Midnight Man (Midnight #1)(36)

She’d never seen driving like that before, where the driver was an extension of the vehicle. John’s gaze went from the street ahead, to the rear view mirror to the side mirror, in regular sweeps. She had to brace herself against the door as he raced through the streets, taking corners in tight turns.

“Is anyone following us?” Suzanne was proud that her voice was steady.

“No, we’re clear,” John replied, eyes searching the road ahead. His deep voice was remote, dispassionate. He could have been reporting on the weather—it’s stopped raining now, instead of no killers are following us.

He had slowed down a little, driving steadily toward the outskirts of the city, finally passing the city limits. There were no streetlights this far from town and his face was illuminated only by the lights on the dashboard. They highlighted the rigid line of the jaw, the brutal slash of cheekbones, the strong brow.

He’d killed two men tonight. He’d done it defending her, but he had two deaths on his hands, nonetheless. He was a warrior, it was part of what he did. Suzanne had no idea how many other men he’d killed, but something about the lethal air he carried with him like an aura told her that there had been others.

She was alone in a car with a man who could kill. Who had killed. Who—if her reading of his vigilance was correct—was perfectly prepared to kill again. She had only the faintest glimmerings of who and what he was, but he was something so far outside her normal life he might as well have been a Martian who had landed in a space ship.

Yet as removed from her as he was, he was the person she’d instinctively turned to in trouble. It was as if the sex they’d had—fast and furious and rough—had somehow forged a bond that was bone deep.

Modern-day sex was supposed to be light-hearted, with no consequences if you took precautions, though she winced at the thought that they hadn’t taken precautions. Still, this was the twenty-first century, and two unattached adults should have been able to have sex casually. Casual, mutually pleasing sex.

Sex with John had been nothing at all like that. It had been earth shattering, so intense she thought she would faint while climaxing. She’d barely slept since then and had hardly eaten. That wasn’t at all what modern sex was about. Modern sex was about flirting and keeping it cool.

Not something so primitive it seemed to have come from the dawn of mankind, where men clubbed women and dragged them to their lair, then protected them with bared teeth and claws.

Some primitive instinct told her that in calling John to come to her aid, she’d crossed a dangerous, invisible line. She’d given herself over to his care. She’d given herself over to him.

Something important had changed, some turning point in her life had come. She was too shocked, too scared to follow through the ramifications of everything that had happened, but one thing was clear. She was now in John Huntington’s hands. In the hands of a man she knew nothing about, save that he could kill. Easily and without remorse.

Suzanne looked at his hard profile and shivered.

A few seconds later, he pulled to the side of the road.

They had been traveling down it for over half an hour. It was deserted and unfamiliar. The last car they passed had been fifteen minutes ago. John got out, bent briefly over the front fender and then the back fender. In a minute or two, he was back behind the wheel, folding a soft beige blanket around her.

“There you go,” he said. The deep voice was low, almost gentle. Suzanne stared into his dark fathomless eyes for a long moment. Holding her gaze, he wiped her cheek with a clean handkerchief he took out of his pocket. It came away stained with blood. With a start of surprise, she realized that she’d been cut. By a shard spinning away from the wall, propelled by the force of the bullet. She hadn’t felt it up until now, probably shock had dulled her senses, but now her cheek stung.

Wonderful. If she could feel the sting of pain, it meant she was alive.

“Thank you,” she whispered, meaning more than for the blanket and the handkerchief. He nodded and started the engine. The heat was on full blast, but she huddled gratefully in the blanket, chilled to the bone from shock and sleeplessness. They drove on, endlessly.

Suzanne was quiet, lulled by the dark empty road. They started climbing and she stirred in the darkness.

“Where are we going?” she asked quietly.

John looked at her briefly then turned his attention back to the road.

“Where no one will ever find you,” he said.





CHAPTER EIGHT


Suzanne awoke with a jolt, dry-mouthed and dazed, as the Yukon took the last of a series of hairpin turns and rocked to a stop. She sat up, banging her elbow against the door, disoriented, pushing her hair out of her eyes. She had no idea how long she’d dozed or even what time it was. Her watch was back in the bedroom, together with her lost serenity and the broken bits of what had once been her life.

All gone.

She was too tired to think coherently, but she didn’t need logic to tell her that her entire existence had been ripped to shreds. Her home—her sanctuary, her refuge—was no longer safe. She’d had to abandon it in the middle of the night. Someone had come in the heart of the night to kill her and she had no idea who, and no idea why.

Until she knew, until she could be sure the nameless, faceless threat was gone, there was no going back.

Her life was shattered, wiped out in a few moments. There was no past, no future. However hard she tried, she couldn’t see beyond the next five minutes. There was only the here and the now.