Forster, Suzanne (6 page)

The rising whine of the Blazer's radiator cap pierced his thoughts. Apparently the Mojave was overheating his car engine, too. He punched a button on the dash to shut off the air-conditioning, then cranked down the window, plunging the cab into a bake oven of gritty heat. The force of it was suffocating, but at least it was a distraction.

Augusta Featherstone, the society fashion model, you know the one I mean? The beautiful brat, the conniption queen? Somebody wants her kidnapped. It's not about money, it's a grudge against the family's retailing empire— political shit. The interested party wants a pro to make the snatch, then he'll take her off your hands. You game? It's worth some real dough....

That was the way the call had come in. Jack had taken the rest of the information from a liquor store phone booth in San Pedro, which was a half-hour from his normal base of operations and outside his area code. It was a precaution he'd insisted on. Everything else about the exchange had been sloppy. Dangerously sloppy. The call hadn't come through normal channels, the anonymous contact had given him more information than necessary about the mark, and he'd referred to Jack by the name Jack hadn't used in years, his real name. If the job had been about anything else, about
anyone
else, Jack would have hung up on the asshole.

The coldness that stirred inside him now was gallows laughter. As it was he'd said yes immediately. He'd been waiting five years for this break. He'd planned his life around it. He would have planned his death if necessary. He'd long suspected that someone connected with the Featherstones had been involved in his five-year nightmare, and Augusta Featherstone, unwittingly or not, was going to help him solve that mystery. If she wasn't his chief suspect, at least she had the keys to the kingdom.

He'd taken what safety measures he could, including covertly changing the rules once he'd accepted the job. He'd struck on a different day, at a different time, than had been prearranged. He'd changed the hideout destination, and he'd employed terror tactics to frighten the holy hell out of his hostage and put her in a vulnerable state of mind.

He'd enjoyed that last part.

The only surprise had been her reaction. She should have been on her knees the entire time, pleading with him not to hurt her, offering him money, her body, anything to save her life and win her freedom. She hadn't acted like a typical hostage at any point along the way, except when she'd thought he'd killed the guard. He wasn't sure what that meant, but he was going to find out.

He glanced at her now, aware that she was shifting around in the seat again. "What's the problem?"

The clicking sounds ceased and from out of the depths of his coat came a mumbled, "I have to go to the bathroom. "

"Suit yourself, but I'm not stopping. "

Her head popped up and she glared at him with almost as much loathing as when she'd pulled her blindfold down. "How much farther until we get wherever we're going?"

"Hours. " This wasn't true, but what the hell.

"Hours? I'll wet my pants!"

"Take the raincoat off first. "

Her furious sniff brought a smile. It actually surprised him when he glanced into the rearview mirror and saw himself. There was a slant to his eyebrow and a dark twist to his mouth. Hell, he felt halfway good for the first time since he'd driven into the land of endlessly rolling hips and thighs, breasts and buttocks—Nature's ode to Jack Culhane's frustration.

The speedometer needle jumped up to ninety as his foot kissed the gas pedal. A sign flashed by: BISHOP 200 MILES.

They would soon be out of the hills and into the crusty basins of the lowlands, where the eye could see nothing for miles but dry lake beds, spiny Joshua trees, and white, arid salt flats. He consoled himself with that. Beyond the flats and looming to the south was the blast furnace heat and bleached animal bones of Death Valley.

The sweat beading on his forehead had begun to trickle down his temples, but the parched air blowing in the windows dried the droplets before they reached his cheekbones. There wasn't even enough moisture in the air to send up the tangy odors of creosote bush and bur sage, but he could smell the gritty desert dust. He could even taste it.

A plastic water bottle was clamped to the side of the console by his knee. He picked up the container and drank from it deeply and thirstily. When he was done, he wiped the mouth and handed it to her, all without easing up on the gas. She wrinkled her nose and continued staring pensively out the window.

"I have a theory about people who drive at breakneck speeds, " she told him, not stopping to inquire about his interest in said theory. "I've always thought they were displacing aggression. Since they couldn't act on their primitive urges, they drove like bats out of hell instead. "

Could damn well be, Jack thought. In his case, the primitive urge was to break a few things, starting with her fingernails.

"Their primitive
sexual
urges, " she added.

That made him look. What the hell could she possibly know about his primitive sexual urges? She refrained from returning his sidelong stare, but he detected a faintly superior air in her profile, as if she prided herself on having him all figured out, urges included. He doubted that. He seriously did. But she had him curious.

"If you really want to know what somebody's like, get in a car with him, " she continued, apparently determined to share her cherished theory in its entirety. "People who won't use their turn signals are probably bad communicators, habitual lane changers have trouble with commitment, and slowpokes are secretly hostile. "

"What does your theory say about men who lay rubber?"

That made
her
look. "Excuse me?"

He let up on the gas, hit the brakes, and pulled the van to the side of the road. He not only laid a little rubber, he raised plenty of dust. The powdery stuff flew as he brought the car to a shuddering stop. It swirled into the cab, catching in the sunlight, fine golden motes that sprinkled his hostage with a halo that made her look deceptively angelic.

Fighting a different urge this time—the desire to stare at her lovely, startled mouth—he reminded himself that any resemblance she bore to the angels was strictly superficial. The woman was nine parts hellcat by all accounts.

Now her much-photographed features were frozen between shock and suspicion as he produced a bandanna from the pocket of his jeans, pulled the material taut, and twirled it into a band.

"What are you going to do with that?" she asked, her voice going faint.

"Act on my primitive sexual urges?"

"You're
not
going to blindfold me again?"

"No, I'm going to gag you. Turn around. "

"Gag me?" She flinched back, incredulous. "Why?"

"Turn it around, " he repeated patiently. "Unless you want me to do that, too. "

She made a sound of disgust and swung around, her shoulders heaving as he reached up to drop the bandanna over her head.

"I can't believe you're doing this, " she snapped, looking over her shoulder at him. "Apparently I must have hit pretty close to the mark with my theory? Is that it? I threatened you?"

"Yeah—" A snort of laughter escaped him. "I'm shaking in my boots. Now stay put. "

She went silent, her shoulders continuing to heave as he slipped the bandanna between her soft, taut lips and secured it with a knot. Her dark hair caressed his hands like silk as he worked, and although the scent coming off her body carried hints of sweat and dust, it was a pungent female perfume—hot and angry, fervently excited.

The tightness he'd noticed in his thighs was creeping upward, bringing the promise of deeper pleasures with it. There was a hot spark of life in his jeans, and he wanted like hell to indulge the sensation. But there was only one reason to do that and a million reasons not to. Maybe she was right. Maybe he
was
threatened. All he knew at the moment was that he wanted her petulant little mouth silent and her award-winning ass still. That way he would have the peace and quiet to plan his next move. That way he wouldn't have to hear her theories
or
her clicking fingernails.

"I will pee my pants!" Gus threatened. "If you don't put me down immediately, I'll do it, I swear. "

Her dire warning fell on deaf ears. Apparently Mr. Quiet-But-Deadly had no objection to the idea of a golden shower. He might even like it, she realized despairingly. He'd parked the van some time ago, lifted her into his arms, and now he was crushing her nearly breathless as he labored through the sand toward some destination he'd refused to disclose. In a bewildering move, he'd removed her gag, blindfolded her, and tied her wrists. If he'd done it to make sure she couldn't slow him up by struggling, it had worked. She was limited to stiffening her body like an indignant child and demanding to be released.

She had no doubt that if some gossip reporter were lurking in the sagebrush, he'd say the beautiful brat was being difficult again, making unreasonable requests of her abductor, and generally harassing the poor devil. Her every move seemed to be catnip to the tabloid press, but she didn't understand why they persisted in seeing her as a holy terror simply because she knew what she wanted in life and went after it. How often did men get faulted for that sort of thing?

"If I die out here from a burst bladder, " she informed him ominously, "you'll have a wet, smelly corpse on your hands and not a penny for your trouble. "

He trudged on, his silence as frustrating as her bonds. He hadn't responded to a single word she'd said so far, and though she'd never been one to beat a dead horse, she hadn't been bluffing. If he didn't let her make a pit stop, she would soon be irrigating the desert.

"Kidnapping is a capital crime in this state, " she said. "Did you know that? Punishable by death—the gas chamber, if I'm not mistaken—which is not a pleasant way to go. And speaking of bladders, I've heard you lose control of your bladder
and
your bowels when they pull that switch—"

He hoisted her up in his arms, his teeth grinding savagely as he bit out the first words he'd spoken since they left the van. "Why the hell did I take off that gag?"

Gus sighed for the unreasonableness of all mankind and for this man in particular. "If you'd stop being macho, put me down, and let me walk, I'd be quiet!"

"You're barefoot, you idiot!"

He had a point. She was still wearing his coat, but there was only one pair of shoes between them, and he was using them. It probably wasn't very smart to expose the most sensitive parts of her body to the griddle-hot sand anyway, though she wasn't sure which would be more hazardous, walking or whizzing.

"Ouch," she thought aloud.

Exhausted from the heat and the bickering, she heaved a great sigh and slumped against his chest. Why wasn't
he
exhausted? she wondered. He'd been hauling her and a duffel bag full of supplies around for what seemed like hours. With the desert sun pounding down on both of them like a sledgehammer, it was difficult even to breathe.

"Aren't you getting tired?" she asked, knowing better than to expect an answer. Once she had made her heroic escape from this man—and she would—if the tabloid press should ask her to describe him, she would tell them that his most annoying trait was his refusal to communicate. "I sincerely doubt that he uses turn signals, and you know what
that
means, " she would tell them.

She went quiet then, surrendering to the heat, the silence, his superior strength, the ultimate helplessness of her situation, the paternalistic society at large, and everything else that was oppressive in life. It wasn't her nature to do anything halfway, including surrendering, and to her great surprise, there was something oddly relaxing about it.

His powerful, lunging gait made her body rock gently in his arms, and he was probably holding her that much tighter to compensate for the unsteadiness. She'd never been one of those give-me-a-gorilla-with-a-vocabulary women, and being carted around the Mojave was not her idea of a fun date. But she had to admit, it was rather sweet of him to carry her in one-hundred-plus degree heat. He must be dying, she thought, he really must.

Given her profession, there'd been plenty of men in her life who'd wanted her in one way or another, but very few of them ever made her feel, well... Unaccountably, the word that came to mind was
protected,
though it was a strange way to characterize the situation with him. She was probably far too independent to allow that sort of relationship with a man, but this one hadn't really given her a choice, had he?

She turned her head into his shoulders, seeking shelter. The rest of her body was covered by the overcoat, but the blindfold exposed the lower part of her face, and the sun was scorchingly direct. It did no good to wet her cracked lips, because they dried almost as soon as her tongue touched them.

The heat was starting to get to her. Her body didn't feel quite right and neither did her head. She was light and heavy at the same time, and her thoughts were straying off to places she couldn't quite follow. She laughed softly for no particular reason, and then it flitted through her thoughts that she might be suffering from sunstroke. Weren't the symptoms weakness, lassitude, delirium?

"I was just wondering what I should call you?" Pleasantly woozy, she mumbled against his damp cotton shirt. "Mr. Kidnapper, maybe?"

He didn't answer, so she went on, amusing herself with the various possibilities. "Let's see... how about the Masked Avenger? I always liked that one. It's from a comic book, I think. How do you feel about Snidley Whiplash? Or maybe Jack? How does that strike you?"

"Jack?"

He sounded startled. Or maybe his voice had simply cracked with the heat. At least she'd got a response out of him. She could feel his heartbeat against her shoulder. "Yeah, Jack, as in Jack the Ripper. "

Laughter, she thought. Was that what she'd heard? A rustle of laughter? "Okay, Jack it is, " she said, glad that was settled.

"Why don't you call me what my mother used to call me," he suggested. "You had a mother?" She looked up at him, as if she could see him through the blindfold.