A Drive-By Wedding

“Not always. Sometimes it’s better to let things ride. Especially when you don’t have more of a plan.” He should know. If he’d let things ride three years ago… No, he would not think it. He would not.

“But not this time,” Allyn suggested.

Jeth glanced at her in the mirror, read the need to know, to believe in her eyes and lost any desire to laugh. Without another word he switched on his blinker, dropped back and moved into the right-hand lane as though he was about to take the next turnoff. While Allyn watched as unobtrusively as she could, the Mercedes dropped back three cars and gradually did the same.

“It could just be coincidence,” she said, but she didn’t sound sure.

“It’s not coincidence, Lynnie.”

She eyed him sharply. “Why’d you call me that? It’s a child’s name. No one calls me that except my mother and sister.”

Use of the diminutive surprised him, too, but he didn’t apologize for it. “It fit the moment,” he said. “It’s the kind of nickname a man uses for his wife when she’s scared.”

“I’m not your wife, and I’m not scared.”

“In a pig’s eye you’re not,” he told her flatly. “Hell, I’m scared, too. I’d rather it just be chance that Mercedes is following us, but I can’t treat the situation that way. Scared is better than foolish.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“You’d better.” He cast another look her way. “And just so we’re clear—if this masquerade is going to work, I’ll call you anything that fits the moment. Got it?”

Allyn’s mouth flattened, jaw tightened. “Long as it’s reciprocal, Jethro,” she agreed.

Silence fell between them, thickened and grew unhealthily stuffy. The only sound other than the rush of the road under the tires were the noises Sasha made jabbering and playing with some of his new toys in his car seat, and Allyn reading softly to him until he started to get squirmy and unhappy. Then she put the book down and talked to him, asking if he was cold, hot, wet, hungry, et cetera. He stared at her without comprehension.

She sighed and felt his legs and arms before she hiked up Sasha’s shirt and tucked the tip of her finger down the front of his diaper. Sure enough, just as she’d suspected. Couldn’t rehydrate a kid with as many fluids as Sasha had guzzled without eventually finding him soaked.

“He needs his diaper changed,” she said without preamble. “We have to stop.”

Jeth swore under his breath. “You can’t change him there?”

Allyn glared at the back of his head until he turtled his neck into his shoulders against the weight of her glower.

“All right, fine.” Not happy. Not cordial. “Apparently not.” Decidedly grumpy. “We need gas, anyway. Let me lose the tail and we’ll stop.”

“Sooner would be better.” No, she didn’t know better than to poke a bad-tempered alligator with a stick when it was close enough to bite.

“Not at all would be best,” he snapped.

She was concerned for Sasha’s comfort as well as for the little boy’s safety—not to mention her own and Jeth’s. But that didn’t mean the good-looking, clean-shaven, libido-startling jughead in the front seat wasn’t starting to rile her temper—heck, her misbegotten Brannigan obstinance—in a major way. “Then drop me off, and you float away when Sasha’s diaper overflows.”

“And risk losing you to them?” Jeth wasn’t exactly feeling casual about their situation at the moment. “Uh-uh, babe, not a chance.”

“You could always leave the gun with me.” The retort was instant, deliberate and provoking.

Jeth snorted. Stubborn, single-minded, sweet-smelling woman. If she didn’t quit playing havoc with both his brain and his body pretty darn quick, he was going to have to jam on the brakes, turn around, reach back and shake her. “Oh, sure. That’d work.”

“You never know,” Allyn retorted. “It might—Hey!” Jeth slammed on the brakes and veered hard onto the shoulder of the highway, causing Allyn to jerk forward into her seat belt and grab for Sasha’s baby seat. “Geez, Jeth, what are you doing?”

Jeth shoved the transmission into reverse, sent them squealing and whiplashing backward down the side of the road. “Shutting you up and losing that damned tail.” Swearing, he watched the Mercedes blow past them in traffic, its driver swiveling angrily in his seat, taken unaware by his maneuver. “Judas, they spotted us. It’s the Colombians. I recognize the driver. We’ve got to get out of here, switch vehicles, find a safer route. These guys are not out to take hostages—except maybe Sasha. And even that’s only a maybe.”

“A maybe?” Panic was an unwelcome and instant companion, changing the circumstances. Allyn felt her stomach clench, her lungs squeeze, her heart pound. “A maybe?” Her voice rose and squeaked, and she hated it. “What does that mean? What the hell have you gotten him into? You think they’ll kill him if they catch us? How does that make it better for him to be here than where he was before? What is the matter with you? Do you ever think before you act?”

“What’s the matter with me?” It was difficult to carry on a knock-down, drag-out while he was driving backward and east down the edge of the westbound I-70, but Jeth managed. Hell, he might not get another chance to give her a piece of his mind if he didn’t do it now. “You, you’re the matter with me. You’re not who you were supposed to be. You were supposed to be June Cleaver, but look at you. I’m running this show, damn it, but you gotta step in, take my gun and tell me we’ve got to stop for baby supplies, stop for groceries, find a damned doctor and I take one freaking look at you and my brain takes a hike. You’ve got hair made for touching, eyes like I’ve never seen, a mouth I’d really like to make shut up, and you’re freaking ornery enough to punch all my buttons. So this, this is your fault, not mine.”

“My fault?” Somewhere underneath Allyn’s outrage a part of her recognized exactly what he’d said and tucked it away in a drawer labeled Oh, my God, now what? for later perusal. The rest of her told him what she thought of him. “You pigheaded, chauvinistic, macho hunk of beef. My fault? You car jack me, but the three of us being followed by a group of drug dealers you gelded is my fault? I don’t think so.” Fuming, furious. “God, I should have known a guy as pretty as you would have to also be a giant pinhead. I’d really like to see you try to shut me up, I really would.” Unfortunately, her body really did want to see him make her shut up.

By kissing her.

Which was just about as pinheaded a desire as they came, under the circumstances. But apparently her body liked the threat of danger a lot more than her head did. And if she hadn’t realized it when he’d stuck his gun in her ribs, she knew it for certain now: Jeth Levoie was as dangerous to her as they came—and in a lot more ways than one.

And this whole line of thought was just a bit more revealing than she wanted it to be—especially while they were in the middle of a big-screenlike chase scene. Or getaway scene. Every instinct Allyn possessed told her to do whatever it took to make this stop.

Trouble was, how?

She’d spent the past several years learning how to think fast under conditions that most people would consider abnormal—including, once or twice, in potentially life-threatening instances—but even Gabriel’s admonitions and training aside, none of her underwater experiences compared to this.

She’d thought quickly enough in the school yard, but that had been as much luck as it had been fury. That had been before she’d understood Jeth Levoie at all, before she’d known about Sasha. Now she didn’t have the steering wheel beneath her hands, she had a cranky baby disturbing her ability to think and an infuriatingly dangerous man who liked purple lollipops making his subtle way under her skin. Her normally more-than-able mind was a blank.

Fortunately, she didn’t have to come up with a way to get them out of trouble; Jeth already had one.

He waited until he saw the Mercedes U-turn into the eastbound lanes and gather speed, then took advantage of a grouping of westbound eighteen-wheelers, let a couple of them get ahead of him, a couple to the side and a couple behind with barely enough room for the Saturn to squeeze into the pocket between them before he jerked the transmission into drive and skidded onto the highway. Allyn covered Sasha’s eyes and shut her own so neither of them would see the mega car squash she was certain was inevitable. When, after a reasonable length of time, no crunch sound occurred, she opened one eye, then the other, then took her hand away from Sasha’s face.

And flat-handed Jeth upside the back of his head with her ring hand.

“Don’t ever do that again,” she said hoarsely. If her voice had been steady she’d have made more of an impression, she was sure.

Without looking, he grabbed her hand before she could withdraw it and imprisoned her wrist. Arizona lightning couldn’t move more quickly, and Allyn knew it at once.

Lightning couldn’t crackle and burn with more electric intensity where it hit, either.

“Don’t ever distract me while I’m saving your butt,” he returned grimly. “You’ll get all three of us killed. I won’t have that.”

“You won’t—” Allyn stared at him breathless, speechless. Too aware of his fingers around her wrist, of how immediately the tension had changed, the threat had grown, of the taste he left on the back of her tongue.

Too aware of him, period.

She would not let him get to her under these or any circumstances, she would not.

“If it wasn’t for you—” The accusation was petty, and she knew it, but that didn’t stop her from making it. From wanting to verbally beat his culpability into him.

From wanting to escape her own.

“—we wouldn’t be here—”

He squeezed her wrist hard, once, and released it. “Give it a rest, Lyn. I don’t apologize for the choices I make anymore. I can’t. We’re here. Make the best of it.”

Startled, she looked at him. Not because the fire in his touch lingered, though it did. Not because his fingers had left a visible imprint on her wrist, though that was true, too. She looked because the passion in his refusal to apologize for who he was and what he did equaled her own.