I Got You Babe

I Got You Babe

On the run for a robbery she didn’t commit, Renee Esterhaus is stuck in East Texas with a broken-down car and a nasty bounty hunter hot on her trail. Desperate for a way out, she makes a promise she never intends to keep – offer the first man she sees a night of unforgettable pleasure in return for a ride. A night to remember, all right, since the man turns out to be a cop on vacation with zero tolerance for sweet-talking criminals. When the truth comes out, John DeMarco is determined to take Renee to jail, but it isn’t long before he thinks she may be innocent after all. Soon they’re working together to clear her name, but that means dodging his all-cop family, dealing with oddball suspects, staying one step ahead of a pissed-off bounty hunter – and trying to pretend they’re not falling in love.

Tags:

MysteryRomanceSuspenseBxGUnexpected RomanceOpposites AttractExotic RomanceCrimePolice ProceduralStrong Female LeadPoliceDetectiveProtectorDramaticSuspensefulRomantic

Word Count: 108,239

Rating: 4.6

Likes: 1

Status: Completed

Chapter One

Word Count: 7,556

Renee Esterhaus peered out of room fourteen of the Flamingo Motor Lodge at the intersection of Highway 37 and the middle of nowhere, shivering a little in the crisp October air. She cast a nervous glance left and right down the sidewalk in front of the other rooms, then turned her gaze to the gravel parking lot and the dense pine forest beyond it. Everything seemed quiet. No suspicious-looking people. No cars she hadn’t seen before. No helicopters circling overhead, ready to drop a SWAT team.

Nothing but the evening breeze rustling through the trees.

She slid out the door, leaving it ajar, then scurried to the snack machine in the breezeway between her room and the motel office, telling herself to calm down, that no matter what she’d done, the SWAT team thing was pretty unlikely.

She plugged two quarters into the machine and was getting ready to insert the third when the skin prickled on the back of her neck. She froze, the quarter poised at the slot, then swallowed hard and glanced over her shoulder.

Nothing.

She let out the breath she’d been holding. Her imagination was getting the better of her.

If only her old Toyota hadn’t chosen the worst possible moment of her life to fall apart, she wouldn’t be stuck overnight in this ratty little motel swearing that someone was looking over her shoulder. She prayed that the mechanic at the Mobil station down the street would keep his promise and have a new fuel pump installed first thing in the morning. Then she’d be back on the road again, one step closer to New Orleans, Louisiana, and one step farther away from Tolosa, Texas.

New Orleans. She didn’t know why she’d chosen that city, except that it had a lot of restaurants so she could easily get a job, and the dark mystery that surrounded it meant she could probably lose one identity and pick up another. Of course, she had no idea how a person went about becoming someone else, but she couldn’t think about that now. She’d get her car, get on the road, and figure out the rest later.

She shoved the quarter in, pushed a button, and her dinner fell to the bottom of the machine—a package of peanut butter crackers. She leaned over and plucked it out of the slot. As she stood up again, an arm snaked around her waist and something cold and hard jabbed against the underside of her jaw.

“Missed your court date, sweet thing.”

In a blinding rush, she felt herself being spun around and slammed against the snack machine. That cold, hard thing—a gun—now rested against her throat. And right in her face was the biggest, ugliest, most menacing-looking man she’d ever seen. He had to be pushing fifty, but not an ounce of muscle had gone to fat. His clean-shaven head, death-theme tattoos, and single gold earring gave him a sinister look that bordered on the psychotic.

“Wh-who are you?” she stammered.

A cunning smile curled his lips. “Max Leandro. Bond enforcement officer. And your luck just ran out.”

It took a moment for Renee to comprehend his words, and when she did, a huge rush of panic swept through her. She’d been watching out for cops, who she assumed would announce their presence with bullhorns and bloodhounds. The last thing she expected was to be nabbed by a two-ton bounty hunter who looked as if he could bench-press a Buick.

He shoved his gun into the waistband of his jeans, yanked her wrists together in front of her, and snapped on a pair of handcuffs. He half led, half dragged her around the corner to his old Jeep Cherokee parked on the west side of the motel.

“No!” Renee said, trying to pull her arm away. “Please don’t do this! Please!”

“Oh, but I’ve got to. See, they’re holding a party at the county jail, and your name is at the top of the guest list.”

“Wait a minute!” She looked back over her shoulder. “What about my stuff? You can’t just leave—”

“Sure I can.”

He shoved her into the passenger seat and slammed the door. He slid into the driver’s seat, lit a Camel, and hit a button on the console. Heavy metal poured out the speakers, the volume so loud that little green men could have heard it on Mars. Then he peeled out of the motel parking lot.

Renee stared at the dashboard, feeling shock and disbelief and a whole lot of anxiety. In less than two hours she’d be back in the hands of the Tolosa police, and they wouldn’t be letting her out on bail again.

She glared at Leandro. “How did you find me?”

“By being the best, sweet thing.”

Damn. Why couldn’t she have been chased by a bounty hunter who’d graduated at the bottom of his class?

She tested the handcuffs with a furtive jerk or two, found them unyielding, then took stock of her surroundings. The door handle had been removed from the passenger side of the front seat. Glancing over her shoulder, she could see the back doors had gotten the same treatment. It appeared that plan A—leaping out of a moving vehicle—was not going to be an option.

“You’re making a terrible mistake,” she told him, putting plan B into action. “I’m innocent. You don’t want to take an innocent person to jail, do you?”

He made a scoffing noise. “Innocent, my ass. You got caught with the loot and the weapon.”

“Well, yeah—”

“The old lady who was robbed said the perp was a blonde woman.”

“There are thousands of blondes—”

“She picked you out of a lineup.”

“I don’t know how—”

“Then there’s your record.”

Renee sat up suddenly. “How did you know about that?”

Leandro gave her a smug look. “I have ways.”

“I was a juvenile. Those records are supposed to be sealed!”

“The records are sealed. But cops’ lips aren’t. When you got dragged down to the station on the armed robbery rap, that headful of blonde hair of yours spurred a few memories.” Leandro grinned. “Shouldn’t pour beer on a cop’s shoes, Renee. They don’t tend to forget that.”

Oh, God. Renee buried her head in her hands as that nasty little memory came flooding back. She was a bit fuzzy on the details of that night, except that she’d gotten very irate when a certain cop suggested that perhaps she and her friends shouldn’t be wandering around downtown at one o’clock in the morning, underage and dead drunk. She’d told him what she thought of his assessment of the situation by upending her Bud Light all over his spit-polished shoes. That had bought her a ticket to the county jail. Again.

“How could he remember that?” Renee said. “It was over eight years ago!”

“I guess you’re unforgettable, sweet thing. Particularly when you add in the rest of your record. Shoplifting, vandalism, joyriding—”

“I’ve been clean since then!”

“Once a criminal, always a criminal.”

She wished she had a nickel for every time she’d heard that, even though she knew it wasn’t true.

When she was seventeen, and had gotten caught riding with her boyfriend in a stolen car, the judge finally decided he’d had enough and tossed her into a juvenile detention center. Her mother had sobered up just long enough to attend the hearing, then went home, pulled out her bottle of Jim Beam, and toasted the judge for finally making somebody else responsible for the daughter she’d barely bothered to raise.

After she’d spent about three months in detention, the pain of incarceration became clear to Renee. But even though she’d seriously started to question the wisdom of a life of crime, she was still way too cool to let them see her sweat. With her attitude still in question, she’d been invited to spend the day at a “scared-straight” program, complete with twelve cussing, hard-core, screaming female convicts whose job it was to convince her and half a dozen other wayward teenage girls that prison was the last place they wanted to be. It had been a lesson Renee had never forgotten, and when they finally released her from the detention center, she promised herself she’d walk through hell if that was what it took to keep from having to go through that experience again.

It had been a long trip up from rock bottom, but she’d managed to make the climb, even when the first step had been a waitress job at Denny’s. Her juvenile record was history—or at least, it had been, until some cop with a savant-like memory decided to open his big mouth.

“There’s no way I could have committed that robbery,” she told Leandro. “I can’t stand the sight of guns. How could I possibly—”

“You’re wasting your breath. I don’t give a damn whether you’re guilty or not. I get paid either way.”

Renee gave a little snort of disgust. “Yeah. Charming profession you’ve got there.”

“It beats robbing convenience stores.”

“I told you I didn’t do it!”

He made a scoffing noise. “That’s what they all say.”

Renee wanted to beat her head against the dashboard. This guy wouldn’t know innocence if it bit him on the nose. She turned and stared out the passenger window, watching the miles between her and incarceration slip away like sand through her fingers.

On the day the robbery happened, she’d been offered the assistant manager’s job at Renaissance, a four-star Italian restaurant with upscale clientele and an honest-to-God wine cellar. About to burst with excitement, she’d called her best friend Paula Merani to celebrate, only to remember that she was away on one of those weekend-for-two packages at a local hotel with her no-good boyfriend, Tom Garroway. So Renee ordered dinner from China Garden and ate it while she flipped around on the tube and thought about all the things she was going to do as assistant manager to help Renaissance get that elusive fifth star.

Then she decided her wonderful new job entitled her to splurge in the finest way possible—with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia—so she grabbed her purse and headed to the twenty-four-hour Kroger. A cop pulled her over because her taillight was out, and she couldn’t believe it when he extracted twelve hundred dollars and a semiautomatic pistol from the back seat of her car. To her utter amazement and subsequent horror, those items pointed to a convenience store robbery in the area only hours before. She didn’t have a clue how they’d gotten there. The arresting officer had been unmoved by her profession of innocence, and before she knew it, she’d landed in jail.

She met with the best defense attorney her savings could buy, a munchkin of a man who wore a tie wider than his chest and had a piece of toilet paper stuck to a shaving cut on his neck. When his message seemed to be, “We both know you’re guilty but I have to defend you anyway,” Renee had a flashback to the walk she’d taken down a long row of prison cells with those convicts leering and jeering at her. That eight-hour descent into hell was a big part of the reason she’d built a respectable life and, ironically, it was the reason she was running now. Unfortunately, a big, bad bounty hunter with a heart the size of a pea had tracked her down and, innocent or not, she was going back to jail.

Renee glanced around the Jeep. Being driven to jail in this vehicle was like riding to hell in a New York subway car. A dozen cigarette butts littered the floor of the front seat, mingling with a handful of Milky Way wrappers and a copy of Muscle magazine. In the back, file folders stuffed to overflowing were scattered on the seat, interspersed with piles of crumpled fast-food sacks. It smelled like a dumpster.

“This car is a pigsty,” she muttered, hating Leandro’s vehicle, hating his music, hating his choice of occupation. Hating him.

Leandro took a long drag off his cigarette and blew out the smoke, adding to the carcinogenic cloud already saturating the car. “My cleaning lady didn’t come this week. You just can’t get good help anymore.”

“That smoke is burning my eyes. Think what it’s doing to your lungs.”

“Turning them black as night, I imagine.”

“Ever think of quitting that nasty habit?”

“Never crossed my mind.”

“Would you mind putting it out?”

“Yes. I’d mind that very much.”

“Secondhand smoke’s a killer, you know. There was a story about it on 20/20 just last week.”

“Gee. Sorry I missed that.”

“There have actually been cases where smokers were taken to court for polluting other people’s air.”

“So sue me.”

“You know, that’s not a bad idea. I bet there are at least a dozen nasty lawyers in Tolosa just dying to—”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” He took a huge, sucking drag off the cigarette, then ground it out in the ashtray. He tossed his half-smoked pack of Camels and his blue BIC into the console beside him and slammed the lid. “There. Happy?”

Not particularly. When it got right down to it, what difference did it make whether she died a slow death from lung cancer or threw away half her life in prison?

Then her stomach growled, which reminded her that she’d eaten next to nothing since she’d left Tolosa, which made her think of the only restaurant they were likely to encounter out there in the boondocks. Dairy Queen. She brightened a bit, not because of the food, but because that might be a dandy place to ditch a bounty hunter. Exactly how, she didn’t know. She’d have to figure that out when the time came, assuming she could get him to stop.

“I’m hungry,” she said.

“No problem. I hear the food in the county jail is five-star cuisine.”

Renee winced. She could see it now: a row of wrinkled old ladies wearing hair nets, slopping swill onto plastic trays.

“Would it kill you to pull into a drive-through?” She glanced into the back seat, crinkling her nose. “God knows it wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Sorry, sweet thing. Dousing the cigarette took me right to the limit of my hospitality.”

“What if I have to go to the bathroom?”

“What if you’re trying to get me to stop somewhere because you think it’s your only shot at getting away?”

Renee huffed disgustedly. “You’re a real jerk, you know that?”

“Yeah,” he said, smiling with delight. “I know.”

She glared at Leandro, then stared out the passenger window again, trying to hold on to her feelings of loathing and disgust because they were about the only things keeping her from melting into a sobbing, hysterical, emotionally distraught wreck. She wasn’t going to get out of this. Innocent or not, she was going to prison, where she’d spend the best years of her life pacing a six-by-eight cell, eating unidentifiable food, and trying to convince large, sexually ambiguous women that she did not want to be their girlfriend.

They topped a hill, and Renee saw a railroad crossing ahead. As they approached it, red lights began to flash and the gates started down. Leandro stomped on the gas to run the gates, but the car in front of him—a rusted-out Plymouth with a handicap insignia on its license plate—didn’t. Leandro screeched to a fishtailing halt, practically driving right up the Plymouth’s tailpipe. The gates fell into place, blocking the crossing. Renee looked left and right. No train was coming.

“Weave through the gates!” Leandro shouted, as if the other driver could hear him. He laid on his horn. The old guy looked into his rearview mirror, but his car stayed put. Leandro slammed his car into park and stepped out, leaving the door open and resting his arm against the top of the car to survey the situation. Renee glanced at the steering column, and her heart leaped with hope.

He’d left the key in the ignition. She might not be able to run faster than Leandro, but she was pretty sure she could drive faster. If he decided to go have a word with the guy in the Plymouth, then maybe—

“Move it!” Leandro shouted. “There’s no train!” He reached a hand into the car and laid on the horn again. The Plymouth didn’t budge.

“Shit. Probably got his hearing aid turned off.” Leandro moved away from the car and started to close the door. Renee held her breath, poised for attack. The moment the door clicked shut, she’d leap over the console, punch down the lock—

The door came back open. Leandro reached inside and jerked the keys from the ignition. He shook a finger at Renee. “Stay put. You hear me? I don’t want to have to chase you down.” He slammed the car door and stalked up to the Plymouth.

Renee slumped back in the passenger seat. What was she going to do now? She had only one way out of this car, and that was the driver’s door. But with Leandro looking back at her every few seconds, her window of opportunity was minuscule. If she ran, he’d drop her like a lion would a gazelle. Besides, this was the middle of nowhere, with no place to hide. She saw a little diner about a quarter mile up the road from the railroad tracks, but what good would that do her? Unless she could divert Leandro long enough to get a sizable head start, she didn’t stand a chance.

Then, just like that, it came to her. She sat up suddenly, her breath coming faster, her heart beating double time. Leandro’s bad habits just might be her salvation.

She dug through the console and extracted Leandro’s BIC lighter. She glanced out the windshield and saw him pointing wildly down the track, his mouth moving like crazy. But the old guy was a rock. He just sat there, probably quoting Amtrak disaster statistics, refusing to move an inch.

She reached into the back seat for one of the wadded-up fast-food sacks, the handcuffs straining against her wrists. Judging from the grease stains, Leandro’s favorite meal was a triple cheeseburger and a giant order of fries. Perfect.

She held the sack beneath the dashboard and flicked the lighter beneath it, shifting her gaze to Leandro every few seconds to make sure he was still reaming the old guy out. In moments the sack flamed. She tossed it onto the floor of the back seat, then reached for a couple of other sacks and tossed them on top of the burning one. The flames spread.

Renee put the BIC back in the console. At the same time she spied a key. Praying it unlocked the handcuffs, she plucked it out.

Just then Leandro gave up and started back toward the car. She stuffed the key into her pocket, shut the lid of the console, and stared at the dashboard, trying to look nonchalant. Behind her, another sack caught fire, then another, and another…

Leandro yanked open the door. “Old fart,” he muttered, climbing into the car. “He could made it. But no. He had to park his hemorrhoidal ass at the crossing the minute he saw a few red lights, and now the train’s coming. At the rate it’s moving, we’ll be sitting here for a week.”

Renee glanced down the track to see the train finally make an appearance. It chugged along like an overweight asthmatic at about fifteen miles per hour, its cars stretching down the track as far as she could see.

“They ought to jerk his driver’s license,” Leandro fumed. “If he even touches a set of car keys, he ought to be shot. And you can bet your ass I’d volunteer for the job.”

The burning sacks cracked and popped, but Leandro was so consumed with his loudmouthed trashing of anyone over age seventy that he didn’t notice. Renee waited, her heart beating madly. The flames grew. She waited another second, then another, and then…

“Fire!” She let out an ear-piercing squeal and pointed madly to the back seat. “Fire! The car’s on fire!”

Leandro snapped to attention and spun around, his eyes flying open wide. He put a knee in the driver’s seat, leaned over the back of the seat, and slapped at the burning sacks, only to pull away with a painful hiss, shaking his hand.

He leaped out and flung open the back door. While he was whacking away at the flames with a file folder, Renee scrambled over the console and out of the car—no small task with her wrists still handcuffed. The moment her feet hit pavement, she ran.

“Hey! Get back here!”

He took off after her. She was fewer than three strides ahead of him, and he made up the ground in a hurry. Alongside the old man’s car he reached for her arm and missed. Then he dove at her, his arms around her hips, and sent them both crashing to the road. Renee’s knees skidded across the pavement.

Ignoring the pain, she whipped around and smacked Leandro on the side of the head. He recoiled, cursing wildly, then fumbled around and managed to catch her wrists below the cuffs. He hauled her toward him until they were nose-to-nose, his eyes wild with anger and his teeth bared. A little foaming at the mouth and he’d look just like a rabid dog.

Renee smiled sweetly. “How do you like your barbecued Jeep? Well done?”

He spun back around. Smoke was pouring out the back car door. He could hang on to Renee, or he could put out the fire. He couldn’t do both.

With an anguished groan, he let go of Renee and jumped to his feet. He pointed down at her. “Stay there!”

Yeah. Right.

As he hurried back to the burning vehicle he hollered at the old man, who gawked out the window of his car with his jaw hanging down to his chest. “Make sure she doesn’t get away!”

Renee leaped to her feet again, infused with hope. If Leandro had resorted to deputizing senior citizens, he probably wasn’t in complete control of the situation.

The train was less than twenty yards from the crossing. She wove through the gates, and in a single bounding leap, she flew over the tracks and landed on the other side. Seconds later the train filled the railroad crossing. The last thing she saw before it blocked her view was Leandro peeling off his tank top to whack away at the flames. Watching him go nuts over that wreck of a car was a beautiful sight, but she couldn’t hang around to bask in the moment.

She pulled the key out of her pocket, fumbled it into the handcuff lock, and held her breath. She twisted it a little and heard a tiny click. The right cuff fell open. Her luck was holding after all. She unlocked the left one, too, then threw the cuffs as far as she could on one side of the road and the key on the other.

Once the train passed, Leandro would be after her again—in his car if he managed to put out the flames, or on foot if it had completely gone up in smoke. Either way, his nasty attitude had already taken a turn toward the homicidal. If he nabbed her again, by the time he dumped her on the steps of the police station they’d have to use her dental records to identify her body.

Her first thought was to hop the train and let it carry her down the tracks, but while it was moving slowly, as trains went, its speed was still too great for such an arm-wrenching experience. If Leandro thought that was what she’d done, though, it might buy her a little time.

She turned and jogged toward the diner, praying some other means of escape would present itself, and fast. No matter what she had to do, she wasn’t going back to Tolosa.

No matter what she had to do.

***

John DeMarco sat at the counter of the Red Oak Diner three miles outside Winslow, Texas, with the front page of the Winslow Gazette spread out in front of him and his hands wrapped around a steaming cup of coffee. He took a sip of the thirty-weight liquid and winced, wondering how much more of this stuff he could drink before he overdosed on caffeine.

He glanced out the window. Evening was edging into dusk, filling the countryside with the muted shades of twilight. Soft sizzling sounds came from the kitchen, like raindrops on a tin roof, mingling with the muffled conversation of a gangly teenage boy and his mousy girlfriend, who were sharing an order of fries in a booth by the window.

This place was like a hundred other backwoods multipurpose establishments—a diner that also carried convenience store items, a small collection of action-adventure videos for rent, and a rack of magazines that centered around four topics—hunting, fishing, hot cars, and sex—aimed directly at the rifle-toting, tobacco-chewing, kick-ass locals on the assumption that they could actually read. Marva Benton served up Texas home cooking guaranteed to clog your arteries, while her husband Harley ran the cash register and shot the bull with the locals. Just about anything you needed to sustain life you could find at the Red Oak, as long as you didn’t set your standards too high.

For the past week John had made a valiant attempt to forget about his job and concentrate only on sleeping late, dressing like a slob, and sitting by the lake with a fishing pole in one hand and a beer in the other.

Easier said than done.

This was the third night in a row he’d come here for dinner. He had to drive twelve miles, but it sure beat cooking, particularly since the cabin he was staying in didn’t have a microwave oven. Or an oven, period. Or a television. A hot plate, a hide-a-bed, and indoor plumbing—that was about it. The boredom factor had settled in about fifteen minutes after his arrival, so when he found this diner he considered himself lucky.

Take my cabin for a week or so, Lieutenant Daniels had told him. Do nothing for a while. Just sit. Think. Clear your head.

What Daniels had really meant was: Get a grip on yourself, and don’t come back until you do.

Harley rang up a Hot Rod magazine and ten gallons of gas for a twenty-something cowboy type in skintight Levi’s and a plaid western shirt. The guy sauntered out of the store, giving John a territorial stare from beneath the brim of his hat that said: I can tell you ain’t from around here, so watch yourself.

Harley pushed the cash register shut, then gave John a gregarious grin, displaying brown teeth, gold teeth, and no teeth all in the same mouth. “So, John. How’s the vacation going?”

John was already on a first-name basis with the proprietors of the Red Oak, a familiarity that appeared to be commonplace in rural Texas. Back in Tolosa he didn’t even know his next-door neighbor’s name.

“Slow,” John said.

“Well, slow’s good if you’re lookin’ to relax, right? Take a break from the big city?”

Big city? John had to smile at that one. Tolosa, Texas, was hardly a major metropolis. But from Harley’s point of view, John figured that Tolosa’s four movie theaters, two shopping malls, and population of ninety thousand made it look like Tokyo compared to Winslow.

“So what do you do for a living, John?”

He sighed inwardly. Sometimes people acted funny if they knew they were talking to a cop. “Just between you and me, Harley, I’d rather not talk about what I do for a living.”

“Which is it? Low pay? Long hours? No respect?”

Harley had just described a cop’s life perfectly. “All of the above.”

But as irritating as those things were, they weren’t at the heart of John’s frustration right now. Nobody in his right mind became a cop and expected to get rich, work short hours, and have people pat him on the back, so he’d been prepared for all of that. But what he hadn’t expected were the massive injustices of what was supposed to be the criminal justice system.

After a month of investigation, John had finally nabbed a nasty little scumbag who’d been beating up senior citizens and then robbing them in the hallways of their apartment buildings. Only one of the victims agreed to testify—a stoop-shouldered, gravel-voiced octogenarian who told John, essentially, that he was mad as hell and wasn’t going to take it anymore. Then the day before the trial, the old guy had a myocardial infarction and ended up a vegetable in the coronary care unit at Tolosa Medical Center. Later that day his family pulled the plug, and the prosecution’s case went to hell.

Without an eyewitness to tell his story, the defense attorney was able to fill the jurors’ minds with a truckload of reasonable doubt about the identity of the perpetrator. John showed up for the verdict, and when the jury pronounced the guy not guilty, his stomach twisted into a tight knot of fury and frustration. He tried to tell himself it was just part of the job. You won some, you lost some. The world went on. But all the while he seethed inside, hating the thought that some bad-to-the-bone, guilty-as-sin loser he’d fought to incarcerate was free to walk the streets again.

Then, as he came out of the courtroom, he saw the little bastard standing in the marble-tiled lobby, grinning like a hyena and backslapping his attorney. As if on cue, he turned and met John’s eyes. A slow, cocky smile spread across his lips, joined by a mocking stare that screamed louder than any words could possibly have.

I win, sucker. And that means you lose.

John wanted desperately to cross the lobby of the courthouse, back the guy up against a wall, and choke him until his eyes bugged out. As an officer of the law, though, he hadn’t been free to exercise that option. Instead he headed to the men’s room to cool off. He took several deep breaths and doused his face in cold water, hoping that would do the trick, and when it didn’t he spun around and whacked the paper towel dispenser with his doubled-up fist.

Now that had felt good.

It felt so good, in fact, that he did it again. And again. And again. And all the while he thought about how wrong it was that somebody could hurt defenseless people, take their money, then never have to answer for any of it.

Unfortunately, the bathroom fixture John was substituting for the guy’s face wasn’t in the best of shape, and slug number five dislodged it from the wall and sent it crashing to the floor. About that time, two uniformed cops wondered what all the noise was and hurried into the bathroom. To their great amusement, they saw that a certain police detective had gone three rounds with a paper towel dispenser, leaving it bruised and battered on the floor in an uncontested knockout.

By the end of the day, John’s battle with an inanimate object was comic legend around the station, leading his colleagues to ask him if he intended to beat up a trash can next, or maybe take on a toilet or two. By then he truly regretted losing his temper, but that hadn’t stopped Lieutenant Daniels from calling him in and giving him a twenty-minute lecture on professionalism, impartiality, and the inadvisability of dropping by the courthouse for jury verdicts.

Forget guilt or innocence, DeMarco. Your job isn’t to make sure justice is served. Your job is to bring the scum in so other people can make sure justice is served.

In John’s mind, those people were doing a piss-poor job of it, but in light of the circumstances he’d kept that thought to himself.

An emotionally involved cop isn’t worth a damn, Daniels went on. They do dumb things. You know, like murder an innocent paper towel dispenser in the prime of its life.

The lieutenant had concluded his lecture by handing John the keys to his out-of-the-way cabin on Lake Shelton with the suggestion that he take a little vacation. John had read between the lines. The vacation wasn’t optional.

He’d reluctantly taken the keys and started out the door, but Daniels hadn’t been through with him yet. He’d mentioned—quite offhandedly, of course—that he’d made his annual contribution to the Joseph DeMarco Foundation to benefit the families of officers killed in the line of duty. And the timing of that remark had really pissed John off.

Eight years before, John’s father had taken a fatal bullet during what should have been a routine traffic stop, and it wasn’t by accident that Daniels chose that moment to mention the foundation set up in his honor. It was his not-so-subtle way of saying to John, What would your father think about how you’re behaving now?

If he were alive today, Joe DeMarco, the most by-the-book cop the Tolosa Police Department had ever known, would have plenty to say about what he would deem to be another of his son’s frequent lapses in judgment. And he would have said it far more vehemently than Daniels could ever have hoped to.

Now John was forced to vegetate in a backwoods cabin for a week, with the implication that he was to do some serious soul-searching and arrive at an effective means of controlling his temper. But as badly as he hated to admit it, Daniels was right. And his father would have been right, too, if he’d been around to orate on the subject. John knew he’d gone over the edge. Find them, arrest them, move on—that was what he had to do. Other cops seemed to have no trouble maintaining that all-important professional detachment. Why couldn’t he?

He finished off the last few sips of his coffee, managing to down it before it congealed into a dark blob of pure caffeine and crawled right out of the cup. Harley filled it again, then checked his watch. He called over his shoulder.

“Hey, Marva! John’s been waitin’ twenty minutes! Move it on the steak!”

A gravelly, two-pack-per-day female voice boomed out of the kitchen: “You want it fast, or you want it good?”

“I want it today!” Harley growled.

“Shut up, you old coot! You’ll get it when I bring it!”

Harley rolled his eyes a little, then leaned over the counter, his expression becoming one of a long-suffering saint. “Thirty-three years I’ve put up with that. Can you imagine?”

John didn’t buy Harley’s “poor me” routine for a minute. He knew a shtick when he heard it, and this pair had mastered it. If they were smart, they’d start collecting a cover charge for entertainment. When he was younger and a whole lot more naive, John assumed that someday he’d have a wife he could fight with right up to their fiftieth wedding anniversary. But the older he got, the less likely it seemed that would ever happen.

The kitchen door swung open and Marva appeared, a gigantic horse of a woman wearing purple polyester pants and a Hawaiian-print shirt. Her iron-gray hair was swept back in a sweat-soaked bandanna. She slapped a platter down in front of John. The chicken-fried steak lopped over the edge of the plate, dripping gravy onto the counter. It smelled like heaven.

“There you go, sweetie,” she said with a smile full of hospitality. “That rotten husband of mine doesn’t understand that good things take time.” She shot Harley a look of total disgust. Right on cue, Harley sneered back.

Marva turned to John. “Thirty-three years I’ve put up with that. Can you imagine?”

With a weary shake of her head, she clomped back into the kitchen. Harley glanced furtively in her direction, then reached under the counter. “Hey, buddy. Take a look at this.” He slid a Hustler onto the counter and opened it to reveal a healthy brunette in all her naked glory. “Ever seen anything like her in your life?”

“Can’t say as I have,” John said, admiring the photo. Hell, it had been so long since he’d seen a naked woman, he was surprised he still recognized one.

Just then Marva reappeared carrying a rack of silverware. She saw Harley’s reading material and rolled her eyes. She slapped the silverware onto the counter, then closed the magazine with a definitive whap.

“Dirty old man,” she muttered. “Didn’t I tell you to keep your hands off the smut?”

“I’ll show you smut, woman,” he retorted, meeting her nose-to-nose. Then the edge of his mouth rose in something that just might have been a smile. “Later.”

Marva rolled her eyes. “Promises, promises.” She turned to John, talking behind her hand in a loud stage whisper. “Ever since he turned fifty, that’s all I get. Promises.”

As she headed back toward the kitchen, Harley gave her a smack on her generous rump. She squealed and went on into the kitchen, then looked back out the window of the swinging door, shaking her finger at him before disappearing again.

“Women,” Harley muttered. “Gotta keep ’em in line, or they’ll walk all over you.”

John wasn’t sure who was keeping whom in line, but somewhere deep inside he felt a funny twinge of longing. No, he did not want to lose half his teeth, marry a backwoods Amazon woman, and run a shabby diner in the middle of nowhere. But sometimes, in the middle of the night when it was just him alone in a double bed, he wanted someone so badly he could taste it. But a cop married to his job made one hell of a poor husband. A cop who had a hard time controlling his temper when faced with the realities of the job made an even worse one.

Maybe he should get a subscription to Hustler and let it go at that.

Renee reached the parking lot of the diner, gasping a little at the uphill jog in the cool evening air. She glanced back over her shoulder at the train, encouraged to see that it didn’t seem to be picking up any speed.

She thought about ducking into the woods behind the diner, zigzagging in and out of the dense foliage, but the piney woods of east Texas went on forever. She had no food, no water, no coat, and no sense of direction, so sooner or later she’d be buzzard bait. Besides, it was past sunset and nearly dark, and she feared snakes and bobcats and great big spiders almost as much as she feared Leandro. Spending the night hugging a tree and praying a lot didn’t seem to be the best solution.

What she needed was wheels.

In the parking lot she spied a tired old Corvette, a beat-up red Chevy pickup, and a forest-green Explorer with dark-tinted windows. She took a serpentine route through the lot, nonchalantly scanning each of the vehicles for keys, then realized she was actually considering car theft.

No. She couldn’t steal a car. That would be a real crime, and she promised herself eight years ago that she’d never commit one of those again.

Well, okay. There was the little fire she’d just started in a certain bounty hunter’s car. Destroying personal property was a crime. But really, when you thought about it, that car of Leandro’s was a rolling fire hazard anyway. It was bound to happen sooner or later. One cigarette butt flicked in the wrong direction, and poof!—up in smoke. She’d done nothing more than hasten the inevitable.

Renee took a deep, calming breath. All this rationalizing was making her a little woozy. She needed another plan, and fast. Surely the owner of one of these vehicles could be persuaded to take her…somewhere.

She opened the door to the diner and stepped inside. She was greeted by warm air and the smell of deep-fried everything. A teenage kid was taking his change at the register, his arm draped around a dark-haired girl. They probably belonged to the Corvette. It was a two-seater sports car, though, and Renee figured she’d be a little too easy to spot if she rode on the roof.

That left the pickup truck and the Explorer.

She matched the pickup with the overall-clad hayseed standing at the snack-cake rack trying to decide between Twinkies and Ding Dongs. She weighed the possibilities for a moment, then discarded his vehicle in favor of the Explorer with its tinted windows. Perfect for tooling around the countryside incognito. By process of elimination, she decided its owner must be the man sitting at the counter having dinner.

From the back he looked like a standard-issue country bumpkin, with a red-plaid flannel shirt stretched over a broad pair of shoulders, threadbare blue jeans, and boots. His dark hair just brushed his collar in the back, and she’d bet the rent he didn’t even own a comb. And he was undoubtedly dumb as dirt.

Okay. She had her target. But what was she going to say to get him to take her anywhere but here?

She couldn’t lie and tell him she had car trouble, or that she’d run out of gas and needed a lift. A lift where? To a phone? There was one right here. Back to her car? She didn’t have one. And if Leandro showed up, she couldn’t say he was the bad guy and expect anyone to do anything about it. He probably had ID that said he could drag her anywhere he pleased. Besides, he had a very large gun and a face that would scare the average person out of ten years’ growth. Asking for protection from him would be like asking someone if they minded pulling you out of the jaws of Godzilla.

If only she had time to think.

Praying a plan would come to her, she slid onto the stool next to the guy having dinner. “Hi, there.”

He turned at the sound of her voice. Renee blinked with surprise. This was not Jethro Bodine. This was not L’il Abner. No way, no how, not in her wildest dreams.

She’d been fooled into thinking he was a local yokel when his back was turned, but she wasn’t fooled now. This man didn’t belong here any more than she did. He looked to be in his early thirties, but she got the feeling those thirty years hadn’t come easily. A few days’ growth of beard darkened his cheeks and chin, but it couldn’t hide the sharp planes of a boldly handsome face. His skin was still sun-bronzed even in early October, his nose sharp, his jaw well defined. By contrast, his lips looked warm and sensual, a surprising feature on a face that held so much raw strength. His dark eyes regarded her with blatant intensity, as if he were assessing every breath she took and didn’t much like what he saw. Somehow he managed, with just a few seconds of eye contact, to make her feel wildly attracted and scared to death all at the same time.

Renee tore her gaze away and glanced around hopefully for the kid or the hayseed, but both of them were gone.

“Is that your car outside?” Her voice came out like a mouse squeak. She cleared her throat. “The Explorer?”

“Yeah. It’s mine.”

Those eyes again. Staring at her. Staring right into her, as if he could see her brain working. And if only it really were working, she might just find a way out of this mess.

Think, think, think!

Adrenaline rushed through her, scrambling her thoughts. How does a woman get a man’s attention right now?

Her brain cells whizzed through the various possibilities, like a hundred search engines activated all at once. And all of them returned the same solution.

She took a deep, furtive breath, sidled closer to her target, and gave him a smile, hoping it didn’t look as phony as it felt. “Do you live close by?”

“Yeah. For a while, anyway.”

She nodded down at his hand. “I don’t see a wedding ring.”

“That’s because I’m not married.”

As he moved his fork down to have another bite of chicken-fried steak, Renee ran a fingertip along his arm, raising a trail of goose bumps in its wake. He froze, his fork in midair.

She swallowed hard. “Well, then. Wanna go to bed?”

Chapter Two

Word Count: 4,374

John decided it was a good thing he hadn’t taken that bite of chicken-fried steak. He’d have choked on it. Big-time.

“Excuse me?”

She leaned closer and dropped her voice. “You and me. Sex. Your place. Right now. Yes or no?”

John blinked with surprise. She was blonde, she was beautiful, and she was throwing herself at him. What was wrong with this picture?

As much as he’d like to think it was his good looks and suave manner that had attracted her, he had to face facts. He had a two-day growth of beard, he was shoveling down a meal fit for a lumberjack, and without looking down he couldn’t even say for sure whether his shirt was buttoned right and his jeans were zipped. And he was pretty sure he’d given her his automatic cop look when she first slid onto the stool next to him, a “don’t mess with me” expression so ingrained after years of dealing with the lowlifes of Tolosa that he had a hard time keeping it in check. It had scared away more than one woman before, yet this one seemed undeterred.

He took a quick inventory of the way she was dressed. Jeans, sweatshirt, Reeboks. Hardly the animal-print miniskirt, midriff top, and six-inch platform shoes so fashionable among most Lone Star ladies of the evening. And her makeup was practically nonexistent, allowing a healthy glow to shine through. Instead of sultry and provocative, she appeared to be going for cute, fresh, and innocent looking. He had to admit her marketing strategy had gotten his attention.

“Sorry, sweetheart,” he told her, adding more pepper to his steak. “I’m not in the habit of paying for pleasure.”

Her eyebrows shot up. Was she expressing disbelief that he’d pegged her profession right away, or offended that he’d think such a thing? Then just as quickly she replaced the look with a provocative smile.

“I’ll admit I’d like to get my hands on a lot of things, but your wallet isn’t one of them.”

This was dangerous. John could feel it in his bones. “Then how about one of Marva’s chicken-fried steaks? Best I’ve ever had.”

She laid her hand on his arm. “So that’s what you’d recommend for a woman who’s really hungry?”

John tilted his gaze to Harley, who was leaning his forearms on the counter, watching the scene unfold like a housebound grandma watching a soap opera. Since he hadn’t greeted her by name, as he did everyone else who ventured into his establishment, John assumed she wasn’t a local. Back on the job he’d have said she didn’t fit the profile of the neighborhood, and that was always a reason for a heads-up.

Still, it had been way too long since he’d been with a woman, and physically, at least, this one pushed all his buttons. Big blue eyes, cheeks tinted pink from the brisk October breeze outside, and a mass of blonde hair that was hers by the grace of God and not Lady Clairol. The hem of her blue sweatshirt fell over Levi’s that showcased the soft curves of her hips so enticingly that it was hard for him to tear his gaze away.

“Yeah,” John told her, sticking to the chicken-fried steak theme. “That’s what I’d recommend. And be sure to get a little extra gravy on the side.”

He picked up his fork again. She pressed his arm back down to the counter. “You have no idea what you’re missing. I can make you forget to eat for days.”

John extricated his arm from her grasp. “Sorry, sweetheart. See, I just started in on this steak here, and I know Marva would be insulted if I didn’t finish every bite.”

“Marva’ll get over it,” Harley said.

John shot Harley a “don’t help me” look. Harley held up his hands in surrender and walked down the counter to the cash register. He snagged a roll of Certs and tap, tap, tapped them on the counter, his expression suggesting that perhaps John might want to stop being an idiot and reconsider having a date for the evening.

The woman inched closer, her eyes focused intently on him, eyes that were a deep, endless blue that mesmerized him. Then his cop brain kicked in. A beautiful woman didn’t just walk up to a man and offer him sex with no strings attached. If he were a betting man, he’d wager this woman had enough baggage to fill a 747.

“Tell you what,” she murmured. “Why don’t we go to your place and talk it over?” She glanced out the window, then looked back. “Like—right now?”

John didn’t want to be suspicious. Not when every man’s dream was planted on a stool next to him, offering him a trip to heaven. But while he’d never had a lot of trouble connecting with women if he set his mind to it, even on his best days they didn’t just fall into his lap. Usually he had to take at least a few swings before he could hit a home run, but this woman wasn’t even making him step up to the plate. Something was wrong here, and if he was smart, he’d never get close enough to find out what it was.

“The fact is, sweetheart, I’m here on vacation, and so far it’s been pretty relaxing. I’d like to keep it that way.”

Harley rolled his eyes. He pulled a six-pack from the cooler and clunked it down beside the Certs, giving John an admonishing stare. Breath mints and beer. Harley’s idea of a really hot date.

She eased closer. “Sugar, the last thing I want is for you to be uptight. All you have to do is settle back and let me do all the work. How does that sound?”

It sounded like heaven on earth, but he hadn’t been a cop for eleven years without being able to spot ulterior motives a mile away. “Well, that’s a real nice offer, but I’m doing this vacation solo.”

Over the woman’s shoulder, John could see Harley about to explode with frustration. He gave John a “hey, stupid” look, then reached to a shelf behind him, picked up a beige box, and slapped it down on the counter next to the Certs and the six-pack.

Trojans.

“Whatever one can do,” the woman said, “two can do better. And they can do it all…night…long.”

John had a mental flash of tangled, sweat-sheened bodies glistening in the moonlight, then another flash of morning sunlight streaming through a window, illuminating the condom box. The empty condom box. Very enticing images. Almost as enticing as the warm palm on his thigh, moving in provocative little circles, inching its way toward his crotch.

John caught her hand, pressing it against his thigh, then fixed his gaze on hers in a no-nonsense stare. “What do you really want?”

Her eyes widened for a moment. Then she raised a single eyebrow. “I think that should be pretty obvious by now, shouldn’t it?”

John knew from experience that an obvious explanation and a truthful explanation were rarely the same. But the intensity with which she stared at him, as if she wanted to take him right here on Harley’s counter, made him think there couldn’t possibly be anything on her mind but sex.

“Maybe I didn’t make myself clear enough,” she said, her lips only inches from his ear. “I’m talking about sex that makes your toes curl. Sex that makes your hair stand on end. Sex that wears you out and hypes you up all at the same time and makes you wonder where your next breath is coming from. Sex that’s so raw, so hot, so sinful that you pray it never ends because there’s no way you could possibly experience anything like it again.”

Every word she spoke was like a carnal caress, and every time she said sex John thought about how long it had been since he’d had any. She teased her fingers over his crotch, and he felt himself getting hard whether he liked it or not. And he liked it. No question about it.

Then her lips grazed his ear, and she dropped her voice to a breathy whisper. “Before it’s all over, I’ll have you screaming so loud they’ll hear you in Bangkok.”

John swallowed hard.

Maybe, for once in his life, he should take things at face value. She was a woman looking for a good time. He was a man who had all the time in the world to show her one. Harley had provided the only other necessity. What more did he need to know?

Then, before he could open his mouth to say yes, no, or something in between, the woman slid off her stool, spun his stool around ninety degrees, and moved between his thighs. She took his face in her hands, dropped her lips to his, and kissed him.

John was so startled that for a moment he just sat there and let it happen. He’d been kissed by a lot of women in his life, but never by one who put her heart and soul into it the way this one did. Her lips consumed his with an intensity that almost knocked him senseless, and when she slipped her tongue into his mouth and teased it against his, a shudder of pure lust shot through him. Her words had been pretty explicit, but there was nothing like a little mouth-to-mouth contact to let him know exactly what it was she had in mind.

This was lunacy, of course. He’d have to be a complete lunatic to sit in a backwoods diner and let a strange woman kiss him into unconsciousness. He gripped her arms with the intent of pushing her away, only to have her shift closer, her thighs pressing against his and sending a shock wave right to his groin. At the same time she deepened her kiss even more, filling it with honey and fire and the promise of even better things to come, and he decided that lunacy was a delightful state to be in and wondered why he hadn’t considered it before. The cop side of his brain saw about a hundred red flags, but the regular guy side of his brain was blind as a bat. For once in his career-consumed life, the regular guy side seemed to be winning.

Finally she pulled away, her breath still warm against his lips, her blue eyes hot and hungry.

Blue eyes. Damn. He loved blue eyes.

He dropped his gaze to her kiss-swollen lips, then met her eyes again. “Was that a preview of coming attractions?”

“Yeah. And it’s gonna be a blockbuster. Trust me. Can we get out of here now?”

John thought he actually felt his common sense leave his body, and he wasn’t sure he was even going to miss it. He went to the cash register while the woman waited by the door. Harley swept the goods into a sack and handed it to him, waving away his money. “This one’s on me,” he whispered. “Go get her, buddy.”

John escorted the woman out to the parking lot. He looked around, surprised that he didn’t see a car that might be hers, even though the diner was way out in the middle of nowhere. The only sign of life was a freight train a quarter mile down the road, disappearing from sight.

“How did you get here?” he asked her.

She looped her arm through his and hurried him along. “I dropped straight down from heaven, sugar.”

He decided he was going to believe that. He was going to pretend her headful of golden hair was a halo, and that she was a member of the Angel Adult Recreation Squad sent here to ensure that his vacation was a resounding success. Otherwise he might have to start asking more questions than he ought to and find out things he didn’t really want to know.

He opened the passenger door and let her in, then climbed into the driver’s seat. He dropped Harley’s date-in-a-bag on the floor near her feet, started the engine, then backed out. But as he turned from the parking lot onto the two-lane highway, he was nearly sideswiped by an old Jeep Cherokee pulling in. Smoke wafted out its windows.

He braked quickly and looked back over his shoulder as the smoking car squealed to a halt in front of the store. “What the hell is that?”

“Did I tell you I’m wearing crotch less panties?”

John whipped back around to find the woman smiling suggestively. All at once the thought of her wearing nothing but a little scrap of lace was a whole lot more interesting than somebody’s smoking vehicle.

“No. I don’t believe you mentioned that.”

“They’re red.”

“My favorite.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

He stepped on the gas. In a few seconds he reached the speed limit of forty, then nudged the car to fifty and wished it was seventy.

“What’s your name?” he asked her.

“Why don’t we keep our names out of this?”

Okay. She wanted to play mystery woman. That was fine by him. “Sure, sweetheart. Whatever you say.”

Hadn’t he had this dream before? An out-of-the-way cabin, all the time in the world, and an anonymous blonde in red crotch less underwear just dying to make his dreams come true?

Maybe Daniels was right. Maybe this vacation was just what he needed after all.

Good God. What in the world had she done?

As the Explorer tooled down the two-lane blacktop, Renee hugged the passenger door, her heart pounding like crazy. She had no idea where all that stuff she’d promised this man had come from. What had ever made her say those things?

Desperation. That was what.

Then she had a terrible thought. She sat up suddenly and turned to her getaway driver. “The people in that diner. Do they know where you live?”

“No. Just that I’m on Lake Shelton. Why?”

She settled back onto the seat, wondering how close that information might get Leandro to discovering her whereabouts. “No reason.”

“I’m borrowing a friend’s cabin. Just for a week or so.”

“So you’re not from around here.”

“Nope.”

She nodded, then turned to stare out the passenger window, relieved that he seemed to be a man of few words. The last thing she wanted to do was make small talk.

She couldn’t believe she’d managed to slip out of that diner only seconds before Smokey the Bounty Hunter tore into the parking lot. She glanced into the side mirror every few seconds, relieved that she didn’t see Leandro. She was further relieved when the Explorer veered off the main two-lane highway onto a less traveled road. If Leandro were after them he’d have to make a decision about which road to take, and that could slow him down considerably.

Then a few minutes later, he swung the Explorer off the side road onto a narrow gravel road surrounded by thick forest. Instead of feeling relieved at the convoluted path he drove, Renee started to feel a little uneasy. He took one fork in the road, then another, all of them unmarked. Renee tried to maintain some sense of where she was, but pretty soon her warped sense of direction told her they must be in Oklahoma by now, and she knew that couldn’t be right. Then the gravel road turned to dirt, and she felt a tremor of panic.

All at once it struck her that she didn’t know a single blessed thing about the man she’d just propositioned. For all she knew, he could be one of those reclusive guys who stayed in some primitive, out-of-the-way place so he could murder women and bury them under the front porch. After he dismembered them.

She gave him a sidelong glance. His sharp profile had blurred a bit in the fading evening light, but she hadn’t forgotten the way he looked at her in the diner when she had first approached him—as if he could freeze her where she sat with a single glance. She searched for something sinister about him, wondering if she’d traded a bad situation for one even worse. He didn’t look like a person who smiled much. Maybe he didn’t have much to smile about. Serial killing would do that to a guy.

Looking down, Renee realized her fingernails were leaving little crescent-moon indentations in the armrest. She moved her hands to her lap and took a few furtive deep breaths. She was letting her imagination get the better of her. The worst thing that was going to happen was that she’d be forced to give him what she’d already offered, but even the thought of that made her heart race with apprehension. Especially the thought of that.

The car slowed, then came to a halt, and it took Renee a moment to realize they’d reached their destination. At the end of a short, wooded path, a small cabin sat nestled beneath the trees, with a lake practically at its back door. A light shone dimly through one of the front windows, and the glow of a three-quarter moon reflected off the water beyond.

He turned off the ignition. The silence was so complete she could hear the blood pulsing in her ears. If only she could dissuade him. If only she could take his mind off of sex. If only she could make him forget all those erotic acts she’d promised him, the sexual heights she’d offered to take him to. If only they could break out the six-pack, maybe turn on the TV, have a nice conversation…

And then do each other’s hair, bake cookies, and play Twister. Damn it. Who was she kidding? After the top-notch sales job she’d done on herself in that diner, the only party game this guy was going to be interested in playing was strip poker.

He grabbed the sack and stepped out of the car, then came around and opened Renee’s door. She climbed out, pine needles crunching beneath her feet, the cool night wind lifting her hair off her shoulders. He shut the car door and walked toward the cabin. Renee didn’t move.

He turned back. “Coming?”

For a moment she considered fleeing into the woods after all, but her fear of forest came crashing back to her.

“Uh, yeah.”

Even ten paces away, he exuded a powerful male energy that seemed to fill the space between them, smothering her with thoughts of how big he was and how big she wasn’t. He had to be at least six two, and while she stood nearly five eight, still he outweighed her by a good seventy pounds. His tall, lean-muscled body made a forbidding silhouette in the near-darkness, and the thought of following him into that cabin made her shiver. A few minutes ago she’d been desperate only to be anywhere Leandro wasn’t, but now all she could think about was what she’d promised this man and how desperately she wanted not to go through with it. Then she took stock of her situation and realized she might not have a choice in the matter.

Her purse was still sitting in room fourteen of the Flamingo Motor Lodge, which meant she had no cash and no credit cards, which meant she couldn’t get a hotel room. Her phone was still charging in the room. She didn’t know a solitary soul within two hundred miles. There wasn’t a twenty-four-hour anything open in this part of the world she could hang out in, even if she could get him to take her back to civilization. The forest was deep and dark and cold and scary. She had no choice but to stay there tonight, and if he insisted she make good on her promise, there wouldn’t be a thing she could do to stop him.

He opened the door to the cabin and stepped aside for Renee to enter. It was the size of an efficiency apartment, with even fewer amenities. A kitchenette lined one wall, which was nothing more than a short counter with a hot plate and a coffeepot resting on it, a stainless-steel sink, and a few knotty pine cabinets with a dull, scratched-up finish. At the end of the counter sat a small refrigerator which was, thank God, not nearly big enough to store body parts.

A stone fireplace sprawled along an adjacent wall, and facing it a sofa in an earth-tone plaid rested on rough pine floors. The room smelled of raw wood and smoke and country air, and despite the obvious lack of tender loving care, under any other circumstances she might have thought it rustic but homey. Now it just looked small. Way too small. With nowhere to hide.

She walked to the window and stared out into the night, at one pine tree after another standing tall against a pale, moonlit sky. It was the most inhospitable sight she’d ever seen. “Do you have any neighbors?” she asked him.

“Oh, yeah. Lots of squirrels. Maybe an armadillo or two.”

“Any two-legged ones?”

“Across the lake.”

So they were alone. Really alone.

Silence. Then the sound of the sack clunking against the floor. That was a bad sign. A man who didn’t refrigerate a six-pack clearly had something more pressing on his mind.

He moved up behind her. She met his gaze in the window reflection, those piercing eyes of his staring back at her with an intent so clear he might as well have spray-painted it on the wall. He closed his hands around her elbows in a gentle but possessive grip. He ran them slowly up to her shoulders, then back down again, and she felt a million nerve endings jump to life. She rested her palms against the windowsill and continued to stare out into the night, afraid to turn around, afraid to do anything that might look like encouragement. No matter what she’d said, she knew nothing about the kind of sex that resulted in broken commandments and global screaming.

She had a feeling this man did.

He ran his fingertip down the length of her hair, blazing a path down her back, then picked up a strand and twirled it around his finger.

“Beautiful,” he whispered.

She shivered at the low, velvety tone of his voice. He moved closer and circled his arm around her waist, pulling her against him. Her back met his chest. She felt something rock-hard just beneath the small of her back, proof positive that talking him into having a beer instead of having sex probably wasn’t going to be an option.

He rested one hand against her abdomen, and with his other hand he brushed her hair away from the side of her neck. The cool air of the cabin washed over her exposed skin, sending shivers down her spine, which rewarmed instantly when his hot breath fell against her neck.

“Tell me again,” he whispered.

She froze. “Tell you what?”

“Exactly what kind of sex we’re going to have.”

Before John knew what had happened, his hot little blonde had slid from his grasp and flown halfway across the room. It was as if he’d touched her with a cattle prod.

He stared at her, dumbfounded, and she stared back, those blue eyes wide and her mouth hanging open as if she wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words.

“Is something the matter?” he asked.

“Uh…no. I just…I need to go to the bathroom.”

John took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He felt like a skydiver on the verge of a free fall who’d just gotten yanked back into the plane.

“It’s in there.” He pointed to the only separate room in the primitive cabin, and she scurried inside and closed the door behind her. He heard her fumbling with the door handle, probably looking for the lock that wasn’t there. Then silence.

John snatched up the sack from beside the front door. He deposited the beer in the mini refrigerator in the kitchen, tossed the Certs on the counter, then stared at the box of condoms. He knew it was too good to be true.

This woman was obviously hiding something. She had no purse, no coat, no car, no phone. It was as if she had come out of nowhere. He’d seen all the signs, but he’d chosen to ignore them. He should have trusted his instincts. He should have stuck to naked women with staples in their navels instead of dragging home the real thing.

He tossed the box of condoms into a kitchen cabinet, then collapsed on the sofa, which was a little uncomfortable to do when a certain vital organ of his was inflated to twice its normal size, still trapped inside a pair of jeans that suddenly seemed two sizes too small. As hot as she’d been for him in that diner, when they got into his car he’d expected to feel her hands roaming all over him and seductive words whispered in his ear, and when they made it back to the cabin he’d expected to have his clothes ripped off before he even had a chance to pull out the sofa bed.

Expected it? Hell, he’d prayed for it. Instead, for reasons he couldn’t fathom, his tigress had morphed into a baby kitten.

She wasn’t completely inexperienced. That much he was sure of. She had to be at least twenty-five, maybe older, and no woman could kiss like that if she hadn’t been around the block a time or two. Still, while he had no idea what she wanted, he had a pretty good idea it wasn’t sex. But she’d sure been motivated to make him think that was what she wanted, and it was time he found out why.

Calling her bluff would likely do the trick.