“It’s him, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Let’s go to the couch and sit down. I’ll fill you in.” He pulled her chair back, held out his hand, and Shiloh placed her damp one into his warm, dry palm.
Shiloh tried to hold on to her escaping emotions as she sat down next to Roan on the couch, her knee resting lightly against his thigh as she turned, facing him.
“What did Sarah say?”
Roan told her almost everything. “Were you aware he was an African big game hunter?”
“Yes.” Shiloh shivered. “My mother hated that part about him. When they got married, Anton wanted to hang the heads of the dead animals he’d killed all over her apartment. She wouldn’t let him. It upset her so much. They got into a lot of heated arguments about it. Mom hated guns and violence.” Shiloh shook her head. “And look what happened to her. She died violently.”
Roan reached out, his large hand covering her two hands clasped tightly in her lap. “Did Leath keep weapons at the apartment?”
“Yes, much to my mother’s chagrin. He was always cleaning them on my mom’s beautiful bird’s-eye maple table. It was a hundred-and-fifty-year-old table that had been handed down through our family. Anton laid down a cloth over it when he cleaned his stuff, but she hated even seeing the weapons around. It really upset her. The place would smell like gun oil afterward for days. I hated it too.”
“Did your real father ever have any weapons in the apartment?” Roan wondered.
“No. He was in the military, but when he got out, he left it all behind. There were never any weapons in our house until Mom married that monster.”
“I don’t mean to push you here, Shiloh, but do you remember the types of weapons he had in the apartment?”
Frowning, she shrugged. “I don’t really know. There were huge, long ones. Rifles, I think. And he had several small handguns, but I don’t know what kind they were. I couldn’t tell one from another.”
“Did he keep up his shooting skills after he married your mother?”
“Yes. He had a membership to several shooting ranges outside of the city. He always invited us to go along, but neither of us ever wanted to.”
“If I showed you some of those long, big rifles he had from images on the Internet, do you think you could identify them?”
Rolling her eyes, Shiloh said, “Yes. Because they were so big, ugly, and powerful-looking.”
“Okay, we’ll do that tomorrow morning, sometime.” Identifying the weapons would help Sarah check with the gun shops in the area. And if a rifle was purchased, it could be the one Leath wanted to use to kill Shiloh.
Shiloh searched Roan’s face. His voice was low and unruffled, but the line of questioning was unhinging her. “Why are you asking me all these questions about his guns? Did Sarah say something to you about them?”
“No. But Leath’s probation officer gave Sarah the background on him. None of us knew he’d been on the Olympic rifle team.”
“What does that mean? I don’t understand.”
Roan hesitated. “It’s just a piece of information for Sarah. The guy is used to using guns. He knows how to handle them.”
She sensed there was a lot more to his remark, searching his dark gray eyes, wishing she could read Roan’s mind. “I don’t know one end of a gun from another.” She frowned. “Do you have weapons here, Roan?” It would make sense that he did because he’d been black ops. Those men were all trained heavily in the use of all kinds weaponry. They had to be.
Nodding, Roan gestured toward the room that would become a second bedroom. “I have a gun cabinet in there. You might have seen it. It’s under lock and key.”
The news made Shiloh feel better. As much as she hated weapons, if Leath was sneaking around, stalking her, he’d have a weapon on him, no question. “I don’t know how to use one.”
“I’ll show you the basics tomorrow.” Roan studied her. “Are you open to that, Shiloh? I know you don’t like guns.”
“What’s my choice? If I don’t arm myself, how am I going to protect myself if he comes around here? He’ll shoot to kill me.” Her stomach rolled over at the thought.
Roan squeezed her hands and released them. “If you feel like it, why don’t I show you some combat moves in the gym tomorrow. Then, I can take you to the indoor shooting range in town in a day or two. Show you how a pistol works, how you shoot it so you won’t be afraid of handling it.”
“I like the idea of working out in the gym with you.”
“And going to the shooting range?”
“I’ll do it.” Even she heard the resolve in her voice. Shiloh had grown up in a household where peace and diplomacy ruled, not guns and violence.
Roan lightly caressed her hair, moving some of the thick, silky strands off her tense shoulder. “I’m going to go clean up, do a little work on my laptop here in the kitchen, and then take a shower. You have a choice. I can either stay and sleep out here on the couch and give you my bedroom or you and I can sleep together. Which do you want it to be?”
Cold reality washed through her. She could die tomorrow. The thought eviscerated Shiloh. “I want to be with you, Roan.” She saw tenderness come to his gray eyes and it muted some of the reality that this could be her last night on earth. And if it was, she was going to spend it with Roan.
* * *
Roan slipped into bed with Shiloh. They were both naked. He had stayed up until eleven P.M., researching the Internet on sniper hunting rifles as well as the type used by Olympic shooters. If Shiloh would look at the images tomorrow morning and be able to identify what Leath had in the apartment, he could then send the intel to Sarah. In turn, the deputies could look at the list of guns sold the last three weeks and see if the exact same rifle or its equivalent had been purchased. And by whom. He kept all those thoughts to himself as her warm, velvet body slid up alongside his. Shiloh snuggled into his arms, her leg over his, her breasts against the wall of his chest.
“Could you just hold me?” she asked softly, sliding her fingers across his chest, coming to rest on his shoulder.
“Sure,” he murmured, pressing a kiss to her mussed hair.
“I don’t exactly have sex on the mind tonight,” she admitted in apology.
“Darlin’, it’s all right. I don’t expect we’ll be making love every night. Do you?”
She nuzzled against his thick neck, inhaling his scent, the sage soap, his maleness that always made her yearn for more from Roan. “I can’t shut my mind off. I can’t focus, Roan. I’m sorry. I’ll probably be so restless tonight I’ll keep you awake half the night.”
“Hush,” he rasped, sliding his arm around her shoulders, drawing her against him. “It’s all right. I’d rather have you in my bed than not. Okay?”
“Even if I keep you awake?” she muffled against the column of his neck. How she needed Roan’s arm around her, holding her tightly. He felt so strong, like a rock where she presently felt like Jello-O. As he stroked her cheek, Shiloh closed her eyes, feeling some of the tension bleed out of her.
“I want you here, with me, no matter what, Shiloh.”
“I tend to talk when I’m nervous.”
He chuckled, the rumble moving through his chest. “I can tell.”
“What do men do? You don’t seem to worry like a woman does.”
“Just put it into a box,” he said. “SEALs call it a kill box, but I prefer to call it something more benign.”
“You can honestly stuff your emotions into a box within yourself?”
“Yes. Our focus is on the bad guy. Not how we’re feeling. If we did let our emotions run wild, we’d never be able to focus on the enemy and kill him.”
“Humph, that’s a pretty slick arrangement you guys have in your brain. It’s not how a woman’s brain works. We’re all about connections. It sounds like you guys have files and whatever file you pull out, that’s your focus. And none of the other files open up to bother or distract you.”
“Brain Science 101?” he teased,
skimming his fingers slowly up and down her arm.
She laughed a little, relaxing more. “I guess. I’ve always been curious about how a man’s brain works versus a woman’s brain. It helps me create dialogue for my male characters, since I’m not a man.”
“That, you aren’t,” Roan agreed. “Thank God.”
Shiloh smiled a little, more of her tension dissolving. “Leath hated Mom talking all the time.”
“What do you mean?”
“He didn’t like us talking a lot. I don’t know why. He said we were like two chattering squirrels. That we never knew when to shut up.”
“You were a child. Children talk nonstop. They’re learning.”
“My mother didn’t take that lying down, believe me. She told Anton if he didn’t like hearing us talk, to move out.”
“When did this happen?”
Sighing, Shiloh whispered, “About six months before he murdered her.”
“It sounds like your mother was tired of being controlled and manipulated by him.”
“I think so, but she never said that to me directly.”
“Because you were a child. She wasn’t going to put that on you. She protected you as much as she could.”
“Yes, she did. But I saw and heard a lot. It was a small apartment. When Anton would chide my mother, try to humiliate or embarrass her, she’d get angry and get into his face. She was never one to hold back how she felt.”
“Maybe an artist’s temperament?”
“My mother was very confident in herself. She was independent. I still don’t know to this day why she married that bastard. He was the exact opposite of my father. What did she see in him?”
“Maybe she was lonely, Shiloh.”
“Yes . . . that’s what I eventually thought, too. My mother was still so young, so beautiful and vibrant. She was such an extrovert. She loved going to parties, to galleries that held openings for her paintings. She loved interacting with people.”
Shiloh sighed, beginning to feel the exhaustion claim her mind, her worrying thoughts starting to slow down and dissolve. “She’d painted a beautiful zebra and her foal on the Serengeti Plain of Africa. Leath had bought it.”
“He hunted there.”
“Yes. I loved the painting because the baby zebra was dancing around his mother. It was such a beautiful painting. So real. As if you could reach out and touch that little baby. My mom was an amazing artist.”
“Do you have it?”
A rush of pain flowed through Shiloh. “No. About six months before Leath murdered my mom, they got into a screaming and yelling argument. He tore the painting off the wall in the den where he had his office, brought it out, and took it into her studio. He had a skinning knife in his hand and he shredded it in front of her.” Shiloh’s mouth compressed. “He did it to hurt her because he knew it was one of her favorite paintings.”
“Jesus. Were you there when it happened?”
“It happened on a weekend. My mom had set up my little easel next to hers. She was teaching me how to paint when Anton came yelling into her studio. I was so scared. I saw murder in his eyes and I screamed as he charged toward my mom with the painting in his upraised hand. I ran to the corner and cowered, hiding my face, so afraid. That knife he had”—Shiloh shivered—“it was the same one he later used to kill my mother.”
He caressed her tense back. “I’m sorry you had to witness that, Shiloh. What happened next?”
“They started shouting at each other. My mom was furious because he’d scared the hell out of me. She stood up to him, and shoved him back, trying to push him out of her studio. He pushed back. My mom almost fell but caught herself. And then he held up the painting, stabbing and slashing through the canvas until it hung in shreds. It was horrible. I couldn’t stop crying.”
Roan scowled. It was a sign of things to come from Leath. And he was out there, somewhere, right now. But where?
Chapter Twenty-One
Anton moved his thumb lightly down the curve of his SOG SEAL Team Elite seven-inch blade. He sat in his hide on the largest of the two Pine Grove halves. It was the closest, distance-wise, to that cedar cabin sitting out half a mile away on the valley floor. And his target, Shiloh Gallagher, was in that cedar cabin.
The chill of the morning was deep as the sun just began to climb over the horizon. He’d been in his newly created hide, halfway up the hill, surrounded by Douglas fir, for two days. Getting lucky on his stakeout, lying prone in a pasture of deep grass on the ranch, he’d seen her ride up to the hills and disappear.
Anton had waited until night, left his sniper post in the pasture, and walked the mile to Pine Grove as marked on the topo map he carried. What surprised him was the cabin hidden on the other side of the tallest hill. And it was there that he’d seen not only Shiloh, but a cowboy. He’d lain perfectly still until they’d both ridden away. Clearly, there was a relationship between them and it only made him feel even happier that he could destroy both of them.
Moving his thumb down the titanium nitride–coated blade, he visualized how he was going to use it on that bratty Shiloh. He’d stalked her for six months in Manhattan. And he found he enjoyed this stalking out here in Wyoming even more. Leath liked nature. He liked the challenge. He was the hunter. Shiloh was his quarry and, now, he was in active stalk mode with her whether she knew it or not.
The SOG SEAL knife was used by the black ops teams. It was a special knife created for special needs. His full lips pulled upward slightly as he closed his eyes, visualizing exactly what he was going to do with her once he captured her. He was waiting for that cowboy to drive off sometime this morning without her. He was hoping Shiloh would be left alone. Alone and unable to defend herself against him.
First, he would silently enter the cabin. He’d already checked it out at night, using his infrared rifle scope. It had two entrances. One on the east side and one on the west side. He’d looked into the windows when there was no one around. Laid out the room design in his mind. There was one working bedroom, so he knew where she’d be sleeping. Two rooms were empty except for what he thought might be a large gun cabinet in one of them. He knew of Shiloh’s hatred of weapons, figuring the cowboy was the shooter, not her.
He had a police scanner radio on him and knew the Lincoln sheriff’s department was actively trying to locate him. They would never find him. He’d spent time hunting in Africa in all kinds of challenging situations and changing conditions. Anton knew how to hide. None of these law enforcement idiots would ever think about looking for him here. He was sure they were tearing up Wind River Valley all the way to Jackson Hole from one end to another, trying to locate him. He’d left no trace of where he was or where he’d gone. Knowing how to stalk, how to become a shadow, using the night as his friend and cover, Leath smiled a little more.
The SEAL seven-inch blade was coated with a matte black finish of titanium, making it invisible in the night. There was no flash or reflection off it. The AUS-8 steel it was created from contained vanadium in it, making the blade incapable of breaking even when encountering the thickest bone in the human body, the femur. And he had been envisioning how he was going to use this knife on her.
He was pleased that the blade had serrated teeth all the way across the top, which meant he could jerk it upward, tearing open her flesh. The knife also had a staggered serration beneath it, as well as on the first third of the blade. Serrations were like tiny sharpened teeth that could surgically cut through soft skin and sink down, ripping and shredding fibrous muscle, ligaments, and tendons beneath it. The serrations were so sharp, it could move through skin and muscle to the vulnerable organs like a hot knife through butter with absolutely no resistance.
It was there that Anton could feel the blade sinking into Shiloh’s soft, rounded abdomen, wreaking havoc, slicing her open, gutting her. He’d open her up so that she suffered in agony for days before she’d die. Gut wounds were always the worst. It was a slow, painful, and grisly death. He would keep Shiloh ali
ve, tape her mouth shut so she couldn’t scream, tie her hands up above her head, then watch her writhe in nonstop agony. Yes, he was going to enjoy every minute he spent with Shiloh, watching her slowly die over a three-day period. She’d die of peritonitis, septic poison finally reaching her circulatory system and going to her heart. Once it did, she’d die of cardiac arrest.
Anton was going to enjoy this so much, and he smiled more deeply, appreciating the serrated teeth on this specially made knife. He’d dreamed of this for years. There wasn’t a day that went by when he wasn’t creating a strategy to find her, stalk her, and then gut her. She’d put him away. He wished that she would live more than three days but under the circumstances, it wouldn’t happen.
As he sat there, listening to the birds sing around him, his hide covered with green netting so that it was impossible to see, he thought about other scenarios. It would be easy to get her out of the cabin and back to his hide. He’d spent one full night with his small military shovel, digging out a rectangular hide. It was two feet vertically and six feet wide. Last night, he’d dug it deeper, five feet deep. Anton was waffling between gutting Shiloh right away or waiting and cutting her here and there, making her suffer like he’d suffered for so many years. She’d slowly bleed to death and he could control how long she remained alive. Maybe he needed to take another look at his plans. Anton knew when she disappeared, there would be a manhunt. But he’d take her in such a way that no one would be able to track him back to his hide. He knew how to do it from past experience.
He would have to make sure Shiloh was kept silent. She would have to remain in the hide with him, undetected. He’d have to feed her, give her water because he wanted her alive and alert. There were a lot of other considerations to change in his plans, but Anton would give his right hand if he could extend her suffering. He’d lived too long for this one moment in his life.
Wind River Wrangler Page 27
