Joe closed his eyes, his head hurting. How had Holbrook managed to set up the frame so quickly? “I can explain-”
“Don’t call me here again.” Riley hung up on him.
Joe stared at the phone, dumbfounded. What the hell was going on? He knew Riley. Had known him his whole life. There was no way he would have bought any story about Joe being a cop killer.
The phone to the police station was already being monitored, Joe realized. Riley had forced him off the line before they could finish a direct trace.
It would buy them a little time, although whoever was trying to discover their whereabouts would eventually follow their tracks to the Shamrock Motel. With luck, it wouldn’t happen until they were already headed west to Boise and the relative anonymity of the bigger city.
But Joe couldn’t risk calling Riley or his office again. He was effectively cut off from all the people he could trust.
He and Jane were on their own.
“Jane?” He looked around the empty motel room. The door to the bathroom was closed.
She’d been in there a long time, he realized. Too long. Pushing to his feet, he crossed to the door. “Jane?” he called, his gut tightening with alarm. Had she been hurt in the ambush and hidden it from him? Had she climbed out the bathroom window and run away?
He heard soft snuffling sounds inside, which relieved him on one count but scared him on another. He tried the door handle. It was unlocked.
“Jane, I’m coming in.” He pushed the door open.
Jane looked up at him from the floor, where she sat huddled on a towel between the tub and the toilet. She’d stripped off her clothes and thrown them in the tub, leaving her shivering in her underwear. Tears reddened her eyes and stained her face. “I didn’t want you to see me like this,” she said, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand.
He crouched in front of her, wincing as his injured side protested. “Like what? Human?”
She managed a watery laugh before her expression fell. Her lips trembled and fresh tears spilled from her eyes. “I’m so tired of having other people’s blood all over me.”
“I know.” He thumbed away her tears, cupping her cheek in his palm. “Tell you what. Let’s get you under the covers and warmed up, and I’ll see what I can do about getting the blood out of your clothes before morning.”
She let him pull her to her feet. As he started to turn away, she lifted her hand to his face, her palm rasping against his beard stubble. “You’re feeling a little feverish.”
“We’ll have to find some ibuprofen in the morning before we head to Boise.”
Her eyes glittered with pride. “No, we won’t.” She picked up something sitting on the edge of the sink and put it in his hand. It was a small, clear, resealable plastic bag full of pills. “Ibuprofen and your antibiotics. I had them in the pocket of my jeans.”
“Smart girl.” He took out one of each and dry-swallowed them, then tucked the bag in the pocket of his own jeans. He pulled a relatively clean-looking towel from the rack by the tub and wrapped it around Jane. “Let’s get you into bed.”
“I bet you say that to all the pathetic, sniveling girls,” she murmured as they left the bathroom.
He chuckled, but deep down, a ribbon of pain threaded through his heart. She sounded so much like the Sandra he remembered, the wounded, beautiful creature who’d turned his life upside down at a time when he hadn’t believed he could ever care about a woman again. She’d gotten under his skin so easily it was frightening, with her combination of vulnerability and steely strength. She was doing it again, chipping away at his armor piece by piece, and he didn’t know what to do to stop it.
He didn’t even know if he wanted to anymore.
“NINETY-FOUR DOLLARS and seventy-eight cents.” Jane slid the last penny into the pile in front of her and looked at Joe with a sinking heart. “We need more cash.”
He nodded. “I think I can get us a ride to Boise with a trucker at the truck stop up the road. But when we get there, we’re going to have to find an ATM and get some more cash.”
“You can’t do that! They’ll be looking for you.”
“I know.” He scooped up the money and put it back in his wallet. “But they’ll be expecting us to end up in Boise anyway, right? We can use that to our advantage.” He settled back against the headboard, pressing his hand against his left side as if he was in pain.
She scooted up the bed to sit beside him, reaching for his shirt to check the wound. “Is it still bleeding?”
He let her look, lifting his arm and settling it over her shoulders. A shudder of pure, feminine awareness rippled through her, but she forced herself to concentrate on his injury.
The bandage she’d put in place back at the cabin hours ago had held, but blood had seeped through to the surface. “I wish we had some way to change the bandage, but there’s nothing sterile in this place.”
“There’s a shop at the truck stop. I noticed it when we passed. We can probably pick up a few things there,” he said, his breath gently hitting her ear.
She lifted her head and found his face inches from hers. The air between them crackled with tension. His arm felt heavy on her shoulders, his fingers curling around her upper arm and pulling her closer.
Heat washed over her, swamping her with yearning. But as she felt herself leaning toward him, a flash of memory pushed through her desire-fogged brain. The angry undercover cop, his face red and his eyes dark with satisfaction.
She pulled back, sliding away from his arm. “We should go to Reno, Nevada.”
THE BUS TRIP from Boise to Reno took over twenty hours. Despite the discomfort from his wounded side, Joe had settled down to sleep an hour out of Boise, suggesting she do the same. They’d gotten very little sleep in the past forty-eight hours, and they didn’t know what would await them in Nevada.
But Jane remained wide-awake, even as they crossed into Utah several hours later. Despite the whirlwind of activity that had started with catching a ride with a big-rig trucker from the Lucky 21 Truck Stop and ended with a mad dash to catch the bus to Reno, Jane couldn’t settle down so easily.
They’d hit the ground running in Boise, searching out a couple of different cash machines so Joe could max out the cash advances on his credit card. He’d also used a credit card to book them two one-way tickets to Portland, Oregon, to throw people who might be tracking his credit-card purchases off their trail.
They’d used some of the five thousand dollars in cash at a nearby drugstore and another cheap motel, where they’d changed their appearances-a buzz cut for Joe and red hair dye for Jane. They’d picked up cheap backpacks and some supplies and clothing at a discount store near the bus station, using another couple of hundred dollars from their cash supply. By 10:30 a.m. they’d bought two one-way tickets to Reno, also with cash, and boarded the bus for the long, winding trip to Nevada.
Even though she was exhausted, Jane couldn’t stop worrying about what waited for her in Reno. For all she knew, she’d been there just once, gotten arrested, and that was the end of it. There was a part of her that wanted to find nothing in Nevada to link her to her past. Every instinct she had was screaming for her to run away and put her past-whatever it might be-behind her.
But her past wasn’t going to leave her alone. Clint Holbrook, whoever he had been to her, wasn’t going away.
He’d called her his wife. But she didn’t feel like his wife. She felt no sense of connection to him, only a deep, grasping fear and a fast-growing hatred for all he’d done to hurt the people she cared about.
She glanced at Joe sleeping beside her. Without the Stetson to hide his new buzz cut, he looked more like a soldier returning from a hard war than a cowboy cop.
He also looked pale and a little thin. They hadn’t eaten much over the past couple of days, and the infection, though proving mild enough for the amoxicillin to handle, had taken a toll on him. She hated waking him when they reached Salt Lake City, but they had to transfer buses. She shook his shoulder, trying to be gentle, but he started awake, his eyes wild with the surge of adrenaline.
He relaxed a bit as he took in their surroundings. “We’re in Salt Lake already?”
She nodded. “We have a long layover. How about we get something to eat?”
They joined the throng of travelers exiting the bus at the Salt Lake City station, Joe keeping her close by draping his arm over her shoulders. They’d agreed on a cover story for their travels-newlyweds on an economy
