They lay warm and relaxed together for another few minutes, until he stirred. "We should go home."
"To your house?"
"Yes."
She nodded, knowing that another chapter in her life was about to unfold. Another chapter in this new world.
"I'll help you break camp," she said.
"Thanks."
They both pulled their clothes back on. Then he took a hat with a sun visor from his duffel bag and handed it to her.
"Put this on, and tuck your hair up under the cap."
"Why?"
"So you look a little different. Just a precaution in case anybody notices us driving around together."
"Okay."
Following his directions, she helped him break up the camp, then watched as he stowed his gear and boxes of plants in the back of the vehicle.
It was big. Bigger than the car parked at the house where they'd gotten into trouble.
"This is a… car?"
"You can call it a car. Technically, it's an SUV."
"SUV," she repeated.
"A sports utility vehicle."
She nodded as if she knew what he was talking about. "It's… nice."
He laughed. "Macho guys like them."
When he opened the door, she leaned into the interior, struck by the rich leather and what looked like wood. But when she touched it, the feel was all wrong.
Uncertainly, she climbed into the seat, still intrigued by the interior.
While Logan went to the back to stow some more gear, she ran her hands along the surface in front of her. There was a seam in the leather, telling her there might be a compartment hidden from view. The assumption was confirmed as her fingers hit a latch.
When she applied pressure, a little horizontal door fell open toward her knees. And one of those weapons—a gun—was practically lying in her lap.
As she stared at it, her throat clenched. She'd seen the man at the convenience store use the weapon, and she'd been awestruck. Now here was one of the things right in front of her.
Mesmerized, she reached for the gun, then lifted it up. It felt cool to the touch. And when she took it in her hand, it was alien and strange and heavier than she expected. Yet she wanted to know how it worked.
She turned it in her hand, trying to remember how the thug had held it: with the barrel part facing away from him. There was a metal ring at the bottom side, and a little lever in the middle of that. She slipped her finger into the ring just as Logan opened the door on the other side of the car.
When he saw the gun was pointed toward him, he froze. "Aim that away from me, then take your finger out of the trigger guard," he said in a low, quiet voice. "If you don't want me to end up with a hole in the middle of my stomach."
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
RINNA STARED AT Logan, trying to take in what he'd just said.
"I'd rather not end up dead. So point that away from me, and get your finger out of the trigger guard."
Her finger went suddenly stiff.
"How?" she wheezed.
Carefully she did as he asked and laid the gun back in the compartment.
Then she began to shake.
Logan breathed out a little sigh. "Thank you."
"I… I… opened the…" she stammered.
"Glove compartment," he supplied as he came around to her side of the vehicle and picked up the gun. Turning it over in his hand, he walked back to the driver's side and slipped it into the compartment in the door.
"Most handguns have a safety catch," he said, as though he were one of her teachers back in school delivering a lesson. "You have to push a lever before you can fire it. But the Glock is different. The safety is inside the trigger guard. So with your finger where it was, you could have killed me."
She stared at him in shock. "I…"
"You need to learn about guns," he supplied. "After we get home, I'll give you some shooting lessons."
"I could have killed you," she repeated, the enormity of it grabbing her by the throat and making it almost impossible for her to breathe. "You should punish me," she whispered.
"Of course not!"
"I should cut a switch so you can whip me."
"Jesus! No." He pulled her toward him and wrapped his arms around her. As he folded her close, moisture stung the backs of her eyes.
"I'm so sorry." She struggled to hold her tears back, but they leaked out of her eyes and trickled down her cheeks.
When Logan felt her shoulders shaking, he rubbed his fingers across her back.
"First I almost killed myself with the electricity. Then I almost killed you with the gun."
"But you didn't. It's okay. Everything's okay."
She fought the tears. "No. I keep messing up."
"No, you don't. Or… not any more than I did in your world. When everything's totally unfamiliar, it's hard to know how to react. I'm the one at fault. I wasn't thinking, I shouldn't have left the gun where you could grab it."
He kept stroking her back and running his fingers through her hair, and finally she got control of herself. She felt him fumbling in the pocket of his door. When she lifted her head, he handed her a small rectangle that felt like flimsy cotton.
"What's that?"
"A tissue. To wipe your eyes and blow your nose."
She did, and he took the crumpled thing and put it in a small bag that was also in his door.
"I suppose a child here would know what that was," she murmured.
"Actually, sometimes they play with guns or show them off, and they kill another child by accident."
"You should get rid of the guns!"
"A lot of people want to. But there are more people who want to defend themselves. Or they argue that even if guns are against the law, criminals will still have them."
"Who's right?"
"It's hard to know."
"In my world a man would act sure of himself, even if…"
"Even if he were blowing smoke out his ass."
She gave a bark of a laugh. "I never heard that. But I know what it means."
"Yeah."
"Why do you have the gun?" she asked.
"Because we're out here in the woods. And I want to be prepared. I had it in the tent. Then I moved it to the car when I went out for a run."
"Oh."
"I'll give you shooting lessons after we get home."
"You'd trust me with that thing?"
"Of course. But we should leave. I want to get the plants back home before they dry out."
She leaned back in the seat.
"Fasten your seat belt."
"What is it, and how do I do it?"
"It's to…" He stopped and laughed. "I was about to tell you it's to keep you safe in case I crash the car. But I guess that doesn't sound very reassuring."
"No."
"A crash is unlikely. But a seat belt is a good safety precaution."
He pulled out a strap from some hidden compartment and showed her how to make the two parts click together. Then he showed her how to open it again.
After she hooked the belt, he inserted a key in a metal slot. The car gave a roar that made her grab the handle next to her.
"It's okay," he soothed.
"I don't like it."
He turned toward her, his face serious. "I know it's all strange and new."
When she reached for the door handle, he lifted her hand away. "Don't pull that. It will open the door, and you don't want to do that while we're moving."
She swallowed. "Okay."
"You can put your hand here… or here." He showed her several places where it was okay to hold on.
He must have caught the worried expression on her face because he said, "You'll get used to it."
"You keep saying that," she answered, although she wondered if it was really true. He had grown up with these things. She was as lost as he would have been in the slave quarters of a great house.
Suddenly the car began to move, and she sucked in a breath.
"How are you doing that?"
"With my foot. I press on a pedal to give it fuel."
"Electricity?"
"In this case, liquid fuel called gasoline. Something like the oil you burn in a lamp. But different."
She had almost succeeded in relaxing when Logan drove from the narrow dirt lane into a wider road with a smooth surface like the one from last night. Immediately he speeded up, faster than any carriage could go.
She held on, being careful to touch where he'd showed her.
"It's fast."
"Some guys go faster."
She tried to imagine that. "When I was in school, some of the highborn children brought sleds to school for the winter months. A few times they let me slide down a hill in the snow."
"Did you like it?"
"Yes. It was fast. And the wind whipped past my head. This is like that, but the glass keeps the wind away."
"We can have a little wind effect." He reached to press a button, and the glass panel above her head slid back.
She dragged in a sharp breath, and he closed it again.
To distract herself, she asked, "Is your house like the place where we spent the night?"
"No. That was kitschy colonial. Mine is werewolf modern."
"What does that mean?"
"We tend to like the rustic look. One of my brothers is a builder, and he constructed it for me."
She wasn't sure what rustic meant, so she tried to relax in the seat as he talked.
Maybe because he saw she was nervous, he kept up a flow of words, telling her about the native plants that he was cultivating and about the work he did designing gardens for people who wanted the ground around their house to look natural but artful.
He had said he was in a hurry to get home, so when he pulled to the gravel at the side of the blacktop road in the middle of nowhere, she looked up in alarm.
"Sorry. Just a second," he apologized as he climbed out and picked up several large rocks that had fallen from a cliff above them. After putting them on the floor behind them, he drove away again.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm always on the lookout for material I can use in a landscape design. These are perfect."
They passed other cars and big vehicles he called trucks.
"If one of them hit us, they would smash us flat," she murmured.
"It doesn't happen very often."
"But sometimes?"
"Unfortunately."
She winced. "I thought coming here would make me safe, but your world is dangerous."
"I guess life is dangerous."
Trees and buildings sped past. Some were impossibly large and ugly. Then they came to an area with more trees than houses. Finally, he slowed.
"Here we are."
She craned her neck, watching for the house, then gasped as they rounded a curve, and she saw a car and a man inside.
LOGAN'S hands tightened on the steering wheel. He wasn't expecting company. And this probably wasn't a Fuller Brush salesman.
So he spoke to Rinna in a low voice. "Let me do the talking."
"What's happening?"
"I don't know. Try not to look scared."
"Is it the police?"
"I don't know," he answered, but he thought that might be the case when a tough-looking guy in a tweed sports jacket and gray slacks got out.
"They know we broke into the house," she whispered.
"Not necessarily," he said, hoping he spoke the truth.
Before he could give Rinna any more advice, the guy walked up beside the SUV. He looked to be in his early thirties with neatly trimmed dark hair and eyes hidden behind sunglasses.
Logan rolled down his window.
"Detective Jake Cooper," the man said, opening his wallet and showing his ID.
"Logan Marshall."
"I want to ask you some questions."
"About what?" he asked, hoping his voice sounded steady.
Beside him, Rinna was sitting rigidly, and he was pretty sure she wished she had a knife in her hand.
"The Easy Shopper in Mount Airy."
Logan struggled to keep his expression neutral. He'd racked his brain to explain about the break-in last night. Now he realized that nobody was planning to arrest a wolf and a big white bird. Maybe they hadn't even seen the naked guy in woods. And even if the cops found fingerprints in the house, his weren't on file anywhere. And Rinna's certainly weren't.
"What about it?" he asked, hoping he sounded completely puzzled.
"You were identified as being in the store during an incident."
"What incident?"
"An attempted robbery."
"I think you're mistaken. It wasn't me."
Cooper flipped open a notebook and consulted a page. Leaning in the window, he looked Rinna up and down before focusing on Logan again.
"You were in that store on Tuesday, the twenty-second, and you signed a credit card slip."
He thought back over the previous week, which seemed like a lifetime ago. "Yes. I bought some flashlight batteries, but I haven't been back since."
"The clerk identified you."
"Sorry. He must be mistaken," Logan said, deliberately getting the pronoun wrong.
"She," the cop corrected.
"What did you say happened?"
"A robbery."
Logan shrugged. "Well, I'm sorry that I can't help you."
Cooper looked at Rinna again. "Were you in the Easy Shopper in Mount Airy yesterday evening?"
"No."
The cop kept his gaze on Rinna. "Can I have your name, please?"
She opened her mouth, but Logan reached to clasp her hand. "Rinna Marshall," he said. "My wife."
Beside him, she made a strangled sound.
"Are you all right, ma'am?" the detective asked.
"Actually, she's sick. She could be expecting. That's why we cut our camping trip short. She needs to get inside and lie down."
"Do you mind if I ask you some questions about the convenience store?" Cooper said politely but still persistently.
"I told you, we don't know anything about it, besides the fact that I bought those batteries. I didn't go back. And my wife was never there."
"Mind if I come in and talk to you?"
"This isn't a good time. Now if you'll excuse us." He climbed out of the car and came around to Rinna's door. "Come on honey, I'll get you inside so you can lie down."
When she fumbled with the seat belt, he opened it for her, and she stood on shaky legs. Leaving the luggage in the car, he took her arm and led her to the front door, which he unlocked before leading her inside.
Turning to cast a brief glance over his shoulder, he saw that the detective was still looking at them.
He wanted to tell the guy to get off his property. Instead, he pressed his lips together.
JAKE Cooper watched Mr. and Mrs. Marshall disappear into the house. Actually, he'd overstated the case a bit. The clerk had thought the man in the back of the store was the one who had come in a few days earlier. She wasn't sure. And unfortunately, the security camera had not been functioning.
The clerk, a Mrs. Dormaster, had told a pretty wild story. Not just about the robbery—but about men appearing out of nowhere in the back of the store. Nobody else had seen them, and Jake had put it down to a case of raw nerves, brought on by the robbery.
But she'd also kept insisting that the man and the woman in the back hadn't come in the front door. They'd appeared in the back, just the way the other guys had.
Mrs. Dormaster's story had sounded like the ravings of a woman with mental health issues. But the more the woman talked, the more convincing she sounded. Of course, there was no way to verify trie story. Jake had gone back and examined the wall at the back of the store, and it had seemed perfectly solid.
Once he'd been the kind of cop who only believed in things that he could verify through his own senses, but then he'd worked with a psychic to find a kidnapped kid.
He'd started off thinking the whole psychic thing was a bunch of crap. Then the woman had found the kid, just minutes before the bastard would have slit his throat. And Jake had changed his attitude.
He was open to the possibility that not everything in the universe was exactly as it seemed. So maybe something had happened in that convenience store that couldn't be explained in conventional terms.
Too bad the video camera had been on the fritz. Or maybe that was part of the whole phenomenon.
At any rate, he did know one thing for sure. After their brief conversation, he was certain that Marshall and his wife had something to hide. Although it might not be connected with the store at all.
When they were out of sight, he walked around to the door handle of the SUV. Keeping his body between the car and the house, he pressed a piece of fingerprint tape to the handle. It was an excellent surface from which to get prints. As was the can of pork and beans someone had used to conk the would-be robber. When they'd run the prints, there had been no match in the FBI database.
The man who'd saved Mrs. Dormaster wasn't a criminal. And he had never served in the military or held a government job. But now it would interesting to see if the prints from the door handle matched the ones on the can. If they did, Jake would come back and ask some more questions.