Jill Shalvis - Smart And Sexy

She stared at him for a long beat, then surprised him by slipping inside. She started to look up at him, but her gaze snagged on a neighboring parked car, a nondescript SUV, and she frowned.

“What?”

“There’s someone in that car watching us,” she whispered.

The SUV started up, but the lights didn’t go on.

Very interesting, he thought. “Why would anyone be watching us?”

“Just get in,” she said urgently, sinking low, reaching back for the hood of her soft, angora hoodie sweater, putting it on over her hair, and slipping on a pair of wide sunglasses despite the fact that the dusk made them unnecessary. “Please, Noah! Just get in and get us out of here as fast as you can.”

Something had changed in her body language, and since he’d had his gaze pretty much glued to her body nonstop, he couldn’t miss it. Everything had gone rigid, her shoulders, her face, and her hands were white-knuckled on the dash. Most telling, the utter, sheer terror was back. So much so that he took a good long second look at the SUV.

With the sun sinking below the horizon, long shadows cast across the parking lot. He couldn’t see through the windshield to the driver, or if there was a passenger.

But his gut told him there was at least one passenger, and his gut was rarely wrong.

And she was still trying to protect him. Hell if that didn’t sting. He walked around to the driver’s seat, casually but quickly, then started the engine. “Where to?” he asked when he got them on the move.

“Uh…” She was looking in the rearview mirror as he pulled out of the parking lot.

The SUV followed.

Oh, yeah, things just kept getting better and better. “Friends of yours?”

“No.”

“So you have no idea who they are?”

She didn’t look at him. “No.”

Shit. Another omission, he was certain. He turned down a side street.

So did the SUV.

Could be a coincidence. A strange one, but still… He made another unscheduled turn.

So did the SUV.

“If you don’t know them, why are they following us?” he asked, dividing his attention between the road, the rearview mirror, and Bailey’s very tense face.

She still had white knuckles on his dashboard, neck craned as she watched behind them with a growing expression of dread and renewed fear. “Don’t know.”

Gritting his teeth, he made a quick turn.

And still the SUV kept up with them.

“I don’t suppose calling the police is an option.”

She didn’t say a word to that.

He glanced at her as he pulled out his cell. “Speak up or forever hold your peace.”

“No,” she whispered.

“Even if I leave out the hijacking part?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because then you might as well just kill me yourself.”

He shot her a look, but she wasn’t kidding.

“Noah, did Sky High Air figure out I wasn’t on that flight to Aspen?”

Noah divided his attention between the rearview mirror and the road, while trying to think with his mind racing at eighty-five miles an hour.

“Noah?”

He glanced at her, knowing the truth was in his eyes, and not sure that he cared.

She just stared at him, horror dawning. “Oh, boy. Well, that’s it then. Now I’ve done it.”

“Done what?”

“Gotten you good as dead, too.”

Maddie Stone closed down her computer and walked through Sky High Air’s building, turning off lights and making sure everything was shut down for the night to her specs. She had high specs-for herself and everyone else-higher than was asked of her as a concierge and personal assistant to three adventurous, gorgeous rebels.

But she loved it here, loved it more than any job she’d ever held, and she’d held a lot of them, carrying far more experience than any twenty-six-year-old should.

Everyone deserved a second chance, she reminded herself, and that Sky High had given her hers…well, she’d never forget it.

At first she’d found it odd that out of everything she’d done, both legal and not, both good for her and most absolutely not, stuff she was proud of and stuff she’d rather forget, she’d ended up on a private airstrip watching over three of the wildest, most outrageously sexy men on the planet.

But then again, that actually fit.

The four of them fit, a surprising wonder she marveled at every day.

Noah, Shayne, and Brody, three childhood buds in crime, had quite the history together. According to legend-or so Shayne had told her after a few beers one night-they’d met on one fateful day in middle school detention; Shayne having been nailed stealing a chemistry test cheat sheet, Brody for getting caught naked with a girl four years his senior in the supply closet, and Noah, fresh from England, having gotten himself in a fight. The three of them, unlikely friends from entirely different walks of life, had bonded that day over a shared love.

Airplanes.

Maddie had never actually given airplanes much thought, seeing as all her life she’d never been able to afford hopes and dreams. But that had changed.

Thank God that had changed.

Still, she held no illusions. She knew she was different, knew, too, that with her funky, out-there clothes and tendency to change her hair to colors not quite on the chart of acceptability, she didn’t look the part of the concierge. But since the day she’d walked in here and proven herself competent, not a single one of them had ever judged her.

She could love them for that alone.

And she did. She loved the carefree playboy Shayne, the intellectual adventurer Noah Fisher.

Which left Brody.

Did she love the edgy, dangerous, bad boy Brody?

Hard to say, as every time she was anywhere near him she lost control of her thought processes and her body went all tingly and weird.

Pathetic, secretly lusting after one of her bosses. Pathetic, and not going to happen.

Ever.

A thought that Brody seemed to share as well, since he did his best to avoid her. Assuring herself that didn’t hurt, that it didn’t matter, Maddie lifted her chin and reminded herself that for the most part, men sucked anyway.

Well, except for Shayne and Noah. The two of them had never been anything but kind and wonderful to her, which was why her heart ached for Noah these days. When she’d first begun working here, he’d been quick to smile, fast-witted, and always the center of the fun. A wanderlust at heart, he’d traveled the globe many times over, and was perpetually adventure ready. His zest was intoxicating, and he’d given her a renewed lust for life by just being himself.

She wanted to see him smile again, wanted him to find joy in life and flying and Sky High Air again. Somehow, she had to help him, would help him.

In any case, she was done here for tonight. The doors were all locked, Shayne had taken a last minute client to Santa Barbara, and Brody…well, Brody was holed up in his office as usual, working himself into an early grave.

She walked by his office door, shut of course, then nearly jumped out of her skin when he whipped the door open.

Just over six feet of sexy-as-hell male stood there with a frown on his face, his dark hair in wild waves from frustrated fingers, his even darker eyes filled with secrets she’d never managed to plumb. Around his neck were his earphones, from which Lincoln Park blasted out at decibel levels uncharted.

How the man hadn’t gone deaf was beyond her, but that wasn’t what she wondered when her gaze ran up his body, which was built like the tough, leanly muscled athlete he was. Nope, what she wondered was why, if she was so damn attracted to him that her brain cells melted into a little pool of longing every time she looked at him, did they drive each other so crazy?

Brody clearly wasn’t wondering any such thing. He had only one question, spoken tersely. “Has he called?”

She knew he was worried about Noah, and she knew why. They’d all spent a considerable amount of time in the past six months worrying about Noah, the third Musketeer, the sexy Indiana Jones who had always been the grounded of the three, the one most likely to hold them all together.

But then had come the crash, and the death of a dear friend and client, and he hadn’t been the same ever since. She knew Noah blamed himself, just as she and everyone else knew how ridiculous that was. No one could have avoided that crash, and no one could have kept Sheila alive. “No, he hasn’t called. You said you talked to him after the landing and that he was fine.”

“No, I said I talked to him and he was alive,” Brody corrected. “Fine? I don’t think so.”

She didn’t question him. No one knew Noah as well as he and Shayne did. If he thought Noah had been more off today than usual, she believed him.

And truthfully? She was worried, too. “I can get him on the phone for you if you’d like.”

Hunching his broad-as-a-mountain shoulders, he shoved his hands into his pockets. At some point he’d changed from his pilot’s uniform back into a pair of beloved old Levi’s, washed to the point of buttery softness, and faded white in the stress points, of which there were tantalizingly many. “He said I was acting like a woman.”

Maddie laughed.

Brody’s frown deepened.

“Sorry,” she said, anything but.

“If you’re sorry, then why are you grinning from ear to ear?”

Uh, because you, a walking, talking attitude, are the farthest thing from a woman I’ve ever seen. “You should see your face.”

Standing there with his attitude blaring as loud as Lincoln Park, with that scowl on his face, looking every bit the wild, rebel pilot that he was, he positively gave her shivers.

Damn, but she had a thing for all boys bad, the badder the better. Yes, but you gave all that up, remember?

And then she saw it, in Brody’s stormy gray eyes. He knew something and was holding back. “What is it?” she asked.

“He’s got Bailey Sinclair with him.”

“What?”

“She didn’t just vanish on me. She vanished into Noah’s Piper. I think she hid out, or Noah would have said something before takeoff.”

“You’re saying he took off without knowing she was on board?”

“Yeah. And when I called, he evaded.”

Maddie stared at him. They all knew about Noah’s not-so-secret crush. “Why would she stow away?”

“I can think of several reasons, none good.”

Oh, boy.

“Call him,” he said, and turned to go back into his office. “Work your magic.”

He thought she had magic? Well now, that was interesting. She thought he was magnificent. “What should I say?” she called out. “That his momma is worried?”

She thought she heard him growl as he shut his office door, which made her smile. If she couldn’t have him drooling over her the way she secretly drooled all over him, she did enjoy irritating him. She pulled out her cell and called Noah, thinking he’d take one look at the ID and not pick up, but he surprised her.

“Yo,” he said softly. “Everything okay?”

“That’s my question to you,” she said.

He didn’t respond to that.

“Noah? Whatever’s going on, you’re not up for it. Get your ass back here.”

He let out a quiet laugh. “What happened to talking to me with kid gloves?”

“I’m not Shayne or Brody,” she said. “Put simply, I don’t have a penis and therefore can actually say what I mean. You are not fit to be doing this.”

“And what am I doing?”

“I wish to God I knew.”

More silence.

“Noah.”

“Gotta go, Maddie. See you Monday.”

“Noah.”

Nothing.

“Don’t you hang up on me-”

But it was too late. She looked up and found Brody standing in his open doorway. “You’re right,” she agreed. “Something’s off.”

He didn’t move so much as a muscle, but she could see the tension increase in his big, tough body. They just stared at each other, and for that one moment at least, they were united in their concern for Noah.

They hadn’t lost their tail; the SUV’s lights were always back there.

After them.

Bailey gripped the Jeep’s dash as Noah drove the mountain passes like a man who knew what he was doing.

But he didn’t. He couldn’t.

Because she hadn’t told him what they were up against. Oh, God, if something happened to him, she’d never forgive herself.

But then again, if something happened to him, she was going to be dead, too.

How did they find her so soon?

How was she going to lose them?

The road narrowed, a sheer cliff on their left, a heart-stopping drop-off on their right. She closed her eyes. “Noah. I can’t let you do this.”

“A little late now, Princess.” His long legs worked the clutch and accelerator as he handled the Jeep with easy precision. “You picked my plane, remember?”