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He had both hands on the wheel, the big automatic lying on the seat beside him. This was likely the best chance she’d have. Lily stayed in the close confines of the floorboard. She fished around for her pistol, which she’d dropped when he was slinging her around as if she were on a carnival ride. She found it under the passenger seat and, with a smooth, economical motion, brought the weapon up and aimed it between his eyes. “Pull over and let me out,” she said.
He glanced at the pistol, then turned his attention back to the traffic. “Put that peashooter away before you piss me off. Hell, lady, I just saved your life!”
He had, which was why she hadn’t already shot him. “Thank you,” she said. “Now, pull over and let me out.”
The soccer players hadn’t been Agency; she’d heard them call to each other in Italian, so they were Rodrigo’s men. Which meant this man was maybe, probably, Agency. He was definitely American. She didn’t believe in coincidence, or at least not in massive coincidence, and for this man to show up just as she was pinned down, with driving skills like a professional and toting a Heckler and Koch nine millimeter that cost close to a thousand bucks . . . yeah, like he was anything else except Agency. Or more likely he was a contract agent, a hired killer just like herself.
She frowned. That didn’t make sense. If he was a contract agent sent to terminate her, then all he’d had to do was stay out of it and she would likely have been dead very shortly, and he wouldn’t have had to lift a finger. She would have tried to make a run for it, though how far she’d have gotten with four gunmen after her and her stamina more than a little questionable, she didn’t know. Her heart was still hammering, and to her dismay she was still trying to drag in air.
There was also the possibility that he was a lunatic. Considering how he’d been laughing, that was more than a little likely. Either way, she wanted out of this car.
“Don’t make me pull the trigger,” she said softly.
“wouldn’t think of it.” He glanced at her again, the corners of his eyes crinkling in another of those grins. “Just let me get farther away from the scene of the crime, okay? In case you didn’t notice, I was involved in that little fracas, too, and a Jag with a shot-out window is kind of noticeable. Shit. It’s a rental, too. American Express is gonna be pissed.”
Lily watched him, trying to get a read. He seemed genuinely unperturbed by the fact that she had a weapon trained on him. In fact, he seemed to think the entire situation was a lark. “Have you ever spent any time in a mental hospital?”
“What?” He laughed and shot her another of those quick glances.
She repeated the question.
“You’re serious. You think I’m a lunatic?”
“You were laughing like one, in a definitely non-funny situ
ation.”
“One of my many faults, laughing. I’d been about to die of boredom, and here I was, sitting in a little park minding my own business, when a shoot-out starts behind me. It’s four against one, and the one is a blond woman. I’m bored, I’m horny, so I think maybe if I drive my Jag over there and get it shot up while I’m saving her life, I’ll get a little excitement and the blonde might jump my bones out of gratitude. So, what about it?” He waggled his eyebrows at her.
Startled, Lily laughed. He looked remarkably silly, waggling his eyebrows like that.
He stopped waggling and winked at her. “You can get up in the seat now. You can hold the pistol on me from that position, too.”
“The way you drive, I may be safer on the floorboard.” But she hoisted herself into the seat, and didn’t buckle her seat belt because she would have had to put down the pistol in order to do it. She noticed he didn’t have his seat belt buckled, either.
“Nothing’s wrong with my driving. We’re alive, aren’t we? Not leaking from any new holes—well, maybe just a little.”
“You were hit?” she asked sharply, twisting toward him.
“No, just some glass cut the back of my neck. It’s minor.” He reached back and swiped his right hand across his neck. His fingers came away smeared with blood, but not a lot of it. “See?”
“Okay.” Smooth as silk, she reached out her left hand to confiscate the weapon lying beside his leg.
Without looking down, he snapped his right hand around her wrist. “Uh-uh,” he said, all playfulness gone from his voice. “That’s mine.”
He was fast, amazingly so. In a flash the good-natured goofiness had vanished, replaced by a cool, hard look that said he meant business.
Oddly, she was reassured by this glimpse, as if now she was seeing the real man and knew what she had to deal with. She moved farther away from him, as close to the door as she could get, not because she was afraid of him but to make it more difficult for him to grab her weapon with one of those lightning moves. And maybe she was a little afraid of him; he was an unknown, and in her business what she didn’t know could get her killed. Fear was good; it kept her on her toes.
He rolled his eyes at her action. “Look, you don’t have to act like I’m psycho or something. I’ll let you out safe and sound, I promise—unless you shoot me, in which case we’ll crash into something and I can’t make any guarantees.”
“Who are you?” she asked in a flat tone.
“Lucas Swain, at your service. Most people just call me Swain. For some reason, Lucas never really caught on.”
“I didn’t mean your name. Who do you work for?”
“Myself. I’m not real good at the nine-to-five routine. I’d been in South America for ten years or so and things got kind of tense there, so I thought taking in the sights in Europe for a while would be a good idea.”
