Wasn’t sure he’d ever tire of looking at the curly red-haired woman who exuded strength and energy and feminine softness all at the same time. In lightweight black cotton pants and a white tank top, she’d just come back from taking care of the small load of laundry she’d run in the combo washer/dryer unit.

  Leaving him to inappropriately glom on her lingerie choices. He figured bikini briefs, but definitely no thongs. And unpadded, no-underwire back-closure bras.

  Sensible. Durable. Strong. And...feminine.

  Her.

  At the time, with her in the back, his musings had been a way of passing the time so he didn’t get off-kilter with conspiracy theory–type thoughts regarding whatever Glen had told her on the phone that she hadn’t told Joe.

  Her “do you want to talk to him” had designated the end to conversation regarding the social media dilemma. After that she’d listened. A quick glance had shown him a frown on her face. She’d rung off without cheer.

  And had only given him the social media update.

  He wanted to trust someone.

  To trust her. Beyond just her skill and willingness to do her job to the best of her ability. Another irony in a life filled with them—he trusted her with his life.

  But wasn’t sure he could trust her beyond doing the one job he was paying her to do.

  Really, what did he know about her?

  “What?” she blurted into the silence that had once again fallen.

  “What, what?”

  “You’re looking at me weird.”

  “I am not. If you have noticed, I’m driving a forty-foot load here. I have to keep my eyes on the road.”

  “You’ve glanced over three times in the past ten minutes.”

  She was counting. He found that...intriguing.

  “What are you thinking about?” Her question...she was pushing and treading into waters that were far too personal.

  He didn’t much care. She’d given him entry, and he wanted to step inside the door. Not far. Just enough to have a look around.

  “I want to know why you aren’t more curious about me,” he said, when what he’d wanted to ask was why she never talked about herself. His tongue had changed course midstream.

  Her shrug couldn’t be more insultingly obvious in its drollness. And before she could answer, he rushed in with, “That sounded narcissistic. I’m just curious as to how you can agree to travel around the middle of nowhere with a virtual stranger, one you half believe is a criminal, and not at least try to find out more about him. For peace of mind, if nothing else.”

  While it hadn’t been the question he’d been meaning to ask—that had been a more basic inquiry into her life in a general sense—it was the one for which he most wanted an answer.

  Because it led him past the foyer—the place strangers saw—and took him more deeply inside.

  “I know what I need to know,” she told him with another shrug.

  He should have let it go. Was facing more than one hundred miles of vast desert with only an occasional vehicle passing by, and had nothing to do but sit and think. “What do you know?”

  “Everything that was in the news.”

  “I’m rich and the world thinks I’m a thief?”

  “I know your lifestyle. You wined and dined on yachts and in private rooms reserved for the wealthy in all the best restaurants. You golf at courses average Americans can’t even afford to get a good glimpse of. You sail a boat that had to have cost twice what I paid for my house...”

  He’d been mentally ticking off her tidbits, remembering them appearing in various news sources, though he was pretty sure they hadn’t all been during the trial.

  Meaning she’d looked him up? Since she’d taken the job with him?

  He should have assumed as much. Knowing her investigation was all part of keeping him safe.

  “And you paid way too much for a certain model-year Maserati because you’d always wanted one.”

  Whoa. Hold on.

  First off, the way she’d said that last bit, her tone of voice, made him sound like a spoiled brat. And second, that information had never been in the news.

  Seeing a rest stop ahead, Joe pulled off.

  They did it occasionally, when he needed to head back to the can. He parked and didn’t unbuckle. Or leave his seat.

  “How did you know that? About my car?”

  If he didn’t know her better, he’d think she’d just squirmed a bit. Joe’s mood lightened a tad. But not much. Was Sierra’s Web’s private investigator prying into every detail of his life? Including a car sale that had happened years before any of his alleged crimes had been committed? Was the firm trying to find things on him that would prove his guilt, not his innocence?

  “You bought it from a gentleman who told a group of people about you, and one of those people then invested in Bellair Software when stock started to rise last year.”

  “The friend of your grandparents?”

  “Distant friend.” The way she said that, as though the distance was what mattered, bothered him.

  Dale Grammar, the man he’d purchased the car from, would only have had friends in the wealthiest of circles. Which meant...

  Surely she wasn’t one of them...the class of people who’d pretended to welcome him in as one of them and then had treated him as a pariah when he’d been arrested.

  Joe frowned.

  He should have trusted his instincts...

  Not trusted her...

  “Who are your grandparents?” He didn’t ask politely.

  “Neil and Glenda Whitaker.”

  He didn’t know them. But they’d be two generations older than him, and since he was brand-new money, not likely to have run into him. Or vice versa. If what he was suspecting was even true.

  “They live in Phoenix?”

  “About two miles from you.” She named a gated mountain community filled exclusively with multimillion-dollar estates. All part of the crowd that had eschewed him—whether they’d invested in Bellair or not. Bilking one of them was like bilking them all.

  No.

  “Who are your parents?”

  She’d said her only connection to him or his case was a friend of her grandparents. Someone she hadn’t seen in years. He hadn’t questioned further. At that point, he wasn’t sure he’d cared.

  “Anne and Kyle Meredith.”

  He’d never heard of either one of them.

  “And they live in Phoenix as well?”

  She’d turned on her phone, was looking at the camera app and watching her rearview mirror. Glancing at his view of the same mirror, he saw a midsize sedan come into view, driving slowly, before pulling into a slot.

  “Go,” she said.

  He had to follow her direction. Intended to. But something made him say, “I’ll go as long as you understand this conversation is not over.” Because cars came and went. People had to pee. And she could be using the sedan’s appearance as an excuse to get out of telling him who she really was.

  Her quick nod brought him a twinge of shame, and he pulled out as quickly as his load would allow.

  One thing was for certain. McKenna Meredith, no matter who she was, had invaded his personal space in a big way.

  And he wasn’t all sorry.

  Chapter 9

  She didn’t feel comfortable talking about her family.

  Most particularly not with him.

  Every nerve in her body tightened, not in a good way, when, two miles down the road, he spoke again. “Do your parents live in Phoenix?”

  “No.”

  “Where do they live?”

  She could lie.

  Or better yet, just not answer. What was he going to do about it? Fire her? Fire Sierra’s Web? In his current state of affairs, he needed them far more than she needed this one job.

  The imbalance in their circumstances pulled at her. The man was fighting for his life, for the freedom the courts had granted him. Even if he’d committed fraud, his sentence wouldn’t have been a life on the run with viral social media after him.

  “My father lives in Shelter Valley.”

  “The town built around Montford University...”

  “Yeah, you ever been there?” She’d be much happier talking about Shelter Valley. She loved the place. Always had.

  “No.”

  “It’s only about an hour from Phoenix, depending on how fast you drive, and with light traffic, maybe less, but it’s like its own world, surrounded by mountains. And the people...they’re...”

  The same car that had been in the rest area was behind them. Which it would almost have to be, since they were on a one-way side of a highway with a big desert culvert between them and the opposite side. Behind them was the only way a car could leave the rest stop.

  But a thirty-three-foot rig, especially one towing a car, wasn’t going to be able to go as fast as a sedan. Every car that came up behind them eventually passed.

  Taking a little longer than she’d have liked, the car did eventually signal that it was going into the right lane, her lane, and came up alongside her.

  She got a good look at the driver.

  A brown-haired, white teenager who didn’t even glance her way as he passed. But he gave them the finger.

  “Guess he didn’t appreciate me driving so slowly in the fast lane.”

  Obviously not. But if bullets were going to be flying out of a car at them, it had to come in at her side, not Joe’s. There was no negotiating that one.

  “You said your father lives in Shelter Valley.” Joe’s tone didn’t sound very conversational as he restarted the conversation she’d hoped was over. “Your parents are divorced.”

  She might have looked for a way to avoid answering another question, but she couldn’t let that one stand.

  “No,” she said. “My parents were soul mates from the moment they met, until the day my mother died.”

  Not that she remembered those times all that much. But she had a gazillion pictures of her mom and dad with her half-brothers, whom Anne had adopted. Had heard the stories over and over again. And never tired of hearing them.

  “Was it recent?” His tone had softened considerably. Striking another chord of tension in her. One that begged her to let herself move closer to him.

  “I was three.”

  He was going to get it out of her. She saw the reality.

  Some of it, anyway.

  Not all of it.

  Only those she trusted with her whole heart got her memories of that last day. Those, of course, she’d never forget.

  “So you grew up in Shelter Valley?”

  “I grew up visiting Shelter Valley.”

  There were the grandparents. He knew about them. And she had to control that rhetoric, so she said, “My grandparents disowned my parents.” She didn’t have to say why. Or which one was their biological child. “After my mother died...” Mama. She could only think of Anne by the name she’d called her. “My grandparents petitioned the courts to raise me, as they could give me far more than my father could. He wanted the best for me, and he agreed to giving them custody of me as long as he got visits every other weekend and a month over the summer.”

  “You grew up in Moon Glow?” The housing development on the mountain.

  “Until I was sixteen, got my driver’s license and drove to Shelter Valley without my grandparents’ permission.” She kind of smiled, remembering the determination in her young heart that day. She’d known that no matter how much trouble she was getting into, she was doing the right thing.

  “You got to stay?”

  “Not quite that simply, but, in the end, yes. The custodial schedule remained intact, but the custodians flip-flopped. And only on the grounds that my grandparents did not take me to any social functions, or in any way expose me to their lifestyle, other than in their home. And my time with them was to be spent solely with them. No one was invited over when I was there.”

  She was telling him too much.

  Far too much.

  He’d wonder how the courts would have agreed to such a stipulation. She’d wonder, too, in his position, if she hadn’t known about the counselor she’d been seeing, the expert testimony that had been given. A testimony that had been a major prompter in her applying to Sierra’s Web once she’d garnered enough commendations in her field to be considered an expert. The firm hadn’t yet been around when she was a kid, but the expert witness psychologist who’d changed McKenna’s life for the better had been her eye-opener to what McKenna wanted to do with her own life.

  Spend it bringing justice and hope, the possibility of renewed joy, to people who needed them.

  And Joe Hamilton, from everything she’d seen, was most definitely in need.

  * * *

  Joe had more questions. A lot of them.

  And over a hill, he finally saw an exit for gas. “We need to stop here,” he said, but McKenna, glancing at the two-pump station with a small inside counter, shook her head.

  “We’re only going to make it another fifty miles or so.”

  She nodded. “There’s a truck stop about ten miles down the road.” And then, as though realizing she’d been sounding autocratic, almost to the point of rudeness, she added, “That kid that flipped us off...his car was parked outside the little store,” she told him.

  He hadn’t noticed.

  But then, he’d been thinking about McKenna’s childhood, trying not to compare it to his, not thinking about young punks who needed to learn some manners.

  “I lost my mother young, too,” he told her as he continued to drive in the fast lane, watching as vehicles passed him on the right—silently apologizing to them for his rudeness. He could hardly tell them he was following instructions, keeping himself in the lane where any would be attacker would have to go through McKenna to get to him.

  Watching her side mirror with more than general care, McKenna didn’t respond. And he saw why. The small black sedan was behind him again. Far enough back that he could see the car from his side mirror as well. And then only from McKenna’s. The kid didn’t ride his ass as he had the last time. Just calmly passed, not even glancing their way as he sped on up the road.

  “Guess he learned some manners.” Joe spoke out loud and wasn’t sure why. He and McKenna weren’t on a sharing-random-thoughts basis.

  As evidenced by her lack of response.

  “I’m sorry about your mother.” A full five minutes had passed since he’d shared his little tidbit. Five minutes of wishing he hadn’t bared any part of his soul to her.

  He nodded. Held his tongue against any further revelations that he’d later regret.

  “How old were you?”

  “Four.” Old enough to remember her, though there hadn’t been a lot of pictures. His parents hadn’t been married and in love as hers had been. They’d just been living together.

  There hadn’t been any grandparents in the picture to fight for him, either, not that his father would have given him up. Mitch had liked the welfare money that having a kid brought in every month.

  And he’d probably liked having a son, too.

  Joe remembered some good times.

  Mixed in with all the bad.

  Mitch had never raised a hand to him. He’d always been thankful for that...

  “Did you grow up in Phoenix?” McKenna’s question, breaking their more common silence, startled him.

  “No. LA area.” According to his dad, his mom had left a not-great home in Michigan at eighteen and never looked back. And Mitch’s’s parents—his mom had been a drug addict and his father was in prison in Nebraska, doing life. The charges against him had changed depending on how drunk Mitch had been when telling the story. Murder was on there, but it wasn’t quite clear if it had been intentional or a case of self-defense gone wrong while stealing a car.

  Or robbing a bank, as the tale was sometimes told.

  Joe had looked the old man up once—saw theft and murder charges—and the fact that Mitch Sr. had died in prison, right there in LA, when Joe was fifteen.

  Feeling the stench of his past life fill up the rig, Joe offered one more fact about himself. “I graduated from college at twenty and moved to Phoenix to take the job at Bellair.”

  The life he’d lived as a child had been out of his control.

  But by the time he’d legally become a man, he’d already become someone else. No arrest, no false charges, no social media, spray paint, slashed tires, death threats or ostracizations were going to change that.

  He was a good man who’d amassed a fortune he was proud of through determination, dedication, unending hard work and carefully thought-out great choices.

  Whether McKenna Meredith ever believed that or not.

  * * *

  When McKenna saw the menagerie of cars, semis, pickup trucks and recreational vehicles parked or snaking around the parking lot of the truck stop, she knew she’d made the right choice to bypass the smaller station.

  Having Joe pull up at an outer pump, where the rig blocked the view of the pump from all but the highway, she instructed him to head to the back.

  She could gas up quickly, using her card to pay at the pump, and then hopefully they’d be out of there before Joe was even seen behind the wheel.

  Her driving lessons were on the schedule for whenever they stopped for the night.

  Which would be as soon as she got a good sense of where that would be. Probably another box store parking lot. So, maybe Yuma. And the next morning they could head up north to the Grand Canyon, where there were hundreds of miles of parkland, plenty of private camping areas, and visitors were a norm, not something to be gaped at.

  As soon as she heard the back bedroom pocket door slide closed, she opened the driver’s door of the rig, her hip on the edge of the seat, ready for her foot to find the first step down, her gaze on the door’s mirrors. The aisle between the rig and the pump were completely clear and...