She arched an eyebrow at him. “Pop. The. Hood.”
“Why?”
“I did grow up on a farm. This is a Jeep CJ-8 Scrambler. I have an idea what’s wrong with it.”
They faced off for several seconds then he made a sound she interpreted as tolerating her fantasy of having any idea what to do. He got out and opened the hood, laying it back on the windshield, then climbed behind the wheel again.
She jumped out before he could say a word about her shoeless feet, but damn, the ground was cold and her socks were getting wet. She stomped her feet while she felt around until she found the butterfly valve and covered it with her palm, shouting, “Try it now.”
The engine rolled a couple times, then caught with a growl of power. He must have pulled the choke out. The motor ran steadily with a high pitch.
Hunter appeared next to her. “What’d you do?”
“Covered the butterfly valve.” She stepped back while he closed and secured the hood. “The butterfly valve won’t close all the way when it’s cold, which affects the fuel-to-air mixture—”
He scooped her off her feet before she could finish explaining.
“I can walk four steps,” she complained.
Dropping her on the seat, he drew her legs around to face him and pulled her socks off. “I’ll give you a towel in a minute you can wrap your feet with.”
“I’m not one of your fragile playmates, Hunter.”
He pushed her legs inside, turning her toward the dash, but she still faced him. When he lifted his head, the interior lights picked up the creases at his eyes.
She had no idea what he’d been doing in the past twenty-four hours, but she doubted sleeping had been involved.
Before he could move away, she caught his arm.
He was eye-level with her. “What?”
The sharp tone didn’t make her jump this time. She’d figured out this man would not harm her. He may irritate the hell out of her at times, but he would not hurt her. “Thanks for holding me.”
“You’re welcome. Truck’ll be warm soon.” He rattled that off quickly, clearly not wanting to put this on any personal level.
Why did he turn into a grouchy beast? To keep her off balance or intimidate her into following orders? Maybe if he realized he was wasting his time, he’d warm up to the point where she could find some middle ground he’d meet her on so that she could convince him to take her back to be with her mother.
“You know what?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “You don’t scare me anymore.”
“If you had a lick of survival sense you’d rethink that statement.”
“All that posturing doesn’t work on me.” She smiled at getting under his skin with that one. “And I’m not buying any of your baloney about having met me before.”
He didn’t say anything at first, but she could see him calculating something.
She probably should have stopped there, but she wanted him to know she wasn’t going to just fold and follow his rules. “I’d have remembered at least kissing you… if kissing you was memorable. Then again, you’re really attractive, almost too good looking. You might not even like girls—”
Hunter leaned in, cupped her face, and kissed her.
His mouth fit the man, hard and hot.
He liked females and she could see why they would like him.
She considered pushing him away for a nanosecond, just on general principles, to let him know he couldn’t do as he pleased when it came to her, then realized something. He wasn’t serious about the kiss.
Just letting her know he was in control.
That she had better toe the line when he said so.
Hunter didn’t like being told he’d lost his edge over her. Thought he was being sly, huh?
She’d fix that. Abbie lifted her hands to his shoulders and slid them up his neck and into his hair. She leaned into the kiss, opening her lips to sweep her tongue into his mouth.
He hesitated for a heartbeat, just enough to confirm she’d surprised him. His hands moved around her hips, his fingers molding to her body when he reached up to clasp her waist and pull her to him.
She wrapped her arms around his broad shoulders, holding on in the middle of a torrential kiss he took control of, demanding more. His fingers slid up her neck, behind her ear, driving into her hair.
At some point he’d turned her into his arms. She tucked her legs closer, twisting against the urgent heat building low. Just when things were getting so hot she was sure ice was melting on the truck, he broke the kiss, muttering something low in unintelligible words.
Like he’d cursed at himself.
She didn’t say a thing, couldn’t quite catch her breath.
When he released her she was shifted back onto the seat. He reached over and snapped her seat belt buckle. “That answer your questions?”
“I suppose.” She shouldn’t antagonize him further, but if he thought that kiss had put her off, he’d used the wrong ploy. Whether he wanted to admit it or not, that hadn’t been about teaching her a lesson. He wanted to kiss her.
Damn if that didn’t make her feel hot.
Hunter placed an arm against the top of the cab and slipped two fingers under her chin, tilting her face to his. “Never let your guard down around anyone.”
“Even you?”
“What do you think?”
“I’ll remember that if I find myself in a compromising position again.”
“If ?”
The snot. She refused to let him goad her over what just happened. She was an adult, capable of kissing men whenever she wanted. Not that the opportunity presented itself often. Hunter was not getting away with insinuating she was prone to being in situations like this or naïve. “You’re still going to have to convince me that we met or cop to checking out my body while I was unconscious. I want to know that I can trust you to tell me the truth.”
“We met years ago.” He sounded positive.
“Where? At the beach?”
“What do I get if I do convince you?”
“I’m not making any more deals with you.”
“Then you don’t really want to know.”
Yes, she did, because a weird sense of “maybe” still poked at her. “You are so annoying—”
“So I’m told.”
“Can’t you just tell me where we met?”
“Nothing’s free in this world.” His lips twitched, another almost smile. His tone dropped a level to sensuous. “What’re you going to give me if I prove we had a memorable meeting?”
“I don’t have anything to trade.”
He quirked an eyebrow.
“I am not trading sex and I never begged you for sex.”
“That’s not what I said.” He stepped back and shut her door.
When Hunter climbed in on the other side, he handed her a towel for her feet and a blanket, both from behind her seat.
She wasn’t done with him. “Yes, you did say that.”
He revved the engine. “No, I said you begged me to take you home with me, but you did beg me to sleep with you, too. So what’s it going to be? I won’t play if the stakes aren’t high enough.”
She had a feeling that said a lot about Hunter.
There was no way she begged him to sleep with her and no way he could prove it. And she knew—without a doubt—they had never met like that before. Not even amnesia would have wiped out spending a night with Hunter. “Tell you what. If you can convince me I said that to you, I will sleep with you. But you only get one chance and have to prove to me we met.” And I mean sleep, not anything else, just as a safety valve. “But if you don’t convince me, I get to go home tomorrow and see my mother.”
She’d never gambled in her life but desperately wanted to get back to her mother. Based on logical analysis, this bet was loaded in her favor. Another woman might have had so many trysts she’d have to hesitate. There was something to be said for a mostly celibate life.
She crossed her arms and smiled at him.
His thumb bumped the steering wheel slowly while he thought. The silence dragged out. Victory stirred in her heart.
Now she’d find out if he backed his bets with honesty.
“We met six years ago in a bar,” he said, giving her a second to think on that before he continued. “You came in wearing a red dress that screamed ‘do me’ and tried to drink me under the table. Later that night, you told me you sneak Godiva chocolates you keep hidden in the refrigerator and you had a crush on your tenth-grade math teacher, before you begged me to take you home.” He angled back into his seat and put the truck into gear. “There’s no road out of here. Sit back and be quiet so I can concentrate or we’ll end up rolling down a ravine.”
She yanked the blanket up and stared straight ahead.
He could still scare her.
She’d never told anyone, not even her sisters, about her crush on her math teacher.
Holy crap. Hunter was that buff shaggy guy she’d met in a bar? He was the nak*d stranger she’d spent a night with and had lusted after for six years?
And here she’d thought being shot at had been the scariest thing to happen in her life.
What the hell was she going to do now?
Chapter Sixteen
Dr. Don Tatum paced in the dark, pausing long enough to glance out his living room windows, where Chicago’s last snow clung to spots the sun didn’t reach during the day. He squinted, checking the street.
No dangerous figures moved around, but his neighborhood was supposed to be quiet during the first hours of a new day.
Standing inside this much glass gave him a nervous life-in-a-fishbowl feeling. Not good for high blood pressure.
He’d loved this house from the first minute he walked in, happy with all the windows for natural light and to have his entire living space on one level. He’d wanted simple and convenient.
No stairs to carry his bulk up and down.
No attic to shove junk in that should be thrown away.
No basement with leaks.
He’d gladly trade the entire house for a safe room in a basement right now. He smoothed his hand over the bald spot on the back of his head and it came back covered in perspiration. The heat was down low since his girls weren’t at home. Sweat pooled under the arm of the blue cotton shirt he still wore, but now it was untucked from his dress pants.
Streetlight glow from outside stretched from the palladium window over to the blue sofa, and fingered the middle of the rosewood coffee table.
The light gave him some measure of security, a defense against buried childhood fears of the infamous bogeyman, but Don worried about a real bogeyman.
He glanced at the square sandwich-size panel on the wall. Two tiny red LED lights peeked through the dark, assuring him the security system was on and ready should an intruder try to enter.
His two little girls were safe with his sister, who thought he was having the house exterminated. She lived in Alabama on a farm with no mailbox, no visitors. Good place to hide his children. She’d been the one person he could turn to after his wife died three months ago.
Tears stung his eyes. He missed his wife every day. Missed his best friend and only true love.
What would she think of him now?
If she was watching over them, she had to know he was doing whatever it took to keep their two girls safe.
Don had no idea why this strange guy had targeted him.
He had never crossed the law. Never drank or gambled, not even a lottery ticket. Why was this guy threatening him?
Don lifted a trembling hand to cover his mouth.
What about Abbie Blanton? She was Meredith’s daughter. Didn’t Abbie’s safety matter?
Maybe she was okay. The guy hadn’t said—
A floor creak spiked the silence.
Don stopped pacing next to the coffee table and swung his head to check the security panel.
No red lights. No green lights. No lights period.
“Hello, Dr. Don.” The dark figure he’d watched for outside walked across the middle of the living room toward Don, wearing all black, a skull’s face covering the stocking-cap front.
“How’d you get in here?” Don fought the urge to scream for help. He couldn’t. He’d been warned.
Calm down. His children couldn’t lose another parent.
“Let’s not waste time on ridiculous questions, shall we?”
Don detected a hint of a British accent in the man’s speech. He didn’t care where this wacko was from. “Who are you?”
“Jackson, like I told you last time we met.”
“I don’t understand any of this.” Don had never been in any financial trouble or had an enemy he knew of, no reason to be blackmailed into this if not for his children’s welfare. This guy hadn’t asked him to do anything really bad, just convince Abbie to go to the fund-raiser and talk to Gwen Wentworth. Don thought the guy was helping at first, supplying information about the Kore Women’s Center Abbie’s mother had visited and come home sick from.
Then this guy’s tone had changed. He’d warned Don to tell Abbie his exact words, to give her details he bullet-pointed verbally about the Kore center and make her believe Don was speaking from personal knowledge.
Don hadn’t seen any real danger in telling Abbie and even thought with Gwen’s help they might figure out what was wrong with Abbie’s mother.
But why had this wacko Jackson come to him and not Abbie?
Don bumped the coffee table with the back of his leg. He froze, nowhere to go. “I did what you said. I told Abbie exactly what you told me to say. She went to the party. She called on her way and asked a couple more questions so I know she went.”
“Yes, she did. I saw her at the Wentworth house.”
Relief charged through Don. He put a hand to his heart. “Thank God. So you’ll leave me alone now?”
“I promise to never come back here again.”
“Good. Good. I promise not to say a word, I swear it.” Don wiped a line of sweat off his forehead.