Zaf Ahmadi was a hollow man. Selling his soul for the sake of a vendetta had been a necessary trade—one he didn’t resent and wouldn’t apologize for. The end—avenging his cousin Raphael’s murder—would justify the means.
But Joey should’ve never been caught in the middle of his war. She was his to protect, and he blamed himself for hurting her. Firing his weapon in an Arizona parking garage hadn’t been a mistake, but striking her...loving her...had.
Tried and convicted as an adult on criminal hacking charges when he was a teenager, trained in the US military at the end of his years-long sentence and unleashed in black ops as an emotionally vacant sharpshooter, he was destined for an isolated, tortured life—but Josephine de la Peña had drawn him toward a utopia he’d never known existed. She was light and color and hope, and he’d screwed up and fallen in love with her.
Then his gun, his bullet, his error, had sent her to the ground on a blanket of her own blood, and he’d been slung back to the world he was meant for—a world void of everything he’d known with Joey. She had been shot but it was he who’d fallen off the grid for five damn years.
The single reason he’d come out of the shadows was to protect her. He’d wounded her, wrecked her in some sense, but it hadn’t been his plan. That plan belonged to another architect, and Zaf would let no one take her life.
He’d been in Las Vegas some months now, lying low but learning the characteristics of the city and the hierarchy of its people. He surfaced at casinos on the occasions that he wanted to play his intellect against sophisticated dealers ruling high-risk table games.
Mostly he tracked the bastard who’d made Joey his target. The threat to her had intensified to the point that Zaf could no longer effectively watch over her from a distance. He needed access, proximity, trust.
Good friggin’ luck getting even one of the three.
Not that he would blame Joey if she tried to run him through with her cane right now. He’d taken no sadistic pleasure in her pain, but welcomed her retaliation. He figured he deserved the wrath, and secretly he prayed it would assuage his agony.
Zaf stood motionless. It was up to her to come to him now. He’d done all the heavy work to this point, hacking into Dating Done Smart’s system, creating a profile and neatly bridging it to hers without leaving a trace that security had been breached. This wasn’t a federal job—he’d find no governmental cooperation should the company be alerted and take up arms against him. But he didn’t care. He knew an attack was coming and this time he would keep her safe.
Inside he shook with a craving to clear the damn room of everyone but his Jo. His Jo. She wasn’t anymore—when would that fact take root?
A line of people nudged past him for a closer look at an exhibit, then he could see Joey’s tears again. No longer offering a mesmerizing shine to the bitter snap in her russet-brown eyes, they streaked down her cheeks. The woman next to her held out tissues but he wanted to block them with his body and erase the wet trails with his tongue.
Whatever she said next had her friend reaching out as though to shield her, but Joey jerked loose and said something that sent the other woman out of the gallery. Identifying her was no challenge—he knew Charlotte Blue was a Las Vegas Slayers athletic trainer and Nate Franco’s fiancée.
And he knew Nate Franco’s godfather, Gian DiGorgio, was a billionaire Joey had crossed. He should be in prison now, staring at the blood on his hands. But his brilliance, duplicity and mighty alliances afforded him the slickest loopholes to escape the consequences of his crimes, and gifted him the opportunity to put Joey under surveillance because he intended to lay his bloodstained hands on her.
Joey navigated the gallery to him but didn’t speak.
To take the coward’s way, he’d ignore the stick, pretend he didn’t feel a bone-deep stab of remorse with each halting step he watched her take. But to be a coward required him to fear something, and the capacity to do even that had been drained from him. “I did that. I did that to you.”
“You did. The bullet’s still embedded. Fragmented. But I’m sure somebody in the network told you that.” Those eyes were relentless—punishing, even. Her accent was spiced with the influence of her Spanish-speaking family and Texas upbringing, her timbre controlled and nonthreatening. Deceptively so. “Qué pasa, Zaf? How does it feel, knowing you’re in me?”
He was beyond redemption for tensing up in violent, dirty lust. Gazing down at her, he absorbed her every erotic detail. Maybe this was punishment, the need to pull those little combs out of her brandy hair and spear his fingers through it, to hurt with a thirst to taste her again, to have perfect vantage point of her breasts exposed by that deep-cut neckline—and knowing he could only need and hurt and look.
“I carry part of you with me wherever I go. I had two surgeries because I wanted you out of my body. But you can’t be extracted.” She circled him and faced the wall, feigning interest in a painting.
Turning with her, he bumped her and instinctively fitted his hands over her shoulders. Contact. He hadn’t been prepared for the naturalness of her frame under his palms and her scent under his nose...the slow and calculated stroke of her ass as she leaned forward on the cane. “Josephine—”
“You didn’t answer my question. How does it feel?”
If this was a pressure tactic, he expected something cleverer from her but could make some concessions. “Soft,” he murmured against one ear. He scraped her hair aside to access the other. “Familiar. I worshipped this. I’ve missed it.”
“I meant, how does it feel to know you hurt me?”
“Like a mistake I can’t undo.”
“Not never-ending death?”
“Is that what you want me to feel, Jo?”
A snicker had them looking sideways where a handful of twentysomethings were openly watching them with goofy-as-hell smiles on their faces.
“We can’t talk here,” he whispered.
“You knew we wouldn’t be able to. But you went to shady extremes to get me here, anyway—which is pretty high on the creep-o-meter.” Joey straightened her posture and without warning pivoted away, leaving him standing there with a stiff cock and as hooked on her as he’d ever been.
So she was furious and she needed space. He gathered his focus again, striding out of the gallery and putting her back into his line of vision.
Where are you leading me? he wanted to ask, but she was too far ahead, and to raise his voice in a library and be shushed might detonate his temper.
Pursuing the stacks, he watched her disappear down an aisle. Rows of nonfiction books confronted him as he followed her to the end then down the next aisle. She spied him over her shoulder, raised a hand to drag her fingers along the spines of the books but continued on.
It was déjà vu, this chase. They’d shared this dance before. Now did she realize why he’d suggested they meet inside a library? Did she remember what he could never forget?
Sensing the next aisle was empty, he listened for voices but the only close sound he heard was the tap of Joey’s cane. Awareness slowed her footsteps and the bounce of her fingertips on the books. Midway she all but stopped, but he kept his casual pace until he was standing before her. Barely turning, she put her backside to the shelves and as she began to drop her hand, he caught it.
Sliding his fingers between hers in an intimate grip, he held her loosely against the bookstack. “We met in a place like this.”
He’d been coming off a trafficking assignment in Russia when his supervisors had put him on an aircraft bound for Mexico to join a DEA team. The group had assembled in a library off-hours and during the late-night briefing a petite, fiercely beautiful operative had laid claim to him with just one appreciative smile as he proffered her a thermos of coffee she hadn’t asked for but he’d sensed she needed.
He didn’t regret sharing weak coffee with Joey that tense night, or joining her afterward for a bottle of tequila and sex in a threadbare room with unscreened windows that let in voracious mosquitos and the fragrance of Mexican orange blossoms.
“I remember,” she said, rolling her lips between her teeth as his other hand sought those old-fashioned little combs. Her hair poured over her shoulders like deep-gold citrus honey from a Mason jar—and smelled as sweet. “I remember how we started and how we ended.”
A gunshot had ended them. So had his lies.
Zaf hadn’t deserved her in the beginning and sure as hell didn’t deserve her now, but he was too selfish to deprive himself of the chance to touch her where he knew her olive-toned skin was smoothest and softest. He wanted to shut down all his senses except touch, wanted to know if her subtle warmth and the rhythm of her heartbeat under his hand would heal his gaping wounds. Intently he searched her face for rejection that didn’t come.
That first brush of his knuckles down that open trail at the front of her dress almost weakened him to uselessness. Watching her, he saw her lashes tremble and her lips press together.
She wasn’t the glittering young woman who tasted like tequila and could strip off her inhibitions grinding out a salsa on an overcrowded dive bar’s sticky dance floor. She wasn’t even the dogged special agent who fearlessly went deep undercover but always returned to him to remind that good still existed in this goddamn world.
She looked the same and rendered the same savagely primitive effect on his body, but she’d changed.
Skimming his knuckles upward, he curled his fingers around the chain of her purse.
“Shy, Zaf?”
He didn’t find the boldness in her tone authentic but accepted the words as a gauntlet thrown. He wasn’t shy; he was desperate and venturing into trouble he couldn’t mend.
Zaf leaned, angled his head, and she met him halfway. Her glossy lips were slippery under his kiss, teasing him as if she was flicking a feather across his face.
“Can’t seem to make a solid landing there, can you?” she uttered against his mouth.
The almost and not quite and close misses were a game to her.
But not to him. For Zaf, this was life and death.
“Joey...”
“Shh. Tell me something. You hacked Willa Smart’s company to get to me. Was it for this, for a kiss from a woman you used to screw?”
He’d done it because he was her protector. Compromising a matchmaker’s compatibility program was the means he’d taken to fulfill his obligation to her. Even if he’d lost his morality, he still possessed a sense of duty—whether he wanted it or not. “You were more than that. You’ve always known it.”
“Have I?”
The love that had once breathed between them had been inconvenient and confusing, yet the realest element in either of their lives. It had struck them unexpectedly. Neither was willing to let it go, and for that they were both to blame. Because something that good couldn’t last. Not for people like them who’d done what they had.
“I got to you because I’m on a job,” he told her. Yeah, it was a vague explanation, but he wouldn’t divulge particulars now. “The kiss is because I can’t fight it. I’ve thought about you constantly since that night. It hasn’t been never-ending death, but it’s been a never-ending mindfuck.”
“They put you down, didn’t they? DC?”
“It needed to happen.”
“Down deep, Zaf. You didn’t turn up at your parents’ place in Jersey or even in Pakistan. There was talk that you were dead but I didn’t think that. I knew you wouldn’t get time, either, that they’d rather have you on reserve than in a cell. About a year after... What I’m trying to say is I tried to bring you back and I couldn’t find you.”
His mind spun through the past five years. The US government had dragged his ass up for a few missions that needed a sharpshooter of his caliber on the front line, but had thrown him back afterward at his request. He was freelance—off record, off the FBI’s payroll, damn near a ghost. He wanted it that way.
“Why’d you want to bring me back?”
“To ask you why you went dirty. You cut a deal with those bastards when I thought we were on the same side. You killed me when you turned, damn it.”
So she still believed he’d defected to the drug-funneling terrorists he’d been quietly hunting since they’d captured, tortured and murdered his cousin eight years ago. The feds hadn’t gone out of their way to clean up his image, but what did it matter now? There was so much that Joey didn’t know. But she’d been a thread in a web that was bigger than DEA and even now it was necessary to lead her with lies.
“The kiss,” she said finally as fresh tears welled. “Don’t fight it.”
There was something he didn’t altogether trust about her spurring him on, but as he’d said—he couldn’t fight it. Nor would he try. Giving her what she provoked, he let go of her hand to hold her head steady. She yielded, opening her mouth to bring him home.
Her taste became his, the slick stroke of her tongue as necessary to him as oxygen. No borders had been settled, so he let himself roam. Parting the halves of her dress, he bared a pair of firm tits. Palming them, preparing them for his mouth, he grazed a nipple with his tongue before catching it in a sucking kiss.
Zaf felt the pressure of her nails burrowing into the back of his neck, but when he started to retreat she pushed him closer. Gasping harshly as his teeth met her flesh, she said, “It doesn’t feel the same. Why doesn’t it feel the same?”
We’re not the same. But he’d be damned if he let that defeat him.
He unwrapped her hand from the cane and set the stick against the books beside them. Guided her to lean back. “Open your legs. Put...” He picked up her hand, selected the middle finger. “This one. Put it inside you.”
“Uh...”
Zaf dove for her, touching his nose to hers before covering her mouth in a kiss. “Inside you, Jo.”
Pulse hammering, he watched. When she slid her skirt up, exposing the slim thighs that had once straddled him, heat surged. When her hand disappeared beneath the fabric, he said something filthy that drew a private, sexy chuckle. “Are you wet?”
She nodded.
“Say it.”
“All right.” She flattened her lips, and her cheeks flushed an irresistible dusky color. Now who was shy? “I’m wet.”
“Show me.”
Joey withdrew her hand, held it up to him. The digit that had been inside her was glazed. As if she knew what he’d demand next, she ran her finger along his mouth. And when he parted his lips to take in the salty-sweet dampness, he gently snapped his teeth over her fingertip and coaxed it deeper before letting her pull out.
“I want more of this,” he said.
She shook her head, pushing his chest so she could have room to fix her dress. “I can’t. My body’s hot for you, but I can’t stand here half-naked—”
“Now you’re modest?”
“Maybe it’s not modesty. Maybe it’s decency.”
“Oh. So now, all of a sudden, you and I are decent people?”
“I can’t pretend that sex will make everything all better. Can you?” Without allowing him the opportunity to approach the question, she tugged him forward to reverse their positions. Now his back was to the stacks and she was leaning against him for balance as she unfastened his belt. “Do you feel the way you felt when I touched you before?”
Zaf was too riveted to comprehend what she was doing. He was staring at her determined frown and the tears collecting in her eyes. Then his pants were open and her fingers were sliding through his pubic hair to wrap around his dick. The first tug of her slim, soft-skinned hand had him bending his knees and groaning out loud.
“Quiet, Zaf,” she whispered, establishing a slow-stroke pace and rocking with him. “We’re in a library.”
“Hold on—”
“Precisely what I’m doing.” Her smile was contradicted by the visceral hurt shadowing her face. She didn’t interrupt the tempo, but kept attentively working his cock. As fluid coated the tip, she made a satisfied little noise then rubbed it onto her thumb and sucked it. “You taste the same. But something’s different. You know it’s different between us.”
Stop her. Get control of yourself.
“This works out nicely for you, Zaf. You betray me, hide for five years, thwart my attempt at something new with a guy who hasn’t single-handedly destroyed my universe and I get you off, anyway.” Joey pressed her face against his shirt to stifle a sob.
Of their own accord his hips gyrated, and he cursed himself for it. How could he still be hard, how could he want this, when she was crying and all but turned inside out? She might be capable of decency now, but he certainly wasn’t.
He didn’t break away and she kept jerking his shaft until the friction twisted between them and his tension splintered. Teeth gritted, restraint bent, he spurted into her fist. What she didn’t capture trickled onto his thighs.
Oh, hell.
“Funny thing about all this,” Joey went on, considering her semen-slickened hand and then cleaning it with a few meticulous licks. “It changes nothing. I will never forgive what you did to me.”
Zaf, still coming down from a sex high, was in a haze as she placed his hand to a spot on her lower abdomen.
“This is the entry point, where your bullet struck me before it cracked my femoral head.”
The words dropped him fast, and if he had a heart it’d be as jagged as broken glass right now. “Jo, it was an accident.”
“There are no accidents, Archangel.” Sweeping up her cane and leaning to kiss him, she left tears on his jaw. “I’m done with you.”
* * *
Joey escaped to the restroom. At the sink she frantically snatched too many paper towels from the dispenser, splashed too much tepid water and tried to cleanse away the evidence of what she’d done with Zaf. The soap smelled sterile and the towels rasped her skin, but she scoured at her breasts and then her lips, anyway.
The door opened and a woman in a UNLV hoodie and jeans shuffled in as Joey was spitting a soap-and-water mixture into the sink. “Yuck—that can’t taste good,” she commented. “Hey, are you sick or something?”
Depends. Would you consider giving an ex a handjob in Nonfiction sick?
Joey yanked out more towels to dry her face. Reflected in the mirror were tearful eyes, a rosy-tipped nose and a swollen, blotchy mouth. “I’m good.” Lies.
“Sure?”
“Absolutely.” Lies. “Thanks.”
The woman pursued a stall and Joey slipped outside.
As of right now, this minute, I’m a matchmaker-free zone.
She must be allergic to normal run-of-the-mill sort of meet cutes that led to relationships and love. To keep things in perspective, she hadn’t agreed to this date for the prospect of a long-term relationship or love. Still, it cut a little too deep to recognize that at age thirty-three, she was as god-awful at blind-dating as she’d been at age twelve.
She’d arrived at the library with her eyes wide open. She simply hadn’t entertained the thought that she would be dealing with Archangel. Zafir Ahmadi was a self-sacrificing guy capable of infinite compassion—contrary to what he wanted to believe. But Archangel, his codename, represented an expert marksman with the heart of a vigilante.
Joey loved Zaf. She hated Archangel.
Archangel was obsessed with revenge. He had overtaken the man she loved. Only, she hadn’t seen the signs until that vexed night in Arizona. The narcotics case had put her entire team on edge, so she hadn’t noticed that in the days immediately preceding, Zaf had begun to pull away from her. They’d shared meals, fucked, slept wrapped around each other—but the talking had stopped. On that bad night Zaf had turned against their unit and she’d been so jarred that she hadn’t protected herself. Someone else’s gun had threatened her life, yet it was Zaf’s 9 mm bullet that had torn through her.
The precautions, training and Kevlar hadn’t shielded her, not really. No armor had covered that vulnerable strip of lower abdomen. Nothing had even stopped her heart from breaking.
The shot had been meant for the man who’d seized her, but she had ignored Zaf’s signals because she didn’t trust him. Failed signals, miscommunication, and ultimately the sharpshooter had pinned her at close range and she lay crumpled on the ground scarcely aware of the bloody chaos around her.
That had been the last time she’d seen Zaf, until he’d decided to invade the new life she was trying to build here in Nevada.
At least Joey wasn’t paranoid. The wariness that warned she was being followed had been perfectly on the mark. Only, this wasn’t the kind of thing she was happy to be right about.
Zaf had eyes on her, but why?
Outside again, beneath a canopy of heavy clouds, Joey wasn’t entirely surprised to see him on the front entrance steps. He wasn’t the type to tuck his tail and run when a mission was on the line. Besides, he owed her a hell of an explanation.
Resting against the handrail, he looked at her with steady intensity. Had what they’d shared not quite twenty minutes ago affected him? It left her a little embarrassed and a lot aroused, reminiscent of when she’d picked open his locker at their Washington, DC, office and tucked her undies inside. “Still here, huh? Did you come for the mind games but stay for the books?”
“I came for you and I stayed for you.”
“Yeah, you did come for me, Zaf. In a couple of ways. The more pressing issue should be how quickly you can get yourself into a pair of clean pants, yet you’re still here angling for a way to get something from me. Single-minded, much?”
Zaf straightened to his full height; he towered over her but somehow it hadn’t mattered before. “I want you to let me do my job.”
God, the man was prince of the cloak-and-dagger. “Which is what?”
“Protecting you.”
Joey halted, taking a moment to seek out the lie in his face, but she couldn’t break through. She saw a man she’d missed even as she cursed the sweltering summer day she’d met him seven years ago. All she could seem to attach herself to were the memories of lazy conversations and how he altruistically volunteered his life for the law. Lean and carelessly sexy with that serious, brooding look that magnetized people even as it pushed them away, he was the Zaf her heart recognized.
But the guy who’d manipulated her into a confrontation? That screamed Archangel. It was his modus operandi.
“Goodbye, Zaf.” She skirted around him to the other side of the handrail.
“Wait, please,” he said, matching her steps but keeping the rail between them. “You can’t look me square in the eye and say you haven’t wondered if somebody’s tailing you.”
“Yes, I’ve wondered.” She’d also wondered if paranoia was making her crazy. “Now I know I was right and the doer is you.”
“It’s not me—”
“Actually,” she said, eyes narrowed as she looked around them, “the old guy with the ratty corduroy pants and the Copernicus biography. Is he on your payroll? Because I’d hate to think I handed a one-hundred-dollar bill to one of your spies.”
“No, I didn’t recruit spies.” He wasn’t even fazed that she’d accused him of it. That’d probably disturb some, but putting extra sets of eyes on subjects was a common investigative practice in their world. “You gave a hundred dollars to a beggar?”
“I don’t know if he was a beggar for certain, but figured the money would cut him some slack. So I’ll skip my next manicure. I don’t mind.”
“You’re a beautiful person, Jo, with beautiful intentions. But don’t you think cash like that might go toward heroin in his veins instead of food in his stomach?”
“I saw the good in him. Sometimes a person needs someone else to see the good in them, Zaf.” With that she was back on the move.
“Josephine, hang on for a minute, okay?”
“No, I don’t have time for this. I’m getting along fine and the sooner you disappear again, the better.”
“Do you mean that?”
“I do.” Lies, lies, lies. But they were her strength and comfort because he couldn’t be trusted with the truth. “I have friends here and a stable job at ODC. Plus, as you’re damn well aware, I’m testing out the dating scene. So I have no time for your pretenses. I don’t want you anymore.”
The last few words crackled in the muggy air. “I might believe that had I not been in that library with your hand around my cock.”
Oh, sure. Bring that up. She stabbed her cane to the step. “Hey, you don’t get to crawl out of the woodwork when I’m trying to patch up my life. And you, of all folks, don’t get to judge me. So give your so-called protection to someone who wants it.”
That shut him down, but only for a taut moment. He literally jumped the rail, his feet touching down neatly on the step below hers.
“How impressive, you do your own stunts.” Thank goodness for snark—dishing it out gave her time to push past a tide of arousal. Facing him full-on took her breath away.
Zaf leaned close, kissed her cheek for the benefit of people passing them on the stairs. To strangers they appeared to be a normal pair of lovers relishing the brightness of each other’s company on a dreary afternoon. So far from the truth. “Joey, you’re wearing a target.”
“Who put it there?” Asking the question didn’t mean she had to put stock in what he said. It wouldn’t be the first time he lied to achieve an end result.
“Gian DiGorgio.”
“Are you lying?” He wasn’t; she fully and completely trusted that on this occasion he was honest. God-given instincts, sharpened by a career as a federal agent, had made her suspicious of coincidences. It wasn’t by chance that in recent weeks Gian DiGorgio repeatedly appeared at the bodega where she’d shopped for years and had never before seen him. Happenstance wasn’t at work when she visited the post office and found the man twisting a key into the box next to hers. Though the Bureau lent her a few courtesies, she had no recourse against a citizen exercising his rights to patronize a bodega and keep a post office box.
But to doubt Zaf would pressure him to release information he likely was reluctant to share with her yet—if at all.
“I’m not lying, Jo.”
Just to stress that she wouldn’t allow herself to be handled, she said, “I want proof.”
“I’ll get it to you.”
“Good.”
“Look, I know you don’t trust me, but DiGorgio isn’t some playground bully. This isn’t casual advice between old friends. Eliminating the threat to your life is my job. Once before you pissed on my judgment, and neither of us will forget how that played out.”
Joey flinched. “This conversation’s over.”
“Take this seriously,” he pleaded. “I didn’t come to Las Vegas to dig up the past or make you cry or to blame you for my screwups.”
“Really? Seems that way to me.”
“None of it was intentional. You’re no longer an irritation to DiGorgio—you’re a threat. I’ve had him tagged for the past few months. What he wants with you is personal. From what I’ve gathered, he’s willing to handle you himself.”
Inside Joey was cold, and anxiety slammed her so hard that her spine started to ache. But she said indifferently, “Let him give it a try, then. Gian DiGorgio’s kissing seventy and he’s no he-man. I can cope.”
“There’s a difference between being strong and being stupid.”
“No one asked you to be my rescuer, Zaf.” She waited for a retort—his body language said he was burning to argue—but no words came and she shrugged. “Give me whatever intelligence you’ve collected.”
“I want to talk to you about this more.”
In other words, he wanted control. But it was she who wore a target. Her life rested in her own hands. That hadn’t changed just because he decided to swagger back into it.
“Come to the house tonight, about sevenish. I’m sure you already know exactly where it is. Bring beer. I like it light these days.” She wouldn’t be home, but let him figure that out in time.
“Okay.” He turned to jog down the steps but hesitated. “Hey, Jo.”
“What?”
He might’ve tried for a smile, but it curved into a contemplative frown. God, she’d been a fool to love him once. A delightfully buoyant little fool. Not anymore, though, and that might be the saddest thing of all. “Nothing. See you tonight.”
“Tonight,” she confirmed, sending him off with a smile she didn’t feel.
Pulling out her phone—not the junk one, which was safe to pitch into a receptacle now, but her smartphone—she found missed calls and unread texts waiting. She’d manage Charlotte’s grilling later. She owed her friend an explanation after dropping a doozy of a bomb on her in the lobby gallery earlier, but she needed an urgent favor and knew who could get it done.
“Tem, hi,” she said cheerily when the woman picked up the call. Pleasantries out of the way, she asked, “About that car. Is the offer still on the table? ’Cause I’m going to do an overnight at the training facility and I could use a change of wheels. With the veterans reporting to camp tomorrow, I should get my bearings. Let’s make that happen tonight, shall we?”
Tem agreed to make the necessary arrangements and, hanging up, Joey grappled for some sort of inner reassurance that using the Las Vegas Slayers gig to dodge Zaf was wise. He would worry about her until he found her again.
But she supposed if she could manage that burden for five years, then surely he could shoulder it for a single night.
Decision final, Joey slid into her Camaro and headed home to pack.