Though she could see nothing she could hear his restless movements. His hair was surprisingly soft, she found as she tried to awaken him by touch. When her gentle nudge had no effect she ran her fingers over his face, trying to determine if he was awake, asleep, or unconscious. His forehead was warm and damp with sweat. His brows were thick. The bridge of his nose was hard and finely chiseled. His cheekbones were hard, too, and prominent. His lips were soft, his cheeks and chin whiskery.
His breath fluttered past her hand. His head tossed from side to side. He said something that she could not understand.
“Jess.” Whispering, she patted his cheek. “Jess.”
Without warning her wrist was seized in a grip like iron. She jumped.
“Jess!”
“Oh, it’s you.” He didn’t sound particularly thrilled about the idea. “What?”
“You were having a nightmare.”
“So?” The single-word question was surly.
“So you were talking in your sleep.”
“So?”
“So shut up,” Lynn said, goaded. “And let go of my wrist.”
He let go. “Is Rory awake?”
“No.”
“Then go back to sleep. We’ve got a little while yet before we have to get moving.”
“Will they still be looking for us do you think? In the morning, I mean?”
“Yes.”
Lynn shivered. She’d known that, of course, but she hated having him confirm it. The danger had begun to seem like nothing more than a horrible bad dream. Now it was real again.
“Are you in pain?”
“What do you think?”
“Do you want another Tylenol?”
“No.”
Lynn was silent for a moment.
“Jess?”
“Hmm?”
“Do you have some kind of plan for getting us out of this alive?”
“What, are you planning to sue Adventure, Inc. if I don’t?”
“Yes.”
“Posthumously, I guess. Big on plans, aren’t you?”
“Do you have one, or not?”
“Yup.”
“What?”
“If we come across those guys again, we run like hell.”
“I’m serious!”
“So am I.”
Lynn glowered, though of course he couldn’t see her expression in the dark. He couldn’t see her, period. And she couldn’t see him, though she was kneeling beside his sleeping bag, her knees nudging his body through the soft padding.
Clearly, if there was to be a plan she was going to have to come up with it herself. If she left it to this big dumb cowboy, she deserved what she got.
“What we have to do is get to where your brother will be waiting with the Jeep. Once we’re on the road we’ll head straight for a phone and call the police.” She was thinking aloud.
“Brilliant.” Sarcasm came through loud and clear.
“You’re welcome to come up with an alternative.” Under the circumstances Lynn didn’t appreciate his tone. His life was on the line here too. “If you can.”
“You’re doing fine.”
“Okay.” Lynn took a deep breath. “How far do we have to go? To where we meet the Jeep, I mean.”
“About eight miles.”
“That far?” Lynn chewed her lower lip. “The problem is that they’re still out there looking for us.”
“Brilliant again.”
“You’re a big fat lot of help.”
“I’ve got it covered, okay? I’ve got a plan. So relax and go back to sleep.”
“You do?”
“Yup.”
“What?” Her distrust came through loud and clear.
“Christ, are you anal or what? I bet you make lists. I bet you get up every freaking morning and write down everything you have to do for the day and check it off when it’s done. I bet you set aside a certain time to return phone calls. I bet your closet is organized by color. I bet your bookshelves are alphabetized.”
That was so close to the truth that Lynn flushed.
“What’s wrong with that?” she asked defensively.
“Not a thing. Trust me, will you? I can get us to the Jeep without being seen.”
“Sure?”
“Guar-an-teed.”
Lynn said nothing. She didn’t believe him, though she wanted to badly. He couldn’t guarantee their safety. No one could. But since he knew the area and she didn’t, since he was more at home in the wilderness than she was, since he was part owner of the outfit responsible for her and Rory’s safety, she was going to follow his lead.
For the time being anyway. She was quiet for a few minutes, coming to terms with that.
“Jess?”
“What now?”
“The man on the cross—” Lynn shuddered at the memory. “What do you think that means?”
“That there are some real sickos in the world.”
Lynn shot him a disgusted glance, which he could not see, of course. “It must have been some kind of ritual killing, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know. Look, go back to sleep, would you?”
“I can’t sleep. I keep seeing that man—and that woman. And the boy.”
“I can sleep.”
“No, you can’t. You were having a nightmare. That’s not sleeping.”
“Works for me.”
Lynn didn’t answer, but she couldn’t bring herself to move. Having slept off the worst of her exhaustion, she no longer had any inclination to close her eyes. If she did, images of the murders would only rise up to haunt her. They were horrifying; it was too easy to imagine herself and Rory in the victims’ places.
She needed distraction to keep her from remembering and then degenerating into a trembling puddle of incoherent fear as she acknowledged that she and Rory—and Jess—were in terrible danger of joining those victims still.
For all their sakes she needed to stay calm. Jess might have the brawn necessary to get them to safety, but she doubted that he had the brain. If, as she had learned on the job, anxiety was crippling to creative thinking, consider how much more crippling abject terror must be.
A cigarette would go a long way toward calming her, but she didn’t have a cigarette. Shifting so that she was sitting cross-legged, her hands resting in her lap, Lynn closed her eyes and resorted to the next best thing.
“Om,” she chanted softly, concentrating. “Om.”
“What the hell is that?” Jess demanded.
Lynn opened one eye. “I’m meditating.”
“Jesus Christ.”
Lynn opened both eyes. “Do you have a problem with that?”
“Loonies to the left of me, loonies to the right …” he sang under his breath, to the tune of “Stuck in the Middle with You.”
“Are you implying that meditating makes me a loony?”
“Not just meditating, no.”
Lynn absorbed the implications of that. “Oh, yeah? Well, if you ask me it’s better to meditate than to spend your life swaggering around doing a bad imitation of Little Joe Cartwright, complete with boots and a big ole cowboy hat. Like a rhinestone cowboy …” She launched into an abbreviated, barely-above-a-whisper rendition of Glen Campbell’s song to retaliate for his earlier stab at musical entertainment.
“Are we talking about truth in advertising here?” he asked when she was finished.
“I’d say that’s what we’re talking about, yes.”
“Then let me say this: At least I don’t wear a Wonderbra.”
“What?” Lynn’s jaw dropped. “Are you implying that I do?”
“I’m not implying anything. I’m saying I know what I saw. It works great, by the way. Makes you look like you have a lot more up top than you really do.”
“I have plenty up top!”
“You do?” A hint of amusement in his voice stopped her cold. Lynn realized that she was being led down a path she didn’t want to travel.
“Why don’t you just shut up and go to slee
p?”
“With pleasure.” Jess shifted and was obediently silent. Lynn closed her eyes again and tried to meditate—making sure this time that the chant was inaudible—but she couldn’t get into the spirit of it.
Loonies to the left of me, loonies to the right … The ridiculous paraphrase kept running through her mind, interrupting her concentration.
The state of relaxation she was striving for wasn’t going to happen, Lynn realized. Not tonight, not under these conditions. Her eyes opened, to see exactly nothing.
She was all alone in the cold, scary dark, with both her companions asleep.
Maybe.
“Jess?”
“Are you still there?”
“Are you still bleeding? Can you tell?” she asked.
“I’m sleeping.” There was a pause. “The bandage is dry.”
“Good. We can’t get out of here without you, you know. I don’t know where we’re going.”
“Or you would have left me back there when I got shot. I know.” There was grim humor in the words.
“Well, no, of course not. But I have to take care of Rory. She comes first.”
“Motherly love.” He shifted. “You love her, she loves you. So what’s this thing you two have going on where you’re always fighting?”
Lynn shrugged, then realized again that he could not see in the dark. “She’s a teenager. What can I say?”
“So?”
“You don’t have kids, do you?” It was a world-weary query from a seen-it-all mother to a non-parent.
“Actually, I do. I have two girls, eight and ten.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Don’t sound so surprised. I’m thirty-five years old. How many men get to be thirty-five without having kids?”
“You’re thirty-five?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t look it. You don’t act it either.”
“Thanks. You don’t look thirty-five yourself. But you sure do act it. Fifty-five, more like.”
“Meaning?” Lynn bristled.
“You need to lighten up—especially on Rory. For Christ’s sake, you dog every step she takes.”
“I do not!”
“You’re here, aren’t you?” He said that as if it were incontrovertible evidence; Lynn knew he referred to her presence as one of the chaperons.
“That’s because—” she began heatedly, then stopped.
“Because …”he prompted.
“Because … nothing. You’re not really interested, and I don’t want to talk about it.”
“If you’re not going to let me go back to sleep, we’ve got nothing better to do than talk for a while. And I am interested. Tell me, why would a woman like you come on a trip like this when you didn’t have to?”
“What do you mean, a woman like me?”
“Christ, you have a manicure! You put on lipstick every morning before we head out! You powder your nose before you get in the saddle! And you can’t even ride a horse! I bet you’ve never camped out before in your life.”
“So?”
“So why’d you come?”
“I came for Rory, of course.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s my daughter, and I love her!”
“And?” Jess probed.
“And because we haven’t been getting along well lately,” Lynn said, finally giving up. It was a relief to admit it. Since she couldn’t see him, since he was nothing more than a low, rough-edged voice in the dark, he was surprisingly easy to confide in.
“My guess is you haven’t been getting along because you overprotect her.” Jess’s summation was dry.
“It isn’t that so much as it is …” Lynn hesitated. “I’m gone a lot. I have to work.”
Lynn heard the defensive note in her own voice, and flinched.
“Everybody has to work.” Jess’s tone was surprisingly understanding. “So she’s mad at you because you’re gone a lot. What do you do, leave her alone?”
“No! My mother lives with us—Rory’s never left alone.”
“So what’s the problem then?”
The truth came out in a rush, exquisitely painful. “She blames me because her father’s not in her life. Sometimes I think she hates me for it.” The total absence of vision was seductive. Never in her life would Lynn have imagined that she would confess that to anyone—much less to Jess Feldman, super-stud.
“Ah.”
“She never knew her father.”
“You divorced him when she was a baby?”
Lynn’s voice dropped until it was just above a murmur. Rory’s breathing was even and untroubled. The sound of it reassured Lynn: Rory had always slept the sleep of the dead.
Lynn didn’t want her daughter overhearing this.
“He walked out on me when I told him I was pregnant. He’s never even seen her.”
“She blames you for that?”
Lynn moved, pulling her legs up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. Her chin dropped to her knees. She had a sudden, intense craving for a cigarette.
“Yes.”
“Is it your fault?”
“No. Well, maybe. Some.” Lynn took a deep breath. “I’d only known him six weeks when we got married. I don’t know what I was thinking. I was young, you know? And stupid Just twenty-one, just getting ready to graduate from college. He was a med student, in his first year. He was smart and handsome and he was going to be a doctor—who could ask for anything more? We were really happy too—until I found out I was pregnant. Kids weren’t on his agenda right then, he said; his whole focus had to be on getting through medical school, and mine had to be on supporting us financially until he got out and we got on our feet. The bottom line is, he wanted me to get an abortion. When I wouldn’t he walked out. I got a divorce, I had Rory, and I went to work. My mother—my father died when I was in college-moved in with us to take care of Rory. And that’s the way it’s been ever since.”
“Does he pay child support?”
Lynn shook her head, then realized again that he could not see. “I never asked for any. Of course, he couldn’t have paid any when we got divorced; I was the one with the job. He was in school. But I didn’t want to see him—and I didn’t want him to see Rory. Not that he ever tried. I never realized how it would affect her—until she was about nine and started really asking about him. Finally I got in touch with him. He was a doctor by then, with a new wife and a new family. He said he didn’t want to hear anything about Rory, that I’d chosen to have her without his consent and she was mine, not his. And he hung up. I’ve called a few times since, and written too. He doesn’t want to know.”
“So how can Rory blame you for that?”
Lynn shut her eyes. “I couldn’t tell her that her father didn’t want to see her, didn’t even care enough to speak to her on the phone or send her a birthday card. If she knew that it would crush her. She has this fantasy built up—this fantasy that he loves her, that the only reason he hasn’t contacted her is because he hates me.”
“So you’re the bad guy.”
Lynn grimaced. “I’m what’s standing between her and her fantasy father.”
“So she comes on to men old enough to be her father, trying to replace him.”
Surprised at his perception, she opened her mouth to ask how he could possibly know that—then realized that of course he would know. He wasn’t stupid, and the psychology of it was obvious. Besides, Rory had been coming on to him. Lynn had merely filled in the why.
“Yes,” she said miserably.
“And to punish you, I’d imagine.”
“I think that’s part of it, yes.”
“You need to tell her the truth.”
“I can’t!” Lynn shuddered at the prospect.
“Suit yourself. But she’s carrying around a whole wagonload of anger, and it’s not going to just up and vanish one day. You need to tell her the truth and let her deal with it. Accepting the world as it is, instead of as you wish it w
ere, is part of growing up.”
“Thank you, Dr. Feldman,” Lynn said. “What are you, some kind of lay psychiatrist?”
“Actually, I minored in psychology. I just never got around to hanging up my shingle.”
“In college? You went to college?” Lynn was glad to be distracted from talking about Rory.
“Why does that surprise you?”
“I just never knew there was a college for turning out fake cowboys.”
“Ha, ha. That’s very funny.”
“Seriously, where did you go?”
“Brigham Young.”
“You’re joking.”
“I am not joking. Why should I be?”
“Somehow I just can’t picture you … never mind. You went to Brigham Young University, and you minored in psychology. What did you major in?”
“Criminal justice.”
“Criminal justice?” Lynn’s voice rose with incredulity on the last word. “Did you get a degree?”
“Sure I did.”
“And you became a fake-cowboy tour guide?” Incredulity still colored her voice.
“Actually, the first thing I did was go to work for the federal government.”
“Doing what?”
His answers were coming slower now, and Lynn got the impression he was in some way reluctant to continue.
“I was an ATF agent.”
“A what?”
“An agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.”
“For how long?”
“Nine years.”
“Then you quit being a federal agent to become a fake cowboy?”
“Would you please stop with the fake-cowboy crap? It’s a business, okay? Owen and I make a good living at it. I quit … because I didn’t like what I was doing anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Can we just forget this? I don’t feel like talking about it.”
“Hey, I told you my life story. It’s your turn. Why didn’t you like what you were doing anymore?”
Jess took a deep breath. “Because I was at Waco, okay? I was one of the agents at Waco. All those people died—our people, their people, women, little kids—and I was part of that. Was it our fault? Did we make the wrong call? Or did the chief nut case plan to whack his own followers all along? Who the heck knows? All I know is, I just couldn’t stand the thought of dealing with the nuts of this world anymore. I had to get out. So I came back here and went into business with Owen.”
Heartbreaker Page 13
