A Drive-By Wedding

A tad arrogant, perhaps, to think that he could protect Sasha better than an entire unit of cops, but it was his experience that the fewer people in on a plan, the fewer places for leaks to pop up. And since he was currently the acting Dutch boy with his finger jammed into the dike, that made him Sasha’s best chance for survival.

The way it should have made him Marcy’s. He forced the thought aside. Now if only he hadn’t gone and screwed things up by choosing the wrong car to hop into.

Focus, babe, he commanded himself. Don’t let it get away from you. Probably ought to be glad the damned woman hadn’t chambered a round before she’d drawn down on him. Take it slow and easy. Don’t spook her. Gotta check the kid.

He held up his hands, offering appeasement. “Be careful with that thing, okay? I just want to get up and see if the kid’s all right.”

“He’s still in the bag on the back seat,” she said, as though he were an idiot to think otherwise. “Get out of the car and spread it across the hood. I’ll make sure you haven’t done him any permanent damage.”

Spread it across the hood? Jeth’s eyebrows crooked, and a startled grin trickled through him. He controlled the almost amusement before it reached his face. God almighty Moses, what had he gotten himself into? Sheesh, she probably carried a badge and handcuffs, too. And wouldn’t that just be super.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“The person with the gun gets to say what happens next,” she said coolly. “That’s me.”

He stared at her, disbelieving.

She shrugged, less a movement than an attitude. “You made the rules. I’m following them.” Then, when he still didn’t move, she motioned with her chin, not taking her eyes off Jeth. “Go on, back out that side.” She slid her thumb up to make sure the safety was off the nine millimeter. “Move,” she ordered softly, calmly, in a tone he’d have been foolish to ignore. “I’ve got a kid to look at.”

Oh, yeah, she was dead serious—or he was about to be. His gut was right on about this one—too late to do him any good, true, but right on nonetheless. She was afraid, but not so much that the fear had stopped her from thinking—or acting. Which meant he was deep in it now. Better come up with a way to make this work—for her sake as well as his, and to his and Sasha’s advantage, and fast, because if she found a way to take off with the kid but without him and the guys he was running from found out and caught up with her… Well, he didn’t want to think what that could mean.

His brain was full of the vivid images of what that could mean. Not nice people, these guys he’d rescued Sasha from. Cannibals and headhunters had better manners. So even did the men who’d killed Marcy.

“Look,” he said, sliding onto the seat and reaching behind him for the door handle. “I know what this looks like, but it isn’t what it seems. Well, it is, but there’s a reason for it. A good one.”

She looked at him over the top of the car as he rose out of it at the same time she reached inside and flipped the driver’s seat forward. “You’ve got a good reason for car jacking, kidnapping and baby snatching? Don’t tell me, let me guess. Ex-wife, ex-girlfriend, current girlfriend doesn’t want your child but has full custody and hates you enough not to let you see him. Or she wants your child, has full custody and won’t let you see him. Or she has full custody but is abusive and you snatched the baby for his own good. Or you’re gay and you didn’t find out until after your marriage ended and your ex won’t give you access—”

Startled once again, Jeth snorted. “I’m not gay.”

He thought he heard her mutter good before she said, “Fine, you’re straight. Pick one of the other scenarios, then.”

“Scenarios?” he asked, incredulous. Who talked like that? “How much TV do you watch?” Only FBI agents and people who watched too many FBI shows on TV, maybe a few corporate executives with delusions of danger talked like that. And he had the distinct feeling she wasn’t among either of the latter. Judas, she couldn’t be with the bureau, could she?

He could almost feel the grave opening at his feet ready to welcome him.

“How ’bout I pick E as in none of the above?” he asked.

“How ’bout you spread your legs, stretch out across the hood of my car facedown and lace your hands behind your head?” she returned.

Oh, yeah, Jeth thought, reluctantly doing as he was told. Deep in it and getting deeper all the time. Much as he hated to do it, he was going to have to tell her the truth.

He only hoped she’d believe him.

The car hood was hot against his chest, stuck to his skin in itchy patches full of sweat. Even minute movement was painful, but move he had to if he wanted to see what she was doing. Carefully he raised his head. She sat in the back seat, Sasha spread limply across her lap, and stared at Jeth through the windshield, coldly furious. Fear circulated through him. Something more was wrong here than the circumstances.

Ripping himself upright, he swung around the Saturn’s open driver-side door without thinking about the weapon she’d taken from him. It lay in quick pieces, bullets scattered in the well of the passenger floor, clip tossed empty on the back seat beside her, gun wide-open and clearly harmless, wedged neatly under her foot where he obviously wasn’t going to get at it easily even if he wanted to.

He didn’t.

“What’s wrong?”

He stooped in front of her, automatically reaching to touch Sasha’s throat, feel for the pulse. She slapped his hand away and gathered the toddler protectively against her.

“What the hell have you done to him?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Jeth assured her—or tried to. Tried to assure himself, too. “He was like this when I took him. It’s why I took him.”

“He smells bad and he’s too small,” she said, paying no attention. “What is he, two? He doesn’t weigh anything. They sleep hard at this age, but not like this. He’s malnourished, he’s probably sick and he needs help.” She aimed a swift but awkward kick at Jeth that he blocked with a forearm. Damn, she was going to be a handful, and he was stuck with her now. Her eyes were bright; anger and something more painful, more accusing—and, unaccountably, disappointed. It was an odd thing to feel, but he didn’t want to disappoint her. “Why aren’t you helping him?”

“I am helping him—I did help him. I got him out of hell. I found you. You’re going to help me help him.” The hair on the back of his neck stood on end: a caution he knew to heed. They weren’t far enough away from the house he’d removed Sasha from to stop for any length of time. He felt naked and vulnerable, weaponless thanks to his stupidity and her, and now he had more than a tiny child to protect; he had her. A school parking lot in a populated neighborhood was not the place for long explanations—especially not this explanation.

“Look,” he said, and she did. Looked him straight in the eye and waited for him to lie convincingly to her. He swallowed. Who needed falsehood when the truth would suffice? “Look,” he repeated, “I wish I could let you go, but I can’t. I wish I didn’t need your help but I do. I wish you’d turned out to be somebody else, some other kind of person—” what was he saying? He didn’t know what kind of person she was “—but you know what they say about wishes.”

“If wishes were kisses all frogs would be princes,” she said. “Or were you thinking of the one where all beggars would ride?”

Animosity was palpable. So was the sudden and out-of-the-blue desire to find out if he could become a prince if she kissed him. He wanted to taste her, that was sure.

The hair on his arms fuzzed to attention. God, he was an idiot. If he kept on letting her make his mind wander, they were dead.

He tightened his jaw. Whatever it took, no kids or strangely fascinating women died on his watch ever again. Especially not because of him. He drew a breath and focused his whole attention on his…captive.

“We have to get out of here,” he said. He reached out to stroke Sasha’s head. “I promise you I don’t mean you or him any harm. I want to get this little guy whatever help he needs, but it has to be far away from here. If we stay here discussing what’s right or wrong about what I’ve done so far this morning, we put him and ourselves at more risk than I can tell you. That’s the truth.”

She had no reason to believe him, but she studied him seriously nevertheless; held herself perfectly still and assessed him with those strangely colored eyes. It was almost a cop’s stare, flat and unyielding, guaranteed to make the guilty look away first. Well, he might be guilty as hell, but he’d be damned if he looked away.

Time passed, a minute, two, before she dropped her chin in the merest fraction of a nod. Then she inclined her head toward the keys still sitting in the ignition.

“You drive,” she said.

He took great pains to belt her and the little boy securely into the rear seat before he grabbed the padded duffel bag, pulled a black T-shirt out of it and mopped himself off with it before sliding it on. Then he climbed into the car, repositioned the driver’s seat to fit his height and did as Allyn suggested. Gravel spit out from underneath the tires when they pulled out of the parking lot, punctuating the urgency with which he drove.

The sensation of power shifting and balancing uncomfortably between them was almost overwhelming.

Allyn did her best not to look at him, not to watch his face in the mirror. The accidental touches when he’d wrapped the shoulder belt around her had been wholly impersonal but nonetheless a challenge to ignore. She liked the smell of him, the taste of him, the muskiness that lay heavy in her lungs. The very thought scared her to death.

He scared her to death.

Of course, being afraid of him only made sense, but there was no way on earth she planned to let him know it.

Reluctantly, Allyn turned her attention to the child in her arms. She’d held a lot of little ones in her lifetime; she was a fair bit older than most of her cousins, and then there were Becky’s kids. All in all, in a family as closely knit as her mother’s, it added up to experience. Experience told her that this youngster was not at all in the shape he should be.

He was dressed in a toddler’s dirty undershirt and a pair of cotton training pants, underneath which he wore a soggy disposable diaper. His hair was blond, skin white to the point of translucence, threaded with the blue and lavender of veins; the light pulse at his throat was visible. Aside from the occasional twitch of eyelids, the pulse was the only movement she could detect in him. And while outside it was hot, he felt cold and clammy to touch; instinctively she wanted to bundle him tight, to warm him. She twisted as best she could to reach behind her for the blanket she kept on the car’s rear window shelf.

“What are you doing?” her captor queried sharply.

“He’s cold.” She met his gaze in the rearview mirror, noted the color of his eyes for the first time: midnight blue. Concerned, but about as genial as a hawk’s. “I’m wrapping him up.”

“Good.” Then, almost apologetically, “There weren’t any blankets where he was. There wasn’t much of anything. I’m not even sure he’s worn clean clothes in the past couple of weeks. Or had a bath. Or eaten much, or done anything kids do. I couldn’t do anything for him where he was. I had to take him.”

Again he met her glance in the mirror. Truth and something more were there where she didn’t want to see either of them. She dropped her gaze first, stroked the child’s hair.

“Do you really mean to help him?” she asked finally, quietly.

“Yes.” Succinct, ferocious. A man who’d found himself in an untenable situation he’d no control over and who’d decided to change the circumstances to appease his conscience—even if it meant forcing his ends to justify his means.

And that included abducting Allyn and stealing her car.

She glanced at him again, considered the simplicity of his yes, the shape the child was in. And for the second time in her life made an abrupt and rash decision—and never mind that she’d currently been in the process of regretting the first quick decision she’d ever made. She decided to throw caution to the winds for the sake of a child. Doing so didn’t mean rashly trusting the guy driving her car, after all. It simply involved making sure that the baby got cleaned up, got help, got home—or got someplace that would make him a good home. In which case, if they were going to spend any time together—if she was going to help him help the toddler—she’d need a name for both of them.

“Okay.” For the second time she offered the man in the front seat a clipped nod. “I won’t do this for you, but I’ll help him. Understood?”

Allyn thought she saw him swallow a grin of relief. “Got it.”

“Don’t get cocky,” she advised him. “Nobody’s home free.”

Astounded, he glanced over his shoulder at her. “Don’t get cocky?” he asked. “Who are you? Who the hell do you think planned this expedition? Cocky, my left little toe. I get cocky, all three of us get killed.”

This could involve all three of them getting killed? Allyn refused to gulp. “As long as we understand each other,” she said—with a great deal more serenity than she felt. But heck, he didn’t need to know that. “And by the way?”

“What?”

“I don’t think you planned this expedition at all well. In fact, I think your planning stinks. The shape this baby is in stinks. Literally. We need to get him cleaned up and find out what’s wrong with him.”

“I saw an opportunity, I grabbed it,” he told her—a trifle huffily, truth be known. “I intend to get Sasha cleaned up and to a doctor as soon as we’re out of the city and I can find someone who’ll accept cash for silence.” He paused. Then, “I suppose you’d have planned things better?”

“Well, I wouldn’t offer cash for silence, that’s for sure,” she said tartly. “Says you’ve got something to hide. No.” She shook her head. “I’d go to someone I trusted and—”

“No.” Refusal was flat and unnegotiable. “Last time I did that my baby sister was killed.”

Killed? Startled, she looked at the mirror, trying to see his face. His gaze remained resolutely on the road in front of them, telling her everything and nothing. “Oh, so you thought kidnapping a perfect stranger would be safer for both your emotional psyche and the stranger?” Her hold on the baby—Sasha, was that what he’d said?—tightened involuntarily, and for the first time a thin cry erupted from the child. She looked at him; his eyes remained closed, but there was some movement in the thin frame, the flop of an arm, the fisting of a hand. She loosened her grip slightly and cuddled him closer, bundled the blanket more securely around him. “I don’t think so.”

“Neither do I.” Denial was savage. “That’s why I have the gun and I’m not letting either you or Sasha out of my sight. I need to figure out who to trust who won’t either get killed or turn on me, and how to let you go safely.”

Silence was abrupt and complete. At the fringes of their concentration on each other and the moment, cracks in the pavement thudded beneath the car’s tires; intermittent traffic whooshed and receded. Allyn broke the silence first.

“I’m sorry about your sister,” she said.

“Me, too,” he agreed tightly. “So,” he asked when the moment had passed. “Any other better ideas than the ones I’ve got?”

Sarcasm fairly dripped from the question. But there were things he didn’t know about her, either. Like the story behind the beginning of her mother’s relationship with her stepfather. She thought of how her mother and Gabriel had pretended to be lovers, pretended to know each other well in order to hide him in plain sight.

About how pretense had become reality.

She shook the thought away. Or rather, she almost shook it away. Something in it didn’t want to leave. “We should probably exchange names,” she suggested. “Make it look like we know each other. Then maybe you should tell me who’s out to kill you—and why, don’t leave that out—and therefore by default me and…did you call him Sasha?”

The grin came this time before he could stop it, wry—and a mite sardonic. “Yeah, I did. That’s what his mother called him when she sold him to her dealer. I was there. Jeth Levoie. Special Investigator for the Tucson prosecutor’s office.”

“Tucson, Arizona?”

“Yeah. You want some ID?”

She ignored the irony in favor of keeping her wits from deserting her. Daughters’ lives were not supposed to parallel their mothers’, they really weren’t. But here was hers apparently paralleling the single deciding event that had happened seven years ago in Alice’s right down to the finding a man at the side of the road and the you-just-happenedto-be-there-and-I’m-from-out-of-town-and-need-your-help coincidence of it. “Please.”

Muttering something about her being a piece of work, Jeth rummaged around in his bag until he found the flat leather case that contained both his picture identification and his badge and tossed it to her. Allyn inspected it carefully, trying not to let her face betray her while her heart thudded hard against her ribs and her breath went short. Unless it was an elaborate fake—and really, since she’d had her nose stuck in her books and lab work for the best parts of the past seven years, how would she know?—he really was Jeth Levoie out of the Tucson prosecutor’s office.

She flipped the case into the front seat. “Allyn Meyers,” she said. “You’re a long way out of your jurisdiction, Jeth Levoie.”

“Hopefully not for long,” he said grimly. “And anyway—” he slanted a glance over his shoulder at her, giving her another glimpse of a profile she’d have really enjoyed looking at and meeting, getting to know and perhaps flaunting at Becky under other circumstances “—what do you know about jurisdictions?”

She made a face. The subject was at least as distasteful to her as being kidnapped by him. Or rather, actually, as often as she’d heard Gabriel fume over the subject of “co-operative efforts between the jurisdictions,” it was more disagreeable than being abducted by Jeth Levoie. “More than enough to fill a thimble, but not much more. Enough to know that Tucson and Baltimore are a long way apart, and I don’t just mean geographically. So what are you doing here?”

“Exchange program. Nobody knows me here. Same with the guy they sent to Nogales to work undercover in my place down there. You know anything about the Russian Mafia?”

“No.” Thank God. Or maybe not, since it appeared she was about to learn more than she ever wanted to about it.

“What about drug cartels?”

Allyn felt herself blanch. “This is about drug cartels?”

Jeth nodded unhappily. “Yeah, indirectly. Mostly it’s about territory. The Colombians have it, the Russians want it. There’s a war on. Sasha’s mama stuck him in the middle of it. Her ex is with the Russians. Courts gave her full custody in the divorce, but Daddy wants his heir. Her addiction of choice is Colombian cocaine. Her dealer found out who Sasha’s daddy was, sold the information to his source, who instructed him to offer Mama a deal. Sasha in exchange for clearing up the debt from her habit and a few days’ worth of highs. She took it. Sasha’s a hostage. His daddy’s supposed to trade for him, but everything goes kerflooey, and my guys tell me to get Sasha out. Only then I’m told they’ll be the ones exchanging Sasha to the highest bidder for information. I tell ’em no way I can live with that, I’ve seen the shape the kid’s in, so they pull me.”

“But you didn’t stay pulled,” Allyn said.

“No.”

Something warm and unexpected fuzzed through Allyn. Maybe the body matched other things she’d wanted to see in him, after all. “Good for you.”

He snorted. “If you say so.”

“Hey,” she told him flatly, “I was brought up by practically the Good Samaritan of all Good Samaritans and her sisters and mother and other relatives. I don’t think a whole lot of the way you involved me in this, but I can appreciate the sentiment big time. Accept a compliment when you get one. I bet it doesn’t happen often. Now when are we going to stop and take care of Sasha?”

A chuckle, dry and unwilling, spilled from Jeth. “You don’t quit, do you?”

“Stubbornness is, like, one of my worst features,” Allyn agreed tongue-in-cheek, reverting to the Valley speak practiced in one of her favorite movies. If Sasha was all right, she might actually discover she was enjoying herself—except for Jeth Levoie’s assertion of danger waiting in the wings, of course. “Now when are we stopping? I think he’s starting to wake up. When he does he’s probably not going to be happy to be wet and cold. If he’s sick… I don’t know if you’ve ever traveled with a cranky two-year-old before, but I have. It’s not pleasant.”

“Was it your two-year-old?” Jeth wasn’t sure why it made a difference—except from the standpoint that he didn’t want to deprive another child of its mother. But it was also more than that. It was that ringless left hand niggling uncomfortably at the back of his mind.

Whether this was the time and place or not.

“Not mine, no. Single, never married, no kids.” Then wickedly, because in her estimation he deserved the dig, “Just lots of relatives who’re expecting me to show up in Kentucky sometime tomorrow or the next day. You?”

He heard the denial with a sort of peculiar relief that fastened in his mind on many fronts: no child awaited her return, and neither did a husband. That made her fair game. Reaction to the part about relatives awaiting her arrival was delayed, made his gut wrench when he heard it. No way could he let her go tomorrow or the next day. The only place he felt certain Sasha would be safe was deep in the Grand Canyon reservation where Jeth had grown up, and where tourists needed to schedule visits well in advance and where there was only one real access open to non-natives. It was a place where those who didn’t belong were noticed at once, and where tribal members were friendly but closemouthed and didn’t encourage contact between themselves and the outside world. All of which meant that he had over twenty-three hundred miles to travel before he could even begin to feel Sasha might be safe, and public transport of any sort was out because it was too damned easy to trace. A car, a family off on a summer vacation, that was the way he’d intended to play this, and paying cash all the way. But if she had family that’d be looking for her…

Nuts. He didn’t even have a car seat for Sasha, nor much in the way of clothing for either himself or the baby. Grabbing opportunities when they arose didn’t leave a lot of time for the kind of planning traveling cross-country with a toddler required. He needed this blasted woman he’d stuck himself with—a trace of something soft and elusive swirled around his senses, and he felt himself tighten suddenly—in more ways than he cared to admit.

A lot more ways.

He couldn’t go with her to meet her family. He knew nothing about her, and they sure as hell wouldn’t be expecting their darling Allyn to turn up with a strange man and a sick baby in tow. Not unless they hadn’t seen her in a while, which he doubted, because that wasn’t the way his luck was running today.

But he couldn’t exactly just avoid the issue, either, now, could he?

Damn. You’re tired, but no falling apart. Sort it out, he ordered himself. Take it one thing at a time. You’ve bought a few hours, at least, before anybody figures anything out. Stop for food, clothes and a phone book with a list of free clinics. Make the rest of your plans from there.

He drew a breath. “There any place we can get clothes, food, diapers and a car seat all in one stop?” he asked.

Allyn rocked the beginning-to-whimper Sasha and shook her head. “This is your temporary stomping grounds. I’m just passing through.”

“Pig whistles,” he muttered.

Allyn swallowed the beginnings of a grin. She didn’t think she’d ever heard that particular expression before. “Excuse me?”

“Had to pick a damned out-of-towner. No use whatsoever.”

“I didn’t ask to be picked, you know.”

He grimaced. “True.”