Levi unzipped his jacket and relaxed against the vinyl of the bench seat, twiddling the radio over to a country station as the wind whipped through the passenger window.
Finally, something had gone right. He regretted leaving the girl behind. She was pretty much everything he liked in a woman-curvy, sassy, competent, and with a very good idea of what she wanted. She would have gone with him, too. Some women were more affected by shifter pheromones than others, and if he'd ever seen one hit with a case of were-lust, well, it was her. And a little company was always welcome. Especially when the company came in a knockout package like that….
But hooking up with a woman, however hot, wasn't exactly on the list of Smart Things To Do When On The Run From A Vampire, especially when the vampire in question happened to manage half the organized crime in Baltimore. He'd done the right thing for her sake, he thought virtuously, leaning back against the seat of the car he'd stolen from her.
A glint in the rearview mirror made him glance up. It was the sun, shining off the plastic headlight of a motorcycle.
Of his motorcycle.
And it was coming up fast.
Damn.
How had she managed to start the thing?
He considered flooring the Skylark, but there really wasn't much of a point to it. Most cars, this one included, would be no match for even an average street bike, and his Superbike was no average street bike.
So he kept his needle pointed at eighty-five as the motorcycle roared up behind him, the woman hunched over the handlebars with her bottle-red hair snapping in the breeze.
He watched her approach in the rearview mirror. There was no way she could see anything, going at that speed without sunglasses or a helmet. Her eyes had to be streaming. She was crazy. She'd kill herself if she kept going like that….
Levi dropped his eyes back to his dashboard and realized that he was slowing-fifty-five miles an hour and falling.
Stupid, he told himself. Speed wasn't the only thing that mattered, but it was important to put as much road between himself and Mortensen as possible. Even as he thought that, the needle fell further. Fifty. Forty-five.
She was just behind him now. Harper, that was her name. She crossed the yellow line so that she was going the wrong way down the opposing lane of traffic-not that it mattered with the road as empty as it was-and pulled even with him.
She reached out and banged on the window with a clenched first.