Dangerous Curves Read online

  He paused at the door and listened. Except for the scream that still echoed in his head, he heard no unusual sounds. He eased the door open, wincing when it gave a protesting squeak. Annie’s room—Sam’s, now—was at the end of the hall around a blind corner. Moving quietly, Jake edged down the hall, his shadow cast on the walls by the night-lights Annie had a fondness for. He rounded the corner in a crouch, wishing for a gun or a baseball bat—something, anything to fend off this sudden sense of helplessness. But his gun was back in the bedroom and he didn’t know if he could use it even if he had it.

  Jake tripped over something and caught himself on the edge of the wall. Instead of the platoon of bad guys he’d imagined, Jake’s nemesis came in the form of one very large canine sprawled in front of Sam’s room, his nose pressed to the bottom of the door. Sniffing out danger, no doubt “Damn dog!”

  Fletcher looked up at him in the darkened hall, his sad-hound eyes beseeching in the glow of a night-light. He whined and Jake retracted his curse. The brave police dog was nothing more than a terrified scaredy-cat “Sorry, buddy. What’s going on in there?” In answer, Fletcher pressed his nose back to the bottom of the door, his ears pricking up as another wail ripped through the silence.

  Jake maneuvered around the animal and slowly opened the door. He could make out Sam, huddled up against the headboard. He turned on the light and approached the terrified woman. Her eyes were wide-open and wild looking, her hair mussed. She’d slept in the shirt she’d been wearing earlier, having tossed her jeans to the end of the bed. The sheets were twisted around her body and her hands fluttered like agitated seagulls around her head. The exposed skin of her neck and upper chest glistened with a sheen of perspiration.

  “Sam?” Jake crossed to the bed and sat down on the edge. She didn’t acknowledge him. “What’s wrong?”

  “Bugs,” she moaned, clutching the sheet to her chest. “Bugs!” The last was followed by a scream sure to wake the neighbors.

  Jake gently took her in his arms and rocked her, feeling the way her body trembled. The hallucinations had begun. “There aren’t any bugs, Sam. It’s the withdrawal. Hang tough.”

  “No! Don’t you see them? They’re everywhere! They’re all over me!” Her hands came up between them, batting at her imaginary tormenters.

  Jake turned her around in his arms, so that her back was pressed to his chest. He hauled her onto his lap and edged back on the bed until he sat leaning against the headboard. “There are no bugs, Sam.”

  She cried out again, her head jerking in fear and clipping him hard on the chin. “Make them go away! Make them go away!” She turned and burrowed her face into his chest, seeking refuge from the terrors of her mind.

  Jake shook her roughly, tasting blood on his lip. “Listen to me!” he yelled over her cries. “Listen! There aren’t any bugs! It’s in your head! Look, Sam, look!” He held the back of her neck and forced her to look up, keeping her steady when she tried to pull away. “See? No bugs.”

  She whimpered as she looked around the room, her erratic movements slowing. “Bugs,” she whispered expectantly.

  “No. No bugs. See? It’s a hallucination. It’s not real.”

  “Not real,” she repeated dully.

  “Right. Not real. It’s okay. It means you’re getting the drugs out of your system.”

  She shook all over, as if rejecting the nightmare. “I was hallucinating?” she asked in her own voice.

  Jake nodded against her hair. She smelled like the night-blooming jasmine that grew by the lake. Her body relaxed in increments against him and he felt the soft swell of her breasts under her shirt. Realizing he was still holding on to her, he let go. She didn’t seem in a hurry to move.

  “It’s the withdrawal. It’ll pass,” he said, blaming the huskiness of his voice on sleep.

  The violent tremors subsided. She turned in his lap, the movement bringing an involuntary groan to his lips. What the hell was wrong with him? He didn’t need this. He didn’t need to get involved in her problems.

  “Did I hurt you?” Her hand, still trembling slightly, came up to his jaw. The scrape of her nails against his stubble was an uncomfortably intimate sound. He snapped his head back, cracking it against the headboard.

  “Son of a—” he cursed, rubbing his scalp. “I’m fine. You can get off my lap now.”

  Color came into her pale cheeks. “Sorry,” she mumbled, sliding sideways onto the bed.

  She gathered the sheet around her like a child with a favorite blanket, protecting herself—from the nightmares and hallucinations, or from him? He wondered which was the lesser of the two evils. Determined to put some distance between them for his sanity’s sake, Jake stood and turned away. She’d shaken something loose inside him—something he’d kept tightly bound for a long time. Before he was halfway to the door, her voice called him back.

  “Jake?”

  He turned to her, trying to ignore the soft vulnerability in her eyes She had the tranquil, doe-eyed look of a satisfied woman Except he knew better. “Yeah?”

  “Uh—Could you, would you—”

  “What?” he asked, impatient to get out of the room, his jeans feeling a size too small all of a sudden.

  “I mean, I was wondering if you would stay with me,” she said, adding quickly, “Just until I fall asleep ”

  “In here?” Jake asked, hoping she hadn’t noticed how his voice cracked like an adolescent schoolboy’s.

  Snuggling down under the covers, Sam gave him a sleepy-eyed grin. “Yeah, in here.” She patted the space beside her. “Please? It’s a big bed.”

  “Not big enough,” he whispered under his breath, walking toward her beckoning hand like a man heading for the electric chair.

  Jake sat gingerly on the bed, resting his chin in his hands. His lip throbbed and he touched it, wincing. How in the hell had he gotten himself into this?

  “Aren’t you going to lie down?” Sam’s voice was husky, but one look at her told him it was sleep—not lust—that pulled at her. “Come on,” she said. “I don’t bite.”

  Stretching out on top of the sheets, Jake muttered, “But I might.” Fletcher approached the bed with a tinkle of metal dog tags and heaved a sigh as he stretched out on the floor next to Jake.

  “I know you’re a nice guy under that tough exterior.”

  Jake stared at the ceiling. “Yeah. You also said the drugs made you crazy.”

  “I’m not crazy.”

  “I know that.”

  He did know it. Whatever she was, it wasn’t crazy. He’d heard plenty of sob stories in his time—hundreds of innocent pleas from lowlife scum trying to avoid prosecution. But he’d also seen innocent people accused of crimes they hadn’t committed. It didn’t happen often, but it did happen. Wrong place, wrong time. Maybe that was the case with Sam. He’d like to believe that. Her voice swept over him, shaking him from the past.

  “Tell me something, Jake.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  He felt her shift beside him on the bed, turning so that she could look at him. He kept his eyes on the ceiling, tracking the faint fingers of light that wended their way through the room. Common sense told him to get out of the bed but it felt good to lie in the darkness with someone. With her. His gut tightened expectantly.

  “What do you do, now that you’re an ex-detective?”

  He exhaled a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “I run a charter service, piloting tourists down to the islands. I have a couple of partners who take care of things when I’m not around.”

  That reminded him. He’d have to tell Brian and Mac something. The truth was so bizarre that even he had a hard time accepting it.

  “Do you enjoy it? I mean, more than being a cop?”

  He thought about that. Being a cop had been his life for thirteen years. He’d felt like someone had cut off an arm or a leg when he’d turned in his shield. When Margo had served divorce papers on him a year earlier, it hadn’t hurt nearly as badly. But be
ing a pilot gave him the freedom and independence he craved. No more red tape. No bureaucracy. No unwritten codes.

  He’d wanted to get away from the stress of police work. Flying charters for tourists was about as far from being a cop as he could imagine. No one counted on him. He couldn’t let anyone down. Every day wasn’t a life-and-death adventure. The only one he had to look out for was himself. And he liked that just fine.

  “It’s different,” he said finally. “When you’re a cop everyone is a little afraid of you Even if they haven’t done anything wrong. You see it in their eyes, hear it in their voices. You feel like the enemy when you’ve made the vow to serve and to protect.”

  Sam watched the angular contours of Jake’s face as the shadows played across them. The husky tone of his voice matched the dawn—steel gray and uncompromising, but laced with golden tendrils of hope and promise. She hadn’t even known he was in the room while the hallucination had her under its power. It had been his voice—powerful, encouraging, utterly masculine—that had driven the demons away. His voice soothed her weary spirit.

  “But being a pilot, well, everybody likes you. Everyone wants to know you. Work is like going to a party.”

  “That doesn’t tell me if you like it better,” she persisted. She watched the emotions play across his face and resisted the urge to run her fingers through his dark hair. She sensed that this man didn’t give freely of himself and she wasn’t yet ready to break the spell of intimacy that wrapped around them like a warm cocoon.

  “I miss being a cop,” he said simply. “But it wasn’t in the cards, so I enjoy being a pilot. I like the freedom.”

  Freedom. It was a word she’d dreamed about for a month. It had taken on new meaning when the walls had closed in on her and someone was controlling every aspect of her life—what she ate, what she wore, when she slept. Freedom meant something to her now. But even being out from behind those hospital walls didn’t give her freedom. Someone still owned her soul and she wouldn’t be free until she found out who. And why.

  “You’d better go to sleep. We have to get out of here before they find us.”

  “Do you think they know where we are?” Her pulse picked up, destroying the calming effect Jake had had on her nerves.

  “Probably not. Not yet. I have a town house in Miami, they’d probably go there first, which is why we’re here.” He shifted, his arm barely brushing hers. “But whoever killed Greg had an inside connection to the police department. It’s only a matter of time before they track me down.”

  The words were practical, but their ominous tone made Sam shiver. They would find her. Whoever they were, they’d invested too much in keeping her quiet, keeping her hidden. They wouldn’t just let her get away. “Then what?” she whispered.

  “Then I figure out who is after you and why they’re dragging me into it.”

  He’d said that before, in the living room. She knew he had personal reasons for wanting to help her. But his voice and his hands had soothed her and somehow she knew he wouldn’t let her down. It was irrational, really, this need to trust him. Her mind argued that he’d tried to turn her in to the cops once already. But her heart tugged when she recognized the familiar ache of loneliness in his eyes, in his voice. He was all she had.

  “Jake?”

  “Yeah?” His voice had dropped an octave, sounding low and gruff.

  “Thanks.” She leaned in toward him, not giving herself time to hesitate, and gently kissed lips that were warm and pliable. It was a featherlight touch, hardly a kiss at all. She felt his breath on her cheek like a sultry tropical breeze and she trembled for a whole new reason. When he didn’t move, she whispered, “Jake?”

  He didn’t seem to hear her. His eyes were closed, his breathing even. She realized he was asleep. A moment later she realized something else.

  He snored.

  “Get up.”

  The voice came from a long distance away and Sam resisted it. She needed to sleep, dammit. When someone prodded her sharply in the ribs, she groaned and rolled onto her side, pulling the comforter over her head.

  “I said, it’s time to get up,” the voice spoke again.

  A more insistent prod—and the suffocating thickness of down—brought her out of her burrow. She sat up, running a hand through her hair and wincing as it snagged in the tangles. “What?”

  Jake stood by the bed, fully dressed in jeans and a white shirt that accentuated his tan. And his muscles. He had shaved and he smelled like soap and woodsy cologne. His dark hair was wet and tousled, curling slightly at his collar. In the bright morning light she could see that it was dark brown, not black, and shot through with deep russet highlights. She felt at a definite disadvantage as he towered over her, his muscular thighs and lean hips hugged by faded denim.

  “Come on. We’re burning daylight. Get a move on,” he said again, his hands on his hips. His dog—Fletcher, was it?—sat behind him, tongue lolling out of his mouth as his tail thumped the floor.

  Sam snapped a mock salute in Jake’s general direction. “Yes, sir.”

  “I want to get out of here in thirty minutes. Think you can manage that?”

  Rubbing the sleep from her eyes, Sam stretched. Every muscle in her body protested, feeling taut and bruised. She still had a sensation of light-headedness but the nausea seemed to have subsided for the tune being. “Sure. What time is it?”

  “Nine. I don’t want to take a chance that someone’s going to find us here.”

  The panic of the night before hit her full force. Unmindful that she was only half-dressed, Sam pushed the covers back and hauled herself to the edge of the bed. “Right. Just let me shower and I’ll be ready.” She needed another shower just to wash away the sleep and take the ache out of her muscles. When he didn’t answer, she looked up and caught him staring at her legs. “Yoo-hoo.” She wriggled her fingers at him.

  His eyes went two shades darker as he glared at her. “Just hurry up,” he said, stalking from the room before she could respond.

  Fletcher turned to watch his master go, then looked at her, clearly more interested in seeing what she might do. His ears were two sizes too large for his head and they flopped back and forth as he turned his head from the door to her, torn by doggy indecision.

  “Come on, Fletcher!” Jake called.

  His tail wagging excitedly, Fletcher went to the door, then glanced back at her. “Better go,” Sam said. “No reason why both of us should be in trouble.”

  The dog went and Sam wondered if talking to animals meant she was losing her mind. “Too late,” she said aloud, heading for the shower.

  Twenty minutes later, judging by the alarm clock beside the bed, Sam was ready to meet Jake on his own turf. She’d unearthed another shirt from the closet—dark green this time—and put on the same jeans she’d worn last night. A futile search hadn’t turned up anything larger. She’d just have to grin and bear it. And hold her breath.

  Following the noises coming from the garage, Sam ventured out of her room and found Jake putting a duffel bag in the back of the minivan. From her vantage point by the door she had a nice view of his backside. Preoccupied with her thoughts, she didn’t hear the jingle-jangle warning until an overzealous dog’s nose had lodged itself in the seat of her jeans. Her yelp brought Jake around with an amused look on his face.

  “It’s not funny,” she fumed, reaching behind to push the dog away and trying to maintain her dignity at the same time.

  “Sure, it is. You were watching me and Fletcher was watching you,” he said, summing up the situation. So much for dignity.

  “Uh, would you mind calling off your dog?”

  His infuriating grin never left his face. “Fletcher, down.”

  Sam felt the dog drop to the floor behind her and she relaxed. “Thank you.”

  “Do I get another kiss?”

  Sam knew her face must be flaming beet-red. “You were awake?”

  “Sweetheart, it’s not often I get kissed by a beautiful woman the
se days. I make it a point to stay awake if at all possible.”

  Make that fire-engine red, Sam thought. Bright and hot. She changed the subject. “What are you doing?”

  “They’ll be looking for my sport utility. They won’t be looking for Annie’s minivan.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Key West.”

  She hadn’t expected him to say that. Whatever her thoughts the night before, she hadn’t really expected him to help her. That he even believed her about the film left her feeling a little giddy. “Oh.”

  “You might want to grab a couple of changes of clothes out of Annie’s closet.”

  That didn’t seem likely, given the slim pickings. “Uh, do I have time to wash my clothes?”

  He shook his head. “We need to get going. Besides, that nurse’s uniform isn’t in any shape to be worn again. Why would you want it?”

  “No reason,” Sam replied, thinking about sitting in Annie’s tight jeans. “I’ll have to see if she left any shoes that might fit me.” The canvas sneakers she’d been wearing were still on the bathroom floor, caked in mud and gunk from the swamp. She’d go barefoot before she’d put them back on.

  “Hurry up, then,” Jake said, following her into the house. At the bedroom doorway he left her and disappeared down the hall, Fletcher trailing behind him. “Ten minutes!”

  Sam went through Annie’s closet and bureau, piling some socks, panties, a couple of shirts and a pair of athletic shorts on the bed. She struck pay dirt in the shoe department, finding a pair of battered Nike running shoes only a half-size smaller than what she wore. She carried her borrowed clothing back to the garage, not sure what to do with it. Remembering the duffel bag, she climbed into the back of the van.

  In the kitchen, Jake stacked cans of dog food in a cardboard box. He added a few other provisions for Sam and himself. Sam. She’d surprised him last night, and that wasn’t something that happened to him often. Even in the middle of a drug-induced hallucination she exuded an inner strength he couldn’t help but admire. The illusion of fragility was only superficial. She was tough. He counted on her staying tough for whatever they were up against. The last thing he needed was a hysterical female.