by Aimée Thurlo
“My foster father’s old cabin. I have a feeling that the code I need is inside one of the books Gene is storing up there.”
“Tell me more about the cabin,” she said. “What can I expect?”
“Daniel and Gene lived there with Hosteen Silver the first year they came to stay with him. It’s small, just two rooms, and when they arrived there was no running water. They had to carry containers uphill from a well that was near a spring on the property.”
“Even a few gallons of water are heavy. That would have been a tough workout.”
“Yeah it was, but Hosteen Silver saw it as a way of making the guys too tired to stir up trouble. They were both pretty wild back then, so he’d decided to challenge them and teach them to work together.”
“Did you have heat?” she asked. “A woodstove or anything?”
“There’s a woodstove for cooking and a well-designed fireplace. The temperature tonight will go down into the low forties, so I’ll make a fire as soon as we get there and warm us up. Since Daniel uses the cabin when he goes hunting, we’ve added a generator and electricity.”
“And running water?”
“Just cold, and trust me when I say cold.”
She smiled. “We can heat some up on the stove if necessary.”
Almost two hours later, Rick pulled up to a wood cabin in the middle of a small clearing a few miles inside the pine forest.
It took a few minutes to find the key, but they were soon inside the solid-looking log structure with its corrugated metal roof.
Kim looked around. It was small, yet despite the frigid temperature in the room, had the comfy feel of an oasis, a touch of civilization in the middle of the wilderness. It was furnished simply, just a couch and one easy chair, but the beautiful, cream-colored sheepskin rug by the fire caught her eye. It looked incredibly soft and fit the cabin’s rustic atmosphere.
“I’m going to build a fire,” Rick announced. “My brother stacks the wood next to the generator shed, so I’ll turn the electricity on while I’m out there.”
As he left, she kept her gloves and coat on to ward off the chill, and looked around. There were no photos on the walls, but on the desk near the corner there was a framed photo of Holly, Daniel’s wife, holding a baby.
After Rick came back in, she watched him start the fire, using wadded-up newspapers to get the kindling lit in a hurry. Rick moved with purpose and confidence, the quintessential man.
Once the fire was going, he glanced up at her. “You’re freezing, aren’t you?” he asked, standing to full height again.
She’d wrapped her arms around herself tightly; her gloves were still on. “Guilty,” she said with a tiny smile. “My heavy coat is still at my apartment.”
He came over and, opening his own jacket, pulled her against him.
The gesture had been completely unexpected and took her by surprise. Nestled against him and his warmth, she felt protected, secure. She loved feeling his heartbeat against her. He was strong and steadfast, and she melted against his rock-solid chest.
He tilted her chin up and kissed her tenderly. “You’re safe with me—always.”
His heat was intoxicating. “I just wish...”
“What? You can tell me anything, you know that, don’t you?
“You’ve told me before that I don’t see the real you, Rick, but how can I, when you won’t let me in? You want me to trust you, to lose myself in your arms. I want that, too, but you’ve put up a wall between us,” she whispered. “Let go. Trust me, just as I trust you.”
He didn’t ease his hold. He kept her pressed against him. “I learned to protect myself by keeping everyone at bay. It was the only way I knew to keep life from kicking me in the gut. As time went by I guess those instincts became part of who I am.”
“It’s a good enough way to live if you plan on spending your life alone, but most of us want more than that.”
“I wanted no part of love. At best it’s an illusion, a fantasy that quickly fades. At its worst, it’s a tool used to manipulate people you care about.”
“But you’re close to your brothers. You love them.”
“What binds us are loyalty, integrity and honor. Those attitudes—commitments—are more reliable than romantic love.”
“For those to remain strong, they have to be rooted in love,” she murmured, her face nestled against his neck.
“I have feelings for you, Kim, the kind you can always count on. I’ll be there for you no matter what,” he said, easing his hold and brushing his palm against the side of her face.
“But you’re still fighting this. Why?”
“Because of what I see in your eyes when you look at me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You see who you want me to be, not who I really am.”
“What I see is the man who protected me, who shielded me with his own body. You saved my life.”
“And took others,” he said. “I’m not a choir boy.”
“What you are is a man who’ll risk everything to do what’s right, one who isn’t afraid of anything—except letting people get close,” she said. “But for us to have more than just a snapshot in time, you have to open your heart.”
He released her and stepped back. “Kim, there are things about me you don’t want to hear. Once they’re said, we’ll never be able to go back to the way things are now.”
“You care for me, but you’ll never trust my feelings for you until you stop keeping me at arm’s length.”
Rick nodded slowly. “All right.” He brushed a kiss on her forehead and moved farther away. Restless, he began to pace, his hands jammed deep into the pockets of his leather jacket. “I thought I was perfect for undercover work—cold, focused and able to think on the fly, but there was more to the job. White hats versus black hats are a myth. There are many shades of gray. The longer you’re in, the more you understand bad guys are seldom totally evil.”
He ran a hand through his close-cropped hair, struggling to find the right words. “When you begin to see parts of yourself in the people you’re there to bring down, you start to question what you’re doing. That’s when things begin to unravel.”
“So why didn’t you ask to be pulled out?”
“It had taken me more than a year to infiltrate that human trafficking cartel, and my work was finally providing valuable intel—names, places and events. I was real close to shutting down the entire operation,” he said, staring into the fire.
Minutes passed, but she didn’t interrupt. Some things couldn’t be forced.
“Then the head of the cartel ordered me to kill a man—his competitor, another trafficker. I would have been doing the world a favor, but I wasn’t there to do the cartel’s dirty work.”
He shook his head and rubbed the back of his neck. “I made the decision to let fate handle the outcome. I arranged a meet, knowing he’d try to kill me and that only one of us would walk away. Self-defense was something I could live with.”
Another silence ensued before he continued. “We met in a church parking lot, which turned out to be an ambush. I was set up. A wedding was going on inside, so he’d planned to use a knife instead of a gun. It was a brutal fight. The man was strong and fast—a former soldier. My training was better, though. Soon I had him pinned against the side of a car. I was about to finish him off when he looked directly at me—helpless.”
Rick turned away from her to lean against the brick fireplace and stare out the window.
She came over to him and placed her arm around his waist.
He turned and held on to her. “It wasn’t until I saw myself reflected in that man’s eyes that I realized what I’d become. I’d wanted to kill him and had been looking for justification. I pulled back, intending to let him go, but he grabbed his fallen knife and to
ok the swipe that gave me this scar. Then he moved in for the kill. In the end, I survived, he didn’t.”
“You did what you had to do,” she said. “You gave him a chance. Your humanity came through.”
“And it nearly cost me my life. As I walked to my car, half-blinded by the blood, his bodyguard stepped out of hiding and shot me three times. A few seconds later, a local cop took him down.
“Later, in the hospital between surgeries, I had plenty of time to think about what I wanted to do next. I decided to come home and reconnect with myself. Figuring once I was back on my turf, I’d be able to find a new purpose for myself, a reason to get up in the morning.”
“And the mystery behind your father’s disappearance has given you that?”
“No, you did,” he said. Tilting her chin up, he kissed her slowly and tenderly.
When Rick released her, a small tremor ran up her spine. “You’ve gone through hell, Rick, but you’re a man of honor and compassion. You’re everything I thought you were—and more.”
He kissed her hard then, forcing her lips to part for him as he drank her in.
* * *
FIRE COURSED THROUGH HER. She’d met men over the years who’d attracted her, but she’d never felt this overwhelming need to give her love without demands or conditions. Maybe real love didn’t need a reason, just the freedom to exist.
Though Rick hadn’t said he loved her, it didn’t seem to matter now. She pushed his jacket back and opened his shirt, wanting to feel his muscled chest. As she looked up at him, she saw the dark fire in his eyes. He was holding back, keeping a tight rein on himself. His jaw was clenched, and as she left a moist trail down his chest, he sucked in his breath.
There were two scars on his chest, both up high, by his collarbone. Below, over his heart, was a Navajo word: Chaha’oh. She ran her fingertips over it. “What’s it mean?”
“Shadow. That’s what many claimed I was like when I hunted man or beast.”
She kissed his scars one by one and felt him shudder. When she moved to unbuckle his belt, he placed his hand over hers. “It’s not too late to change your mind, but it will be in another second or two.”
“Rick, I’m not afraid of you. Open your heart to me. Let me show you that love doesn’t have to hurt.”
She undid his belt and caressed him.
“Slow down,” he whispered, pulling her hands up and placing them on his chest. He slipped off her jacket, then tugged at her sweater and pants until she stood naked by the fire. Lifting her into his arms, he lowered her onto the sheepskin rug.
In the flickering firelight, a world of light and shadows, they came together. Heat became a living force. The roughness of his touch drove her wild. This was love—and their destiny.
She knew Rick struggled to maintain control for as long as he could. Yet the fire coursing through him seemed to increase with each second. With a groan, he surrendered and completed what was meant to be.
Even after their breathing evened, Kim held on to him, refusing to let him move away. “For now, you’re mine and I’m yours. Don’t go.”
“I’m here.”
Chapter Seventeen
Time passed and the air in the room began to grow cold.
“The fire’s almost out,” Rick said, moving away from Kim’s arms and getting dressed. “Too bad it’s not summer. I would have loved seeing you walk around naked.”
“You’re not so bad yourself,” she said, her gaze taking him in slowly.
He laughed. “Scarred and worn, but not too bad?”
“I’ve got no complaints,” she said, reaching for her clothes.
He gave her a hand up. “We’ll warm up sooner if we get to work. Let’s find the books and take them out to the SUV. I’m not leaving them here. This place doesn’t have the electronic protection the ranch does,” he said. “More importantly, we don’t know who else knows of this place besides family.”
“Did your brother tell you where he put the books?”
“No, just that they’re in a metal trunk. I don’t see them here, and they weren’t in with the generator, so I’m sure they’re in the bedroom,” he said, gesturing with his head toward the door.
“I can’t remember ever being this cold,” she said, wrapping the sides of her jacket tightly around herself.
“I do, but it was a long time ago,” he admitted. “Once I get the fire going again, it’ll heat up fast. Don’t worry, I can build a fire in the stove, as well. Daniel’s a wuss about cold, so he sold the old potbellied stove and added this beauty.” He pointed toward the steel stove with its two big doors, the right one with a glass window. “No gas, no electricity, just firewood in the left side.”
“Daniel doesn’t seem like a wuss to me,” she said, laughing.
“Well, he is. Just don’t tell him I said so. He’s the one who paid for the upgrades.”
A short while later they’d pulled two large boxes from a big trunk in the bedroom. They were clearly labeled Books and marked with the date they’d been packed. “That’s Gene. He’s organized about everything,” Rick said.
They carried the boxes into the main room and placed them on the heavy pine table. “I want to sort through these before we load them into the SUV. I’m not taking back any passengers, like mice, to my brother’s house.”
“Yeah, I saw the chewed corner,” Kim said. “He must have kept the boxes outside the trunk at one time.”
Rick opened the flaps of the first box and reached for a fat, clearly water-damaged paperback that had long lost its cover. “I remember this one. It’s signed by one of the Navajo Code Talkers, a man Hosteen Silver greatly admired. Kyle was reading it one summer and accidentally dropped it into the horse tank. I helped Hosteen Silver dry it out, but it looked ruined to me. Since he’d read it a million times, I assumed he’d chucked it,” he said, leafing through the loose, brittle pages until he found something of interest. “There’s a torn page from another book stuck in here at the halfway point. It’s from a book about Richard Sorge, from what I can tell.”
“Who’s Richard Sorge?” Kim said.
“Don’t know. Once we have internet access, we can do a search. If the code I found in the notebook is based on a book about, or by, Sorge, maybe we’re on to something.”
She helped him return the books to the box before they opened the other one. “You want to go directly to Daniel’s place instead of to the ranch house? Paul and Daniel seem to know more about codes than Kyle.”
“Yeah, let’s go to Daniel’s. I have a feeling we’re close to answering some important questions.”
He doused the fire and they locked up the cabin, loading the boxes into the SUV.
Rick took it slow as they went down the narrow road, which was basically a bumpy trail cut into the hillside by vehicle use, not road equipment. After a quarter of a mile, needing to slow before crossing a dip in the road, he touched the brake.
“The brakes feel spongy,” he said in a taut voice, his hands clenching the wheel. “Not good.”
The SUV bounced hard as they crossed the shallow trench. Kim grabbed the armrest and adjusted her seat belt.
“We’ve lost our brakes,” Rick said. He pulled the handbrake and it grabbed, slowing them a little. “Hold on,” he said, turning the wheel slightly to the right and trying to skid to a stop as he reapplied the handbrake.
The SUV rocked to the left and the right rear tire rose off the ground. When he swerved left, the wheel touched down again. Even though they bounced heavily, the road was steep and they picked up speed once more.
He glanced over at her. Kim had pressed her back against the seat, her eyes wide with fear as she hung on to the armrest.
Ahead was the steepest part of the trail, a sharp curve and a fifty foot drop to the left. At the speed they were going, Ric
k knew he wouldn’t be able to hold the turn. They’d fly right over the edge.
For a second he thought a forced roll would be safer—they were buckled in and the air bags would help. Then he remembered the brush ahead. There was still a chance...
“Hang on, this is going to get rough,” he yelled, veering off the road to the right and ramming into a scrub oak thicket about three feet high. The soft impact knocked him into the steering wheel, enough to cost him a breath, but not enough to trigger the air bag.
Rick hung on to the wheel, whipping it back and forth, fishtailing as they rammed their way through the thicket, racing up slope. There was a loud, jarring thump somewhere underneath them and Kim bounced into the air, bumping her head on the roof.
Their speed dropped and the rear wheels grabbed on to something. As the SUV slid to a stop, dust enveloped them in a cloud.
Rick reached down and turned off the ignition. The engine rattled for a few seconds. The front end vibrated. Then suddenly it was dead quiet.
After a second Rick’s ears stopped ringing and he looked over at Kim.
She smiled weakly. “Are we there yet?”
“Take it as a win. This may be as far as we can go, but at least we’re in one piece.” He looked around carefully before glancing back at her. “Stay in the vehicle for now. I’m going to take a look underneath to see if I can figure out what happened.”
“No, I’m going with you. I can hold the flashlight while you check the brakes. I can also keep an eye out for anyone who might be lurking about. This may not have been an accident,” she said, climbing out her side.
Rick crawled beneath the SUV and studied the damage. “From the smell of brake fluid and the crimp in the line, which is now dangling loose, you’re right. This was done on purpose.” When he came back out and stood, his jaw was set. “I let my guard down, Kim, and brought this on. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t understand. How is this—” She stopped abruptly. “You mean because we made love?”
