“What do you mean?” She frowned as she watched him merge into traffic.
“Did he ever give you jewelry or clothing or—”
“Yes.” Laila couldn’t look at him. She hated to think about having once accepted Victor’s and Hector’s “kindness” so naively. “But I no longer have those things. I left Emilo’s compound in nothing but a bath towel.”
He frowned. “I heard that.”
Laila didn’t believe the concern or empathy or whatever that note in his voice was. “You were not part of the extraction team. Why?”
“I was sick.” He grimaced, glancing in the rearview mirror. “I ate sushi from a truck stop and ended up in the hospital.”
It seemed difficult to believe anyone sane would do something so foolish. “Neither was Kane Preston.”
As Trees rolled through a yellow light and continued north, he checked behind him again, then seemed to relax. “This is his first day on the job. Are you wondering if we actually work for EM Security? Is that the problem? Call Walker now. He’ll tell you.”
“No. Señor Walker already made your association clear. Why is he not here?”
Pierce Walker had proven honorable, even in the worst of circumstances. He had never touched her beyond the ruse necessary for them both to escape. He hadn’t even been erect when she had showered with him to make her “seduction” look believable for Emilo.
Trees? He had been visibly hard while looking at her fully clothed. In her experience, that was a terrifying sign of things to come.
Her supposed protector sent her a sour glare. “Other assignments. But we work for the same firm. We have the same priority to keep you safe. You need to trust me.”
He sounded miffed that she didn’t. Foolish man. If she had her way, she wouldn’t be with him long enough to try.
“Hmm. Where are you planning to take me?”
“We need gas for this guzzler before we leave civilization, so I’ll have to stop. Before I do, I’ll put as much distance as possible between us and that Mercedes.”
She would make her escape then. “All right.”
“If Victor is in that car and you’re not wearing anything he could track, how the hell does he keep finding you?”
Laila slid him a suspicious glance. “Perhaps they are tracking you somehow. With this enormous vehicle maybe? It sticks out.”
“I’m thinking through that possibility, trying to come up with contingencies. But after we left the alley, they didn’t follow us. I looked—more than once. Yet somehow they reached the store by the time we left.”
“Is this not your area of expertise?”
“Yeah, but things aren’t adding up. If they had an exact bead on you, why didn’t they attack us in the alley?”
A valid question. “Because the area was too public? Because they did not want to confront you?”
Trees shook his head. “No one else was around, and they would have been happy to double-tap me in the head if it led to you. Drug runners aren’t shy about murder.”
Or any other crime. Laila knew that firsthand. “True.”
“And if they had your exact location, how were we able to slip from the parking lot of the store just now without them realizing?”
Laila shrugged. Certainly, she’d been doing her best to avoid Emilo’s men since her escape from the compound last September. She couldn’t think of anything she’d done to compromise that.
Worry wrinkled Trees’s brow, but she didn’t make the mistake of thinking he cared. More than likely, he hated to be outsmarted. Most men did.
After another twenty minutes of silence, he pulled onto a side street, then rolled up to an older gas station. “I’m going to fill this up. It will take a bit. I won’t be far.”
Now was her chance. “I need to use the bathroom.”
“There’s one in the RV.”
She glanced behind her. One of the closed doors hid a toilet? She had never seen a vehicle that also served as a small house. If she had time, she would explore it simply to assuage her curiosity. But his reply ripped away her excuse to disappear into the attached mini-mart and sneak out the back.
Time for another plan.
Laila held up her wrist, jingling the cuff against the rubbery door handle. “I cannot reach that far. You will have to uncuff me.”
“Yeah.” He reached into his pocket, then narrowed a glare at her. “No running. No tricks. No BS.”
Or she would be sorry. The words hung unspoken. He was big and forbidding and strong as hell.
Though her sister seemed convinced he was one of the “good guys,” he lived a life of violence. And he seemed to see straight through her.
“I can hardly run away when I am using the toilet.” She glanced down at the sacks they had acquired at the store. “Maybe you could give me my new phone so I could call my sister? It would occupy me. I would use the one I took from Victor’s thug, but—”
“You still have it?” He growled, lunging for her.
Laila resisted the urge to shrink back. Would he hit her now? Do something even worse? “Yes.”
“You didn’t ditch it last night?”
“No.” Why would he think that? “I kept trying to reach my sister and—”
“Fuck.” He banged his fist into the side of the vehicle. “Is it still on?”
“Yes. The battery is low, but—”
“Goddamn it. Give it to me.”
And cut off her only source of communication? Her only way of calling for help?
“Now!” he snarled. “That’s how they’re tracking us. They’re pinging the cell towers. Motherfuck.”
“They can do that?”
“If they know the right people and drop enough cash, you bet.”
Dios mío. If Trees was right, he was blameless—at least in this. She had foolishly given Victor the means to follow them.
Frantically, she tugged at the cuff. “Release me.”
“Tell me where to find the phone.”
“The diaper bag.”
In a long-legged stride, he hurdled their purchases and swiped the toy-train covered tote from the floor, slamming it on the eat-in table and ripping into it. Moments later, he came up with the device. “What’s the passcode?”
“What will you do?” Take it? Trash it? Punish her horribly for having it?
“Start by turning it to airplane mode so they can’t track the fucking device anymore.”
With an unsteady voice, she rattled off the four-digit code. Trees punched it in, and the screen brightened. His thumbs flew across the flat panel as he whizzed through the menus, then breathed an audible sigh of relief.
“Victor can no longer track the phone?”
“Every way he could digitally locate this device is off. But I’m going to trash it to be safe.” Then he darkened the mobile and looked up. “You still need the bathroom?”
She didn’t, but the urge to flee—before Victor showed up again—rode her even harder. Even if he couldn’t trace his henchman’s cell anymore, Trees was abnormally big and incredibly easy to spot. So was the RV he drove. She could blend in better on her own. Thankfully, the area was busy, and she’d seen more than one conceivable place to hide until she could devise a better plan. “Please.”