Shadow Woman Read online

  At least she had an explanation for why she sometimes knew what she knew, such as evasive driving and hot-wiring a car.

  Duh! Collections! Now she remembered. Before she’d become a bodyguard, she’d repossessed a car or two, or ten. The cars she’d hot-wired hadn’t been stolen; they’d been recovered by the company to whom they rightly belonged when the purchasers stopped making payments. Of course, some recoveries hadn’t been any more complicated than having a tow truck pick them up off the street, but some others had been … interesting, to say the least.

  She’d liked her work as a bodyguard much better. The pay had been significantly better and she’d never been sent on a job that required her to get grease under her fingernails. At least, not that she could recall.

  As she coasted down a small hill, she took momentary pleasure in the feel of the wind in her face and ignored the sad truth that another uphill piece of road was looming ahead. Crap. She didn’t know how much more her legs could take.

  Oh, God, she was going to die.

  Lizzy didn’t think she’d ever before been this tired, not even during training. A couple of times, when her legs and back hurt so bad she didn’t think she could go another inch, she got off the bike and pushed it. At least that used different muscles, and walking was a hell of a lot easier than pedaling. After all, she walked every day of her life. When this was over, she’d pay money not to ever have to park her ass on a bicycle again.

  And speaking of asses, even that was sore.

  She didn’t remember ever being sore when she was a kid, when she rode her bicycle every day. How did kids do that? Why didn’t their little asses get sore? It just wasn’t fair. She was running for her life, here, not just playing around the neighborhood.

  At one point when she was pushing the bike she thought she heard the roar of a motorcycle coming up behind her, hidden by a curve in the road, and her heart nearly stopped. Quickly she left the road, shoving the bike through the high weeds on the side of the road until she reached some kind of bush. She laid the bike on the ground behind the bush, then flattened herself in the weeds beside it. At that point she didn’t care if she was in the middle of a patch of poison ivy, or even if there was a freaking snake crawling up her leg. Her heart was pounding so hard her ribs were reverberating.

  She buried her face against the earth, the smell of grass and dirt filling her nose, leaves prickling against her skin, and listened to the deep, coughing, almost tiger-like roar that signaled a Harley, as it got closer and closer. X’s motorcycle was a Harley. No other motorcycle in the world sounded like it, in her opinion.

  Chills ran over her entire body. Dear God, how had he found her so fast? She’d dumped her car. She’d dumped her phone. She’d dumped her purse. She was on a bicycle.

  At least she’d chosen a black helmet instead of the bright pink one that had caught her eye. Pink would stand out, even among these weeds. Black just blended in. The bright spokes on the bicycle tires … would they flash in the sun? If she had time she’d pull some weeds to cover the bicycle, but she didn’t have time; the motorcycle was right there and she didn’t dare look, didn’t dare move—

  It roared past without the rider even letting off the gas, and Lizzy went limp with relief. Then she quickly lifted her head to stare at the swiftly receding figure to see if she could tell for certain if it was X, if that was the same Harley.

  No way to tell, not from the back, and not at the speed at which he was traveling, disappearing around a curve. The best she could tell was that the rider looked like a big man.

  So … inconclusive. Could be X, could be just another guy on a motorcycle. There were a lot of Harleys in the world.

  But, if it was him … oh, shit. He was now in front of her, and she might run into him at any turn of the road. All he had to do was pick a good spot and wait for her.

  On the other hand, this spot right here was pretty secluded. Cautiously she sat up and looked around: rural, no houses in sight, which was probably a good thing or her bolt into the weeds might have been witnessed. She could just envision some curious kid tromping through the weeds toward her, alerting X to her presence.

  And, thinking this through, if that had been X, he had to be tracking her somehow and would have seen that she’d stopped, and he’d have stopped too. Ergo, that either hadn’t been X or he didn’t have a tracker on her. And if he didn’t have a tracker on her, what were the odds that he’d be on this two-lane road heading deep into Virginia, right behind her? Almost zero. Logically, then, that hadn’t been X.

  She sucked in a deep, shaky breath. She’d felt safe on this road, on her bicycle, her identity hidden under the helmet and sunglasses. Her instincts had been right … she hoped. But if she heard any more motorcycles coming up behind, she was still going to get off the road and hide.

  Between the walking and this episode, she’d lost enough time. She had to get back in the saddle—literally—and get going. Standing, she settled the backpack in the proper position again, tightening the straps a little because throwing herself on the ground had shifted everything. She pulled the bike upright, pushed it through the tall weeds to the road, and mounted up.

  The short “rest,” as stressful as it had been, had done her tired muscles a lot of good. Of course, the adrenaline shot caused by sheer terror had a lot to do with that, but she’d take whatever push she could get that would move her on down the road.

  If she made it to the bus station alive, she was never, ever throwing her leg across a bicycle again. They were instruments of torture.

  Pedaling steadily, she tried to distract herself by thinking of the satisfactory ways in which she could get rid of the bike. Simply leaving it on a sidewalk had no real payback; she wanted to do something that brought revenge, and closure. She wanted to shoot it. No pistol, so that was out. She wanted to set fire to it. She wanted to take a hammer and beat it to tiny little pieces. Both of those were viable options, because she could buy gasoline and matches or she could buy a hammer. Which one would be better, and less likely to get her arrested as being a danger to herself and others? The hammer, probably. People tended to notice fires, even small ones.

  Traffic was light. Several cars passed her, but minutes would go by without anyone in sight. Up ahead she saw a three-way intersection, with a service station set square ahead. The sign for the road she was following indicated she should take the left. Oh, yeah, she remembered seeing a kind of dog-leg turn on the map; the road should be turning back to the right within a mile of the intersection.

  But that service station was the most welcome sight she’d seen in a while. Her thigh muscles were killing her. She wanted some aspirin, a bottle of cold water, a protein bar, and she wanted to pee. Pee first, in fact.

  It was the good kind of service station, with the public toilets inside. She wheeled the bike off to the side, and took the precaution of tucking it behind the trash bin so it couldn’t be seen from the road. Then she took off her sunglasses and limped into the station.

  The clerk, a middle-aged woman with frizzy hair and a warm voice, was talking to a younger woman who held a toddler on one hip and a little boy of about three by his hand. “Don’t go anywhere, stand right here,” the mother warned the boy, because she had to release his hand in order to pay for their fruit juices and her bottle of sweet tea. He squirmed and jumped up and down, but didn’t wander from her side.

  There were two other customers, both men; one was looking at candy, the other was in the back dragging a six-pack of beer from the refrigerated case. Neither so much as glanced at her.

  The cool air from the air conditioning was more welcome than a prayer. Lizzy went into the women’s bathroom—a single, so she locked the door behind her—and heaved a giant sigh of relief at the coolness, at walking instead of pedaling, at the fact that she was still alive and well away from the D.C. area. The small bathroom could use some updating and smelled heavily of bleach, but it was clean, so she included that in her relief.

  Aft