LITMIR.BIZ

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actually, since hitting on her only implied doing some mild flirting that a guy hoped might lead to a night’s romp in bed, Jeth was pretty certain he’d go out of his way not to hit on her. He’d go out of his way to start a conversation, get to know her and head hip deep and sinking into the quicksand of starting a relationship with her. And if he wound up in over his head, he had the awful sense that he wouldn’t even care.

      Judas, he was out of his mind. He didn’t even know her name. He was making use of her like some macho, chauvinistic PI in some old dime novel. And he wanted to slide his hand up along her ribs and let it replace where his gun was.

      He blinked. Oh, for the love of… He’d snapped. Totally, completely. So far this morning he’d stolen a kid, blown his cover, car jacked a woman he’d never met but now was contemplating how to go about having a relationship with. What came next? Doing his damnedest to coerce her into a convenient marriage so she couldn’t testify against him when he was inevitably caught and tried for whatever the DEA could come up with and make stick even marginally because he’d fudged up their case?

      Providing, that is, that she was single.

      He caught himself checking the ring finger on her left hand and cursed himself silently, roundly. Oh, man, he was tired. Had to be it. He’d never be so stupid otherwise. Too much on guard recently…too little sleep waiting for his chance to rescue the kid from hell…the constant talk of women and sex that went on around him combined with a nonexistent love life… Yeah, it all added up. He was a fool. A worn-out, double-lived, paranoid fool.

      But at least he could label himself.

      He felt the Saturn slow slightly, hesitating.

      “Turn here?” the woman asked, glancing at him.

      Jeth forced himself not to note the all-too-evocative huskiness of her voice or the unnerving depths of the one green, one blue eye looking at him, and nodded. “Drive. I’ll tell you where to turn next.”

      God bless the universe, Jeth swore. Where in Satan’s hell had he mislaid his mind?

      Trying to keep her mind clear and focused, Allyn drove automatically, noting pedestrians and traffic signals, paying only enough attention to where she was to make sure she wasn’t passing any of Baltimore’s police precinct houses. Finding a spot with a lot of cops around seemed like a promising way to dump this situation.

      Or maybe not. A lot of cops around meant the possibility of a lot more casualties than just her. She’d never particularly thought of herself as either noble or heroic, but the idea of bringing a man desperate enough to car jack her at gunpoint into an arena of even more weaponry suddenly didn’t appeal as strongly as she’d supposed it might. She didn’t want anyone shot or killed. And she knew, because it was one of the things Gabriel had taught her, that minimizing a situation like this was not only possible, but plausible.

      She let her eyes flick carefully toward the rearview mirror where she could glimpse only a small portion of her kidnapper. Her lungs were tight, the muscles in her throat contracted to keep from breathing him in. He still had the gun in her ribs, but a significant portion of her mind was traitorously occupied with the taste the scent of him left on the back of her tongue. Never in her life had she inhaled anything that matched him.

      Probably fear, the incorrigible half of her brain said, and snorted. His and yours.

      The thought, unexpected as it was, caused Allyn’s mouth to quirk sideways, made her relax. So she liked the taste of fear—or was it adrenaline—did she? Well, that was something she wouldn’t have thought of herself.

      Always before she’d considered her life a matter of choosing the safer path: ordered, straight, narrow-paved and without potholes. Now all of a sudden she’d hit a totally unforeseen and rather dangerous chuckhole, and she found it terrifying but interesting.

      And downright exciting.

      Mentally rolling her eyes at herself, Allyn risked another glance at her abductor. His face was turned mostly away from her while he did something to adjust the bundle in the back seat. There was strain in the set of his shoulders, obvious strength in the cord of muscles along his arm and neck when he struggled one-handed with the duffel bag. She heard the light whishk draw of a well-soaped zipper, felt rather than saw the man beside her strain harder for a moment before relaxing slightly. His left arm remained stretched over the seat, apparently to keep his bag propped upright.

      Curious, Allyn stretched her neck slightly to see what divided his attention. A bag full of ill-gotten cash? Drugs? Some rare and priceless artifact? Or maybe it was—

      A baby.

      Her heart caught, slammed upward into her throat and started to pound. Her foot reflexively pressed the gas pedal, hands stuttered on the steering wheel, and the car veered sideways toward a power pole. A baby. Oh, holy mother. Oh, sweet merry Christmas. However unwillingly, she was aiding and abetting someone whose picture would wind up on a milk carton alongside somebody else’s baby’s. She couldn’t let him do this, couldn’t let him threaten a child. She had to do something, she had to—

      “Watch it!”

      In one swift move the man beside her jerked, dumped his weapon and grabbed the steering wheel, forced the car away from the pole, out of the line of oncoming traffic and into a side street lined with houses, cars and scraggly trees. Tires squealed as the Saturn swerved back and forth, jockeying a none-too-straight path down the street. A lone, early morning cyclist swiveled hard between two parked cars and over the curb to avoid them.

      Allyn’s captor swore and reached for her clam-digger-clad knee. “Get your damned foot off the freaking gas,” he ordered, yanking the steering wheel so they skidded into the empty school parking lot at the end of the street.

      “Quit telling me what to do, you baby-stealing bastard,” Allyn retorted. With a furious twist she wrenched control of the Saturn back. Nobody who kidnapped kids for a living was getting away with it on her watch.

      She spun the steering wheel hard, sending the car into a controlled sideways skid over the parking lot gravel, gave the wheel a second tug and stamped on the brakes. Unbalanced by trying to keep the duffel-bagged toddler safely on the rear seat, the man rocked back and forth across the seat, then banged forward into the dashboard before winding up on the floor. Momentarily stunned, he waited a fraction too long to regain control of the situation. Before he could react, Allyn did something she’d done only once before in her life—and that was at her stepfather’s insistence when he’d taken her to the shooting range to teach her how to handle them. She picked up her captor’s weapon. Then she got out of the car and did something she’d never before done: pointed the gun at a human being and threatened him with it.

      “Get out of my car,” she told him flatly.

      Chapter 2

      Jeth viewed her, stunned, trying to decide whether or not she’d actually use the weapon. Hard to tell. He couldn’t read her eyes from here, but she certainly held his Browning properly.

      Like she knew exactly how much kick to expect from it.

      Damn.

      Her weight was well balanced, two-handed grip classic and firm. Nuts, the functioning half of his brain thought. One of the new breed of women who believed in handling their own affairs—and being responsible for their own safety in all ways. Her mother was probably a member of the women’s lib generation. Damned do-it-yourself bra burners had a lot to answer for. Blasted woman probably believed in the turkey-baster school of procreation, too.

      Good grief. Jeth shook his head lightly, checking for dizziness and nausea. Where had that come from? Must have hit his head harder than it felt like to even bring that thought up at a time like this. Especially when he had greater things to worry about.

      Like if anybody from this neighborhood saw her with the gun, witnessed this standoff, they were well and truly cooked.

      If the local cops got involved in this so, undoubtedly, would his own chain of command which,

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