Afterglow (26 page)

She frowned. “If it’s not the police, then w—”

“Tighten your seat belt and hunker down.” In case she didn’t understand the “hunker down” part, he put his gun hand on her crown and shoved.

“Holy shit, Rand! Both hands on the wheel!” Dakota slid lower in the seat, her head sliding below the headrest.

He’d just wrapped his fingers back around the wheel when the truck was sideswiped with a loud crunching of metal and a bone-jarring shudder. A blare of horns from other cars trying to avoid being sideswiped by either the attack car or the truck reverberated in the night wind.

A metallic
bang-bang-bang
and the accompanying muzzle flashes indicated bullets hitting the body of the truck. The blast of answering shots fired from Rand’s gun made Dakota’s ears ring in the close confines.

The bad guys volleyed back, a burst of gunfire peppering the steel body of the truck in a cacophony of bangs and metallic whines set her teeth and nerves on edge.

With a grinding, almost animal-in-pain sound, the car scraped down the driver’s side. Their wheels squealed as Rand fought to stay on the road. “Fuck.”

He could say that again.

He fired several more shots through his window, which were answered with several from the other car. Dakota saw the muzzle flashes in the darkness, and waited for a bullet to hit one of them.

No bullet through the brain, just the jolting impact of the other car slamming into them again, immediately accompanied by the shatter of breaking glass. The force jarred all the way down her spine as the truck slewed across the road with a high-pitched screech of the tires. “Son of a bi—”

“What?” She raised her eyes to try to see what was happening.

“Stay down!”

She buried her face in her lap. Something exploded through the window beside her, showering her with chunks of shattered glass that glimmered like diamonds on her clothing and hair in the lights of oncoming traffic. She squeezed her eyes shut and wrapped her arms over her head, bracing her feet on the floorboard as the car swerved and bumped over something, then swerved again. Blaring horns and squealing tires made her picture the drivers slamming on brakes and wrenching their cars out of the way of the careening truck.

Rand cursed again as the heavier vehicle slammed once more into the rear on the driver’s side, pushing them partway into the ditch running alongside the road, a two-foot drop. The truck tilted dangerously, and Dakota grabbed the door handle and braced her feet.

“Don’t worry,” he yelled. “I’m still a member of the PDA.”

“Public displays of affection?” Dakota yelled back, voice muffled by her lap.

“Professional Driving Association.”

“Oh, yeah. That’s the bunch that doesn’t give disability insurance, right?”

“I’ve done dozens of high-speed chases. Just keep your head down. I’ll lose them.”

This wasn’t a movie stunt where he had two or three rehearsals and several takes from different angles to make it look realistic. Rand wasn’t going to lose them if they were attached like Velcro to the side of the truck. “Tell the director to yell ‘cut’ anytime soon.”

The shrubs and tree branches in the ditch slapped the truck’s body as he accelerated. The other vehicle body-slammed them from the rear, then again, shoving them forward toward a stand of trees visible in the cone of their headlights.

Another bullet whizzed through the truck, leaving the rear passenger window shattered, and the windshield with a vast spiderweb crack that made visibility difficult. Dakota dug her nails into the fake leather armrest on the door to prevent herself from shrieking every time the other car slammed into them, every time they got off another shot. Not for herself, hell, she’d be happy to scream her head off like a girl, but she didn’t want to distract Rand, who was doing a masterful job.

He knew how to handle a car, thank God. However, when he’d done his job, he was working with other stuntmen. Not some homicidal maniac determined to kill him.

The truck lurched and bumped back onto the tarred road just shy of the trees, only to be hit again from behind. Her head snapped back. She didn’t know what she could do to help. Shut up and not distract him was the best she could come up with.

She didn’t know when she’d lifted her head from her knees, but if she was going to die, she’d prefer looking death in the eyes. She pulled the belt tighter across her body, keeping her head low but her eyes firmly fixed on the road illuminated in the headlights.

Rand’s fingers were white as he clenched the steering wheel, then gave it a vicious tug that had her grabbing the dash with both hands as he swung the truck in an arc that left it pointing at their attackers—head-on.

No. No. No!

Aghast, she realized that far from slowing down, Rand was aiming straight for the other vehicle, a large black sedan with tinted windows, the front fender crumpled, one headlight shattered. A lethal Cyclops that Rand was going to play chicken with.

“Brace!” With a flip of his wrists, he sideswiped the attack car, sending it skating across the road into an oncoming vehicle. Horns blared, lights tilted and dipped as the two cars spun out of control.

He floored the truck, did a wheelie, and kept going. Dakota smelled burning rubber. She pulled herself upright and turned to look behind them.

“I think you shook them.” She swallowed. “You shook m—oh, damn it to hell! Here they come.”

“See ’em.” He had his foot hard on the accelerator. The truck shook and rattled with the speed. But this wasn’t an Indy 500 race car. It was an old truck. The car behind them looked new, shiny, and heavy. And very, very determined.

He waited until they were inches from the bumper, then wrenched the wheel again, spinning the truck into a screeching, bone-rattling one-eighty. Dakota saw the other driver’s face, his eyes wide as the two vehicles passed within inches of each other. Rand fired a shot, but they were traveling so fast Dakota had no idea if it found its mark.

“Got a hairbrush in that bag?”

Dakota slung the bag on her lap and rummaged through it. She leaned over, giving him the boar’s-bristle brush without question.

“Here, stick this in there.” He handed her his gun. “And this.” His wallet and phone.

Dakota tossed everything into her tote and zipped it.

“Give it here.” He took the bag, shoving it between his seat and the truck door. Not a particularly safe place to stash it.

“Slide over here, and hold the wheel.” He manipulated the seat control and the seat slid back, giving him more legroom.

She had to undo her seat belt to accomplish that. Probably not a smart move under the circumstances. She slid across the cracked vinyl seat until she felt the heat of his body through her clothes.

“Eleven and three.” He unbuckled his belt, then curled his warm hands over her freezing fingers to make sure her hands were where he wanted them. “Hold tight, they’ll ram us again. Keep going straight.”

Wind coming in the broken windows whipped her hair into stinging strands across her face. She had a death grip on the plastic steering wheel, her knuckles ghost-white in the near dark. She kept her eyes on the road, ignoring the trees and shrubs whizzing by in her peripheral vision. Rand contorted his body across her lap, thrusting his arm between her knees and down to the pedals to wedge the brush … somewhere. The truck’s speed dropped so dramatically that the bad guy’s car skimmed their bumper, then kept going right past them. Dakota had a glimpse of two men in the front seat, and then they were once again plunged into darkness.

“Get on my lap.” Rand pushed against the door with his shoulder, then contorted to get his leg bent enough to give it a solid kick.

Horrified, she turned to look at him. “No wa—” He gave her a steely look in return. “You’re
insane
!”

He finally managed to pop the driver’s-side door open, and Dakota saw the black ground rushing below in the wedge of the open door as her bag flew out and disappeared from sight.

“Damn it to hell, that had all our stuff—”
Oh no, oh no, oh no.
Before she could retreat to her side of the seat, he grabbed her under the arms and lifted her onto his lap, facing forward, squeezed between his unyielding chest and the hard steering wheel. The truck swerved and danced across the road, and she had to grab his leg with one hand to keep her balance.

“You can’t do this,” she shouted over the crunch of gravel beneath the tires. The wind whipped her hair around them in a twisted tangle. “Rand, for God’s sake. This isn’t a movie set.”

The steering wheel dug into her stomach. His chest was hard behind her, his thighs flexing as he rearranged his legs to accommodate her on his lap.

“It’s going to be all right, sweetheart. Let me do the work. Keep your head down and tuck and roll. Let go of the wheel.” He slid closer to the wide-open door. He half-stood, crushing her ribs against the steering wheel. Dakota wrapped her arms around the arm he had clamped around her midriff, cutting her circulation; his other arm protected her head. “Crazy damn man, who’s going to protect
your
hard head?”

“That’s my girl. Head down. Hold tight.” His arms tightened like a vise around her, his body protecting hers. “Cowboy up. Ready?”

“No!”

Rand jettisoned them out of the car into the blackness of the night.

ELEVEN

R
and landed hard, his left shoulder taking the brunt of the fall as he kept his body wrapped protectively around Dakota. No crash pad to land on in this stunt. Just skin meeting pavement. Not textbook-perfect in the stuntman’s fall guide, but as far as he could tell, nothing was broken.

They slid, rolled, and bounced across the dirt verge for a hundred feet before slowing down on the softer grass. The slide felt like an eternity, but experience told him it was probably a minute or less before they came to a jarring stop.

Had anyone seen them bail?

If he had been capable of drawing a breath, he would have used it to curse. Having the wind knocked out of him still sucked after all these years, but he knew to take small sips of the warm evening air until his lungs inflated. His hand was over Dakota’s breast, and he could feel her instinctively doing the same.

While it would’ve been excellent to stay right where he was in the cool grass, Dakota clasped in his arms, they needed to
move
. “How’re you doing?” he whispered against her cheek as her breathing stabilized.

Her long hair was all over him. It smelled like lemons and crushed grass.

“Every bone in my body is broken,” she informed him breathlessly, not moving as she labored to drag air into her lungs. “If you’re not going to fling us into space again, could you loosen your arms a bit so I … can … breathe?”

Her bottom was pressed against his groin. Very much as it had been hours ago in the catacombs. Damned fool that he was, he didn’t want to let her go. He loosened his grip, feeling the loss of her as she straightened her legs and rolled onto her back, panting.

He looked down the road, no curves, so he could see the taillights of their stolen truck as it kept going. A few seconds later, the sedan’s headlights barreled toward them from the opposite direction. Thank God there were no other vehicles; the road was dark and deserted save for the truck and the attack car.

They were in the ditch, the darkness and long grass hiding them from view. But if the car stopped and the men got out, they’d be sitting ducks. Rand flattened his body, and watched the headlights spin as the car made a U-turn to come up on the rear of the truck. The truck was going about thirty-five miles per hour. Easy enough to catch. Two sets of red lights moved into the distance.

With a loud, grinding crash, the car slammed into the back of the truck, the sound horrifically close in the still night air. “Bad guys think we’re still in there,” Rand said softly, his attention on the road. No one would be looking back here, but he wasn’t taking any chances with Dakota’s life.