Page 94 of Ford

“We’d better get back to our seats,” she said quietly.

Yes. Find his sister, get her home.

And figure out how to live happily ever after with the woman he loved.

They had to get off this train.

And not just because York had dropped a body over the side in the thick grass of western Russia, just outside the city of Yekaterinburg, but because they’d been found.

Maybe Boris had a snitch. Or David Curtiss. Or perhaps Gustov had been watching all the trains. York didn’t know, but whoever York had just dispatched, the man knew his game.

“Bristow—let me in.” York knocked on the door to their compartment, grateful to see that it was locked. “It’s me.”

The door slid open, and RJ stood in the gap.

He wanted to pull her to himself, kiss her all over again, but—

“You’re bleeding.” She grabbed his ripped shirt and pulled him into the compartment, down onto the bunk. “Are you stabbed?”

He shook his head. “Just a slash on my forearm. It’s not as bad as it looks.”

But it burned, the slash probably deep enough for stitches. He’d had nothing else to protect his body as he deflected the stab, but was fast enough to grab the man’s wrist, to move it back onto the attacker.

Two puncture wounds, one in his gut, the other in his chest, and York had simply pitched him off the fast-moving train.

Stood there breathing hard. If he hadn’t seen the flash of light reflected off the knife…

He didn’t do emotion, and this near miss was exactly why.

He shouldn’t have been kissing her. He told himself he was just checking on her, making sure she was okay. But he’d turned into a liar, as well as a sap, because he’d been dreaming about that kiss in the park. He’d opened his eyes, found her gone, and followed his stupid heart all the way down the hall.

He’d found her standing in the wind, and when she turned, she looked at him again like he was some kind of freakin’ hero, so much admiration in her eyes. It reeled him in and made him stop thinking. Forget who he was.

RJ just had this way of reaching inside him and making him feel, however briefly, healed. Worthy. Not dark, broken, and deadly.

But he needed dark, broken, and deadly if he hoped to get her home alive.

He wasn’t letting her out of his sight again.

RJ grabbed a sheet and was ripping it into strips while Kat examined the wound.

“It’s deep,” she said.

“It’s fine. Get your stuff together. We need to get off this train.”

RJ stepped up to him and put a folded strip of sheet against his wound. “Hold that there,” she ordered.

Her mouth was set in a dark line of—anger? Worry? But she said nothing as she wrapped the bandage with another strip.

“You could have been killed,” she whispered, meeting his eyes.

“Don’t wander off again,” he said.

Her mouth tightened, and he was a jerk. But if he didn’t snap at her, he might do something stupid and pull her against himself again, and there would go all the tightly packed emotion, bleeding out everywhere. Which, in the end, would only get them all killed.

“I ran.” She tore a strip down the middle and tied it around the wrap. “I hope you saw that.” Her voice was trembling.

“Yeah, I saw it.” Then because he couldn’t bear to see her trying not to cry, he grabbed her wrist. “Ruby. Thank you.”