Her face was so familiar that, even as a child, she’d never been able to go into a store without people watching her every move, but she was too tense to appreciate the novelty of shopping anonymously. She finished up quickly, stood in line to pay, and headed back to her car. With her purchases tucked safely in the trunk, she returned to the freeway.

By nightfall, she planned to be well into Pennsylvania, and sometime tomorrow, she’d get off the freeway permanently. Then she’d begin roaming the country that she knew both so much and so little about. She was going to travel until her cash ran out or she was caught, whichever came first.

The reality of what she’d done sank in. She had no one looking over her shoulder, no schedule to stick to. For the first time in her life, she was free.

Chapter 3

3

AS MAT JORIK shifted in the chair, he bumped his elbow against the edge of the attorney’s desk. Mat frequently bumped into things. Not because he was ungraceful, but because most of the indoor world had been built too small to accommodate a man of his size.

At six feet six inches tall and two hundred and ten pounds, Mat dwarfed the small wooden chair that sat across from the desk of the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, attorney. Still, Mat was accustomed to chairs that didn’t fit and bathroom sinks that hit him just above the knees. He automatically ducked when he walked down a set of basement steps, and the coach section of an airplane was his idea of hell. As for sitting in the back seat of nearly every car on the road—fuhgetaboutit.

“You’re listed on the birth certificate as the children’s father, Mr. Jorik. That makes you responsible for them.”

The attorney was a humorless tight ass, the kind of person Mat Jorik most disliked, so he uncoiled a couple vertebrae and extended one long leg—more than happy to use his size to intimidate the little worm. “Let me spell it out. They’re not mine.”

The attorney flinched. “So you say. But the mother also appointed you their guardian.”

Mat glared at him. “I respectfully decline.”

Although Mat had lived in Chicago and L.A., the blue-collar Pittsburgh neighborhood where he’d grown up still clung to him like factory smoke. He was thirty-four years old, a steeltown roughneck with big fists, a booming voice, and a gift for words. One old girlfriend said he was the last of America’s Real Men, but since she was throwing a copy of Bride magazine at his head at the time, he hadn’t taken it as a compliment.

The attorney pulled himself back together. “You say they aren’t yours, but you were married to their mother.”

“When I was twenty-one.” An act of youthful panic that Mat had never repeated.