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He didn’t hesitate. “Run!”
Stumbling in her high heels, Tara tried to keep up with him. Something hit the wall of the building next door to the gallery. A shard of brick seemed to explode from the wall, missing Tara’s cheek by inches.
Blake cursed and yanked at her arm. “Hurry!”
Tara told herself it couldn’t possibly have been a bullet. She tried to convince herself that she’d watched entirely too much television during the past two weeks. But the urgency in Blake’s voice and the cold fear in her own chest propelled her to run faster.
They rounded the front of the gallery, emerging in the parking lot, which was crowded with vehicles and people either arriving late to the art show or leaving early. Never slowing down, Blake zigzagged through the obstacles toward his own car. He unlocked the doors with a remote device and had the engine running and the car in gear almost before Tara had crawled into the passenger seat.
He pulled out of the parking lot with a burst of speed, just missing a black Lexus that was turning in at the same time and a BMW coming from the other direction. Tara closed her eyes tightly as horns blew and tires squealed. She felt the back of Blake’s car fishtail for a moment, but he steadied it almost immediately and sped away from the gallery.
“We’re being followed,” he said before Tara could catch her breath to demand explanations. “Fasten your seat belt and hang on.”
She obeyed his curt instructions with shaking hands.
She didn’t dare ask what would happen if whoever was following them actually caught up with them.
IT TOOK BLAKE less than five miles to lose their pursuers. Driving through a neighborhood of built-toimpress mansions in one of the more exclusive Buckhead neighborhoods, he checked the rearview mirror repeatedly, until he was finally satisfied that he’d eluded the other car. Only then did he turn his attention to Tara, who’d been sitting in absolute silence, her hands twisted in her lap as she waited for an explanation.
He wished he had one to offer her. He had no idea how a case that was supposed to be so simple, so safe, had gone so very wrong. His assignment had been simply to accept an envelope of information from an anonymous contact. If he’d had any inkling that there would be danger involved, he never would have invited Tara to go with him.
“Are you all right?” he asked, reliving the shock of finding her struggling for her life in that back office, a dead man at her feet.
She countered with a question of her own. “Are they still chasing us?”
“We’ve lost them,” he assured her.
She nodded, though she didn’t look particularly relieved. “Will you please take me home now?” she asked, her tone just a bit too polite.
Blake winced. “I wish I could.”
Tara gave him a look that he suspected had made hardened IRS agents quail on occasion. “What do you mean? Why can’t you take me home?”
“Where’s your purse, Tara?” he asked gently.
“I...er...” She looked around for a moment, then grimaced. “I dropped it When I saw that man lying on the floor.”
Blake nodded. “That’s what I figured. The guy who grabbed you must have fallen on it when I hit him with the bronze.”
She swallowed. “Did you... Was he...?”
He understood what she was trying to ask. “I didn’t kill him. Probably just stunned him.”
In fact, the guy had probably been in the car that had followed them out of the gallery parking lot.
Tara drew a shaky breath of relief. “Thank God.”
Blake thought it best not to tell her that his first instinct, when he’d seen the jerk with his hands on Tara, obviously hurting her, had been to kill. The fury that had crashed through him had been powerful and violent. And since Blake didn’t consider himself a violent man, that had shaken him.
“They have your purse,” he said grimly, turning to more immediate concerns. “Which means they have your address, and even your keys. If we go to your apartment now, someone will likely be there waiting for us.”
“Someone?” Tara’s voice had gotten higher, tighter. “Someone will be at my apartment, waiting for us? Can you be a little more specific?”
He made another sharp turn, checked the rearview mirror again, then tried to answer her. “I’m afraid I’m a little short on details right now. Trust me, Tara, I have no more idea of what’s going on than you do. This was supposed to be a safe, easy assignment. Something went wrong.”
“Obviously,” Tara retorted with heavy sarcasm. “Someone tried to shoot us!”
He remembered the sound of a silenced bullet striking brick, only inches from Tara’s face, and his anger threatened to choke him again. But he managed to speak fairly normally when he said, “I’m afraid so.”
