BRAVE, Episode Three - the Color of Danger (6 page)

“Are they?” murmured Chloe.

“I think so. I hope so. Someday I’d like to run my own restaurant,” he went on with fresh enthusiasm. “I’m good at multitaskin’, and I can handle the day-to-day operations. But computer stuff.”

“Logan.” Her voice dropped into a lower register, sexy and compelling. “I’m a
whiz
at computer stuff.”

“Well, now.” He reached across and laced his fingers through hers, a glimmer of racy grin and a glint of impish green eyes lighting her up.

If he did that erotic non-love-play thing again she’d melt into a little puddle on the spot. She rushed into speech, “That would be so cool, to get—”

There was a commotion at the front door and she paused. She shrank back and peered over his shoulder. Just a noisy late-night party entering. No Jonathan, no David.

“Okay, that’s enough serious talk for tonight,” Logan sad. She’d concealed the agitation all night, but it peeked through a bit. “You’re tired. Let’s clear out and head on back to my place.”

“All right. But what about the bill for all this?”

He rose and extended his hand to help her to her feet. “No bill. But I do plan to collect the tip one of these days. And it’ll be a big one.”

* * * *

CHAPTER FIVE

Sunday passed by quietly in a haze of rain pouring off the rooftops and washing the streets clean. Logan left the apartment early, while Chloe was still asleep. Apparently, he had extra duties at work due to the demands of a weekly brunch. She woke and found him gone, and it bummed her out a bit.

She depended on their mornings together, enjoying his never-failing good humor and friendly companionship. But he’d left her a note, a cheery few words to explain what time he’d be home and suggest a movie they might watch.

She took a leisurely shower and cleaned up a bit, then sorted through her safe-deposit documents. She pulled them out of her tote – she’s hidden it under the bed – and smoothed them out on the kitchen table. Just to check. Just to make sure she had everything she needed.

It would break her heart to leave Logan behind. But what choice did she have? David was still on the hunt and probably in cahoots with Jonathan, the two of them joining forces to track her down. It was a chilling thought. She didn’t want to know what David might have planned. It wouldn’t end well for her, and that was the point. She had to get away. She had to.

She fell asleep with a mindless rerun of a program playing on a local channel and her important papers scattered around her on the couch. In her dreams she frolicked through turquoise-colored water and rose-colored sand, naked, beguiling, while off from the distance approached a man calling her name. Someone tall and rugged, with a Marine tattoo on one arm and a mischievous glint in his green eyes.

“Chloe? Hey, girl,” came a soft voice.

She stirred, shifted, murmured something.

“Don’t wanna wake up and sit with me?” asked Logan, clearly disappointed. “Okay if you’re that tired, you may as well hit the sack and maybe we can talk a little later.” He gathered her up, holding her close like an exhausted child.

“Mhm,” she murmured again, this felt good. Her left arm lifted and settled around his neck, and she rested her head against his chest with a deep sigh.
 

He placed her on the bed and pulled the sheets up to her shoulders.

* *

Logan didn’t sleep. He headed back to the couch and gathered up the scattered papers instead. Odd: Chloe didn’t usually leave a mess.

It wasn’t until later that the significance hit him.

Logan piled it all on the table. A collection of passports, one in the name of Veronica Sanders, one Edie Blankenship, one Patty Morrell; driver’s licenses and social security cards, ditto; addresses registered in San Francisco, New Orleans, and Denver; a divorce decree between Jessica McKenney Halterman and David Halterman; a substantial Last Will and Testament; a number of stock certificates, a Personal Financial Statement listing a whole slew of figures; a Health Care Directive. And a stack of plastic credit in rainbow hues: green, black, blue, silver, red.

His knees wouldn’t hold him upright. He crumpled onto the couch. Logan picked up several of the smaller documents and fanned them through his fingers, like a deck of playing cards.

His heart had stopped beating; flesh and blood had turned to cold, hard lead; and his insides curdled.

This was it, then. She’d made a decision, and he wasn’t part of it. She was going to run.

With slow, palsied movements, he shoved every piece of paper into the black tote bag on the floor. The tote he’d bought for her.

Then he picked up his keys and his jacket and left the apartment.

* * * *

CHAPTER SIX

“Logan! Where have you been?”
Chloe flew to meet him at the door, frantic with worry. “I woke up during the night, and you weren’t here, and there wasn’t any note, and I didn’t know where you’d gone or how long you’d be away, or—”

“Out,” he said, shrugging free from his jacket and laying his keys on a table in the front hall. “I went out last night. Back to the restaurant for a while, caught up on some paperwork.”

He didn’t seem concerned about her state of mind, and that bothered her more than anything.

It was 7:00 am. Yesterday’s rain had been chased away by sunshine, already slanting through his living room windows, and Chloe had showered and dressed in her favorite skinny jeans. She was ready to face any emergency. She was afraid this might be one.

She traipsed along behind him, dogging his footsteps as he headed for the kitchen. The coffee had brewed, strong and hot, primed to start blood flowing and pulses beating, and he poured a mug full.

Then Logan leaned back against the counter as if he was too weary to move. In their nearly two weeks of association, she’d never seen him so dispirited and it frightened her.

“What is it, Logan?” she asked warily. “What’s happened?”

“Where are you goin’, Chloe?”

“Going? Why, what do you mean? Where would I?”

“You left all your bank papers on the couch last night.”

“All my—oh.” Her hand reached out, seeking the kitchen chair, and she sank blindly down onto its hard seat.

Logan looked awful. His eyes were red-rimmed from lack of sleep, his goldy-red beard had sprouted into bristles, and his short hair was as disheveled as a wet dog’s.

“You’re gettin’ ready to leave, aren’t you?”

Wordlessly, miserably, she nodded. Then, in a defensive burst, “You must see that I have to, Logan. I can’t stay any longer. I’m back to normal, physically, and I’ve already been here far longer than the original week we agreed to.”

“Have you heard me complainin’?”

“Oh, Logan, of course you haven’t complained! But there’s no doubt that David has been hunting for me this whole time. There’s no doubt that, at this minute, he has found out who you are and where you live, and he has someone watching the building. I have to get out of town before it’s too late. Please…please understand.”

“So Saturday night was our farewell dinner, was that it?”

Chloe put out her open hand, piteously. “Ah, please don’t make it sound that way! I loved our dinner, I loved being with you—I told you that.”

His eyes had gone as rock-hard and flinty as the muscle in his square jaw. “But I’m just the guy from the wrong side of the tracks, who was able to keep you safe for a little while. And now it’s bye-bye, sucker.”

“Logan, no!” Chloe sprang up. “Never that. Never that! I simply can’t risk what else is going to happen as long as I’m here.”

“So you’ve taken all precautions,” he said slowly, considering. Big and fine and apparently unmoved by her nearness, he treated her as if she was a bee, buzzing around. “Passports to the West and the South and the Midwest. Coverin’ all bases, aren’t we? How many times can you skip out, Chloe? How far can you go, before he finds you again?”

“I don’t know, Logan, I don’t know,” she moaned. She clung to the knotty forearm clenched across his chest like a barrier. “Please don’t do this. Please let me leave without our fighting about it. Please let me go on friendly terms.”

He looked down at her. “You ask a lot, don’t you, Chloe?”

She backed up a step and lifted her chin with determination. “I do. Right now I’m asking you to help me get a plane ticket.”

“A plane ticket. Oh, that’s rich. To where, Miss Runaway? Where are we jet-settin’ off to?”

The sarcasm was so completely unlike his sunny nature that her blood congealed, and she turned away in despair. She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t cry. Not yet. If cried, she’d never stop. “Fine, I’ll do it myself. I can go online—if you’ll allow me to use your computer—and order one, and pick it up at the airport.”

“And take a chance on David’s trackin’ down one of your mystery credit cards? Or were you hopin’ I’d go there in person and use cash?”

“That was my hope, I must admit.”

“Wrong. It ain’t gonna happen.” He stood still as granite.

“Logan, if you—if you feel anything at all for me…”

“And that ain’t gonna work. Sit down, Chloe.” Logan motioned to the kitchen chair; defeated, she accepted his dictate and hunkered down. Immediately he turned his own around, straddling it to confront her while leaning both forearms across its back. “Chloe, the other night I told you my history for a reason. I had to stand up to my demons and face ’em down. And I wanted to prove to you that you can do the same.”

“So I can be waylaid by David again, and attacked.”

“So you can stand tall and proud and know that you’ve done your best. Violence is never the answer, but you gotta be willin’ to call the bluff of anyone who wants to hurt you. You gotta fight for what’s right.”

“I tried that, Logan,” she whispered. “It almost got me killed.”

“But you ran afterward. You were all alone, and you ran. This time you’d have me.”

“I don’t have you, damn it! I don’t have anybody!”

“Why won’t you accept my help?” He was baffled and angry.

“Because—I can’t, I simply can’t—!” she flung that at him.

She shoved back her chair, grabbed her tote bag and jacket, and dashed to the door. Before Logan could make a move to stop her, she had raced through it and away.

* * * *

CHAPTER SEVEN

Logan had snatched a little sleep here and there, between the hours of paperwork and worry. He was exhausted, grainy-eyed and raspy-voiced, but he cried out to Chloe even as he sprang into action.

Truck keys, house keys, door slammed and locked, and he was into the outer hallway and down the stairs in pursuit.

At the street he paused, casting wildly about to see where she’d gotten to. No sign of her. How could she possibly have disappeared that quickly? Racing to the parking lot and his truck, he careened along while keeping careful watch everywhere he could.

He passed the neighborhood park, drove around the block, idled at a light. No Chloe.

He returned to the restaurant, zipped inside the back door, into the kitchen. No Chloe.

Obviously she’d planned this getaway for at least a day. She must have somewhere she was prepared to stay until he gave up and stopped looking. He settled himself into the truck cab and used his phone like the computer he hated: calls to the library, which had just opened; to other restaurants; to every hotel/motel in the area.

It was futile. No Chloe.

Oh, God. What if the worst had happened? What if she was right, after all, and David had somehow snatched her up during that wild dash away?

Logan’s blood ran cold. He drew in several deep relaxing breaths, steadied his nerves, and then called the friend he should’ve called at the beginning of this crazy adventure: Nick, his former Marine buddy and current police officer in Ohio, with access to all sorts of private information. Time to ask for the help Chloe had insisted she couldn’t get.

* * * *

CHAPTER EIGHT

Chloe sat slouched in one of the hard vinyl seats, supposedly made to conform to any passenger’s body shape, at the American Airline terminal in LaGuardia Airport, while she debated her next step. Her black tote bag was securely zipped shut and slung over one shoulder.

It was high noon. The occasional squall of a hungry baby, the buzz of conversation, the click-click of heels on the marble floor lulled her. She didn’t attract notice with her dark sunglasses, hair tied up into a tight bun, and nondescript clothing. Chloe was an expert at the fine art of living as a chameleon.

She could purchase a ticket in cash to anywhere she chose. Which of her false identity papers should she use? She rather liked the name of Patty Morell. And Denver would be a good start.

Time to say her final goodbye. And, with that thought, she mourned not being able to part with Logan on better terms. He was such a good man, and she wished—no, she longed, with every fiber of her heart and soul—that she might have stayed to see where this relationship could go.

“Hello, Cam?”

Outside of Logan’s apartment, four hours earlier, she had hailed a cab, then stopped at a nearby electronics store. There, she’d purchased a throwaway cell phone. An untraceable cell phone. Thank God for modern technology.