The bus ground to a halt, and Priscilla rose. “Do you need any help?”
He shook his head as he struggled to stand while a wave of dizziness crashed over him. By sheer willpower, he managed to exit the bus without falling flat on his face. Thank You, Lord.
Once off the bus, Priscilla paused as the driver reentered traffic after picking up passengers. She pointed to a black SUV idling by the curb. “That’s our ride.”
Luc nodded and followed behind her at a slower pace. He placed his hand on the side of the car to steady himself, pleased he hadn’t stumbled and fallen to the ground during the short walk. Priscilla reached the vehicle first and spoke to the driver through the open window.
Priscilla opened the back door. “Get in.”
Probably not a good idea to climb into a car driven by a stranger, but the truth was, he didn’t think he could stand on his own two feet much longer. Besides, he didn’t want to lose sight of Priscilla again. In he climbed, with Priscilla right behind him. The dark interior warmed his body, the back windows heavily tinted. A man in the front had short-cropped hair and wore dark shades and a Bluetooth headset in his ear.
“Did anyone else follow you?” the man asked Priscilla in clipped tones, smoothly merging the SUV into the late-afternoon traffic on Fairfax Boulevard.
“I don’t think so, but I can’t be sure.”
“Right.” The man threw a glance at Luc in the mirror. “How’s your arm?”
Luc glanced down at the bandanna covering the wound. The gray bandanna with pink Yorkshire dogs had only a bit of red smudged along one edge. “Okay. I think it’s stopped bleeding.”
“We’ll get it checked out when we arrive.” The man turned his attention back to the road, his eyes moving from the rearview mirror, to the side mirrors, to the windshield.
“Where are we going?” Luc should have asked that question before getting into the SUV, but where Priscilla was going, he was along for the ride.
“That’s on a need-to-know basis,” the man stated calmly. “Priscilla, you’ll find a first-aid kit under the front passenger seat.”
Luc closed his eyes as the SUV continued north on Fairfax Boulevard. He wanted to ask who the driver was, question why he couldn’t be told their destination, why Priscilla had called this man after the shooting, and a million more questions. But a wet blanket of tiredness and pain settled over him, dulling his senses.
“Mr. Long?” Priscilla’s voice brought him back to reality.
He opened his eyes, focusing on her warm brown ones. Wait a minute. Priscilla had had blue eyes—not a bright vivid blue like his own, but a softer shade like the sky after a gentle summer rain. No, he was sure this was the woman he had married. He wanted to ask her why she acted like she didn’t know him, but with his brain fuzzy from the pain, he should wait until his head was clear to tackle such questions.
“Here’s some ibuprofen for your pain. I’m sorry we don’t have something to wash them down with.” Priscilla ripped open a single-dose pill packet.
When he extended his right hand, she shook the pills into it.
Luc tossed the ibuprofen in his mouth and dry swallowed. “Thanks.” He closed his eyes again, but couldn’t help asking one of his many questions. “You were going to leave me in the woods. Why didn’t you?”
She sighed. “Because I’m responsible for your getting shot.”
Luc’s eyes popped open. “How could you have known someone would start shooting into the hair salon?”
Priscilla didn’t answer, but exchanged a look with the driver. Something wasn’t right here. Even his pain-dulled brain picked up on the undercurrent of concern—no, fear—that hummed around Priscilla. Why would she still be afraid when they’d escaped the shooter?
He hadn’t realized he’d voiced that last question aloud until the driver responded. “I’m asking the questions. Who are you? Why were you following Priscilla?”
Luc frowned. Priscilla had asked the same thing, but he hadn’t had time to answer her fully. He wasn’t sure he wanted to blurt out the entire story in front of a man with whom Priscilla was acquainted but of whom he knew nothing. “I could ask you the same question—who are you?”
The man executed a sharp right turn onto a business street that ran parallel with the main road. “I’m US Marshal James MacIntire.”
A US marshal? Luc blinked. He might have guessed law enforcement from the way MacIntire carried himself, but he wouldn’t have pegged him as a marshal. “I thought marshals hunted fugitives.”
“They do.” MacIntire cut his eyes to the rearview mirror, then the two side mirrors. He punched something on the middle console that Luc couldn’t see from his vantage point behind the passenger’s seat. “We’ve got company. A silver Ford Explorer with North Carolina plates Charlie, zebra, delta, one, three, five.” He repeated the plate number, listened for a moment, then disconnected the call.
“I was followed?” Priscilla sounded scared and angry at the same time. “I’m sorry, Mac.”
Mac. The person she’d been talking to on the trail. Then he remembered the other job marshals had—witness protection.
As Mac whipped the car into the parking lot of an apartment complex and exited on the back end into a residential neighborhood, Luc turned to Priscilla, who gripped the grab bar with one hand while the other remained fisted on her lap. Her fear, the certainty with which she knew the shooting at the salon had been because of her, Priscilla’s reluctance to share anything with him, and her observation of his presence on the fringes of her life instantly made perfect sense to him. She was in the US Federal Witness Protection Program.
That knowledge didn’t alleviate his concern that she didn’t recognize him. Luc would puzzle that out later, but he could clarify what was happening right now. That knowledge brought a fierce need to protect her from whatever danger she was in, despite the fact that she had deserted him directly after marrying him. As Mac executed an illegal rolling stop at a deserted intersection, Luc quietly said to Priscilla, “You’re in witness protection, aren’t you?”
Priscilla gaped at Luc. “What did you say?”
Luc patiently repeated the question, relieved that the ibuprofen had indeed dulled the pain and given him back some of his mind.
Her expression shuttered, giving him no clue as to her thoughts. “Who are you, Mr. Long?”
Luc gave her a pass on not answering his question. Maybe hearing his name would jingle a bell in her memory. “For starters, my name isn’t Mr. Long. It’s Lucas Benedict Langsdale the third.” Saying his full name always sounded pompous to his ears. Blast his father for naming him after his paternal grandfather, who had been named for an ancestor who had died in the mid-1800s.
She raised her eyebrows, a slight smile playing across her lips. “The third, hmm? The second must be your father, then?”
“The second is my grandfather, still alive and kicking at the ripe old age of eighty-five. I go by Luc, while my grandfather’s Lucas.” He neatly steered the conversation back to Priscilla. “But my name is not important. Why are you hiding out in witness protection?”
Mac turned right onto Annandale Road as a newscaster on the radio read the top-of-the-hour news at 3:00 p.m. “Priscilla isn’t at liberty to discuss the matter.”