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“Get in,” John whispered, moving aside so she could crawl in from that side and not make more noise by having to open and close the passenger door, too. She wasn’t a four-year-old, and the Renault was small; she banged her knee on the gear shift, her head on the interior light, and her elbow on the steering wheel. Swearing under her breath, she finally maneuvered herself into the passenger seat.
John wasn’t laughing, but his mouth wore a curve that said he wanted to. The small interior light gave her the first clear look at him since they left the estate, and her heart skipped a beat. The right side of his face was streaked with dried blood, despite his efforts to wipe it off. His once-snowy shirt was rusty with dirt and blood, his hair was tousled, and beard stubble darkened his jaw. With the black strip of silk tied around his head, he looked like a disreputable, Armani-clad pirate.
If anyone saw them the way they looked now, they were busted.
He twisted the wires together, and the engine began trying to crank. It coughed, the fan turning, and he slid into the seat and gently pressed the gas pedal. With a high-pitched hum like a sewing machine, the car started. Without closing the door, he put in the clutch and shifted into low gear; the car began rolling as he let out the clutch. Fifty yards down the road, he closed the door.
“What time is it?” she asked, slumping in the seat. Her feet were throbbing. She eased them out of the sandals, knowing she might not be able to get her shoes back on and not caring. Sitting down was such a relief she almost groaned.
He glanced at his wristwatch. “A little after three. With luck, we have two or three hours before anyone notices the car is missing. Why don’t you try to get some sleep?”
“I’m not sleepy.” She wasn’t. She was exhausted but not sleepy. She was both hungry and thirsty, and really, really needed to soak her aching feet in cold water.
“You will be. When your adrenaline drops, you’ll crash.”
“What about you? Don’t you have adrenaline?” she snapped, though she didn’t know why she was suddenly crabby.
“I’m used to it. I’ve learned how to work through the crash.”
“I’m okay.”
She wasn’t, though. She glanced at him. His strong hands were steady on the wheel, his expression as calm as if he were out for a Sunday drive. Maybe she looked that calm, too, but inside she was shredded.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No,” she said, appalled. There was no need to ask what “it” was. She didn’t want him to be reasonable and logical and tell her to just look at what they’d done as part of the job. All she wanted was to get this over with and leave with some semblance of dignity still intact.
“We have to at some point.”
“No, we don’t. I just want to forget it.”
He paused, and his jaw tightened. “Are you mad because you came, or because I did?”
She felt like screaming. God, why wouldn’t he just leave it alone? “Neither. Both.”
“That’s certainly a definitive answer.”
“If you want definitive answers, get a dictionary.”
Another pause, as if he measured her resistance. “All right, I’ll drop it for now, but we will talk.”
She didn’t reply. Didn’t he understand? Talking about what happened was like touching a wound, keeping it fresh and bleeding. But, no, how could he understand, when it wasn’t like that for him?
“How far is it to Nice?”
“A couple of hundred miles if we use the expressway, less if we go over the mountains. The direct route probably won’t be the fastest, though, at least not in this car. It doesn’t have the horses to climb the mountains at much more than a crawl.”
“The expressway should get us there by six-thirty or seven, though.”
“In the neighborhood. We have to stop and steal another car.”
“Another one?”
“We’re too close to Ronsard’s estate. He’ll hear about this as soon as it’s reported. We need to ditch this one.”
“Where?”
“Valence, I think. I’ll look for something there.”
