Chapter 33
THIRTY-THREE
“Christ on a bike,” Ryan muttered as he climbed out of the van. “If it’s not one damn thing, it’s another.”
Several huge pine branches lay across the road, blocking their path. The grass shoulders and medians had turned to swamps, making it impossible to drive around it without sinking two feet deep.
He could feel the heat radiating up from the ground like warmth from a body. He went to the nearest branch and wrapped his hands around the thickest part. It was so heavy he could drag it only a few yards before having to stop.
Suddenly, it grew lighter, and he saw Jessica had grabbed hold of the thinner section and was hauling it up.
“I got it,” he said. “I don’t want you to do yourself an injury.”
“I’m stronger than I look,” she said. “Core muscles.”
He didn’t want to think about her core muscles right now, so he focused on lifting the branch.
Together, they got it out of the path. He returned to do the same with the second one, only to find that she was no longer helping him.
She was just standing in the road. Staring at that last branch like was the only thing between her and a fate worse than death.
He straightened. “What is it?”
She shook her head and swallowed hard. “I don’t want to go to Baton Rouge.”
He put both hands on his hips. “What?”
She looked at him and her face was stricken.
“I don’t want to go to the safe house. I don’t want to keep running anymore.
” She looked back the way they had come, then crossed her arms across her chest. “I’m tired of being a burden.
Of being someone’s job. Your job. To get me from A to B, until I become someone else’s problem. ”
“You’re not anyone’s burden,” he said, even though he’d been thinking something very similar only two days ago.
“I’m tired of it,” she said again. “I just want it all to be over.”
He shook his head. “Jessica, there’s a reason witness protection is for life. You crossed some very dangerous people back in Chicago. And these guys, they don’t quit. They’ll happily spend the rest of their lives hunting you down. It’s like a blood sport to them.”
She took a step towards him. “You could keep me safe.”
‘What?’ he said again, but this time it was a whisper.
She scraped her hair back with both hands and gave a shaky laugh. “I know, it’s crazy. I can’t even believe I’m saying this. I’ve only known you for like,” she glanced down at her watch, “forty-three hours or something.”
The action of her looking at her watch triggered a memory, but he ignored the feeling. He was too busy trying to process what she was suggesting. What he thought she was suggesting.
“But,” she went on, shaking her head, “even though it’s only been that long, I already feel like I know you. Better than anyone else in my life.” She gave him an almost apologetic smile. “Which, admittedly, is a pretty sad reflection of my life.”
He tore his eyes away from hers. “You don’t really know me.” He didn’t want to say those words. He didn’t want to make her think he was pushing her away, but it was the truth.
Her smile faded. “But what I do know about you,” she said with a soft sincerity, “I really like.”
His heart felt like it had stopped beating.
“You’re a good guy, Ryan,” she said. “And I know that because my life has been a parade of really shitty ones. But you’re decent.
And you’re kind. And smart. And for some reason, I find all your over-thinking weirdly soothing.
Then there’s the way you look at me, like…
” She swallowed, and he was amazed to see her cheeks had gone pink.
Like I’d charge hell with a glass of ice water for you? he finished for her in his mind. Because I would. With bare feet.
“Like you might have feelings for me,” she mumbled.
He wanted to tell her he did have feelings for her. A whole damn lot of them. And that while she was wrong about the good man thing, he wanted nothing more than to be one for her.
But when he opened his mouth, he didn’t end up saying anything like that. Because the thing that had been trying to get his attention, the thing waving at him from the back of his mind, finally broke through into his consciousness.
So, the words that came out were, “Jessica, your watch.”
She blinked at him in surprise. Probably wondering why, when she was standing there baring her soul, he was more interested in what she was wearing on her wrist.
He strode forward and lifted her arm, looking at the watch. She’d had it on this whole time, but he’d never paid it any attention. Maybe because he’d been too busy paying all his attention to various other parts of her.
He said, “That is a smartwatch.”
“Yeah,” she said, baffled.
“It syncs your location to your phone, right?”
She nodded.
“Your phone that went missing from your house back in Florida?”
“Yeah,” she said again, an uneasy note creeping into her tone.
“So, you’ve basically been walking around with a tracking device on your wrist this whole damn time. A tracking device that is currently beaming your location to a phone that we don’t know who has.”
She swallowed hard. “But everything is offline because of the storm. There’s no cell signal or mobile data. So surely it can’t be sending out any kind of signal—”
“It can through its GPS receiver,” he interrupted. “Satellites. Nothing to do with cell or internet coverage.”
“But my phone is locked!”
“Is it an older phone?”
She paused. “It’s a couple of years old.”
He shook his head. “Then there are ways into it.”
She visibly paled, then stared down at her wrist in horror. “The silver Cadillac,” she whispered, her eyes darting back up to his. “The one that was following us.”
He nodded grimly.
With shaking fingers, she took the watch off and held it out to him like it was a bomb that was about to go off.
He grabbed it, then turned and pitched it as hard as he could into the swamp beyond the road.
He stared after it for a long moment, then he looked back at her and said, “This is why you have to stay in WITSEC.”
“No. This is why I have to stay with you.”
He sighed. “If I’d been doing my job properly, Jessica, you wouldn’t be in this mess.”
“What do you mean?”
He eyed her tiredly and scrubbed his hand through his hair. “I mean, I shouldn’t have let you leave Florida with that thing on your wrist.” He started walking back towards the pile of branches in the road. “You remember I told you to leave all your devices behind?”
She followed him. “Then it’s my fault, not yours.”
He stopped walking, just stood there in the road.
“I’m not going to Louisiana,” she said to his back. “And you can’t make me.”
No, he couldn’t. She wasn’t in his custody. She was free to leave him and the program anytime she wanted.
“Where will you go?” he said dully.
When she didn’t answer, he turned to face her. She rolled her eyes and raised her hands into the air. “Memphis,” she said, as if it should have been obvious. “With you.”
He stared at her like she’d just told him she was planning on moving to Mars. And while one part of him was ecstatic that she wanted to stay with him, a far more practical part of him knew it could never work.
He swallowed and shook his head. “I…it’s…it wouldn’t be allowed.”
“So we don’t tell anyone.”
He threw up a hand. “Jessica, I gotta answer to a bunch of people. People who are gonna wanna know what the hell happened here. Why you up and vanished mid-route and washed up back in Tennessee with me. And I don’t think we’ll be able to blame it on the hurricane.”
She took a step closer to him. Blew out a breath.
“Okay. So you tell them that while you were filling up at a gas station outside Mobile, I got out of your car and, before you could stop me, climbed into an old silver Cadillac. And that was the last you saw of me. You don’t even know if I survived the storm. ”
He opened his mouth, but no words came out. Was he actually considering this?
“I’ll change my name when we get to Memphis,” she said. “I have to start again from scratch, anyway.” She paused, then added, “No one has to know about us.”
All he could do was stare at her for a long time. When he could finally engage his vocal cords, the only word that came out was, “Us?”
“There doesn’t have to be an ‘us’,” she said quickly. “I mean, I could stay at an Airbnb or something for a while, then—”
“Do you want there to be an us?” he interrupted.
She chanced a glance at him. When she spoke, her voice was barely above a whisper. “Do you?”
He appeared to have lost the ability to do anything but stare at her.
Like an idiot. Then he felt something in him break.
The part of him that always tried to do the right thing.
The decent thing. The thing that would assuage that permanent feeling of guilt he carried around with him.
It just snapped, like a ligament off a bone. He almost heard it go.
He took two steps towards her, took her face in his hands and kissed her.
She gave a little gasp against his mouth, and he pulled back, only to have her press her lips more firmly against his.
Her mouth opened for him with a soft moan.
When he finally broke it off, he kept her face cupped between his palms and rested his forehead against hers. “Good God, I want there to be an us.”
She wrapped her hands around his back and clamped herself to him. Their mouths locked together again, and he didn’t realize they had been walking backward until she bumped into the van.
He placed his hands on the hot metal roof, on either side of her head. Her hands were everywhere, running over his chest, tugging at his belt.
He encircled hers, stopping them. Wishing he didn’t have to be the pragmatic one. “Jessica, we gotta get off this road. We’ll keep heading north. Find a town. Find a motel room. Figure out what the hell we’re gonna do next.”
Actually, he knew exactly what they were gonna do next. Motel rooms had beds. With sheets. Clean ones. Where he could lay her down. Take his time with her. Taste her. Make love to her real slow. And then do it all over again.
He tilted up her chin and kissed her mouth again. Then he took his phone out of his pocket, turned it on and unlocked it, then handed it to her. “See if you can find a couple of bars of signal. Figure out where the hell we are. I’ll finish clearing the road.”