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She was already at the door, having snatched her heavy purse from the foot of the bed as she ran past. She spared only a glance back as she jerked the door open.
Just for a moment, the mental lid lifted at the sight of him kneeling in pain. Emotions threatened to spill out of their enforced confinement. “I’m sorry, Gabe,” she whispered.
And then she hardened her expression, stepped out of the room and slammed the door closed behind her.
3
GABE GUIDED his pickup into another motel parking lot, pulled into the most isolated space he could find and shut off the engine. And then he waited.
It was after three in the morning. The parking lot was deserted. From Gabe’s CD player, which he’d left playing to keep him awake, Larry Gatlin crooned about having “done enough dying today,” after the breakup of a longtime relationship. Gabe winced. Country music had both soothed and tormented him these past two years. Sometimes he’d felt as though the songwriters had looked into his own bruised heart.
To distract himself from the sad song, he looked around, spotting Page’s car parked at one end of a row of rather disreputable-looking vehicles. This motel was hardly first-class, nor was it in the most prosperous section of Springfield, Missouri.
Page had certainly chosen an out-of-the-way place in which to hide this time, Gabe mused. She hadn’t been aware, of course, that she had been followed all the way from Wichita.
He could hardly look at her car without being bombarded by memories of the day they’d bought it How he’d teased her about checking out the radio before she’d bothered testing the vehicle’s performance. The little car still looked pretty good, he noted automatically. No visible dents, though it was dirty. So dirty, he realized, that the numbers on the license plate were almost indecipherable. Accident—or intentional on her part?
Without warning, the passenger door of the truck opened and a man slid inside. He closed the door quickly to shut off the overhead light.
“How are the eyes?” Blake asked, settling comfortably into the passenger seat.
Turning off the music, Gabe scowled and muttered something incomprehensible, trying to ignore the lingering discomfort. It had taken him well over an hour of washing his eyes with water and tears before he’d trusted his ability to drive.
Had Blake not been standing by with his van and his cellular telephone, Page would have made a clean escape. Again.
“You’ve got to admit the woman’s resourceful,” Blake commented. After a moment he added, “Something tells me she’s had to be.”
“Yeah. She’s definitely running from something. Or someone. And it isn’t me—at least, not entirely,” Gabe amended, thinking of her determination to evade him.
“You’re still sure of that?”
“I’m sure.” He’d been writhing in agony and blind as a bat after she’d zapped him with the vicious spray, but he’d heard her soft apology.
Just as he’d heard the sincere regret behind it.
He was beginning to understand that she had what she considered to be compelling reasons for her actions. But, whatever her motivation, he was still furious with her for what she’d done to him. Everything she’d done to him for the past two and a half years.
“So she’s on the run. And she refuses to tell you why.”
“Right.”
“Has it occurred to you that you have no right to hound her like this? You’re basically stalking her, you know.”
Gabe shot the other man a savage glance. “I know exactly what I’m doing. I’m trying to put my life back together. That’s my right.”
“How far are you willing to go to get your answers?”
Gabe considered the question—and the somber tone in which it had been asked. What was Blake suggesting? And how far was he willing to go?
“As far as I have to,” he muttered, as much to himself as to Blake.
Blake nodded in the shadows, as though he’d received the answer he’d expected. “Okay. Then I have a plan.”
PAGE DIDN’T SLEEP much that night.
She’d driven as far as she could before exhaustion had claimed her. She’d hoped to get a couple hours’ rest and then move on, putting as much distance between herself and Wichita as possible in the next few days, taking a circuitous route that would be difficult, if not impossible, for Gabe to trace. Back roads, switchbacks, obscure towns—Page had learned all there was to know about them. Not that they’d helped her all that much.
She tried to sleep, but every time she closed her eyes, she was haunted by the look in Gabe’s eyes just before she’d deliberately sprayed burning liquid into them. It bothered her that she’d been able to do so without the slightest hesitation.
