But she couldn’t summon the courage to face anyone, not even her best friend, who understood so much more than the rest. She’d let her family know she was safe. Soon. Just… not quite yet. Not until she’d figured out what to say.

She stood in front of the biker like a big, blue-headed alien. He was staring at her, and she realized she still hadn’t spoken a single word to him. How awkward. She needed to say something. “How do you know Ted?”

He turned back to fasten the clasps on the saddlebags. The bike was an old Yamaha with the word WARRIOR written in silver across the black fuel tank. “We did time together in Huntsville,” he said. “Armed robbery and manslaughter.”

He was baiting her. Some kind of biker test to see how tough she wasn’t. She’d have to be crazy to let this go on any longer. But then she was crazy. A bad kind of crazy. The crazy of someone who’d fallen out of her skin and didn’t know how to crawl back in.

His shadowed eyes, heavy with another kind of threat, slid over her. “You ready for me to take you back?”

All she had to do was say yes. One simple word. She pushed her tongue into the proper position. Arranged her lips. Failed to force it out. “Not yet.”

He frowned. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

The answer to that question was so obvious even he could figure it out. When she failed to respond, he shrugged and climbed back on the bike.

As they pulled out of the parking lot, she wondered how riding off with this menacing biker seemed less chilling than facing the family she loved so much. But then she didn’t owe this man anything. The worst he could do was-She didn’t want to think about the worst he could do.