Jodie Bailey - Hidden Twin

Sam hit the brakes and turned to look over his shoulder as Amy screamed.

The pickup had appeared out of nowhere and broadsided Wainwright’s car, pushing him at full speed across the narrow intersection and into a light pole. The passenger side was smashed against the truck and the driver’s door curved around the pole.

“Wainwright!” Sam yelled for his partner.

Only silence answered.

Sam gunned the engine and spun the car to face the carnage as people raced toward the accident scene. Inside the pickup, the driver was slumped over the steering wheel. The airbag clearly hadn’t deployed.

His earpiece came to life. “I’m okay.” Wainwright was breathless but alive. “Get Amy out.”

Sam scanned the lot, searching for the red car. To his left, a blur of motion caught the low-hanging sun as the car hung a J-turn and aimed at them, roaring across the empty parking spaces, gaining speed and power.

This was a coordinated attack, and Sam was on his own.

Amy’s shoulder cracked against the window as Sam executed another sharp turn and floored the gas pedal, leaving her stomach somewhere behind them on the asphalt.

“Hold on.” Sam’s hands were tight on the wheel, his focus on what lay ahead of them. He was intense yet he radiated no stress, only a fierce sense of capability that left Amy with the overarching belief that she was safe. She was safe even inside of a car going way too fast for the empty section of parking lot they were currently speeding through.

There was a brief exchange between him and someone she couldn’t hear in his earpiece, but his words didn’t make sense to her until he said, “We’re going to make a lot of turns without warning.”

Amy pressed her back into the seat even farther than she had before. Her fingers ached around the grab handle above the door, but she didn’t let go. “Is Wainwright okay?”

“He’s okay. Fortunately for him, side airbags are a thing.”

Relief was temporary, flung aside as Sam threw the car into another turn away from the more crowded section of the parking lot.

She should have been panicking right now. Her brain should have already given way to adrenaline and fear, throwing her into a state of sheer terror. It had happened under less harrowing circumstances. An overcrowded store during the holiday season. A sharp sound during a movie. Simply waking up too suddenly in the middle of the night. Panic attacks had become a semi-regular occurrence since she’d fled her real life.

Flying across the parking lot as though they’d been fired out of a missile launcher, the only thing she felt was detachment, as though her body was buckled into the front seat but her mind was somewhere slightly to the left. She was two steps behind what was happening.

She braced herself against the dash with her free hand as Sam navigated the turn out of the shopping center and shot up the road toward the highway entrance. Numb detachment was another thing she was used to, a side effect of the anxiety that had hounded her since the night she realized WITSEC had killed the old Amy Brady and given rise to Amy Naylor. Since the moment she’d realized the person she’d been from birth was dead.

In essence, although she still lived and breathed, she’d died that day. No more job. No more friends. No more sports medicine degree. WITSEC had rewritten and recreated her degree. They had fabricated her past work experience to fit this new person, a community college professor teaching biology, which she had studied a bit while taking sports medicine. She couldn’t even use her experience as a personal trainer, the job that had kept her afloat during college, without risking her own life. Everything she’d worked for and fought for was gone.

Worst of all, there was no hope of ever reconciling with her twin sister. Like the rest of the world, Eve had been told that Amy Brady was dead.

Well, she would have been told if the Marshals Service had been able to find her. Eve had disappeared shortly before Amy discovered the truth about Grant Meyer and began compiling evidence against him. For all Amy knew, Meyer’s coconspirator—who was also Eve’s boyfriend—had murdered her...or worse.

Amy jerked her mind into the present, to Sam taking the highway exit and threading through cars like a madman. If she continued down this road of thought, she’d jerk herself out of the numbness and lose control. There was no time for Sam to stop and coax her through an attack now. He needed both hands on the wheel and both eyes on the road.

She stared at her feet braced against the floor mat and prayed her stomach would stay inside her body. Thankfully, she’d never been prone to motion sickness, but a hundred miles an hour on an interstate, weaving between cars, might change everything. “The police won’t like this.”

Sam’s chuckle was low and humorless as he navigated around a slow-moving truck. “My team leader is in touch with them. They’ll give us space, but the guy behind us is about to have his hands full.”

As if on cue, sirens squealed in the distance, seeming to come from all directions at once. Two police cars zoomed past on the other side of the highway. Amy dipped her head to peek at the side mirror. Two more, lights flashing and sirens blaring, were running up fast on the red car from the parking lot. While Sam and Amy blew past the next off-ramp, the car trailing them cut onto the exit and sped off the interstate, the police close behind.

Sam lifted his foot from the accelerator and exhaled loudly as the car leveled out to a more normal highway speed. His relief was the first sign he’d been holding any tension, a slight crack in his cool armor. He dropped one hand from the steering wheel to his thigh, flexing his fingers as though they were tight.

They probably were, given the grip he’d had on the wheel while he was evading their pursuer. His shoulders, his neck... Everything was probably balled into knots. If Amy had been in his shoes, there’d be a tension headache pounding through her skull.

It was a whole lot easier to think about his physical state than it was to think about all that had happened and all that was about to happen. Denial was her friend, and it would be until she had a moment alone to fall apart. “Thank you.”

“Just doing my job.” He winked at her, a rare flash of his personality beyond his role as a deputy marshal. There was a flash of a smile, then he tilted his head slightly as though his earpiece was talking to him again.

The glimpse of the real person who lived inside of him zinged along her spine. Amy looked away. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t noticed him the first time she’d seen him, the epitome of tall, dark and gorgeous. Every time he’d visited alongside Deputy Edgecombe, Sam had dogged her thoughts for days after.

She’d ignored the attraction. Her minor in psychology had taught her to recognize that her childhood could create a fascination with honorable men and heroes who galloped in on white horses to rescue fair maidens.

The men in her young life had been transient, coming and going at her mother’s princess-fantasy whims. Her mother had been addicted to the rush of new love. The minute her high was gone, she moved on to someone else.

Only one man had stayed longer than a month. Only one man had ever come close to being a father figure, and he’d vanished when his connections to organized crime threatened Amy and her sister.

She clenched her teeth. Amy had promised herself she’d never be like her mother, drifting into the princess fantasy of needing a man to rescue her or to complete her.

As it turned out, she was almost as bad as her mother. She’d jumped into marriage with Noah when she was nineteen because he’d not only loved her but had promised the security her life lacked. They were both young, lost and looking for someone to come home to. Sure, she’d loved him, but maturity made her wonder what would have happened with their marriage had he come home alive. They’d still been in the getting-to-know-each-other phase when she’d married him. Like her mother, she’d fallen into the rush of first love.