Shiver

part, and I won’t bleed to death. And maybe we’ll both get out of this fiasco alive. Ready?”
    She looked alarmed. “No.”
    “Too bad. Here goes.” Taking hold of the dangling end of the belt, bracing himself for what he was about to do, Danny nevertheless succumbed to the smallest of grim smiles as he got a good grip on the buckle that was digging into his flesh. She looked so apprehensive that he couldn’t help it. Her eyes were big, her mouth was tight, and she was gripping the pad—white-knuckling the edges of it, actually—in both hands.
    “Probably you should know that I’m not a fan of lots of blood,” she said, unexpectedly meeting his eyes.
    “Me neither. Especially when the blood’s mine.” Gritting his teeth, he eased the leather free of the buckle, then groaned as the belt loosened, blood flowed in a warm gush, and a wave of agony rolled down his leg. Not pain, mind you. Pain he had been prepared for. But this was something different, like a chainsaw chewing up his leg from the inside out. Gritting his teeth, he lifted his rear off the seat and shoved his jeans down his legs, moving fast before the pain had a chance to overwhelm him. To his surprise, she helped him, gripping the waistband and yanking hard. The feel of the bloody fabric of his jeans releasing its hold on the wound was a revelation, and not in a good way.
    “Ah, shit,” he breathed as the world receded and he had one final second of clarity in which he knew he was going to faint.
    Then he did.
    The surprise was that he woke up again. He became aware of something jabbing uncomfortably into the right side of his neck and opened his eyes and turned his head to find out what it was. An outdated, knob-style car door lock, he discovered, was gouging him right in the tender flesh just below his jawbone because his head had been slumped against it. The reason his head had been slumped against it was—it took a second, but then he had it—that he’d passed out. The top of his head protruded through the open window. He realized that when, still slightly disoriented, he glanced up and saw the dense black of the night sky punctuated by stars. The chirping of insects and the rustle of the tall grass surrounding the truck he was sitting in filled his ears. He was . . . where? Then something in his brain clicked on, and the events of the preceding four hours fast-forwarded through his mind in what was basically the highlight reel from hell.
    He should be dead already. But he wasn’t, not because of the overwhelming might of the various government agencies charged with keeping him safe, not because of his own smarts and physical prowess, but because he’d gotten lucky.
    Well, lucky worked. So far.
    And he was lucky again, he thought as he shifted position so that he was more or less sitting up back inside the cab, that the window he’d landed on had been made of safety glass and had exploded into nothing when he’d shot it, or he would have been in danger of cutting his throat on the remaining jagged shards when he had keeled over.
    “Don’t move.” A sharp voice caused him to glance down in surprise. A girl— the girl: Sam, he identified her almost instantly; yeah, he knew who she was, he wasn’t as out of it as all that—crouched in the foot well beside him. She was close, close enough so that he could smell the same faint floral scent he’d caught a whiff of in the trunk earlier, close enough so that his hand brushed the soft cotton covering one warm, firm breast when he moved. He shifted his hand away, of course, but not before registering the unexpected sexiness of the sensation. She’d lost the baseball cap long since, and long, wavy strands of inky hair that had worked loose from her ponytail were tucked behind her ears. Turned slightly sideways as she leaned in over his still-teeth-clenchingly-painful thigh, she filled the space where his legs would have rested under normal circumstances. At the moment, though, he was sprawled in a semireclining position along the cracked vinyl seat with both of his legs from the knees down hanging off into the driver’s foot well. His feet were hobbled together by his jeans, which from the feel of things were down around his ankles. After he’d fainted, she’d clearly pulled them well out of her way and gone to work on his wound on her own. So his dignity was in tatters; at least he was alive.
    “I passed out.” Stating the obvious, he was chagrined to realize that his