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And now, she wasn’t hidden.
Taking the turn onto the main road, he was racing toward Dawg’s in less than a minute. The Viper ate up the miles, taking the curves with a smooth, easy performance he didn’t even pay attention to.
All he could think about was the danger Lyrica would face if she reached the inn. All he could consider was life without Lyrica in it, and the knowledge that if he weren’t s
uch a stubborn bastard, she would have never slipped away on him.
The turn to Dawg’s farm was just ahead, and still he hadn’t caught up with her.
That fucking pickup wasn’t that fast, he thought, a premonition suddenly racing up his spine.
No, she wouldn’t have gone to the inn, he tried to tell himself. She wouldn’t have considered something so foolhardy without him or her brother at her side.
As he reached the turn, the sight of Natches’s modified ruby red Charger coming at him, moving so fast it was nearly on two wheels, had him stomping the brakes as he swung the Viper into a turn the second the car passed; the sight of both Dawg and Natches in the front had that premonition cementing to stark knowledge.
“Incoming call. Secured. Encrypted.” The computer announced the call.
“Accept.” The growl was torn from his throat, fear filling his senses, sharp and acrid on his tongue.
“What the fuck did you do?” Dawg yelled into the connection. “Lyrica wasn’t on her way here. She’s on her way to the inn. She passed Rowdy less than five minutes ago, tearing the roads up in that fucking truck of yours.”
He was sweating.
As he shifted gears quickly, the Viper tore around the Charger, taking the lead as Graham cursed furiously.
“Graham, I’ll take your head off if she gets hurt.” Natches wasn’t screaming. He was icy cold, calm.
“You have that friend of yours with you?” Graham bit out, referring to the sniper rifle Natches always kept close at hand.
“Why?” the other man asked with cool, biting fury.
“Don’t bother with the house; get in place with it once you arrive,” he ordered, the Charger still in his rearview mirror despite the pure power Graham was pouring into the modified engine beneath the hood of the Viper.
Dawg was cursing furiously.
“There’s an angel in the trees,” Natches informed him. “Why me?”
“Fuck if I know,” Graham snarled. “Just do it.”
Flicking the disconnect button on the steering wheel, he pushed the Viper harder, hearing the tires scream as he took the curves now. Rather than risk the more heavily traveled route to the inn, Graham took the dirt road ahead instead.
Turning onto it with a spray of dirt and gravel, he was forced to fight the steering wheel for a precious second before the Viper was racing toward its location once more.
The direct route to the inn would alert Davis and his fiancée, if she was involved, that he was coming. The back road that ended just behind the tree line behind the house would hide his arrival. Something warned him that slipping into the house might be all that saved Lyrica.
Some inborn sense of danger, a warning he didn’t dare ignore, tightened in his gut. This was why a move hadn’t been made. Someone had known she would make her own move.
Davis couldn’t have known her that well. But the fiancée had been at the inn for months. Long enough to have gotten to know Lyrica. Long enough to know how close each girl was to her mother.
Damn, he should have seen this coming. Lyrica had called her mother just after leaving her apartment that night. She’d told Mercedes she was coming, that she’d just left. Carmina would have known Lyrica was on her way. If Davis was just waiting for a chance to get to her, then he could have easily been in place to force the Jeep off the road.
If Lyrica’s vehicle hadn’t been so well reinforced, she would have been dead. Whoever had driven that van—Davis, he was guessing—hadn’t been expecting the steel reinforcements Dawg had welded into the frame just in case something like that had happened during the years he’d driven it.
It would have taken far more than a van ramming the passenger side to hurt the driver. If he’d rammed the driver’s side, then he’d have accomplished his goal. The sheer force of the blow would have killed her.
But he’d hit the passenger side, expecting the Jeep to crumple and fly over the edge into the depths of the ravine.
He hadn’t been wrong about Lyrica making an appearance on her own sooner or later, though. But was he expecting it this soon?
