LITMIR.BIZ

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conspiracy, his pupils melodramatically shifting left and right. “Somebody called nine-nine-nine on a burner phone to report that a woman had stopped breathing at St Pancras. By...chance, this was the closest ambulance. A lone officer, as far as Ambulance Control was concerned, returning the vehicle to his station after a repair.” The ambulance slowed. “A happy coincidence all around, wouldn’t you say?”

      “We’re going to a hospital? Jamie, that’s not a good idea. If anyone saw paramedics take me from the station, they’ll assume that’s where we’re headed. And there’ll be security cameras. My photo is—”

      “Everywhere, I know. You’re an overnight sensation. But that photo does you no justice. And don’t worry—the patient is about to have a remarkable recovery and refuse transportation.” Jamie grinned, wrinkling the suntanned skin beside his eyes. God, that was a beautiful sight.

      The siren bleeped and the driver accelerated.

      “Recovery?” She rested a hand on her chest and swiveled, her legs dangling over the side of the gurney. Her backpack was by her feet. “I don’t know if we can be sure of that yet.”

      “Happy to perform any medical procedure you need. Cutting people open is my favorite pastime.”

      She smiled up at him. It was a relief to smile for real. To talk to someone. To not be alone. To be with...him. “You are joking, yes?”

      He shrugged, his eyes not leaving hers.

      Of course he was joking. He was ninety-five percent tease and flirt. It was the five percent that intrigued her, those flashes of frustration or concern that broke through the facade, like a solitary boom of thunder from a clear sky that left you wondering if you’d imagined it. “I didn’t know you were a paramedic.”

      His eyebrows angled up. “To be fair, you don’t really know me at all.”

      Ouch. “I...guess not.”

      She did know for sure that he’d hold eye contact as long as she was game, like it was a challenge—or he was drilling into her mind and amused by what he found.

      Deliberately, she turned toward the windscreen. You don’t really know me at all. The exact words she’d thrown at him that fall morning after he’d offered to stay. I know you want me to, he’d said. Coincidence, or did he remember that hideous conversation as clearly as she did?

      The driver navigated onto a narrow street flanked by stone-and-brick buildings with sash windows and brave balcony gardens, all shrouded in a gaseous gray light. Near-leafless trees stretched up like clawed skeleton hands. Her breath had shallowed out. With everything that was going on, with everything she was processing, she didn’t need the kind of confusion that came from looking a charming, magnetic man in the eye for too long.

      A branch scraped the ambulance roof. She shivered. Winter had set in prematurely here. Even after all her years living in North America and Europe—through most of her childhood, her teens, her college and university years, her twenties—the sight of bare-limbed trees chilled her. From the corner of her eye, she registered Jamie unbuttoning his uniform shirt.

      More reason to look elsewhere. In the last year she’d assured herself that her memory was exaggerating the connection she’d felt with him. Right now, her mind and her belly and even her skin weren’t so sure.

      He was right—despite one fateful week, ending with one fateful night, and one hideous morning—she knew very little about him. He was Scottish, a medic in the French Foreign Legion and in his early thirties, a little older than she was. And now she knew he’d been a paramedic, which wasn’t hugely revealing—in Ethiopia she’d watched him stitch a head wound with the precision of a master tailor. Maybe he was one of those friendly people you thought you knew when you really didn’t, a flirt you thought singled you out when he treated every woman like the only one in the room. As a medic and soldier, he was paid to be protective and observant. He was probably assessing her mental health when he looked into her soul like that—with good cause.

      Her peripheral vision reported that he was down to a khaki tank. Don’t look. She caught a fresh scent, somewhere between mint and pine, weighed down with something spicier, like cinnamon. Had he smelled that way in France? Something tweaked low in her belly, like her body remembered even if her mind didn’t.

      She shook her head slightly. She had bigger things to think about. Like mercenaries. Mercenaries. Wow. She was trained to deal with virtual problems, not real ones. If Jamie hadn’t got to her first...

      “Mate,” called the driver, looking in his side mirror. “Know anyone who drives a white Peugeot hatchback? I’m taking back streets, as you said, but he’s making every turn we are—and he just followed us through a red.”

      Sure enough, a car was hugging their rear, with two people in the front—including a wiry blond man, talking on a cell phone.

      “Oh no,” Samira whispered.

      “You recognize them?”

      “The passenger—he was on my train. And there was a guy with hair like that in Tuscany the other night but I didn’t get a close look. He seemed to be following me at the station. I told myself I was imagining it.”

      “Looks like your instinct was right.” Jamie pulled out a chunky gray handgun. A holster was strapped to his side, over his tank.

      “Oh my God. Where did you get that?” He couldn’t have flown into London with it.

      He clicked something into place. “An acquaintance. Get down.” He raised his voice. “We need to lose him, Andy.”

      The driver swore. “You’re still as much of a shit magnet as ever, I see.” He flicked a switch and the siren wailed. “Hold tight.”

      Jamie stooped to read a street sign. Samira followed his gaze. King’s Cross Road. “Keep away from the markets. We get caught up in those and we’ll be stuck tight, siren or no.”

      “Mate, you’re talking to the guy who didn’t run off and join the fucking Foreign Legion. I know every road cone this side of the Thames. I’ll loop round, head east.”

      Jamie hauled a backpack from a cubbyhole and pulled something out of the front pocket. A phone.

      Gripping the gurney with one hand, Samira caught his forearm. “We can’t make any calls. Tess said—”

      “Tess is the world’s most paranoid woman. It’s a brand-new phone and I’m not making a call, just doing some Googling. I have an idea of how we could lose them.” He glanced at the car. “Besides, I think Hyland’s already onto us.”

      The ambulance swung onto another street. She slid sideways, into air. With his spare arm, Jamie caught her around the waist and steered her onto a fold-down seat. The sight of his bare arms made her shiver all over again. Why was she the one breaking out in goose bumps?

      “You might want to buckle up, Samira,” he said.

      He swayed to the narrow gap between the front seats and spoke to the driver, swiping the phone. She dived for the seat belt. Between the siren, the straining engine and the thick accents, she couldn’t follow the conversation. Something about bridges and gates.

      Behind them the blond man was still on his phone, his gaze fixed on the back of the ambulance as if he could see her through the one-way glass. Calling reinforcements? How many thugs did Hyland have in London? The Peugeot driver wore a cap low and a scarf high, with sunglasses bridging the gap. The car stuck to the ambulance like a water-skier behind a boat, skidding left and right as they weaved. The man nestled the phone between his shoulder and his ear and made swift hand movements in his lap. He lifted something, its black outline obvious for a second before it disappeared behind the dash.

      “Jamie, they have a gun.”

      “They what?” yelled the driver. The ambulance lurched sideways. “Shit.”

      Jamie swiveled. “Flat

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