Montana Refuge

by Alice Sharpe

  Her whole body jerked and then she lay very still. He untied the blindfold and she looked up at him, fear in her eyes turning to tears as he removed the gag. She was sobbing by the time he hacked through the rope binding her hands and feet, and then she threw herself into his arms.

  He held her trembling body as close as he could, amazed she was alive. “Are you hurt?” he asked, holding the sides of her face and staring at her.

  She shook her head. “I’m so glad you’re here—” she began but he didn’t wait for her to finish. In that instant he forgot his vow to himself, to let her go, and when he claimed her lips it was as her husband, the man who loved her and needed her.

  She tasted as sweet as she always did, and the desperation in her kisses instantly hiked up his libido. He wanted to possess her, right that moment and forever....

  She broke away but clung to him as though he was a life preserver. “We have to get out of here,” she whispered frantically against his neck. “Now, before he comes back.”

  “Before who comes back?” Tyler asked, looking beyond her to the three horses who by their calm demeanor suggested no one new was approaching. “Julie, who is behind all this?”

  “Trill,” she said icily.

  “He’s here?”

  “No, his partner was. Dr. Marquis,” she added, standing. “Only he isn’t really a doctor.”

  Tyler stared at her for a moment, her words not making any sense to him. The man had bandaged wounds and listened to heartbeats. And yet, had he done anything any media-savvy adult hadn’t read about or seen performed on a screen a hundred times?

  “I finally recognized him,” she added. “He was one of the men in the photograph I found in Professor Killigrew’s notebook. The heavy-set one.”

  “But he’s as thin as a rail,” Tyler said as he got to his feet.

  “He told me several days ago that he had his stomach stapled. I bet he isn’t half the size he used to be. But none of this matters right now,” she added, pulling on Tyler’s sleeve. “He said he was going to find someplace his phone would get reception. You have a gun with you, we have to go someplace and hide and ambush him when he comes back for me—”

  “He’s not coming back,” Tyler said. “He’s dead.”

  Her eyes were very wide as she gasped. “Did you—”

  “No, I didn’t kill him. It appears he fell into a crevice and landed in a nest of rattlesnakes. Who was he going to call? Did he say?”

  “It must have been Trill. That’s who sent him, who else? He was really mad that things hadn’t turned out the way he planned. All those ‘accidents’ were meant to disable me so I would be unconscious and under a ‘doctor’s’ care. He had a vial of something that would have stopped my heart had I survived any of the so-called accidents he arranged. He even tried to give me a shot last night, claiming it was a sedative. His goal was to make it look as though I died while he was trying to save me.”

  “What about things like autopsies and the fact the real Dr. Marquis will show up eventually? Sooner or later, your death would be known for what it really was—murder.”

  “He killed the real Dr. Marquis,” she said. “He bragged about it.” She wrapped her hands around her arms as though she was cold.

  “Let’s get you out in the sunlight,” he said although he was hot even standing under the trees.

  “He said he was keeping me alive in case you caught up and he needed a bargaining tool,” she said as they made their way through the broken branches, the bedroll now tossed over Tyler’s shoulder. “His plan was to smother me after he knew he was safe.”

  “The real doctor made his reservation months ago. How could this guy have known about that?”

  “I don’t know. He just said he killed the doctor after the poor man landed at the airport. That’s why you got that call saying he was held up in Chicago.”

  “He must have had a contact on the ranch,” Tyler said with a sickening thud in his gut. “One of us. It’s the only way he could have known the identity of one of our guests.” None of this made sense.

  “Does it matter right now?” Julie said as they stepped out from under the trees.

  “I guess not right this minute. We have no way of knowing if your abductor completed his call before he died. He might have arranged a rescue. I think we’d better get out of here.”

  “We could check his phone,” Julie said, rubbing her arms.

  “No, we can’t do that, not with the rattlers in the rocks. Let’s just get away from here. It’s going to be dark in a few hours.”

  She nodded but it was accompanied by a hasty look around.

  “I don’t have anything to give you to eat, but I do have water,” he added as he fetched the canteen from Yukon’s saddle.

  Leaving her to drink, Tyler tied the bedroll to the back of Shasta’s saddle, then quickly gathered the roan. He helped Julie mount Shasta, and the two of them took off the direction Tyler had come, trailing the roan behind.

  “Why didn’t he just shoot you?” Tyler asked. “Why threaten to smother you?”

  She glanced at him and away. “I convinced him you were hot on his trail and that a shot would carry up here in these hills for miles and miles. I told him if he shot me, you’d know where he was and you wouldn’t stop until he was dead.”

  She flashed him another look as though gauging his reaction to such bold declarations of what she meant to him. Her eyes were as much a mystery as ever. Did she have any idea how close to the truth her threats were? He doubted it.

  “I just wanted to scare him into keeping me alive,” she said softly.

  * * *

  “WHAT HAPPENED YESTERDAY?” Tyler asked as they rode. “You know, at the wagon.”

  Julie glanced over at him. “Oh, my God—Andy. How is he?”

  “Not good. I left him with John Smyth and Mele. They were trying to get him stabilized before putting him in the wagon and taking him back to the ranch. What happened?”

  “We were just riding along when all of a sudden the fake doctor produced a pistol I didn’t know he had and shot Andy in the back. Andy fell off his horse, but he got a shot off first. I got conked on the head. When I woke up, he’d tied me up and thrown me over Shasta’s saddle and I didn’t know where we were. He was furious that he’d been forced into a direct confrontation. He said it was supposed to look like an accident and he probably wouldn’t get all the money that was due him and it was my fault.”

  “And you’re sure he was the man in the photo?”

  “Yes. I asked him about Trill when he took the gag out of my mouth and he gave me that creepy smile he had. I told him I’d seen him in a photograph with Trill.”

  “So you think Trill hired him?”

  “Yes. I think this guy and Trill were targeting Professor Killigrew, although I don’t know why. But the professor must be in terrible danger and there’s no way around the fact that I’m complicit. It must have something to do with his Seattle trip because that’s what Trill was always asking about. I’ve got to warn Killigrew.”

  “As soon as we get back to the ranch,” he said.

  “I have to come clean to the police and talk about what Trill did. Whatever he has in mind, he has to be stopped.”

  “I agree,” he said, and they rode in silence for a while.

  By evening, they’d made it back to where the shooting had taken place. The wagon was gone as were humans and animals. The road was a mass of tracks from feet and wheels.

  There was an unspoken agreement between them that they would keep going until they lost the light. They made it to the top of the cliff where Tyler told Julie about Meg Peterson’s fall and her theory that it had been caused by whoever was after Julie.

  “Did you check the horse and see if someone had somehow rigged her saddle or something to spook the horse?” she asked Tyler as they started down the switchbacks.

  “I didn’t have a chance. I hope someone else thinks to look. But really, I have a feeling Meg caused the acciden
t when she waved at me and startled poor Snowflake. I have a sneaking suspicion she knew she’d done it because she’s not as good a horsewoman as she pretended to be and she was embarrassed. I mean all that jolly Midwestern charm went up in smoke when she got hurt. She turned whiny and clingy.”

  “Is it a bad break?”

  “I don’t know. They should be back at the ranch by now so she’ll be getting it fixed. Andy is the one I’m really worried about.”

  Julie nodded, silently agreeing. How many people had now been hurt because of her? James Killigrew, the real Dr. Robert Marquis, Nora, Andy, maybe Meg Peterson. Had they suffered because Julie was a coward afraid to face her mistakes? Was she what Tyler claimed she was—a quitter?

  “You’re awfully quiet,” Tyler commented as they neared the bottom of the hill and entered Dead Man’s Ravine.

  “Just thinking,” she said.

  They stopped by the shack which Tyler opened by breaking the lock because the key was on the wagon. They gathered a few supplies and then continued on down to the creek at the bottom of the ravine where the welcoming sound of gurgling water perked the horses right up.

  They unsaddled the horses who waded into the water and drank while Tyler started a fire. Julie filled one of the small dented pots they’d taken from the shack with water from the river and propped it on a rock to heat. If she could boil it long enough, it should be safe to drink. She looked through the canned food they’d gathered up at the shack—the selection wasn’t great, but she was so hungry that even canned tamales and fruit cocktail sounded delicious.

  For the first hour of darkness, they made the camp habitable, spreading out the bedroll, heating the tamales and eating them right out of the pan. They had found only one spoon, so they took turns fishing the fruit directly out of the can, and between the trilling water and fitful spitting of the fire, the flickering firelight and the carpet of stars overhead, Julie began to believe she was safe.

  The light from the fire barely illuminated the creek, but after dinner, they took the sliver of soap and the one towel they’d found in the shack and walked down to the creek. Julie waded out breast-high wearing all her clothes. They were filthy but she’d rather be wet than take time to remove them. It was very dark so far out in the water, cold and kind of eerie, the beach illuminated like a small stage. She dipped her head under the water and tried to work up a lather with the soap. She was rinsing her hair when she glanced toward shore and saw Tyler standing on the beach, strong and naked. Her stomach flipped. At least she thought it was her stomach; the sensation might actually originate from farther down.

  Man, he was hot, his body perfect, the fitful light thrown from the fire bathing all his muscles, a god of sorts, a man in his element.

  By the time she got out of the water, he’d towel-dried and pulled on his jeans, and held his wet underwear in one hand, his shirt in the other.

  “You going to wear that shirt tonight?” she asked.

  “No, you want it?”

  “Please.”

  He handed it to her, staring down at her as he did so, his eyes almost impossible to see because the firelight was to his back. His gaze stirred a few embers inside of her and her breath caught.

  He handed her the towel next and told her he was going to go stoke the campfire. She quickly stripped off her clothes and put on his shirt, buttoning it with shaking fingers. Towel wrapped around her head, she wrung the water out of her heavy, wet clothes, then gathered them together and walked back up the gentle slope.

  Tyler was in the process of draping his underwear over the makeshift clothesline he’d created by stringing the lasso from Shasta’s saddle between two trees. “Allow me,” he said, holding out a hand and she handed him her wet garments. As she unwound the towel from her hair, she watched him dangle her bra and panties over the rope with his two big hands. The same sensation his nudity had caused happened again, and this time there was no doubt about where it originated and what it meant.

  “I shook out the bedroll,” he said. “Can you stand the thought of getting back in it?”

  She was trembling, but it wasn’t the bedroll’s fault. “Sure, we just won’t zip it.”

  “You don’t have to share it with me,” he said. “I can sleep on the ground and use my saddle as a pillow.”

  She stared at him for a long, slow minute while summoning the courage to speak the truth. “I can’t stop thinking about you,” she said. “About us.”

  “Now just be careful,” he said, “about what you say and how you say it. You know how I feel about you.”

  “Still, Tyler? After everything I’ve put you through?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  His response was immediate and said with the simple sincerity she had always found so compelling. She smiled in spite of all the terrible things that had happened in the past week. “That first night in the barn—”

  “Too fast,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Yes...and no,” she said. “I told you it wasn’t what I wanted, but I was lying.”

  “You were lying,” he repeated. “Why?”

  “Because I didn’t know what making love would mean and I didn’t want to hurt you again.”

  “It’s too late to worry about that,” he said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, if you’re going to sleep on the ground, you’re going to need your shirt,” she whispered, and began unbuttoning it, aware his gaze was glued to every movement she made until she shrugged the shirt off her shoulders. Standing there naked, she offered it to him.

  He made a deep, sexy sound in his throat. “I have a better idea,” he said, reaching for her.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Just touching her, holding her against him was almost more than he could bear. He wanted everything to be perfect for her, but it started out so fast and just seemed to go faster and faster like a runaway train. One minute he was clutching her backside to him, the next she had wrapped her legs around him and he was holding her and always, always their mouths were together, tongues exploring, the world reduced to warm, wet and wild.

  He laid her down atop the bag and stripped off his jeans, then he straddled her, touching every inch of her fire-lit skin with his hands or his mouth or both. And she was all over him, freer with her body than she’d been for years, like the old Julie he’d married...and lost.

  Thoughts like those, when they surfaced, were pushed away like a dangerous log jamming a fragile pier. There would be time to consider what all this meant later; for now he was content to be in the moment, making love to the woman he loved.

  When at last they came together it was like an explosion took place within the confines of the bedroll and they lay sweaty and spent in each others arms, limbs entwined, out of breath and exhausted. He kissed her forehead a dozen times as her body gradually relaxed and her breathing became regular, planning on staying awake all night to keep watch or maybe just to extend the unity they’d rediscovered before the cold light of day split it asunder.

  But the previous few nights caught up with him after a while and he felt his eyelids growing heavier and heavier as the fire quietly died down and the world shrank to just the two of them.

  * * *

  JULIE AWOKE WITH THE dawn and found herself still in Tyler’s warm arms. For a while she watched him sleep, unsure if the night before had been the best of her life or the biggest mistake she’d ever made, or maybe a little of both.

  As though sensing her gaze, his eyelids fluttered open. When their eyes met, he smiled and kissed her lips briefly. “Morning,” he said.

  “Morning.”

  “Have you been awake long?”

  “No, just for a few minutes. But I think we should get up and start back to the ranch. I’m anxious about Andy and I know Rose must be worried sick about you.”

  He closed his arms around her. “Maybe there’s time—”

  “Get up, you lazy bum,” she said.

  He got ou
t of the bedroll and stretched, treating her to his nude backside which she studied, enjoying the way his muscles flexed when he walked. He pulled his shorts off the line and slipped into them, then gathered her clothes and brought them to her. “I’ll get some water to heat so we can at least wash our faces,” he said, and grabbing the beat-up pot, sauntered down to the river.

  Julie dressed quickly, her clothes mostly dry but cold from the cool morning temperature. Not that she was complaining. Hard not to compare this morning with the one from the day before when she’d woken up after a night trussed like a turkey, cold and stiff and lying on the dirt, without a glimmer of reasonable hope. She had been certain she was looking at her last day on earth yesterday, and yet here she was.

  Thanks to Tyler...

  As he finished dressing, she gathered wood for a small fire, then surveyed the last of the two cans they’d swiped from the shed. “Ravioli or chili for breakfast?” she called.

  “Chili,” he said. While she opened the can and dumped the contents in the pan, he tended the reluctant fire. They ate with a kind of shyness brought on by the memories of the passion they’d shared the night before. She was afraid he was going to want to talk about it, investigate her feelings, discuss what had changed and what hadn’t and how they each felt about it, and she was too confused for such a talk. But as though he sensed her reluctance for that topic, he ate his chili without conversation.

  After they’d eaten, they washed up, buried their refuse and gathered the horses for the ride home.

  It took several hours of intense riding to get back to the river into which Julie had fallen, then a few more to get back to the site of their first camp. Tyler broke the lock on that shed, too, taking it out with a single shot. This time they found mostly canned fruit and ate it standing up, out of the can. A sealed plastic jug of water served to quench thirst and after a hurried meal, they were back in the saddle and headed out for the last leg of the trip.

  “Do you think about the future much?” Julie asked Tyler as they neared the ranch.

  “I used to,” he said, darting her a quick glance. “It’s no secret I’ve wanted kids for a while now. The ranch needs a new infusion of Hunt blood.”