Hold Me Read Free Page B

know.” She waved a hand, then grabbed the wheel again as they bounced over a pothole. “Shooting at bad guys, car chases through small towns, etcetera, etcetera.”
    “Oh, that.” He shrugged and twisted in the seat to face her. “I don’t know. Pretty often.”
    Katie glanced at him and saw that his eyes were twinkling. She blinked. The jerk really did have beautiful eyes. They were a rich, deep shade of chocolate brown, framed by incredibly long, dark eyelashes. Never in her life had such eyes actually twinkled at her. She almost steered the car into a ditch and the bump drew her attention back to the road.
    He didn’t appear to notice anything unusual. Probably women drove into ditches whenever he walked by.
    “Besides,” he said, and grinned, “how do you know I’m not the bad guy?”
    Katie swallowed. The giddy high washed away, leaving her weak and shaken. This wasn’t a game, she reminded herself. She didn’t know this guy. She didn’t know the first thing about him. Thoughts of murderers and rapists raced through her mind again. What if she’d been running from the police all this time? Of course, she’d never seen the police driving black sedans, and one would hope they wouldn’t shoot at a car on a busy highway, but who knew?
    As soon as possible, she pulled over to the side of the road.
    “Get out. Now.” She tried to sound hard and powerful but didn’t think she’d pulled it off. That was the problem with being short—no authority.
    “Hey, come on. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it,” he said, his voice soothing. He didn’t even try to move.
    She swallowed and shoved her glasses higher on her nose with a shaky hand. What was she going to do? He was a lot bigger than she was and seemed to be in pretty good shape. His shoulders stretched the material of the black T-shirt he wore and his biceps bulged quite nicely, even though he wasn’t doing anything special with them at the time.
    Now that she really looked at him, she noticed he had a long scar across his left cheekbone. She didn’t know how she’d missed it before. He had a tattooed band of Celtic knots wrapped around the arm closest to her, peeking out under the short sleeve of his shirt. And there was another tattoo of a snake farther down on his forearm. He looked dangerous.
    All right. So, she probably didn’t have any hope of forcing him out of the car by herself. A surreptitious tug on the seatbelt confirmed that the buckle still wouldn’t move. But if she could reach her utility knife in the glove compartment, maybe she could stab him…
    “Come on, I was joking,” the man said into the thick silence. “I’m not one of the bad guys. I swear. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
    Joking? And he expected her to believe that? How stupid did he think she was? She crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him.
    “You’re with the FBI?” she asked.
    “Yeah.”
    “Don’t you have to show me some kind of a badge or something?” She’d seen enough cop shows on television to know that much.
    “I don’t have one with me.” He squirmed a little in the seat. “I am, was, working undercover.”
    “Okay.” She raised her eyebrows to show him she didn’t buy it. “Then just tell me what’s going on.”
    He coughed. “I can’t.”
    “All right.” Katie studied him, refusing to let his beautiful eyes distract her, refusing to notice how he took up most of the room in the car. “So, let me see if I’ve got this straight. You’re telling me that you’re with the FBI, but you can’t prove it. You’ve carjacked me, gotten me shot at, and generally scared the heck out of me, but you’re not going to tell me why. About cover it?”
    He hesitated, then nodded. “Uh, yeah.”
    “Buddy, if you think—”
    “You really did save my life. I can tell you that much.” He smiled at her fully, and the temperature in the car went up about ten degrees. His face had a fierce quality that, combined with the scar and his