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“What I’m about to do is going to seem insane, but I need you to just trust me. Get on the floor.” Gunner instructed, eyes still locked forward. I nodded tightly.
He rolled down both the passenger and driver windows as I crawled onto the floorboard, wrapping my arms over my head as if it would do me any good if we crashed. Broken arms, broken skull, it didn’t matter. If Gunner was hurt, I was fucked.
I felt the Rover decelerate at the same time that the roar of the Humvee accelerating came through the open windows, and just like before, they hit us. Before I can even compute what was happening, we were spinning horizontally across the road. I slammed against the bottom of the dash, but managed to hold an arm up in time to brace myself.
True panic tried to set in as the Range Rover spun to a stop. I half-expected the Humvee to hit us in the side and end the whole chase, but with the stillness, nothing else came. Gunner waited until one of the Humvee passengers stepped out of the vehicle to make his move. All I heard before everything went wild was the slamming of one of the Humvee’s doors.
With Gunner seemingly beaten and forced to surrender, the Dark Hand Syndicate must have assumed he would roll over and give up easily. Instead, he waited for the perfect moment, and fired the gun that was on his hip.
Pop! Pop!echoed in the air behind us, the noise loud enough to make me want to cover my ears. There was yelling, and then the sensation of the Range Rover being thrown into drive and speeding down the road.
I climbed up just enough to see out the back window, spotting the Humvee tipped awkwardly forward, but Gunner yelled at me to get back down before the Syndicate gathered their wits again and started firing on the Rover. Luckily, the protections held up, and nothing penetrated the outside of it.
We hauled ass for another few miles before Gunner gave me the go ahead to climb back into the seat, but my hands shook too hard to work the seat belt. Finally, once it clicked into place, I collapsed backwards, adrenaline already starting to ripple through me.
“We’re okay,” Gunner assured me, even if he didn’t sound so sure himself. “We’re okay.”
“They really want to kill us,” I said thinly. “I can’t live my entire life like this. My heart can’t take it.”
He wanted to say something, I could see it in his eyes, but what was there to say? We weren’t any closer to finding the artifact than we were yesterday, and this made it clear that the Syndicate was amping up its efforts by the hour. The window to find the statue and return it was closing rapidly, and once it was completely closed, there was almost nothing that could stand between the Syndicate taking me.
Gunner couldn’t be at my side for the rest of his life. He had his own family, a thriving business, and a life of his own. The fact that he had stayed with me 24/7 was already incredible, but if we couldn’t pull it together and get this mystery solved, there would be no more hiding out and waiting for the other shoe to drop. It would just be over, and I would have to pay the price for Trevor’s crimes.
We arrived back at the hotel after having spent the rest of the drive in complete silence. The crash from all the adrenaline leaving my system was enough to make me doze off for some of the time and I was groggy when Gunner shook me gently awake.
“We shouldn’t spend a lot of time outdoors for the rest of the night if we can avoid it,” he said, offering me a helping hand out of the car and walking almost uncomfortably close as we entered the building.
I could tell there weren’t going to be chips and margaritas by the pool tonight. If the failure of searching the house wasn’t heartbreaking enough, the murder attempt was definitely the nail in the coffin of today being somehow positive. How many of these days were in my future?
I wanted to crawl right between the sheets and shut the world out, but I never got to clean up after my run, so I reluctantly dragged myself to the shower. The only silver lining was that I had brought my own bath things, and the familiar scents of my soaps and shampoos helped to undo some of the tension that was coursing through my bones. Being clean often gives me a new outlook when I’m feeling overly negative, but today … this situation with the Anubis statue … this was no run-of-the mill funk that I was in. A shower wasn’t going to cure me, but at least it left me feeling a little less like the world was about to end.
Gunner was seated, to my surprise, on the edge of my bed, looking haggard and exhausted. He patted the area next to him, and while I was not sure it was the best idea, I took the seat, our legs almost close enough to touch.
He sniffed the air. “Peaches?”
I smiled tiredly. “My favorite body wash.”
“Ah.” He hesitated. “Rachel, listen. I want to apologize for not getting us out of that situation fast enough. Had I been more on my toes, maybe I could have avoided them all together. I miscalculated.”
I shook my head emphatically. “Stop. You got us out of a crazy situation unscathedagain.I didn’t even know people like you existed, Gunner. You’re like an action hero or something.”
“Then why did you look so hopeless?” he asked, and I knew it was a rare moment of vulnerability.
“Because that’s how I feel. But not about you,” I lowered my voice. “Never about you.”
He swallowed, both of us ignoring the million unsaid things between us. “What can I do to help you?”
I wanted to tell him that he’d already done so much, and that there wasn’t anything else I could possibly want from him, but it would have been a lie. Because there was something I wanted that I hadn’t had in a long time, possibly because I hadn’t trusted anyone enough to ask. Now, though, I thought I might.
In a small voice, I asked, “Do you think you could just hold me for a little while?”
He made a choked sound suspiciously full of emotion, but didn’t give me anything else verbally. Instead, his immense arm wrapped around my shoulders, and pulled me into his body, as he embraced me fully. He was warm, heat rolling off his body like a forge, and with him all around me, I allowed myself to finally relax.
I don’t know when I started to cry, or when I moved from sitting beside him to sitting in his lap, but Gunner held me the entire time, letting me vent my hopelessness, fear, frustration, and anger wordlessly. I didn’t know if I could give this up once everything reached its inevitable conclusion … didn’t know if I could give him up, this incredible man. But I supposed we’d cross that bridge when we came to it.
Chapter Nineteen
“So, are we going to talk about it?”
