Sophie finished and they returned to the blessed comfort of Maddy’s little cabin.
With the clear weather, the snowplows would be busy. She had a neighbor who had a plow on his truck, and he would clear her dirt road and driveway. She paid him back with free coffee whenever he came into the café. Thinking of coffee, she began rummaging in her cupboards for her old Corning stovetop coffeepot. After rinsing it, she filled it with water, measuring grounds into the basket. And no matter how much she tried to direct her mind to anything other than the man currently sleeping in front of the fireplace, there he remained, front and center.
A crazy part of her wanted to crawl back under the blankets to wake him in the most satisfying way. The other, saner part was busy calling herself all sorts of idiot.
The light over her kitchen sink blazed on and her microwave gave a little electronic chirp, startling her out of her reverie. Electricity. Yay! She’d been worried she’d have to bury everything from her freezer outside in the snow, but now the refrigerator emitted a productive hum. Life had just rejoined the twenty-first century.
She set the oven temperature and wrapped the pumpkin muffins in foil, placing them in the oven to warm. Opening the refrigerator, she grabbed the creamer for the coffee. She closed the door, turning to bump solidly into a bare chest. Lust and longing grabbed her by the throat. She wasn’t used to so much sexiness so early in the morning. Long arms, hard pecs, even the scrape on his forehead under the dark lock of hair combined into a potent package that sapped her will to resist.
Blue-gray eyes searched hers, then Logan bent his head to kiss her firmly on the lips. The crazy side of her threatened to launch a mutiny and make a return trip for another happy dance.
He didn’t do anything to quell that reaction. Big hands spanned her waist and he hitched her up onto the counter. Moving between her legs, he captured her mouth in another kiss that scattered any working brain cells she had left .With his warm hands framing her face, he broke the kiss.
She struggled to pull together a coherent thought. “Ah, good morning.”
She must have sounded dazed because he quirked an eyebrow over amused eyes. “Good morning.”
“Um, electricity is back on.” Call her Obvious Girl.
“I noticed.” He stepped back and gave her a little tug to regain her feet. “How about phone service?”
Logan’s first concern understandably would be the women in the trailer parked somewhere in the mountains. She crossed the room to pick up the receiver for her landline. “There’s no dial tone.”
“Damn. Internet?”
She motioned to her laptop sitting on a small desk in the corner of the living room. “Go ahead and give it a try.”
He moved to sit in the ladder-back chair while she gave Sophie her morning biscuit, and then Maddy busied herself with breakfast. How was she going to deal with Logan? That good-morning kiss had been a statement of possession, and while a part of her was thrilled, the other part held a hard-earned wariness. She opened the oven to peer in. The muffins needed a few more minutes, and the coffee was making its bubbly noises as it percolated its way to caffeine. She reached into the cupboard for mugs, then froze as the reality of her mistake slammed into her. With a quick indrawn breath, she spun around. “Wait.”
He sat motionless, staring at the screen. Even from the distance she could see the image of herself on her desktop, holding four-month-old Lily, both of them smiling into the camera. “Who’s the kid?” His voice held a hollow tone.
She didn’t say anything. Blurting out “your daughter” seemed too sudden, too meaningful, too tragic. She’d never considered how it might affect Logan to learn he’d had and lost a daughter.
He turned in his seat, an utter stillness about him that erased any emotion from his face. “She’s your daughter.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.” Maddy’s voice came out husky, and she cleared her throat. “That’s Lily.”
“Lily. Where is she now?”
Her throat closed, and she swallowed past the hard lump. “In heaven.”
He jerked back as if she’d struck him. “And the father? You’re not with him anymore?”
She didn’t have a chance to school her features, to keep her expression from giving her away. He was out of his seat and across the room in an instant, hands gripping her elbows, pulling her to her toes, eyes blazing with internal fire. “Was she mine, Madison? Did I have a daughter?”
She could only nod numbly. His grip tightened, his face going blank. He set her on her feet and let go, a finger at a time, as if he had to think about each individual movement.
When he turned away from her, Maddy felt a hard knot forming in the pit of her stomach. Logan grabbed his clothes, then pulled them on. He sat on the hearth and yanked on his boots. In seconds he was out the door, closing it quietly behind him. She’d have felt better if he’d slammed it. Or said something, anything.
She had no way of being sure what he was feeling, but if she had to place a bet, she’d lay odds that anger was at the top of the list. Well, she was angry, too. He’d left her, and a week later, she’d figured out she was pregnant. But by then, Logan had left town. Even if she’d wanted to tell him about the baby, she couldn’t have, at least initially. He’d been due to report to basic training at Fort Wood in Missouri, but had left Hangman’s Loss months prior in a beat-up old Volkswagen camper. He was going to see something of the country, he’d said. Even Brad hadn’t heard from him for six months, and she’d used every ounce of persuasion she possessed to convince her brother not to say a word about her pregnancy. After a few hellacious arguments, he’d agreed not to tell Logan for the time being, but then Lily had died and it had been too late.
Maddy dropped onto the couch, resting her head on the pillow she clutched to her chest. When she’d been pregnant, she’d fantasized about Logan coming home and realizing she was having his baby. She would have been serene, regal even, letting him grovel as he begged her forgiveness, until eventually she would be generous and allow him to share in the experience. Of course, he would have professed his love, begged her to marry him, and swore never to displease her again. God, she’d been such a child.
But her childhood had come to a screeching halt the moment the doctor with the sad eyes had come in with the results of the ultrasound and told her there was something wrong with her baby, and that she might not survive to her first birthday.
Maddy needed to tell Logan the whole story.
She’d kept the knowledge of her child to herself because Lily had been Maddy’s. Now a niggling voice at the back of her head suggested that perhaps she’d been punishing Logan. He’d left her, therefore he didn’t have the right to share in the beauty of their daughter.
Maddy didn’t like the idea that maybe she hadn’t been as much on the side of right as she’d always placed herself. She’d been so angry with him, and not entirely rational about it. Logan hadn’t known she was pregnant when he broke up with her, she hadn’t even known, but that hadn’t stopped her from being mad at him for leaving her when she was pregnant, for not being there when her baby fought for her life. For not being there when she died. Keeping her from Logan had been a way to punish him.
Logan pushed through the knee-high snow, breathing in air so cold he wasn’t sure why the trees didn’t simply splinter into giant shards. Cold was good; maybe it would cool the red-hot rage that hazed his vision. He’d had a little girl, a beautiful, dark-haired little girl, and hadn’t known. And she was dead.
Anger propelled him down the drive, made him want to beat his fists into the trunk of a big pine until they were bloody. Why hadn’t Maddy told him? Why hadn’t Brad told him? The cold began to penetrate through the turmoil. He couldn’t stay out for long. He didn’t have his phone and wasn’t dressed for the weather. But the image on Maddy’s laptop wouldn’t budge from center screen in his head. The tiny, perfect little girl. Lily. His daughter. His and Maddy’s. He wondered if Maddy had known she was pregnant a
t the time they’d broken up, and what he would have done had she told him.
One thing he did know: he wouldn’t have abandoned his child. Would he have stayed in the Loss and married Maddy? He could have taken her with him. He’d never know, because he hadn’t been given the option of making the choice, of doing the right thing. Of knowing his daughter.
What had happened to her? To Lily? His mind spun with the questions, unanswerable until he and Maddy talked. But anger clawed at him with razor-sharp talons and he knew that at the moment a conversation would not go well. Until he had a leash on his emotions, he needed to steer clear of Maddy.
He trudged on through the snow, his face starting to feel numb. In the image on the laptop, both mother and baby had smiled into the camera, but there had been a particular expression on Maddy’s face, like she was holding tightly to the moment with her baby in her arms. Lily’s death must have devastated Maddy. The knowledge helped push back on the anger enough to realize that Maddy had suffered, and that whatever had happened to their little girl had been Maddy’s tragedy, too.
He slogged to the end of the long driveway, and while he would have liked to have kept going, hike into town and avoid Maddy altogether until he had himself back in control, he couldn’t risk hypothermia again. More importantly, somewhere in the freezing wilderness, a group of young women and girls were abandoned, locked in a delivery truck. Who knew if they had enough food and water, or if there were any blankets. Getting word to Rittenhauer about the truck had to be Logan’s top priority.
The roar of an approaching vehicle had him moving into the trees for cover, not that his tracks weren’t easily visible if someone looked. When he saw the guy with the big-ass truck and the plow attached to the front clearing snow off the road, Logan stepped out and waved to get his attention. The guy stopped and after a short discussion, Logan hopped into the truck. The man introduced himself as Theo, and he kept up a monologue about the weather as he turned up Maddy’s driveway, pushing the snow neatly to the side. At the house, Logan opened the truck door. “My wallet’s in the cabin. I’ll be right back.”
Theo waved the comment aside. “No worries. Got me an understanding with Maddy. I like plowing snow, and she likes making coffee. Maddy makes sure I have coffee whenever I’m in town.”
Logan wasn’t surprised at the arrangement; the reach of Maddy’s connections in the community were extensive. He stepped out and waved as Theo drove back down the driveway before Logan turned to the cabin.
When he let himself inside, he found Maddy sitting on the couch, feet tucked beneath her, steam rising from a mug on the end table next to her. He crossed to the desk and brought up the screen again. After a long look at the smiling baby, he clicked the mouse to access the Internet. It took several minutes of back-and-forth messaging, but he was finally able to communicate with Rittenhauer. Minutes later he signed off, then with a last look at Lily, closed the lid of the computer.
When he rose from his seat, he found Maddy’s eyes on him. “FBI is on its way. Your friend Theo cleared the roads, so they should be able to pick me up in thirty minutes.”
“Logan, we need to talk.”
“Not now.”
“You should know what happened.”
That brought his control near to the snapping point. “I should know what happened? Damn straight I should know what happened. I should have known ten years ago. We’ll get to it, but I can’t talk to you right now.” The anger was too close to the surface. He needed to iron that out before he felt calm enough to talk to her.
He took the stairs to the loft two at a time. In the shower, he braced his hands on the tile wall and let hot water beat down on his head and shoulders. He’d been a father. For his entire life he’d wanted a real family. He couldn’t really remember his mother. What stuck in his mind were more sensations of being held close, of having his back rubbed as he drifted off to sleep. Of being loved. But then she’d died in a car accident, and her death had destroyed his father.
Bob Ross had numbed his sorrow with a bottle and kept at it until it killed him. Other than some distant cousins Logan had never met, he had no living relatives. But for a few short months he’d had a daughter. Knowing her, loving her, had been denied him. He wasn’t sure he could ever forgive Maddy.
Twisting off the taps, he toweled off and dressed in the same clothes he’d been wearing. When he went downstairs, Maddy sat curled on the couch, staring into the fireplace. She didn’t say a word, the silence between them deafening. He strapped on the shoulder holster, checking both guns before sticking his in the holster and the other in his waistband before pocketing Lazlo’s knife.
Logan stood on the porch to wait until a big black Suburban pulled in front of the cabin. He got in the vehicle, and after a nod to his boss, watched in the side mirror until Maddy’s cabin disappeared from view.
Chapter Eleven
With the sun’s rays long in the late afternoon sky, Maddy stepped out the back door with Sophie on her leash. The storm had cleared out and, according to her outside thermometer, the temperature was a frigid twenty-six degrees. She’d dug out the snow in the area behind her cabin with hopes of reestablishing the poop spot for Sophie. While the dog did her business, Maddy checked the messages on her phone because, for the moment, the cell phone gods were smiling and allowing service in her little corner of the mountain. Nothing from Logan, of course. He didn’t even have her cell number. The unfinished business between them loomed like an oppressive blanket of fog.
She tromped through the path she’d shoveled to the woodshed, glancing up at the sound of an engine and tires crunching on snow. A black truck with a dented front end and a shell over the bed turned onto her driveway. She didn’t recognize the vehicle. Maybe some mountain visitor had taken a wrong turn. But the truck didn’t turn around, instead pulling up to the area Theo had cleared in front of her carport.
Maddy tightened her grip on the leash when the passenger door opened and a man exited the vehicle. The driver, wearing dark sunglasses even though the last of the sun’s rays were filtered by the surrounding forest, stayed in the truck with the engine idling. But it was the man who approached her who commanded her attention. It was the same man who had come in the café, the one Logan had described as Horvath. His skin was so pale it looked like he hadn’t seen the sun in months, and without a beanie covering his head, his hair hung to his shoulders, dark and lanky. A deep purple bruise on his temple showed in stark contrast to the pasty white skin. A frisson of warning skated up her spine when he turned black eyes on her, his smile almost gleeful.
“We meet again. How,” he paused, gaze running up her body, “stimulating.”
“What do you want?” Even with the many layers she wore against the cold, the look in his eyes gave her the feeling of clammy fingers groping unwanted along her skin. She kept her tone neutral even as Sophie growled low in her throat.
He stared at the dog, then at her. “Sadly, not you at the moment. I’m looking for someone. I have a house on the other side of this ridge.” He gestured to the snowy slope. “Isn’t that exciting? We’re neighbors.”
When she didn’t respond, he continued, “A guy who works for me went missing yesterday. I wondered if he headed this way.”
“I haven’t seen any strangers in the area.” At least that was truthful. She had no doubt this bastard was talking about Logan. The evidence of the confrontation between them was there in the injuries to his face.
“Not a whole lot of places he could have gone if he was going to survive. This place is the most likely.” The unusual cadence marked his speech, his accent weighing down every word.
Sophie pressed into Maddy’s leg, and she could feel the vibration when the dog growled.
“Sorry I can’t help you. Have you called nine-one-one? Our fire department has a search-and-rescue team.”
“Yeah, I’ll do that.” He paused, gaze tracking again to Sophie. “Your dog’s been injured.”
“Yes.”
&nb
sp; “You had it long?”
“Why do you ask?”
“A friend lost a dog a couple days ago. This one kind of looks like it.”
“This is my dog.”
The look he gave her with those black eyes had the hair prickling on the back of her neck.
But then he nodded. “My mistake, then.” He turned, gaze scanning the area around her cabin. “There are a lot of footprints here for one woman and a dog. Some of them are pretty big. Anyone else living here with you?”
“That’s none of your business.”
Those black eyes locked on hers again, and when his fist clenched, body tense, she thought he would take a swing. Sophie erupted in loud, furious barks, and had the man Maddy was sure was Lazlo Horvath jumping back, boots slipping in the icy slush.
He retreated to the truck. At the door, he faced her. “You be careful with that dog. He barks like that and someone’s liable to shoot him.” He climbed into the vehicle. The taillights glowed bright red as the two men drove back down her driveway.
Maddy suppressed a shiver that had nothing to do with the temperature dropping as the sun set. “Let’s go inside, baby.”
After setting the logs she’d brought in next to the fireplace, Maddy picked up her phone, swiping to her favorites list on her phone. Brad picked up on the first ring. “Madison.”
Just hearing her brother’s calm voice had the tension inside her easing. “Brad, where are you?”
“San Francisco. We’ve got a hotel here for tonight. We’ll try to get into Reno early tomorrow.”
“That’s good. How’s Emma?”
“Doing good, relaxed. What’s going on?”
“Have you heard from Logan?”
“I got off the phone with him about half an hour ago. He told me what happened. Said you know he’s FBI.”
Already Gone Page 11
