Slow Dancing With a Texan

He looked past her to the picture of a bullfighter on the wall. “At least you have people who are worried about you and who would care if you lived or died.”

She opened her mouth to make a remark, but the waitress brought the food just then. Before the plates could be arranged on the table in front of them, they both dug in without another word.

It wasn’t long until Sloan polished off the last flour tortilla and signaled the waitress to bring another beer. “You’re not going to be able to go back home for a while, you know.”

Her eyes widened and she swallowed her last bite of food with a cough. “What? Why not?”

“It won’t be possible to provide you with adequate protection if you just go blithely back to your old routine. After you give your statement to the police detectives, you and I will have to disappear.” He watched as she picked up her fork and squeezed her fingers in a death grip around the handle. “This might be a good time to consider a mini vacation. Someplace where no one will recognize your face.”

“I have to work. With my sister in the hospital, someone needs to do the columns. I have contracts to fulfill and people who are desperate for my advice.”

“Your sister writes the columns?”

“I give the advice, she makes sure it appears in the column the way I intended.”

“I heard somewhere that columnists usually have a couple of weeks worth of columns stashed away for emergencies. What if you were taken ill or had to take some time off for other personal reasons?”

She slid down on the booth’s bench. “I do have a few backup columns. But still, without Suzy I will have to make sure they get turned in and are set the way we expect them to be.”

“Could you give someone else instructions on where to find your files and then check to make sure it’s done properly by using a computer and the Internet?”

She grimaced, heaving a sigh. “I suppose. But…”

“Great. One problem solved,” he interrupted. “We’ll have the captain rig up a laptop for us, and he can send a secretary to your office for your files.” He tipped his beer for a fast sip before he quickly plowed ahead. “Now, the next problem is finding a place to hide out.”

“If this is a vacation, why don’t we just go to a five-star resort somewhere?” she asked as she munched on the tip of her iced tea straw. “I’ve been meaning to try that new place I’ve heard so much about on the Big Island in Hawaii. Why don’t we go there?”

He stopped the chuckle before it escaped his lips. “I don’t think Captain Johnson would be able to afford it, for one thing. And for another, we need to find a place where no one will recognize you, remember?” He was trying to keep the fear out of her eyes.

She ignored his question and honed in on the cost. “Why would Captain Johnson have to pay for it? I’ve got money. We can just put it on my credit card.”

Sloan shook his head and tried to keep the exasperated expression from his face. “Well, that might make some sense…if you had your wallet and credit cards with you. And if—”

“My purse! I forgot I dropped my purse when the shooting started.” The panicked look was back in her eyes.

“Don’t worry,” he told her. “I’m sure the detectives have found it by now. And you can’t use the cards, anyway. Credit card charges are one of the easiest things to trace. From now on we’re strictly on a cash basis.”

Her eyes clouded over and he was fascinated by the muddy-river green color they had become. But she didn’t seem to have much else to say on the subject of how they paid for their getaway. He was grateful he’d remembered to bring along a few hundred in cash.

“One of my buddies in the Rangers has a cabin somewhere in the hill country,” Sloan mentioned, trying to sound casual. “He’s got it up for sale, but I don’t think he’d mind if we used it for a few days. What do you think?” He knew she must be feeling as if her world had tilted on its axis.

“I suppose so.” Lainie sounded so tentative that Sloan wanted to find a way to put the strength back in her voice.

“I’ll call him later and arrange it. Meanwhile…” Sloan hesitated, but in the end decided that even her anger had been better than this forlorn look. “Let’s go on back to our room and get some sleep.”

“Our room?” she yelped. “You think we’re both going to sleep in that tiny cubbyhole? Fat chance, buster.”

A flashdance of anger burned in her eyes, and Sloan breathed a silent sigh of relief that the spark was back. “Well, tell you what, sweetheart. If you don’t want to stay there, and since you don’t have any cash on you, I’ll be glad to give you the use of my truck for the night.

“The passenger seat reclines,” he continued as he covertly surveyed her reactions. “It shouldn’t be too uncomfortable for one night. But it might turn cold later on. Sure hope you don’t freeze.”

It was a thrill to see the bright pink flush of frustration spread across her features. She straightened her back and scowled.

So what if that look could burn a hole right through a steel door? At least her spirit was intact.

Her eyes narrowed to little slits when he didn’t make any other remarks and simply flagged the waitress to request the bill.

“All right,” she grumbled. “We can both stay in that little cave if you insist. But you’d better be praying that the bathtub is more comfortable than it looks, cause that’s where you’re headed. There’s no chance in the world that we’re both going to be sleeping in the same bed tonight.”

Three

“So what’s your plan for the night?” Lainie asked. They’d just locked themselves firmly inside the cheap motel room once again. “Where do you intend to sleep?”

Sloan sat down and stretched out companionably on the double bed, his body fully extended and his head propped up against the wall behind it. “The bed isn’t half-bad.” He patted the narrow spot next to him. “Try it out for yourself.”

The look on her face was priceless, Sloan mused. He loved it when he got to her, and he wondered why that was.

Since she continued to stand there, staring down at the ugly bedspread as if it were a rattler pit, he decided to try a different tack. “Look. It’s early yet. Why don’t you sit and tell me about your job? Maybe together we can come up with a reason why someone wants to kill you.” He pushed the lone pillow up against the wall for her.

When she tentatively checked to make sure the top button of his raincoat was securely fastened at her neck before she sat on the bed, it was all Sloan could do to keep a straight face. But he refused to laugh. He was feeling unsure enough about his own motives, let alone hers.

She settled in as far away from him as physically possible. “Maybe you’re right. I’m still too tense to sleep, anyway.”

He allowed himself a half smile, while she took off her shoes and daintily dropped them on the floor.

“Okay.” She wiggled her bottom down into the mattress until she’d apparently nestled herself into a more comfortable position. “That’s better. What do you want to know?”

“Well,” he began as he toed his boots off, “I thought maybe you’d just start talking. You know, tell me about how a normal day goes, what kind of letters you receive, that sort of thing.” He reached over, wanting to flick a tiny, lingering crumb off her chin, but quickly caught himself.

“Oh, but that’s so boring,” she sighed. “Are you sure hearing about that stuff might help?”

He shrugged a shoulder. “You never know. What else have we got to do?”

The minute he said it, the visions of what else he’d like to be doing in this bed blindsided him. But if Lainie noticed the change, she didn’t mention it.

“My day always starts at six-thirty. Suzy and I jog every morning. It gets the blood moving.”

“Your sister lives with you?” He eased his body around slightly and tried to concentrate on her words, but shifting his focus didn’t do much to change the tension.

She looked startled for a second. “Oh, that’s right. You don’t know about my family.”

“Captain Johnson just told me that you were a single woman and that your mother was a longtime, dear friend of his. I assumed you either lived alone or with your mother.”

Lainie smiled then and folded her hands in her lap. “I sort of do both…live alone and also live with my family, that is. A few years back, I bought a big house in a fancy Houston suburb. It’s an old place and has a good-size guest house right on the grounds. I bought it with the idea in mind of letting my sister and her husband use the guest house.”

She frowned at a large crack in the wall directly in front of the bed. “But when it came time for us to move in, I realized that the two of them would be much more comfortable in the bigger place. So…”

“You moved into the guest house,” he said with a yawn.