by Paula Graves
At least there was a dead bolt on the front door. If their unexpected visitor was a civilian searcher, the locked door might be enough to send him on his way. An unlocked door might have been better, and a cold parlor, but that option wasn’t available.
He’d hoped the secluded cabin would be far enough from the hotel or any well-used hiking trail to be a reasonable hiding place.
He’d underestimated the reach of the Ridge County Sheriff’s Department.
“Who do you think it is?” Susannah’s voice was a faint whisper in the darkened cellar. There was no light here in the cellar at all, though he’d grabbed a flashlight from the kitchen on his way downstairs.
“Probably someone from the search party for you.”
“I thought we were far enough from the hotel that they wouldn’t come out here.”
“So did I. We were apparently wrong.”
Her hand closed around his wrist, cool and remarkably steady, given the way she’d trembled beneath his touch earlier as he led her downstairs. “What if it’s not someone from the search party?”
“I’m not sure it matters to us either way. We can’t risk being found.”
“Not even by the cops?”
“Do you know which cops you can trust and which ones will sell you out in a heartbeat?”
She was silent for a long moment. “No.”
There was an odd tone to her voice that piqued his curiosity, but he shoved his interest to the back of his mind to consider later. Right now, he had to figure out what to do if he heard someone enter the cabin above.
The floorboards creaked quite audibly when someone was in the cabin overhead. He’d learned that fact when Janet had helped him move his stuff into the place when he first returned from Afghanistan and decided to make it his getaway. It wasn’t officially in his name; Janet still held the deed. It wouldn’t be the first place Billy Dawson looked for him, since he’d let Billy think he was estranged from Janet, that he’d hated her job with the county prosecutor’s office and she’d hated his political views. He’d hoped it would be enough to protect his sister from trouble if his undercover work went belly-up.
God, he wished he could talk to her right now, let her know everything would be okay.
“Either way, whether they come in or not, we can’t stay here after this,” he murmured. “You realize that, don’t you?”
She remained silent, though her fingers tightened around his wrist.
“I know you don’t trust me. But I’m asking you to take a chance here. Even if the people knocking at the door go away, we can’t risk staying here now that someone knows this place exists. They may go find the cops, get someone who can break in and take a look around. Sooner or later, they’ll connect this cabin to me and then they’re going to turn it upside down.”
“Because you’re their primary suspect in my abduction.”
He nodded. “I go missing from the hotel the same day you go missing? Hell, yeah, they’re going to think the worst.”
“Would they be wrong?”
“Technically, I guess not.”
They fell silent, the only sound in the small cellar the whisper of their breathing. Overhead, the cabin remained eerily quiet.
“Do you think they went away?” Her whisper broke the stillness a few moments later, plucking his nerves.
“I don’t know,” he admitted softly. “I need to go up there and check. Can I trust you to stay put?”
“Nowhere to go but up there with you.”
He hadn’t told her about the outside exit, he realized. He probably should tell her now, but he wasn’t sure he could trust her not to make a run for it. She was strong-willed and hardheaded, traits he ordinarily liked in a woman—unless those traits led her to make risky choices.
But leaving her stuck down here, defenseless, if he met with trouble upstairs would be putting her in harm’s way. She was a smart woman, and more resourceful in a crisis than he’d thought. She had a right to make her own decisions, either way.
“There’s a door hidden behind that old broken armoire in the corner. When you open the armoire, you’ll see it’s empty and all the shelves have been removed. Just step into it. There’s a pressure switch in the bottom that opens the door to a tunnel that leads to a door outside.” He put the flashlight in her hand. “If I’m not back in five minutes, you go. It leads to an escape hatch in the woods.”
She was silent for a long moment before her fingers closed over the flashlight, brushing his. “Who are you?”
“The better question might be, who was my grandfather?” he murmured. “He worked at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory during the height of the Cold War.”
“A scientist?”
“A maintenance man, but he saw and heard enough to be paranoid about nuclear war, so he did what he could, in his limited way, to build himself a shelter in case the Soviets dropped the big one.” He couldn’t hold back a wry smile, even though she couldn’t see it in the dark. “His understanding of nuclear fallout was clearly limited, but you can’t fault him for his will to survive.”
“Okay. Five minutes.”
As he started toward the stairs to the main floor, she grabbed his arm, her fingers tight. He stopped, turning back toward her, and their bodies collided with a light thump, the softness and the steel of her pressing intimately against him. He found it suddenly impossible to breathe.
“Be careful,” she whispered, her fingers convulsing briefly around his arm before she let him go and backed away, robbing him of her soft heat.
Sucking air into his burning lungs, he felt his way to the stairs and climbed as silently as he could. The door creaked faintly as he eased it back open, the sound skating down his back on a razor’s edge of alarm. Staying very still, he listened.
The knocking sounds had subsided a few minutes earlier. There were no sounds of occupation, save for his own carefully shallow respirations. No creak of the wooden floor. No rustle of clothing. Everything was utterly quiet.
Edging through the narrow opening of the doorway, he eased down the short corridor to the front room. It was empty. His footsteps sounded like thunder as he crossed quickly to the front window and peered through the narrow gap in the curtains with one eye.
Two men walked away from the cabin slowly, with no attempt at stealth or any show of distress or alarm. One of the men was speaking into a phone. Calling in a report of their attempt to enter the cabin to look for the missing woman?
They’d be back. There was no way the county sheriff’s department would leave a cabin in the woods unexamined as long as Susannah Marsh was missing.
They’d bought some time, but not much.
He crossed back to the cellar door and called softly. “They’re gone. You can come back up.”
For a long, tense moment, there was no sound from below. Then he heard her footsteps on the wood stairs and his heart started beating again.
“Did you see them?” she asked as she emerged from the stairwell.
“Just their backs. Looks like a couple of search-and-rescue volunteers. One of them was on the phone.”
“Reporting the existence of the cabin?”
He nodded grimly. “I’m sorry. I was hoping we’d have a little more time here.”
She gave him a considering look before her expression softened and she gave a slight shrug of her shoulders. “What good is it doing us to hole up here, anyway? It’s not going to stop whatever your buddies have planned for the conference.”
“Yeah. And they’re not my buddies.”
She gave him another one of her laser-sharp looks. He could almost feel the heat of her scrutiny, as if she’d somehow burrowed her way inside his brain and started sifting around to see what was there. He was both intrigued and unnerved, and it took most of his self-control not to look away.
“Remember I was telling you that I had access to the executive parking deck at the hotel?” she said just before his control snapped.
He nodded. “Yeah, you did
n’t finish your thought earlier.” A flood of heat poured through him as he remembered why.
Her eyes darkened. “Well, what I was going to tell you is that since the door has no security system, I can get us into the hotel without anyone knowing about it.”
“But how are we going to get into the executive parking deck without a vehicle that has an access sticker or whatever it is that lets you in?”
“That’s the thing,” she said with a grin so cheeky and appealing he almost kissed her right then and there. “Half the battle of any security system is putting up a stern front. But it’s mostly show. There are all kinds of holes in the security system at the hotel. Not for the guest rooms of course—management takes guest security and privacy really seriously. And they’re careful about cash handling and all that. But for getting in and out of the place? Really not that hard.”
He gave her a considering look of his own. “You sound like a thief.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Not me. I’m honest as the day is long.”
* * *
SUSANNAH WASN’T LYING. She wasn’t a thief. But her daddy could have written a book on the topic, and he’d taught her just about everything he knew about parting people from their hard-earned cash.
Her grandmother had plucked her out of that situation fast enough, once she realized her daughter had run off and left Susannah and her brother, Jimmy, with their shiftless daddy. Jimmy had run away from their grandmother’s place and gone back home to be his father’s little sticky-handed apprentice, but Susannah had fought to stay with her grandmother.
Her grandmother hadn’t been soft, sweet or maternal, which probably explained Susannah’s own mother’s desperate need for love and attention. But her grandmother had loved Susannah in her own way, in a pragmatic and fierce way. And that kind of love was better than the selfish claptrap her father tossed around and called affection.
Susannah supposed she was very much like her grandmother where the heart was concerned. Feelings were no substitute for good sense. Feelings would steer you wrong every time. Good sense always carried the day.
“What aren’t you telling me?” Hunter asked softly.
She ignored his question. “We’ve got to get out of here fast, right?”
“Pretty fast. They might not get back here in the next couple of hours, but they’ll be back to take a look around.”
“So let’s not waste any more time talking. Do you have an extra backpack around here for me? That way we could take double the supplies.”
“You sure you want extra weight? Where I’m taking you is a two-mile hike up the mountain.”
She stifled a groan at the thought. Working a desk job had taken a toll on her endurance, but she was young and mostly fit. Her feet would probably hurt like hell, but there was nothing structurally wrong with her feet, and pain alone wouldn’t kill her.
She lifted her chin and met his gaze. “I can handle it.”
He gave her another one of those long, thoughtful looks he’d been tossing her way over the past twenty-four hours, as if he were assessing her. She had a feeling his initial impression of her had changed quite a bit since he dragged her out of that parking lot into the woods, with good reason. The woman he knew was Susannah Marsh, a sophisticated, polished professional.
But the woman standing here in jeans and sneakers was all Susan McKenzie, except for the brunette dye job. She wore no makeup, her gray eyes were back to their normal color, and she even carried herself differently, her shoulders squared to challenge an unforgiving world.
She was her grandmother’s granddaughter, after all.
“Okay,” Hunter said finally with a brief nod. “I’ll get the pack.”
“I’ll see what we can take with us from the pantry.”
As she started to pass him, he reached out and touched her hand. A brief flick of his fingers against hers, but it was enough to send tremors darting down her spine. She looked up, not feeling nearly as fierce as she had just a moment earlier, and the heat that poured into her belly at the look in his eyes only made her feel weak-kneed and vulnerable.
“I know you don’t trust me,” he said quietly. “I know you have no reason to. But I take protecting you very seriously. I don’t want you to be afraid of me.”
“I’m not.” She forced her chin up, even though she was feeling anything but strong.
“Good.” His fingers brushed hers one more time, the lightest of caresses, and fell away.
Somehow, she managed to make it to the kitchen without her wobbly knees buckling under her.
Chapter Ten
About four months earlier, shortly after Alexander Quinn had approached him at Smoky Joe’s Saloon in Bitterwood, Hunter had decided to see what the CEO of The Gates was really all about. So he’d followed the man one afternoon on a winding ride up Lamentation Rise, a foothill just outside the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. On a clear day, he suspected, a person could probably see most of Ridge County spread out like a postcard, but the day he’d followed Quinn had been rainy and cool for early June. The peak had seemed to be buried in the clouds, the sprawling cabin near the summit a misty apparition in the afternoon gloom.
All this time, Hunter had believed that Quinn hadn’t spotted his tail job. He should have known better.
“Meet me at my cabin on Lamentation Rise,” Quinn had said tersely into the phone after warning Hunter about the two men heading for his front door. “I know you know where that is.”
“How much farther?” Trudging beside Hunter, Susannah sounded weary. She looked weary as well, her brow furrowed and dark circles starting to bruise the skin beneath her winter-gray eyes. They’d been hiking for almost two hours now, rabbiting around in circles for the first mile up to be sure to avoid any searchers out in the woods. Quinn’s cabin was far enough up the mountain that it wasn’t likely the searchers would get anywhere near it.
But they had to get there without being spotted first.
“Almost there,” he told her, hoping he was telling the truth. Quinn had given him quick GPS coordinates before hanging up, but a lot had been going on. He wasn’t sure he’d remembered them exactly, and it wouldn’t take much to go completely off track.
If he could just find the narrow road he’d traveled up the mountain to reach Quinn’s cabin—
“Is that a road?” Susannah asked.
He followed her gaze and saw the dusty gray of a gravel track barely visible through the trees ahead.
“It is,” he answered, relief fluttering in his gut. Reaching for her hand and giving it a tug, he set out for the road, giving her little choice but to follow.
The day was clear, the cabin visible almost as soon as they reached the rocky road up the rise. Next to Hunter, Susannah sucked in a quick breath, and he turned to find her grimacing.
The gravel, he realized, watching her take a couple of limping steps forward. The rocky surface must be hell on her injured feet, especially after so much nonstop hiking.
He shrugged his pack from his back and swung it from the crook of one elbow. “Okay. Hop on.” He held his free hand out to her.
She looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“You enjoy pain?”
“Enjoy might be a strong word. I can endure it, though.”
“You don’t have to. Come on. Piggyback time.”
She stared at him a moment, her lips pressed into a thin line of annoyance. But he could see the idea of getting off her sore feet appealed to her as well.
“Oh, what the hell.” She grabbed his shoulders and jumped onto his back, wrapping her legs around his waist. “Mush!”
Grinning, he hooked his arm around her legs to steady her and carried her forward. The extra weight of the woman and her pack made the last few yards to the cabin downright grueling, but he made it there without any embarrassing stumbles and deposited her on the first step of the cabin’s wooden porch.
Before he had a chance to catch his breath,
the front door of the cabin opened and Alexander Quinn stepped out onto the porch, greeting them with a silent nod.
Susannah’s surprised gaze flicked toward Hunter. “What’s going on?”
“Susannah, this is Alexander Quinn. Quinn, this is Susannah Marsh.”
Quinn’s eyes narrowed slightly at the introduction, but he managed a hint of a smile as he reached out his hand. “Ms. Marsh.”
Hunter watched as the princess reappeared, her neck extending regally and her movement graceful as she took Quinn’s hand and shook it firmly. “Mr. Quinn.”
Quinn’s lips quirked at the corners but the smile faded as quickly as it had come. He released Susannah’s hand and looked at Hunter. “Any trouble getting here?”
“We had to do some evasive maneuvers on the way up, but no trouble.”
Quinn took the pack from Hunter’s arm and motioned for Susannah to give him her backpack as well. “Hungry?”
Susannah’s eyes lit up before she could school her features to a neutral mask.
“Food would be great,” Hunter answered for her, following her and Quinn into the cabin.
While the large cabin was rustic-looking on the outside, inside Quinn had made the most of the space to showcase an exotic display of furniture, fabrics and knickknacks he’d apparently collected during decades of Foreign Service. Hunter supposed the princess, who was looking around the place with great interest, could probably tell him just what it was he was looking at as he scanned the room and drank in the riot of color and textures, but all he could think about was finding the nearest tub and taking a long, hot soak.
His bum leg felt as if it were about to fall right off his body.
“I have to be back at the office in an hour, so we don’t have long,” Quinn warned as he deposited the backpacks near the large brown leather sofa that took up most of the middle of the large front room. “The fridge is full, so as soon as we have a quick word about tomorrow, you can dig in and see what you like.”
“Tomorrow?” Susannah and Hunter asked in unison.
Quinn looked up at them both. “Tomorrow is the start of the conference. And we’re going to have to figure out a way to get the two of you back in that hotel.”
