Chapter
One
Approximately 1300 hours Friday
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
"Hey, watch out!" Chloe
Burgesse shouted at the paint-chipped and dented used-to-be gold sedan as the
car slipped in front of her from out of nowhere, tires screeching and squealing.
Chloe's back came off the seat as she braked, too. The driver ahead succeeded
in gaining only a few feet before a tight throng began to spill into the
streets between the cars, halting traffic.
She let out a long sigh. Geez, some people should learn to drive. However, in this country she
could consider herself lucky not to have been run over by now. Chloe snorted,
watching the passers-by, and gripped the wheel a little tighter. A flicker of
annoyance raced through her as she noticed the odd absence on her ring finger
where a four-carat ring used to
encircle, no diamond there now to turn between her fingers as her grip
increased.
She honked again, this time with a pinch
more aggravation. Pedestrians were the only
things here that seemed to slow traffic at all. She glanced down on the map
across her knees once more as the shoppers milled between the cars, tracing the
road with her finger.
Chloe thumped the map, seeing the road
she needed to be on several blocks over, and smacked the map down into the passenger
seat—the apparently outdated map she
had picked up at her travel brochure acclaimed, five-star, yet nonetheless
dirty, hotel. Chloe pushed her sunglasses back up the bridge of her nose and
sighed, teeth tightly clamped together.
This day marked the seventh—and last,
thank God—day of what should have been her honeymoon in what she thought would be paradise. Wrong. Not
that any of the should-have-beens mattered. The not-honeymoon vacation matched the complete aura of her life right
now.
She had never wanted to leave a place
more. Even the reminder of what awaited her at home didn’t deter her want for
normalcy.
Betrayed and left at the altar, she'd
found out a little too late her groom wouldn’t make their ceremony—because he'd
already married another woman a week before. And what hurt the most, this
hadn't been an
I-lost-control-and-accidentially-married-a-stripper-in-Vegas-during-my-bachelor-party
kind of thing. The happy new couple had known one another for several months,
and all the while he had pretended to be loyal to Chloe.
She had seen the warning signs, but had chosen
to ignore the red flags without a single question.
Still, she didn't understand his tactless
retraction from their relationship.
After the botched ceremony had been
cleaned up and her unused gown stuffed somewhere out of sight—she suspected for
her mother's fear she might shred it, too—her youngest sister had suggested she
take the “honeymoon” alone.
Chloe could still hear her sister,
kneeling down beside where she had sat huddled in a chair, grieving and
bemoaning her life. Hey, her sister
had said. The trip is paid for, so why
not? Take some time to recuperate, let off steam, and perhaps have a fling with
a hot Brazilian. What happens in Brazil, stays in Brazil, the quirky
nineteen-year-old pest had suggested.
None of which had happened.
Chloe had picked up the already packed
suitcase without another thought and let her sister whiz her to the airport
where she clambered onto the plane at the last second and took full advantage
of the in-flight drink menu.
At the time, she had only wanted a
distraction to make her forget, to be somewhere far, far away from her sucky
life. Somewhere she couldn’t bump into him.
So much for getting away. Her mind hadn’t
allowed her.
The entire seven days in Rio had been
spent in reflection and beating herself up over the entire relationship. On top
of that, she had gotten food poisoning. Gotten sunburned. Slipped on a freshly
mopped (or slopped) floor and ended up with a sore tailbone and ruined white
capris. Now she'd managed to get lost on the edge of the city as she headed for
the airport in her rental.
Chloe lay on the horn as the jackass in
the sedan swerved and then braked hard in front of her. She came very close to
driving her car right up his ass.
"For the love of Pete!" Chloe
euphemistically cursed, pounding the steering wheel, sending three clearly
perturbed short honks to the other
driver. "Only a few more miles," she yelled, then huffed. "Maybe. And if I don't wreck the car that
would be awesome. Thanks!"
The vehicle shot to the far right, off
the road, sending up a cloud of dust as the driver veered around a jeep ahead.
The jeep wisely turned into a drive, but this left Chloe following the raging
driver again.
She clenched her teeth and groaned as she
came back into a residential neighborhood. The street narrowed snugly between
buildings, and her speed slowed drastically for the sake of more pedestrians.
Steadily, she watched the driver ahead. His impatience was evident in the way
he swerved left to right in a constant zigzag.
"It's not like your going to pass
anyone here," she mumbled, momentarily throwing her hands in the air over
the steering wheel, then smacking her palms back on and gripping hard. She
sighed deeply and fell back against her seat to rub at her forehead.
A headache was beginning to strengthen,
tightening like a band around her skull.
Chloe counted the rows of clothing
fluttering on lines above, connecting from building to building in the
impoverished neighborhood. At last, the line of cars exited the one street onto
a busier thoroughfare. She made a point to get around the angry driver, casting
a sharp glare out her window as she accelerated past.
Chloe blew out a breath, relaxing, but
suddenly her shriek-growl filled the compact car as the driver yet again
swerved back into her lane, tightly. All lanes seemed to freeze simultaneously,
and much honking chorused objectionably to the halt. Her car, unluckily, ended
the procession, the jam far enough ahead she couldn’t see what had happened.
Great. Chloe slammed back in her seat,
this time with much more gusto, and checked her watch. She still had two hours,
fortunately, but after a miserable week, she itched to be on the plane headed
home to Charlotte, back home to her mom and her two unruly sisters.
An odd movement in the car ahead caught
her eye then.
Chloe blinked, squinting as she saw the
movement again. "What in the…" Chloe scrunched her nose as she peered
closely over her steering wheel, gripping the worn leather tightly. Had the back-end
of the car … bounced?
Her eyes flared.
The trunk did it again!
She gasped as a boot-print imbedded the
trunk lid of the gold sedan, from the inside out. Chloe sat rigidly. Her eyes
widened even more as another dent obtruded up from the top of the trunk.
Her spine stiffened, and she jolted back
into the seat, riveted to the tail end of the car. Her hand fluttered to her
open mouth. She lost her breath at the sharp realization.
"Oh-my-God," she breathed in a
rush. The irate driver had a person
in his trunk!
The cars began to move again, though
slowly. Chloe inched along in fascination, picking up pace but making sure to
stay three car-lengths behind the erratic driver. She really couldn’t afford to
pay for her rental on top of the weighing debt from a wedding that didn’t
happen, although the insurance on file for her rental was under her ex's name.
If anything happened, she would undoubtedly be stuck with that expense, too,
since she had fudged the paperwork at the rental agency.
Technically, she was still on his insurance, but didn’t want to have to deal with
him to clear anything else up.
They had said all that needed saying on
their should-have-been wedding day.
Chloe continued to watch the trunk for
any signs of movement.
Swallowing hard, she admitted she really
wasn’t sure what to do. Did she dare get involved in a criminal case in a
foreign country when she was due to leave within a couple hours? Or let someone
else on the busy thoroughfare call in on the deviant driving the gold sedan.
She looked around. There were plenty of other passersby. They would surely
notice, too.
Chloe scoffed to herself as she realized
she didn’t even know any emergency numbers in Brazil, then cringed. Naive,
wasn’t that what he had called her
the last time they spoke, in the gigantic argument over the phone, which had
reverberated throughout the entire church?
The trunk bounced ahead of her, nearly
bumping the road.
She pursed her lips and fixated her stare
and mind on the footprint. Judging by the size, that surely wasn’t a child in
the trunk. Her worry edged a bit, though her brow remained furrowed. The trunk
bounced several more times, more heavily than before, nearly contacting with
pavement.
Chloe chewed her lip, worrying and
pondering over what she should do.
She had sworn off being kind and
generous, accused of being too nice by her ex. He had accused her of a healthy
number of faults, which had all stabbed too deeply. She'd never thought a
person could be too good. Apparently
that was the taboo thing to be and not what a man wanted anymore—not what he had wanted.
She sucked in a little sob at the same
time as her eyes flared wide. Chloe slammed her brakes as the car's trunk flew
upwards. She screamed when a man's face, bloodied and haggard, came into view.
Their stares clashed for a brief second as he struggled free of bindings around
his shoulders and sat up, catching the trunk lid from flopping closed again.
Chloe screamed louder.
Though she had watched all along, somehow
she had not expected quite the sight
before her.
Wide-eyed and still screaming, both
Chloe's hands flew to cover her mouth. A wisp of a second elapsed before she
jumped to grab the wheel and regain control, her rental coming close to the
other vehicle as her tires squealed.
Hesitation flickered in the briefest
instant.
This poor man, he'd been tied up and
looked to have been tortured. Chloe peered around him into the trunk, expecting
the worst.
Shit,
shit, shit. Her silent
mantra began.
Guilt instantly swallowed her for not
immediately trying to signal someone for help, too caught up in her own
dilemma.
Too caught up trying to be someone she
wasn't.
But
how could I help him?
Chloe wondered, watching the man search the surrounding road, blood crusted on
the side of his face. Other cars whizzed past, honking, staring, laughing and pointing, but no one
stopping to do anything.
A noise of disgust escaped her.
Did they think this was joke? A stunt?
Chloe glanced around, too, but saw no
movie cameras.
Something snapped in her then. She was
sick of the world and sick of the uncaring assholes in it. Humans lived to hurt
one another and nothing else.
They might not want to be kind, but damn
it, she was a kind person.
A seedling of doubt sprouted.
She might be caring, but she was not of
hero material by any stretch of the mind. She would stop and help an old lady
if she spilled her purse, but this…. Helping this man was out of her league for
kindness.
Chloe's shoulders slumped, watching the
lid to the trunk as it flopped above the man's arm where he kept it from hitting
him on the head. He seemed unsure. Trapped. He struggled to pull himself free
of ropes around his legs.
She didn’t know what came over her then,
because normally she tended to stay within the beloved “box”, never daring a
thought of trespassing those boundaries, but obviously that wasn’t working well
for her anymore. Chloe clenched her jaw.
Her ex had claimed she was too
predictable, too boring.
A little pang began to ache in her heart,
but Chloe chased the memory away with a snort.
Ha!
She could be unpredictable and still be
caring.
She sped up, bumping the other car with a
slight sense of glee, and beckoned the man to take the leap onto the hood of
her car. He looked at her strangely through the windshield, panicked almost.
His look made her wonder if he would take the offered help.
She watched as he kicked ropes from his
feet, and a tangled net of bindings flew from the trunk as he tossed them. The
gold sedan swerved, now well aware its prisoner had freed himself.
Chloe bumped the gold sedan again, harder
this time as the driver attempted an all out stop. Just as the other car
swerved to the side, the man from the trunk leapt out, catching onto the top of
her hood, near the wipers. He grunted at his landing, slipping across the hood,
his long legs going over the side. In the last instant, as she thought he would
surely slip to the pavement and be hit by an oncoming car, he pulled himself
back up.
Chloe tapped her brakes. The stranger
growled as he tried to hold on and cast her a look of annoyance through the
glass as his body slid up the windshield from her sudden halt.
She swerved again, hitting the gas. The
bumpers caught between her car and the gold sedan, sending them in a spiral, and
the other car crashed headlong into a ditch and the trunk snapped shut.
As Chloe sped by, feeling triumphant and
rushed with adrenalin, she saw the other car's engine steaming. She hoped she
hadn't killed the person, no matter how bad they were. Terrified, she kept
going, though in the wrong direction of traffic. Many honks sounded around them
as cars swerved out of her way. Chloe gassed the car, breaking intermittently
as car after car sent her swerving, too.
"Drive," the tortured stranger
shouted. "Don't stop." He grunted. Blood smeared against the
windshield and light green paint of the hood as he pulled himself toward the
passenger side of her car. Chloe met his incensed stare, nodding wildly and
tried not to hit her brakes again. She reached over to roll down the window,
keeping one hand on the wheel.
Somewhere deep, deep inside she began to
wonder if she had gone completely crazy.
Chloe squeaked out a tiny shriek as the
man threw his long legs around and slipped inside, effectively filling the
small car with his dominating size. He gave her a strange look, as though he
thought her insane, too.
Chloe swallowed her tongue and gawked,
her stare quickly falling down him. Her foot unconsciously pressing a little
harder on the gas-pedal.
His tan t-shirt had open slashes in
several places, bloody gashes revealed underneath. Tan pants showed proof he
had been through little less than hell. Her gaze halted on the empty gun
holster strapped around his thigh.
What
in the heck had happened to this man?
Her gaze flickered back up his body, and
she stopped to wonder at the smudged—was that paint on his face?—blotches of black and green, too.
Chloe swerved again as another passing
car caught her attention. She quickly looked between the stranger and the road.
There was a bleeding, very large man in
her car.
She swallowed.
What had she done?
She meant to ask, Was he was all right? Should
she take him to a hospital? Where was the hospital? What happened? but none
of that came out.
Chloe shook her head, gaping. She was
without a doubt shell-shocked, and now that he was inside her car, Chloe was
not entirely sure she had intended to let him inside—it had just happened.
"Set your cruise control. Give me
the wheel." His voice was deep and rough.
Reality pounded away at her, adrenaline
thumping in her veins.
Chloe stifled a cry as his long tanned
fingers slipped around the wheel beside her own. Still glancing between the
passenger side and the road, she groped to release her seatbelt, and then
attempted what he said by fumbling for the little switch on the end of the signal
control, first sending her turn signal blinking left, and then right. Chloe flushed,
and glancing down, she tried again. Her wipers swiped across the windshield,
and she cursed, giving up and tearing her focus away from the stranger and road
long enough to do what he'd asked. She set the cruise control.
He gave her a half-smile. "Great,
you’re doing fine." His voice was so deep and smooth and calm she almost
believed him. "Now, I want you to crawl into the backseat and keep your
head down."
"What!" Chloe's voice trembled.
She looked at him as though he were insane for the suggestion. She gave a
little whimper as she looked at the tight space between him and the console.
He didn’t so much as glance at her as he
steered from the passenger seat. "Just do it."
Shakily, she managed, lifting herself
from the seat and trying not to make contact with the stranger as she slipped
over the console. Her knees and butt dipped to the floorboard, and she pulled
her legs through the gap, then inched onto the seat and buckled herself in.
The man commandeering her rental pulled
himself into the driver's seat after her and adjusted for his height, muttering
curses as the driver’s seat slammed back to accommodate his legs. Their car
shot forward and turned right.
"Who are you?" Chloe asked as
she ducked into her lap and splayed her hands against the back of her midnight
hair. "Please, oh please, tell me you're not a terrorist or in a
cartel." She panicked, fear bringing sobs. She squeezed her eyes, berating
herself for the burst of impulsiveness.
The car rocked as he swerved for a
pedestrian. Chloe's head shot up in alarm. A stack of papers knocked from the
hands of the person on the street fluttered behind them.
She tried to scream, opened her mouth,
but nothing came out, and so she quickly dropped her head back to her lap and
silently prayed she wouldn’t get killed.
"My name is Jericho Eden." He paused
to glance back at her. "And no, I am not a terrorist—unless of course
you're a terrorist, then you might consider me such … You're not a terrorist,
are you?" He cut another quick glance into the backseat, in attempt to
ease her fear, and grinned despite the blood caked on the side of his face and
in his hair, evident bruising swelled along a strong, darkly-bristled jaw.
Chloe shook her head dumbly, peeping up
from her knees. "Me? No."
"Good, Chloe. Things might have
gotten really awkward between us had you said yes."
She paused, then came to edge around the
seat precariously. "How do you know my name?"
"It's on your bag," he said,
turning off the road they had been on, onto the tight street she had traveled
some twenty minutes earlier.
They sped along, the people there
scattering out of their path. Chloe peeked from over the console. He turned the
car back in the exact direction she had come and then off the road the jeep had
taken earlier when the sedan sped off the road.
As their car bounced over the unpaved
area, Chloe cut her eyes to her bag beside her in the backseat. Of course, she mentally grumbled.
"Don't worry. I promise I won't hurt
you." Chloe's attention flinched back to him. Their eyes caught in the
rear-view mirror. "I'm one of the good guys," he said.
She swallowed hard, but didn’t drop her
gaze. "Then how did you end up in someone's trunk and looking like
that?" she asked, her tone rattled. She flicked her gaze over his torn and
bloodied clothing, his bruises and cuts.
The stranger winced as a grim expression
crossed over him. His stare returned to the road ahead, a darkness filling his
gaze.
©2013 Kerri M. Patterson
