Shooting Starr Read Free

to the nearest—”
    Damn it. He elaborated on the swearing under his breath while he shook his head and rubbed unhappily at the back of his neck. “Ma’am, I wish I could do that—I do. I’m not allowed to pick up passengers, okay? I could lose my job.” Which was sort of a lie—the part about losing his job, anyway. His brother might chew him out good, but he wasn’t going to fire him. On the other hand, the no-hitchhikers rule was something all the Blue Starr drivers understood and agreed on, mainly because it made basic good sense. Picking up strangers was dangerous, especially the female variety. Those could complicate a driver’s life in ways C.J. didn’t even like to think about.
    But because he was softhearted by nature and hated tolet anybody down, he looked at this particular female and tried on his best smile, dimples and all. “Unless it’s a matter of a life-or-death emergency, I suppose that’d be different.”
    â€œIt is.”
    C.J. narrowed his eyes and didn’t say anything for a minute or two; she’d caught him off guard with that, with the quiet tension in her voice and those silvery eyes never leaving his face. He felt a prickling under his skin, a kind of itchy-all-over, shivery feeling that made him think of the way an animal’s fur lifts up when he’s feeling threatened. He couldn’t have said why he should feel danger connected with such a fragile-looking woman, but right then he was pretty certain if he’d had fur it would have been standing on end.
    â€œAre you in some kind of trouble?” he growled without stopping to clear his throat.
    She made a sound he’d have sworn was a laugh, except her face didn’t look like she thought anything was funny. She spoke slowly and deliberately, as if to a not-very-bright child. “I thought I’d made that clear. My car is broken down. I need you to take me—us—to the nearest town. Right now. As in, immediately. Do you understand? ”
    The urgency in her was so palpable C.J. actually stepped backward. His mind was racing, looking for explanations that would make sense to him. “Wait— How…is somebody—”
    She didn’t wait for him to work his way through it. Closing her eyes, she gave a regretful sigh and withdrew her hands from the front pocket of her sweatshirt.
    Momentum carried C.J. through. “—hurt or someth—” Then his hands shot up in the air without his brain even telling them to. A natural response to the gun in her hand. “Aw, jeez. ”
    â€œI’m sorry,” she was saying in that same quiet but urgent way, “I don’t have time to explain. I said we have toleave here immediately. This—” she gave the gun a little wave, a very little one, she wasn’t being careless with it “—is to let you know how serious I am about that. I will shoot if you—”
    She interrupted herself with an exasperated sound and a hissed, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, will you please put your hands down? You look silly with them up in the air like that.”
    Not to mention what it’s gonna look like to anybody who happens to pull into the parking lot right about now, was C.J.’s thought—his first coherent one since she’d pulled the snub-nosed pistol out of her sweatshirt pocket.
    He snorted and muttered crossly, “Yeah, well, it seemed like the thing to do when somebody’s pointin’ a gun at me. Sorry—guess I just don’t know how to act.” He did lower his hands, though…slowly. Now that the first shock was fading, he was starting to get good and mad, and he ground out the rest of it between gritted teeth. “I’ve never had anybody threaten to kill me before.”
    She made a grimace, the first sign of honest-to-God emotion he’d seen in that fairy-princess face. “I did not threaten to kill you. I said