voice the opinion out loud.

  “I can walk. How many miles are we talking about?”

  “Three. And I’d like to get there in about twenty minutes.”

  “That’s not walking. That’s running.”

  He shrugged. “I think we’re fine here, but the more distance we put between ourselves and this helicopter, the better.”

  “I don’t see you torching your helicopter, though,” she noted, feeling small. But what the hell?

  “This doesn’t have potentially top-secret research remnants in it.”

  “You guys have got me mixed up with somebody else. I’m just—”

  “Since the other side has you mixed up, too, apparently, save it for now. Okay?”

  “Fine. Twenty minutes.” She climbed out of the helicopter. She had run track in high school. A long, long time ago of course. But she was nothing if not persistent. “You’re on.” And she took off at a run.

  It would have been perfect if he hadn’t called out, “You’re going in the wrong direction.”

  Chapter Three

  #xa0;

  For all her whining, Veronica Barrett was pretty tough. It had taken a little longer than twenty minutes, but not much, before they were at the check-in desk of the Bear Pointe Lodge in Great Pines, Montana.