Lara's small car was parked across the street by one such meter, which she'd fed quarters into. Still, she half-expected to find a parking ticket fluttering on the windshield.
She was no more than three steps into the street when she heard the screech of tires. From the north end of town, a battered pickup truck suddenly careened around a corner and roared toward her, fishtailing wildly.
Blinded by the headlights and pinned in their glare, Lara waited numbly like a rabbit staring at a diving hawk.
Lara couldn't make a sound. She couldn't move or think. All she could do was stand frozen and stare at the vehicle bearing down on her. It couldn't have been more than twenty feet away when she was suddenly yanked back out of the street and held in powerful arms against a hard body.
Vaguely hearing the truck roar past, Lara didn't try to free herself. The man held her tight. His fingers bit into her arm, and she was absurdly conscious of the faint, musky scent of his after-shave or cologne. Her face was pressed into his shoulder, and the arms around her were so strong....
Those powerful arms loosened suddenly, and one of his hands gently turned her face up. "Are you all right?"
His eyes were colorless pools in the faint light, his hard, handsome face still and unreadable. Lara drew a deep breath, too numb from the shock to feel much else. "Yes. Yes, I think so. It must have been a drunk driver." Her voice sounded normal, she thought.
Too normal.
A frown drew his flying brows together. "What else could it have been?"
"Nothing else.
Of course, nothing else."
She was still holding her script and keys, and bemusedly looked down at her hands. "Thank you for pulling me out of the road. I couldn't move for some reason. Stupid."
"Natural," Devon Shane
corrected,
that haunting voice of his cool and calm. "You shouldn't drive yourself tonight; I'll take you home."
"You don't have to—"
He ignored the protest. "Will you need your car tomorrow?"
"No. But I can't leave it here."
Devon took the keys from her nerveless fingers. "I'll park it around back so you won't get a ticket. Wait here."
She half-turned to watch him stride across the street, but waited obediently on the sidewalk.
Obedient.
Obedient.
Her mind began working again, and she felt a pang of self-disgust. When had that happened to her? When had the numbness of shock and grief become this apathetic willingness to do only what she was told, to wait for others to guide her?
She had never been that way—before. She had charged at life, taking responsibility for her own sometimes reckless actions and stubbornly resisting any guiding hand. But then all control over her life had been snatched away from her, leaving her rudderless and stunned, and she had been forced by the sheer madness of the situation to accept guidance.
That had been natural, she thought now, and reasonable; she couldn't have coped on her
own,
and she knew it. But somewhere in these last months, acceptance had become a kind of mindless docility, and that was wrong. Wrong.
Lara started slightly as a car drew up to the curb before her, but she didn't move as Devon got out and came around to open the passenger door for her.
"Get in," he said.
She found herself taking a step toward him,
then
stopped jerkily. Who was he, after all?
A stranger.
Just a stranger with a haunting voice and burdened eyes.
Just a man she didn't know, a man she couldn't trust.
"Lara." He held out one hand to her. "Come on."
She couldn't see his face clearly, and his curiously moving eyes were only dark pools, but his voice... his haunting voice. She saw her hand reach out slowly until his long fingers closed around it, and his strong, warm touch was like a lifeline.
Seconds later, waiting for him to move around to the driver's side after he closed her door, Lara thought vaguely,
She
would have let down her braid, Nick.
Without looking.
Without even hesitating.
Any woman would.
"Where do you live?" Devon asked, sliding into the car beside her.
"About two miles away."
Her voice was steady.
"On the main road.
Just head south."
He put the car in gear, but didn't release the brake. "Do you want to report it to the police?"
"No. I couldn't identify the truck. Unless you—?"
Devon turned the wheel and pulled the car away from the curb, heading south. "It happened too fast," he said. "I didn't see enough to make
an identification
either."
There was silence for a few moments, and Lara was so aware of the man beside her that she could hardly think. What on earth was wrong with her? "I—I've never seen you around here." Not that she got out much, but, still, it was a small town. And she would definitely have noticed him.
"I've been here only a few days," he said. "I was transferred from the West Coast."
She glanced at him. "Oh? What do you do?"
"I work at Com-Tech. Do you know it?
The big plant on the other end of town."
Lara nodded. "It's an electronics plant."
"Right.
I work in conceptual design." He sent her a brief look.
"How about you?"
"I work in design too.
A different kind.
I'm a commercial artist, an illustrator."
"Freelance?"
"Yes. I work out of my apartment." She hesitated,
then
said, "It was an impulse, auditioning for the play. I've never done any acting before. Have you?"
"In college.
It's a good way to meet people when you're new in town."
New in town.
She wondered if the driver of that truck had been new in town. Until now, the lingering shock and Devon's effect on her senses had kept her from thinking about the near miss, but she couldn't block it out any longer. She could feel inner tremors building, the numbness of shock giving way to the first icy prickles of fear.
A drunken driver?
Or something else, something that hadn't been random, hadn't been accidental?
Had Devon saved her from an accident—or a murder attempt?
"Lara?"
She clenched her teeth to prevent them from chattering. "It's just up ahead," she muttered.
"The apartment building on the left."
She could feel the glance he sent her, but he said nothing as he guided the car into the parking lot
beside
the big, five-story building.
"My keys—" she began, but Devon was turning off the engine, getting out of the car. She waited until he opened her door, then got out herself and said, "Thank you for—for everything."
"I'm coming up with you," he said briefly, shutting the car door and taking her arm.
"You don't have to." The forced calm in her voice was deserting her, leaving a wavering sound behind it.
"I know that." His fingers tightened gently around her arm. His free hand pushed open the entrance door for them, and he frowned slightly as he guided her inside. "Which floor, Lara?"
"Third.
Apartment 304." She answered automatically, wondering in bewilderment what it was about his deep voice that tugged at her so.
There was no elevator. They went up the carpeted steps of the central, well-lighted stairwell in a silence broken only by the occasional faint sounds of music or television from inside the apartments they passed. When they reached her door, Devon produced her keys and unerringly selected the correct one.
Lara had left the living room lamps on. She always left a light on, even during the day, reluctant to take the chance of returning to darkness. Her apartment was decorated in soft pastels, the furniture was comfortable. And yet, it was an impersonal place, lacking a sense of its occupant. The framed prints on the walls were the kind that could have been found in any hotel room, and the color scheme blended with the bland touch of professional decorating.
Only the drafting table set up in one corner near a window struck a somewhat personal note, with drawings still pinned to it, and a clutter of supplies beside it.
Devon glanced briefly around the room,
then
guided her to sit at one end of the couch. He dropped her keys on the glass-topped coffee table. "Where's your kitchen?"
She nodded toward the short hallway leading off the living room, not trusting herself to speak. She didn't look at him as he left the room, just remained where he'd placed her with her fingers tightly laced together in her lap. A very quiet and sane voice in her head told her that she had every right to feel frightened, that it was a bit too coincidental that an anonymous driver had so narrowly missed her tonight.
But it just didn't make sense, she argued with the voice. It didn't. It was such a chancy thing, hit and run, with so many possibilities of failure. Guns, a bomb, that made sense; she would have expected something like that.
In fact, had expected it.
Lara felt her lips twist bitterly. But what did she know about it, after all?
Books, television, the movies.
She didn't even know enough to be sure there was a reason for her fear.
A distraction from her chaotic thoughts presented itself as Ching crawled out from under the couch and leapt lightly up onto the coffee table. He was a strange cat. Technically he would be labeled a tabby-point Siamese. His thick coat was a pale shade between cream and gray, and the markings on his face, paws, and tall were faint blue-gray stripes. He wore a leather collar with a silver bell that never made a sound unless he wanted it to.
In the five years that Ching had condescended to live with her, Lara had heard more than one baffled attempt to describe him; none of them quite hit the mark. Not only was he oddly colored and unusually large at almost twenty-five pounds, none of it fat, but he was uncatlike in behavior and in language; no sound even resembling a "meow" had ever escaped him. Oh, Ching talked. He muttered, he grumbled, he commented, he even cooed to wary birds outside the apartment windows. He always sounded polite, except when he was being profane, and his pale, aqua-blue eyes were eerily human in their expressiveness.
Now, sitting on the coffee table so that his long, ringed tail hung over the edge and swung slowly like a pendulum, Ching glanced toward the hallway and then at Lara. There was a question in the look.
"Company," she murmured. She'd stopped feeling peculiar talking to her cat, deciding that anyone who lived with Ching would have talked to him. It was a compulsion. One just couldn't help it, somehow.
Ching half-closed his pale eyes and lifted his chin. "Yah," he said softly. He was smiling. Most cats, Lara had decided, wore an almost permanent smile because their faces were made that way.
But not her cat.
Ching smiled only when he wanted to. And, despite his Oriental antecedents, his pointed face was wholly scrutable. Right now, he was pleased.
Lara eyed him uncertainly. What did he have to be pleased about?
Surely not Devon's presence.
Ching's habit of hiding under furniture whenever there were visitors had been born in kittenhood; a gregarious cat when he was taken outside his own domain, he tended to be suspicious of invaders and disliked being visited himself.
Before she could react to the unusual pleasure of her cat, Devon returned to the living room and sat down on the couch beside her. He was holding two cups and handed one to her.
"Tea?" she asked, accepting the cup.
"Hot and sweet.
Drink it, Lara."
She sipped cautiously, unwilling to look at him; they weren't in the dark any longer, and she felt wary of seeing that strangely moving pain shadowing his eyes. Forcing her voice to remain even, she said, "The traditional remedy for shock. Do you think I'm in shock?"
"I'd be surprised if you weren't. You could have been killed a little while ago."
"I—I would have been, if you hadn't—"
"My pleasure," he interrupted.
Lara frowned at her tea. "What were you doing out front, by the way? Your car was parked in back."
"Nick asked me to check the front door and make certain it was locked."
Perfectly reasonable, of course.
Lara told herself not to be so damned suspicious. Devon certainly hadn't been driving that truck. She looked at Ching, finding his gaze fixed meditatively on Devon. Unable to help herself, she stole a glance at the man, and saw that he was returning the cat's steady regard.
"Ching, I gather?" he murmured.
"Yes."
"Hello, Ching." Devon's voice was conversational.
"Prroopp," the cat responded politely. His smile widened, curling up at each end. Suddenly, he reminded Lara of the Grinch, evilly bent on stealing Christmas—or whatever else wasn't nailed down.
She took a hasty sip of her tea, stole another glance at Devon, and found herself caught. He was looking at her, and with only a foot or so separating them, his eyes were far too intense. She felt a pang she couldn't define, a strange tug inside her, as if he held one end of a link that was connected to some vital part of
herself
.