by Rachel Lee
Gage shook his head. “Why in the name of all that’s holy would I call them? If this isn’t just some kind of weird coincidence, then we’re dealing with an organization that has already leaked information about you. They’re the last ones I’m going to call now. Unless that’s what you want me to do.”
Cory shook her head quickly. “No. No. I don’t want to run again. I can’t do that again.” Her entire soul seemed to be screaming that another round of running and hiding would break her forever. Clenching her fists, she said again, “No.”
Gage’s face gentled. “Not even to save your life?”
“What life? If I don’t make a stand now, I’ll never have one. I’m tired of always being frightened, of always looking over my shoulder. This guy is a killer and I’m the only one who can put him behind bars. If he’s found me, then I want to finish it now. I can’t…I can’t keep living this way. I just can’t.”
“All right then.” Gage stood. “I won’t even call the Marshals for a sketch of the murderer. I’m going to send an artist over here to do one just for us. I’d also like a sketch of the guy Wade thinks was following you. Are you up to that, Cory?”
“Definitely.” The decision was made. She would stand her ground.
And amazingly, that decision calmed her. The calm probably wouldn’t last, but for now it felt wonderful to have finally made the choice. “I’m through letting that guy ruin my life,” she said, looking from Gage to Wade. “And frankly, the way I’ve been living is no life at all. So let’s finish it, one way or another.”
The police sketch artist turned out to be nothing like Cory had imagined. Esther Nighthawk was a beautiful redhead who wore a long skirt and leaned heavily on a cane. Under one arm, she carried a sketchbook.
“Oh, I just do this to help out,” Esther said as Cory invited her into the kitchen so she’d have a table to work on. “I’m a full-time watercolorist, but I enjoy the challenge of doing these sketches for the sheriff.”
She settled on the chair facing Cory, and opened her sketchpad to a blank page. Then she pulled a box of drawing pencils from the large woven bag she carried. “I’m sorry we haven’t met before. My husband and I live on a ranch—he raises sheep—and I only get to town every couple of weeks for shopping. Or when one of the children needs to come in for something.”
“That sounds like a nice life,” Cory said almost wistfully.
“It is.” Esther’s gaze softened a bit. “My life sure changed radically after I met Craig. Before then I spent most of my time hiding.”
“From what?”
“Life. I had myself convinced that my art was all that mattered, but basically I was just afraid of a whole bunch of things. Neurotic would probably be a good word.”
“And now?”
“Now I love every minute of every day.” Esther smiled. “So, you’re going to help me draw a picture of a man Gage seems to be worried about?”
“Yes. I’ll try, anyway.”
“You talk, I’ll draw.”
So Cory closed her eyes for a minute, and tried to summon her memory of the man who killed Jim. “It’s hard,” she said after a moment. “You know how faces seem to skate away when you concentrate on them?”
“I know. That’s why you’re not going to concentrate. You’re going to give me one detail to start with. I’ll draw it, and you watch. As you watch me, tell me what’s right and what’s not. It’ll work. Trust me.”
So that’s what Cory did. She started with the general shape of the guy’s head, and after a few erasures she decided it was correct. Then a nose, and that needed only three iterations. Little by little, the image built, and Esther was right, it was easier to say when something was wrong than to give an exact description of what was right.
A half hour later and she was looking at an eerily familiar face, one she couldn’t have pulled out of her memory any other way.
“That’s him,” she said. “You couldn’t possibly get any closer.”
Esther nodded, smiling. “It’s never as hard as people think it will be.”
“Only because you’re such a good artist.”
Wade joined them, and together he and Cory helped create a sketch of the man they had met at the grocery.
“This is truly amazing,” Cory remarked again as she looked at the second sketch. “I thought I’d forgotten him entirely, but this is him.”
“You’re very gifted,” Wade told Esther. “Very gifted.”
Esther laughed. “Keep stroking my ego. More is always better.” She began to pack up her materials. “Listen, why don’t you come out to the ranch for dinner some night? I’d like a chance to get to know you better, and maybe someday you can tell me what this is all about.”
“I’d love that,” Cory said immediately, realizing she would. The urge to put down roots here had become almost compulsive since just a few days ago. It was as if warning flags had started to pop up in her psyche, telling her that if she continued on her current course she might as well die.
And along with all those warning flags, a desire to start making connections again, a real life again, pushed her.
Possibly into a very dangerous place, the dangerous place she’d spent more than a year hiding from.
Cory said goodbye to Esther at the door, then stepped back away from the opening as Wade ushered the woman to her car.
“Lock up and set the alarm after me,” he murmured as he passed. “I’m going to scout a bit before I come back.”
She did as told, then went to sit in the living room and wait. How had she survived the past year living this way? Waiting for a doom that never came, too afraid to lead any real kind of life, trying to be invisible even at her job.
With absolute certainty, she knew she couldn’t return to that way of life. She’d been dying by inches for too long. She couldn’t do it anymore. No way.
And if that meant possibly sticking her head into a noose, then that was what she would do.
Wade returned about twenty minutes later, quieting then resetting the alarm before he joined her.
“You’re going to go crazy,” she said when he sat beside her.
“I am? Why?”
“Because I just looked in the mirror.”
“Meaning?”
She gave a little shake of her head. “Inside this house is limbo. I sit here doing next to nothing, worrying, grieving, afraid. You’re going to go nuts locked in here with me.”
“I see.” He drummed his fingers briefly on the arm of the couch. “I won’t go crazy. I’ve been known to sit in hides for days on end waiting for the right moment, or the target, to appear. I can do it.”
“Well, I’m tired of it. I was just sitting here wondering how I’d managed to do nothing for so long.”
“Aww, Cory,” he said quietly. “Give yourself a break. You went through a terrible trauma, and then you got dumped on a foreign shore where almost nothing was familiar anymore. You needed time. You took it.”
“You’re very generous.”
“Just calling it the way I see it. If you’d lost your husband but been allowed to remain with your friends and family, to keep your job, you could have coped with your grief better. If you hadn’t lost your husband but had simply been obliged to move, you would have coped with that, too.”
“So sure?”
“I’ve watched your transformation over the last two days. I’m sure. What’s more, I think you need to cut yourself some slack because you experienced two major traumas, both of them stressful to the extreme. And then you had a killer to fear. Most people would have dug a hole and pulled it in after themselves.”
“That’s basically what I did.”
“But look at you now. For whatever reason, you’ve reached the point where you’re ready to take action. But that doesn’t mean the time you took to hide and lick your wounds was wrong.”
She would never have imagined this man could be so kind. Or that he would be willing to put himself out there the way he had today.
He’d seemed so self-contained, so impervious, so…rocklike. Yet while she still felt the almost insurmountable strength in him, she had found a kindness and understanding that seemed like a gift.
It was likely that if she’d ever put herself out there over the past year, she might have found that kind of kindness and understanding from other sources, but she’d been terrified into silence not only by the fact that a killer might be hunting her, but also by all the strictures the Marshals had placed on her. All the warnings. They had meant well, she was sure, but how do you pick up a life that had been so completely and totally interrupted?
“It was like they wanted me to erase myself and start out like a baby all over again.”
He nodded. “From their point of view, that seems like the best way to handle it. But it also leaves you without much of a starting point for anything.”
“Others are probably more resilient.”
“Most of those others didn’t see their husbands murdered and lose their baby at the same time.”
The stark truth of that bowed her head. She drew a shaky breath, hoping she wouldn’t dissolve into tears again.
He slipped his arm around her shoulders and squeezed gently. “Just grant that you’ve been doing the best you can.”
“I want to do better.”
“You’ve made that clear.” He paused for a moment, then said, “The way you need to think about the last year or so is that you were wounded. And it takes time to heal. So while you’re recovering, there are lots of things your body won’t let you do. Or in your case, your mind and emotions. Things that need to rest will rest.”
“I hardly think being totally terrified was much of a rest.”
“How can you know?”
“What do you mean?” She turned her head to look at him.
“Maybe the fear was a rest from things that were even harder for you to bear.”
That drew her up short. She hadn’t thought of it that way before, not at all. “Maybe,” she said finally. “I know how it’s been feeling, though.”
“How’s that?”
“Like I’ve been stuck in a quagmire of awful feelings with no way out.”
“And now?”
“I see a door. I don’t like what might be on the other side. It scares me. But, like I said, I’ve got to crawl out of this swamp or I’m going to die anyway.”
“We’ll get you out.”
He sounded so confident. She wished she could be as sure. But life offered absolutely no guarantees, and if she had just accepted that months ago, she might have already started to construct a new life.
Of course, if she had done that, she’d still be sitting here worried that the killer might have found her. Would it have made it any easier for her if she’d allowed herself to put down all those roots she was thinking of now? Not one bit.
In fact, it might have become even scarier. And this was already going to be scary enough.
Chapter 8
She tried to pass the time reading a book, but that didn’t work at all. Wade prowled the house from time to time only to return to the living room and sit for a while. She had no idea if he was peering out windows or what. Maybe he just couldn’t hold still.
She could barely stand it herself. Finally she closed the book and looked at him. “Are we supposed to just sit here indefinitely like bumps on a log?”
One corner of Wade’s mouth lifted and he came to sit beside her on the sofa. “What would you ordinarily do?”
“Exactly this,” she admitted. “Only now I’m too antsy.”
“Well, I don’t think we should do anything until Gage tells us he has his ducks in a row. Waiting is always the hardest part.”
She pursed her lips, trying to find some way to anticipate what might come next. “This guy, this killer, he wasn’t afraid to come to our house in the dead of night, knock on the door and shoot everything that moved.”
“Apparently not.”
“So what’s to keep him from doing the same thing here?”
“Nothing, except that I’m an unknown in the equation. That won’t hold him back indefinitely, but I’m sure it’s giving him pause.”
“What kind of pause?”
“He’s probably wondering just what kind of protection I can provide. Whether there’s a way he can separate us. All of which is based on the assumption that he’s really found you.”
She sighed. “I wish I knew for certain.”
“There are times when you can act, and times when you simply have to react. This is one of those times that we have to wait to react. Because we don’t know anything for certain.”
She felt a crooked smile twist her lips. “Listen to me. I spent more than a year just letting myself be pushed one way or another and now all of a sudden I want to do something. Anything.”
“I know that feeling.”
“You probably do.” She looked down at the book she was still holding. “I still can’t understand what they thought they’d accomplish by killing Jim. It’s not like they could erase the grand-jury testimony, or prevent indictments from being handed down.”
“I don’t know. Maybe they thought that if they removed one prosecutor, the government would have a hard time finding someone else to take over. Intimidation is the only reason I can see.”
“I doubt it worked.”
“But you don’t know?”
She shook her head. “Jim didn’t talk about his cases with me. He couldn’t. So even if I tried to check newspaper stories or court records, I couldn’t tell which case was his.”
“But you knew he was after a drug gang.”
“That was all I knew. And I’m sure he wasn’t the only prosecutor working on a case like that. In a way it’s hard not knowing if all his work put those guys in jail. But at the same time…” She shrugged. “What difference does it really make? It won’t change anything. Not for me, or Jim, or our baby.”
He turned her a little, cupping her chin with his hand, and kissed her gently. “I’m so sorry.”
If he meant the kiss to be comforting, it went beyond that. Way beyond that. She wished she knew how his kiss could drive everything else from her mind in a flash. And this one hadn’t even attempted to be sexy.
She searched his dark eyes and caught her breath as she saw the heat there. She wasn’t alone in her sudden desire, not alone at all. Yet he didn’t press her, didn’t even try to tip her in that direction.
His hunger for her went straight to her head, lifting her out of herself so that she forgot everything except this man and the heaviness growing between her thighs, a heaviness that demanded an answer.
There was something incredible in arousing a man so powerful and self-contained so easily and quickly. Maybe it was the only way he felt he could truly connect anymore. Maybe he would have responded that way to any woman.
She didn’t care. She knew what she wanted, and it was right in front of her. In his eyes she could see that he wanted it, too.
Her fingers moved before she realized it, reaching for the buttons of his shirt. He waited, letting her unfasten them, watching her face intently the whole time. When the last button was undone, she looked down at this chest and sighed.
“You’re beautiful,” she said, meaning it. Pressing her palms to that wonderful, warm skin, she ran her hands over him, feeling the rocks and rills of honed muscle, glorying in the sensations and in the way he indulged her exploration.
A slightly ragged breath escaped him. “Are you sure?” he murmured. “Very sure?”
“Yes.” The word came out on the last puff of air in her lungs, and hardly had it escaped her, than he scooped her up in his powerful arms and carried her back toward her bedroom.
“I won’t stop this time,” he warned her. “No half measures.”
“I don’t want half measures.” The truest words she had spoken in a long, long time.
“No quarter,” he said.
She wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but she was eager to take
this ride all the way to the end. Not only did she want this, she needed this. All of it.
He laid her on the bed in her half-darkened room and stood over her like a hero of myth, so big, so hard, almost unreal in his strength and power.
He shrugged off his shirt, then made it clear what was coming when he reached for his belt and the snap of his jeans.
Was she sure? Oh, yes. She watched with hungry fascination, hearing each tooth in the zipper as he drew it slowly down. It was the sexiest sound she had ever heard.
“Stop me now,” he said, pausing. “Now.”
“No.” His own word flung back at him.
She dragged her gaze up from where his hands rested against his fly and saw a lazy smile start to curve his mouth. His eyelids drooped a little with passion, but the rest of his face hardened with hunger.
He kicked off his shoes, then in one smooth movement shoved his pants down and discarded his socks. When he straightened, he was naked to her gaze, and what a breathtaking sight he was.
Michelangelo had never carved a more perfect male body. Nor had anyone to her knowledge ever carved a statue with an erection like that. He was big, he was hard and he was ready.
And the sight of his readiness made her damp, so damp she might have been embarrassed if she weren’t already in thrall to her needs. And his. For his need excited her even more than her own.
He bent over her, his fingers pausing just briefly as he once again warned her. “Last chance.”
She had begun to pant with the hunger he had already stoked in her, and it was hard to say one word, just one word: “Yesss…”
He stripped her clothes away impatiently, tossing each piece across the room until she lay naked. He paused a moment, drinking her with his eyes, leaving her feeling at once utterly vulnerable and utterly beautiful. No one had ever looked at her like that before, not even Jim, as if she were the most desirable woman he had ever seen. Just that look was enough to make her nipples harden and her center throb so hard it almost hurt.
In that instant, she became woman primal. Everything else vanished entirely. Nothing mattered except this man and this moment. She hardly noticed that he used the few seconds to don protection, because she watched his eyes as they traveled over her like a caress.
