Page 129 of Stolen By the Billionaire
“Ah.”
“But he shouldn’t have been able to find us.”
“Yes,” Blaze said, scowling as he piloted the flying car onto the freeway. “I’d like to know how he did that, too.”
34
The Mentally Unstable Horse
Blaze
Within hours, Blaze and Sarah had crossed the Ohio state line, an invisible barrier but for green signs flanking the road and the GPS app’s soothing announcement, “Welcome to . . . Pennsylvania,” as Blaze drove relentlessly down the highway.
The app’s feminine voice was so similar to the alerts installed in fighter planes that Blaze was momentarily shifted in space and time to the many times he’d been delivered to US Navy aircraft carriers, those vast floating platforms of war, via F/A-18F Super Hornets for missions in remote locales.
A hard blink restored him to the highway snaking through the green summer forests of Pennsylvania.
Blaze was still behind the wheel, still not trusting Sarah to drive because that was his nature.
Plus, it was his car, his mission, and his plan. Driving was his responsibility.
Sarah had been quiet during the ride, gazing out the windows. The landscape changed from flat cornfields to hills and then to mountains bristling with old-growth forest, and she seemed happier. Her chatter was less about him kidnapping her and more about the cut-crease valleys velveted with dark green as they drove deeper into the Pennsylvania landscape.
A few hours later, they were well into the Pocono Mountains in the middle of the state, past even the town of State College that supported Penn State University, when the Pathz navigation app announced in its soporific tone that a crash was causing a delay on the highway ahead. Thus, the navigation app was routing them through a side-road detour.
Blaze took the exit as prescribed.
The Pathz app absolutely told the truth when it said you should get the hell off the highway, and according to Blaze’s gray-hat computer-genius friend Twist, it did not track his movements. Trustworthy in two ways was a bonus to a security-paranoid soldier like himself.
That was how they found themselves ambling on a two-lane country road, veering onto the gravel shoulders to give wide berth to horses pulling black-draped buggies with battery-lit taillights, sprightly trotting with pricked-up ears and bay coats shining in the late afternoon sun.
The car’s slower pace must have influenced Sarah to start talking.
She said, “I’m not sure what’s happening between us.”
Blaze scratched the back of his neck as he accelerated from a stop sign. “Yeah?”
“You’ve said some conflicting things.”
Blaze prided himself on being direct and straightforward, but relationships were not his strength, obviously. “I can clarify.”
“You said some things when we were—you know—this morning. And then you said some other things, other times.”
Pastures populated with black and white dairy cows bounded the road. Blaze asked her, “What did I say that was contradictory?”
“Yesterday morning in the garage, you said you were a possessive A-hole, and the way you said it sounded like you were joking. And other times, it sounded like you really meant it.”
Blaze kept his eyes on the road even though they were only going about thirty miles an hour through the countryside. “That is accurate. I am a possessive asshole.”
She chuckled, a far better reaction to his cursing than the repressed winces and shocks from their first few days together. “So, are you possessive about everything? Are you possessive about your car?”
“I wouldn’t let someone steal my car, either. Obviously.”
“Okay, bad example.”
She crossed her knee away from him and jiggled her leg, fretting.
Blaze coasted the car and braked at a stop sign. The world slowed, and a green valley quilted with farmland spread from the road to the forested mountainsides. “Are you asking if I like you?”
