A PERFECT RENDEZVOUS

Adventure

Harry Styles seemed to be both a godsend and a disastrous kink in his plans. Rather than curse fate for saddling him with him and the deadly threat to his freedom that he represented, he decided to give fate an opportunity to work out this problem and to try to help them both relax. Reaching behind him for the thermos of coffee, he thought back to his last remarks and came up with what seemed like a good conversational opening. In a carefully offhand, nonthreatening tone, he inquired sociably, "What's wrong with my jeans?"

He gaped at him in blank confusion. "What?"

"You said something about my 'damned jeans' being the only reason you offered me a ride," he explained, filling the top of the thermos with coffee. "What's wrong with my jeans?"

Harry swallowed an hysterical surge of angry laughter. He was concerned about her life, and he was concerned about making a fashion statement!

"What," he repeated determinedly, "did you mean?"

Harry was on the verge of an angry retort when two things occurred to him at once—that it was insane to deliberately antagonize an armed man and that if he could make him relax his guard by indulging in small talk with him, his chances to either escape or get out of this alive would be vastly improved. Trying to inject a polite, neutral tone into his voice, he drew a long breath and said without taking his eyes from the road, "I noticed your jeans were new."

"What did that have to do with your deciding to offer me a ride?"

Bitterness at his own gullibility filled Harry's voice. "Since you didn't have a car and you implied you didn't have a job, I assumed you must be having a hard time financially. Then you said you were hoping to get a new job, and I noticed the crease in your jeans..." His voice trailed off when he realized with a disgusted jolt that instead of the nearly destitute man he'd thought him to be he was actually a mega-millionaire movie star.

"Go on," Zayn prodded, his voice tinged with puzzlement.

"I leapt to the obvious conclusion, for heaven's sake! I figured you'd bought new jeans so you could make a good impression on your employer, and I imagined how important that must have been to you while you were buying them in the store and how much hope you must have been feeling when you bought them, and I-I couldn't bear the thought that your hope was going to be trashed if I didn't offer you a ride. So even though I've never picked up a hitchhiker in my life, I couldn't stand to see you miss having your chance."

Zayn was not only stunned; he was unwillingly touched. Kindness like his, a kindness that also required some kind of personal risk or sacrifice, had been absent from his existence for all the years he'd spent in prison. And even before that, he realized. Shoving the unsettling thought aside, he said, "You envisioned all that from a crease in a pair of jeans? You've got one hell of an imagination," he added with a sardonic shake of his head.

"I'm obviously a bad judge of character, too," Harry said bitterly. From the corner of his eye, Harry saw his left arm swing toward him and he jumped, muffling a scream before he realized he was only holding out a cup of coffee from the thermos. In a quiet tone that almost seemed to carry an apology for adding to his fright, he said, "I thought this might help."

"I'm not in the slightest danger of falling asleep at the wheel, thanks to you."

"Drink some anyway," Zayn ordered, determined to ease his terror even while he knew his presence was the source of it. "It will—" he hesitated, feeling at a loss for words, and added, "It will make things seem more normal."

Harry turned his head and gaped at him, his expression making it eloquently clear he found Zayn's "concern" for him not only completely revolting, but insane. He was on the verge of telling him that, but he remembered the gun in his pocket, so he took the coffee in a shaking hand and turned away from him, sipping it and staring at the road ahead.