Moving Target Read online

  “Then navigate. I don’t know this city well enough to know where the dead ends are. We need to lose this tail or we’re going to run into some serious problems.”

  “Fine! But stop snapping at me and stop calling me Katherine. I prefer Kat, if you don’t mind.”

  “Fine! Kat. Get on it!”

  “Take a right down Landers,” she shouted seconds before he passed the street. He jerked the wheel and they skidded down the narrow street, clipping a parked car and smashing a taillight. “And then hook onto Fourteenth. If we can lose him long enough, we can catch the 101 from there.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me.” He drove dangerously fast down the residential street and prayed they didn’t hit a pedestrian or attract the attention of a beat cop. The last thing he needed was to involve local authority. Fate smiled on them and their tail didn’t catch their last-minute switch down Landers. Jake booked it to Fourteenth and within minutes, the freeway entrance loomed. The town car’s springs groaned as they jounced along the uneven pavement of the centuries-old city and they took the freeway access like a bullet exiting the chamber. The town car hurtled down the freeway and melted into the night.

  * * *

  Kat couldn’t breathe. She’d always been a weak, spindly thing as a kid and as if that hadn’t been bad enough, she’d been afflicted with asthma, too. She’d mostly outgrown it but there were times when she had flare-ups, usually when she was under extreme stress or after cardio activity. Since she still hadn’t grown much stronger since high school, she didn’t see the point of going to the gym and since being in her lab was soothing, she didn’t have all that much stress. But one wild car chase was enough to awaken her sleeping breathing disorder and now it seemed her body wanted to take a nostalgic walk down I Can’t Breathe Lane. Her chest fought to draw air into her aggrieved lungs but they were being stubbornly uncooperative. “J-Jake,” she managed to gasp, her vision dotting. “I—I c-can’t b-breathe...”

  “What?” Jake shot a questioning look at her and immediately took the off-ramp. “Do you have asthma?” he asked. At her jerked nod, he swore under his breath. “Concentrate on remaining calm. You need to focus on drawing breath into your lungs. I’m guessing you left your inhaler at your place,” he asked rhetorically, chagrined. “Okay, hold on. Caffeine will work in a pinch.”

  He screeched to a stop at a convenience store and dashed inside. He returned with an espresso in a can and helped her drink. “The caffeine will dilate your lungs enough to calm down,” he explained as she struggled to quell the panic. Her fingers shook as she gripped the can with his help. Bit by bit, the caffeine started to loosen her lungs and she took slow, measured breaths with relief. He removed her glasses carefully and wiped away the tears that had trickled down her cheeks.

  “Feeling better?” he asked, his gaze searching hers. She nodded, her heart rate finally slowing to a normal speed. She struggled to sit up, but he wasn’t about to let her move too quickly. “It’s okay. We can take a minute. We lost the tail miles ago. Why didn’t you tell me you needed your inhaler?” he asked.

  “I forgot. It’s not every day that I get kidnapped for my own good. I forgot my toothbrush, too.”

  “You haven’t been kidnapped,” he corrected her with a subtle frown.

  “If I haven’t been kidnapped, am I free to go home?”

  “You know it’s not safe there,” he answered, his frown deepening. “This incident just proves my point. Whoever was tailing us had been minutes from your apartment. Something tells me they weren’t coming over for tea.”

  Kat worried her bottom lip. It was difficult to refute plain logic. “So now what?” she asked.

  “First, we need to ditch this car. They’ll be looking for a rented town car.”

  “Especially one with a smashed-out taillight.”

  “Yeah, that’s true, too.”

  “So...that returns us to my original question. What are we going to do now? If I had a car, I’d offer to drive but it’s too darn expensive to park in the city. I take the BART or the Muni to get around.”

  “We couldn’t take your car, anyway. Chances are whoever was tailing us would’ve already received intel on your vehicle and would’ve been looking for it. We’ll rent a car.”

  She peered at him, enjoying the faint tingle at the pit of her stomach as she perused his handsome face. Up close, she could smell his cologne and the warm scent of his skin. So masculine, she noted almost clinically. From an evolutionary standpoint, he’d make lovely babies. “You really owe it to the human race to pass on your genes,” she mused. She clapped a hand over her mouth at his look of astonishment, then realized she had no choice but to own it. “You have to know you’re very handsome. I’m just saying that the world loves a pretty face. You won the genetic lottery. Do you have a brother?”

  He scowled. “Yes, but he’s taken,” he answered, misinterpreting her reason for asking.

  “Not for me, you goose. Just wondering if your parents spread their beautiful DNA among a sibling group. For the good of ensuring pretty people inherit the earth, of course,” she tried joking but he didn’t laugh.

  At the mention of his parents, his expression became shuttered and all semblance of tenderness or concern fled from his eyes as he pulled away. “Are you feeling better?” he asked.

  Sharing time was over, apparently. “Yes. Thank you. I never knew that trick with caffeine,” she murmured, sharply disappointed in the change.

  He nodded and pulled away from the parking lot to ease back into the flow of traffic. “I need to make some calls. We’ll hole up in a hotel for the night and then start fresh in the morning.”

  “Okay,” she said, risking another look at Jake. Her assessment still stood. Her kidnapper was one beautiful—and judging by the way he freaked out when she mentioned his parents—emotionally screwed-up individual. Her good sense said to steer clear but his messed-up psyche called out to hers and she was helpless to resist it. She’d always been a sucker for the bad boy with the broken heart, even if the bad boys in her past had never even looked twice her way. In her imagination, she’d nursed plenty back to emotional stability wherein they became productive, emotionally selfless individuals capable of mature love and admiration. Did she mention she was alone with her thoughts a lot in her youth? Aaaaand, this is why I’m still a virgin, she thought dryly.

  “For the record, men aren’t pretty,” he stated, his eyes never leaving the road. “Only women and little girls can be called pretty.”

  “Really? I never realized there was a rule in effect.” She paused then said, “Babies are pretty.”

  “No. Babies are, at best, cute. But most look like doughy old men until their hair grows long enough to discern gender. Women are pretty. Men are handsome,” he explained gruffly. “How would you feel if someone called you handsome?”

  She smiled wistfully. “I don’t think I’d mind much. Anything aside from ‘four-eyed weirdo’ would be a pleasant change. Unlike you, as you can see, I didn’t exactly win the genetic lottery.” She tried for lighthearted self-deprecation but it still stung to know that she was no swan and deep down there still remained the seventeen-year-old girl who wanted the cutest guy in school to notice she was more than someone to copy chem notes from.

  “You’re not ugly and anyone who would say so is plainly blind,” Jake said, shocking her. He shook his head as if befuddled they were even having such a conversation, and gestured to the navigation. “Find us a cheap hotel off the main streets—something old and less likely to be filled with tourists. We need to be as low profile as possible.”

  Kat swallowed the questions that had bubbled to the surface at his shocking statement and nodded, her mind chattering. Did he, in a roundabout way, just call her pretty?

  A slow grin lifted her lips as delight tickled her insides.

  Sounded like it to her.
r />   Jake, her government protector/kidnapper, thought she was pretty!

  She’d take it.

  Chapter 4

  They’d been driving for hours. Or maybe it just felt that way because her stomach had been grumbling for the past hundred miles and she was ready to start chewing on the upholstery if she didn’t get some food pronto. “I’m new to this kidnapping thing but is food on the agenda? I have a very high metabolism and I have a tendency to burn through calories at an alarming rate. If you recall, I was in the midst of my dinner when you kidnapped me for my own good.”

  “Will you stop saying that? I did not kidnap you. Government officials do not kidnap people.”

  She shrugged. “I’m not going to argue semantics with you when I’m too hungry to temper my words.”

  “Why do you think you have to temper your words?”

  “Well, you carry a gun, you’re kind of surly, and I’m not sure you like me, so under the circumstances, I would say it’s probably wise to temper my words. But I’m starving and you’re starting to look as good as a ham on rye so it’s very possible my judgment isn’t the best right now, which means I may well say something I probably shouldn’t.”

  “I get the picture. You’re hungry,” he said dryly. “Do you have any dietary restrictions I should know about?”

  “I don’t care for sweet potatoes,” she answered, thinking. “And I’m not wild about cucumbers. It’s not that I don’t like the taste—they’re okay—but I’m a little uncomfortable with phallic-shaped vegetables.” Was that a snort? She cast him a sidewise glance but found him watching the road, stoic as ever. Perhaps she’d imagined it. “And I guess the same goes for bananas but I do eat them because they’re good power foods.”

  “Power foods.”

  “Yeah, you know, foods that digest slowly for the maximum fuel benefit for your body. I’m surprised you don’t know about that considering how fit you are.”

  Was that a tiny smile playing at the corners of his mouth? Oh, it was, which told her he’d been playing her. “You know all about power foods. You’re probably the kind of person who only eats raw, organic and brings their own utensils to a restaurant.”

  “Hardly. Just because I believe in eating clean doesn’t mean I’m OCD. But yes, I already knew about power foods. I was just surprised you know about them.”

  She frowned. “And why is that?”

  “Because when I picked you up you were about to eat a bunch of processed goo masquerading as macaroni and cheese.”

  Kat sniffed. So judgmental. “I happen to like that processed goo. I’m a scientist and adhere to the better-living-through-chemistry creed. And unless you grow everything you eat, you can’t afford to be so judgy. There are chemicals everywhere.” She risked a short glance his way. “Do you grow a garden?”

  “A small one,” he admitted reluctantly. “Tomatoes, bell peppers and cucumbers mostly—the nonphallic kind. And when I asked about your dietary needs, I meant, are you allergic to anything?”

  “No.” Of course he was. And she’d started talking about her weird little food quirks. He must think she was a nut-ball. Heat burned her cheeks but she lifted her chin and tried to return the conversation to something somewhat normal. “Well, good for you. I have a black thumb. I have a tendency to kill anything green. Back to the original topic, can we please, for the love of all that’s holy, get some food before I pass out?”

  He had MREs but in the interest of time, perhaps a drive-through would be best, he realized.

  “In-N-Out work for you?” he asked with a sigh and she nodded gratefully. Jake maneuvered the car across the lanes and took the first exit with the huge In-N-Out sign sticking out over the freeway. “Good. We’re using the drive-through.”

  “Actually, a potty break would be great.” At his dark scowl, she shrugged. “I can’t help the way the human body was created. Gotta eat and drink, gotta go number 1 and number 2. Simple biology. Don’t like it, take it up with evolution. Or God. Whichever way your philosophies swing, it doesn’t matter to me.”

  “Fine.” He exhaled and pulled into a parking spot. “But we’re not dallying. You relieve yourself while I order the food. What do you want?”

  Relieve herself? He sounded so formal. But she supposed that was efficient. “Cheeseburger, animal-style.”

  “Animal-style?”

  She smiled. “They’ll know. Secret menu.”

  “Right,” he said, looking at her as if she’d dropped a screw. “Animal-style it is. Anything else?”

  “Medium—no—make that large soda and fries. I’m starving.”

  He gave her a look that said he didn’t know where she would put all that food. It was a look she recognized because people often gave her that look. She could put away an entire large pizza on her own within an hour or two. When she returned from the restroom she found Jake sitting by the window, watching the parking lot warily. From this vantage point, he had a clear visual of the car. “Do you think they’re still after us? And who exactly are they? Russians? Are we still in conflict with the KGB? Or maybe the Libyans?”

  “You don’t get out much do you?”

  “No. Not really.” She spent most of her time in the lab or in her apartment without much deviation, except on occasion she ventured out in costume for cosplay conventions. Should she mention that? He probably didn’t even know what that was. Some people thought cosplay was weird. She didn’t want to run the risk of coming off as totally strange, so she added instead, “Sometimes I attend renaissance festivals.”

  “Is that where they dress up and pretend to be from the Middle Ages?” he asked, and she nodded, even though he’d gotten the time period wrong. He followed with a short grunt. “Why?”

  “I like the costumes and the history.” Plus, just like cosplay, it was fun to pretend to be someone else for a day.

  “And who do you dress up as? Queen Victoria?”

  She scowled. “I see history was not your favorite subject in school. Queen Elizabeth I was a Renaissance queen, not Queen Victoria. And no, I don’t dress up as the queen. I’m a...fairy princess.”

  “Fairy princess?” He nearly choked on his burger. He wiped his mouth when he could breathe. “I don’t recall fairies being somewhere in history.”

  “Not all participants follow the actual history. It’s just fun to dress up,” she retorted, her cheeks heating. Now she definitely wasn’t going to tell him that she also enjoyed dressing as Catwoman at cosplay conventions. She liked the feel of the latex and it made her feel badass when she’d never actually been badass in her life. And it was sexy...another thing she’d never considered herself on a normal day.

  She stuffed down the urge to reveal such a personal thing about herself and instead, changed the subject. “So...who are the superpowers these days?” Jake refrained from immediately answering and dug into his burger instead. She took that as a cue to continue talking but awkward silences were...well, awkward. “It’s a bit weird to wrap my head around what is happening,” she said, munching her fries. “I mean, the most excitement I’ve had in a long time is when my apartment super installed the new dishwasher. I really hate hand washing. It’s not the actual washing of the dishes that bothers me, it’s the way my hands feel after they’ve been stuck in water for so long that the skin prunes up. Ugh. I hate that feeling. It always feels like I’m rubbing together two pieces of wet parchment paper.”

  “Wet parchment paper would rip,” he said between bites and checking his watch.

  “Okay, maybe not parchment paper but something other than human skin and that creeps me out.” She took a big bite and Jake’s eyes widened imperceptibly but she was used to it. She had a big mouth and she could cram a lot of food into it. “So where you from?”

  “You should concentrate on swallowing your mouthful. You might choke.”

&n
bsp; “Sorry,” she said, realizing she needed to brush up on her manners. Spending time with monkeys wasn’t all that good for social interaction with humans. “Forgot.” She swallowed her mondo bite but couldn’t stop talking. “My uncle raised me when my parents died and he didn’t have a single clue about raising a little girl but he tried real hard. So I’ll try not to do anything terribly, inadvertently offensive in the future.” There was a minute roll of his eyeballs and she pursed her lips. “You could use a brushup on your social skills, too, you know. If we’re going to be traveling together, we should at least pretend to get along, right?”

  “Why?”

  His blunt response took her aback. “What do you mean, why? Because that’s what nice people do. They pretend to get along until such time that they can talk about each other behind their backs later. It’s called civilized society.”

  “I thought you said you don’t get out much? How would you know what civilized society does or doesn’t do?” He didn’t wait for an answer and shoved another fry in his mouth, saying, “We’re not friends and we’re not bound to be friends anytime soon. You represent a mission and I will see to it that you are safely delivered as per my directive. Understand?” At her dejected nod, he seemed satisfied and continued eating. “We leave in five minutes. I don’t feel comfortable being out in the open like this.”

  Well, poop. So much for making the best of things and looking forward to an impromptu road trip. Tears stung her eyes and she had to look away before she embarrassed herself. Too late. Jake had noticed and he probably noticed what an ugly crier she was, too.

  “Are you crying?” he asked.

  “No.” A tear slipped down her cheek and she wiped it away. “And what difference does it make to you if I’m crying or not? I’m just a mission, right?”

  “Oh, criminy,” he muttered, his dark brows pulling into a frown. “Look, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I just don’t want to give you the wrong idea or anything.”