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Kat managed to mutter between her clenched teeth.
    Dair gave a grin of satisfaction even as he concentrated on getting them safely out of here. It would have taken much longer by road, and there were no headlights visible to show any vehicles were following in the woods behind them. But he couldn’t be one hundred percent sure that his intentions hadn’t been obvious, and one of the police cars wouldn’t have doubled back to be waiting for them when they emerged out onto the highway. If that was the case they were in for a car chase too.
    He had to give it to Kat, though; she had taken all of this in stride, once reassured he was who she thought he was.
    It was curious that she had recognized him earlier just from the sound of his voice when he had spoken to her in the darkness; he couldn’t claim he would have been able to do the same in regard to her own voice. Damn it, he had barely recognized Kat yesterday morning, and he had been looking at her in full sunlight.
    That bastard Sergei had a lot to answer for. Luckily Dair knew that Gregori Markovic was exactly the man to make sure that he did.
    Dair had been involved in some serious fighting during his years in the army, and several of the security cases he had worked on during the past few years hadn’t always been resolved without bloodshed. But a man drugging his own wife, and then locking her away in a secure clinic, leaving her totally defenseless, went against every code of honor Dair possessed. And his investigation indicated Kat had been at the clinic since shortly after arriving back in New York following her father’s funeral.
    If Gregori didn’t kick Sergei’s ass hard enough then Dair was going to do it for him!
    Dair didn’t have any time to give more thought to that subject as the SUV barreled out of the cover of the trees and out onto the highway, the vehicle skidding briefly as the wheels lost traction on the smooth surface of the road.
    Luckily there was no other traffic on the road for them to hit, but even so it took Dair several seconds to get the SUV under control and accelerating in the direction of the private airport.
    He kept the night-goggles on and the headlights of the vehicle off, but even so he was able to ease up on the tension in his shoulders a little as he leaned back in his seat, the adrenaline still pumping hotly through his veins.
    Only for him to tense up again the moment he spared Kat a glance. She was staring at him with those huge dark eyes a man could find himself drowning in if he allowed it.
    Dair didn’t allow it. Instead he raised his hand and rubbed the scar on his temple, as a reminder of what had happened the last time he had trusted a woman with those same limpid dark eyes. He had been lucky to survive the experience.
    Nor was he the adrenaline junkie Kat had implied he was. At least, he didn’t think he was. He had been given a job to do, and he had done it to the best of his ability. No personal involvement, no emotions, just the job he had been trained to do. End of story.
    Yeah, and that was Santa’s sleigh and reindeer he had just seen winging their way across the sky.
    It had been just a job, until his first glimpse of Kat in the clinic yesterday. Then it had become personal. Protectively personal. Sergei Orlov wasn’t going to get to Kat again without going through him.
    “What?” the anger rasped in his voice. “Would you rather I hadn’t bothered to come for you, that I had just left you sitting in that place, strapped to the chair?”
    There was silence inside the vehicle for several minutes, and then the sound of Kat’s raggedly indrawn breath. As if she had forgotten to breathe for those same minutes. “They always strapped me down before Sergei came to visit me.”
    Dair gave her another quick glance. “Why?”
    She gave a shrug. “Probably because the first time he came to see me…in there, I tried to stab him with the knife from my breakfast tray.”
    “What—! Why?” So much for his