Pursuit (32 page)

He kissed her hand again and carefully returned it to her lap to put both hands on the wheel as they entered the city limits of San Luis and he started the series of turns that would take them to her house.

The air in the cab was charged with energy, crackling with it. Charlotte felt alive in every cell of her body. She was aware of Matt next to her in every fiber of her being. It was as if she breathed him in with every breath she took.

She’d cheated death, time and again, over the past few months. Life wasn’t always sweet, she knew that now, but it was there to be lived to the full, each moment a gift. Like now, in a dilapidated Jeep in Baja California, with a man she hardly knew. And yet—she knew the essence of him. She knew he was brave and loyal and never played games. She knew he said what he meant and meant what he said. She knew he had an incredible streetwise intelligence that fascinated her, as if he’d seen it all and had filed it all away.

Matt parked behind Charlotte’s house and killed the engine. He turned to her, big arm draped over the steering wheel. Again, that look like a punch. She didn’t need to ask what he was thinking—she knew. With every look, with every touch of his hand to hers, she knew.

“We’re here,” he said quietly.

Yes, they were.

They were where they’d been heading since he’d rescued her from the black, clutching tentacles of the sea. Maybe they’d been heading toward this since the day she’d seen him outlined against the setting sun—a broken husk of a man taking strength from a wounded woman on the run.

He’d saved her life. In the most primitive way there was, deep in the bone and blood, she was his.

She couldn’t take her gaze from his. The windows were down, and the sounds of the night air sounded loud in the silence of the cab. The soft splashing of the sea, revelers along the beach, a guitar strumming in a nearby house. The whites of his eyes gleamed in the darkness. He reached out a long finger and ran it down her cheek. Charlotte couldn’t help the shudder that ran through her body. She lifted her hand and pressed his hand against her cheek.

“It’s time, Charlotte,” he whispered, and she nodded against his hand. Yes. It was time.

Tijuana

April 28

Barrett parked the car and walked up and down the Avenida Revoluciòn, feeling his way into the city. He’d done this hundreds of times before. When he tracked prey down to a specific city or town, he walked around the various sections of the city, using every bit of knowledge of the prey he had. He’d spend hours, senses wide open, seeing through the prey’s eyes, thinking with the prey’s head.

It worked, more often than not, particularly in wide-open places like Tijuana, where if you had a weakness, it was available to you in abundance, twenty-four/seven. Too bad Charlotte Court didn’t have any weaknesses, not in the usual sense. She didn’t drink, do drugs, or need to mainline designer clothes and jewels. The only weakness she had that he could see was an almost neurotic need to paint and draw, especially under stress.

By evening, he was convinced that she wasn’t in Tijuana. She might have spent the night, but the next morning, if she was capable of driving, she’d have lit out. Tijuana was not the place where she would settle down. Barrett was convinced of that by nightfall. Barrett came to this conclusion in a small street just off the Avenida, sitting on a rickety chair out on the irregular paving stones, sipping a beer. A mass of guidebooks and maps was spread out on the little round plastic table, and the bottle of the local cerveza held down a pile of brochures against the rising evening breeze. He’d chucked the shiny black Feeb suit, the shiny brass Feeb badge for faded jeans and a tee—Fred Dugan, farm machinery rep out of Cleveland out for some fun in the sun, looking like every other
gringo
who’d just crossed the border.

The maps and guidebooks weren’t there as part of a disguise. He was poring over the information, trying to find out where she’d have gone to ground. By the time the light started fading from the hemp-colored sky, Barrett thought he knew where she’d go. San Miguel de Allende. A famous art colony, with more galleries than restaurants, full of foreigners. Founded in 1542. A good-sized city, elegant, filled with Italianate plazas. It had Charlotte Court written all over it.

The light was fading. If he wanted to make tracks, he had to get going. And yet he continued sitting, tracing the map of Mexico with his forefinger, stalling . . . Something wasn’t quite right . . .

He opened one of the brochures on San Miguel again. A music festival, ceramics and art courses, perfectly restored seventeenth century Spanish churches, a large expatriate population. Ken Kesey had lived there once. It was full of cute little cobblestoned streets with funky brightly colored adobe houses on each side. Christ, it even had something called Lifestyle Tours. In English. It was perfect.

What the fuck is wrong with this picture? What’s wrong?

He continued touching the map, tracing the roads, his finger slowly making its way from the northwesternmost portion of Mexico, Tijuana, down into the southern heart of the country, then back up, trying to figure out what was wrong.

His eye traversed the distance between Tijuana and San Miguel once more . . . It was too far away, that’s what was wrong.

That’s what his subconscious had been trying to tell him. San Miguel was more than two thousand miles away, over sometimes narrow, twisting roads.

Barrett sat while the sky darkened, and the street lit up with a cornucopia of small lights. Salsa music drifted in from an open window above the taverna, and couples dressed for an evening out started emerging from the buildings. The sharp smell of women’s perfume and men’s cologne—the odors of a night out—mixed with the delicious smells coming from the back room of the taverna, and the sometimes-acrid whiff of sewer coming from an open grate. He sat, thinking it through.

Barrett was thoroughly male, forty-five years old, a soldier all his life. But he had an uncanny ability to put himself in his prey’s shoes. So while the light drained out of the sky and raucous nighttime Tijuana replaced frantic daytime Tijuana, he turned himself into a twenty-six-year-old, beautiful, wealthy woman who was passionately interested in art. He
was
Charlotte Court.

He was a pampered heiress on the run who had just made an epic escape across the continental United States, wounded and frightened. It was the kind of journey that would tax most people who hadn’t had Special Forces training, let alone a civilian. She’d just crossed the border into Mexico after a grueling trip through the snowy Midwest. God, that had had to give her a feeling of safety, of having somehow found sanctuary. The human animal can marshal vast reserves of adrenaline to keep going when life is at stake, but the longer the period of emergency panic, the greater the adrenaline depletion. Crossing that border, feeling safe, warm, anonymous for the first time in what must have felt like forever—she’d be exhausted, completely wiped out. Would she plan another long, cross-country trip? In a country she wasn’t familiar with?

He turned it over in his mind, tuning out his surroundings, oblivious to the night sounds of a city of sin.

No,
he thought suddenly. She wouldn’t. She’d head in a straight line, where she didn’t have to worry about directions.

And that would be straight down into Baja.

He’d head out at first light.

San Luis

April 28

Matt opened the door to Charlotte’s house, letting it swing open and ushering her across the threshold with a hand to her back. They’d walked in silence, hand in hand, after parking Lenny’s Jeep. They didn’t need words. Matt didn’t, anyway. He knew what he wanted.

Her. He wanted her, Charlotte. At the deepest level possible, she was his, and words wouldn’t make it any truer.

The instant the door closed behind them, Charlotte turned in the circle of his arm and stepped forward until her breasts touched his chest and just like that she was in his arms, a slender column of pure fire, struggling to get closer to him.

Matt had had every intention of taking it slow, coaxing her into bed with him, but she blew those plans right out of the water. She took the kiss from zero to sixty so fast he nearly got the bends. Inside a minute, she was grappling with the buttons of his shirt, finally pulling his shirt apart, the buttons making little
ping!
sounds as they hit the tile flooring. When she put her hands on him, it felt like fire. She burrowed her hands underneath his shirt, sliding them around his back, all the while pressing closer, closer . . . Her mouth was a little honey trap—it was impossible to lift his mouth from hers. For a second there, he thought he should tell her to slow down, reassure her, do something with his mouth other than kiss her, but that was insane. What could he possibly tell her in words that his body wasn’t telling her?

He was as hard as a pike, that muscle just one of the many muscles of his body that were hard with arousal. It didn’t help that she was rubbing her hips against his, driving him insane.

He lifted his mouth from hers for a moment and looked down, thinking that he’d remember this moment for the rest of his life. She looked up at him, her face a pale perfect oval. Not so pale, no. Even by the dim light of the streetlamp outside, he could see that her cheeks were flushed, her lips red and swollen, her eyes dark with arousal. He wanted this to be romantic, gentle, but his blood was up, and so was hers. In a second, they were on the bed, grappling, rolling, wild hunger in the blood. He lifted her up a little and slid the zipper down on the turquoise dress, pulling it off her shoulders and down. With it came bra, panties, sandals, and he was dumbstruck as he looked at her, naked in the moonlight, a pale, slim column of fire.

She opened her arms. “Come to me,” she whispered.

Yes.

He slid into her, hard to soft, gritting his teeth as he lowered his face to hers, shaking with the effort to keep still so she could adjust to him. Her whole body lifted into his, those long slender legs hugging his hips, breasts brushing his chest. They watched each other, light to dark. “Now, Matt,” she whispered.

He started moving in her.

San Luis

Early in the Morning, April 29

The window was open, and Charlotte could hear the waves plashing on the shore, keeping time with Matt’s slow heartbeat. Her ear was directly over his heart. His heart had, as she would have expected, the slow beat of an athlete, almost one to her two beats. He also had the stamina of an athlete. The memory of last night made her smile. It had been months—no,
years
—since she’d woken up with a smile on her face.

“I can hear you smiling,” Matt said, his voice a deep rumble in his chest. His arms tightened around her, and she nestled more deeply against his shoulder. As pillows went, it was too big and too hard, but it had other advantages. It was the perfect position for her head so she could lie in his arms, boneless and replete.

And safe.

She felt utterly and completely safe, as if the world had been purged of bad things. Or rather, that Matt would stand between her and the bad things in the world. She was lying half on him, one leg over his. One large hand moved lazily up and down from her backside to her neck, his hand warm, the skin calloused.

“I hope that smile is because of me,” he rumbled.

“Oh, yeah,” she sighed. Definitely. She didn’t feel exactly carefree—her problems were like large black clouds far away on the horizon—but right now it was possible to think of nothing at all and it was such a delicious feeling. No fear, no planning, no worries—just an endless, floating now.

She drifted, content . . .

His stomach rumbled, waking her up. She laughed. “I guess that’s body language for—get up and fix me breakfast.”

“Depends.” His voice was wary. “What do you have in the house?”

“Yogurt, an apple, and tea,” she said primly. “If you want more, you’ll have to go out and forage.”

A deep, long-suffering sigh. His hand tightened in her hair. “Can’t we keep more stuff to eat here? You’re starving me. And here I am your very own sex slave and personal trainer. It takes calories to do that.”

Charlotte ran the palm of her hand over his chest. It was such a sensual pleasure. The crisp chest hairs tickled her hand and under them was warm skin over heavy muscle. Every once in a while, her sensitive fingers came across ropy scar tissue. “No whining. The sex slave thing is very good, but speaking of being my own personal trainer . . .” Her finger found his nipple, a small, hard bead, and rubbed, pleased to feel a small shudder run through him.

He might be a very powerful man, but it turned out that she was a very powerful woman.

“Stop that,” he ordered. “If you want to talk to me, that is.” His head lifted from the pillow.

“Unless you’d like to—”

Charlotte sighed and shook her head. The idea was lovely, but she was sore, and this closeness in bed was too . . . luscious to spoil with sex.

“Okay.” His head fell back on the pillow. “So tell me what you want.”

Charlotte ran a finger down the indentation between his pectorals, putting just enough fingernail into it to make him catch his breath. She was being naughty. She felt naughty, so totally unlike her, Ms. Cool. He was aroused—she could feel him against her thigh. He was good about it, he didn’t push against her, he wasn’t pressing for sex, but he’d like it. She’d like it, too, only later. Right now she was feeling languid and was enjoying tormenting him, just a little. It was like playing with a tiger you knew wouldn’t attack.