And now the driver's door was opening, as were the doors on the passenger side. The rear driver's side door stayed closed, which meant I'd probably taken out at least one. Still, I had a feeling I was about to be outnumbered and outgunned, and Temple was in the middle, a good fifteen feet away.

  I popped off a shot at the body emerging from the driver's door; I hit him I wasn't sure where, but I knew I'd hit him because blood spattered and his feet slipped and he slumped to the ground. Not dead, but out of the fight. I was running, obviously, and ten feet hadn't ever felt so far. It felt like I was running in place, not quite able to cross the distance between me and Temple, not quite able to put myself between her and the bad guys.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  I let my pistol do the talking, cracking off another two shots at the partially broken rear window, shattering it completely and breaking the window on the other side, making way for the second round, which--through sheer luck, found a target. The dumbass was just standing there, as if the window was going to stop a bullet. My round caught him in the shoulder, sent him spinning and clutching the wound, and I sent another bullet his way, which hit him in the face and dropped him. Two down.

  I reached Temple, crouched in front of her, waiting. "Stay down," I hissed, and she nodded under her hands.

  "How do they keep finding us?" she asked, her voice muffled and shrill with hysteria.

  "Fuck if I know. These guys probably knew we were on foot somewhere near the apartment and just went in widening circles until they found us." I hoped that was the case, because this was becoming intensely distressing, the way they kept showing up. It was twice now. Twice could be luck, or coincidence...but my gut instinct was suggesting otherwise.

  I saw a pair of feet underneath the overhanging back end of the SUV, wearing black sneakers, creeping toward us, crouched to take advantage of the body of the truck. I heard voices muttering low, heard the snick-click of slides being pulled and released. At least two more, maybe three or four. I glanced around quickly, hoping to find somewhere for Temple to take better cover, but there wasn't much except doorways. Which, I supposed, were better than being in the open.

  I tapped Temple on the shoulder. "You're gonna run for cover," I said, pointing at the doorway of an office building twenty feet behind us; at the first bark of gunfire, the few people there'd been on this side street had vanished, but it wouldn't be long before black-and-whites started showing up here, too--time was at a premium once again. "When I say three, you're gonna run fast as you can for that doorway and you're gonna hunker there till I finish this shit off. Ready?"

  Temple's gaze went to the dead body half in and half out the driver's door, the shattered rear window, the blood splattered on the black leather interior, and then she glanced back at me and nodded.

  "Ready," she said.

  I cut a look at her feet. "Shoes?" I said, ejecting the partially used magazine.

  She wiggled her toes in her wedge heels, and then slipped them off and held one in each hand. "Okay, I'm ready for real this time."

  I slid a fresh magazine into the Beretta and pulled the slide. "One...two..." I fired two rounds at the rear of the vehicle, and then shouted "THREE!"

  Temple took off running, and I was impressed. She was faster than I thought she'd be--the doorway was twenty some feet away, and she was halfway there before I'd finished the shout. I brought the Beretta to bear on the front of the SUV as I moved to put my shoulder against the wall, caught a bit of black hair and the top of an ear. Sent two rounds at the head, aiming a little high for the first one and lower for the second. Red sprayed, and I bolted forward to lean against the hood of the Tahoe, paused, and then rolled out to the other side. Two bodies. Made that four down, and at least one more to go.

  I straightened into a Weaver stance. "Hey, asshole. Over here."

  Stupid bag of dicks fell for it, too. He popped from behind the Tahoe, but at least he came out firing. He missed, but points for the effort. Four banging concussions, yet none of his shots came close enough for me to even notice, and then my pistol bucked in my hands and he fell backward. No tricks or waiting, this time. I swung sideways all the way around the back of the SUV, and then peeked in the back window.

  That was all of them, then. I jerked open the rear driver's side door and let the dead body fall to the ground; thank god I'd popped this asshole first, since he'd been packing an AR-15. The trunk of the Tahoe was filled with firepower--two more AR-15s, two small rectangular cases which I assumed contained more handguns, several boxes of assorted bullets, a Mossberg 500...these boys had been packing the right firepower to take me on, they'd just made the stupid mistake of not using it the second they saw me.

  I yanked the corpse out of the driver's door and kicked him aside, noted with relief that most of the mess from my round hitting him had been contained to the side of the driver's seat and the metal of the A-pillar between front seat and rear. Meaning, the seat wasn't all nasty. I tossed the duffel bag behind the driver's seat, kicked the back door shut, then hopped behind the wheel, keyed the ignition, and hauled the driver's door closed.

  I pulled even with Temple and grinned at her from behind the wheel. "Good news is, we got us a ride."

  "But there's--there was--"

  "Yeah, well beggars can't be choosers. No mess on your seat, so just don't look back if it bugs you." I reached across and shoved open the passenger door. "Now let's go, sweetcheeks!" I heard sirens close.

  She hopped in, and looked back. "Oh my god. There's blood everywhere! And the windows are gone!"

  "I told you not to look. At least the dead guys aren't in here with us, right?"

  She shuddered. "Yeah, I guess that's a bonus."

  I gunned the gas pedal and we took off. "Need you do to me a favor."

  She eyed me warily. "I'm not giving you road-head."

  I snickered. "Well damn, how'd you know what I was gonna say?"

  She rolled her eyes. "You're a typical guy, so all you think about is getting your dick sucked."

  I shrugged and pulled a well yeah face. "I mean, it is pretty much the best thing ever." I jerked my thumb at the rear of the truck. "But actually I was gonna ask you to climb back there and grab the shotgun for me."

  She glanced back. "Shotgun?"

  "In the trunk. Big fuck-off black thing, like an assault rifle only bigger. It's got red shells stuffed into these little loops on the side."

  Temple sighed and climbed over the console into the backseat. Which...unfortunately, was a little messy. "OH MY GOD that's so gross!" She toppled sideways into the footwell. "I've got blood all over my hands and skirt."

  "Um. Ooops? Forgot about that, sorry."

  She popped up between the seats. "You forgot about a giant pool of blood?"

  I glanced back. "That's not a giant pool. That's a bit of splatter. If I'd nailed him in the head, there'd be a lot more of a mess. That's nothing to worry about. It'll wash right off your hands."

  "And my skirt?"

  I growled. "Once I sort this bullshit out and get you safely back to Malibu, I'll personally take you shopping to buy you a new fucking skirt." I eyed her. "Now please...get me the shotgun."

  Temple groaned in disgust, but climbed gingerly onto the seat and leaned over the back, reappearing with an AR-15 in her hands. "This?"

  "No, honey, that's an assault rifle."

  "So that's not it?"

  "Nope. Try again. Big. Black. Red shells on one side."

  "This is big and black." At my sigh of irritation. "Hey, what do I know about guns?"

  She leaned over the seatback once more, the wind whipping through the broken rear windows, ruffling her hair and skirt. I was watching the through the rearview mirror because, come on, the view was to die for. That tight round ass of hers was all framed and spread out, bulging against the fabric of the skirt, which was inching up bit by bit as the wind blew it around. She leaned further over the seat, reaching, tiptoes pressing against the floor, and then...oh hell yes--the wind tossed her skirt up completely as she stretched to reach the shotgun, showing me that bare, delectable, perfect ass for a brief but beautiful moment.

  She squealed as the wind blew her skirt up, tugging it back down and twisting to sit on the bench. She shoved the shotgun through the opening. "Here's the stupid gun." She stuck her tongue out at me. "Enjoy your free peep show?"

  I took the shotgun from her and stuffed the barrel down near my left foot, leaning the stock against the side of my seat. "Hell yeah, I did." I grinned at her as she climbed back over the console into the passenger seat. "I told you already, Fancy, you've got the most gorgeous ass I've ever seen. I could stare at it all damn day and never get tired of looking at it."

  She rolled her eyes at me, but couldn't quite hide her flattered, pleased smile. Then she glanced at her hands, and lost the grin. "So gross, for real." She wiped her hands on the front of her skirt, which helped only marginally.

  "Your hands are just gonna be sticky for a bit, I'm afraid to say," I told her. "Blood can be hard to get off your hands."

  She didn't answer right away, staring at the tacky redness on her palms. "Do you mean that literally, or metaphorically?" She asked, after a while.

  I sighed. "Wow, going right for the hard shit, huh?" On a whim, I dug into the console storage compartment between our seats, and found a bottle of hand sanitizer. "Here, squirt that on, rub your hands together, and then wipe them on your skirt, should get some of the blood off."

  I watched her squirt a ridiculous amount of sanitizer onto her hands, and then returned my attention to the road.

  "Well," I said, "I guess I mean it both ways. Or maybe I mean it literally because I know it to be true metaphorically, as well." I thought for a moment. "Literally speaking, blood is an incredibly damn hard substance to deal with. It stains, it hardens, goes all tacky. Get it in your hair? Forget about it. You'll be shampooing that shit for twenty minutes. Metaphorically speaking, the first few kills tend to stick with you. You never forget those. Then, after awhile, you just...learn to deal with it. You don't think about it, because if you do you won't be able to do your job. But sometimes when my insomnia gets bad, yeah, the metaphorical blood on my hands can be pretty fucking hard to wash off. "

  She was obsessively squirting sanitizer onto her hands and rubbing it off, even though her hands were mostly clean by that point. Eventually, she tossed the now half-empty bottle into the little cubby beneath the infotainment center.

  Her eyes went to mine, blue streaked with green and brown, her expression unreadable. "Do you...do you enjoy it? Killing people?"

  I narrowed my eyes at her sidelong. "That's a shitty question to ask, Temple."

  "It's an honest question. I want to know what kind of person I'm with." She stared unblinking at me, until I looked away first.

  I spent a good long time thinking as I drove us out of Denver, keeping an eye on the road behind us. "Do I enjoy it? No. I'm not a serial killer or a sociopath. I don't do this job because I get some sick pleasure watching motherfuckers bleed out, okay? I do it because I'm damn good at it. I'd never shoot an innocent person on purpose, and I do my fucking damnedest to keep collateral damage as minimal as I can." I fiddled with the A/C settings just to have something to do with my hand. "I'm good at what I do. I was a good soldier, a better special forces operative, and I'm one of the best goddamn security contractors in the game. I've got zero problem dropping some asshole who's shooting at me, and even less problem taking out someone who's done violence to someone innocent. But I don't do it because I enjoy killing. Does that answer your question?"

  "I suppose." She picked at her fingers, scraping underneath one fingernail with her thumbnail. "Have you ever killed an innocent person?"

  I eyed her. "Well, good goddamn, woman. Any other deep dark secrets you plan on ripping out of me?" I gripped the steering wheel with my right hand and used my left thumb to flip the safety button on the top of the shotgun from safe to fire and back again. "Yes. That's the short answer."

  She waited a moment before following up with the next question, which I was expecting, but was hoping she might not ask. "And the long version?"

  "Why do you want to hear this shit?"

  "I told you, I'm trying to figure you out."

  "You do realize this is the kind of thing you're not really supposed to just come right out and ask a guy?"

  Temple just shrugged. "I've never played by anyone's rules but my own."

  "Fair enough. But if I answer your questions, you have to answer mine." She nodded, and I took a minute to put together my thoughts. "You have to understand the scenario. We were in Africa, the Congo. Part of that nasty business that's been going on there for so fucking long. Can't really say much, except that my unit was part of a larger offensive. It was urban warfare, in an occupied city. Innocent people everywhere, and damn near impossible to tell who was the enemy until they shot at you. Absolute fucking hell is what it was. Our orders were to push the bad guys out of that city entirely, which was like playing whack-a-mole at best, suicide at worst. Well, I was around the corner of a building with the other guys from my unit. We'd been chasing this group for several blocks in this back and forth sort of battle. They had us pinned down, and the L-T had tapped me to roll out and try to draw their fire while laying down some suppression." I focused on just retelling the story without thinking about it too much. "So, I rolled out. Put down suppressing fire, drew theirs. It was all well and good until I saw this body peek out from behind the side of a building. I shot half a dozen rounds at him and it turned out to be this...it was a woman. Hiding, just trying to figure out how to get to safety. Hers is blood on my hands that'll never wash off."

  She reached out and slipped her hand under mine, palm to palm, and gave my hand a squeeze. "I'm sorry."

  "Yeah, well, now you know." I glanced at her. "My turn."

  She sighed. "Let me guess...you want to know about my rules."

  "You've mentioned them a few times. So, yeah, I'm curious."

  6: RAPUNZEL

  I wasn't even sure where to start, honestly. My rules were complicated, and had arisen from more than one situation. I'd never explained them to anyone. Which was weird, considering how many girlfriends I had, and how often we talked about boys. But then...none of those girlfriends were really...friends. Not close friends, not the kind I'd unburden this kind of thing to. This was deep, and hard to talk about, and real. Which begged the question...why was I telling Duke? If I didn't trust my inner circle of friends with this, then why was I trusting Duke with it?

  Because even those dozen girls that formed my inner circle...I still didn't totally trust them. They were wealthy, beyond wealthy, like me, but...they weren't on my level socially. They didn't have famous parents. My mom had been, and still was, one of the most famous actresses in the world, and my dad was a rock god, on the scale of Stephen Tyler and Mick Jagger. Some of the girls actually came from more money than me, so it wasn't about money. It was about status. It was about the red carpet that got rolled out whenever the Kennedy name was mentioned, the constant press around my parents' every move, and then add to that the fame I'd earned on my own with Temple, my reality show...everyone wanted to be close to me. I didn't trust anyone to care about me for me. No one. I'd learned this hard way. I'd had too many so called "friends" sell stories about me, tip off my whereabouts to paparazzi so they'd be photographed with me, or invite themselves on vacations, or try to finagle their way into my house when they knew the cameras were running.

  Duke? He didn't give a shit about any of that. If anything, he was derisive of it.

  I trusted Duke, literally with my life at this point, and I just didn't see him being capable of trying to cash in on knowing me, or having fucked me.

  "Fancy?" Duke asked. "You in there?"

  "Yeah, sorry. Just...thinking." We were on the freeway at this point, cruising at a steady seventy-five.

  "About?"

  "How weird it is that I'm talking to you like this."

  "Why's it weird?" He asked, his thumb still constantly flipping that button back and forth on the scary-big shotgun.

  "Because I don't talk about myself with my girlfriends." I twisted a lock of hair between my fingers. "I talk about boys, or gossip about who's fucking who, or fashion, or pretty much anything else. But...I never talk about this shit with my girlfriends."

  "Why not?"

  "Well, that's what I was just trying to figure out."

  "And?" He prompted.

  "You don't seem impressed by who my parents are, or how much I'm worth, and you don't seem too keen on getting your fifteen minutes of fame out of me. If you're gonna use me for anything, it's gonna be my body, and--I'm more okay with that than I am with you trying to use me to get fame or favors or money." I paused, but then kept going to keep him from saying anything. "I guess it's just weird, because I've known a lot of the girls in my inner circle of friends for eight or ten years. I've known most them since we were little. Our parents are friends, and a lot of us have traded boyfriends back and forth. But...we're not the kind of friends that confide in each other, because none of us trust each other. Especially me. I don't really, truly trust any of them."

  He frowned, and scrubbed the scruff on his jaw. "Doesn't seem like much of a friendship, if that's the case."

  "It's how things are, the way I grew up. Famous parents and more money than god? Everyone wants a piece. I've been sold out and betrayed more times than I can count, so my cynicism is well-earned, I'd have to say." I sighed. "But you're different. And again, it's weird because I barely know you. It's been what, a few hours? But I'm literally trusting you with my life, so it doesn't seem like that much of a stretch to trust you with some dirty history."

  Duke didn't answer right away. I'd noticed that about him--if the answer was especially important he thought about his response before he spoke; it was a rare and unexpected quality. "I've got no use for your money, and even less for your fame. Shit, I don't even like being photographed for passport pictures, much less want to be have some picture of me out there in magazines with a bunch of bullshit speculation about my life or whatever the fuck." He glanced at me. "Plus, I take trust very seriously, Temple. If I say you can trust me, you're getting the full force of everything I am as a man behind my word. I don't say that to many people. I mean, professionally, my word is my bond--if I say I'll get your kid back, or shut down a blackmail attempt, then it's as good as done. But personally, I trust about as easily as you do. Which is to say not at all."