Ice Blue - Anne Stuart [35]
He followed her through the house, turning off lights as they went, the shadows growing behind them.
It was after midnight. If she took him straight to the urn he could finish everything and be out on the first plane in the morning, making sure the Shirosama knew what Takashi was taking with him, and what he’d disposed of. Until this afternoon they would have had no idea who was helping their quarry, but now Heinrich Muehler would be able to describe him, and there were enough powerful people in the True Realization Fellowship to be able to put two and two together. There’d be people looking for him, even when he was traveling alone, and while he could easily transform himself into one of his alter egos, he’d still need to be very careful.
No, he couldn’t afford to be sentimental over a soft little gaijin with more brains than common sense.
It was chilly in the night air, and Summer shivered when they stepped outside. He resisted the impulse to give her his jacket—he couldn’t afford to risk getting blood on it. He asked no questions as she led him around the side of the house. With anyone else, he might wonder if he were being drawn into a trap, but with Summer he had no such fears. He was the danger in their relationship, not her.
Technically, they had no relationship, other than hunter and prey. Captor and quarry. Perp and vic, as they said on cop shows. Murderer and corpse.
They reached Micah’s old garage, its tile roof partially gone. Whatever was inside would be exposed to the elements. Was she lying again?
There was only one car inside the structure, a large, anonymous shape covered by a tarp and a pile of dead leaves.
She headed straight for the hidden car and pulled the tarp off. For a moment he stood in awe. He had no particular reverence for cars, having always been more interested in performance than beauty, but he would have had to be a fool not to recognize the beast in front of him.
“This was here when Micah bought the house. It was just a pile of rust, but Micah worked on it for the past five years.” Her voice cracked for a moment, but there were no tears. Only pain. “Poor Micah,” she said in a whisper.
“You’d be better off worrying about yourself,” Taka said.
It was a Duesenberg, circa 1935, perfectly preserved, the chrome shining, the body a dark, rich blue, the seats a matching leather. “Does it run?”
She opened the side door, not looking back at him. “Does it matter? We’re not about to drive it, anyway. It probably goes fifty miles an hour if we’re lucky.” She disappeared into the back seat, her legs still sticking out, and he could see her butt wiggling as she searched around for something. And for some damn reason he got hard.
He leaned back against the wall behind him, waiting. It was a waste of time being angry with himself—he had a healthy appreciation of female flesh, and while he’d never considered himself much of a connoisseur of women’s butts, there was no denying that hers was delectable, trapped in that pair of faded black jeans.
But getting hot for someone he was about to kill was someplace he didn’t want to go. He’d known men, and women as well, who enjoyed sex and death, who got turned on by the thought of killing someone and would combine both acts. That kind of thinking, and reacting, was the first step toward a sickness of the soul that was terminal. Summer Hawthorne was a job, off-limits, and if she emerged from that behemoth of a car with the Hayashi Urn in her hand then she would then become a casualty of war.
And he could go out and see if he could find a deceptively fragile, blond gaijin with pale skin, freckles and a delectable butt, and get his rocks off that way. Saner, healthier, straightforward. He was, after all, a practical man.
She slid farther inside the car, thankfully, so he no longer had to watch her wiggling ass, and a moment later flipped