“If you could keep in mind that you’re kidnapping me!”

“I’m protecting you!”

“Then uncuff me.” She was breathing as if they’d been running miles, instead of a quarter mile, tops, but she needed to be uncuffed. Now. “You don’t need me,” she gasped. “Just uncuff me and go do what you’ve got to do.”

“You have to stay with me. Or-”

“Or what? Or I’ll be safe?”

“Damn it, I told you, I’m keeping you safe!”

“Let me go.” She heard the panic in her voice but couldn’t help it. “I’m…I’m begging you, Hawk.”

He closed his eyes. “Abby…” His voice was hoarse. “I have to do this. If something happens to you, I won’t be able to live with myself.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to me-”

“Right, because I’m going to make sure of it. Besides, I know you. If I let you go, you’ll go digging-”

“No.” He didn’t know her. He didn’t know, for example, that she was an inch from meltdown. Or that she could scarcely breathe because of it. Or that she didn’t understand any of this, not the way she’d broken protocol and left the van in the first place to run after him when she’d thought him in danger, not the way she’d let him kiss her for a good long time before she’d kneed him…

And now she was handcuffed to him, the man she’d been so secretly attracted to. Gee, what great taste she had. Clearly there was something seriously wrong with her. “So you want me to believe that this is for my protection?”

“Yes,” he said, clearly relieved that she got it.

But all she got was that he was unbelievable. “What an overprotective, egomaniacal, stupid thing to do! I can protect myself, Hawk. My God, I’m a trained agent, too!”

He was already shaking his head, his eyes flat and stubborn. “No. You didn’t see him tonight. You didn’t see his eyes.” He turned from her and studied the night. “He’s lost it. Completely.”

Abby tried to see whatever he was looking at, but she couldn’t see a thing. She had no idea how he decided which way to go, but suddenly they were moving through the woods again. As they moved, she eyed his pockets, wondering which one held the key for the cuffs.

Because she was going to get free.

The wind continued to whip at them, cutting bites that nipped at her skin. The smoke was still thick, choking her. When she started coughing, Hawk stopped and waited for her to catch her breath.

A thoughtful captor. Too bad she still wanted to kill him.

He wasn’t looking at her now, but was taking in their surroundings, an awareness about him, a physical readiness. He was primed and ready for more trouble, but then he turned to her, and his eyes changed. Softened. He pulled something from her hair. And something else. Twigs, she imagined. Pine needles.

Then he touched her face.

She jerked back at the uncomfortable, unfortunately familiar, claustrophobic feeling of someone being too close. “Don’t.”

Don’t touch me.

It was too dark to see his expression clearly, but he went still for a charged moment, then stepped back as far as he could, considering they were still linked. “I told you, I’m not going to hurt you.”

But that wasn’t the promise she wanted. “So let me go.”

Instead, he turned away. “Let’s go. Almost there.” And they were running again.

From the depths of her pocket, Abby felt her cell phone vibrate. Incoming text message. She glanced at Hawk. He was slightly ahead of her, watching where they were going. That, and the dark night allowed her to pull out her cell without his seeing. She flicked aside the mini credit card attached to the small chain on the antennae in order to see the screen. Watkins. Where are you?

She hit Reply, then hesitated because there was the little issue of trust. She had no idea who to believe. Abby shook her head. No. That didn’t matter right now, all that mattered was getting free. She hit Send, and off the blank message went. As an SOS. It would have to do.

They came to a clearing that she recognized. They’d gone in one big circle, eastbound, putting them just south of the farmhouse… She looked around but saw nothing with which to help herself. The woods were thick, black as the inside of Hawk’s heart, but still not as scary as, say, being handcuffed to him.

Damn, she wished she had her rifle back. She’d get that, too, along with the key. She was determined.

And terrified.

She tried to keep the panic at bay. After all, tonight was nothing, nothing at all, like her nightmare.

The nightmare that had really happened.

First of all, it’d been daytime, at a gun specialty shop where it’d been suspected the Kiddie Bombers were selling confiscated weapons out of the back. She’d been on duty the day of the raid. In hindsight, it had been just rotten luck. Not so agreeable to the raid, the men had fought back as if they’d known the ATF were coming. Abby had been taken hostage and held in a basement, a cold, dark, dank place that even now, a year later, she could still smell in her dreams.

“I thought you were hurt,” she said bitterly to Hawk’s back, forced to keep her feet moving or get dragged along.

“Just stunned.”

“From?”

“Taking a bullet to the chest.” Slowing to a walk, he grabbed her free hand and pressed it up against his vest, over his heart, forcing her to feel the hole in his vest.

A bullet indentation. “He shot you when you pulled your gun on him?”

“No. He shot me point-blank.”

“He must have known you were wearing a vest. Why didn’t he shoot you where he’d have had a chance at killing you?”

“He tried. But it was dark, and I rolled. Then I pulled a gun on him.”

“That’s not what I saw.”

“Sweetheart, I am not trying to argue with you here, but maybe you should get your eyes checked.”

“You’re saying Elliot drew on you first?”

“Elliot?” Hawk asked, and stopped so unexpectedly that she plowed into the back of him. “You call him Elliot?”

“It’s his name.”

“Sounds pretty chummy.”

Yes, well, after he’d busted into that basement, guns drawn, to find her stripped naked and staring down the thugs who’d just pulled out a set of jumper cables to torture her with, they were definitely on a first-name basis. “We have a…history.”

Hawk just stared at her, his eyes gleaming in the night. Clearly this news had not made his day. “So, you were what, fucking the boss while he was stealing back the confiscated stolen weapons to re-sell them on the black market?”

“You really are an asshole.”

“Just calling it like I see it.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“No? Then enlighten me.”

Abby pressed the fingers of her free hand to her eyes and tried to keep a level head. “Why? Why would he do such things, Hawk?”

“Well, connecting the dots, I’d hazard a guess that it’s because he’s the bad guy.”

Rolling her eyes, she turned away.

He sighed and pulled her back. “You want me to believe that lover boy never mentioned any of this when you two were doing the tangle on his sheets?”

Staring up at him, she slowly shook her head, feeling frustration and anger push aside her fear. Good, because she’d sure as hell rather be pissed off than afraid. “You are way out of line, Hawk.”

“Yeah? Then put me in line.” He stood there, his eyes searching hers, not mocking now, just wanting the truth.

But she didn’t have the words. “Just tell me what you think we’re supposed to do now.”

“We need proof of Gaines’s indiscretions. Unfortunately, my rock-solid proof ran off.”

“What?”

“Eighteen months ago I shot the leader of the Kiddie Bombers. It was dark, in a warehouse, but I got him. Tonight, wrestling with Gaines, I saw the scar. Here.” He pointed to his collarbone.

“A bullet hole? But lots of ATF agents have bullet holes.”

“Not undocumented ones. But now we have this.” He patted the rifle. “If the serial number on this baby matches one of the serial numbers on the ATF database, it’s one of the pieces of the puzzle.”

Her mind whirled. “But even if that matches-”

“Yeah, yeah, we still need to tie it to Gaines, I know.”

“If it’s him.”

“Abby-”

“Because from where I’m standing…” She jangled the cuffs. “It sure as hell could still be you.”

She waited for him to defend himself, and though a muscle bunched in his jaw, he said nothing.

“I’m not going to make this easy for you,” she told him.

Rubbing a weary hand over his face, Hawk sighed. “Yeah. Tell me something I don’t know.”

8

“KEEP MOVING,” HAWK DEMANDED, refusing to give in to Abby’s resistance when he was this close. They were headed toward the farmhouse and the trucks he’d seen there. His plan-get to an ATF database.

“Damn it, Hawk. Slow down.”

She was tugging again and probably going to yank them to the ground, which she’d done four times and counting. He had the bloody knees to prove it, which, considering how dead Gaines wanted him, was the least of his worries.

Jesus, he could hardly even wrap his brain around how badly the evening had gone. Logan, down. Gaines, rogue. Abby…definitely not on his side.

He wasn’t sure whose side that put her on.

“Hawk.”

He’d been trying to ignore her, but she sounded panicked and breathless. Not from running so much as hyperventilating, and while that fact brought out some sympathy, it also came with annoyance, because, for Christ’s sake, he wasn’t hurting her.

He’d never hurt her.

Too bad she wouldn’t say the same. “Nearly there.”

To her credit, she kept going, but he knew it wasn’t for him but to get to wherever he was headed and get uncuffed. He appreciated the warrior in her, more than she could know, because his shoulder blades kept itching.