Page 82 of Close Pursuit

“I prefer it if no one cares for me. Saves a world of hassles to avoid emotional ties of any kind.”

She stared across the interior of the car at him. “Are you serious? You don’t ever want any kind of emotional ties to another human being?”

“Correct.”

“Then why on God’s green earth did you make yourself one of Dawn’s legal guardians?”

“Being a guardian has nothing to do with being a parent. It merely means I will provide support and resources to whoever raises her.”

“Bullshit,” she exploded. “You promised you’d never lie to me, Alex.”

He all but drove off the road, he was scowling so angrily. But then it hit her. To be honest with her, he first had to be honest with himself. He was already emotionally invested in Dawn whether he’d admitted it to himself or not.

“It’s hard, isn’t it?” she asked sympathetically.

“What is?”

“Giving up your grand isolation and stepping up to being an adult?—“

Something big and fast-moving slammed into her side of the car and the BMW swerved violently. A black SUV had just side-swiped them, hard. Alex stomped on the accelerator. If she thought he’d driven fast before, that was nothing compared to the way he flung the BMW around now. She braced herself grimly held on to the bent door for dear life as he tore across the city like a madman.

It took five of the most nerve-wracking minutes of her life for him to lose the big vehicle, but the superior speed and agility of the German sports car finally prevailed over the clumsier SUV.

Eventually, the SUV disappeared behind them and Alex decelerated once more.

“We’ve got to ditch my car,” he bit out.

“Because the damage is obvious?”

“No. Because whoever’s after us is tracking this vehicle somehow. I checked for bugs, but they’re doing something else. Watching it on satellite or tracking the on-board computers, somehow.”

He pulled into a long-term parking lot next to a Metro stop. And then he did a strange thing. He took the key fob off its chain and left it prominently on the dashboard in the front windshield. “Leave your door unlocked,” he muttered as he jumped out of the car. He did the same.

“Are you trying to get it stolen?” she asked, confused.

“Yes. Then our thugs can follow around the thief for a while instead of us.”

Ahh. A clever misdirection. “You’re good at this spy game stuff,” she puffed as they ran for the Metro entrance.

They slowed down once they were underground. He answered belatedly, “I bloody well ought to be good at it after the way I was raised.”

“I wish I could go back in time and hug that little boy. He must have been so lost and lonely.”

“You don’t miss what you never had,” Alex retorted.

Her resolve to show him love strengthened once more.

“Now what?” she asked as they stepped onto a Metro train. They fell into seats and accelerated into a dark tunnel.

“We go to ground.”

We, huh?Guess she wasn’t going home to Pennsylvania just yet. Not until people quit trying to kill Alex or get to him through her. Good. It would give her time to teach him what love was. Whether he liked it or not…

15

Alex knew spies tended to think in terms of disappearing in the underbellies of cities. Therefore, he chose to hide right out in the open among crowds of tourists. His biggest problem was that he and Katie made a strikingly attractive couple. They were memorable.

Oh, well. They would just have to stay in their hotel room and find a way to occupy themselves for a few days. Gee. Darn.

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