Undercover Memories. Alice Sharpe

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СКАЧАТЬ yelled.

      Sure. Pushing down on the gas pedal, she jammed the shift into Reverse. The car jerked backward. John looked mad enough to jump in front of the car. Let him.

      Instead, he raised his hand and she saw what she hadn’t noticed before. He was holding a gun.

      Merciful heavens. He was going to kill her! She shifted into forward and gunned the engine again, but the back end had apparently wound up in a ditch or something and the car wouldn’t go forward. The tires just spun uselessly in the muddy snow.

      She reached down and pushed the door lock button, still revving the engine and going nowhere fast.

      He was at her window. “Stop the car,” he demanded.

      The rearview mirror revealed blue smoke billowing out the tailpipe. There was no point in burning up her engine. She took her foot off the gas pedal.

      “Stop the car and get out,” he said. He didn’t raise the gun; he didn’t need to. He knew he’d won.

      She switched off the engine and pounded on the steering wheel, then opened the car door.

      He grabbed her arm and hauled her out. His powerful chest was as bruised and battered as his arms. “Get in the house,” he said.

      She walked through the snow, her feet in the wet socks freezing now. He was barefoot and gave no sign he even felt it.

      “This is the thanks I get for letting you have the bed?” she snarled as he closed the front door behind them.

      “You mean the swamp?” He ran a hand through his hair. “What happened, Paige? Why did you bolt?”

      So, what did she do? Inform him he was wanted for nearly killing a man? Might that not give him ideas? Her gaze strayed to the television. She hadn’t turned it off but the volume was so low she couldn’t hear it from ten feet away. The same reporter as before was back on the screen. They were replaying the same story.

      She looked away, but too late. She’d caught John’s attention, and he stepped behind her to see what she had been watching. His picture filled the screen, then faded away as an ad came on.

      John looked down at her, the gun by his side.

      “Why was my picture on television?”

      “You seriously beat a man,” she said. There was no point in not telling him. All he had to do was wait for the story to loop around again.

      “Tell me what you know.”

      She repeated the few details, pausing after announcing he was actually John Cinca, looking for some sign the name clicked with him. There wasn’t one. He made a brief comment about the coincidence of giving himself a pseudonym that was actually his real first name, but that was it.

      Next she told him he was a bodyguard living in a city two hundred miles away and that he’d rented a car that was still in the campground although probably impounded by now.

      As she spoke, he made a fist of his left hand and gazed at his knuckles as though searching for proof he couldn’t have beaten someone senseless. But his hands were not only large and powerful, they were covered with bruises and cuts. And the knots of muscles in his chest and upper arms that flexed when he moved were further proof that if motivated, he could easily inflict some serious harm.

      A shiver of fear snaked down Paige’s spine. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on his lean frame. Whoever he was, he kept himself fit.

      “So, you tried to leave because you realized you were in a small cabin with a would-be killer,” he said.

      “What would you have done?” she whispered.

      “Tried to leave.” He shook his head. “I obviously have a gun. Why would I beat someone up?”

      “I don’t know, John. Noise, maybe?”

      “Where did this happen?”

      “At the park on top of the bluff.”

      “I wonder how I ended up in the river. Wait, were there eyewitnesses?”

      “They didn’t mention any.”

      “Then they don’t know for sure I did it, right?”

      “I don’t think so. But they’re looking for you. It’s only a matter of time before they start checking out these cabins, you know.”

      He nodded in a distracted fashion.

      “What are you going to do?” she asked him.

      “Beats me.”

      “Well, for starters, could you maybe put the gun away?”

      He fiddled with it for a second, she assumed flicking on the safety. Then he looked into Paige’s eyes and offered her the gun.

      “What are you doing?”

      “You have to look out for yourself. If I’m capable of something like what you described—”

      “Then you could easily kill me with your bare hands,” she said, and then stepped back inside her mind and stared at herself a second. Was she crazy? The man had confronted her over the barrel of a gun just a few minutes ago. She took the weapon. It was the first time in her life she’d ever held a gun, and she was surprised at how heavy it was.

      She handed it back to him. “Take out the bullets.”

      He ejected what looked like a slender package of cigarettes. “It’s called a clip.”

      “Give me the clip, then, and you keep the gun.”

      He smiled at her.

      Okay, really, he had the sexy, glowering alpha male bit down to a T. In fact it seemed effortless. But when he smiled, he turned into a guy who probably had a perfectly normal life somewhere. A wife maybe, or a girlfriend. Children. A mortgage.

      Again, she took a mental step back. Had she just dismissed the fact that he had probably beaten a man to a pulp less than twenty-four hours before? No, but it was hard to believe it was true. Impossible, almost. He could just as easily have been another victim, or the injured man might have attacked him first.

      “Would you really have shot me?” she asked.

      “No,” he admitted. “I just grabbed the gun like it was a habit of some kind.”

      “There’s a first-aid kit in the kitchen. A couple of your wounds need bandaging. I’ll get it for you.” When she returned with the kit, he thanked her.

      “We both could use some coffee and food, and then I think we better get you to the police,” she said as she took off the coat and hooked it over the back of a chair.

      He’d looked cooperative until the last part. He shook his head. “No way.”

      “I’m putting on a pot of coffee. We’ll talk about it.”

      “You СКАЧАТЬ