Page 86 of Hot Intent

“I give you my word of honor.” She sagged abruptly in the chair, and he smiled sardonically. “Go to bed. I’ll be here when you wake up. Or, if I’ve stepped out, I’ll be back momentarily.”

She stood up, but instead of climbing into bed, she came over to stand in front of him. “You do know I would never betray you, right?”

He stared up at her. He might accept that the drug they’d fed him had messed with his head, but his heart was another matter. He’d been betrayed so badly in his past it was hard for him to trust anyone the way she was asking him to. It was as if the cannabis extract had flipped on a paranoia switch in his brain, and he had no idea how to turn it off.

Maybe the paranoia had been there all along. And now that it was exposed to his conscious mind, he couldn’t put it back in the unconscious box it had come from.

Paranoia or not, his gut was telling him to stay in spy mode. Not to let her seduce him out of that cold, detached place in his mind where life and death were merely two decisions among many.

She sighed. “I’ll find a way to prove to you that I wouldn’t turn on you, Alex. That’s my promise to you.”

He had no frame of reference to know how to answer a statement like that. Everybody turned on everyone else eventually. It was why relationships were so dangerous.

He picked up the pad of notebook paper lying on the room’s desk and started writing notes and drawing lines between them, looking for connections he’d missed before. And when he gave up for the night, he burned the entire pad and flushed the ashes down the toilet.

One thing he knew for sure. He was being used by somebody. And whether it was Katie or his parents or someone else altogether, he didn’t like it. He was not going to play ball and be a good little spy. Not by a long shot.

17

Katie woke with a jolt. Crap. There was some reason she wasn’t supposed to sleep. No, wait. Alex had promised he wouldn’t run out on her and abandon her again. She sagged back to the mattress in relief. Except something was still wrong. But what?

Alex was curled on his side facing her, sleeping quietly. Lord, he was handsome, even with his hair tousled and his face mashed against a pillow. How did he still manage to radiate pain like that, though?

She would give anything to lift it away from him. For his mother to be a lovely woman who had desperately missed her son over the years and adored him in absentia. But Alex seemed to think she was somehow tied in to their current predicament.

God, he was so suspicious of everyone and everything. She thought she’d gotten past that with him, but at the moment, she seemed to be included in his lengthy list of people not to be trusted.

It was still dark outside. She checked her cell phone. A little after four a.m. Restless, she slid out of bed and padded over to the window. She lurked beside the curtains like she’d seen Alex do before and peeked sideways around them without disturbing the hanging drapery.

A car was just pulling into the motel parking lot. Weird hour for that. Even weirder as it turned the corner that its headlights were off. It parked beside another car of identical make. It must have been noise of the first car pulling in that woke her up. A warning vibration erupted in her gut.

“Alex,” she said low. “I think we have a problem.”

He lurched awake and was out of bed in a single catlike lunge. Talk about reflexes. Dang. Remind her not to startle him out of a hard sleep when she was within arm’s length of him.

He stopped in the middle of the room just long enough to see what she was doing and then he slid over to the other side of the window. It took him about two seconds to announce, “Get dressed and head into the bathroom. Lie down in the bathtub.”

“What are you going to do?”

He ignored her question and ordered, “Call 911 on your cell phone and tell them there’s a shootout in progress.”

“But there isn’t any shooting?—“

Alex lifted the pistol he’d been holding down by his side. “There’s about to be.”

Where…he must have been sleeping with it under his pillow.Paranoid, much?“Who’s out there?” she asked in quick alarm.

“Go, Katie.”

She made the 911 call, giving the name of the motel and Alex’s message. She hung up as soon as the operator said she’d dispatched police.

Katie snatched up her clothes, closed the bathroom door, and felt her way to the bathtub in the dark. It wasn’t long enough to stretch out in, so she curled on her side in it. Extremely awkwardly and with copious mental swearing, she managed to pull on her clothes. But they were all crooked and pulling at her in weird places. She finally gave up and stood up to adjust the darned things.

A tremendous explosion of sound erupted from the living room and she dropped like a rock into the cold, hard tub. Holy mackerel! Sometimes she forgot just how loud gunshots were, particularly in a confined space. A dramatic fusillade of return fire from the parking lot made her lurch again.

That was at least three weapons firing back at Alex, maybe more.

“Alex!” she shouted, “Are you okay?”

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