Page 27 of Ace
Her fingers fluttered for him to take her hand. “Come on, Secret Agent Man, get your butt moving. The truck’s gone. I don’t have all day.”
At last, Keller could stand without embarrassing himself. Grunting, he took her tiny hand, and gripping it gently, he let her think she’d rescued him. Who knew? Maybe she had.
By the time he’d climbed onto the road, the monster truck was long gone.Bastards.“Are you okay?” he asked the lady climbing up the embankment with him.
“Just dirty,” she replied as she swiped mud away from her nose and mouth only to smear it across her cheek. Talk about plucky. She was one gutsy woman. Disobedient, but courageous.
Blinking to clear the murk out of his eyes, Keller held onto her other hand, hoping to instill comfort as well as dissolve any pain she might have acquired in the fall. At least this part of the swamp was shallow. The dirty water came up to his ears. If he could only get his heart to stop pounding. “I told you to get to Sanctuary,” he huffed as waves of contentment flowed from Savannah to him.
She was doing it again, comforting him. “And leave you to face those creeps alone? You know who they are?”
“No,” he answered, pulling back to see the truth in her eyes. “Do you?”
Two feminine brows lifted while her forehead filled with those adorable wrinkles. “I don’t and I’ve never seen that truck before, either.”
Like a trusting child, she closed in on him until her cheek melted against his chest.
Instinctively, Keller closed his eyes while his body reacted like a hound dog to the shivering, womanly flesh pressed into his arms. Her heart was pounding as hard as his, and for one fleeting moment, he wished it pounded for a better reason than her fear. As much as she pushed comfort at him, she couldn’t disguise her adrenaline spike.
As easily as if he’d willed it, a different picture of her riding him imposed itself over his cavalier feelings. Keller wanted to kiss those lush chocolate lips, now pursed with indignation and sass. He wouldn’t have minded threading his fingers into all that hair, holding on tight while he… while they…
Aw, hell.Now he was fighting to keep his hands from wandering too low. From grabbing two hands full of her backside and scooping her off the road and into his arms. Gran Mere’s lovely great granddaughter was fast becoming more temptation than he’d expected.
“We should get going before they come back,” he told Savannah, sounding like he’d swallowed a mouthful of that red gravel road.
“Mmm,” she murmured huskily, the lovely vibration of her voice soothing and apparently just what Keller needed. With the monster truck long gone and Savannah under his arm, he allowed a deep breath. This road was certainly the one less traveled. Not a car insight. Only the birds coming back to life in the trees and—
BOOM!A thunderous tail smacked the muck and mud behind them.An alligator? No, two.
“Get back in the car,” Keller told Savannah as the spiny back of a third good-sized reptile wound its way through the shallow water toward them. “Hur—”
Keller could’ve sworn he’d heard incoming ordnance just as—
BLAM!The Camaro lifted off its wheels with a hiss of flames and spitting body parts.
Turning his back on yet another catastrophe, Keller pulled Savannah into his body. He hunkered over her, around her, shielding her from flying shrapnel whistling past.She clung to him even as he kept both eyes on the reptiles now on the road, one at his left, two on his right and all headed his way. Jesus Christ, did everyone want them dead?
Just when he thought things couldn’t get worse, they did. Another alligator peered over the edge of the road, its short, stubby legs scrambling for solid purchase on the gravel bank. Only this fourth one to the party was no American native. This one was a gharial, a long-snouted crocodile that normally inhabited rivers in northern India and Nepal. The big fellow looked to be nearly fifteen feet long, and as it climbed onto the road, it dragged a thick heavy tail behind it.
Shit.Straightening his arm, Keller fired at the closest alligator. But he missed its eye. The beast halted, annoyed but uninjured. Not even bleeding. It kept coming.
The alligators Keller understood, but gharials weren’t known for hunting humans. Their preferred diet was fish. The slender, toothy jaws on this beast were designed to sweep from side-to-side through their primary habitat while they fished. They didn’t hunt land animals, and they weren’t known to attack humans. What was it doing here?
The thing hadn’t slowed since it climbed the bank. Which meant either there were no fish in this part of the swamp and this guy was hungry, or it preferred white meat.
“Get behind me,” Keller growled, not giving Savannah the chance to disobey again. With the burning car blocking the road behind them and the alligators in front, they were trapped. Worried now, he steadied his arm and fired again.
Direct hit. The beast’s jaws snapped open as its left eye exploded. A roar bellowed out of those cavernous jaws. When the other reptiles stopped advancing, every hair on Keller’s body stood up with primordial fear. These four creatures were hungry, man-eating predators. Their species was more than one-hundred and fifty million years old. They’d avoided extinction when much larger dinosaurs had not. He and Savannah were nothing but snacks.
But at least the wounded alligator’s roar distracted its buddies. They turned, their stubby, lizard-like legs now advancing on it. Judging the distance, Keller fired again. Another eyeball exploded into bloody goo, and an all-out feeding frenzy ensued. Even the gharial attacked the massive thrashing bodies.
Taking one definite step back, Keller pivoted on Savannah. “How far are we from Sanctuary?” he asked, keeping watch over his shoulder.
“’Bout a half mile,” Savannah answered breathily, her eyes frozen on the horrific battle.
The first injured reptile was now fighting for its life, whipping its massive tail at its brothers-in-crime even as they attacked. The gharial held the wounded reptile’s leg in its jaw even as the injured beast bit down on the first alligator’s snout. It was a scene straight out of“Jurassic Park,”dinosaurs fighting dinosaurs.
“Run,” Keller told her as he holstered one pistol and grabbed her hand. “Run!”
