Dakota Marshal. Jenna Ryan
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me in Ben’s Creek?”
“I’ll take that to mean you want to stop. Next place we pass, I promise.”
True to his word, ten minutes later he pulled off the ancient two-lane highway that was probably only used by logging trucks now and into a dusty roadside clearing, complete with a tippy wooden shack, two gas pumps and a rear yard full of abandoned vehicles.
Alessandra took one look, stuck his hat on her head and shoved the door open. “I hate you, McBride. This place better have a washroom.”
To her relief, it had two. The man tearing a seat out of an ancient Oldsmobile took one look at her and stabbed a thumb at the shack. “Ellie’s my wife. Buy one of her blackberry pies, and she’ll let you use her private john.”
Alessandra thanked him, bought two pies and was immediately ushered into Ellie’s paying-customers-only washroom.
It smelled like pine cleaner and the toilet did flush—if she pulled really hard on the chain. The cold-water tap almost worked, as well. The mirror didn’t. A haze over the glass gave her face a tintype-photo look that would have made her laugh if she hadn’t glimpsed the remnants of an old bus through the window behind her. The thing had fallen on its side like a drunk elephant with its fire-blackened underside fully exposed.
For a motionless moment, Alessandra’s throat muscles seized, so badly that she couldn’t swallow. Voices swarmed in her head.
An elderly man: “I’m off to Chicago to visit my brother….”
A geek: “I’ll have this textbook read by the time we hit the city limits….”
A wispy woman from Arizona: “Excuse me, do you suffer from motion sickness…?”
A young marine: “I’m getting married in three months….”
Words and faces overlapped. She felt the floor moving, the bus skidding, rolling. She heard glass shatter, metal shriek, murmurs turn to screams.
With a huge effort, Alessandra tore her eyes from the mirror. But not until she saw another face that drifted in. McBride.
Sexy, smoke-gray eyes stared at her. “Don’t worry, I’m a cop. Give me your hand. I’ll get you out of here….”
“You all right, dear?” A rusty female voice shattered the spell.
Alessandra jolted back to the present. She breathed out, dried her hands and checked her reflection one last time. “I’m fine, thank you.”
When she opened the door, Ellie offered a toothy, yellow smile. “I thought maybe you’d passed out from the heat. We don’t get many customers here, us being so remote and all. When we do, I like to give them a special parting gift.”
Letting her smile grow bigger, she produced a knife from the pocket of her apron.
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