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He hadn’t judged her. Not the harsh way she judged herself. Neither had Angelina. They’d treated Cate tenderly, lovingly, but with a matter-of-factness that allowed her to retain that mental disassociation from her past. As if those things had happened to someone else. Not to her.
Now that she was aware of her surroundings, Cate realized she could barely breathe beneath the blanket. It was hot, stuffy, smothering. She was also aware of the steady rumble and vibration caused by the engine and the SUV’s wheels as they ate up the miles. Putting distance between themselves and the men who’d tried to kill her. Vishenko’s men. She had no doubt about that.
The SUV slowed. Then veered to the right. Then stopped. Cate heard the driver’s door open and close, but she didn’t move. Didn’t speak.
Suddenly the side door opened. “Sorry,” a deep voice said above her as the blanket was abruptly removed. “Why didn’t you say something?”
Strong yet gentle hands helped Cate rise and come out of the SUV to stand next to it, and for a moment the world swung dizzyingly around her as she regained her equilibrium. Then she steadied and was able to focus on the man in front of her.
He looked so much like Alec Jones that he could be his twin brother. But there were differences, and though Cate couldn’t have said exactly what those differences were, she knew in an instant this man wasn’t her cousin’s husband. He was tall and broad-shouldered, just as Alec was, with a muscular compactness that spoke of a man who kept himself in fighting trim. Close-cropped auburn hair, also just like Alec. And soft brown eyes. Is it his eyes that are different? she wondered distractedly. Not the color, no. But the expression in them. An expression that told her plain as words he found her attractive. Man-woman attractive. Alec had never looked at her that way. Alec had known she never wanted any man to look at her that way...ever again.
But there was something else in this man’s expression that bothered her even more. Gentleness notwithstanding, Cate knew he’d made a snap judgment about her...and found her wanting. It wasn’t obvious from his manner, but she had a sixth sense about these things.
“Who are you?” she asked abruptly. “You’re not Alec.”
“Liam. Liam Jones. Alec’s my brother.”
She glanced around now, taking in their surroundings. They were in a rest stop on the highway. Not deserted, but not overly crowded, either. There were no other cars in the parking area, but there were a couple of tractor-trailer trucks on the other side of the divider. “Why have we stopped here?”
He smiled ruefully, and Cate caught her breath. That smile changed his whole face from pleasantly masculine to something extraordinary. “You were so quiet I forgot you were under the blanket in the back,” he said in a deep voice that sounded like Alec’s in a way, but was also different somehow. “When I remembered, I was kicking myself for not letting you out sooner. I stopped the first chance I had.”
His hand went to brush back her tousled hair—a perfectly natural response under the circumstances—but Cate shied away. Then despised herself as a coward when the smile faded from Liam’s face.
“Sorry,” he said again, but there was a watchfulness in his eyes now. A guarded expression she couldn’t read. Not exactly. But she knew he hadn’t missed her reaction to his innocent gesture. His gaze dropped from her face to her dress and then to her arm, and when she looked down she realized the blood had already dried. Not her blood, of course. The blood of the men who’d risked their lives protecting her. Men like this man.
She didn’t know how she knew Liam was a bodyguard, too. There was just something about him. She had only vague, disjointed memories of their flight from the courthouse—she’d already entered that escapist fugue state almost the moment the first shots were fired, the moment the two US Marshals had thrown themselves on top of her to shield her with their bodies. But Liam had carried a gun, she remembered that now. And he would have used it, she remembered that, too. Had he already used it? Was that how the machine guns targeting her had been silenced?
“Did you kill them?” The question popped out before she could stop it.
He obviously knew to whom she was referring. “I killed one of them,” he said quietly. “Alec got the other one. But there could have been others around—backup killers—there was no way to know. So Alec told me to get you out of there.”
She culled her memory, trying to recall the frenzied voices around her during and after the attack. Then she said slowly, “‘She dies, this case dies, too.’ That was Alec, yes?”
