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you.” He hoped Dylan got in touch with Grant soon and figured this mess out.
    “H-how can she verify, if I don’t tell her your name?” she finally asked.
    Good question, but he didn’t like the sound of the voice asking it. She was going to lose it, if he didn’t get her calmed down.
    “I’ll give her a code and route her through someone she knows,” he said. “She has more than a few friends at DOD.” It was Marilyn Dekker’s
only
redeeming quality. She was an all-American, blue-blooded hawk from the top of her no-nonsense, dirt-brown pageboy haircut to her black patent leather pumps. Every time he saw her, he wondered where Kat had come from. That the blond bombshell and Mrs. G.I. Joe shared a genetic base was hard to imagine. Marilyn Dekker was built like a linebacker, one square block on top of another, and Kat had more curves than a cyclone.
    “No.” The word came out dangerously breathless, yet damnably insistent. “I don’t think so.”
    “No?” He shot her a quick glance. “What do you mean, no?”
    “No, I’m not . . . n-not going to call my mother.”
    Perfect. She wasn’t going to call her mother, but she was going to hyperventilate herself into a dead faint. He could hear her over there on the other side of the car, each breath coming faster than the last, each one shallower than the one before. So much for the ice-princess package. She was going into full meltdown mode.
    “Take a deep breath,” he advised. “Please.”
For my sake
.
    “I . . . I—” Her voice caught in her throat.
    Ah, hell. She wasn’t going to make it. Easing down on the brake, he quickly slid Roxanne down through her gears and pulled over.
    “Put your head down.”
    “C-can’t.”
    Okay, that was his fault. He’d buckled her in using Roxanne’s three-point harness. Moving fast and sure, he reached over and undid the seat belt with one hand, then put his palm over her nose and mouth as he gently pushed her head toward her knees.
    The last thing he wanted was for her to faint, but this . . . this was crazy. He was in a car with Katya Dekker, and she was holding on to him like her life depended on it—one hand gripping his wrist, the other cupped around his hand. And she was breathing on him like a package deal of bolt-on boost, fast and cool on the inhale, warm on the exhale.
    A small, tearing sound drew his gaze downward, and he watched in calm disbelief as her dress slowly ripped another two inches, maybe three. She was going to come out of it in about two more seconds, with him practically on top of her.
    There was a lesson in here somewhere, he was sure. Or maybe he’d offended some ancient, pre-Columbian god while he’d been in South America—because this was a test.
    “Breathe,” he reminded her when she stopped for a couple of seconds.
    She did, and this time kept going, sounding like she was starting to get the hang of it. In. Out. In. Out. Going slower, getting steadier.
    Hell. He turned his face into his shoulder and looked over her head out the passenger-door window.
    Katya Dekker. He didn’t deserve this.
    He didn’t have any room for her anywhere in his life. No room for regrets, or anger, or memories. No room for anything. She didn’t exist for him. That’s the way he’d arranged things. That’s the way he liked things.
    But for someone who didn’t exist, she was taking up a helluva lot of room in his car.

C HAPTER
    4

    H OW ABOUT SOMETHING for panic attacks?” Hawkins asked Doc Blake. “She just about hyperventilated herself into a coma on the way over.”
    Doc peered up at him over the rims of his bifocals, turning from his shelves of neatly organized and labeled drugs. Hawkins knew he got them from a couple of ER doctors over at Denver General who figured any help Doc Blake could give out was better than some fool kid dying on the street because of an overdose or an infection.
    “Maybe if you quit scowling at her, she won’t be so nervous.”
    Scowling? He wasn’t scowling at