by Paula Graves
She complied, wincing as the coldness of the rock blasted right through her skirt and underwear to chill her backside.
“Sorry. Didn’t bring a seat warmer.”
But he had brought supplies, she saw with growing alarm, as he reached into the pocket of his jacket and withdrew a soft-sided zippered bag that contained a compact stash of first-aid supplies.
Had he known beforehand that he was going to need to treat a wound?
He ripped open a packet and the sharp tang of rubbing alcohol cut through the musty odor of the cave. “This is gonna sting,” he warned a split second before he wiped the alcohol swab across one of the jagged scrapes on the bottom of her foot.
“Son of a—” She clamped her teeth shut and gripped the edge of the outcropping doubling as her seat.
“Sorry.” Once again, he sounded sincere, making her feel off balance.
He worked quickly, efficiently, as if he was used to offering aid. Hell, maybe he was. Maybe he was some sort of psychotic cross between Dr. McDreamy and Hannibal Lecter. Emphasis on the McDreamy, she added silently as she watched the muscles of his back flex visibly beneath the thick leather jacket he wore.
He couldn’t conjure up a new pair of shoes from his little first-aid kit, but he did wrap her feet in a liberal amount of gauze. As footwear, the gauze didn’t have a chance of lasting through another wild hike through the woods, but for the moment, the gauze was bringing her numb feet back to tingling, aching life.
She was beginning to wish they were still numb.
With her feet safely bandaged, Hunter turned off the flashlight, plunging them back into icy blackness. The shocking change from light to dark sent another hard shiver through Susannah’s chilled body.
Then warmth washed over her as Hunter settled on the rocky seat next to her, his hip pressed firmly against hers. She felt his arm wrap around her shoulder, and even though she wanted to pull away from his touch, the sheer relief his vibrant heat offered her shivering body was too much of a comfort to rebuff.
With a silent promise to grow a backbone as soon as she could feel her fingers and toes again, she nestled closer to his heat.
* * *
HE’D LOST HIS cell phone. In the greater scheme of his present troubles, it wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened to him out there in the woods, but it was bad. How was he supposed to call in the cavalry—assuming Quinn could assemble one—if he didn’t have his phone?
Beside him, Susannah Marsh had finally stopped shivering, her soft curves molding themselves to the hard planes of his own body. He’d felt her tighten up when he’d first slipped his arm around her, but she was a sensible woman. Even if she thought he was a crazy kidnapper—and really, she’d be an idiot not to—she surely saw the wisdom of letting him keep her from sinking into hypothermia.
“I’m not a crazy kidnapper,” he whispered, feeling foolish but unable to stop the words from slipping between his lips.
She stiffened beside him. “What proof can you offer in your defense?”
“I wasn’t the one with the guns?” Well, technically he did have a gun, a subcompact Glock 26 tucked in an ankle holster. But if he told her that—
“No, you’re the one who accosted me in the parking lot, dragged me barefoot through the woods and told me I had to run or die.”
“Those were the only choices at the moment.”
She sat up, away from his grasp, and cold air slithered into the space between them. Only a whisper of ambient light seeped into the small cavern from outside, so all he could make out of her expression was the faint glimmer of her eyes as she turned to look at him.
He knew she couldn’t see him in the dark, but he wondered what she’d seen earlier, at the hotel, when she’d looked at him. He’d let his hair grow in the year since he left the Army. Or maybe the better term was, he’d let it go. Like he’d let a lot of things go—his self-respect, his control over his temper, his once-upon-a-time ambitions. Even before taking on the role of the life-battered maintenance man, shuffling his way around the Highland Hotel and Resort, he’d been slacking off the simple disciplines of life, like shaving daily and trying to find a job that paid more than minimum wage.
Mostly, he’d wallowed. In self-pity. In anger. In a crushing amount of guilt for everything that had gone wrong for him since Afghanistan.
It had served his purposes to come across as a loser at the hotel. But if she could see him now, with the play-acting role sloughed off, would she see anything different?
He’d hoped this job with The Gates would give him back a sense of purpose. So far, all it had given him was a queasy sense of impending doom, a coming juggernaut of danger and disaster that left him feeling helpless and overwhelmed.
“Can I go?” Susannah asked quietly.
His gut tensed at the very thought. If she left this cave, she wasn’t likely to reach civilization again without running into people who wanted her dead. She was a city girl, a pampered, polished princess who might know her way around a mall but had no chance getting out of these woods alive.
Nevertheless, he couldn’t hold her captive. Not even for her own good. He’d been a prisoner once, and it had damn near destroyed him.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “But I wouldn’t, if I were you.”
Her voice tightened. “Because there are people trying to kill me?”
“Yes.”
“And how did you know they’d be there in the parking lot?”
He could hardly tell her that he was working with the people trying to kill her, but anything else was a lie or a secret he wasn’t prepared to tell.
When he didn’t answer immediately, her voice sharpened to a diamond edge. “Are you one of them?”
“You’re still alive, aren’t you?”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s all you’re gettin’.” For now, at least, until they could reach someplace safe and contact Alexander Quinn.
She settled back into silence again, but she’d shifted far enough away from him that he knew any attempt to pull her back into the shelter of his arm would be seen as an assault, not an offer of comfort.
“It’s raining,” he said as the drumbeat of raindrops hitting the rocky ground outside filtered into the cave. “We’re not going anywhere for the next little while, so why don’t you try to grab a nap?”
Her voice rose. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Shh!” He slanted a quick look toward the cave entrance. Outside, the steady beat of rain masked almost all other noises. It would certainly cover any movement outside, which meant they were not only cornered with nowhere to run but also vulnerable to a sneak attack.
He’d tried to plan on the fly, once he’d learned the hit on Susannah Marsh had been moved up by twenty-four hours, but even faking illness to leave work early that afternoon had afforded him only a couple of hours to get his supplies together. He’d barely reached the parking lot in time to pull her pretty little bacon out of the fire.
“How do I even know there’s anyone out there?” she asked, not bothering to lower her voice. “How do I know that wasn’t just a car backfiring?”
She knew better. He could tell by the tension in her voice, the little tremble as her tone rose at the end of the question. She knew she was in danger, though he doubted she had any idea why. But she was also determined not to trust him one whit.
And he couldn’t really blame her for that, could he, when he didn’t even trust himself?
“You know it wasn’t.”
“I didn’t get hit. They must have been lousy shots.”
Fortunately, he was pretty sure they were. For one thing, they’d deliberately chosen to make the hit with pistols fired from a moving car, a piss-poor choice if you were serious about actually hitting your target. A critical thinker with any skills would have set up on the hill overlooking the parking lot with a Remington 700 or an AR-15 with a suppressor to keep down the noise.
Lucky for Susannah Marsh—a
nd for him—they weren’t dealing with critical thinkers.
But that didn’t mean the men who were undoubtedly out there in the woods trying to track down their prey weren’t dangerous as hell.
“There are a lot of them and only one of you,” he said. “At close quarters, it won’t matter if they’re lousy shots.”
“Who says they’ll get close?” The volume of her voice dropped to a hiss of a whisper.
He almost laughed, trying to picture her out there in the woods, barefoot, dressed in a straight skirt that might make her legs look outstanding but wasn’t ideal for hiking. The woman normally looked like a catalog model, all sparkling clean and perfectly groomed. He wouldn’t be surprised if he turned on the flashlight right now to find that she’d somehow managed to finger-comb her hair back to its normal glossy state.
“So, you’re not just a brilliant event planner but you’re also an expert outdoorswoman?”
“You know nothing about me.” She somehow made a whisper sound haughty.
He schooled the grin playing at the corners of his mouth. “I’ll give you that.”
A sharp noise outside sent animal awareness crackling along his nerves. He felt Susannah’s instant tension snap across the space between them, as electric as lightning.
He reached out to touch her, to silently urge her to be quiet, and felt her skin ripple wildly beneath his touch. But she held her tongue as they waited in breathless agony for another noise.
The sound of footsteps barely registered above the hammering downpour of rain. Giving Susannah’s arm a quick, reassuring squeeze, Hunter rose from the stone bench and moved toward the cave entrance, ignoring the protest of pain that clawed its way through his bum leg.
Keeping to the shadows just inside the cave, he looked out on the rain-drenched scene, letting his gaze relax. Movement would be easier to pinpoint if he wasn’t actively looking for it.
There. He spotted a man dressed in dark camouflage moving slowly through the woods about twenty yards away. He held a pistol in one hand, a satellite phone in the other. It was hard to make out anything more about him through the heavy curtain of rain and mist, but from his general shape and size, Hunter guessed that the man outside the cave was probably Myron Abernathy, one of the handful of men Billy Dawson had directed to take down Susannah Marsh.
Myron had been one of the ones most enamored of her candid photo, Hunter remembered with a grimace. If he were to get her alone—
“Do you know him?” Susannah’s taut whisper sent a shock wave rippling down his spine.
Taking a swift breath through his nose, he hissed, “Do you ever stay put when asked?”
“You didn’t ask,” she whispered back.
The urge to give her a shake was damn near overpowering. He allowed himself a quick glance in her direction, wishing there were more moonlight outside so he could get a better look at her expression.
But he didn’t need moonlight to see that her eyes had widened and her perfectly shaped lips had trembled open with shock.
Following her gaze, he sucked in another sharp breath.
It was Myron Abernathy all right. No doubt about it.
Because he was ten yards closer and moving straight toward them.
Chapter Three
Oh God, oh God, oh G—
Hunter’s hand closed over Susannah’s mouth as a low, keening noise filled the tight confines of the cave. It took a second for her to realize the noise was coming from her own aching throat.
She swallowed the rest of the sound and moved backward with him, deeper into the shadows of the cave.
Outside, she could still hear the swishing noise of the man with the big gun moving through the thick underbrush and dead autumn leaves that carpeted the forest floor outside the cave. A few more steps and he’d—
A harsh bark of static made her jump. Hunter’s arms tightened around her, as if he was trying to keep her from flying completely apart.
“Billy says regroup at the camp.” A tinny voice, barely audible through the rain, floated into the cave.
Hunter’s grip tightened like a spasm. Then she heard the unmistakable sounds of the man outside retreating, moving steadily away from the mouth of the cave.
Hunter let her go, and she pulled away from him with a jerk, waiting until she could no longer hear the sound of movement outside before she asked in a low growl, “Who the hell is Billy?”
Hunter didn’t answer. She hadn’t expected he would. She was beginning to understand that silence meant he knew things he had no intention of telling her.
Like how he’d happened to be waiting in the parking lot at just the right time to play hero for her when the shooting started. Or how he happened to have an emergency kit packed and tucked away in his jacket, as if he wanted to be ready for whatever might go down tonight.
Or why there had been something hard poking into her ankle where his right leg had braced her when he pulled her back into his grasp.
He was armed. Ankle holster, which was why she hadn’t spotted it before. Did that explain the limp? If he wasn’t used to ankle-carry, he might not realize that unless he balanced the weapon with a counterweight on the other leg, like extra ammo strapped to the opposite ankle, it could seriously mess up his walking gait.
Except he limped with his left leg, didn’t he? Not the leg with the weapon.
Before she had a chance to puzzle it out, Hunter snapped on the flashlight, slanting the beam across her face. She squinted, turning her face away from the painful glare. “Do you mind?”
“I do,” he said, still speaking softly. “We got damn lucky just now. But you have got to learn to listen when I ask you to do something.”
“You don’t ask. You order,” she muttered, kicking herself for saying anything at all. One of these days, her grandmother had always promised her, her smart mouth was going to get her into trouble.
As if it hadn’t a million times already.
But fear made her angry, and abject terror made her furious and verbal about it. If Mr. Enigmatic Maintenance Man with the hidden gun and a hidden agenda couldn’t handle a little pushback from her when he started barking orders, this night was about to go downhill at blazing speed.
“Look.” He was struggling with some anger of his own. She could tell by the way his jaw was working, as if he had a mouth full of chew and no spit cup. “I know you’re confused and scared. And I wish I could tell you there wasn’t any reason to be, but we both know there is.”
“I don’t need you to candy-coat anything,” she said flatly. “I just want to know all the facts. Why is somebody trying to kill me? And how did you know about it?” She swallowed the final question she wanted to ask, about the gun strapped to his ankle. It might be in her best interest to keep that knowledge to herself for the moment.
He gave her a long, considering look before he turned his gaze away, eyeing the narrow stone outcropping they’d used as a bench earlier. “I meant what I said about getting some sleep. It’s cold and it’s wet out there, and that gauze wouldn’t last long if we started trekking through the woods tonight.”
“It’ll get torn up just as badly tomorrow.”
“If you’ll promise to sit tight and wait, I may have a way to fix that problem.” He waved the flashlight beam toward the stone bench. “Get some sleep. I’ve got to go somewhere.”
She stared at him, not believing what she was hearing. “You’re going to leave me here? Alone?”
“They’re convening somewhere else for the night. You should be safe enough.” He didn’t say it, but she could see the rest of what he was thinking in his hooded eyes. Even if he was here, there wouldn’t be much they could do to hold off a whole crew of armed men looking to take her down. She wouldn’t be much safer with him than stuck here shoeless with the damp, bitter cold and the rugged mountain terrain between her and safety.
“What are you going to do out there?”
He looked down at her bandaged feet. “Well, first of all, I’m going t
o get you some shoes.” He lifted the flashlight upward again, handing it over to her. “You keep the light. I won’t need it out there.”
She closed her hand over the flashlight handle. It was warm where he’d gripped it, transferring welcome heat to her numb fingers.
But almost as soon as he slipped out into the rainy night, she extinguished the beam, preferring the comforting obscurity of the darkness to the stark reality the light revealed.
She was trapped and hunted. She was stuck with a man she didn’t know, for reasons she wasn’t sure she understood, in a place that might as well be the far side of the moon, for all the chance she had of finding her way out of these woods barefoot in the pouring rain.
Who was this man named Hunter? And why did his name seem to ring a bell with her, as if she’d heard it recently but couldn’t quite place where? She’d certainly never seen him before, as far as she could remember, but there was still something about him that seemed familiar.
She made herself turn the light back on, aiming the beam around the small cave to get her bearings. Hunter hadn’t told her where he was going, so she didn’t know how long he might be away.
Bottom line, she did not need to spend the night in this cave with a man she didn’t trust. If that meant wrapping her feet in every inch of gauze she could find in that first-aid kit he’d so kindly left with her, then that’s what she had to do.
She had to get out of here before he got back, get to a safe place and start figuring out who those men with the guns really were.
Because if they were somehow connected to the Bradburys, then her life was about to get a thousand times more dangerous.
* * *
HUNTER DIDN’T THINK it was likely that Myron and the other boys had stumbled upon his hiding place while they’d been scouring the woods for any sign of Susannah Marsh. He’d stashed the large rucksack filled with emergency supplies in a hard-to-access area of the woods, where fallen trees and some rocky granite outcroppings created a natural nook perfect for hiding and sheltering something the size of the rucksack.
