Free Savior in the Saddle by Delores Fossen Page B

us,” Brandon explained.
    She pulled back, met his gaze. “This means there’s a leak?”
    He nodded and hated the fear he saw in her eyes. “You were right, Willa. We can’t trust the cops.”
    She made a sound of agreement and blinked back tears. “What about Sergeant Cash Newsome? Can you call him?”
    “Maybe.” Brandon did trust his old friend and would try to contact him but not now. Not until he could figure out a way to make sure any conversation he had with Cash would be private.
    “So what do we do?” Willa asked.
    He put his hand over his gun and kept watch around them. “For now, we wait.”
    Brandon was sure it wouldn’t be long before there would be another attempt to kill them.

Chapter Seven
    The sound of someone talking woke her.
    Willa forced open her heavy eyelids and realized it was no longer dark, and they were no longer parked outside the sheriff’s office. The car was moving. And judging from the massive buildings around them, they were driving through downtown San Antonio.
    She sat up, yawned and looked at the man behind the wheel. She recognized that dark hair and those steamy brown eyes.
    “I remember you,” she mumbled.
    With the phone sandwiched between his shoulder and ear, Brandon glanced at her and nodded. The corner of his mouth lifted into a near smile. Thank God she didn’t have to re-create her life and memories this morning. But then Willa remembered something else.
    The danger.
    That kicked up her heartbeat to an uncomfortable level, and she looked all around them to make certain Shore wasn’t still following them. There were plenty of vehicles on the road, but she saw no signs of that SUV.
    “We’ll be there in a few minutes,” Brandon told the person on the other end of the line. “Remember, this stays just between us.”
    He closed his phone and shoved it back into his pocket. “That was Cash.”
    Her breath went thin. “You’re sure we can trust him?”
    “He’s given me no reason not to. Not yet anyway,” Brandon added in a mumble. “Cash insists there isn’t a leak at SAPD. He thinks Shore is tracking us some other way.”
    “How?”
    “Well, it’s not my cell phone because I know it has an anti-tracking device.” Brandon glanced at her PDA. And her stomach knotted. It was her lifeline. Her security blanket. It had saved her life—literally.
    “It’s just a possibility,” he added.
    True, but Shore was finding them somehow, and maybe her PDA had some kind of GPS tracking system.
    It made her physically ill to think of what she had to do, but she couldn’t let her lifeline put her baby at risk. Willa opened the glove compartment and fished out a pen.
    “Don’t give me any reason to regret this,” she warned Brandon, and Willa waited until he made eye contact with her before she scrawled the words across her palm.
    Trust Brandon Ruiz.
    He glanced at the sentence and then mumbled some profanity. Profanity he didn’t explain as he brought the car to a stop in a hotel parking lot.
    “Leave the PDA in the car,” he told her and checked their surroundings. “We won’t be coming back to this vehicle or the parking lot.”
    She glanced around as well, and her attention landed on the hotel. “Are we staying here?”
    Brandon shook his head, grabbed her overnight bag and opened the door. “In and out. We’ll be on foot for a few blocks.”
    Good. She didn’t want to be anywhere near her PDA or the vehicle with the shot-out windows. “But I’ll need to find a bathroom soon,” she let him know.
    Brandon took her request to heart and hurried them from the car into the hotel. They didn’t stop in the lobby but went to the back and exited into another parking lot. They walked past two more buildings before entering another hotel. Willa expected them to exit this one as well, but she came to a dead stop when she spotted the sandy-haired man in the lobby.
    He was almost certainly a cop.
    Willa didn’t know who he was, but he did seem familiar.