“Get in the car.” He held open a door to the back seat.
She stared in at the interior of the car. It looked grotesquely lonely. He couldn’t do this. Could he? She started shaking her head again, backing away. “No, I…”
Reaching out, he gave her an encouraging push that brooked no argument or hesitation. She got in awkwardly, her hands stretched out behind her.
“Okay, wise guy,” she muttered, anger beginning to rise in her. “Okay,” she said more forcefully, turning to look at him, her cheeks bright with the humiliation. “If you think you know so much about me, tell me this. Who do you think I am?”
He flipped up a clipboard from the front seat and scanned it. “Billie Joe Calloway of Fort Worth, Texas,” he read off what he had clipped there. “Twenty-eight years old and good-looking. Five foot six with nice curves. Golden blond hair. Blue eyes. Driving a green Ford Mustang with California plates.” He dropped the clipboard and looked at her. “Now, doesn’t that sound familiar?” he asked her softly, his eyes as cold as an Arctic winter.
If it wasn’t so scary, the situation might have been funny. But right now it would be pretty hard to work up a real, honest laugh out of it.
“I’m thirty,” she said quickly. “And I’m not from Texas. Do you hear even one tiny hint of a Texas twang in. this voice?” But when you came right down to it, the rest fit her to a tee. “I’m not this Billie Joe person,” she said more strongly, glaring at him for emphasis. “You’ve got the wrong woman this time.”
She thought quickly. There had to be some way to prove it. Of all the times to lose her purse. “Oh, my car registration!”
He shrugged. “So you stole a car.”
“Oh, I see. No matter what I come up with, you’ll have a reason why it doesn’t apply.” She stared at him in exasperation. “You’re going to feel like such an idiot when you find out the truth.”
He shrugged again, seeming totally disinterested. “We’ll see,” he said as he swung into the driver’s seat.
“My car,” she protested, suddenly realizing they were going to drive off and leave it. “It’s just sitting there. Someone will take it.”
He turned and looked at her through the opening in the glass partition between the seats. “Don’t you get it?” he said, his voice soft but tough. “There is no one around, Miss Calloway. You took the wrong road, all right. You must have gone past three separate barriers to get this far. You were on a street to nowhere when I picked out your headlights and came on out here to see what was going on.” He started up his engine. “If you’d gone a mile farther, you’d have probably driven right off a cliff,” he added, sounding almost cheerful for once, “since you seem to have an opposite reaction to warning signs, or any other sort of rules or regulations.”
Cami turned slowly and looked back, squinting into the blurry white wilderness, dumbfounded. Was he right? She didn’t remember any barriers. So now she was supposed to consider him her savior instead of her enemy? It didn’t make any sense, but it served to keep her quiet as they rode down the mountain and turned onto a highway. She was thinking things over—and getting more and more puzzled all the time.
“My purse,” she murmured hopelessly at one point.
“The snow’s getting too deep to find it now,” he told her. “I’ll send someone out in the morning to look for it.”
She lapsed into silence again, overwhelmed by it all. She’d been in scrapes before. In fact, she’d been known by her friends as someone who seemed to attract trouble. She liked to think of it as trouble attracting her. And she usually had no problem in dealing with such things. But nothing in her background and experience had prepared her for this, and it was going to take some time to pull herself together and figure how to get out of this one.
“This is utterly outrageous,” she said, staring at his rock-hard profile. “You can’t just go around arresting people like this.”
“Sure I can,” he responded, glancing back at her. “It’s my job.”
Okay, so this was going to be a little more complicated than he’d thought. Rafe eased the car around the corner, wheels spinning in the snow, and avoided looking in the rearview mirror. With the storm coming in, he was probably going to be stuck with her for the night. Oh, well. It came with the job. And it had been so long since he’d arrested anyone, he’d almost forgotten how to do it.
“Here we are,” he said as the car slid to a stop beside the old adobe building. “Hold on a minute. I’ll get your door.”
He wasn’t being gallant, merely careful. With the rap sheet this lady carried in her background, he wasn’t going to take any chances. She was tougher than she looked—had to be, with the things she’d done lately. He held the door and watched her emerge awkwardly from the car, and then wished he hadn’t.
She had the longest damn legs he’d seen in some time. And what was she doing wearing a skirt up here in the mountains, anyway? Nobody wore skirts around here. And if she had to wear a skirt, why couldn’t she control it better? She didn’t have to let it hike halfway up like that.
He knew that was hardly fair. After all, she was still in handcuffs. Still, it made him feel better to complain, even silently. The way she moved did allow him to get a good look at some of the most beautiful legs he’d ever gawked at, but that wasn’t what he wanted to do—not at her. She was a suspect, for Pete’s sake. He wasn’t supposed to notice her legs, or anything else about her. It wasn’t professional. He swore at himself and looked away. No, this definitely was no cinch.
“We’ll go on in,” he told her, turning her and pointing her in the right direction. “We’ll get the proper forms filled out, and then we’ll call Santa Fe.” There was still a chance they would come on out and pick her up right away. It all depended on how badly they wanted her.
“Okay,” she said absently, gazing about herself.
A city girl all the way, Cami had been expecting a nice brick building swarming with experience-toughened cops who would be crusty but ready to hear the truth if it were presented correctly. One call to some sort of centralized information bank, one check of the picture with the arrest warrant for Billie Joe, one look at Cami herself in the light, and this whole fabrication of her supposed criminal career would crumble into the dust. Apologies all around. Someone would drive her back to her car and send her on her way. And it would be all over.
No such luck.
“This is it?” she asked in wonder as he led her through the thickening snowbanks into the small adobe building set right against the street. She looked to the right and to the left and saw no more than three or four small buildings set back along the side of the road, one of which had a sign that read Country Store and had a bus stop designation hanging out front. The place was barely a crossroads, much less a town.
“This is your police station?” Standing in the middle of the floor, she looked from side to side at the desk, the table and two chairs, the television set, the small, old-fashioned cell in the corner of the room. “Where’s the rest of it?”
The only sign that he’d heard her was a slight twitch at the corner of his mouth as he came in behind her, shrugging out of his jacket. With one quick, deft movement, he unlocked the handcuffs and removed them, setting them down on the desk beside the hat he had just removed, as well, then pulled up a chair. “Sit down and we’ll get the paperwork started,” he suggested.
“This looks like something right out of an old Western movie,” she said, still looking around nervously and rubbing her wrists. “A