Safe and Sound (The Safe House Series Book 3) (5 page)

"Hurry back," he called.

Baudin raised his middle finger and vanished behind the door.

Prick
.

Sixty seconds,
Max promised himself.
That's all he gets.

Fifty-eight seconds in, Baudin exited the building, zipping his fly. The hitman lifted his head, looking smug with himself before his expression caved.

"Merde!"
Baudin pointed at something over Max’s shoulder.

Max spun in time to spot Lola spill out of the driver's seat. Her knees hit pavement. She shot a panicked look their direction, but she was up again in the next instant and running.
He had taken his eyes off the car for maybe ten of those sixty seconds—more than enough time to leave an opening.

"Shit!" Max translated.

Pretending to be asleep for the better part of an hour wasn't easy. In a classroom full of elementary school kids who had to rehearse a school play every year, Lola had always been the worst actress in the room. Standing offstage with a script in her hands, ready to deliver dropped lines to pint-sized Grace Kellys and Laurence Oliviers had always been her best role.

Feigning sleep became exponentially
more
difficult when she felt Max's hand on her cheek.

She didn’t have to open her eyes to confirm her suspicion—hadn't she already felt Max’s touch multiple times? Her heart had slipped out of its near-comatose rhythm at his unexpected caress, and almost gave away her sleeping subterfuge. Thankfully he hadn't lingered long. Otherwise he would have noticed she stopped breathing.

In stark contrast, her breaths now rivaled the speed of her feet.

"Lola!" Max shouted from behind her.

She didn't glance over her shoulder to acknowledge him. She knew he was gaining on her, and double-dipped into her adrenaline to produce an extra terrified burst of speed. Max was a large man. It was possible his muscled frame would work against him in this instance, but Lola wasn't exactly a marathon runner herself. In fact, she couldn't remember the last time she hit the gym. She had so many responsibilities—lesson plans, grading, faculty meetings, taking care of her cats, calling her brother, cooking dinner for her neighbor—she never made time for herself. But if she got out of this alive, she vowed to put aside the time to get back into shape.

Lola sprinted for the highway, legs and arms pumping. She abandoned the idea of going into the gas station for fear of trapping herself and the clerk inside. Max Sterling would have no reservations in dragging her back out, and taking the clerk with them under the guise of
keeping safe
. Considering there was at least one seat still unoccupied in the back of the car, the outcome didn't seem farfetched.

A hand clamped down on her bicep—
hard
—arresting her mid-flight. Lola rounded on her captor with a cry of dismay. Max Sterling, yet again, had her in his hold. She struggled to bring her handbag down on his head. Her strike hit his shoulder before he grabbed her other arm. The pressure of his thumb on the tendon in her wrist caused her to drop her bag immediately.

"Let me go." She didn't make it a plea this time, but an order. Her voice quavered, but she narrowed her eyes resolutely and attempted to stare the man down. Maybe it was a tone of voice that would have worked on her students, or on someone like Adrien Baudin, but it didn't appear to have any effect on Max.

"As soon as I’m able, Lola," he said, his words peppered with exhales. "I give you my word. But right now I need you to
listen
to me."

Lola didn't listen. She pulled away from him, but his grip never relented, and she succeeded only at hurting herself more. As if he realized this, Max yanked her against his chest and banded his arms around her, redistributing his strength and making it harder for her to find a single point of contact to try and exploit. To anyone watching, they would appear as lovers locked in an embrace. At the thought, Lola’s already-racing pulse threatened to jackhammer out of her chest. If they did have an audience, it was more than likely that anyone she approached now would give a second thought to helping her if they thought that she was only acting out as a result of a lover’s spat.

She pulled her head away from his chest and arched her back, but freeing her arms proved impossible. Lola was as firmly bound against his length as she had been to the chair in his kitchen.

As she continued to resist, Max's expression shifted. His demanding stare peeled away all pretense and gave a naked and unabashed assessment of her cleavage, her eyes, her lips. He looked at her as if he wanted to kiss her, not kill her, and her struggle brought what might have been an incidental brush of genitals to a full-on grind.

Tears sprouted in Lola’s eyes. Not because she loathed the raid of his firm body against her much softer one, but because she liked it. What was
wrong
with her? Life or death. Captive or free. None of it seemed to matter much anymore where her heart was concerned.

"For all that you
seem
like a genuinely decent man, Mr. Sterling, I can't reconcile that with what you've done. You've abducted me against my will and laid your hands on me more times than I have expressly given you permission."

"Does that mean if I ask permission, you'll comply?" Max's hot breath gusted across her face, close enough to kiss.

Lola blinked several times in rapid succession, completely flustered. No, that was most assuredly
not
what she had meant, and she had a feeling the man holding her knew that. Was this his idea of a joke? If it was, it was ill-conceived. She wanted to stand by her determination not to give in, but his eyes were kind and unwavering and elicited something real and honest inside her. No more running. No more games.

“I’m scared.”

“I know, sweetheart.”

The endearment nearly shattered her. So secretive, so tender and emphatic. If he was putting on his own act, he had just nailed an Emmy.

Her window of escape closed—for the moment. If she acted as if she thought it had closed permanently, maybe she stood a chance of Max letting his guard down around her once more in the future.

She allowed him to lead her back to the car. The chase had ended, but her heart hadn’t received the memo. It couldn't be Max's hand on her bicep, she reasoned. He held it secure, skintight, because she had proven herself untrustworthy. Her wild pulse had nothing to do with the back of his hand skimming the side of her breast with every step.

“If you two are finished with the foreplay, let us drive,
Oui
?” Baudin waited for them by the car, looking tired but amused by her attempted escape.

“Shut up, Baudin.” This time, Lola fired the order.

Baudin chuckled.

Lola wrenched her arm free, knowing she only succeeded in the attempt now because she was close enough to the car for Max to relent. She climbed in the front and scrambled to the backseat. Max was already in the process of unlocking the back door and pulling it open for her, but she ignored him. Like heck she was going to let him falsely present himself as a gentleman. The last time she checked the rules of engagement between sexes, endearing yourself effectively didn't involve chasing an unwilling partner down in a parking lot.

"You brute." Baudin acknowledged Max with a raised eyebrow. Some kind of testosterone code she didn’t understand.

Lola sank back into her seat and refused to meet anyone's eyes, even when Max reached in to offer back her purse. She had taken it with her out of habit, but it was completely useless without her two most essential self-defense items: her cell phone, and her gun.

Not that Lola could use her .357 on either man. In fact, they were beginning to grow on her, which was, quite possibly, the biggest threat of all to her freedom.

#

The next time Lola awakened, she roused from real sleep. Body shuddering-yawning, cat-like-stretching, crawl-into-consciousness kind of sleep. She sat up. Every muscle and bone in her body screamed in silent agony.

Lola groaned and slumped forward in the backseat. When she opened her eyes, she saw a palm extended beneath her that held two aspirin.

"Thanks, but I've got some in my bag," she muttered, squinting her eyes against the bright daylight, against unknown narcotics. The pills certainly looked like the harmless, candy-coated pain killers, but she couldn't be sure. The hand withdrew.

Max refocused his attention on the road.

"Where are we?" she asked.

"Nice try," came Max's automatic response.

They drove down a winding road that wasn't the highway. The landscape around them looked exceptionally well-manicured, too manicured to have happened by accident or as the result of a weekend gardening hobby. Lola craned her stiff neck around to look at the rolling emerald lawns unfurling behind them.

"We're at Blue Moon Resort," she said with certainty.

Baudin gave a short laugh from the front seat. “This one, she is sharp.”

Sexy. Sharp
. At this rate, she might consider becoming a card-carrying member of the Adrien Baudin fan club.

"My neighbor always talked about coming here." Lola popped a handful of pain killers into her mouth and dry swallowed. There weren't enough left to down them all and force Max to take her to a hospital, something she had already contemplated and dismissed. Her primary goal now was to stay alert and healthy, so that when opportunity presented itself—and it would—she could make another break for it, unencumbered. And, while she thought she could estimate how Max Sterling would react if she put herself in a real health crisis, she couldn't be one hundred percent sure that he would take her to a hospital if it got in the way of his duty. Better to play it safe and wait it out.

They pulled up in front of a two-tiered, opulent welcome center. In the distance, Lola spotted the rest of the resort. The layout looked familiar to her from Eugenia's cuttings and collected postcards. Her neighbor’s ecstasy about Blue Moon Resort had rubbed off a bit on Lola. Staying at a place like this had always seemed like a pipe dream to a young woman surviving on an elementary school teacher's salary. Now that she was here, she couldn't be sure she
wasn't
dreaming. This time when Max pulled open the door for her, she accepted the gesture without thinking and got out of the car. Her eyes traveled up the broadside of the building, and she managed to stifle a gasp of awe before it gave her away completely.

Instead, she turned to Max and hugged her bag against her chest. "Isn't this a little ritzy? I mean, aren't you worried about us being spotted?"

"Place is full of rich people." Max moved around the side of the car and pulled the trunk open, tossing Baudin one of two black duffle bags. He pulled the other one up over his shoulder and looked at Lola pointedly. "Perfect place to lay low for two days until the trial. Security is tight."

"Aiden Baudin aim serré."

At Lola’s quizzical look, Baudin translated.

“Yours truly likes it tight.”

“Ew.”

To his credit, Baudin clammed up instantly and managed to look a little sheepish.
Just
like one of her students. Men were still overgrown boys, after all—even if they were hitmen.

"Shut up," Max advised his charge. "And quit looking at her like that. The two of you are
not
rooming together."

"Do I get my own room then?" Lola asked hopefully. She really shouldn't have let her voice betray her optimism, because now Max also fixed her with a look of thinly-veiled impatience.

"The reservation is a two-bedroom suite. You’re rooming with me.”

Lola gawked at this, but found herself at a loss for words. She couldn't share a room with Max Sterling—no way. Her instincts should have rioted, her temper should have ignited, her brain should have concocted a counter-argument to her last best chance of escape, gone. Instead, her instincts plunged south, her temper flat-lined, and her brain fashioned a dozen different domestic images of her with Max, none involving clothes.

She had officially lost it.