by Sharon Sala
But he was ready to move. All he needed now was a means of escape. And like everything else that had happened since he’d crawled out of the wrecked plane, it appeared to him like magic in the form of a red-and-white pickup that was parked on the side of the road.
There was only one problem. When he had left the concealment of the trees in which he stood, he had a good hundred yards to cover, without being seen, just to get to where the pickup had stopped. And while he was debating how to accomplish that, the driver solved his problem when she turned her back on his location and began to change a flat.
* * *
“Just one more lug nut,” Toni muttered to herself, and reached into the hubcap near her knee where she’d tossed them earlier.
Sweat ran into her eyes; her hands were filthy; her nose itched, and she wanted a drink of water. She was miserable.
“Hey there, honey. Are you about done?”
Startled by the sound of a man’s voice, her first thought was that he could have at least come a little earlier and helped. And then she stood and turned. She had a vague impression of a huge ham-fist swinging toward her chin, then oblivion.
* * *
When the sheriff’s car turned the curve, Lane breathed a sigh of relief. Toni’s pickup was on the side of the road. Even from here he could see the elevated rear.
“There she is,” Dan said. “Looks like she had herself a flat tire.”
But Lane’s relief died within seconds as he saw a flash of dirty orange and a hulk of a man pulling an unconscious woman to the opposite side of the pickup. Instinctively, his hand went to his gun.
“Call it in,” Lane said harshly. “It’s Rice. He’s got Toni.”
Holley’s hand was on the radio before the patrol car came to a stop, and by the time he started relaying the message, Lane was already out of the car. He was crouching behind the half-open door, shouting an order to surrender to a man who didn’t know the meaning of the word, as the dust they’d outrun slowly caught up and settled upon them.
“No!” Justin screamed as he ground his vehicle to a halt just behind the sheriff’s car, then started to get out.
“Stay down, you fool,” Dan shouted. “He’s armed.”
“But he’s got my sister,” Justin yelled.
And he’s got my lady, Lane thought as his finger tightened on the trigger of the gun he had aimed at Emmit Rice’s head.
“Give it up, Rice. Let her go,” Lane ordered and shifted the sight of his gun to follow the erratic movement of Emmit’s upper body.
“Get back, you son of a bitch, or I'll break her neck,” Rice yelled, unable to believe who had pulled a gun on him. The last time he’d seen that man, he’d been dead underneath DeVon Randall and a section of seats. What had he done? Resurrected himself?
Lane didn’t blink. His arm was rock steady, his finger taut and ready to pull.
“Let her go,” Lane repeated, and fought back a wave of fear. He couldn’t let himself think about the woman in Rice’s arms. She was a hostage, an unknown. He couldn’t let himself remember her laugh, and her eyes or the way she’d gone weak at his touch.
“Like hell! You get back, and I mean now! I'm in charge here! You do what I say or the woman dies,” Rice roared.
“Let her go!” Lane said once more, swallowing back the bile rising in his throat.
Rice laughed. His head tilted in amusement as he shifted his squeeze hold on the woman’s neck just to prove that he could.
A barrage of images flashed through Monday’s mind. A dog with a broken neck. A calf with its throat slashed and gaping. Toni, limp and unmoving, as Rice held her to his chest like a shield.
“Toni! Can you hear me?” Lane shouted.
“Help is on the way,” Dan told him, and shifted to a less compromising position at the back of the patrol car.
“Help will be too damned late,” Lane growled. He knew this man. He’d seen his rap sheet. There were no survivors of encounters with Emmit Rice.
“You get back, and you get back now,” Rice shouted, and waved the gun that he was holding toward Toni’s head. “Move, or I blow her brains out. It makes no difference to me, Monday, and you damn well know it!”
“Dear God, no!” Justin groaned.
“I'm taking her with me,” Emmit shouted, and started toward the door on the passenger side. “You give me safe passage and I promise I'll...”
Lane’s thoughts froze on the word promise. Emmit Rice didn’t know the meaning of the word. Suddenly Lane stood, his decision made as he offered himself as a target to the man with the gun.
Dan Holley saw Lane’s movement and followed to cover him.
Lane shouted. “Rice! Let her go!”
Startled by the shout as well as the lawman’s unexpected movement, Rice inadvertently jerked, then turned as he aimed at Lane’s chest. Just a fraction. Just enough.
The gun bucked in Lane’s hands, and a loud, reverberating roar echoed over and over at the once-quiet roadside where a woman had been fixing a flat. The gun in Emmit’s hand discharged in return. But it was only a reflex, and the bullet went into the ground, because Emmit Rice had died the moment the bullet from Lane’s gun had hit his brain. He went down, taking Toni with him. Within a heartbeat of the shot, three men were running toward the other side of Toni’s truck.
Lane reached her first and tore her out of Rice’s grasp.
Don’t let this be happening, Lane thought as his hands traced her face and body. Don’t let it be too late!
This was not the first time that he’d touched Toni’s body in such an intimate manner, but now he wanted to feel a heartbeat, not the catch in her breath as their bodies joined. And when he found her pulse, coupled with the slow, uneven groan that slipped out of her mouth, he knew a moment of total joy unlike anything that making love could have brought him.
“Thank you, God.” It was all he could say.
He lifted her into his arms and carried her away from the remnants of the man who’d nearly ended her life.
“You damn fool!” Justin grabbed at Lane’s shoulder, trying to pull his sister from Lane’s embrace. “You might have killed her.”
“I might have,” Lane said, and then looked back at the man on the ground. “But he would have. Emmit Rice did not take hostages. He took victims, and left them in pieces for their families to bury.”
Justin blanched, then watched, unable to move as Lane carried Toni a short distance away.
“Let it go, Justin,” Dan said as sirens could be heard coming down the road. “He did the right thing, and it saved Toni’s life.”
Chapter 11
Toni shifted in Lane’s arms.
“What happened?” she mumbled as her hand moved toward her jaw and the pain that she felt there.
What happened? I nearly lost you, lady. But the thought did not fit the decision that Lane had already made. He couldn’t lose something that he’d already given away.
Lane caught her fingertips before they centered upon the swiftly darkening bruise and held them to his lips without caring how it might look to the gathering crowd. All he could think of was the living, breathing woman that he held who had survived the ordeal. He had no way of knowing how long she’d been in Rice’s clutches, or what she’d had to endure, but at this point, he didn’t care. She was alive.
“You're safe, baby,” Lane said softly.
Toni’s heart thumped erratically as she blinked to clear her vision. She knew that voice. She recognized the touch.
“Lane? Is that you? How did you...” Toni jerked, and started to fight her way out of his arms. “There was a man!” she cried. “He came up from—”
“He’s gone. It’s over. He can’t hurt you again,” Lane said, and felt satisfaction from the knowledge.
Justin knelt, and without asking, pulled his sister from the lawman’s embrace. “Come here, sis, don’t be afraid. You're safe now.”
Toni let herself be traded from one man’s arms to the other’s because it was not
in her at the moment to think straight. But when Lane had turned her loose and walked away, she knew a bit of her heart had gone with him.
Lane had given her up to Justin because he had no right to object, but it was a cold, empty feeling that he took with him as he returned to the scene of the crime. There were things to be done that only he could do, and the one that satisfied him the most was giving a positive identification to the man who was lying in a spreading pool of blood.
“Justin, where did you come from, and better yet, where did they?” Toni shuddered, staring around in dismay at the gathering of people and cars.
“God, Toni, I thought you were dead.”
Toni vaguely remembered seeing the man’s fist and then everything going dark. It could just as easily have been a permanent “lights out” for her. She had never realized before how fast a person could die.
“It seems that Lane Monday wasn’t the only man who survived the plane crash,” Justin informed her. “The body the authorities fished out of Pigeon River wasn’t Emmit Rice, after all. It was old man Sumter. They're speculating that Rice was responsible for the thievery.” He shuddered and clutched his sister tightly. “We figured he was trying to steal your pickup for a getaway. He was going to take you with him as a hostage.”
“Oh, my God!”
Toni wouldn’t let herself think of what might have been. Suddenly, she was very glad that she’d been unconscious. Having to deal with remembering something like this might have taken a while to get over.
“How did they stop him?”
Justin bowed his head. “Monday did it. He saved your life.”
Toni’s heart leapt in her chest. It was a strange and telling thing to know that she now drew breath because of another person’s actions. Now I know how he felt, she thought.
“Justin, help me up,” she said, and started to struggle to her feet.
“No, Toni! The ambulance should be here any minute. Let them check you out first and see if—”
“I have a sore jaw. Nothing more. The dirt on me was already there before he came. I was changing a flat. Now damn it, Justin, help me up!”
Justin sighed. “Just be careful,” he warned, but she was already gone, walking through the heat and dust toward the tall, dark-haired man who was standing in the center of the nearby crowd.
Toni’s legs were shaky, but her need to get to Lane was strong. She hadn’t expected to see this man ever again, and now, to have it happen like this was almost too much to bear. When he’d left last week, in her mind, they had been even. She’d saved his life and he’d granted her a last request.
They were an unlikely couple with an impossible situation between them. He had more than made it plain to her that he didn’t want entanglements, and as hard as it had been to accept, she’d taken from him what he was willing to give and told herself it was enough. Yet why, she wondered, did fate keep throwing them together? What good could ever come from the pain of continual parting?
But the knowledge that she could see him, be with him, even if it was only for a short space of time, was worth more sleepless nights, because Lane Monday had stolen a piece of her heart.
“Lane.”
In the middle of a crowd, in the middle of a sentence, Lane froze. The soft sound of his name on Toni’s lips sent him spinning around as the people surrounding them blurred out of focus. All he could see was her face and those eyes, dark and compelling, asking more of him than he was willing to give.
He looked over the heads of the people around him, searching for Justin, for the paramedics, someone... anyone...to explain why she was not under someone’s care. And then she touched his arm and it was too late to stop the flow of feelings that swamped him. He could no more stop himself from touching her than he could have ceased taking his next breath. His palm cupped her cheek, and gentleness was in every nuance of his touch and voice.
“What are you doing up, lady? You should be lying down taking it easy. You've had a hell of a scare.”
She covered his hand with her own and shook her head. “I'm not the one who got scared. I got off easy. I don’t remember a thing after a swinging fist until I heard your voice.”
“Ah, God.” He pulled her into his arms and crushed her against his chest. “I was nearly too late,” he said, and let himself go as he started to shake.
Toni wrapped her arms around his waist and allowed herself the fantasy that this was where she belonged. His heartbeat was rapid beneath her eardrum. His clutch seemed desperate as he held her fast. She pretended it was more than relief with which they embraced.
“This time it was you who saved my life,” Toni said. “I don’t know how to say thank you, but I...”
The words died on her lips. A sensation of having already been in this place, saying these words, made her head spin as a wave of embarrassment sent a rapid flush to her cheeks.
Lane went still. Only days ago he’d been saying the same thing to her. And the memory of what she’d asked was uppermost in his mind as he tilted her face to his and stared long and hard into her eyes. Could he? Should he?
“I do,” he said, and felt her shock even though she did not move.
Dear Lord, Toni thought. Please let this be what I think.
“You do? What?” she asked.
“I know how you can say thank you.”
She closed her eyes and swallowed. If she was wrong, there would be no way to get out of the shame of letting him know that she cared too much. She opened her eyes. When she looked up, she was staring into a wall of blue fire.
“What are you saying?” she whispered.
He tried to smile, but it got lost in his pain. “Once more...just for fun?” he whispered, and kissed the corner of her mouth.
“Toni! The ambulance is here,” Justin said, grabbing her arm as he demanded her attention.
Startled by the interruption, Lane stepped back and resisted the urge to punch Justin Hatfield in the nose.
Toni didn’t argue. She was too busy trying to assimilate the implications of what Lane had asked. Oh, God, if I do this again, will I have the strength to pretend it doesn’t matter when he leaves?
She answered her own question when she suddenly stopped, then turned and looked back to Lane, who was still watching her.
“I suppose there will be all kinds of paperwork,” she asked, and knew it was the last thing he might have expected her to say.
“A fair amount, I suppose.”
She nodded. “It will probably take at least a day or so, won’t it?”
Lane’s eyes widened. Suddenly he knew where she was leading, but he couldn’t help himself, or hide his expression of shock. She was going to say yes.
“At least,” Dan Holley added, overhearing and answering for Lane as he walked up. “It’s good to see you up and walking, girl,” he said, and patted her gently on the arm. Then he grinned. “And you had better believe there'll be paperwork. Local reports, state reports and federal forms that I don’t even want to consider. I've already got this man a room at the Smoky Mountain Motel. He’s not budging from Chaney until he has dotted the last i and crossed the last t.”
Toni nodded without looking at Lane again, but it hadn’t been necessary. In his mind it was what she hadn’t said that counted. She hadn’t told him goodbye.
* * *
Toni wished that she were in her own home this evening, instead of under the caring, watchful eye of Justin and enduring the noisy romp of family running in and out of the house. Her thoughts were on Lane and what he’d asked. And she knew good and well that she’d complied simply by asking about his location. Inwardly, they read each other all too well. It was what they couldn’t say aloud that was making all of this so difficult.
Justin pretended to be reading a paper, but Toni knew that he hadn’t missed one of her fidgets since bringing her home. But her family was simply going to have to worry, because there wasn’t anything she could say or do to help. It was going to take time for them to learn how to accep
t that the ugliness of the outside world had come into their small, rural community and changed their perception of safety forever.
As for herself, she’d already come to terms with losing more than a woman deserved to bear. For Toni, all she had left was her life. Her parents were gone. The man she’d foolishly fallen in love with was leaving her again. She had nothing but years stretching ahead of her. Single, lonely years, unless...
She took a deep breath and rose from her chair, unwilling to let hope get in the way of consequences. She and Lane had made love, but for all the wrong reasons. She’d wanted something from him that he wasn’t willing to give, and had taken something he didn’t know that he’d left. It remained to be seen whether anything would come of their union, but one thing was clear. Baby or not, she would never forget Lane Monday.
A tiny squeak, followed by a rather loud cry, was all the impetus that Toni needed to pick Lucy up from her crib.
She clasped the baby close against her, loving the feel of downy hair brushing against the skin on her neck. “What’s wrong, little girl? Is there too much noise for you to rest?”
Judy walked over and gave her baby’s rump a comforting pat. “Noise is the last thing that bothers her,” she said. “It’s probably my fault. I've done nothing but cry all evening. I'm sure she senses the unrest. Here, let me have her. I'll rock her a while. Maybe that will calm her down.”
Reluctantly, Toni gave up her niece, and turned toward the door, unwilling to stay inside another moment under her brother’s scrutiny.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
Toni sighed, pausing in the doorway. “Outside, Justin. Only outside. I need some space. Okay?” Without waiting for his permission, she walked out, closing the door firmly behind her as indication that company was not invited.
* * *
The next morning, when the sun was barely over the horizon, Justin walked out of the house in time to see Toni loading her overnight bag into her pickup.
“Where are you going?” he asked. “You haven’t even had breakfast.”
Toni hugged her brother’s neck. “I'm going home, Justin, where I belong. I want my own bed. I need to check on the livestock. I want to eat a bowl of cereal in peace without looking to see if you're watching me eat.”
