Obsession (19 page)

Jeez, her head was hurting again. “Like I said, does it matter?”

“Maybe. There’s a lot of traffic around us. No telling who’s in any of these vehicles. I just thought it would help if I could kind of eliminate people like that guy in the minivan there, say, from suspicion.”

Katharine raised her head high enough to see a tan Dodge Caravan rattling along in the lane beside them. The driver, bald and pudgy, was looking in his rearview mirror as he yelled at the quartet of kids strapped into the back.

“Him you can safely eliminate.” She let her head drop back down against the seat.

“He was just an example. You see what I’m getting at here.”

Reluctantly, she did. She had a feeling her heart would have picked up the pace again if she hadn’t been so totally wiped out.

“You think we’re being followed?”

He shook his head. “I
don’t
think so. But I’ve been wrong before.”

“Wonderful.”

“So, you see anything else on this guy that struck you as memorable? What about his feet? What kind of shoes?”

She had a momentary flashback to a kick slicing through the air.

“Black,” she said. “Dress shoes.”

In her mind’s eye, she was back beneath the kitchen island, fighting for her life as the foot flew past her face with scant inches to spare. It seemed so real suddenly that she could almost feel the breeze. At the time, noticing his footwear hadn’t been her primary focus. Plus, she’d gotten only a glimpse, but . . .

She frowned. “There was something on the sole—a logo. It was round and—” Her eyes suddenly went wide. “Oh, my God. The floor. The floor’s wrong.”

“What?” Dan looked at her with incomprehension.

She barely noticed. Mentally, she was still there, clinging to the wrought iron, her right side battened down against unyielding terra-cotta tiles.

“The tiles are wrong. They’re . . .” Her voice trailed off for a moment as rising panic threatened to choke her. “They’re too small.”

Katharine didn’t even register that he had spoken. She was frantically replaying everything that had happened in the kitchen earlier today in her mind, and comparing it with what had happened there the previous night.

Last night she had been nose to nose with a floor sadly in need of a mop. Beneath the grime, the terra-cotta tiles had been smooth, cold, and hard as brick. In her mind’s eye, she could see them perfectly: stone-colored grout lines marking out straight rows of twelve-inch squares.

Today she had fallen on that same floor. She had scrambled across it on all fours. Her hand had been palm down across one of the tiles, her nails scratching against the stone-colored grout as the heel of her hand was abraded at the same time by the roughness of yet another line of grout. In other words, her hand had actually been longer than the tile.
Because the tile itself couldn’t have been more than six inches square.

Today, the entire kitchen floor had been a sea of smooth, cold, hard-as-brick
six-inch
terra-cotta squares.

Her mouth dropped open in horror.

“What?” he said, watching her. “What?”

“The floor’s wrong.” Her voice was faint. The interior of the SUV seemed to be closing in around her like a big, black fist. She felt as if she were trapped, suffocating. Suddenly, it was hard to breathe. “The tiles have changed. How could the tiles have changed?”

“What?
You’re not making any sense.”

“Something’s wrong.” She felt like she should be screaming the words, but instead her voice was barely audible. Her vision went all blurry; her heart began to thud. Her head throbbed like it would explode. “Oh, God, something’s really, really, wrong.”

A wave of dizziness swamped her.

For the tiles to have changed was impossible.

“Just so you know, you’re starting to scare me here. You’ve gone white as a sheet. I need to know what you’re talking about if you don’t want to get rushed to the nearest emergency room, pronto.”

Katharine got the impression that the Blazer was speeding up. Either he was putting the pedal to the metal, or the world outside the SUV had suddenly turned into a kaleidoscopic blur of color and sound. The hospital—he was threatening her with the hospital again. Still, she couldn’t get those six-inch terra-cotta tiles out of her mind. They were wrong, wrong, wrong . . .

She sucked in air.

“I don’t need a hospital.” She took another deep breath. “It’s just . . . oh my God, Dan, I think I’m losing my mind.”

“Well, that’s reassuring,” he said dryly after a moment passed in which, busy trying to convince herself that she’d somehow gotten it wrong about the tiles, she didn’t say anything else. Katharine became vaguely aware of an abundance of green whizzing past the windows, and realized that the Blazer was banking around a steep turn that could only, from the amount of foliage surrounding them, be an exit.

“No hospital.” Her voice was stronger. She tried to focus exclusively on the here and now. As far as the floor was concerned, her mind had to be playing tricks on her. She realized that. No way could the floor really have changed. But each image was so real. The twelve-inch tiles. The six-inch tiles. In the same kitchen, only hours apart. She almost moaned, but bit the sound back when she realized that it would probably send Dan over the edge.

They were on a straightaway again. Katharine realized that they had left the interstate behind for an only slightly less busy four-lane highway. Clustered around the intersection where they found themselves was a collection of fast-food places, cheap motels, and gas stations.

“What are you doing?” she asked as he pulled into a Stop-N-Go Mart that looked like a shoebox made of equal parts concrete blocks and glass. An ancient blue Ford pickup and a newer white Infiniti were at the pumps out front. A beefy farmer type complete with overalls did the honors for the pickup. A blond, stylish, fiftyish woman was filling the Infiniti. Both looked harmless. More cars were parked in front of the store. Their passengers were, presumably, inside.

“We’re going to stop here for a few minutes and watch who comes off the expressway after us. And in the meantime, you’re going to talk to me and tell me what the hell is bothering you so much about a floor.”

The Blazer pulled on around the store and stopped near the restrooms, which were located on the side of the building well away from the gas pumps. At the far edge of the pavement, back behind a trio of lurking Dumpsters, two empty picnic tables had been set up in the grassy strip between the parking lot and the Taco Bell next door. A raggedy-looking elm provided them with patchy shade.

Dan turned off the engine and got out, slamming the door behind him. Then he came around to Katharine’s door and opened it. The all pervasive sound of traffic immediately filled her ears.

“Come on,” he said. “Get out.”

Complying, she discovered, wasn’t all that easy. With the best will in the world, she didn’t seem to be able to make her muscles work. When she simply looked up at him without doing anything else, he made an impatient sound under his breath, then leaned in and unfastened her seat belt for her. His upper arm brushed her breasts, and she was suddenly very aware of the contact, and of how firm his biceps were. Her brow knit; that tiny jolt of awareness was impossible to mistake for anything else—and the most disconcerting thing about it was that it felt so hauntingly familiar. He was close, so close she could see the texture of his bronzed skin and each individual hair in the stubble darkening his jaw, and a tiny, comma-shaped scar near the corner of his left eye. He must have felt the weight of her gaze, because he glanced at her and their eyes met. The reassuringly mild blue of his eyes was no longer quite so mild, she discovered, nor quite so reassuring. Instead, his eyes had taken on a glint that made them look harder and more purposeful.

“Come on.” Straightening, he held out his hand to her. If he was feeling anything approximating the jumble of conflicting emotions that had just hit her, he gave no sign of it. “I want to get where I can see the road. If we sit at the picnic tables, we can watch everything that’s going on around here without being noticed. Unless someone knows precisely where to look, they won’t spot us.”

She took a deep breath. The worst of the shock seemed to be receding—as long as she didn’t think about those damned tiles. Even letting the smallest memory of her kitchen floor into her mind threatened to send her world tilting on its axis.

Because no matter how she spun it for herself, there was no reconciling the difference in the size of those tiles.

The thing was, though, she was very much afraid it was too late: She already was.

“How do you know that?” Katharine put her hand in his simply because his was there in front of her and resisting required more effort than doing what he wanted. His hand closed around hers, warm and strong, and she allowed him to pull her from the car. Only when she was on her feet and the steamy heat was wrapping itself around her like a hug did she notice how cold she was. Goose bumps covered her arms. She had to grit her teeth to keep herself from shivering. Her legs felt unsteady. Taking a step sideways, she leaned against the side of the Blazer for support. The blacktop was hot beneath her bare feet, and getting hotter by the second. Shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot, she was suddenly thankful for the too-long hem of Dottie’s pants. If she hadn’t discovered the insulating properties of little puddles of rayon just when she did, she would have been doing her own personal version of an Indian war dance right there beside the car.

“I’ve stopped here before. It’s on the way to the cabin.”

He dropped her hand as he closed the door behind her, then pressed the button on his key ring to lock the vehicle. She knew that was what he did, because she heard the beep, but she really wasn’t paying much attention because she was trying so hard not to compare mental images of the tiles.

“Katharine.”

Startled out of her near panic by the forcefulness of his tone, she looked at him in surprise. He was standing right in front of her, arms folded over his chest, giving her the kind of look that made her think he had probably said her name more than once. Meeting his gaze required that she look up, and as she did so, she registered just how tall he truly was: The top of her head barely reached his chin. His eyes were narrowed against the sunlight, she saw, and his mouth looked surprisingly grim.

Again, she was struck by that disconcerting sense of déjà vu
.
Had she stood with him like this before?

“Hmm?” she murmured distractedly, her eyes searching his face. Every feature was familiar, but she could recall no details at all about any interactions they might have had prior to this morning. She knew him—and yet she didn’t.

Her heart started to thud.

“Can you make it?” His tone was impatient.

He meant could she walk to the picnic tables. Katharine blinked a couple of times in an effort to clear her mind, then nodded, again because any alternative was bound to be more trouble than simply agreeing with what he wanted her to do. As she straightened away from the Blazer, she was suddenly aware of how bad she really felt. She was dizzy, weak-kneed, and tired to the bone. Her head hurt and her stomach churned and she was freezing despite the blazing heat that was multiplied tenfold by the intensifying effect of the blacktop. But the worst thing of all was knowing that she had lost it.

Absolutely, totally, without a doubt lost it. Because what other explanation could there be?

She was a skinny blonde named Katharine Lawrence. And those tiles had to be the same.

“Careful,” he warned when she started hotfooting it (literally) toward the grass and almost tripped over her borrowed pants in an effort to keep her feet off the sizzling pavement.

She didn’t bother to reply. Awkwardly joggling from foot to foot took concentration, especially when stopping was not an option unless she wanted fried feet.

“Jesus Christ,” he added in a resigned undertone, coming up behind her. He swung her off her feet and into his arms before she had any idea of what he meant to do. “Don’t you have any shoes?”

“Hey,” she protested as she grabbed on to his shoulders for support. They were wide beneath the limp blue shirt, sturdy and well-muscled, and the arms cradling her were sturdy and well-muscled, too. “There are some in the duffel bag.”

“Here’s a radical thought: Maybe you should try putting them on your feet.”

“Next time I have a few spare minutes when nobody is trying to kill me, maybe I will.” Her tone was tart.

That made him smile. His eyes crinkled and his mouth quirked at the corners, and he flicked a glance at her.

“Point taken.”

With her arms wrapped around his neck, she had an up-close-and-personal view of his profile. It wasn’t classic, precisely, but it was handsome and manly, and the crooked smile struck a chord deep in her memory bank: She’d seen him smile like that before, she was almost sure, but again, no details surfaced to back up the feeling. The sun beat down on them, gleaming off the unruly dark gold waves of his hair, deepening the tired lines around his eyes and mouth. He was looking tense, and with a little wake-up call of surprise, she saw that he must be almost as scared and jumpy as she was. Driving a getaway car for a woman running for her life was almost certainly not something he did every day. Getting pulled into the thick of a murderous (possible) government conspiracy likewise must be new to him. She hadn’t thought of it like that before, but now that she did, she saw that he was really being a mensch about everything. More than a mensch, in fact: a hero.
Her
hero.