He shook his head, an action that didn’t help my current state of mind at all. “Not yet.”
“Where are we going?”
He gave me an address I’d never heard of before but knew was somewhere upstate.
“And you think you’re going to drive us there?” I asked, incredulous.
Once again, he shook his head. “No,” he rasped. “You are.”
And with that, he slumped sideways in the seat, his head lolling, his eyes closing.
Lunging from my seat, my seat belt digging into my chest and tummy, my stunned shout tearing at my throat, I caught the steering wheel just as Lucas’s hands slipped from it.
Heart racing, I navigated the Camaro to the shoulder, thanking freaking God it was two am in the morning and the streets were deserted.
“Lucas,” I said, giving him a shove with one hand.
The car stalled to a halt as the soft thud of his foot falling from the accelerator filled the cabin.
It took me a long time to get him out of the car. Fighting with the blanket and his extreme weight—who knew muscle weighed so much?—I dragged him around to the passenger seat and lowered him into it, the effort giving me a stitch in my side and burning lungs.
I really needed to start working out. That was the trouble with being naturally skinny. There was no incentive to exercise, so when you found yourself on the run from an unknown threat with your scary, sexy and highly secretive neighbor, you struggled.
Finally getting him back into the car, I spent a good few seconds longer than I probably should have checking his body for fresh blood.
Some of his wounds seemed to be seeping more than they had when I first saw them. God knows how much extra damage I’d done moving him the way I just had. The thing was, I didn’t have a choice.
I had to believe we were in danger. I had to believe Lucas was trying to get us—or him, at least—out of danger. And I had to believe him when he told me not to trust…
Yeah, that instruction still hadn’t been finished. I’d have to take him to task over that when he regained consciousness.
If he regains consciousness.
I ignored the niggling question, draped the blanket of his groin—Jesus, were those cigarette burns on his inner thigh?—and ran
back to the driver’s side, buckled myself in, entered our destination into my maps app on my smartphone and floored the accelerator.
It was time I drove the Camaro like it was meant to be driven.
Lucas didn’t regain consciousness when I stopped for gas three hours later.
By that stage, the sky was starting to turn a pinky gold with the approaching dawn.
If the gas station attendant noticed the shirtless man with a bruised and bloody face slumped against the passenger window in my car, he didn’t show it when I paid.
I made sure I paid with cash. I also made sure I was relaxed and normal. I didn’t want him to get suspicious about the nervous, jittery woman paying for gas in the wee hours of the morning if someone happened to question him at some point. As an added precaution, I covered my hair with the baseball cap I always kept in the car for days I found myself needing protection from the sun.
If I’d had a spare pair of reading glasses in the car, I would have put those on as well. Unfortunately, I didn’t. I realized I’d also left my glasses back home.
Hopefully, I wasn’t going to need to do any serious reading while on the run with Lucas.
On the run.
God, I wish I knew what I was on the run from.
It took another tank of gas and a pee break—during which I spent the entire time straining to hear what was going on outside the public bathroom in fear whoever was after us was going to get to the still-unconscious Lucas slumped in the car—to get to our destination.
When I did pull into the driveway of the address he’d given me before passing out, I wondered if I’d heard him correctly.