Secret Identity (7 page)

“How are your defensive-driving skills?”

“Rusty,” she admitted, “but I still remember a few things.”

Rick checked the back window. The SUV was about four car lengths back. “This Charger will do 140 miles an hour. I bet we can outgun that land boat back there. If they try to run us off the road or start shooting, just floor it.”

She gave a brisk nod, her gaze flicking back and forth between the light traffic ahead and the rearview window. He saw her shoulders tighten. “Weapon!” she barked.

He turned and saw a large-caliber handgun extending from the passenger window of the Toyota. “Duck and gun it!”

Dropping low in his seat, he held on as the Charger bolted forward, the engine singing with the power surge, and sent up a quick prayer of thanks that his sister Shannon had talked him into buying the muscle car instead of a less expensive, more practical sedan.

Amanda weaved the Charger through traffic, the SUV staying with her for about a mile before it started to fall back.

“I love this car,” she declared, sounding like the Tara Brady he remembered. A rush of pure male hunger surged through him, badly timed but strangely welcome. For the first time in a long time, he felt like the Rick Cooper who’d fallen hard for the sexy American spook.

It was about damn time.

Chapter Four

At least it wasn’t a tent in the Sudan, Amanda thought as she surveyed the shabby facade of the roadside motel a few miles outside Chattanooga. After the scare on the interstate, they’d taken side roads and backtracked now and then, which turned their hour’s drive to Chattanooga into five long and tension-filled hours.

“Floozy up, pretty mama.” Rick straightened his jacket, grimacing with pain as the leather rubbed his wounded arm. He unbuttoned a couple of buttons on his shirt, glancing at her. “Come on, if we’re going to sell this one-night stand, you’re going to have to look a little trampier.”

She slanted a look his way, not missing the gleam of amusement in his eyes. He was enjoying himself, the jerk. She wanted to be angry at him, mostly because anger was a lot easier to deal with than what she was really starting to feel, a flicker of the old excitement that used to grip her right in the chest every time she spotted him coming her way.

Their time together had been so long ago. So much had happened since then. Things he didn’t know about. Things she didn’t want to remember.

It’s a job, she reminded herself. If anyone in the world knew how to become someone she wasn’t, it was the little girl born in McComb, Mississippi, who’d hidden from her series of drunk “daddies” and browbeaten mama by pretending to be someone—anyone—she wasn’t. She pushed her jeans down around her hips and started to pull up her T-shirt to tie it into a knot over her belly, stopping just in time.

She shot another quick look at Rick to see if he’d noticed her sudden hesitation. He was scanning the area outside the car, making sure they hadn’t picked up a tail somewhere along the detour route.

She tucked the shirt into her jeans, hiding the scars across her lower back where the al Adar rebels had made her pay for her insolence. Exposed midriff was out. She’d just have to go the more obvious route. “Do you have a knife handy?” Hers was packed in the duffel bag.

Rick pulled a Swiss Army knife from his pocket and handed it to her with a curious look. “Is this about to get kinky?”

She opened the sharpest blade and sliced through the neckband of her T-shirt, tearing the fabric down the front until the tops of her breasts, cradled in a lacy blue bra, were exposed. She glanced his way. “Trampy enough?”

His gaze settled on her breasts. The air between them felt like a furnace blast, thick with heat and tension.

“That’ll do.” He cleared his throat and looked away.

The manager’s office was a tiny room at one end of the one-story motel. Just outside, Rick threw his good arm around her shoulders, tugging her close to his side. An overwhelming sense of familiarity rocked her, sending a tremble through her legs. He was hard and lean-muscled, masculine to the core despite his outer veneer of sophistication. She’d always known there was a hard-loving, hard-fighting Alabama country boy lurking beneath the surface of the urbane charmer.

It was one of the things she’d loved most about him.

At the front desk, a balding man in his early fifties sat behind the counter, reading a Zane Grey novel.
Knights of the Range.
One of her favorites. He didn’t look up immediately.

Rick caught her chin in his hand, drawing her face up to his. As his lips descended, she felt like a fly trapped in a web, watching the spider’s inexorable approach.

His lips met hers. Soft at first, then fierce and hard, as if fueled by an impatient hunger he was desperate to sate. The world around her reeled, forcing her to clutch him with both hands to stay upright.

He dragged his lips away and turned to look at the desk clerk. He’d finally looked up from his book at their public display of hormones.

“One hour, two hours or the night?” he asked, his gaze dropping to Amanda’s breasts.

“The night,” Rick answered, bending his head to suckle the skin at the base of her neck. Electricity shot through her, heading straight for her sex. Her knees wobbled again.

“That’ll be forty bucks. Phone and TV extra.”

Rick licked the curve of her collarbone, his tongue rough-textured and hot. Heat settled low in her belly as his voice rumbled through her. “All we need is a bed.”

The clerk laughed, his gaze still firmly affixed to the front of Amanda’s ripped T-shirt. Rick pulled his lips away from her neck long enough to hand the clerk two twenties and retrieve the key the man handed him.

He walked outside with his arm still around Amanda’s shoulders. She knew, as they moved down the breezeway toward the room, that she should move away from him, but her body wouldn’t listen to the warning bells clanging in her head.

Rick handed her the key when they reached the room. As she unlocked the door, her hands trembled violently. She tried to tell herself it was delayed reaction from the day’s events, but that attempt at self-delusion didn’t last past the first step inside the motel room, when Rick slammed the door shut behind them and flattened her against it with a hungry growl.

His mouth descended, hot and fierce against hers. Twining his hands with hers, he pressed them against the door, pinning her in place for his slow, thorough exploration of her mouth.

He felt so familiar she ached, but there was also a newness to his touch, as if he were an entirely different person from the man she’d taken willingly to her bed a few short years ago. The contradictory sensation was both exciting and disconcerting, setting her pulse racing.

His hips pressed against hers, the hard ridge of his sex pushing into the softness between her thighs until she was aflame with anticipation. The denim between them was too much. She needed to feel the hot silk of his skin on hers, creating friction and fire.

She pulled one hand from his grasp and reached between them, cupping his sex in her palm. His breath burning against her lips, he growled a low profanity that only spurred her to stroke him more firmly.

Her body prickled all over, like a deadened limb coming slowly, painfully to life. When he dipped his head to taste the swell of her breast peeking over the edge of her bra, her body hummed with delight.

He reached for the hem of her T-shirt and tugged upward. The soft cotton rasped against the scar tissue crisscrossing her back.

Ice replaced fire, freezing her in place. Rick didn’t seem to notice at first, sliding his hand under the loose cotton to trace the curve of her lower spine.

But as his fingers crept closer to the web of scars across her back, she grabbed his wrists and tugged his hands away from her back. “No.”

He took a faltering step backward. “What?”

“No,” she said more firmly, her skin crawling where the scar tissue gathered. There were other scars, more than just the ones on her back.

The al Adar rebels had not been gentle.

He walked away from her, toward the lone window in the tiny bedroom. “I’m sorry.”

“No,” she said again, her tone apologetic. “I just—I can’t go back.” For so many reasons.

He flexed his injured arm, frowning with pain. “Okay.”

“We’re supposed to be fixing your arm,” she said gruffly.

“I think I need a shower first.” He waved toward the door. “Think you could get the supplies out of the Charger?”

“Of course.” She headed outside and took their bags from the car. When she returned, the shower was running in the bathroom. She dropped the bags by the door and sat on the end of the bed, trying not to look too closely at the faded, threadbare bedspread.

She and Rick would have to share that bed tonight, after what had almost happened between them a few minutes ago.

How on earth were they going to get through the night?

Rick emerged from the bathroom wearing only his jeans and a towel wrapped around his neck. He gave her a wary look as he approached the bed, his eyes dark and pained. “I think I cleaned most of the grime out of the wound,” he rasped.

She felt an instant twinge of sympathy. “Sit here and I’ll bandage you up.”

While he settled on the end of the bed, she dug through her duffel bag for the first-aid kit. Gathering the supplies she needed and returning to his side, she got to work.

“If we can keep ointment and bandages on it for the next few days, you ought to be able to avoid infection.” Her voice came out in a tremble, but her hands, at least, remained steady as she dabbed a generous layer of antibiotic ointment across the bloody gouge in his upper arm. She flattened a thick gauze pad over the wound and taped it down. “There we go.”

He caught her hand as she started to back away. “I really am sorry about before. I took the charade too far.”

A dart of pain hit its mark just beneath her breastbone. “Yeah. The charade. Just like old times, huh?”

“It wasn’t a charade back then,” he murmured.

“Sometimes it was,” she countered, keeping her voice deliberately light. “That was the fun of it.”

His lips curved slightly. “Sometimes,” he conceded.

She took her time gathering up the supplies and putting them back into the first-aid kit, needing that little bit of distance to get her emotions back under steely control.

“Maybe we should have paid extra for the phone,” Rick commented as she was putting the kit back into her duffel bag.

“Thinking of ordering a pizza?” she asked over her shoulder, pleased with the easy tone of her voice.

“I am kind of hungry,” he admitted.

She pulled a couple of protein bars out of her duffel bag and tossed him one
. “Bon appétit.”

He caught it, shooting her a wry grin.
“Merci.”

Not trusting herself to sit on the bed beside him, she settled cross-legged on the floor at the end of the bed and unwrapped her own protein bar.

“But what I meant about the phone was, I think I should call my brother Jesse.”

Her gaze snapped up, meeting his. “No.”