“Oh, dear.” I dry swallowed, managed to keep my jaw from dropping by holding it up with my finger. “I should never have crossed my heart and hoped to die.”
He continued with an attractive urgency, “I’d better drive. The odds are already against us.”
He wasn’t that attractive. Outrage gathered my scattered senses from the four corners of my brain. “You’ll drive this car when—”
“Look, love.” Without warning, he was in my space, his hands on my shoulders, his face so close I could see the smooth texture of his skin and smell him, not his after-shave. “There’s no time. If they come after us…we go or we die.”
Now, when it was too late, I felt the undercurrent beneath his yummy, civilized surface. The yuppie had a dark side and I was in his way. Fear spiked faster than lust. I went from hot to cold in the space of a single heartbeat.
“Please don’t hurt me.” I hated how begging I sounded, but at least he quit gripping my shoulders. One hand drifted up to cup my cheek. Heat bloomed where he touched, sending impossible comfort to battle fear.
“Sweetheart, I’m trying to save you.”
I probed his eyes looking for sincerity. He did sincere well. I wanted, no, I needed to believe him. If his dark side was gonna mow me down, I didn’t want to see it coming.
“What do you want me to do?” My dry whisper sounded distant and a bit hollow. His smile was relieved and as dangerous as bullets to one in my vulnerable state. That dang dimple. I didn’t whimper, but only because my throat was too dry.
“If you’ll stand up, I’ll slide under you—”
Slide? He couldn’t be planning to scale the gear shift again?
“You’re kidding. Aren’t you?” His brows arched in an unspoken query. It put me on the same page he was. The one where neither of us trusted the other one enough to get out of the car.
“I’ll just—” I pointed up, I looked up, then reached up and hooked my fingers over the open edge of the sunroof. His hands, warm and strong, went around my waist, providing extra boost.
“Can you pull your legs clear?” he asked.
I tried to concentrate, but it wasn’t easy. It was hard to do before the feel of his hands on my waist bleed warmth that was more than warm into me. I managed to work my legs free of the steering wheel. With only minimal skin loss, I got one foot on the armrest attached to the door, the other on lower edge of the steering wheel and pulled until my head emerged into crisp night air. It helped clear my head a little, but I had other problems. Gravity fought back with an insistent summons that was hard to ignore. Sweaty palms weren’t helping either.
I peered past myself to ask, “Can you get under me?”
I heard a shrill woof and looked toward the sound.
An excitable dust mop dog was doing a “job” on the corner lawn. At the other end of his leash was an old man staring at me with shocked pleasure. I smiled at him, trying to look like it was normal to be half out of a sunroof while a man crawled into the seat under me. My hands squeaked against the unyielding surface of the wet car roof. I dug in. I just needed to hold on a little longer—
Gravity threw in with wet and unyielding. I didn’t want to, but it was no use. Like Orpheus, I was descending. I caught my passenger just as he was mounting the gear shift.
I’ll never forget the sound he made.
We were embarrassingly and painfully tangled and when we got embarrassingly untangled I was kneeling in the seat, facing the rear of the car, looking back down the long length of street. Moving like an old man, he finished his descent into the driving position. I opened my mouth to apologize, saw a minivan careen around the corner in an ominous manner and turned the apology into a warning wail of dismay.
Warning wail appeared to be a language he understood. In a heartbeat, he shook off the blow to his male pride, put the car in gear and hit the gas. We accelerated with a squeal that left me open-mouthed—and suspended across the head rest.
Behind us the minivan miscreants opened fire. The bullets thudded into Rosemary’s car. Fear thudded into my heart. Why, oh why had I crossed my heart and hoped to die? I was so far up the creek, I should just beat myself to death with the paddle and be done with it. If the minivan shooter didn’t plug me, Rosemary would. With her glue gun.
We sped through the quiet neighborhood, the street lights blurring to a ribbon of gold in our wake. Corners were taken on two wheels.
I turned to protest his wanton car abuse, but when I looked at him protest dried up in my throat. My heart pounded with fright and a complicated longing to be someone daring enough to go with the moment—and with the man. I was the only component that didn’t fit. Questions rose, like tiny bubbles breaking on the surface of my mind. I even opened my mouth to ask him—
And snapped it closed again. In books and the movies, knowing what was going on was a Bad Thing. Of course, so was speeding through the suburbs at a million miles an hour. A straight stretch of road let him give me a quick, assessing glance. I turned myself face forward and pointedly buckled my seat belt.
“Look, Mr.—”
“Kapone. Kelvin Kapone.”
“Ca—” I swallowed dryly, “—pone?”
“Ka-pone,” he corrected, “with a ‘K.’ No relation to Al.”
I managed a weak laugh. “Of course not.”
Just because we were being chased through a subdivision by armed maniacs in a minivan was no reason to assume it was because his name was
