Lucidity (3 page)

She shook her head. Geez, what an awful way to live. It had never occurred to her that this insanity might be harder on him than it was on her. “Then knowing what’s
really
going on would help you do your job. Can we talk about this?”

“No.”

“Please.” Unlocking her seat belt, she swiveled to face him. “I know I’ve suggested it before, and I know we’re not supposed to discuss it, but—”

“No.”

“Damn you. Did it ever occur to you that
I
might need to talk about it? That I hate knowing you have the wrong idea about the One Hundred? About me? C’mon, big guy. We’re all alone here. Nobody needs to know—”

“No.”

“Stop being so bullheaded. Don’t you care about the
reason
for these sacrifices? After all this time, aren’t you even a little curious?”

“As you said earlier—we’ve had this discussion, Carlotta. I don’t need to know.”

He only called her Carlotta when he felt she was being childish. It made her want to scream. “If you would, just this once, let me explain—”

“I really don’t want to hear it.” He paused to skillfully play the wheel as the car swerved on a patch of black ice. “I was told not to ask questions. I was given this assignment because I’m good at doing exactly that. I don’t work like most people. I don’t want to know the enemy. That way, I have no assumptions about who they are or how they’d behave. Makes it easier to mistrust everyone and be prepared for anything.”

She tried to imagine maintaining such a mind-set. She couldn’t. Even after two years of hiding away, she still smiled when someone smiled at her, still responded to open faces and warm voices, and tried to give everyone the benefit of a friendly doubt. “How in the world do you sleep at night?”

“Not well. But I wake up the next day.”

“But the Temple—”

“Carlotta. My orders were simple. Keep you moving. Keep you safe. That’s all I have to do. Avoid engaging the enemy if possible. And provide a secure environment for you to…meditate.”

The man knew how to take his money shots. She practically bristled beside him. “I don’t ‘meditate’, Mr. Munroe. I’m not a freaking saint. I just go to sleep. And dream.”

“Whatever.”

His lack of interest in something so important to her—to
everyone
—was infuriating. If he knew what was at stake, he wouldn’t be quite so casual. “It’s not even about me, Parker. I’m only one member of the group. The One Hundred—”

“You mean the ‘saviors of all mankind’.” He chuckled derisively. “Yeah, I know that much. I do read the rags in the grocery line, Carlotta. Your gang was featured there, right along with the flesh-eating frogs and the world’s largest cockroach.”

She’d never wanted his good opinion—had, in fact, gotten kicks out of trying to make him think the worst of her. So why did it hurt to hear him say he did? “I strike you as some sort of opportunist? You think of me as some kind of fear fanatic?”

“I try to think about you as little as possible, Ms. Phelps.”

If she’d been standing, she would’ve staggered. Ouch. No heart on that sleeve. No heart at all.

“You don’t need to feel guilty about running a gambit. Everybody’s got an angle. I’ve heard it might be studying the asteroid that’s due to miss hitting us by just a few million miles next week. Or predicting the long-overdue killer California quake. Maybe your people will lead us out of the wilderness of some anticipated financial collapse. Any apocalypse will do, right? You’re going to rescue us from whatever seems convenient at the time?”

“You’re being unfair,” she fumed, crossing her arms defensively. “You don’t mind making fun of my group, but you’re more than willing to take our persecutors seriously.”

He shook his head, slowing to take an off-ramp. “I’m not putting your people down. If you’ve conned the big government bozos into believing, good on you. No sweat off my skin. The suits didn’t see fit to tell me the silly details, and as I said—I don’t need to know.”

It sounded like an easy way to cruise through life. No major decisions to sweat over, no shades of gray, no worrying about right and wrong. Just wear the appropriate blinders and do your duty. Did he really believe things were so easy? And he called
her
a daydreamer.

“You
should
know, Parker,” she said quietly. “For your good as well as mine. C’mon. I need to tell you, to have you understand what I’m doing. Please. Will you stop the car?”

“What? Out here? Get real. I’m supposed to keep you safe, remember?”

Maddening. Inflexible. Infuriating. Over-the-top macho. All these things and more could be said of Parker Munroe. But he was also a fair-minded man—if you could wedge a crowbar far enough into that thick skull to get to his brain.

She had one small point of leverage, a point that might make a dent in that rigid resolve. She’d been saving it, hoping to bargain for a covert trip to a mall. God, she missed shopping. But this would have to do.

“Listen, mister. Since the day you first lumbered into my life, I’ve never asked you for a thing. Not a decent meal, a sympathetic ear, not so much as a freaking cup of coffee. I’ve let you do your job and drag me from city to piss hole, from swanky suites to shacks on stilts, without making so much as a single request. Now I’m asking you for this very simple thing. Pull over. Just for a few minutes.
Please
.”

He slowly eased the car over to the shoulder of the two-lane road, muttering something to himself about “crazy women”. His gray eyes gleamed silver in the shadows as he threw the gear into park and stared at her. The silence was strangely unnerving, the quarters much too close. After weeks of trying to convince him to listen to her, this was her chance.

And now she didn’t know what to say.

There was only one way to do this convincingly. Before he could make a move to stop her, she opened the door with a decisive push and jumped out of the car. A brittle slap of cold air hit her in the face, and she ran, skirting the ragged, reaching limbs of sinister pines, toward a clearing some yards behind the Jeep.

Of course he’d come after her. She knew it. His voice hit her ears just as she slipped on an icy patch and fell awkwardly, landing butt-deep in snow.

“
Carlotta!
”

He was beside her in an instant, pearl-handled pistol drawn, yanking her to her feet and hard against his side. “Don’t
ever
do that. Do I need to remind you that we just barely got away from whoever the hell’s after you? You never know who might be working these woods or following us, and—”

“Would you dim the headlights?” she asked, trying to sound calm.

Parker always wore an insulated vest rather than a coat, and having his strong, bare arm around her waist nearly took her breath away. A few inches higher and he’d be cupping her breasts. A little lower and he could feel the heat he inspired between her thighs.

He never touched her unless it was absolutely necessary. So naturally, when he did, her heartbeat went haywire. It was a sad indication of how lonely she was. It couldn’t be the man who sparked such a strange fire in her. That would be against the rules. “Could we make do with the dark for a moment?”

Grumbling thinly concealed obscenities, he trotted back to the car. Dousing the headlights, he left the engine running and returned to her immediately, his disapproval obvious in his expression. “Forget the moment. You’ve got thirty seconds before I haul your ass back to the Jeep. I’m counting.”

Bully
.

Carly stuffed her hands into her pockets, shoulders shrugging off the cold. In some other world, other lifetime, it might have been a beautiful evening. The snow in the clearing was a silvery-white crust, the sky a vaulted lake of liquid dark. The night pressed in like plush velvet around them, and there was a restless stirring in the air, a sense of spring, even in the freezing temperatures.

It could’ve been a perfectly romantic setting for intimate confessions, or even a first kiss—if she wasn’t busy running for her life and he wasn’t so determined to be a prick.

She’d been attracted to Parker from the very beginning. Six foot three inches of rock-hard male was pretty hard to ignore in the close quarters they usually shared. But his reluctance to treat her as anything more than an assignment was an almost-tangible barrier between them. Oh, she got a kick out of getting under that thick hide of his, watching that anvil-like jaw clench when she said or did something ditzy, or the unvarnished flare of fire in his eyes whenever she debuted a new nightgown.

Despite his dedication to duty, there were some things a man simply couldn’t hide.

She wasn’t fool enough to think he wanted
her
, of course. But he wanted sex. And that meant there was
something
more than red, white and blue running through his veins.

Sadly, it was a moot point. Acting like a hormonal teenager was out of the question. There were so many more important considerations, and unlikely to be such a thing as “the right time” for them.

“Twenty seconds.”

Tonight was no exception. Tipping her head back, she lifted her eyes toward the sky, allowing them to adjust to the night. Dammit, she’d never been very good at directions. Not knowing where the hell they were certainly didn’t help her get her bearings. The moon, barely a shimmering slit in the heavens, rose in the west, right? And she was fairly sure the last exit had read “south”.

A second later, she’d sighted her target and pointed a rigid finger at it. “See that little light in the sky there, Munroe? Just to the right of the tallest evergreen? Pretty, isn’t it?”

He shifted to move directly behind her, to view the exact angle, and she shivered from the warmth of his body.

“You mean the small star?”

“It’s not a star.”

“Huh. You’re right. It’s not flickering. Planet, then. Or the International Space Station. Five seconds.”

“It’s not a planet either. It’s an NEO.”

“A what-the-hell?”

“A Near Earth Object.”

“Did we come out here to stand in the snow and play twenty questions, Carly?”

She sighed, searching for words. Even with visual aids, this was going to be hard to sell. “That, Mr. Munroe, is Apothos 2012. The large asteroid due to breeze a few million miles by our little blue planet. So unimportant it’s barely a feature story on the cable news channels. It’s visible to the naked eye now.”

Carly turned to look at him. The cold was making her eyes water, and she blinked, hard and fast. She wanted to make it clear she wasn’t crying. Yet. And she wanted to see his face when he heard the truth. “What your people are not telling you, Munroe, is that it
isn’t
going to breeze by. It’s all a lie. That big rock is on a steady course to strike the earth. And you’ve been assigned to protect me because my job is to try to stop it.”

Chapter Three

Parker had no freaking idea whether his buddy’s name was really Vic. He wasn’t actually much of a buddy. And he was definitely not an uncle. But his place wasn’t far from the Pennsylvania border, and it was easy to guard. Uncle Vic’s Bed and Breakfast had proven to be a safe haven for Parker before, so he had no qualms about holing up there again.

Uncle Vic, clad in faded fatigues and baseball hat, greeted them on his poorly lit porch with a grunt, a surly nod and an open palm into which Parker silently placed a large roll of cash. He had a notion that Victor Doyle was either an ex-government mole or a mercenary with no loyalties and no ties. He liked cold cash and warm whiskey. They’d shared a bottle or two in years past, but no secrets. No questions were ever asked by either one of them. They had an understanding when it came to security, and a code of silence when it came to their separate affairs.

The selling point right now was that Vic could have no hidden agendas. He wouldn’t know who—or what—Carly was, let alone what she did. He’d just assume they were lovers. There was also no rear door to the joint, and Vic rarely left his desk. It was basically where he lived, complete with computer, cable and comfy recliner. He sat at his station with his back to the wall, and no one got by without his knowledge—or without him alerting Parker.

And since he’d recently crawled out of the bottle after half a lifetime’s addiction, the old guy would be more interested in keeping sober than he’d be in Parker’s business.

The B&B wasn’t much to look at. A simple A-frame of split logs, washed-out metal sign on the roof, and a few surrounding acres. The inefficient glow of a single outdoor light glinted off the rusty iron balconies that staggered against the upper rooms, and the pebbled snow was deeper than the drifts they’d left behind.

He’d hoped Carly would think of it as charmingly rustic. Instead, she’d gasped as they pulled into the drive and the headlights swept the desolate yard. “Please tell me that outhouse is a decorative touch and this guy’s mother isn’t mummified in the basement.”

He’d flashed her a grin as a peace offering. “Relax, Carlotta. We’ve got running water, power and no basement on the premises.”

She’d spoken the truth. He had dragged her to some pretty god-awful places in their time together, and she’d always been a good sport about it. Necessity was a mother, and for now they’d have to make do. “It’s quiet enough for you to do your thing, and fairly isolated—but you may have to ignore Vic. If he seems a mite grumpy, it’s because he’s a recovering alcoholic and misses the booze something fierce.”