To the Edge (7 page)

"I have a right to know," she insisted.

"You have the right to remain silent, too, but I don't suppose you're going to exercise it."

What happened then amazed her. A small grin—a mix of amusement and fatalistic forbearance—cracked that granite facade. Earlier, when he'd terrorized her in the bathroom, he'd given up some semblance of a smile. But that had been staged, manufactured to show scorn, to let her know who was in charge and to scare her into wetting her pants—which she might have, if she'd had any on.

This smile was different. It was spontaneous. Unguarded. And though it had been barely there, it had been a break in his armor—although why she thought she wanted to breach it she had no idea. Just like she didn't know why that small concession to emotion had transformed all of his uncompromising and harsh beauty into something she hadn't wanted to
deal with before, either: The fact that he was real. Something more than a stranger with a gun, a protector without a heart. He became a man to her in that moment... a man of flesh and blood and feelings.

For some unsettling reason, it made him seem even more dangerous. It had been much easier to dismiss him as a cold-blooded machine. Now she had to entertain the possibility of seeing him in a whole new light.

"Rangers," he finally volunteered, surprising her yet again and snapping her away from those troubling thoughts.

"Lead the way," she finished the credo, then waited for a reaction that never came. Unless you considered his eyes going dead a reaction. Given that she'd just witnessed an actual display of human emotion from him, she decided it was. A big one.

The elevator finally hit the ground floor. The doors slid open and he dragged her with him across the lobby at a fast jog, assured the change-of-shift security guard that all was well, and headed out the door.

As they scrambled toward the parking garage, Jillian tried to get a better handle on the workings of this frustrating man's mind. She was not an empath nor was she clairvoyant, and truth be known, she waffled between believing in either one. She'd researched and reported on a piece a year or so ago about a self-professed empath who had done some quasi-amazing work with the police department. While Jillian still swayed toward the side of disbelief, the absolute
that
she'd taken away from the experience was that some people fell into the category of sensitives. Sensitives knew when there was more to someone than met the eye. Jillian was firmly convinced that she was one of those people. Not in a hocus-pocus, booga-booga way but to a degree that made her instinctively aware when someone was withholding information, feeling guilt, or experiencing pain. Many people would simply call it intuition.

Whatever they called it, she had it. And she used it. It had helped her get to the heart of the matter more than once in an interview.

Right now, whatever it was, it was telling her that Nolan Garrett of the cool blue eyes and unreadable expression guarded not only
her
with his life; he also guarded secrets. It told her that he lived with an incredible amount of guilt. That he harbored an exhausting measure of pain.

As they moved at a fast clip toward the far end of the dark garage, she glanced at the uncompromising profile of the man her father had paid to protect her and, inexplicably, felt an almost overwhelming urge to comfort him. To tell him it would be OK.

And then she got a clue.

Not more than an hour ago she'd have cheerfully knocked him into next Tuesday. And now . . . now she had absolutely no idea why she wasn't still asleep and dreaming about ways to get rid of him. She needed some answers about what was happening. If she didn't get them soon— about where he was taking her and why—she might just decide Tuesday wasn't far enough.

She was about to demand he tell her where they were going when they reached an emerald green Mustang, from the 1960s. He stopped beside the passenger door. Turned and looked at her—and her breath stalled somewhere in the vicinity of Cuba. An unexpected and immediate sexual tension, as sharp as the knife he'd slid into his boot, suddenly electrified the air she needed very badly to breathe if she had an
y
prayer of clearing her head.

His blue eyes transitioned from ice to fire as his gaze slid down her body in a blatantly sexual assessment. He took his time about it, lingering on her bare legs, moving slowly up to the strip of skin exposed between her hip-hugger shorts and cropped T-shirt before snagging on her breasts and boldly holding.

Her pulse leaped at the shock of his less than subtle inspection. Something else reacted in shock, too. Her nipples tightened, tingled, pressed aggressively against the tight cotton knit. She would not flinch, she told herself, yet she couldn't keep from crossing her arms over her breasts to cover her body's reaction that was both knee-jerk and involuntary
.
And uncalled for.

His gaze shifted to her mouth, then lifted, ever so slowly, to her eyes, and just that fast, blue flame cooled to flinty ice.

Her breath whispered out on a relieved little rush that fairly echoed in the underground garage when he averted his attention to unlock the car door. She looked away, too. And blinked and settled herself and told herself she'd imagined all that... raw, primal heat. But her pulse said no, she hadn't imagined anything. It had been very, very real. And very, very hot.

Good God.

Shaken by it and by the fact that she'd reacted to him on any level other than anger, she eased into the passenger seat, then dared a quick glance at his profile when he settled behind the wheel. His jaw muscle clenched—and to her utter shock, a few of her internal muscles did a little clenching, too, right along with her pulse, which was pumping in places she didn't want to feel it.

This was going way beyond crazy. She wasn't sure what had just happened between them, but whatever it was, she didn't like it. Neither did he, if his dark scowl told the story, but it sure hadn't stopped him from looking his fill.

All right. It should be easy to rationalize. A truckload of adrenaline had pumped through her system during the last few hours. That could account for some momentary brain cramps and a little skewed perspective.

It called for a quick fix: Level out. Get a grip.

He shoved the key in the ignition about the time she'd convinced herself that whatever had just passed between them not only was over; it also hadn't been nearly as intense as she'd thought.

And then she didn't have to rationalize anymore, because it took every ounce of concentration she could muster just to keep from screaming.

She couldn't help it. Jillian clutched the dash and buried her feet against the floorboard as they cut down the nearly empty streets at breakneck speeds. The needle on the speedometer had made only passing acquaintance with the speed limit— and that had been several blocks ago.

"God forbid that I point this out, but in my experience, red generally means stop," she said through clenched teeth as they flew through yet another light.

She craned her head around to look behind them.

Nothing. No cars. No trucks. No police cruiser when you needed one.

"Fill me in."

She looked from the deserted street to Garrett's face. "On color-coded traffic lights?"

He looked dead ahead, the streetlights casting ominous shadows over his hooded brow. "On the death threats. When did they start? How were they delivered?"

She swallowed back a squeal as he took a corner on two wheels, then replied in the same concise verbiage that seemed to be his stock-in-trade. "Two weeks ago. The first was on my home voice mail. This week's came to the station. E-mail. My God, do we really have to drive this fast?"

"Who do you think it is?"

Her grip on the dash and the door tightened. "I have no clue."

"What are the police saying?"

"They
have no clue."

He snorted.

And she saw red.

"So sorry," she bit out with the sweetness of alum, "but you're going to have to translate that one for me. I'm not fluent in brooding male grunting."

Another almost smile, which she chose to ignore, lifted the corner of his mouth. 'Translated: that's not much to go on."

She glared out the window as street signs raced by. "And less to get worked up about. I still maintain it's someone's idea of a joke."

"And in your experience a death threat is a laughing matter?"

It was her turn to snort. "Experience? I have no
experience
in this. I just want it to go away."

"Well, princess, that makes two of us."

She whipped her gaze to his hard profile. The anger hit her first. "Do
not
call me princess." Then came curiosity as she tried to figure him out. "If you hate this so much, why are you here?"

The look he gave her when he turned his head and met her eyes made her blood run cold and hot at the same time. "Hell if I know."

Before she could recover from another bout of inexplicable sexual heat and pounce on his cryptic remark, he braked, then whipped the car into a parking space littered with newspapers, fast-food wrappers, and the remains of a battered shoe.

Jillian looked through the windshield, blinked, and gaped.

"A bar? You dragged me out of bed in the middle of the night to take me to a
bar?"

She stared in disbelief at a cinder-block building that sat on the corner of a backstreet where either the streetlights had burned out or—and
this
was a reassuring thought— they'd been shot out.

Amazing. He'd almost made a believer of her. As he'd driven through the city like a man avoiding a death wish—or heading toward one—she'd just hung on, trying not to be aware of him as she sat beside him in the passenger seat of a vintage emerald green fastback Mustang. His hard eyes had been glued to the deserted streets, his movements economic and proficient as he downshifted through tight corners and ran more lights in ten minutes than she had in her entire life. She'd actually thought they were running from, not
to,
something.

Apparently, she'd thought wrong. She'd been doing that a lot tonight. She didn't like it. And she didn't like this.

The sign on the dingy gray building read:
nirvana.

In her worst nightmare, maybe.

The one-story structure made a definitive architectural statement: early urban decay. The plate-glass windows, tinted almost black, were streaked with grime and ... and things she
really
didn't want to think about. The thick, shatterproof glass was crisscrossed with duct tape over spidery cracks that crept from a central circular hole. A woman a little less mired in denial might recognize it as a bullet hole. To keep from whimpering like a baby, she chose not to be that woman.

Through the cloudy and cracked glass, neon signs advertised several brands of beer on tap; below the windows unoriginal but graphic graffiti extolled the virtues of someone's mother in bold red letters. The front door—which looked like it had been kicked in... several times ... recently— was propped open by an empty beer crate. Shards of brown glass littered the sidewalk where scraggly weeds struggled to grow in the gap between the building's cracked and crumbling foundation and the pocked concrete. Why anything would even attempt to grow in this environment was beyond her. So was her ability to figure out what they were doing here.

Several huge motorcycles and a couple of dented pick-ups filled the spaces directly in front of the building. From inside, raucous laughter—low-down, dirty, and mean— rumbled beneath the head-banging rock blaring from a jukebox and seeped into the humid tropical night like toxic waste. Through the open car window Jillian could smell cigarette smoke and beer and the unmistakable undercurrent of danger.

""Put these on."

She jerked her head toward Garrett as he dragged a pair of sunglasses from the dash and handed them to her.

"Put 'em on," he repeated when she stared from the aviator glasses to him, her expression saying it all.

Are you crazy?

"I don't want anyone recognizing you."

She actually laughed, despite his stone-faced glower. "Well, that's not going to be a problem, because I'm not going in there "

He eased out of the car and walked around to the passenger side. Just as he reached for the handle, she punched the lock. Smirked.

He rolled his eyes at her ineffective and juvenile show of defiance, inserted the key, and opened her door.

When she held her ground and refused to move, he hunkered down to eye level and reached for her seat belt.

"No," she said, batting at his hands and grabbing for the buckle. "You know what? I've had it. I've been dancing to your tune all night, but I'm done now. I'm packing in my tap shoes. You want to be my bodyguard? Fine. Be my bodyguard ... not my social director, because if this is your idea of a fun night out, you suck at it."

When he hung his head, she got the distinct impression it was to hide a smile. "This is not a social call."

"So glad we can agree on something." She stubbornly tugged the seat belt across her lap again and fumbled with the catch on the buckle. "We'll just have to reschedule this little attempt to bury the hatchet and get chummy over a bottle of Ripple and a fifty-cent draw for some other night. Now take me home."