The Survivor

“I’ve already eaten, too,” he told her. “But I think we need to plot our route a little more thoroughly, so why don’t we stop for a quick cup of coffee and work that out?”

She nodded. “Sure. That sounds good.”

He found a coffeehouse with an outside eating area for Honey, and Bess stayed with the dog while he went in and ordered for them. The air had a bit of a chill to it, but thankfully not so cold as to be unpleasant. Bess had tied Honey’s leash to a chair and was busy petting the dog, who naturally had her head angled toward the store until he came out.

“She doesn’t like it when she can’t see you,” Bess remarked when he returned with their drinks and a Danish apiece. He handed Bess her spiced apple cider and took a chair opposite her. Honey immediately came to sit at his feet, resting her chin against his knee. He patted her head and rubbed her velvety ears. “She’s awfully devoted. How long have you had her?”

“About five months,” Lex told her.

She took a sip of her drink and he noticed she’d donned a kelly green hat, a matching scarf and fingerless gloves. Impossibly, she looked even more gorgeous. “So she wasn’t a puppy when you got her?”

“No. According to the vet she’s about a year and a half.” He tore off a piece of apple tart and put it in his mouth. “What about you? What’s a Severus?” he asked, remembering her instructions to Elsie.

She laughed softly. “A Severus is a black cat and he’s the unofficial boss of my house.”

“Unofficial boss?”

“I’m the official one,” she confided. “I just don’t tell him that.”

“And this is Severus, as in Severus Snape, the much-vilified and hated Potions Master at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry?”

She gasped delightedly. “A hobby etymologist and you know your Harry Potter.”

He’d read the books while he’d been recovering. It was the first time in years that he’d had so much time to simply be still, and he’d heard the books were filled with a lot of literary references and mythology. He’d enjoyed every minute of them.

“They were incredible,” he said. But nice as this was, it wasn’t getting them any closer to their goal. He snagged the maps on the table and picked up a red ink pen. “In order to make sure we know exactly where we’re going and where we are in relation to where he might be, I think we need to mark everything off on the map and then go from there.”

She pulled an atlas from her bag and opened it to Georgia. “You mean like this?” she asked.

Lex was genuinely beginning to wonder exactly why he was here. “Yes, like that exactly,” he said, shooting her a forced smile.

Evidently catching the slight snarl behind his grin, she chuckled. “I’m sorry,” she said, her green eyes twinkling with humor. “I did this last night. As I understood it, they were only bringing you up to speed this morning and I thought it might be helpful.”

It was helpful and he had no reason to be irritated or feel like she’d lopped his balls off and handed them to him, but he did. This was his first assignment and so far she’d done all the work. It was time for him to start earning his money.

“It is helpful,” he said. He snagged the book and flipped through it. She’d marked up all the surrounding states, as well, everywhere she’d been. It was very thorough, very meticulous and he couldn’t have done a better job himself. Still, he hadn’t done it, and that was the problem.

He looked up at her and released a pent-up breath. “Let me ask you something, Bess.”

“Sure.”

“Are you a good shot?”

She frowned, seemingly confused. “You mean with a gun?”

“Yes.”

She sucked in a breath, released it and shrugged. “Not particularly,” she demurred.

Good, he thought. Then maybe he’d be of some actual use on this assignment. Provided he got to shoot at someone. Preferably not himself, though intuition told him he was going to need some form of distraction to put him out of his misery—that of the sexual variety—before this was over.

SHE HADN’T REALLY LIED, Bess thought. She wasn’t a good shot—she was an excellent shot. Good implied mediocre, and she was far from just good. After her mother had committed suicide, Bess had been utterly terrified of guns. She’d go into a fit of terror if a car backfired, if she heard a fake gunshot on television. Simply seeing one sent her into a panic.

Given the way she’d reacted, one would have thought that she’d been in the house when her mother had taken her own life, but that wasn’t the case. Her mother, bereaved and out of her right mind as she was, had at least had the forethought and kindness to send Bess over to a friend’s to play. She’d attached a note to the front door to prevent anyone from letting her child into the house so that Bess wouldn’t be the one to find her. A second note for Bess, with a simple “I’m sorry” at the end of it for her, was tucked behind a picture of the three of them together, Bess and her mom and dad, one of the few she had from her childhood.

At any rate, convinced that the only thing that was going to get her over her fear of guns was learning to handle one herself, her grandfather had taken her out for target practice over and over again and proved to be delighted when she’d been a natural. Regardless of what kind of piece he put in her hand, be it a pistol or a rifle, she always came within an inch of the bull’s eye.

Her gaze slid to Lex, who was going over the maps, evidently plotting their route. Somehow she didn’t think it was a good idea to tell him that she was an excellent marksman. He was already feeling relatively useless, if she had her guess.

But just because she could plot a map and fire a gun didn’t mean she’d actually have the guts to shoot someone if it came down to it. She’d like to think that she could do it to defend her own life or someone else’s, but she’d never been in that situation.

As a former Ranger she knew he had, and she also knew that she couldn’t be in better hands.

But she didn’t need to think about being in his hands, because that ignited a thought process that took her imagination to depraved places it had no business going and made her panties feel like they’d been dipped in steam.

His eyes weren’t just blue, as she’d noted before. They were a bizarre mix of blue and green with a darker ring of lapis around the edges. They were utterly arresting, the shade managing to be both bright and dark, like the sky in a Maxfield Parrish painting, so perfect it had earned the name “Parrish Blue.”

She’d known the minute she’d looked at him that she was going to be in trouble, that she was going to want him with an intensity far beyond anything in her experience. On a physical level, he simply did it for her. He was big and hard and exuded confidence without being cocky, and there was an irreverence in his gaze, in the shape of that droll, incredibly carnal mouth, that was particularly attractive.

Something about the line of his jaw against his neck when he turned his head just so made her long to slip her fingers along that bone, to trace the shell of his ear. Everything about him was masculine and beautiful, even the way his hair lay against his scalp. She watched his fingers trace a path along the map and her belly gave a clench. His hands were large and veined and the strength in them was palpable. She imagined them kneading her flesh and released a sigh deep enough to draw his attention.

She felt a blush race to her hairline and took another sip of her cider.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

Only with her misguided libido, Bess thought. She blinked innocently. “No.”

His lips twitched with humor.

“Are you laughing at me?” she asked, waiting to watch the way his mouth moved when he talked. It was sensual and mesmerizing.

“No,” he said. “Not at you.”

“But something was funny?”

He dropped the pen in his hand and leaned back and regarded her more thoroughly. That lazy scrutiny made her stomach flutter and warm. “Yes, actually. I was thinking you must have learned that little innocent look you just gave me from Elsie because it was the same exact blinking incomprehension that she gave you when you told her not to call unless it was important.”

She popped a bite of Danish into her mouth and laughed. “It’s possible that I picked it up from her,” she said. “I’ve known her most of my life.”

“She’s quite a character,” he said, which she thought was more charitable than saying she was crazy as a shit-house rat, which was what most everyone else thought about her. Including Bess, if she were honest, but it only added to Elsie’s charm.

“She is,” Bess said with a nod. “She has the sight, you know.”

“The what?”

“She likes to think she’s psychic,” Bess clarified, and wondered again what had spooked him so much when Elsie had taken his hand. Something had, she was sure. And for all his irreverent nonchalance, there was an unexplained shadow in his gaze—almost haunted-looking—that made her wonder about his story. Everyone, in her experience, had a story and she found herself unbelievably intrigued by his.

It was his turn to blink and she chuckled again. “Seems like you’re a quick study on the look, as well,” she told him, wrapping her hands around her drink to keep them warm.

A rustle of leaves swept along the sidewalk and pots of mums bloomed in burgundy and yellow batches around the little patio. She loved fall, Bess thought. It was her favorite season, when the harvest peaked and Mother Nature, proud of her accomplishment, settled in and took a much-needed rest. Every wind felt like her sigh, and Bess huddled more snugly into her jacket.

“She rattled you, didn’t she?” Bess prodded, knowing he more than likely wouldn’t answer, but curious all the same.

He bit the inside of his cheek. “You mean when she practically slithered across the counter toward me and lowered her voice into that alarmingly breathy purr?”

She felt her own lips twitch. “Elsie likes younger men.”

He grinned and quirked a brow. “Do they typically like her?”

She chuckled again, unable to help herself. “She’s managed to date a few younger men.”

“And by younger, you still mean they are senior citizens?”

“Yes,” she said, snickering.

“Aha,” he said. “I thought so. I’m less than half her age.” He gave a shudder. “I almost feel like I need a bath.”

Laughing quietly, Bess felt her eyes water. “Oh, come on,” she said. “It can’t have been as bad as that.”

“It was,” he deadpanned. “Because I thought she was you.”

Her sides were aching. “Yes, I know,” she wheezed.

His eyes widened in outrage. “You know? You knew?” He gasped. “You were watching,” he accused. “You saw the whole damned thing, didn’t you?”

She nodded, unable to respond.

“That’s… That’s…evil,” he said, staring at her with a new sort of appreciation in his eyes.

She merely shrugged. “I saw you when you got out of the car,” she said. “I might have corrected you, but you were in such a hurry and then—” she pressed her lips together to keep from grinning again “—and then it was just too funny not to watch.”

He shook his head, continued to stare at her, then sketched a makeshift bow. “Glad to provide your entertainment, milady. Let me know when I can do it again.”

Ooo-la-la, Bess thought as the last words rolled off that incredibly smooth tongue. She had a feeling he could provide her with hours and hours of hot, sweaty, wonderfully wicked entertainment if she’d let him.

And judging by the heat scorching her veins, she just might before this trip was through.

4

AFTER AN HOUR IN BESS’S company, Lex was beginning to wonder if he might have been better off protecting his virtue from Elsie than essentially being trapped in the car with a woman he’d wanted to lick from head to toe the first moment he’d set eyes on her.

Licking, he was relatively sure, wasn’t in his job description, and considering that he was already feeling like he wasn’t doing the damned thing properly—that she’d beaten him to a plan, as it were—he didn’t need to further complicate matters by making a play for his…partner. He couldn’t think of anything else to call her, really. She wasn’t his client or his target or even his accomplice.

And more importantly, she was Brian Payne’s friend. Brian had mentioned that he’d known Bess for years, that he’d been buying things from her for a long time and that her case was special. Though he hadn’t said as much, Lex imagined that Bess was either trading him out inventory for services or she was getting a vastly reduced rate. He didn’t have any idea what kind of money she pulled in through her store selling her ju—stuff, he mentally corrected, remembering Payne’s warning about her dislike of the word, but he couldn’t imagine that it was a huge income.

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