“The conference is over. We don’t have to have him with us if we’re just going out for a few hours, do we?” she pleaded.

For a moment, she thought Craig hadn’t heard her. His foot pressed down on the accelerator as the light turned green. He adjusted the car’s ventilation to let in some fresh air, loosened his tie and weaved promptly around a driver who was straddling two lanes.

“Of course we don’t,” he said finally.

And immediately regretted that decision. He knew Sonia hated their tail, and he knew she’d guessed that Shadow was there primarily to protect her. Craig would never have put up with Shadow for himself alone, regardless of the knife someone had tried to poke at him in Sheridan, Wyoming, two years before. Sonia didn’t know about that, and never would. At the time, he’d hadn’t known whether his attacker was after his wallet or angry over his work with shale oil. It didn’t matter. Sonia did.

He couldn’t stand the thought of something happening to her.

For the past three days, though, whenever he spotted Shadow’s car in his rearview mirror, he felt like a pretentious fool. He might have a little money, and for a short while maybe he was in a modest limelight. He was still just a man, and a man who’d known how to defend himself from the time he was nine.

In protecting Sonia, however, it was unlike him to let his better judgment be swayed by impulse. He didn’t like big cities and knew the conference had received national publicity, so he had no regrets about taking on Shadow-but dammit, at the moment he just wanted to be with his wife. He wanted the freedom to make her laugh, to talk nonsense and simply play without an audience. To make love later, yes, but first to cherish a few stolen hours of privacy with her. It wasn’t as though Shadow had spent the past three days staring at them, but the few minutes they’d had alone together just hadn’t been enough.