Annabelle could recall the phone conversation Jack had, word per word. “You said, ‘Get Sherry out of the country. She’s been wanting to visit Rome. Tell her that I’ve asked her to meet me there.’ Then you said, ‘a few days, four at most.’”
Jack’s brows raised. He cut his gaze to her and then turned back to the road. “You have an amazing memory, Bella.”
She shrugged. “Yeah.” She did. She always had. As Adrian Monk would say, it was a gift – and a curse.
“When I spoke those words, I was basically giving Sherry, herself, the heads-up on what was occurring. At the time, I wasn’t certain we weren’t being monitored and whenever possible, Bella, we try not to take chances.” He paused, formulating his explanation before he went on. “‘Rome’ is a red-alert term. I was making certain she understood that Detective Chen’s visit was sure to be followed up by whoever it was that killed Max.”
“What about the ‘she’s always wanted to visit’ part?”
“It comes from the term ‘nice place to visit, but wouldn’t want to live there’, and refers to the nearest safe house, wherever that happens to be at the time.”
Wow, Annabelle thought. That’s complex.
“And the ‘few days, four at most’?”
“Sherry had asked me who was involved. That answer told her two things. One, I didn’t have a name, and two, there was more than one person involved.” He smiled at her. “Four at most.”
Okay, Annabelle thought, I’m in way over my head. I need to get back to the real world, with normal sentences and normal businesses and no flying bullets…
“Relax, luv. You’ll be fine,” Jack told her softly. He was eyeing her carefully, as if he could sense her overwhelmed apprehension. She caught his gaze for a moment and then pulled her eyes away. He turned back to the road.
“Jack, there’s something that’s been bothering me.”
Jack kept his gaze trained on the road. A fat raindrop landed on the windshield. And then another one. Only an hour before, the sky had been clear, the moon full. Now the night had drawn a blanket, thick and stifling. Lightning arced across the London sky line.
His black driving gloves tightened on the wheel.
“What is it?” he asked, keeping his tone even. It was hard. There was a storm coming. He could feel it. And it wasn’t just outside.
Annabelle hesitated a moment, and then cleared her throat. Her fingers nervously fiddled with the material of her dress. She pulled her white wrap more tightly around her shoulders and bit her lip.
“I saw the detail of men you had watching over your family.”
Jack said nothing. His grip grew tighter.
“There were quite a few of them even before you increased their number.” She paused. “And I couldn’t help but wonder…” She felt stupid asking this. Of course, his answer would be ‘no’. It couldn’t be anything other than ‘no’. After all, for all intents and purposes, he’d been married, right? Anyone going after the people he loved would go after his supposed wife and family. Not her. But she needed to hear it from him.
“Did… Did you ever have people watching me too?”
Lightning split the night sky. Thunder rolled.
Ah, Christ.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Annabelle threw open the car door at the next stop light and jumped out of the car. It was the fastest series of maneuvers she had ever managed, involving her seat belt and the door at once.
“Annabelle!” Jack reached out for her a split second too late. She raced, blindly, down the street beside the cars, irrespective of where she was going or what she was going to do when she got there. She was so angry – so fueled by a passion beyond her understanding – that she simply needed to get away. To run away as fast and as far as she could. She needed wind and didn’t have a bike. Running would have to do.
It was either escape, or pull the gun out of the holster strapped to her thigh beneath her dress and kill Jack Thane with it.
Behind Jack’s black luxury sedan, three other dark colored cars threw open their doors and Jack’s hired guns shot from the cars to race after Annabelle.
Jack had his own door open and was sliding over the roof of the sedan just as the first of his men joined him. “Go around!” he bellowed the order, not slowing as he tore down the street after her.
Absently, Annabelle was extremely glad that she’d chosen to wear flats. She was equally glad that she was a very fast runner; long legs helped a lot, and years of gymnastics and running, despite the pain, had made her agile and strong.
Her hips were already beginning to ache, but she ignored them, enraged beyond any ability to reason.
Behind her, Jack dodged passers-by and sprinted at full speed to catch up with the fleeing woman fifty yards ahead. He’d considered the possibility of her doing something like this but had honestly believed that Annabelle possessed more sense than to take off on her own in an unfamiliar city, without an escort. When Godrick Osborne so badly wanted her dead.
He’d been wrong. She possessed no sense at all whatsoever.
He winced as he thought to himself, or she’s so bloody beyond pissed that she doesn’t give a fucking toss what the hell happens any more…
And when it came down to it, he knew damned well that she possessed a good deal of common sense. Everyone had their breaking point. He’d simply pushed her too far.
He swore under his breath as she turned a corner and shot out of sight.
At that moment, Annabelle hated everything about Jack Thane. She hated what he was and everything he stood for, with his codes and guns and tranquilizers and his false marriages and his hired goons spying on her for… How long? How long had she had shadows following her, knowing her secrets, watching her from the darkness like fucking peeping toms?
What of the boys she’d dated since meeting Jack Thane? Now that she considered it, they hadn’t exactly been dates. They’d all broken up with her after barely meeting her and before they’d even had a chance to get to know her. One had only so much as asked her out when he called that night to say that he’d suddenly changed his mind.
Suddenly.
It was Jack all along.
She screamed in wordless outrage, but the sound was captured and drowned by the thunder that rolled overhead and the rain that began to slam into the world around her by the bucket load.
In the heat of it, she managed to retain just enough sanity to know that there was no way, in the end, she could out-run Jack Thane. He would catch up with her. And she would have to shoot him. And she wasn’t sure she would feel too good about that. You know, when she’d had time to cool off. Later.
She realized that the only way to get away from him long enough to have any real time to think was to hide. But where?
She knew nothing practical about London. Except that she could now confirm that the rain did seem to come at the most inopportune moments, as a friend had once jokingly told her. She was running full-tilt and that didn’t give her time to slow down and notice anything.
And she could feel them closing in on her. She could feel Jack and the others. Like homing beacons that had spread out into a city that they were a hell of a lot more familiar with than she was. She felt desperate, in that instant. So very, very desperate.
What would she have to do in order to get away?
Air left her lungs in a painful rush as he tackled her from behind, lifting her off of the ground with an arm around her waist and a hard spinning motion that shoved her roughly into an adjoining alley and up against a wall.