Judith McNaught (22 page)

memories—memories of all those glamorous stories about him in magazines, memories of countless hours

spent in theaters with her brothers and, later, with her dates admiring him and even fantasizing about him.

At eleven years old, she hadn't understood why her brothers and all their friends thought Zack Benedict was so special, but within a few years, she'd understood it perfectly. Ruggedly handsome, unattainable,

sexy and cynical, witty and tough. And since Julie had been away on a summer scholarship in Europe during his famous trial, she had no knowledge of any of the sordid details, nothing concrete to offset all

those lovely on-screen images that had seemed so real to her in theaters. The shameful truth was that when he'd told her he was innocent, she'd believed it might be possible he was telling the truth because it then made sense for him to try to escape so he could prove it. For some incomprehensible reason, a tiny part of her still clung to that possibility, probably because it helped her control her fear, but it didn't lessen

her desperation to get away from him. Even if he was innocent of the crime for which he was sent to prison, that didn't mean he wouldn't kill to prevent being sent back there, and that was
if
he was innocent—a very big, highly unlikely
if.

Her whole body jerked in alarm when the bag on the floor crackled. "Here," he snapped, shoving a Coke toward her.

Refusing to look at him, Julie stretched her hand out and took it, her gaze fastened on the view through the front windshield. She now realized her only hope of escaping without getting anyone hurt or killed was to make it easier for him to take off in her car and leave her behind than it was to stick around and try to shoot his way out of his predicament. Which meant she had to be out of the car and in full view of onlookers. She'd blown her first attempt to escape; he knew now she was desperate enough to try again.

He'd be waiting, watching. When she tried again, everything would have to be exactly right. She knew instinctively she wasn't likely to live to have a third chance. At least there was no further need to carry on

any nauseating charade that she was on his side.

"Let's get going," he snapped.

Wordlessly, Julie turned on the ignition and pulled out of the parking lot.

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A quarter of an hour later, he ordered her to pull over at a roadside phone again, and he made another phone call. He had not spoken a word except to tell her to pull over, and Julie suspected he knew that silence wreaked more havoc on her nerves than anything else he could do to intimidate her. This time

when he made his phone call, he never took his eyes off her. When he got back into the car, Julie looked at his impassive features and couldn't endure the silence another moment. Giving him a haughty stare, she

nodded at the phone booth and said, "Bad news, I hope?"

Zack bit back a grin at her rigid, unremitting rebellion. Her pretty face belied a stubborn courage and

acid wit that continually caught him off guard.

Instead of replying that the news was very good, he shrugged. Silence ate at her, he'd noticed. "Drive,"

he said, leaning back in his seat and stretching out his

legs, idly watching her graceful fingers on the steering wheel.

In a few short hours, a man who looked very much like Zack would drive from Detroit through the Windsor Tunnel into Canada. At the border, he would make enough of a nervous spectacle of himself to

cause the customs officials there to remember him.

When Zack remained at large for a day or two, those customs officials should remember him and notify U.S. authorities that their escaped convict had probably crossed into Canada. Within a week, the hunt for Zack Benedict should be mostly centered in Canada, leaving Zack much more free to continue with the rest of his plan. For now, for the next week, it

rather looked as if he had nothing whatsoever to do except relax and revel in his freedom. It seemed like a delightful notion and it would have put him rather in charity with the world if it weren't for his troublesome hostage. She was the only kink in his relaxation. A very big kink, since she apparently wasn't half so easily subdued as he'd thought she would be. At the moment, she was driving

unnecessarily

slow and casting angry looks at him. "What's the problem?" he clipped.

"The problem is that I need to use a bathroom."

"Later!"

"But—" He looked at her then and Julie realized it was useless to argue.

An hour later, they crossed the Colorado state line and he spoke for the first time. "There's a truck stop up ahead. Get off at the exit and if it looks all right, we'll stop there."

That truck stop turned out to be too busy to suit him, and it was another half hour before he found a service station that was relatively empty and laid out to please him with an attendant positioned in the island between the pumps so he could pay for gas without going inside and with rest rooms on the outside of the building, "Let's go," he said. "Take it slow," he warned as she got out of the car and started toward the rest room door. He grasped her elbow as if to help her walk through the snow, his feet crunching the crusty powder in perfect rhythm with hers as he matched her stride for stride. When they reached the rest room, instead of letting go of her arm, he reached out and opened the door, and Julie's temper exploded. "Do you intend to come in here with me and watch?" she burst out in furious disbelief.

Ignoring her, he looked around the tiny tiled room, checking for windows, she supposed, and finding none, he let go of her arm. "Make it quick. And, Julie, don't do anything stupid."

"Like what?" she demanded. "Hang myself with toilet paper? Go away, damn you." Yanking her arm free, she marched inside, and it was as she was closing the door, that the obvious solution of locking the

door and staying inside hit her. With an inner cry of triumph, she turned the lock with her fingertips and slammed the door at the same time, throwing her shoulder against it. The door slammed into the jamb with a satisfying metallic thud, but the lock didn't seem to catch, and she had a sickening feeling he was

holding the doorknob on the other side to prevent it from happening.

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From the other side of the door, he twisted the knob and it turned in her hand at the same time his tone of amused resignation told her she was right. "You have a minute and a half before I open this door, Julie."

Great. He was undoubtedly a pervert too, she thought as she hastily finished what she'd gone in there to

do. She was washing her hands in freezing water in the sink when he opened the door and said, "Time's up."

Instead of getting into the Blazer, he hung back, his hand in his pocket with the gun. "Put gas in the car,"

he instructed, lounging against the side of the car and watching her while she obeyed. "Pay for it," he ordered when she was done, keeping his face turned away from the man in the booth.

Julie's outraged sense of thrift momentarily overrode her frustration and fear, and she started to object when she realized he was holding two twenty-dollar bills in his outstretched hand. Her resentment was compounded a dozen times by the realization that he was biting back a half-smile. "I think you're starting to enjoy this!" she snapped bitterly, yanking the money out of his hand.

Zack watched her rigid shoulders as she turned away and reminded himself that it would be far wiser and far more beneficial if he could neutralize some of her hostility as he'd intended to do earlier. If he could put her in a decent humor, that would be even better. And so he said with a low chuckle, "You're absolutely right. I think I am beginning to enjoy this."

"Bastard," she replied.

* * *

treacherous

that she'd only averaged thirty miles per hour for long stretches. Three times they'd been held up for hours because of accidents on the highway, and still he made her go on. All night long, the radio had been

filled with news bulletins about his escape, but the further into Colorado they traveled, the less was being

made of his disappearance, no doubt because no one expected him to be traveling north, away from major airports, trains, and buses. The sign she'd passed a mile back said there was a picnic–rest area five

miles ahead, and Julie was praying that this one, like the last one they'd passed, would have at least a few trucks pulled off into it, their drivers asleep in the cab. The most feasible idea she'd been able to come up

with during the endless, exhausting drive was the only one that fulfilled the dual criteria of forcing him to

take the car while leaving her behind. It seemed as foolproof as anything under the circumstances: She was going to pull into the rest area and when she was alongside the parked trucks, she would slam on the

Blazer's brakes and jump out of the car, screaming for help in a voice loud enough to wake up the trucks'

occupants. Then, if her entire fantasy came true, several burly truck drivers—preferably gigantic men holding guns and wearing brass knuckles—would lurch awake and jump out of the trucks, racing to her rescue. They would wrestle Zachary Benedict to the ground, with Julie pitching in to help, then they'd disarm him and call the police on their CB radios.

That was the best possible scenario, Julie knew, but even if only a fraction of that happened—if only one driver woke up and got out to investigate the cause of her screams—she was still relatively certain she'd be free of Zachary Benedict. Because from the moment she raised an alarm and attracted notice, his only

sensible choice would be to take off in the Blazer.

He'd have nothing to gain by hanging around to shoot

her and then walking from truck to truck to shoot the drivers, not when the first gunshot would only alert all the other drivers. Any attempt on his part to reenact the final scene from
Gunfight at the O.K.

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Corral
would be just plain stupid, and stupid was one thing Benedict was not.

Julie was so certain of that, that she was going to bet her life on it.

She slanted another searching look at him to make certain he was sleeping. His arms were crossed over his chest, his long legs were stretched out in front of him, his head rested against the side window. His breathing was steady and relaxed.

He was asleep.

Elated, Julie gently eased her foot off the accelerator slowly, imperceptibly, watching the speedometer drop from forty-five miles per hour to forty-two, then very slowly to forty. In order to pull into the rest

area without a sudden change in speed that would alert her passenger, she needed to be traveling at no more than thirty miles an hour when she reached the exit. She held the speed at forty for a full minute, then she eased up on the accelerator again, her leg trembling with the effort to make each change undetectable. The car slowed to thirty-five miles an hour, and Julie reached out and turned the radio a little louder to compensate for what seemed like a quieter atmosphere inside the car.

The rest area was still a quarter mile away, shielded from view of the highway by a stand of pine trees, when Julie reduced her speed to thirty and turned the steering wheel a fraction of an inch at a time to begin angling off the highway. Uttering a disjointed prayer that she'd find trucks there, she held her breath

as she drove around the trees, then expelled it in a silent rush of gratitude and relief. Up ahead, three trucks were parked across from the small building that housed the rest rooms, and although there was no

one moving about in the early dawn, she thought she could hear one of the diesel engines running. Her heart racing like a trip hammer, she ignored the temptation to make her move now. To maximize her chances, she needed to be directly beside the trucks, so that she could reach the door of one before Benedict could catch her.

Fifteen yards behind the first truck, Julie was absolutely certain she heard the engine, and her toe angled

stealthily toward the brake, all her other senses so focused on the cab of the truck that she yelped in shock when Zachary Benedict suddenly sat up.

"Where the hell—" he began, but Julie didn't give him a

chance to finish. Slamming on the brake, she grabbed the door handle and flung open the door, throwing

herself out of the moving car, landing on her side in the snowy ruts. In a blur of pain and terror she saw the Blazer's rear tire roll past, missing her hand by inches before the car lurched to a jarring stop.

"HELP

ME!" she screamed, scrambling to her knees, her feet sliding as they fought for traction in the slush and

snow. "HELP ME!"

She was on her feet, running toward the cab of the closest truck when Zachary Benedict exploded from the Blazer, cutting around the rear of it and running straight toward her, blocking her path to help. Julie changed direction to avoid him, "PLEASE

SOMEONE," she screamed, cutting across the snow in an

effort to make it into the rest room and lock the door.

Off to her left, she saw a truck door being flung open and a driver stepping down, frowning at the commotion; close behind her she heard Benedict's feet

pounding into the snow. "HELP ME!" she yelled at the driver, and she glanced over her shoulder just in time to see Zachary Benedict scoop up a handful of snow.

A snowball hit her hard in the shoulder and she screamed as she ran, "STOP HIM! He's—"

Zachary Benedict's laughing shout a few feet behind her drowned out her words: "CUT IT OUT, Julie,"

he yelled at the same time he launched himself at her in a running tackle. "YOU'RE WAKING

EVERYONE UP!"

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Trying to drag in enough air to scream again, Julie twisted, landing underneath his sprawled body in the snow, the breath knocked out of her, her terrified blue eyes only inches from his enraged ones, his teeth