LITMIR.BIZ

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stayed running. “Nice!”

      He waved to Tori as he lunged out of the vehicle to slam the hood, heart suddenly pounding where he’d been mostly calm up to this point. So close. They were so damn close to getting out of there! She burst from the trees, moving fast but still quiet, gripping his pistol two-handed and somehow managing to look simultaneously terrified and utterly capable as she piled into the SUV from the other side and banged the door shut with a slam that was gunshot-loud after all the quiet.

      Pulse racing, he met her eyes. “Here goes nothing.” Only it was really everything as he shifted into gear, the transmission synched up and he hit the gas … and everything worked the way it was supposed to. He didn’t realize he was holding his breath until it came out in a big whoosh. “Come on,” he muttered under his breath. “Hang in there.”

      Tori didn’t say a word, just kept the pistol in her lap and her eyes moving, scanning the passing scrub. But she reached over with her free hand and briefly gripped his wrist in thanks.

      For Jack, the next few hours passed in a blur of death-gripping the steering wheel, squinting to tell the faint tread-marked trail from the surrounding unstable shale, and hoping to hell his patches would hold. He and Tori exchanged a few words now and then on the practicalities, and once they were out of the Forgotten, she set aside the pistol, turned up the heat and sagged against her door, her eyes still moving, watching for trouble even in the moonlit darkness.

      They both knew that if there was going to be a problem at this point, they likely wouldn’t see it coming. The SUV’s headlights lit the night with an “aim the RPG here” sign in neon, but it wasn’t like he could turn them off. He was having a devil of a time staying on the trail as it was. So he drove, wincing with every bounce and bang, imagining his patches loosening up and the hoses teetering on the brink of separation.

      He was strung out, his eyes burning, his body caught in a surreal state of exhausted terror that had him hallucinating as he tried his damnedest to see the track. That had to be a hallucination, because there was no way—

      Tori jolted and straightened. “It’s the tower! We made it!”

      He blinked hard, then had to blink again to clear his burning eyes, but the lights didn’t disappear along with the gritty fog shrouding his vision. They stayed true—small, amber pinpricks that expanded to glows and then became the solar floodlights that topped the observatory.

      Station Fourteen had never looked so good.

      “We could walk it from here,” he rasped, feeling the tension draining away, leaving him nearly limp with relief.

      “Let’s not and say we did,” she said drily. Then she flashed him a grin, her eyes gleaming with the same mad joy that was suddenly pumping through him.

      He snorted, guffawed, cracked up. And they rolled into the parking lot laughing like a pair of idiots.

      The second he took his foot off the gas and hit the brake, though, the engine thudded and died. Kaput. Done.

      He choked off the tension-relieving laughter, letting it bleed away in a long sigh. “Holy crap, Tori. We made it.”

      She reached across and gripped his wrist as she had done before, only this time she let her hand linger. “We only made it because of you. Thank you, Jack. I …” She shook her head. “Thank you.”

      The old “just doing my job” got stuck in his throat, locked there by the flare of heat that kindled at the point where she was touching him and rolled up his arm to fill his chest. He just shook his head, not even sure what he was denying anymore as he turned his grip inside hers to thread their fingers together and tug her closer.

      She could have pretended not to understand, could’ve pulled away. She didn’t do either of those things, though. Instead, as the breath backed up in his lungs and the warmth turned to a gnawing ache mixed with flames, she leaned toward him in the darkness. He lifted his other hand and drew his fingers along the side of her face and back to brush her hair behind one ear, giving her one last chance to retreat. She didn’t, though.

      And so, in a broken-down SUV that had died in the back of beyond, he broke the rules he’d spent most of his adult life figuring out—three dates to a kiss, at least ten to take it further, everything slow and methodical, and designed to test the compatibility and long-term potential of each match. This wasn’t the third date, wasn’t even a date, but he didn’t care. All he cared about was kissing Tori.

       Chapter Five

      As Jack’s lips touched hers, Tori decided that she didn’t care that he was a cop and a local; she only cared that he was solid and warm against her. His mouth was firm, his grip demanding even though she knew he would let her go if she pulled away.

      She crowded closer instead, and parted her lips to taste him.

      A groan rumbled in his chest as their tongues touched and slid, and her soft moan echoed beneath the sound, coming from the sharp, masculine flavor and the heat that seared through her, surrounded her. He was there, he was real, and that was a shock to the senses in the wake of the last few hours, which felt suddenly unreal, as if they had happened to someone else, or came from a movie about shootouts, sabotaged vehicles and car chases.

      The man kissing her was equally outside of her normal zone, as were the heat and desire rocketing through her, but she could grab on to those feelings, dig into his solid strength and feel alive. They had made it out, made it down. They were okay, thanks to him. If he hadn’t been there. She shuddered against him, feeling safe and protected.

      But at the same time she was very aware that this, too, was a moment out of reality, fleeting and temporary. It had to be. So when her hands wanted to clutch, she made them caress instead, and when his body stiffened and he made a low noise of surprise, she let go and leaned back, hands up and open in the universal gesture of “don’t freak, no harm, no foul.”

      That was how she ran each and every one of her short-term relationships, after all: no harm, no foul.

      They sat there a moment, in a pool of light coming from the observatory’s floods, staring at each other. His breathing was fast, his eyes hot with a desire that speared straight into her and made her want to fling herself at him, on him, kiss him until neither of them was thinking about anything but the slip and slide of flesh and the pounding of their hearts.

      But even though his eyes were hot, he shook his head slowly as if to clear it, or maybe deny what had just happened between them. And although that rejection pinched at her feminine core, she was the one who’d let go first, and she was the one who broke the suddenly strained silence to say, “Sorry. Got caught up in the moment there.”

      He searched her face for an interval that stretched long enough for her to wonder what he was looking for, what he saw. But he only said, “We should get inside and start making calls. The guys at the station house need to hear about what just happened, as do the members of the task force; I need backup, and you need an official escort back down to the city.”

      The implication was “and a plane ticket the hell out of here,” and she wasn’t arguing—there was a line between dedication and stupidity, and sticking around when she was being shot at would put her way over onto the “stupid” side.

      THE RINGING PHONE brought Percy Proudfoot groggily awake. As he fumbled on the nightstand for his cell, he muttered, “Damn it.” He slept alone, so there was nobody to care if he kept up his cursing when he knocked the phone off the nightstand and onto the floor and had to get down there and hunt for the damn thing. And if the staffers who lived in the other wing of the mayoral mansion heard anything, they’d been well-paid to turn a deaf ear to far stranger sounds.

      The Aubusson carpet scuffed his bare knees and he nearly brained himself on the corner of the nightstand, but he came up with the phone and leaned back against the giant canopy bed to flip it open. There was no ID on the display, just a number, but when he saw that it was coming in on his most private line, the sleepy cobwebs disappeared.

      Taking

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