Jase drove straight to her apartment. He felt a little better after talking to the guard behind the desk in the lobby, warning him to be on the lookout for trouble. But they needed to keep a low profile. Zepeda had warned them about the cops. Hector had warned them. The fewer people who knew, the better.
“No one comes up,” Jase said. “No one. Got it?”
“Yes, sir. You can count on me.”
“Thank you, Gordy,” Kate said.
“Keep a sharp eye. These men mean business.” They rode the elevator upstairs in silence. Kate didn’t say anything until they were inside her apartment and Jase had checked to be sure the place was secure.
“All right,” she said, propping a hand on her hip in a gesture he recognized. “Let’s hear it. Start from the beginning.”
Resigned, he started talking, beginning with the phone call from Paulo Diaz, Hector’s murder and ending with Paulo’s warning that they were now the ones being hunted.
Jase tried not to flinch as the color slowly drained from Kate’s pretty face.
Kate refused to leave. At least not without a plan. It had taken her a while to get over the shock of being told men were coming after them, but now that she had accepted the news, there was no way was she going into hiding.
“You aren’t being realistic,” she said. “We can’t just disappear. We both have lives, businesses. We have to find these men and stop them.”
“I’ll find them. In case you’ve forgotten, it’s what I do.”
“Oh, I haven’t forgotten. You’re a big, bad, bounty hunter. But in caseyou’veforgotten, Hawk Maddox, this is my life we’re talking about. It’s my life that’s in danger, just like yours. I’m sure as hell not going to sit around waiting for these guys—whoever they are—to find me and put a bullet in my head.”
“You need to trust me, Kate—just this one time.”
Kate looked up at him, her heart squeezing with how much she had missed him. She rested a hand on his cheek, felt the familiar roughness of his unshaven jaw.
“I trust that you’re the best at what you do, and that you’d to anything to protect me. Even give up your own life.” The minute the words were out, she knew they were true, had known in some deep part of herself all along.
Jason captured her palm against his cheek and looked into her face, and she could feel the power of those blue, blue eyes. “I don’t want you getting hurt. I couldn’t live with that.”
She forced herself to move away. “I can help you, Jason. Together we can find these men and put them away, put them somewhere they won’t be able to hurt us or anyone else ever again.”
He paced across the room and back, his muscled shoulders rigid with tension. “Getting you more deeply involved in this is the last thing I want.”
“I can’t just go into hiding. It’s not realistic and it isn’t safe. We have to stop them. You know I’m right, Jason.”
He fell silent for several heartbeats. Finally a resigned sigh whispered out. “Unless we can find these guys and put them away, neither of us will ever be safe.”
“We can do it if we work together,” Kate said.
Jase paced away for several heartbeats, then walked back. “Since I’m not willing to leave your protection to someone else, we stay together—on one condition. After we get settled, I take you through some basic self-defense moves. And as soon as we get a chance, we practice your shooting.”
“Fine.”
He scrubbed a hand over his face. “We need to make a plan.”
“Whatever plan we come up with, we’re going to have to go back to Houston.”
“Yeah,” Jase said simply. “I know.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“Find her! All of you—spread out and keep looking! She can’t have gotten that far. Whatever you do, don’t let her get away!”
The men fanned out, at least five of them, running off in different directions. Two of them charged right past the entrance to the alley where she was hiding.
It was dark, the night so black Callie could only feel the rough brick walls as she crept along in the fetid, humid air. Carefully she picked a path through the rotten garbage strewn all over the pavement, past the overflowing metal dumpster, trying to ignore the disgusting smells, careful not to step on a beer bottle or nudge a tin can with her foot and give herself away.
