by Julie Miller
She’d wanted an adventure. No time like the present.
Stretching up on tiptoe, she peeked through the moon-shaped opening. Lenny stood about two feet from the door, his head bent over his hands as he wrote something in a little black notebook. Jerome sat by the fire, his suspenders hanging around his hips. He held a mirror and was shaving around one of those perennial cigarettes between his lips. Cade was still inside. Asleep, she hoped.
Ellie closed her eyes and said a silent prayer. When she opened them, she grabbed the cross-piece on the wooden door, put all 130 of her pounds behind it and shoved.
She didn’t look back to see the results of the thump and the curse behind her.
“She’s running!”
Ellie was into the trees before she heard the menacing gallop of heavy feet behind her. There were shouts and curses. A crashing sound. A door slammed. More shouts.
She tuned out the words and used the sounds only to gauge the distance between her and her pursuers. From the position of the sun, she judged her direction to be roughly southwest. She tore through branches that grabbed at her clothes and bit into her forearms.
Lenny hadn’t allowed her a belt, saying it was a potential weapon, so her pants sagged and caught on her hips, bunching between her thighs and forcing her to shorten her stride. She had to pick her knees up high as she ran so she didn’t trip over the toes of her big shoes. The contorted stride pulled at unused muscles and made her lungs burn.
This was too hard. She wasn’t built for this. She couldn’t make it.
“Princess!” That was Jerome’s voice, wheezing a warning from a different direction.
She had to make it.
Fifty yards. She counted off the steps with every slap of her shoes on the carpet of moss and grass. Fifty yards into the woods and then she’d turn due south.
Ellie had taken up running with her school chum Jillian for a whole semester in an effort to lose weight and streamline her body. She’d hated running back then. It hurt her shins. It hurt her hips. And she hadn’t lost a single pound.
“Thirty-two.” She gasped the number, sternly reminding herself that she had no choice. She had to run.
She heard a blast of shattering wood some twenty paces behind her. A pungent stream of vile curses rang through the trees, every one of them directed at her.
Forty-one. The trunks of the trees seemed to grow smaller. They’d been as wide as a barrel by the house. These were the size of her waist. The numbers of trees thinned and still she ran.
Forty-six. The trees were the size of her thigh.
“No!” She could barely squeeze the word past her tight, aching throat.
She didn’t have fifty yards.
Ellie slowed her pace as a blue-gray mirror peeked its way through the trees. She scraped her hand on the deep-grooved bark of a maple and jerked herself to a stop above a five-foot drop, kicking a shower of pebbles and dirt over the edge.
A lake. She’d run forty-nine paces straight to the edge of a lake.
Her jaw dropped as she sucked in reviving air. Her chest bobbed up and down in time with the ripples she’d created across the surface of the water. She looked to the left. Looked to the right. Looked to the distant shore and trees the size of toys that told her it was too far to swim across.
She tried to hear above the pulse pounding in her ears. The shouts had stopped, but she could still hear the smash of branches and thunder of footsteps. Ellie dared a glance behind her. But she was already backing to the south, twisting the surplus waistband into a knot to free up her legs when she heard the sound.
A motor.
She scanned the silvery water closer to the shoreline and saw what she had missed before. A boat! A fisherman was pulling into a cove just beyond the next rise. Hidden by the trees, she would have missed the dock altogether if she hadn’t known to look for it.
“Help!” She left the shoreline and charged straight up the hill. When she crested the top, she waved both arms and called to the fisherman again. “Help me!”
Was the old man deaf?
“Hel—!”
She slipped on an exposed mossy rock and landed on her rump. The muddy earth jarred the rhythm of her breathing and she doubled over in a fit of coughing.
But with the forced stop, she realized she’d made a huge mistake.
She’d given away her position.
She could hear what sounded like only one of them now, booted feet slapping the ground, tracking her down like a dog on the hunt. Change the placid woods to a tropical jungle and she’d put herself smack in the middle of that scary dinosaur movie where the raptors closed in on her, unseen, from every direction.
“No.” The protest was a growly rumble in her parched throat. “Help me.” She kept breathlessly articulating the same two words, over and over, pushing herself to her feet and stumbling forward.
She was close to a clearing now, where a little fishing cabin sat back from the lake’s edge. The fisherman had climbed onto the dock and was tying down his boat as Ellie cleared the last tree. A cramp twisted her right calf into punishing knots, nearly crippling her. But she lurched forward, toward the old man, limping her way toward freedom.
“Sir?” She stopped on the path leading down to the dock and channeled her remaining strength to her lungs and her vocal cords. “Sir?”
The fisherman raised his head and turned around. As he stood, Ellie could see he wasn’t terribly old at all. Maybe late fifties, sixty tops. His stark white hair had fooled her. Ellie tumbled forward, barely catching herself. He could help her. He had to help her.
“Please.” She wiped the sweat and tears from beneath her glasses and pushed them up on the bridge of her nose. “I need your help.” It was so hard to breathe and talk at the same time. “I was kidnapped.” She reached out to him, willing him to walk up the path to meet her. “I need a phone. We have to call the police.”
She tripped again, but her legs had turned to mush and she collapsed onto the ground. The white-haired man swam in circles before her eyes.
“Please help me,” she begged, feeling the last of her will draining away. “Please.”
CADE RACED THROUGH the trees, heading straight for the sound of Ellie’s voice. He pumped his fists harder, compensating for the booby-trapped terrain of slick moss and exposed roots by shortening his stride and running at a faster pace. He’d left Jerome and Lenny far behind. He’d jump-started his body from his catnap on the couch the moment he’d heard Lenny’s shout and hadn’t slowed since glimpsing Ellie’s caramel-colored hair flying out behind her shoulders through the trees ahead of him.
He didn’t know what the girl was running on, but even he was panting from the exertion of their cross-country dash. When he heard her moving along the shoreline, he adjusted his course to cut her off.
Cade crested the low-rising slope and swore as the dappled shade gave way to clear sunshine. She’d reached another cabin. That willful, little—“Son of a bitch.”
He backpedaled to a stop, skimming his feet across the tops of the slippery rocks exposed by erosion on the lee side of the hill. He caught himself with his hand and straightened in time to see Ellie collapse in a heap on the gravel path below him.
Giving himself a moment to catch his breath, he wiped the sweat off his upper lip with the back of his hand. He walked slowly, purposefully down the hill, watching Ellie refuse to surrender to the weakness of her spent body. She jerked herself onto her hands and knees and crawled toward the water.
“Ellie.” He called to her, warning her to stop, begging her not to push her body beyond its limits. She didn’t hear him.
Knowing his compatriots in crime might be within hearing distance, he covered her identity before shouting. “Princess!”
Cade felt the other man’s eyes the instant the word left his mouth. His soldier’s instincts buzzed an internal alarm, clearing his head, priming his body to face the unidentified threat.
Hidden by the growth of infant saplings that follow
ed the shoreline, the man stood on an old wooden dock, not more than six feet from Ellie.
Cade hurried his pace, but didn’t run. No sense frightening the man until he had him figured out. He looked like an ordinary fisherman. Rust-splotched green boat with an outboard motor. Jeans damp to the ankles above muddy rubber boots. Plaid shirt. Green vest with fishing lures pinned in the nylon mesh.
But something about him didn’t feel ordinary. Like his not rushing forward to help a woman who had fallen. Like his not backing away from a six-one, lean, mean, armed-and-dangerous machine of a man stalking out of the woods toward him.
“Please.”
His guilty conscience almost tripped him up at the quavering rasp in Ellie’s voice as she reached out to the man. But instead of giving in to the pulling need to run to her side to see whether she was truly hurt or just winded by her long run, Cade fixed a smile on his face and slipped into a more laid-back role.
“Morning.” The man watched him with a curious gaze as Cade nodded a friendly greeting.
Cade walked right up to Ellie. He bent his knees far enough so he could slip his hands around her shoulders. She shrugged and tried to shift out of his grasp. But it was a token gesture, really. He could feel the gelatinlike tremble of muscles that had been pushed too hard and were refusing to cooperate.
He kneaded the weary muscles, giving the appearance of tender care to their one-man audience. He had to get her on her feet. He had to get her out of there and back to the house before Lenny and Jerome arrived on the scene and spooked the fisherman enough to call the authorities. Or worse, they might just bypass the intimidation stage and kill the innocent neighbor.
Ellie reached up and with boneless fingers tried to pry Cade’s hands from her arm. “Don’t.”
“It’s all right, honey. I’ve got you.” The endearment slipped out without conscious thought. But he heard it when he said it. Ellie’s big blue eyes rounded behind her glasses, indicating she’d heard it, too. For a moment Cade wondered whether his undercover training was so thorough that it had popped out naturally, or his subconscious mind was thinking things that were sure to get him into trouble somewhere down the road.
So the lady was hurting. So he was partly responsible for her suffering. So what? The job came first. He gave himself the stern mental reminder. Ellie Standish was a necessary means to an end, nothing more. If he wanted to reach out with a little compassion, then that was just part of doing his job. He was protecting his interests, not being taken in by the pain and pretty eyes of this determined Cinderella.
Cade squeezed harder and pulled Ellie to her feet. She swayed and seemed to favor her right leg, so he kept his hands on her shoulders. Just to steady her. Just to protect his interests.
Now, to get her out of here before the white-haired man tried something chivalrous.
“How’s the fishing?” Cade asked, hooking an arm around Ellie’s waist and moving a step closer to the other man while aligning himself with her.
“It’s all right, I s’pose.” Cade watched the gears shift in the man’s dark eyes. He was having second thoughts about minding his own business. “I’ she okay?”
For a moment Cade didn’t answer. Not because he didn’t have a lie on hand, but because of the man’s voice. The humming modulation, almost running his words together, sounded familiar. Not enough to trigger an alarm, but enough to make him cautious. Had he heard that voice on TV? The radio? Maybe the guy was some famous actor trying to get away from the spotlight. That could explain his reluctance to help Ellie.
Cade zipped through the catalogue of observations and acquaintances stored inside his head but came up empty. The man’s face, complete with perfectly-tanned skin and a scar, instead of crow’s feet, beside his left eye, didn’t seem familiar. Surely that shock of snowy-white hair would be impossible to forget.
He wasn’t done with this yet, not until he knew where that sense of recognition came from. But Cade had to nip the man’s concern in the bud before he acted on it. He had a starlet of his own he wanted to hide from the public eye.
Cade spread his fingers over the swell of Ellie’s hip and tucked her to his side. It was a subtle move to angle her out of the man’s direct line of sight and position himself between them. Her exhaustion was evident in the fact she didn’t struggle to get away from his possessive touch.
“I’m working as a bodyguard for the lady,” Cade offered in explanation. “We had a bit of a scare back there. Thanks—for helping out, Mr….”
It was a lame gambit to try to connect a name to the voice, but it worked. “Costa. Tony Costa.”
Cade scanned his memory. No bells of recognition. Nothing. He’d come back to it later.
“Thanks, Mr. Costa. Good luck.”
“He’s not…” Ellie began to protest. Cade felt her palm flatten against his chest. But she barely pressed hard enough to stand herself up, much less push him away. She seemed to realize her weakness at the same time. Her chest expanded in a hard, shuddering breath. “Mr. Costa, why won’t you help me?”
“I’ve got everything under control now, hon.” Cade turned into her, brushing his fingertips across her cheek and feathering them into her hair. It would have been the most natural thing to pull her cheek against him and hold her, to let her absorb the warmth and strength of his body until she reclaimed enough of her own fire to give him hell again.
But despite the way his body seemed to wake up to the feel of her curves against his chest and hip, Cade knew they had to leave. This was all about the job, he reminded himself, ignoring the bothersome nick on his conscience. The job, and not the woman, was the most important thing. “We’d better leave Mr. Costa alone now.”
Cade nodded to the fisherman, who responded with a simple, “Ma’am. Stay safe.”
Ellie’s hand fisted in the front of Cade’s shirt. But she made no other protest when he circled around her to steer her off the path and up into the woods. They walked two steps before her right leg collapsed beneath her like a limp noodle. Stumbling off balance with her, Cade righted himself and scooped her up into his arms.
It wasn’t exactly the way he’d envisioned hauling the prisoner back to camp, but at least he had her secured. He’d get her out of sight, hide his face beneath the mask once more, then lock her in the basement where she couldn’t cause him—or herself—any more trouble.
He started up the slope, felt his foot slide across an exposed rock and knew this return trip was going to be tricky. He climbed a few more careful steps before glancing over his shoulder to see Costa kneeling on the dock beside his boat, his meeting with the neighboring princess and her “bodyguard” apparently forgotten in favor of the local trout.
Ellie’s weight felt good in his arms. He felt inexplicably relieved knowing she was this close. But in order to keep an eye on Costa, support Ellie’s injured leg and catch Jerome and Lenny before they stumbled onto Costa’s clearing, he needed to get himself centered again—both physically and mentally.
“Can you put your arms around my neck?” he asked.
He focused on her downturned face, waiting until she lifted her gaze to meet his before saying anything more. When their eyes met, he could see a tiny bit of rebellion in the pursed pout on her lips. Good. Her body might have given out on her, but her spirit was still alive and kicking.
Enough sunshine filtered through the locked doors inside him that Cade thought he might remember what having a soul felt like. He almost laughed at the invisible daggers the little firebrand was spitting his way. Almost. He summoned a rusty smile, instead. “Please? You can lecture me on impropriety later, but I don’t intend to waste any more time getting you back to the house. And if I fall down, we’d both get hurt.”
She never answered him with words, but she lifted her arms. Her fingertips brushed against his chest. His skin shivered at the unexpected caress, but he held himself still. She touched his shoulders and the sides of his neck, as if checking to see where she might find the surest grip. By the tim
e she finally hooked her fingers together behind his neck, Cade was startled to realize that he’d stood there, unmoving, for nearly a minute. Even more startling was the cautious admission that he was willing to stand there even longer, waiting until she was ready to move on.
Ellie wasn’t like any of the women he’d spent time with. She didn’t know all the right moves to make around a man. There was no practiced seduction about her, no playing a man to get what she wanted. She was out of her comfort zone with his practical request. He had expected that her hesitation to throw her arms around his neck would make him uncomfortable or impatient. Instead, he found himself calmly anticipating what she might do next. Silently hoping there’d be a reward of some sort, like a smile or another touch, or maybe even a kiss.
This was Ellie Standish, after all. Gentle-natured and pure of heart, a tempting antidote to his dark, godforsaken world. But not weak. Never weak. He’d served with soldiers who had less strength and courage than this woman. Given time to figure out her options, she’d do what needed to be done. She’d find a way to accomplish her goal.
Trouble was, if these tentative, unintended caresses distracted him so, what would a purposeful touch do to his concentration?
“Tighter,” he coached her. He’d always been a big one for getting into trouble. “I won’t break.”
Cade hiked her up in his arms and she held on more tightly. Her body relaxed until several of those curvy inches of hers dissolved into his chest, letting her weight become part of his balance. Settled at last, Cade bent his mouth to the silky curls above her forehead, teasing them and his own resolve with his lips. “Here we go. Trust me?”
“Never.” She whispered the defiant word in a taut little exhalation of breath against his neck.
Cade threw his head back and laughed. This was his reward. Her spirit had been bowed, but not broken. A glimmer of that unshaken hope wound its way inside him, casting a little light into a heart that had long ago given up on finding goodness in people. He cinched his arms securely around her and carried his prize back to the house.
