Free Deadly Pursuit by Ann Christopher Page B

from her.
    After one disbelieving second, Amara growled with outrage.
    Jack cut her off by planting his hand over her mouth, jerking her to him and speaking quietly in her ear.
    “As I have been trying to tell you since I got here,” he said, “some bad people are after me and I’m afraid they’re coming back right this second, as soon as they get another weapon.”
    Amara whimpered at the thought.
    “If you’ll be so kind as to throw on some clothes, pack a couple of things in a bag and come with me,” Jack continued, “I’ll be happy to take you somewhere safer until we can contact the authorities and figure out what to do with you. Does that work for you, or should I leave you here to deal with the killer yourself the next time he comes back?”
    Shoving her away, he turned her loose and she rounded on him, opening her mouth, itching to finish the verbal castration she’d started and make sure he didn’t manhandle her again in this lifetime.
    But then she tamped down her hot temper and realized that while he may be a jackass, he’d saved her life once tonight and she sure hoped he’d do it again if the time came.
    “Let’s go.” She hurried down the hall toward her bedroom and clothes. “What’re you waiting for?”
    “You’ve got two minutes,” Jack told her grimly.

Chapter 7
    “I need to make a phone call,” Jack said.
    Amara, who was sitting in the motel room’s single chair, looked up from the spot she’d been staring at on the floor and blinked. Her face was so expressionless that he doubted she’d heard him and wondered if she was in shock.
    They’d driven twenty miles down the interstate and found a no-tell motel with a vacancy. No one had followed them; Jack made sure of that, and it was easy to track the people behind you on a deserted highway in the middle of the night.
    The motel, one of those sprawling ranch types with an actual neon sign, didn’t look promising. A bored clerk who could barely be bothered to look around from the online poker he was playing checked them in. Cash didn’t seem to be a problem, though, and the room smelled clean, so Jack was grateful for those small blessings.
    Amara, on the other hand, was a first-class, grade-A problem of the highest magnitude, one he needed to wash his hands of as soon as possible. Her silentroutine in the car didn’t fool him for a minute, nor did those big, unfocused eyes and the bewildered way she’d noted the ugly blue and green flowered bedspread, matching drapes, black-velvet wall art and threadbare carpet, as though she didn’t know where she was and couldn’t understand how she’d gotten there.
    Any moment now, she’d get a second wind and come out swinging, as much of an unmitigated pain in the ass as she’d ever been.
    “How come you get to make calls and I don’t?” she demanded.
    Sure enough.
    Jack stared at the intransigent line of her mouth—nothing bewildered or unfocused there, not now—and wondered why God had sent this woman to torment him. Was it because his life wasn’t screwed up enough already? He needed a few more trials and tribulations to test his mettle as a man—was that it? Or was it a slow day out there in the universe and God just needed a good laugh?
    “Well, Amara.” He took care to strike the exact sarcastic tone he needed to make her stubborn chin jut at him—there it was. Funny how he took time out from a life-threatening situation to press her buttons and let her press his. “If you have a prepaid cell phone that’s registered in a false name like this one”—he found the phone in his jacket pocket and flashed it at her—“that won’t lead any killers to our door, feel free to use it.”
    The words struck a chord with her and her eyes widened with unmistakable fear. “That was a killer, wasn’t it?”
    “That was a killer.”
    “How did he find me? Did he follow you?”
    “I know how to blend in. No one followed me.”
    “Then how did he find me?”
    Jack shrugged.