He bit her hip.
“Left,” she gritted.
He turned left and took off at a trot.
The strain on her neck was too much. She put her head back down. Her breasts were in her face and, as she bounced against his back with each step he took, her backpack thunked her steadily in the back of the head. At least her face was cushioned against the repeated blows. She wasn’t getting her nose hammered rat-a-tat-tat into his spine. Thank God for small blessings. Or two large ones, as the case may be.
“Where are you taking me?” she mumbled against her sweater.
“I am taking you to whatever manner of transportation you have. You are then taking us to procure suitable lodgings.”
“I am?”
“If you wish to live.”
She wished. She mumbled directions to the lot in which her car was parked.
“You’re mumbling, lass.”
She mumbled again.
“What was that?”
She mumbled again.
“Did you just say something about your breasts?” he said warily. A pause, then a reverent “Och, Christ, they’re in your face!” He stopped so abruptly her backpack thumped the back of her head in double time: a soft whump followed by a solid thwack, dazing her.
When she felt his chest shaking, it took her a few moments to identify the motion. He was laughing. The rat-bastard was laughing.
“I so hate you,” she told her breasts. Meaning not them, of course, but him.
As he continued to laugh, the fight went out of her, up in a puff of smoke. She was tired, she was freaked out, and she really just wanted to walk on her own two feet. “Would you please put me down?” she said plaintively.
She suspected he must have felt the diminishing of tension in her muscles, read her body language, and knew, mentally, she’d capitulated.
His laughter subsided. He bent and gently deposited her on her feet. His scotch-gold gaze glittered with amusement and sexual heat he made no effort to disguise. “Better?” He cupped her chin with one big hand, thumb brushing her lower lip.
She twisted her face away. “Better. Come on. Let’s get out of here before someone sees us with the professor’s—”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Jess?” Mark Troudeau barked sharply behind her.
Jessi turned disbelievingly. What—had the mere thought been a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Mark’s office was a few hundred feet down the hall from Professor Keene’s. When she’d passed it earlier, there’d been no lights on. Didn’t he have a life? What was he doing here so late?
Was nothing going to go right anymore?
Great, just great. This was just what she needed: Mark running off to tattle to anyone who would listen that not only had she crossed police lines and gone into the professor’s office, but she’d made off with a priceless, mysterious artifact. If the police did the least bit of checking into things, they would discover that what she’d taken was what the (murdered) deliverymen had delivered to the (murdered) professor.
And she would be oh-so-incriminatingly on the lam, nowhere to be found, last seen in the company of a tall, dark, kilt-clad stranger, “stealing” the fabulously expensive black-market relic that three people had already died over.
Without getting the slightest chance to tell her side of the story and point out that somebody’d tried to murder her too.
As if anyone would believe her anyway.
Shit, shit, shit. When all this was over, she really wanted to be able to finish her degree at the university where she’d begun it, not via correspondence courses from jail. That kind of stuff just didn’t look good on a resumé.
“Oh, for crying out loud, Mark, it’s two in the morning! What are you doing here?”
“I believe I just asked you that.” Close-set brown eyes behind rimless glasses darted from her to the half-naked, towering man toting the mirror, and back to her again.
What could she say? Dredging her mind, she drew an empty net. Try though she might, she couldn’t think of a single excuse for her current circumstances—convincing or otherwise. She would have been grateful even for an absurd one, but apparently her brain was done for the day.
As she stood there, staring at him like the biggest idiot, Cian MacKeltar took care of the problem.
“You will go back in that room from whence you came, and remain in there, silent, until well after we’ve gone. Now.”
Mark turned and cantered dutifully back down the hall toward his office without so much as a neigh of protest.
Wow. Jessi blinked up at Cian MacKeltar.