Fucking prick.
He wasn’t kissing me again. In fact, the second we stopped, I was getting out and leaving him.
Screw this. I didn’t have to stick with him. He was no one to me. Just a bad boy who’d moved in next door to me and proceeded to make my high school years hell. Sure, he was always wonderful to his parents and mine, but he used to laugh at me over and over. And then confuse me with those freaking brownies. And those enigmatic smiles… Dammit, I owed him nothing. He had—
The screaming wail of an ambulance cut my surly resolute thought dead. Or maybe it was the way Lucas propelled my car into speeds I don’t think it’s ever been driven before. Certainly not while I was behind the wheel. Just because I owned a muscle car, didn’t mean I drove it like I was in NASCAR.
But Lucas found the grunt in the Camaro’s engine. Found it, whipped it into a lather and proceeded to find more. He gunned the engine, red-lining the RPMs as he flew through the gears.
Before I could take stock of the situation, my home was long behind us, not a sound of the ambulance’s siren to be heard.
“Lucas,” I began, pretty certain I was going to break my nails clinging to the dash as hard as I was. I didn’t want to break my nails. It had taken a long time to break my habit of biting them, and only two days ago, I’d spent a ridiculous amount of money on my very first manicure. “You need to tell me what’s going on. Now.”
He flung us around a corner so fast I think my poor car went up on two wheels. He made doing so look easy.
The blanket he wore was pooled around his waist, leaving his upper body bare. The wounds peppering his torso continued to seep blood, but he didn’t seem to care.
Nor did he seem inclined to answer me.
“Lucas,” I snapped, that dark anger I’d experienced earlier over the garage door flaring up to epic proportions now. “If you don’t fucking tell me what’s going on, I’m going to throw myself from this car and go to the cops.”
He shot me a quick look, his eyes and expression unreadable in the muted light from the dash.
“I mean it,” I said, closing the fingers of my right hand around the door handle. “Now spill.”
He eased back on the accelerator. A little. Not a lot, but enough for me to not feel like we were participating in an insane race.
The trouble was, a part of me suspected we were, with an unseen pursuer more menacing than even Lucas. And right now, he was incredibly menacing.
“The less you know, the better,” he finally answered, just as I was about to repeat my demand.
I laughed; a dry, sarcastic bark of a sound I’d never made before. “No. The less I know, the worse for you. At this point in time, I can’t decide if you’re deranged and I need to check you into a loony bin, or if you’re unhinged and I need to call the police.”
He surprised me by uttering his own laugh. If it wasn’t for the fact it disintegrated into a coughing fit that ended with bubbles of blood on his bottom lip, I think I may have hit him.
Instead, I almost gasped with worry.
Wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand, he frowned briefly at the blood and then returned his focus to the road. “The cops aren’t who you want to call, Ronnie. Not now.”
I swallowed. He sounded…shaky.
He coughed again. No blood this time, thank God, but a lot of wincing. What made a person cough up blood? I don’t know. But whatever it was, it couldn’t be good.
“You need to get to a hospital,” I said, unable to keep the concern from my voice. Damn it. I wanted to say angry with him. When I was angry, it was easier to forget how scared I was. When I was angry I forgot about those times when he would intimidate the shit out of the school’s quarterback every time the jerk tried to feel me up in the lunch hall. “And you need to tell me what’s going on.”
He didn’t answer. Not straight away. What he did do was keep flicking glances in the rearview mirror.
Finally, as if satisfied we weren’t being followed, he slowed a little more—to a speed somewhere in the vicinity of the posted limit—and shifted in his seat.
Once more, I frowned. “Who are you, Lucas? Where do you go when you disappear? Who beat the shit out of you? Why did you turn up naked in my bed, and who do you think is going to try to hurt me?”
A ragged breath left him, the sound becoming a gurgling cough. He slid a quick look my way. This time I couldn’t hold back my gasp. Whatever adrenaline he’d been running on, whatever dogged determination to get us as far away from my home as possible, had left him.
If a freshly dug-up corpse had been driving, I would have been less dismayed. Less concerned.
“I’ll tell you everything,” he answered, the words close to a mumbled slur, “when we’re safe.”
My eyebrows lifted. “And we’re not now?”