Absolute Fear. Lisa Jackson
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on the very day she decided to take the reins of her life again.
Fate?
Coincidence?
Or just bad luck?
Not that it mattered.
Because she wanted to see him again. Intended to face the bastard.
She had a hell of a lot of questions for him.
Within a few miles, the rain let up then stopped completely. Her wipers were suddenly scraping and screeching against the glass, and sunlight, so long filtered by the clouds, bounced off the pavement in bright, blinding shafts. Maybe things were getting better. Even the cat had stopped crying. Eve switched off the wipers just as her cell phone jangled. With one eye on the road, she pulled the phone from a side pocket of her purse and flipped it open.
She put the phone to her ear. “Hello?”
“He’s free,” a raspy voice hissed.
“Excuse me?”
The phone went instantly dead.
“Hello…?”
A tingle of fear plucked at her spine.
She wanted to think that someone had dialed her incorrectly, that the call had been a mistake, but she knew differently. The message was meant for her, to tell her that Cole had been released from prison.
“No shit, Sherlock,” she muttered, scowling as she tried to read the display on the small screen. Caller ID failed her: Unknown Number was all she learned for her efforts.
She dropped the phone into the pocket of her purse again and fought a tiny drip of panic. So some idiot had called to…what? Inform her? Warn her? Scare her? So what?
It was no big deal.
Then why did whoever called hang up?
Why not finish the conversation?
The gravelly, almost hissing timbre of the voice in those two small words, He’s free, caused latent goose bumps to rise on her forearms.
She glanced in the rearview mirror and felt the spit dry in her mouth. A dark pickup was following her. Surely it wasn’t the same shadowy truck she’d seen in the parking lot of the restaurant nearly an hour before? The one with tinted windows where a man had been smoking…?
Don’t go there, Eve. Don’t panic. You, of all people, know how dangerous that can be.
But her heart rate jumped and her palms began to sweat.
Don’t do this…. It was nothing. NOTHING! A phone call. Nothing more.
Her gaze flicked to the rearview mirror. Had the pickup closed the gap? Was he hanging on her bumper? She knew all about incidents where someone would intentionally rear-end a victim on the pretense of an accident, but when the victim pulled over, the assailant would get the upper hand, pull a gun or a knife or…
Her heart was pounding crazily now.
She stepped on the accelerator and switched lanes, speeding past an eighteen-wheeler carrying gasoline. The pickup followed, and her heart thumped even more wildly, and she considered calling 911.
Get a grip, she told herself. The guy’s just passing the semi. It happens all the time.
She was breathing shallowly again, and the cat, damn the cat, as if he were infected with her own fear, started yowling again. She checked the mirror as she shot past a minivan and two cars, the needle of her speedometer twenty miles over the speed limit. Fine. Let her get a ticket. Be pulled over by the police. That would solve the problem!
But as she flew past the last vehicle, the dark truck she’d thought was so malevolent lagged far behind, soon disappearing from view.
He hadn’t been following her.
It probably wasn’t even the same truck that she’d seen at the rest stop.
She’d overreacted.
Again.
“No reason to borrow trouble,” she told herself, remembering one of her grandmother’s favorite phrases: Why borrow what you know is already coming your way? “Oh Nana,” she whispered, instantly missing the woman who had helped raise her once her mother had died fifteen years earlier.
Her sudden anxiety attack melted away, and she slowly let out her breath. For the next fifteen minutes she tried to concentrate on the radio, talking nonsense to the cat, obsessively checking her rearview mirror every few seconds. The menacing dark truck failed to reappear.
Maybe Anna Maria was right. She was still far from a hundred percent of being herself. Then again, would she ever be the woman she was before she’d been shot?
Of course not.
No one could ever be.
Not when she knew that the man she loved, the man she had trusted above all others, had tried to kill her.
His breath came in short gasps.
His heart was thundering so loudly that the freeway noise, usually crushing, couldn’t be heard. He snapped the stolen cell phone shut and licked his lips. Though he stared straight ahead, driving by instinct, his mind was full of her, recalling, relishing the sound of her voice as she’d answered.
Hello.
Innocent.
Trusting.
One little word, and it caused so many emotions to roil deep within him. His fingers gripped the steering wheel more tightly, and he smiled. A tingle swept through his blood, causing his groin to tighten just as the sunlight broke through the clouds. He stepped on the accelerator. The truck nosed up a small rise. Through the bug-spattered windshield, he spied her car again as she switched lanes, the Camry half a mile ahead, gliding easily around another eighteen-wheeler.
His heart thumped in his chest.
Behind his sunglasses, his eyes squinted as if he could focus sharply enough to see her. His fingers stretched over the steering wheel.
Come on, baby. One glimpse…that’s all I want.
Then her car disappeared around a long, sweeping curve. But he knew she was close, could feel her. He knew where she was going, but he couldn’t let her get too far ahead, out of sight, just in case she took a detour.
No, he had to remain within view.
Without checking his mirrors, he floored the pickup and sped around an ancient Mercedes burning too much oil, black smoke pluming from the exhaust pipes.
More speed!
He was losing her!
He pushed down on the gas. His truck roared past a newer Ford Focus with heavy-metal music throbbing loud enough that he could feel the thrum of the bass through his closed windows.
Still his eyes remained straight ahead, his gaze focused on the little red Toyota with Eve at the wheel.
He’d blown it the first time at the cabin.
She’d lived.
He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.
CHAPTER 4
Eve couldn’t make it all the way to New Orleans. The needle on the gas gauge was hovering near empty, while her bladder was stretched to full. With less than eighty miles to the city, she was resigned that she’d have to stop, so she pulled into a gas station/mini-mart that shared a parking lot with a coffee hut. Across a small access road was a McDonald’s where cars and trucks were stacking up at the drive-up window and vying for spots near the doors.
Eve eased her car to a pump and waited for the minivan in front of her to drive off. Finally she filled her tank, pulled around to a parking spot, took Samson out of his cage for a couple of strokes of his long fur, then offered him water from her bottle. He clung to her like crazy, rubbed the top of his