Page 36 of Ransom
Winston grabbed my arm and steadied me. "Keys."
"What?"
"Give me the keys. You're not driving."
I pulled them from my pocket and held them out. Winston's palm closed over mine and held a beat longer than it had any reason to. Then he let go. The keys came with him, and I felt the absence of his hand in a way that had no business being a feeling I had. Winston backed us toward the truck, gun still out, watching all three men.
"Pleasure meeting you boys," Winston said. "We'll be going now."
He opened the passenger door and shoved me inside, then went around to the driver's side. He climbed in, started the engine, and pulled out of the parking lot with the headlights cutting through the dark.
Ransom hadn't said aword in twenty miles, and that was how I knew I was in trouble.
He sat in the passenger seat with his head tilted forward and his bandana pinched around his nose, blood drying in his stubble.
I'd holstered my service weapon two miles back. My hand kept drifting toward it. I kept making it stop. The crazy thing was that some small, ugly part of me wanted to find out which way he came down. I wanted to know what it looked like when he made up his mind. One way or the other, I wanted him to decide and stop pretending it could go either direction and put his hands on me.
"Pull off there," he said.
Up ahead, a turnout opened on the right with a gravel shoulder wide enough for the truck. It was dark enough you'd miss it unless you were looking.
I pulled off.
The engine ticked loudly in the sudden quiet.
"Out," he said.
"Ransom—"
"Out."
I got out slowly.
The night air hit cold and clean, a relief after twenty miles of breathing copper and his silence. The headlights threw a cone into the scrub. There was nothing for a hundred miles in any direction except wind moving through brush and the truck engine ticking. I walked around to the front of the truck and stopped. My hand wanted the gun, and I forced myself to let it go again.
Ransom climbed out the passenger side and pulled the bandana down off his face. Blood smeared across his upper lip and chin, dried into the stubble along his jaw, dark in the headlights. He looked like he'd come up from a fight he hadn't quite won, and he looked at me like he'd already won the next one.
He walked around the front of the truck and stopped a foot from me. "Hands on the hood, Ranger."
I turned and put my hands on the hood. The metal was still warm from the drive. He stepped in behind me, close enough that I could feel the heat of him along my back, and his hand came up and pressed flat between my shoulder blades, holding me there. The other hand started at my waist and worked up under my jacket, slow, slower than a man searching for a weapon needed to be. He found my service weapon and pulled it out of the holster, and set it on the hood by my left hand. His knuckles dragged across my hipbone on the way back.
"Pretty," he said. "Try anything with it and I take it out of your hand and shoot you with it."
"Noted."
He took the backup off my ankle and my pocketknife. He took his time about all of it, working his hand up the inside of mythigh. I stiffened as he cupped me through the denim. I was already half hard. He huffed a laugh against the back of my neck.
"You just can't help yourself, can you?"
"Ransom."
"Shh." He squeezed, just once, hard enough to make my hips jerk forward against the hood. Then his hand left me, and the absence of it was its own kind of violence. "We're going to have a conversation, you and me. You're going to keep your hands on the hood. You move them, I break a finger. We clear?"
"Clear," I said, but my cock didn't get the message. It twitched eagerly like he was offering his lips instead of violence.
"Good." His weight shifted off my back. He moved around to my left side, where I could see him, and leaned a hip against the truck. The blood on his face had gone almost black in the headlights. The bruising under his eyes had come in. He looked beautiful and mean, and I wanted him to hurt me.
"You're a Ranger," he said. "Are you a Ranger?"
