She quirked an eyebrow in doubt, giving her expression a sassy sort of class that reminded him of a favorite sixth-grade teacher. “Uh-huh.”
One thing that marked all the Kincaid men was that their word was good. Dissing the family honor was not allowed. Even if the criticism was couched in the halfway teasing banter she challenged him with. Rafe splayed his fingers at his hips, and reminded her of all he’d done for her today. “I promised I’d be here tonight. I’m here.”
“So you are.” Maybe she was being smart, sensing the spark between them and purposely trying to distance herself so they could concentrate on more important matters. “All right. I trust you. Just don’t make me regret it. Please.”
“I won’t,” Rafe vowed, granting her that space, and silently thanking her for keeping him on track as well. He turned his attention to the radio. “This has been destroyed on purpose.”
“That’s what I thought. The second I mentioned it, the accusations started flying. I think we all panicked when we realized we were completely out of touch with the outside world.”
She hadn’t panicked, Rafe noted. She’d been trying to keep the peace and had gotten banged up for her effort. He admired Hannah Greene’s toughness. He hated that she’d had to be.
“Can you fix it?” she asked.
He picked up the remnants of Frank’s radio and let the pieces trickle through his fingers onto the table. “No.”
He hated this whole mess. Sabotage. The kind where the perpetrator drops the equipment down a canyon wall, or goes after it with a sledge hammer.
A murdered guide. Missing food. A broken radio.
This wasn’t about Frank Brooks or his work with the Watchers, the uniquely trained, covert group of men and women that Rafe himself still answered to on occasion. This was about Randolph College. This was personal. He looked up and saw that Hannah suspected it, too. “Someone’s going to a lot of trouble to make sure you never get home.”
She shivered, though he’d guess the temperature still hovered somewhere in the forties. “I’ve been thinking about that. If someone out here wants one of us—or all of us—dead, and they’re willing to kill Frank to strand us so that it looks like some kind of accident, or so there are no witnesses…” She trained her gaze deliberately up to his. “Then that person isn’t going to be too thrilled that you showed up to replace him.”
Rafe ignored the urge to squeeze her shoulder or take her hand to offer his warmth and comfort. No touching was the key to concentration. “The same thought occurred to me.”
“There was a note in Frank’s pocket, that Macbeth quote I read you.”
“Do you still have it?”
She nodded and pulled the crumpled paper from her pocket. While Rafe unfolded it, she voiced her fear. “To me—to anyone who understands literature—that note’s a threat. A promise that more bad things are going to happen to us. Did you notice it was typed?”
He’d noted the same detail. The plain paper told him nothing, but the letters sent an unmistakable message. “That means Frank’s death was planned out ahead of time, when this note was prepared—or that someone up here is hiding a battery-powered keyboard and printer.”
She shivered again and rubbed her hands up and down her arms. “I’ve only read murder mysteries. I’ve never lived one.”
This time he did give in to the urge to touch her. Reaching out, he smoothed aside that silky curl that refused to stay in place. “I’ll get you home, Kansas. I promise.”
“I want us all to get home, Rafe.”
He might have resisted those soft gray eyes and tipped-up chin if she hadn’t couched her concern in the seductive balm of that voice. But it was too late. Something inside him shifted in a dangerously personal direction. Suddenly, he was leaning in to taste the lips that framed that voice. His fingers were swallowed up by a riot of silky curls. He was bending closer, inhaling the earthy scents of the mountain that clung to Hannah’s skin and hair.
He was going to kiss her. He hadn’t kissed a woman in months. But this one needed kissing. He needed…
A gentle hand, pressed firmly to the middle of his chest stopped him. “What are you doing?”
Making a mistake.
Rafe retreated a step and scraped his hand across the prickly crop of his own short hair. He should apologize. He should explain.
He did neither. He turned away from the question in her eyes and called himself every name in the book. They had a murder on their hands, for cripes sake. One of his best friends was gone and these people were in danger.
Not just Hannah. Everyone—and it was his responsibility to protect them. He needed to concentrate on their three-day descent. He needed to focus on keeping them safe from the killer on their trail, or uncovering the killer amongst them.
He couldn’t afford to be distracted by anything Hannah made him feel.
“I told you before, don’t worry about me.” Rafe retrieved the radio hooked onto his pack and tucked it into his pocket. It wouldn’t be the first time in his life he’d had an imaginary target painted on his back. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d screwed up a relationship with a woman, either. He was either gone too much, or wasn’t cultured or civilized enough, or he didn’t know how tell a woman how he… Hell!
Sparring on the radio and thirty minutes of face time scarcely constituted a relationship. Focus. “Is there anyone in this group with something to hide? Any secrets someone would go to these lengths to in order to cover them up?”
Though her eyes remained clouded behind her glasses, Hannah shrugged. “We all have secrets of one kind or another.”
Touché. “Are you speaking metaphorically? Or does Professor Hannah Greene from Kansas have something to hide?”
“It’s just Hannah, Mr. Kincaid,” she answered with a weary huff and a Miss Chapman-like tilt of her chin. “We’re a troubled bunch of brainiacs. That’s why we’re here. To find a way to get over ourselves and work together. But believe me, I’m not interesting enough to have anything to hide.”
Rafe wanted to argue that last point. Instead, he let the subject drop. “Before the others get back, I’d like to say goodbye to my friend.” He was too late to do it right, but he intended to make amends as best he could after the fact by completing Frank’s assigned task, finding out who murdered him and why he’d had to die. “Do you mind showing me the body?”
“Of course not.” Seeming willing, even eager, to move away from the scene of that almost kiss, she pointed to a tent separated from the others on a small outcropping. “This way.”
Rafe fell into step behind her, taking note of the others’ locations around the camp when he really just wanted to enjoy the view.
We all have secrets. So what kind of secret did Hannah Greene have to hide?
And whose secret was worth killing for?
Chapter 4
Damn. Damn. Damn.
Where had the Incredible Hulk come from?
One slight miscalculation in timing his return to Frank Brooks’s tent, and a whole new, big problem had arisen.
It was that Greene woman’s fault. He’d sorely underestimated her. To think a quiet mouse like that would pick this particular occasion to grow a backbone and get to the radio before anyone else could.
No, that wasn’t quite true. She’d had backbone enough when she’d stood up at that dissertation review and announced that although the culmination of several years of hard work were interesting, the results were flawed.
Rejected. Denied.
And to think, he’d wanted to do her a favor by asking her out. Linking himself to the Greene name would have been quite the coup. She’d have been grateful for his attentions.
But no more.
She’d be dealt with like all the others. The new guide from Extreme, Inc., was a problem he could handle, too.
He’d already spotted the little flickers of attraction between the mountain man and the bookworm. No accounting for taste. But it provided a weakness. A weakness he�
��d have no trouble using to his advantage.
Rafe Kincaid’s arrival might have thrown a wrench into a perfect plan, but the outcome was still inevitable.
Revenge was inevitable.
Time to take care of business.
Rafe Kincaid was more man than she’d ever seen live and in person. He was tall. Broadly built. Packed with muscle from his rugged jaw to his booted feet. A true outdoorsman, big enough to conquer the mountain and the threat of murder.
And he’d wanted to kiss her.
Hannah frowned against the morning sun that was already being masked by the gathering drift of rainclouds. She was still working on that one. Why? She wasn’t a hottie. Murder and sabotage weren’t exactly conducive to romance.
And yet there was something there. Some inexplicable bond that had been forged by the two of them over the radio, intensified by fear and compassion and a gallant rescue from a fight. There was something mysteriously deep in the shadows of his cinnamon-brown eyes, something extraordinarily unnerving about his penchant for touching her. There was a bold confidence about him. A deceptive nonchalance about him that indicated he didn’t do a damn thing he didn’t want to.
And he’d wanted to kiss her!
It was heady, arousing—and confusing as hell.
She’d been so dumbfounded by the possibilities, so distrustful of the why’s and wherefore’s—so afraid he’d be disappointed when the real deal didn’t live up to his curious expectations—that she’d pushed him away.
A phone call to her sister might give her some clues as to whether Rafe Kincaid was truly into her, or whether she was just projecting her own gratitude-fed attraction onto him. But there was no phone. No sister. No innate trusting her gut when it came to men.
There was only this…connection.
While she buttoned her flannel shirt and stretched the kinks from her body, Hannah sneaked glances at the nearly au natural view of Rafe stripping off his shirts beside the table near the firepit. He splashed his face, neck and shoulders in lieu of a shave, then patted everything dry with his white T-shirt before slipping the garment on over his thick biceps and tapered back. Though several feet of rock and a sharp incline separated them, they were the only two up and out of their tents to see the sunrise, and the solitude made the stretch of craggy peaks and endless sky feel like a private room.
Running a comb through her shoulder-length curls, she watched him tuck in his shirt and sweater. Then he went to work, restoking the fire and putting together the makings of coffee from his pack. He was as at home in these natural surroundings as she was in her classroom. His taut features and once-broken nose kept him from being truly handsome, but there was an ultra-masculine appeal to his short crop of earth-brown hair and economy of movement that tripped through her pulse the same way the cavernous depth of his voice had done over the radio yesterday.
They certainly didn’t build many like him back in the halls of academe. Maybe in the tomes of mythic literature—he could be a Hercules or a Beowulf. Jane Eyre’s Mr. Rochester.
And like that plain, bookish heroine, Hannah found herself irresistibly drawn to the big, mysterious man who had barged into her sedate, predictable world like a force of nature.
“Yeesh.” Hannah buried the fanciful notions back in her imagination and quickly tucked her hair into a ponytail, pulling it through the back of the ball cap she used to keep the stray tendrils out of her eyes when they climbed. “He’s just a guy.”
A guy whose presence made her feel safe in an unfamiliar situation. A guy whose halting goodbye and whispered vow for justice over his friend’s dead body had touched her heart. A guy whose pupils had dilated and whose breath had stilled in anticipation of kissing her.
“Get over it, girl,” she chided herself.
Maybe if she had a little more experience with men, live and in person, instead of the ones she met in her books, she could make sense of what was going on between her and Rafe. She wouldn’t question his motives or second-guess his attraction to her.
But she didn’t have that experience. Piper was the femme fatale of the family. Hannah had always attracted study-buddies and intellectual types whose idea of meeting behind the stacks meant to locate books and do research. She could be counted on as a teammate in Trivial Pursuit and a back-up escort when a real date fell through. She’d been on a couple of curious forays into the process of having sex—but passion? love? Unless her obsession with the English language and all the wonderful ways an author could put words to paper counted, she was out of luck when it came to understanding and dealing with her feelings for Rafe.
So she’d stop peeking, stop pondering, stop wishing—and go about the business of her day.
After stashing her comb inside the tent, Hannah closed the flap behind her so as not to disturb Irene’s slumber. It was at this time yesterday that she’d planned to meet Frank—before the others had roused from their sleeping bags. A subconscious memory blipped into her mind, diverting her attention into an equally disturbing train of thought.
She wasn’t the only one who’d been awake at dawn yesterday. Rowdy had startled her at Frank’s tent. Irene had been up doing her yoga. Professor Hawthorne had been out. Where? Exploring? Dr. Copperfield and Natalie had been…well, they hadn’t been sleeping. And she hadn’t actually seen Lydia and Charles inside their tent.
For a bunch of night owls, there’d been an awful lot of activity going on before sunrise.
Could one of them have seen or heard an argument in Frank’s tent? Did they hear his final cry or last gasp of breath? If so, why hadn’t they shared that information with the group? Why pretend to know nothing about the murder? Unless one of them needed an alibi. And needing an alibi would indicate…
An uneasy feeling crawled up Hannah’s spine. She didn’t want to believe a group of her so-called colleagues could be hiding a murderer in their midst. But how else could she explain the unusual activity in camp yesterday morning?
That uneasy feeling spread through her bones, leaving a trail of suspicion in its wake. Since she and Irene had the highest vantage point, it was easy for her to look from one tent to the next on the terrain below. Were they all occupied this morning? She glanced back over her shoulder and even wondered if Irene was only feigning sleep.
“That’s a frowny face.” The deep voice from below her feet startled her from her paranoid imaginings. Rafe stood with his hands splayed at his hips in a stance that emphasized the bulk of his shoulders and arms. A probing curiosity glinted in his warm brown eyes. “Should I say good morning? Or is this not your best time of day?”
“No, I love to start my day early. Good morning.” Hannah mustered a civilized greeting and a smile. She used her diaphragm to give her voice more oomph to carry against the breeze.
But Rafe heard her. He smiled, and that rugged, beard-dusted face sent something much more pleasant than suspicion shimmering along her spine. “Morning, Kansas.”
Their positions on the gravelly, grass-studded slope gave their conversation an intimate Romeo and Juliet feel. But since doomed, star-crossed lovers wasn’t exactly the way she’d envisioned a romance for herself—or even this pointless crush she had on Rafe—Hannah decided to join him at the firepit. Her pulse simmered as she remembered his coaching from the night before. But, concentrating on the skill, not the teacher, she sat back a little over her knees and climbed down the six-foot slope to the main campsite.
Rafe watched her descent with an approving nod. “I see you’re learning how to handle the mountain.”
Her temperature rose as if he’d just called her beautiful. Hannah adjusted her glasses to hide the irrational blush. “I had to think about it, though. Your balance seems second nature to you.”
“I’ve been climbing since I was a kid. You’ll get the right moves if you practice enough.” And, oh, how she wanted to practice with him. But he was talking about mountain-climbing, not kissing or her desire to learn everything he could teach her. Her flustered thoughts put her
off guard, leaving her unprepared for his next question. “So what’s wrong?”
Standing close enough to smell the outdoorsy scents of pine and smoke and chilly air on him, Hannah got a quick reminder of the easy sensuality that had made her stop and stare in the first place. She turned to answer and got an eyeful of taut, ragg wool sweater blocking her view. Big. Broad. Masculine. And he smelled good. Yeesh. She wisely stepped away before she embarrassed herself.
“I was thinking about Frank.” She busied her hands righting his enameled metal coffee cup and retrieving one for herself from the supply bag he’d set on the table. “The more I go back through what happened yesterday, the more convinced I am that someone here in camp must have seen or heard something.”
“Are grammar teachers known for their detective skills?”
This one was going to be since their lives might depend on uncovering the truth.
“I’m the only one who admits to being up early yesterday. But I know I wasn’t. And leaving a quote in Frank’s pocket tells me it’s a message for us.” She glanced around at the noiseless tents before seeking Rafe’s intent gaze. “We’re a bunch of literary nuts. I think the killer’s trying to say something that only people like us would get. He’s speaking our language. There has to be a reason for that. It’s a taunt. A warning.”
“You think it was written by one of your fellow nuts?”
“Either written by, or intended for. I sure don’t think it’s a random clue.” She tightened her grip around the cup in her hands. “That could explain why everyone was so edgy yesterday. One of us knows what really happened to Frank. He or she’s either a witness or the killer. We might have both in our midst.”
Rafe’s jaw dipped in the slightest of nods. “I’m suspicious of your buddies, too.”
“You are?” He believed her?
“I walked the perimeter of the camp at first light. There are no tracks leading into or out of the area except my own.” He picked up the nylon sleeping bag that had been spread out beside the firepit and shook it, scattering bits of dirt and grass. “Frank didn’t shoot himself. And if the killer isn’t out there, then he’s one of us.”
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