Shiver

wasn’t going to die as Marco if he could help it, but as long as he considered that he had at least a decent chance at staying alive he was going to play this out like Marco would.
    “So why don’t you give me that phone in your pocket?” He held his hand out for it. Watching her slight start and widening eyes flash a look in his direction as he revealed his knowledge of what she undoubtedly considered her guilty secret would have been amusing if he hadn’t felt so bad, so light-headed and nauseous and like he was growing weaker by the second. As it was, he just wanted to get them both somewhere safe as quick as he could. Before, as he feared was going to happen soon, he was no longer able to function. “There’s a call I need to make.”

CHAPTER EIGHT
     

     
    “Y ou know a place called Miss Kitty’s?” Quasimodo covered the mouthpiece of her phone—a cheap, folding silver Nokia, a poor substitute for the piece of technology she had long coveted, which was an iPhone—to glance at her.
    “Yes.” It was all Sam could do to keep to keep from sounding as out of sorts as she felt. She couldn’t believe she had just tamely handed over her phone to him. Just because he’d told her that he needed to call someone who would come and pick him up didn’t mean she had to do what he asked. She had the gun; she could have held it on him while she used the phone herself to call 911. Of course, she wasn’t going to shoot him, probably, and he knew that, so holding the gun on him wasn’t going to act as much of a deterrent. Still, giving him her phone might well have been a step too far. If it came to that, what was she still doing driving this guy around? She’d had the perfect opportunity back there to escape, and she hadn’t taken it. He had blacked out; instead of pushing him out of the truck, or even leapingfrom the truck and running away herself if she was afraid he’d revive before she could get his door open, what had she done? Stayed put and used her training to save his sorry-ass life. Why? At least that had a simple explanation she could latch onto: she was pretty sure that he would have bled to death if she hadn’t.
    Given that she wasn’t feeling bad at all about the two men she’d just shot, why letting this one die had felt different was something she was still trying to work out.
    Maybe because of that kiss on her hand. Maybe because she was secretly kind of attracted to him. Maybe because stupidity where men were concerned was her fatal flaw. Who knew?
    Examining her own motives had never been something she wasted much time on, but this particular Gordian knot was beginning to unravel in her mind. If she hadn’t shot those two men, they would have killed her. She knew it as surely as she knew her own name, and not just because Quasimodo had told her that that was their intent. She had felt it in some deep, instinctive place as soon as the trunk had opened and she’d seen that gun pointing her way.
    Quasimodo hadn’t harmed her, had never tried to kill her, and in fact had seemed intent on making sure she didn’t die.
    There was the real difference, not the physical attraction thing, not that any of it really mattered now that the thing was done. What mattered was that, for whatever reason, here she was, listening to him talk on her phone, chauffeuring him around when what she needed to be doing was racing home, grabbing Tyler, and taking off for parts unknown on a long, enforced vacation that she didn’t want and couldn’t afford.
    It was like she and Quasimodo had bonded or something. The thought made her scowl.
    “I’ll be there. And, hey, Sanders—don’t fuck this up.” He disconnected, clicked her phone shut, and looked at her. By this time he basically had one good eye: the other was swollen almost shut. His nose was looking more misshapen than ever, too, sort of like a potato stuck in the middle of his face. If in real life he was good-looking, and she suspected he was, right now you couldn’t tell it. In other words, it sure wasn’t his good looks that had kept her from abandoning him. Maybe she should just chalk it up to her own soft heart.
    Yeah, right. She didn’t have a soft heart. She’d never been able to afford one.
    “They’re going to meet us in the parking lot of Miss Kitty’s.” The words had a forced quality that made her think he was having to work to get them out. He was growing weaker, she could tell, and she would be glad to pass him off to