Dangerous Refuge

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Hungry in too many ways to count, he concentrated on the only appetite he could appease at the moment. Barbecued ribs and various vegetable sides vanished with impressive speed. Though he had twice the food Shaye did, he finished at the same time.

  “Like a starving wolf,” she muttered as he put the last clean rib bone on his plate.

  “Like a man who is used to being called out during dinner. And breakfast. And lunch.”

  “Ah.” She tilted her head to the side and looked at him. “You missed a spot.”

  “Of food?” He glanced at his plate. “Where?”

  “There’s still a little patch on your chin that isn’t covered in sauce. Makes me want to dab some on and finish the job.”

  He looked up and gave her a slow smile. “Dab away.”

  She gave him a sideways look, then deliberately touched him with a saucy fingertip. With a speed that was almost startling, he took her hand and began thoroughly cleaning each fingertip. She shivered as he kissed her little finger and slowly released her hand.

  “All done,” he said, watching her with vivid blue eyes.

  “I’ve got another hand.” She heard herself and laughed, shaking her head. “You’re bad for my impulse control.”

  “Good,” he said huskily. “You’re hell on mine. Fair warning, if I clean your other fingers, I won’t stop there.”

  There was an electric silence, then she sighed and tore open a package containing a damp wipe.

  “You sure?” Tanner asked.

  “I’ll lick fingers in public, but that’s as far as I’ll go. Here.” She handed him the damp napkin. “Wipe your face. I don’t trust myself to do it for you. And that’s a first.”

  “Not wiping faces?”

  “Not trusting myself.”

  He smiled slowly. “God, you’re beautiful.”

  She gave him a look of disbelief and wiped off her own face with a second damp napkin before she went to work on the hand he hadn’t licked. “Since sex isn’t on the table—”

  “—here,” Tanner said. “I’ve got a table at the ranch that—”

  “—let’s go find out where Rua got his gold coins,” she said firmly.

  “I’m taking you home before I talk to the mook with the California driver’s license.”

  “I said I was impatient, not bored.”

  “Up until now, this has been civilized ride-along stuff, talking to mostly civilized folks who aren’t likely to try to crack my skull. All we know about Rua is that he might have killed Lorne and damn sure had five of his coins to sell. I’m going alone.”

  Her chin came up. “Would anyone give you a warrant—for anything, much less murder—on the basis of what we know right now about the ‘mook’ and the coins?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Really? It sure looks like the only point that matters. You can’t see circumstantial from where we are and you know it. And FYI, sweetie. Overbearing men are high on my never-again list.”

  “It’s not overbearing to want to keep you safe,” Tanner said reasonably. The fact that his fists were curled under the table was his secret.

  “Okay,” she agreed.

  His hands relaxed. “Good. I’ll take you home and—”

  “I want to keep you safe, too,” she cut in, looking reasonable. “So neither of us goes.”

  “I’m a cop.”

  “Which means I’ll be safe, right?”

  He bit off the response he wanted to make. He had known one thing about Shaye from the beginning—treat her with respect or take a hike.

  “Let’s compromise,” he said. “You wait in the car with the doors locked while I chat up Rua.”

  “If the guy knows anything about what happened to Lorne,” she said, “I want to be there to hear it. Damn it, I found Lorne. Let me do something to make me feel less like I hurt him and never had a chance to make it right.”

  Tanner pushed away from the table and shook their tray of dinner debris into a nearby trash can. The bones rattled on the way down. He was still hearing the unhappy clatter when he got back to the table.

  It’s my own damn fault, he thought. I wanted to know her better—a lot better—and figured I was pretty much on a wild-goose chase and that would be as good as any excuse to keep her with me.

  Now the chase doesn’t look so wild, and the quarry sure as hell isn’t goose.

  It’s time to start thinking like a cop and less like a hound dog.

  “Fine,” Tanner said to Shaye. “The compromise is that I don’t dump you at your condo. In return, you stay in the car and play JAFO.”

  “Is that like charades?”

  “Just Another Observer,” he said. “Eyes open, mouth shut, out of the way.”

  She filled in the missing word and knew he wasn’t going to change his mind. “Okay.”

  For a moment he looked surprised. “I’m not kidding.”

  “Neither am I.”

  Eighteen

  Tanner’s phone vibrated as he was paying—over Shaye’s protests—for dinner.

  “Licking fingers makes it a date,” he said, answering the phone. “Not you, D. I’d sooner lick asphalt. What do you have?”

  “In your e-mail.”

  “That was fast. Thanks—” Tanner snapped his phone closed after realizing he was talking to himself.

  When he and Shaye were in the car, he picked up his phone and punched buttons until he got his e-mail. As he read, he summarized for Shaye.

  “Rua’s last known address is Meyers. Lives alone. Minor rap sheet. Several drunk-and-disorderly, twice for assault and battery—bar fights—dismissed for lack of testimony. No drugs. No B and E. No stolen goods. No listed place of work, but since he’s never been on probation, there’s no reason we’d have it.”

  “That’s a ‘minor’ rap sheet?” Shaye asked.

  “To me? Small beer. To the average citizen? Not someone you want your daughter or friend hooking up with. Certainly not anyone I want you getting within a country mile of.”

  “Then park more than a country mile away from Rua’s house.”

  He didn’t know whether to laugh or swear, so he turned on the engine, waited for it to die or fly, and was relieved when it chose life. Ever since engines had gone electronic, he’d left their care and feeding to professionals.

  “What’s Meyers like?” Tanner asked.

  “Quiet. A lot of forest. Small. Mostly a relatively affordable town for the folks who work in Tahoe. Meyers gets some of the tourist money coming and going to the city, but not much. Its primary claims to fame are the largely ignored California State ag enforcement station and the marine inspection station, where people hauling boats to Tahoe get vetted for invasive plants or animals stuck to hulls.”

  “Gotcha. D and D and small-time drugs, occasional spousal battery.”

  “D and—oh,” she said. “Crimes. Is that how you see a place?”

  “I’m a cop. I look under rocks.”

  “Right. Ever look at the flowers, too?”

  “I must. I’m riding with one.”

  Shaye smiled and tried not to think about Tanner’s tongue neatly licking her fingers clean. It was impossible. The longer she was with him, the more she saw that her first impression of him had been misleading. He was tough, yes, but he wasn’t a bully and a whiner like her ex. And she wasn’t the insecure, anxious-to-be-loved young woman that she had been.

  Time to cut myself some slack. I’ve paid for Marc again and again. Thank God the Dodgers are paying his rent now.

  Forget him. He was a loser.

  And who says you have to marry Tanner because you’d like to peel off his clothes and find out just how hard he is? This is the twenty-first century. Marriage isn’t required for good sex. It sure didn’t help with Marc.

  Tanner and Shaye turned off Highway 50 for the half mile between it and Antonio Rua’s last known address. Wind tousled the pines in the moonlight, making them look like a shaggy herd of animals flowing by on either side. Sh
e felt like she was speeding through giant wild things out of a children’s book. It was primitive. Eerie.

  “You really shouldn’t be here.” Tanner’s first words in many miles broke the silence.

  “Already decided.” Her voice was clipped, angry without knowing why.

  “Not what I meant. You’re smart, fine-looking, city bred, able to live and work anywhere. Why are you stuck way out in ranch land and wilderness? Why a place like Refuge, where most of the men think women’s rights means being a slut?”

  “You mean, why live like a country bumpkin?” Shaye asked acidly, thinking of the running argument she had with her family. “Lemme just spit out my chaw, scratch my crotch, and tell you to—”

  “Go to hell,” he cut in. “Whew. Stepped on a land mine there, and I don’t mean a cow pie. Sorry, didn’t know you were so sensitive about—”

  “I’m not sensitive,” she said across him. “I’m just damn tired of everyone second-guessing my choices.”

  “By everyone I assume you mean family?”

  She shot him a look. “Been checking into my background?”

  “Nope, just a good guess. Nobody pushes old buttons like family.”

  She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Sorry. You’re right. Old buttons lovingly polished by my parents and sister. Like you and Lorne, I suppose.”

  “Don’t know about the loving part, but the polishing? Oh yeah. As for the rest, I still get surprised that a woman like you chooses to work with ranchers who are as hard as the land.”

  “Is that why you never came back?” she asked. “Too hard a life?”

  “I wanted to make a difference in the world, make it better, so I became a cop.” He laughed without much humor. “Yeah, I was real damn young. I got older telling the grieving widows that their husband of too many years got whacked because he was in the wrong bed screwing the wrong woman, and said woman earned her keep on her back and her knees, and the widow should make an appointment with her doctor for the kind of tests you don’t talk about with your friends.”

  Shaye looked at Tanner. In the reflected lights of the dash, his face was stark and his eyes like cut crystal. He should have frightened her.

  He fascinated her.

  “Then I got a lot older telling frantic parents that their son or daughter died because some sick son of a bitch got off on little kids,” he continued. “And by the way, the sicko just happened to be the kid’s uncle or the husband’s best friend or the nice neighbor down the street.”

  Silently she put her hand on Tanner’s thigh. It seemed like such a small comfort to offer a man who had known too much of the underside of life. A man who was more interested in helping out than being famous.

  His hand settled over hers, squeezed, then returned to the wheel.

  “So my youthful shine got scuffed off on concrete, and I finally got the memo that people weren’t going to change no matter how many killers I put in jail or how many hours I worked.”

  She waited, but he didn’t say any more.

  “Why didn’t you quit?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I’m good at what I do. Now I’m back in Refuge with a flower in my front seat, hoping like hell I don’t bruise her petals along the way to finding out why my uncle died in the wrong clothes with tobacco spread over his shirt.”

  “I don’t have petals.”

  “You do to me,” Tanner said. “And I have all the finesse of asphalt. Don’t let me hurt you.”

  “I won’t,” she said, and hoped it was true.

  She could all too easily be haunted by Tanner when he left. Especially if he was her lover.

  He lifted a hand, brushed the back of his fingers over her cheek. “Petals,” he murmured, then returned his attention to the road.

  Her heart turned over. She wanted to crawl inside his skin. And stay there.

  Just as a few, widely scattered lights appeared, the nav computer pinged. He glanced at it, turned off onto a narrow road that needed new gravel, bumped into the weeds near a clump of mailboxes, and killed the lights.

  The darkness was another kind of intimacy drawing Shaye to Tanner. She wanted to brush her fingers down his cheek. He wouldn’t feel like petals. He was warm, slightly rough, with surprisingly soft lips.

  In too fast, too hot, too deep, she told herself, and wanted to believe it.

  She breathed out in a rush and forced herself to look anywhere but at him. Houses out here were lonely, built away from the main roads by people who preferred their privacy and the company of the trees. The moon hung silver over the forest, neither full nor crescent, giving a flat metallic light to the gravel road. Beyond the pale line of the lane ahead, the trees ate moonlight, leaving only shadows.

  “See that light just off to the right?” Tanner asked.

  She blinked and stared through the windshield. Several hundred feet away, at the end of a dirt driveway off to the right, she glimpsed the pale yellow of porch light winking through the wind-stirred trees.

  “A cottage?” she asked.

  “The last one on the road. Nothing after it except forest and ridgelines. No other lights on anywhere, even though there are five mailboxes at the turnoff.”

  “A lot of the places here are owned by people who rent them out to skiers or summer tourists,” Shaye said. “Summer’s over and skiing is a few good snowstorms in the future.”

  “Stay here out of the wind. I’ll check the mailbox.” He opened the car door.

  “Your overhead light is out,” she said, noticing it for the first time.

  “I don’t need it to drive.”

  The door closed softly behind him.

  She watched him walk back toward the highway, a shadow moving among shadows. She glanced back at the gravel road leading to the cottage. The light had vanished. Either it was on a motion sensor that had been set off by wind-tossed branches, or someone had shut the light off.

  Her skin rippled and tried to raise a nonexistent ruff. For all her ease in the wilds, this place was different. It was civilization, yet it . . . wasn’t. The pale gravel lane went past deserted homes to a dead end at the isolated house of a man with a “minor” rap sheet, a man who had sold coins that someone stole from a man who was recently dead or soon to be so.

  It wasn’t a comforting thought.

  How can Tanner do this all the time? Is this what my parents feel when they think of me on lonely ranches or out looking for hikers who were supposed to check in yesterday? Is that why they’re always on me to move back to the city?

  What was normal to her wasn’t normal to her parents.

  What was normal to Tanner wasn’t normal to her.

  You insisted on coming along. Don’t wuss out just because it’s a dark, windy night. You’ve camped alone in bear country. Suck it up.

  A small light flashed briefly as Tanner read the mailboxes. Darkness returned while he walked back to the car.

  He got back in with a minimum of noise. “Rua’s box is crammed with junk mail, local newspaper throwaways, and what looks like bills. Either he’s been gone several days or he doesn’t check his mail real often.”

  “We’ll find out.”

  He tapped his right index finger on the steering wheel. “I will. You’re going to slide over and get ready to drive if somebody who isn’t me approaches the car.” He glanced at her, his eyes like slices of midnight. “Don’t give me any grief. This is borderline stupid as it is. I’m going in at night with no real backup—and don’t say you’re backup because you aren’t armed.”

  “I can shoot a pistol, a rifle, and a shotgun.”

  “Not if you aren’t carrying one.”

  “And you are?” she shot back.

  “I’m a—”

  “—cop,” she finished. “So where’s your gun?”

  “Closer than yours.”

  She wanted to be angry, she wanted to laugh, and most of all she wanted to hold Tanner’s arms and tell him not to let go.

  I’m all over the emotiona
l map and it’s nowhere close to my period, she thought. Suck. It. Up.

  He makes me laugh instead of looming over and intimidating me. Or trying to. God, how did I marry my ex? I was more desperate than I knew.

  She watched Tanner reach under the front seat, then straighten and clip something to the back of his belt. A big handgun.

  “If Rua is home, what will you do?” she asked.

  “Tell him I want to buy some 1932 Saint-Gaudens.”

  “Right,” she said through her teeth. “I’ll wait here like a good little girl.”

  “Thank you.” He ran his fingers over her cheek in a brief caress. “Don’t worry, honey. If it’s me or the other guy, I have no problems with it being him.”

  “But if there’s no trouble, you’ll come and get me, right? I don’t like being a helpless little flower.”

  “I’ll come get you and teach you the finer points of B and E.”

  She smiled crookedly, touched a lean, warm cheek whose stubble had passed five o’clock hours ago, and smiled. “I’ll look forward to it.”

  “If you see a car turning onto the road, duck out of sight.”

  “Yes.”

  “Sure hope I hear that word again soon, under better circumstances.”

  Before she could answer, he was gone, devoured by shadows and at home among them.

  Tanner stayed in the deepest pools of night he could find and looked for any sign that Rua was home. The weak porch light he’d seen as they turned onto the road was nowhere in sight. There was no garage or visible vehicle.

  A hard gust of wind bent the trees. The dim light at the front of the porch came on.

  Motion sensor, he thought.

  Not unusual for a rural house, but not real helpful on a windy night. At least the wind would cover the inevitable small sounds his boots made on the gravel.

  Of course, the same would be true of anyone sneaking up on him.

  The light was either set on a very short cycle or had a short, period. It went dark again. From inside the house came a bluish glow that had been too faint to be seen from the road. It flickered, too, but not from a faulty contact.

  TV is on.

  Not good.

  Tanner began circling the house, listening, hearing nothing but the wind and an occasional sound from the TV.