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“Matteo? Who was that?”
“No questions. Not now.”
“But—”
He bent his head and kissed her. Not gently. Not tenderly. He kissed her hard and despite everything, the confusion in her eyes, the panic in her voice, she rose to him and returned his kiss with an intensity that swept straight through him.
He wanted to hold her like this forever, caress her and kiss her until she didn’t want to remember anything except him.
He held her a second longer. Then he pulled back just far enough so he could look down into her eyes.
“Ariel. Do you trust me?”
“With my life.”
The thought of how true that was made every muscle in his body tighten.
“Then you have to do as I say. Without question. Will you?”
She didn’t hesitate, not even for a heartbeat.
“Yes.”
One last, quick kiss. Then he put on his jacket, went to the door and eased it open. Nothing. Nobody. The motel lot was a snow-driven wasteland.
Working quickly, he grabbed the bags of clothing from the dresser, dumped the medications into one of them, took the bags to the car and tossed them in the back seat.
“Ready?” he said, as much to himself as to Ariel.
She nodded and he swept her into his arms. She clung to him, her face buried in the crook of his neck as he carried her to the car. He put her in the passenger seat and closed her seatbelt before getting behind the wheel and turning the key.
Traffic was all but non-existent. Even the big rigs seemed to have given up.
The road was slick with snow and ice. The car fishtailed a little as Matteo took the ramp onto the highway, but he was in luck. The red lights of a plow blinked in the darkness directly ahead; it had done its job and the lane was free of snow, enough so he stepped hard on the gas and the car shot forward.
“We’ll be fine,” he told Ariel.
If she sensed that his words were as much reassurance for himself as for her, she didn’t show it. He gave her a quick smile. Then he reached for the car’s GPS system and punched a couple of buttons.
“Good. There’s a service area seven miles from here. We’ll stop, gas up and get some—”
His phone rang. He’d stashed it in a cup holder on the console. Now, he listened to its insistent bleat and all but felt his blood chill.
Couldn’t you track people by their smartphones? By GPS devices? You could. A hundred different spy movies said so.
Matteo let down his window and hurled the phone out into the snow. The GPS was built into the dashboard. There was no way to remove it without tools.
“Ariel. Check the glove compartment. See what’s in it. A small set of tools, anything like that.”
She leaned forward and did as he’d asked.
“No tools,” she said. “Wait. There’s a flashlight.”
“Great. Give it to me, honey.”
The flashlight was long and thin, and made of aluminum. A couple of good whacks on the GPS screen, and the lights on the device blinked out.
“Okay,” Matteo said. “Okay. That’s better.”
But not by much, he thought. The car they were in was traceable. They’d have to ditch it for another vehicle as soon as possible. For now, he had to find a gas station to tank up the car, a place where he could buy them something to eat, and figure out where they were going.
But mostly, Matteo thought, his hands tightening on the steering wheel, mostly, he had to keep Ariel safe.
In three short days, she had become all that mattered.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The snow tapered off, but the road was bad, an icy black arrow into the night.
That didn’t keep Matteo from driving fast.
He had a talent for it. Why collect fast cars if you weren’t going to take them out on the road and ask them to show you what they could do?
Tonight, his passion for speed was paying off in ways he could not have imagined.
He was fleeing an asshole who wanted to kill him and the woman with him.
Matteo almost laughed.
He was a lawyer. The closest he’d ever come to a threat from a client was when he’d had to tell the ninety-year-old heir to a billion dollar fortune that he wasn’t going to be able to keep his thirty-year-old trophy wife from collecting alimony. The old guy had tried to pop him in the nose. Matteo had sidestepped the blow, his client had slid straight past him, directly into a file cabinet.
The only thing the scene had lacked was a banana peel.
Sure, he’d faced danger in what he thought of as the real world. He liked living on the edge when it came to things like driving those Lamborghinis and Ferraris, or free-diving in the Caribbean.
But this? The situation he was in now?
It was unbelievable, and deadly serious.
Pastore was a savage, capable of anything.
And Ariel was a woman in terrible peril.
Matteo’s hands tightened on the steering wheel.
A few months ago, he’d thought he’d had the shock of a lifetime, learning that his father had kept a hidden family.
Wrong.
This was an even greater shock. It was as if he’d stumbled into the dark underbelly of reality, with a woman’s safety, her very life, in his hands.
He took his eyes off the road just long enough to look at Ariel. She’d fought against sleep, yawning and insisting she was wide awake, but finally her head had fallen back and her breathing had turned deep and slow.
Her face was turned toward him. He could see the feathering of her lashes against her cheek.
He was glad she was sleeping. She needed the rest. You didn’t have to be a medical expert to know that. She’d been through more in the last hours than many people experienced in a lifetime.
And she’d stood up to all of it, even to the premonition, whatever you wanted to call it, that someone was after her.
Except, it wasn’t a premonition.
He knew it for what it was.
Reality.
Tony said she was crazy. Delusional. And the night they’d met, her behavior had seemed to point in that direction. Now…
Now, nothing about her seemed crazy. Or delusional. Definitely not delusional, Matteo thought grimly, as he replayed Pastore’s phone call in his head. The drugs Stafford had found in her bloodstream, her behavior the night they’d met, her fierce refusal to take anything that might cause confusion…
Tony had kept her drugged.
Matteo had no proof, not yet, but he was sure he was right.
Why? Why did Pastore see his wife as such a threat? She had to know something she wasn’t supposed to know…
“Matteo?”
“Yes, cara.” He looked at Ariel and smiled. “Did you have a good nap?”
“I did. But you must be exhausted.”
He was tired, yes. His neck, his shoulders… He needed to get off the road for a couple of hours.
“I’m fine.”
She peered out the window. Nothing was visible. No stars. No moon.
“Where are we? Did we leave the highway?”
“Yes. About half an hour ago.”
“It’s so dark. I don’t see anything out there.”
She was right. The road was a narrow ribbon that cut through a dense forest. He hadn’t seen a house, or even another vehicle, in miles. The only light piercing the darkness was that of their headlights.
All of that was good, or it would have been if they weren’t close to running on fumes.
“Where are we going?”
“I wish I knew. Don’t look at me like that, cara.” He flashed a quick, deliberate smile. “Where’s your spirit of adventure?”
She didn’t smile back.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know the first thing about myself, what I have and what I don’t have.”
She was right. Not about wondering if she had an adventuresome spirit. She was brave and tough, but the only one of
them who knew less about her than he did was Ariel herself.
It was a sobering realization.
“Well,” he said, still trying to sound relaxed, “here’s one thing we both know. We need to find a gas station, so I’m going to take the next turn we come to and see if we can find a place that’s still open. With luck, we might even find one that sells food. What do you feel like having? Steak? Lobster?” He flashed her a quick smile. “If we’re really lucky, maybe some hot dogs.”
For a long couple of seconds, nothing happened. Then she smiled, as he’d hoped she would.
“Hot dogs,” she said. “With mustard and sauerkraut.”
“Deal,” he said, smiling back at her.
