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intending that she take wallet and all. She did, stretching out and snagging it, then moving farther away in case he suddenly recuperated and jumped at her. She didn’t think he would, or could, but that wasn’t a chance she was willing to take.
    There was cash in the wallet, enough to make a nice thick bulk, some credit cards, and a driver’s license. Looking back and forth between him and the wallet, she saw that the Virginia license did indeed say Morgan Yancy. The Morgan Yancy in the photograph looked much healthier than the one sitting in her driveway. The face had the hard, sculpted look of a man who kept himself in peak physical shape—not a handsome face, but definitely a masculine one. Brown hair—check. Blue eyes—check; she was close enough to see that. They were a particularly striking shade of blue, fierce and icy, as if an eagle had been born blue-eyed. Six-foot-two, check. Two hundred thirty pounds? No way in hell. He was at least thirty, forty pounds shy of what the license said, which explained why his clothes hung on him like shapeless bags.
    On the plus side, the ill-fitting clothes were clean and in good shape, nothing fancy, just jeans and boots and a flannel shirt. On the not-so-plus side, Ted Bundy had been clean-cut and nicely dressed, so that didn’t prove anything.
    Tricks barked again.
    He retrieved the cell phone from the dashboard and tossed it to her; startled, she juggled the wallet and made a one-handed catch of the phone that she considered nothing short of miraculous, given that she’d never played any kind of sports. She should have let it drop in the dirt. Who threw cell phones around? “Call him,” he said, leaning his head back against the seat and closing his eyes again. He was breathing kind of heavily.
    â€œI don’t know his number.”
    â€œIt’s the only number programmed into that phone.”
    Well, wasn’t that all special and spy-ish? And useless, because—“I haven’t talked to him in seventeen years. I wouldn’t recognize his voice.” Besides, she didn’t want to hear Axel’s voice again—ever.
    â€œSo work it out.” The guy didn’t open his eyes. “Maybe he knows something about you that no one else does.”
    He was taking a lot for granted, she thought with resentment, a complete stranger showing up uninvited and evidently expecting her to take care of him. Or maybe he was at the end of his endurance and didn’t have the energy to move on down the road. From the way he looked, she had to reluctantly go with that last conclusion.
    Damn it. She didn’t want to get hooked into anything, but at the same time she didn’t see how she could send him away when he was incapable of going.
    She took a few more cautious steps away from him, just in case he was faking and tried to charge her while she was distracted by the phone. She didn’t think so, but yeah, she was cautious—and suspicious. Looking back and forth between him and the phone, she examined it; it was a cheap dumb phone, keypad instead of a touch screen. She pressed the call button and put the phone to her ear.
    There was some unusual clicking. She waited and was beginning to think the call hadn’t gone through when there was another click and a man’s voice said, “Yes.”
    She said, “Who is this?”
    â€œNice to talk to you, too.” The voice was male, mature, and no way in hell could she tell if it belonged to her former stepbrother.
    â€œSorry,” she said briskly. “You won’t be talking to me a second longer unless you tell me something that identifies you.”
    He snickered. “One word: stripes .”
    Dismayed, she shook her head. Even if “stripes” hadn’t verified his identity to her, the adolescent snicker would have. She was caught: this was indubitably Axel MacNamara. No one else, not even her mother, had known that when Bo