Boneyard Ridge

by Paula Graves

He did not succeed.

  Time seemed to slow to nothing, and still she didn’t move away from him. They settled there, his hips pressed back into the kitchen counter, her legs tangled with his as she settled her body against his. Despite his arousal, he felt no burning need to change anything, no desire to break away from her grasp nor to take control and push the closeness between them to a different place.

  Slowly, the tension in his body eased, and even desire ebbed to a slow, sweet burn low in his belly. He felt her fingers brush through the crisp stubble of his buzz cut, exploring lightly, like a curious child.

  A bubble of humor rose unexpectedly in his chest. “The ladies always love the buzz cut,” he murmured against her throat.

  She laughed in his ear, but he felt it rumble through him everywhere their bodies touched. “It’s hypnotic.”

  He eased her away from him, but not too far, still holding on to her waist to keep her close. “In case you’re wondering, my virility is just fine.”

  She flashed him a sly grin. “Yeah, I can tell.”

  She crossed back to the table, picked up her own pack and slipped her arms through the straps, adjusting them until they fit. By the time she put the backpack down and turned to face him again, she’d donned a mask of cool professionalism, as if the warm, sweet woman who’d just hugged him out of his bad mood had disappeared.

  He felt the loss more keenly than he’d expected.

  “I think we’re going to have to risk leaving the packs somewhere off the hotel property,” she said. “If we take them with us, we’ll stick out like sore thumbs, and I don’t like the idea of leaving them in the SUV, in case we can’t get back to the parking garage.”

  “Good thinking.” He flashed her a grin. “Sure you didn’t spend some time in the Army?”

  She smiled, but there was careful distance in her expression. “I’m sure. But I think my grandmother may have spent some time as a boot-camp drill sergeant.”

  There was a thread of sadness in her voice, underlying the composure. It had sharp edges, pricking his conscience. He’d spent so much of the last few months with his head stuck in the middle of his own problems, it hadn’t even occurred to him that she had spent over a decade isolated from everyone she’d loved. “Do you ever get to see your grandmother?”

  She looked away, her profile sharp with regret. “She died two years ago.” She turned her winter-bleak eyes to meet his gaze. “We made a deal before I left, you see. That she would take out a classified ad in the online Knoxville newspaper once a week, just to let me know everything was okay. Then, one month, it wasn’t there. And I knew. I checked the obituaries for the month and there it was. She died peacefully in her sleep at the age of eighty-nine.”

  Despite the distance she’d deliberately put between them, he couldn’t have stopped himself from touching her again if he’d tried. Cradling her face between his hands, he bent and kissed her forehead. “I’m sorry. I would hate to find out about my sister’s death that way.”

  She covered his hands with hers, gently easing them away from her face and stepping back. But she kept her fingers entwined with his. “Does your sister know? What you’re doing? Where you are?”

  Her question was as good as a bucket of ice water in the face. Janet knew he’d joined the BRI. But she didn’t know he was working undercover. Quinn had convinced him he couldn’t let her know the truth.

  Now he wished he’d listened to his own instincts. But he couldn’t dwell on what he couldn’t change.

  Avoiding the question, he let go of her fingers and nodded toward the back door. The garage that held their transportation was through that door. “Let’s get everything packed in the SUV for tonight. Then we should probably try to get some sleep. It’s going to be a long night.”

  Without waiting for her, he headed out the cabin’s back door.

  * * *

  SHE SHOULD BE feeling anxious, Susannah thought. Jittery. But somehow the mere act of doing something besides running and hiding had a calming effect on her nerves, so that by the time they pulled up to the ticket gate of the executive parking garage, she rattled off the employee access code without even having to think about it, though it had been months since she’d parked there.

  “Will hotel security be able to identify you by the code?” Hunter asked a moment later as the metal gate rose and they drove into the belly of the concrete garage.

  “No. It’s a universal code. They do change it whenever an executive leaves or is fired, but there’s not a lot of turnover here. The company treats executives well, and it’s hard to beat the view from our offices.”

  “I didn’t spot a camera, but I assume there is one?”

  “I honestly don’t know. Like I said, security expenditures tend to lean heavily on the guest-protection side of the equation. If there is a camera, it’s probably not great quality.” She glanced at him, taking in his pin-neat appearance. “And trust me when I say, even up close, you look nothing like the maintenance man I ran into in the elevator the other day.”

  The corner of his lip crooked. “Should I say thanks?”

  She grinned back at him. “Entirely up to you.”

  He picked out a parking spot halfway between the exit and the basement entrance, close enough that they had a chance of winning a footrace to the SUV but not so close that they’d have to drive the whole curving length of the garage to reach freedom.

  They’d stashed their rucksacks behind a fallen tree about a quarter mile up the winding two-lane road that led to the Highland Hotel and Resort. If they managed to ditch pursuers by the time they reached that spot in the road, they could pull off down a dirt road about two hundred yards past the hiding place, hide the SUV in the trees and circle back to get their supplies.

  For the hotel invasion, they’d agreed to take a minimum of tools. Their weapons, of course—Hunter’s Glock still safely hidden in his ankle holster, hers tucked into a pancake holster at the small of her back, the bulge covered by her loose-fitting rain jacket. Susannah’s multiblade Swiss Army knife was tucked in the pocket of her jeans. She’d packed another pocketknife she’d found at Quinn’s place in Hunter’s backpack, but she’d forgotten to grab it when they stashed the packs. It probably didn’t matter—she assumed former First Sergeant Hunter Bragg was probably carrying something even more useful, and deadly. And they both carried small pen-size flashlights, in case they needed to provide their own light.

  They entered the hotel through the basement door and stopped just inside a narrow corridor that ended at a simple steel door about ten yards away. “Tell me that door isn’t locked,” Hunter said quietly.

  She had no idea whether it would be, she realized with dismay. She hadn’t even remembered there was a second door into the maintenance area. “Only one way to find out.” Bracing herself, she strode forward and turned the door handle.

  It gave easily, the door swinging open with the faintest of creaks. A shiver of relief washed through her and she edged inside the larger maintenance area.

  The mysterious, humming source of the hotel’s electricity, air-conditioning and heat wasn’t visible from this part of the basement, hidden behind a row of doors that lined the left side of a wider corridor leading from the garage to the service elevators located near the center of the room. Susannah bypassed the elevators and went to a large steel door just beyond. EMERGENCY EXIT was written in bright red letters on a sign just over the doorframe.

  The door opened into a roomy stairwell. Once she and Hunter made it inside the relative safety of the enclosed area, Susannah let out a gusty sigh of relief.

  “On the service elevators, this is marked P for Parking. I think the stairway doors to the floor levels should be marked the same way—lobby will be one, second floor two, etc.” She realized he was looking at her with a faint smile on his face. “Oh, right. You worked maintenance here. You probably already knew that.”

  He shrugged. “I did. And you’re right. That’s how they’re marked. So where do you w
ant to go first?”

  “My office,” she said. “I want to see if Marcus Lemonde is hiding anything in his desk that we need to know about.”

  As they reached the lobby level, she reached for the door, but Hunter caught her wrist before she could push the handle. “Let’s go up another flight. If I’m remembering the floor plans correctly, this door comes out in view of the lobby desk. We go up to second, we can go down the hall, come back down from the other side and none of the night staff is likely to see us.”

  “Good thinking,” she conceded, following him up one more flight of stairs to the second floor. So far, her healing feet weren’t giving her too much trouble, thanks to the excellent fit of the tennis shoes Hunter had purchased at the thrift store and the last-minute bandaging job he’d done before they left Quinn’s cabin.

  “How’re you holding up?” he asked as they opened the door that led into the second-floor corridor.

  “I’m good. How’s your leg?”

  He slanted a narrow-eyed look her way. “It’s fine.”

  Okay, then. Not a profitable topic of conversation.

  “It hurts,” he said a moment later as they edged out into the hallway after a quick look around. “Some days worse than others. Like I said before, lots of bolts and pins in there.”

  The hallway was deserted, the lights set on emergency lighting. There had been a few times Susannah had pulled an all-nighter preparing for a big event at the hotel, so she was used to the look of the place after hours.

  But apparently Hunter hadn’t worked any evening or night shifts during his short stint in the hospitality industry. “Is it always this dark at night?”

  “Saves power, which saves money. Because it’s occupied, they don’t cut out the lights, even in the business section of the hotel. But after six, they go to what they call the evening protocol, cutting out all but essential exit lighting.”

  “So if we turn on the light in your office, someone’s likely to spot it from outside.”

  “If they’re looking.”

  “I think we have to assume they will be.”

  Susannah stopped with her hand on the door of the stairwell at the far end of the corridor. “You really think they’ll be watching my office?”

  “I honestly don’t know. I just think we have to go on the assumption that they’re watching. Safer that way.” He closed his hand over hers, pushing the door to the stairwell open.

  She slipped inside, trying to ignore the little shudder of awareness that rippled through her as his body pressed close against her back. He placed his hand over her arm, stilling her forward movement, as the door clicked shut behind them.

  In the echo chamber of the stairwell, his whisper sounded impossibly loud. “Speaking of assuming the worst, what if there’s already someone in your office when we get there?”

  “You mean Marcus?”

  “If he’s up to his eyes in this plot, he might be here, finalizing things,” Hunter said.

  “We’re armed. We take him down, tie him up and make him tell us what they have planned.” She was only half joking, she realized.

  Hunter looked at her through narrowed eyes. “Bloodthirsty.”

  “Just tired of sleeping in strange beds.” She shot him an apologetic glance. “Not that your bed wasn’t perfectly nice. And really quite warm.” As warm as the air in the stairwell had become since they’d been standing there, pressed intimately close. She edged away from him before she did something reckless, like stand on her tiptoes and kiss him. “There’s a window in the door of my office. It’s not very large, but it should allow us to take a look inside to see if anyone’s moving about.”

  The first-floor corridor was empty when they eased through the stairwell door into the hall. Handing over the office key, Hunter scouted ahead a few yards, stopping just long enough to glance through the window in the office door. “All clear,” he said softly, moving up the hall to make sure they were still alone as she scooted toward her office.

  She unlocked the door and slipped into the darkened room, her heart knocking in rapid thuds against her sternum. Crazy, she thought, that two days ago, this office was as familiar and comfortable to her as her own apartment. Now it felt like an alien place, full of shadows and threat.

  The door handle rattled behind her, and she whipped around, her hand already closing on the Glock tucked behind her back.

  Hunter held up his hands. “I come in peace.”

  She dropped her hand to her side, squeezing her trembling fingers into a fist. “All quiet?”

  He nodded, moving past her to the windows, where the wooden blinds were currently levered open. One by one, he eased the blinds closed, then turned back to look at her. She could barely see him in the faint light seeping in through the window in the door, the dimmed hall lights offering little in the way of illumination.

  Pulling his penlight from his pocket, he nodded toward her desk. “The cops have probably already searched your desk—was there anything in there that would reveal your real identity?”

  “No,” she said firmly.

  “Does such a thing exist?” he asked curiously as he flicked on the penlight and aimed the narrow beam on Marcus’s desk. “Anywhere?”

  “Not anymore.” After her grandmother’s death, with nothing else to connect her to her old life but a blood vendetta she’d spent over a decade desperate to elude, she’d destroyed the handful of keepsakes she’d held on to for memory’s sake.

  Her grandmother had never been sentimental, and she’d managed to strip most sentiment from Susannah, as well. There hadn’t been a lot to hold on to, anyway. Just memories of a foolish mother, a venal father and a weak brother who could have made a better choice for his life but chose to follow in his father’s shiftless footsteps instead.

  And her grandmother, who never sat for a photo in her life besides her driver’s license photo.

  She crossed to where he crouched, looking under Marcus’s desk. “I used to have a piece of an old driver’s license that belonged to my grandmother. The photo part.” It had been one of the keepsakes she’d finally destroyed after her grandmother’s death, the grainy photo almost a decade old. Her grandmother had cut up the license when she’d received a new one shortly before the shooting that had sent Susannah out of town.

  Hunter looked up at her. “Just the photo part?”

  “She’d cut it up when she got her new license in the mail,” Susannah explained, tugging at the top right-hand door of the desk. “This is locked.”

  Hunter pulled a small wallet from his jeans pocket. “I was prepared for that possibility.” He flipped open the slim leather wallet to reveal something that brought back a few old, unpleasant memories for Susannah.

  “You have a lock-pick kit?”

  He glanced at her again. “You know what a lock-pick kit looks like?”

  “Did I mention my daddy was a thief?” She watched as he wielded the thin pieces of metal to pop open the lock on the drawer. “Explains why I was living with my grandmother, huh?”

  “What happened to the picture of your grandmother?” he asked as his penlight flicked across a collection of perfectly ordinary office-desk minutiae—a small box of staples, a few loose rubber bands, several paper clips in a variety of sizes. Nothing that screamed “domestic terrorist.”

  “I burned it after she died.” The memory stung. “She would have wanted me to. In fact, she’d have been furious if she’d known I’d kept the picture. She was so adamant about changing everything about my life, including my past.”

  “She was probably right. If the wrong person had seen it—”

  “I didn’t keep it on me. I bought this old locket at an antique store in Raleigh. A cheap piece of junk jewelry, but I kept my grandmother’s driver’s-license photo inside that locket. I never wore it or anything. Just kept it around so I could open it when I was feeling lonely.”

  Hunter put his hand on her arm, his touch gentle and deliciously warm. “I’m sorry you’ve had to
live that way.”

  “As long as there’s a Bradbury in these hills, I’ll be living that way. I guess it’s time to stop wishing for something else.”

  Hunter closed his other hand around her arm, penlight and all. “Don’t stop wishing for something else. When you stop wishing, you start dying.”

  “Why does that sound like the voice of experience?” she murmured, her heart hurting a little at the sight of his bleak expression, barely visible in the gloom.

  “Because it is.” He gave her arms a squeeze and let go, turning back to the desk.

  With the lock picks, he unlatched the rest of the drawers. In the top left drawer, the beam of the penlight flickered across what looked like loose tea leaves scattered along the right edge of the drawer.

  “Hmm,” Susannah said.

  “What?”

  She waved at the dried leaves. “I never figured Marcus as a tea drinker. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him drink anything but coffee before.”

  “Well, I don’t think he’s going to wipe out a cop conference with a bunch of rogue tea leaves, so maybe we should look elsewhere.” Hunter closed the desk drawer and looked around the office. “Is there anything you can remember about Lemonde that might lead you to believe he’s not what he seems?”

  “Honestly? We don’t really interact that much. He tends to do his job without talking much, which is fine by me.”

  “Antisocial much?”

  She arched an eyebrow. “Pot...kettle...”

  He grinned at her retort before his expression grew serious again. “Where would his personnel records be kept?”

  “Actually,” she said, moving toward the file cabinets behind her desk, “I should have a copy in here somewhere.” Flicking on her penlight, she aimed the beam toward the top drawer of the cabinet on the left and pulled it open, grimacing as some dark powder came off on her fingers. “Ugh, is that fingerprint powder?”

  Pausing at the edge of her desk, Hunter pulled a couple of tissues from the box by her phone. “Here.”

  “Thanks.” She wiped her fingers on the tissue, then used it to pull the drawer open wider so she could get to the file tucked in the back. She pulled it out and carried it over to her desk. “He had pretty good references from his last job.”