onto the floorboard. “Go!” she rasped.
Another gunshot rang out. Jack heard the screech of metal on metal and realized the last shot had hit the truck. He swallowed a profanity and pressed the gas pedal to the floor.
“Left or right?” he asked seconds later, forced to brake when they reached the T intersection with the winding road that had brought him there from the main highway.
“Left,” she said after the briefest of hesitations.
Right would take them to the highway, he knew. He wondered where she was taking them.
He watched the rearview mirror as he barreled along the narrow two-lane road that appeared to hug the curvy contours of Deception Lake. Riley and Hannah had taken him fishing there earlier that morning, he realized, though probably on a different part of the lake, since nothing about this road or these woods seemed familiar to him.
He spared a quick look at Mara. “Where are you injured?”
“My pride,” she answered in a hard, flat tone.
“You were shot.”
“My duffel took the bullet. It knocked me down and winded me, but I’m not shot.”
He wasn’t sure he believed her. In fact, he was beginning to wonder if he could believe a single thing she’d said to him since they ran into each other at the diner a few hours earlier.
“Who was shooting at us?”
“Us?” She looked at him from beneath the tangled fringe of her auburn bangs, wide-eyed and rattled.
“I’m pretty sure there’s a bullet hole in my truck, so yeah. Us.”
“I don’t know.”
She was lying. At least, she wasn’t telling the whole truth. Maybe she didn’t know exactly who’d ambushed her in her cabin or who had started taking potshots at them from the woods.
But she had a theory, one she had no intention of sharing. He could hear the secret hiding in her voice.
Fine. He could table his curiosity a little longer, while they got as far away from the gun-wielding maniac in the woods. But as soon as they found a safe place to stop and regroup, he was going to ask a lot more questions.
And she was damn well going to answer them.
* * *
BY THE TIME they reached the point where the lakefront road ended in a T intersection with another highway, the rain that had been threatening all afternoon hit with a vengeance, pelting the truck and limiting visibility to a few dozen yards. The highway at this end of the lakefront road was the main artery leading from Purgatory to the little mountain hamlet of Poe Creek about fifteen miles north.
Like Purgatory, Poe Creek had never managed to become a tourist destination as so many little towns in the Smokies had, but its close proximity to the mountains as well as a main road to Douglas Lake ensured that there were a handful of hotels and motels in the area, including several small, cheap places where a few bucks could get the night clerk to look the other way when you rented a room with cash and no identification.
She directed Jack to head north, shifting her duffel bag to her lap and setting the backpack on the floorboard at her feet. She took time to buckle her seat belt—the last thing she needed was the Tennessee Highway Patrol to flag them down for breaking the state’s seat-belt law. “Can you belt yourself while driving?” she asked.
Jack shot her an incredulous look. “A little busy trying to see ten feet in front of the truck at the moment.”
“Hand me the buckle and I’ll do it for you.” She knew, in the greater scheme of things, seat-belt safety laws were way down on the list of things she needed to worry about at the moment, but doing something—anything—that would restore a sense of control was a good thing in her book.
Jack passed the seat belt across his lap and shoulder, and she took the buckle he held out to her, pulling it down into place and connecting it with the latch at his hip. Her fingers brushed his thigh as she finished, making the skin of her knuckles tingle where they’d touched the denim-clad warmth of his muscular leg.
She pulled her hand back into her lap and grabbed the duffel bag, inspecting the hole that had ripped through one end of the sturdy canvas.
“Are you sure you weren’t hit?” Jack shot another worried glance her way.
“Positive.” She made herself look away from his dark eyes, a little unnerved by the attention. She’d spent most of the past few years of her life cultivating an aura of invisibility, making herself as unobtrusive and unremarkable as possible—a complete turnaround from her first twenty-three years of life, when all she’d craved was attention and she’d gone out of her way to find spectacular, outrageous ways to make it happen.
She’d learned the hard way that the wrong kind of attention could be downright deadly.
“Where are we going?” Jack asked.
She didn’t like the way he used the word we, as if he thought he was any part of what she had planned. For all she knew, he was involved in this whole mess she’d managed to land herself in the middle of. How could she be sure that he just happened to be there, picking up his truck, at the moment she tried to make her escape and ran into another camouflage-clad man on a mission, this time carrying a rifle?
She couldn’t be sure it was the same man who’d accosted her on the porch of her cabin. Neither could she be certain he wasn’t.
In short, she didn’t know who was after her. Or why.
Though the “why” part of the equation was pretty limited. Either it was the project she’d been working on for Alexander Quinn that had drawn unwanted attention to her, or it was something from her past rising to bite her again. Either way, she had to get as far away from Purgatory as she could, as fast as she could.
And she had to do it flying under the radar, which meant the last thing she needed slowing her down was a cowboy with no idea who she was or what kind of unholy mess he was swaggering into.
“Not going to answer?” he asked, sounding incredulous.
“Just go until I tell you to stop.”
The look in his dark eyes should have given her plenty of warning, but she still found herself slamming forward into her seat belt as he whipped the truck onto the shoulder of the road and put it into Park.
“I realize that I owe you money and an apology for the things I did, but that goes only so far.” Jack spoke in a low, twangy growl that reminded her of a week she’d spent in Wyoming when she was just eighteen, partying with frat boys who’d taken her along for their spring break trip out West. She hadn’t even been attending the university where frat boys had been students; they’d picked her up at the little diner where she’d been working part-time as a waitress and brought her along for the ride.
That she hadn’t been left raped or dead in Jackson was a miracle; sure, the frat boys had tired of her quickly when she wasn’t willing to be shared around the group, but at least they hadn’t forced her to do anything. They’d just abandoned her to find her own way back to school in
