Perfect Stranger (2 page)

Chloe screamed louder.

Though she had watched all
along, somehow she had not expected
quite
the sight before
her.

Wide-eyed and still screaming, both Chloe's
hands flew to cover her mouth. A wisp of a second elapsed before
she jumped to grab the wheel and regain control, her rental coming
close to the other vehicle as her tires squealed.

Hesitation flickered in the briefest
instant.

This poor man, he'd been tied up and looked
to have been tortured. Chloe peered around him into the trunk,
expecting the worst.

Shit, shit, shit.
Her silent mantra began.

Guilt instantly swallowed her for not
immediately trying to signal someone for help, too caught up in her
own dilemma.

Too caught up trying to be someone she
wasn't.

But how could I help
him?
Chloe wondered, watching the man
search the surrounding road, blood crusted on the side of his face.
Other cars whizzed past, honking, staring,
laughing and pointing
, but no one
stopping to do anything.

A noise of disgust escaped her.

Did they think this was joke? A stunt?

Chloe glanced around, too, but saw no movie
cameras.

Something snapped in her then. She was sick
of the world and sick of the uncaring assholes in it. Humans lived
to hurt one another and nothing else.

They might not want to be kind, but damn it,
she was a kind person.

A seedling of doubt sprouted.

She might be caring, but she was not of hero
material by any stretch of the mind. She would stop and help an old
lady if she spilled her purse, but this…. Helping this man was out
of her league for kindness.

Chloe's shoulders slumped, watching the lid
to the trunk as it flopped above the man's arm where he kept it
from hitting him on the head. He seemed unsure. Trapped. He
struggled to pull himself free of ropes around his legs.

She didn’t know what came over her then,
because normally she tended to stay within the beloved “box”, never
daring a thought of trespassing those boundaries, but obviously
that wasn’t working well for her anymore. Chloe clenched her
jaw.

Her ex had claimed she was too predictable,
too boring.

A little pang began to ache in her heart,
but Chloe chased the memory away with a snort.

Ha!

She could be unpredictable and still be
caring.

She sped up, bumping the other car with a
slight sense of glee, and beckoned the man to take the leap onto
the hood of her car. He looked at her strangely through the
windshield, panicked almost. His look made her wonder if he would
take the offered help.

She watched as he kicked ropes from his
feet, and a tangled net of bindings flew from the trunk as he
tossed them. The gold sedan swerved, now well aware its prisoner
had freed himself.

Chloe bumped the gold sedan again, harder
this time as the driver attempted an all out stop. Just as the
other car swerved to the side, the man from the trunk leapt out,
catching onto the top of her hood, near the wipers. He grunted at
his landing, slipping across the hood, his long legs going over the
side. In the last instant, as she thought he would surely slip to
the pavement and be hit by an oncoming car, he pulled himself back
up.

Chloe tapped her brakes. The stranger
growled as he tried to hold on and cast her a look of annoyance
through the glass as his body slid up the windshield from her
sudden halt.

She swerved again, hitting the gas. The
bumpers caught between her car and the gold sedan, sending them in
a spiral, and the other car crashed headlong into a ditch and the
trunk snapped shut.

As Chloe sped by, feeling triumphant and
rushed with adrenalin, she saw the other car's engine steaming. She
hoped she hadn't killed the person, no matter how bad they were.
Terrified, she kept going, though in the wrong direction of
traffic. Many honks sounded around them as cars swerved out of her
way. Chloe gassed the car, breaking intermittently as car after car
sent her swerving, too.

"Drive," the tortured stranger shouted.
"Don't stop." He grunted. Blood smeared against the windshield and
light green paint of the hood as he pulled himself toward the
passenger side of her car. Chloe met his incensed stare, nodding
wildly and tried not to hit her brakes again. She reached over to
roll down the window, keeping one hand on the wheel.

Somewhere deep, deep inside she began to
wonder if she had gone completely crazy.

Chloe squeaked out a tiny shriek as the man
threw his long legs around and slipped inside, effectively filling
the small car with his dominating size. He gave her a strange look,
as though he thought her insane, too.

Chloe swallowed her tongue and gawked, her
stare quickly falling down him. Her foot unconsciously pressing a
little harder on the gas-pedal.

His tan t-shirt had open slashes in several
places, bloody gashes revealed underneath. Tan pants showed proof
he had been through little less than hell. Her gaze halted on the
empty gun holster strapped around his thigh.

What in the heck
had
happened to this
man?

Her gaze flickered back up
his body, and she stopped to wonder at the smudged—was that
paint
on his
face?—blotches of black and green, too.

Chloe swerved again as another passing car
caught her attention. She quickly looked between the stranger and
the road.

There was a bleeding, very large man in her
car.

She swallowed.

What
had she done?

She meant to ask,
Was he was all right?
Should she take him to a hospital? Where was the hospital?
What happened?
but none of that came
out.

Chloe shook her head,
gaping. She was without a doubt shell-shocked, and now that he was
inside her car, Chloe was not entirely sure she had intended to let
him inside—it had just
happened
.

"Set your cruise control. Give me the
wheel." His voice was deep and rough.

Reality pounded away at her, adrenaline
thumping in her veins.

Chloe stifled a cry as his long tanned
fingers slipped around the wheel beside her own. Still glancing
between the passenger side and the road, she groped to release her
seatbelt, and then attempted what he said by fumbling for the
little switch on the end of the signal control, first sending her
turn signal blinking left, and then right. Chloe flushed, and
glancing down, she tried again. Her wipers swiped across the
windshield, and she cursed, giving up and tearing her focus away
from the stranger and road long enough to do what he'd asked. She
set the cruise control.

He gave her a half-smile. "Great, you’re
doing fine." His voice was so deep and smooth and calm she almost
believed him. "Now, I want you to crawl into the backseat and keep
your head down."

"What!" Chloe's voice trembled. She looked
at him as though he were insane for the suggestion. She gave a
little whimper as she looked at the tight space between him and the
console.

He didn’t so much as glance at her as he
steered from the passenger seat. "Just do it."

Shakily, she managed, lifting herself from
the seat and trying not to make contact with the stranger as she
slipped over the console. Her knees and butt dipped to the
floorboard, and she pulled her legs through the gap, then inched
onto the seat and buckled herself in.

The man commandeering her rental pulled
himself into the driver's seat after her and adjusted for his
height, muttering curses as the driver’s seat slammed back to
accommodate his legs. Their car shot forward and turned right.

"Who are you?" Chloe asked as she ducked
into her lap and splayed her hands against the back of her midnight
hair. "Please, oh please, tell me you're not a terrorist or in a
cartel." She panicked, fear bringing sobs. She squeezed her eyes,
berating herself for the burst of impulsiveness.

The car rocked as he swerved for a
pedestrian. Chloe's head shot up in alarm. A stack of papers
knocked from the hands of the person on the street fluttered behind
them.

She tried to scream, opened her mouth, but
nothing came out, and so she quickly dropped her head back to her
lap and silently prayed she wouldn’t get killed.

"My name is Jericho Eden." He paused to
glance back at her. "And no, I am not a terrorist—unless of course
you're a terrorist, then you might consider me such … You're not a
terrorist, are you?" He cut another quick glance into the backseat,
in attempt to ease her fear, and grinned despite the blood caked on
the side of his face and in his hair, evident bruising swelled
along a strong, darkly-bristled jaw.

Chloe shook her head dumbly, peeping up from
her knees. "Me? No."

"Good, Chloe. Things might have gotten
really awkward between us had you said yes."

She paused, then came to edge around the
seat precariously. "How do you know my name?"

"It's on your bag," he said, turning off the
road they had been on, onto the tight street she had traveled some
twenty minutes earlier.

They sped along, the people there scattering
out of their path. Chloe peeked from over the console. He turned
the car back in the exact direction she had come and then off the
road the jeep had taken earlier when the sedan sped off the
road.

As their car bounced over
the unpaved area, Chloe cut her eyes to her bag beside her in the
backseat.
Of course
, she mentally grumbled.

"Don't worry. I promise I won't hurt you."
Chloe's attention flinched back to him. Their eyes caught in the
rear-view mirror. "I'm one of the good guys," he said.

She swallowed hard, but didn’t drop her
gaze. "Then how did you end up in someone's trunk and looking like
that?" she asked, her tone rattled. She flicked her gaze over his
torn and bloodied clothing, his bruises and cuts.

The stranger winced as a grim expression
crossed over him. His stare returned to the road ahead, a darkness
filling his gaze.

Chapter Two

0200 hours, 12 hours earlier, Thursday

Outside Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

"Break Contact!" Special Forces Master
Sergeant Jericho Eden shouted.

Flashes of the explosion seared into his
mind forever in that moment, just before the blackness of night
surrounded him again.

Rounds pounded the dirt at his feet as he
ran. The missed shots became heavy thunks penetrating into the
ground, sending sprays of soil upward around his footfalls.

Maloney was dead. Dead! He
couldn’t believe it. The visual of his fellow
soldier—
his friend!
—diving over the grenade ripped through him. He wanted to let
loose all his anger, but could not. He alone was responsible for
getting the rest of them back, and he wouldn’t let Maloney's
sacrifice be for nothing.

A sacrifice that should have been his own,
had he been closer.

Regret swelled in Jericho, and he pushed
himself through the jungle, his remaining men following behind
him.

The ambush had come from out of nowhere.
None of them had expected a damn thing, only reacted, putting to
use the years of training they had committed to.

Maloney was dead, and MacKall MIA. The
hostiles had probably captured his fellow team member.

Flashes of gunfire surrounded from all
directions as they made the road where one of the trucks waited,
camouflaged and at the ready. The smell of gunpowder from the many
explosions hung heavy in the laden air, so strong that the acrid
taste lingered on Jericho's tongue.

At least his team hadn’t left without doing
damage. However, he needed more men, and he needed them now, before
the hostiles quickly disappeared, alerted to their presence.
Already they should have had a team on the ground canvassing the
area for those fleeing a scene that should not have happened, but
as challenged as their mission was, only one team—his team—had been
sent to the area. They needed more men to come back to extract
MacKall and… Jericho swallowed hard as he ran, thinking of
Maloney's young wife. The couple hadn't been married a year.

Determination flared, charging his blood
with the need for retribution.

He would see Maloney's body returned
home.

They left no one behind.

Jericho broke into the little clearing, his
men hot on his heels, and grabbed the side of the camo net and
pulled the cover to the ground as he rounded the truck. He slung
the leafy mesh away and threw open the door, taking the driver's
seat. The truck bounced with the weight of his other two team
members as they jumped in. Gunner took shotgun while Butler threw
himself into the bed of the truck, snapping a new magazine into his
SCAR, or Special Forces Combat Assault Rifle.

"Goin' hot," Butler yelled, returning fire
from the back as they spun out, dust kicking up on the unpaved
road.

Too soon did a strangled yell come from the
bed of the truck. "I've been hit," Butler called to Jericho and
Gunner.

"Thirty-minutes ETA to safe house," Gunner
said from the passenger seat, tossing the navigational device aside
to take up an RPG from he backseat. "Can you make it?" he asked as
he swung himself halfway out the window to take aim at the jeep
trailing them much too closely for anyone's liking. Their follower
bounced along on the dirt road behind them, fishtailing in the soft
sand. One of their men got off a few more shots.

"
Hooah
," Butler called. "You're
clear," he said.