Runaway Heart

by Saranne Dawson

  THE NIGHT was cold, but instead of going inside, C.Z. drew the blanket around her more tightly, then daubed at her tears with a corner.

  Delayed reaction, she told herself, but understanding it didn’t help. Neither did Zach’s explanation. Yes, she wanted vengeance—but she also felt as though a wound that had almost healed had been torn open. It hadn’t been easy for her to accept that her father had been the victim of some hunter’s stupidity, but facing the possibility that he’d been murdered was far worse.

  How could they go about proving Harvey Summers’s involvement? She had been relying on Zach to come up with a plan. After all, he was the detective. But she was in a better position to gain information than he was. Even in disguise, he could not afford to become too noticeable, while she could quite easily move around, asking questions, prising information out of various people.

  She was just beginning to consider how she might go about that when she heard a sound behind her and Zach appeared on the deck. He had offered her the bed in the loft, but she’d insisted on using the sofa downstairs. The conversation had been fraught with tension because they both knew there was a third choice, the one they both wanted but refused to voice.

  “It’s cold out here,” he said. “Come back inside.”

  His voice was soft and filled with understanding, and she was struck by how very gentle he could be and how appealing that gentleness was, coming as it did from a man like him.

  She followed him inside, but kept the blanket wrapped around herself, since she was wearing nothing beneath it but an oversize T-shirt.

  “I was actually hoping you wouldn’t make the connection,” he said as he tossed another log onto the fire. “At least not until later. We could have this all wrong, Charlie.”

  “I know,” she said, smiling at his use of the nickname. “But I think we’re right.”

  “I do, too,” he admitted, glancing at her as he squatted in front of the fire. “But proving any of it isn’t going to be easy.”

  She told him about the job with Ondago Family Services. “That would make it easy for me to be here and maybe look up some old friends. In fact, Stacey invited me to come stay with her for a while.”

  “That’s fine, except that you’ll have to be very careful. If we’re right, this is a man who’s killed once and tried to kill a second time to protect his secret. We have to assume he’s already made a connection between us.”

  “If we don’t take some chances, we’ll never get at the truth,” she pointed out.

  He stood up and jammed his hands into the pockets of his jeans. She tried to avoid staring at his bare chest with its sprinkling of dark hairs, but her eyes followed the thin, dark line that disappeared into the waistband of the jeans. She clutched the blanket still tighter.

  “Taking chances is my business—not yours.”

  “Not anymore,” she insisted. “If he killed Dad—”

  “That’s why I hoped you wouldn’t make the connection,” he interrupted harshly.

  “Well, I did, and now I have to know. Getting information out of people without revealing my thoughts is part of my work, Zach, and I’m very good at it.”

  “That’s a whole lot easier to do when you’re not emotionally involved,” he observed.

  Their eyes met, and she knew he was reading her thoughts. She had been emotionally involved even before she realized Harvey Summers might have killed her father.

  The cabin was lit only by the shifting glow of the fire. The only sounds were the soft hissing and cracklings as the fresh logs succumbed to the flames. C.Z. grew very warm inside the blanket, but she knew it wasn’t the result of the fire’s heat.

  “There’s an irony here somewhere,” he said into the tense silence. “Back at the hospital, we were both ready to forget where we were and take a chance. But now…”

  He paused, and she was about to ask him why that had changed for him. But before she could form the words, he’d closed the small space between them. His fingers grazed her cheek softly, and then his lips were on hers.

  His kiss seemed all the more potent because he wasn’t otherwise touching her. Instead, his lips and tongue teased and tormented and promised, then withdrew only to begin tracing a moist, hot trail along the curve of her jaw and across her throat. A sigh escaped from her lips, and her grip on the blanket loosened.

  The folds of the blanket bunched between them, and Zach tore it away, his impatience contrasting sharply with the slow meanderings of his lips.

  But then he seemed to regain his self-control as he drew her carefully into his arms. Taut nipples brushed against the hardness of his chest through the thin barrier of her T-shirt. She moved closer, fitting herself to him, sliding her arms around him, feeling the smooth muscles beneath her fingertips.

  There were good reasons this should not be happening, but they no longer seemed important to her. Or perhaps a part of her illogically believed it wouldn’t happen because it hadn’t happened before. But they were no longer at the prison or at the hospital. They were alone in a cabin miles from anywhere and anyone, with a blazing fire casting a ruddy glow that softened the hard edges of reality.

  His hands slid down to press her more firmly against him, and she felt the force of his desire being answered by her own throbbing need. Before she could even think it, her lips were forming the word.

  “Yes,” she whispered huskily. “Yes.”

  His only response was a deep groan as he slid his hands beneath the T-shirt and pulled it quickly over her head. She arched backward, clutching at the taut muscles of his arms as his lips traveled with agonizing slowness across her throat and along the soft swell of her breasts, lingering, teasing—until he finally captured one aching bud and then the other as he ground his hips against hers.

  Instinctively, she fought against the wildness that was taking her over, but the battle was lost almost before it began. With a sigh, she surrendered to the flames of passion that were consuming her. Every fiber of her being cried out for his touch as he eased her onto the rug before the hearth, then stood over her as he stripped off his jeans.

  In the flickering light of the fire, she saw him as dark and dangerous and so essentially male that it took her breath away. Before, she could never have imagined herself wanting such a man, but now she knew she could want no other. His pale eyes glowed with an electric intensity as he stared at her. The stubble on his cheeks and some of the hairs on his chest gleamed silver. He seemed so alien to her, strange and wondrous and as different from herself as it was possible to be.

  She reached out to him, and he came to her arms, all hardness and roughness but still gentle, his passion contained, coiled within him by sheer force of will. She could feel him shuddering beneath her touch.

  Bodies entwined, they sought to learn each other, quickly embarking on a journey of discovery as desire screamed silently through them both. With lips and fingers, they explored each other and laid claim to each other and yielded their secrets.

  His beard had not yet grown long enough to be soft, and it scraped against her skin as he kissed her, moving with deliberate, taunting slowness along the length of her body, a body she yielded to him willingly, eagerly.

  It was a wild coming together, the ultimate joining of male hardness and female softness in a frenzy of need that drove them both all too quickly over the edge into pure, mindless ecstasy, then sent them spiraling down slowly, softly, as the ancient rhythms of love gave way to pleasant, rippling aftershocks.

  “ZACH! Someone’s out there!” C.Z. whispered urgently as she moved from the warmth of his arms to the cold reality of their situation in a heartbeat. It couldn’t be happening—they couldn’t take him away from her now!

  He slid naked from the bed, but without any great urgency. “It’s that damned bear again. I forgot to bring in the trash can.”

  “Are you sure it isn’t—”

  “They wouldn’t come at night,” he said, but she noticed he had picked up her father’s gun.


  He disappeared down the stairs from the loft and was swallowed by the darkness. Despite his assurances, her heart was threatening to leap into her throat. She could hear him below her, opening a cabinet in the kitchen. What on earth was he doing?

  She got out of bed and went to the railing just in time to see him open the door and step onto the deck. Instead of the gun, he had what looked like a couple of pans in his hands. A moment later, she heard him shout and then heard a metallic crash as though he was beating the pans together.

  The door opened and he was inside. He glanced up and saw her. “That should get rid of him for the night,” he said as he walked to the kitchen. “But just to be sure, I’ll bring the can inside.”

  C.Z. returned to the bed, willing her fear to go away. But it refused to go. It could have been the police—if not at night, then sometime in daylight. How could she have let herself believe they were two ordinary lovers enjoying an interlude in a romantic, isolated cabin?

  Zach came up the stairs and put the gun in the drawer of the nightstand. When they’d come up here earlier, it had been on the top of the nightstand, but the moment he saw her staring at it, he’d put it away.

  He sat on the edge of the bed. “They won’t come at night, Charlie.”

  “But they will come,” she persisted. “Stacey said they were searching all the cabins in the area.”

  “That’s going to take some time, and they’ll probably start with the ones closer to town. There aren’t enough men on the force to get to them all quickly.”

  He ran a hand over his stubbly cheeks. “By the time they get here—if they get here at all—my disguise should be ready.”

  She said nothing, but she was wondering how a disguise—even a good one—could hold up against the scrutiny of men who knew him.

  He slid in beside her and drew her into his arms. “I want you again,” he murmured against her ear. “I can’t stop wanting you.”

  “WHERE ARE WE GOING?” she asked nervously. How could he risk going out with her in broad daylight?

  “Just down to the other cabin. He has a garage, and we can keep your car there. There’s no place to hide it up here.”

  “Oh.” She hadn’t given any thought to that.

  “Then, after we hide the car, we’ll take the Jeep and go over to my place through the woods. I need to get some things.”

  “Zach!” she cried. “You can’t go over there!”

  “They won’t be watching it every minute. In fact, they’re probably not watching it at all. They won’t be expecting me to go there. And as long as I’m in that area, I’m going to see if I can get to Summers’s camp through the woods. I want to see if he’s keeping an old truck there.”

  She started her car. “But surely he wouldn’t have kept the same truck.”

  “No, but I’d still like to see if he has one.”

  C.Z. didn’t see how that would prove anything and she couldn’t imagine he needed anything from his own place so badly he should risk going there. But she didn’t protest because she understood what was really behind this. He needed to do something, and for now, this was all he could do.

  She pulled up in front of the small, detached garage, and Zach asked her to open the trunk. When she did, he took out the lug wrench and started toward the garage door.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Pry the door open. I checked it the other day, and it’s locked. But it’s a perfect hiding place for your car because there aren’t any windows.”

  Trespassing and breaking and entering, C.Z. thought as Zach forced the door lock. It really bothered her that she could be so blasé about committing a crime. And she wondered how many other laws they would break before this was over.

  Zach turned to her, and she realized her misgivings must be obvious because he cupped her shoulders with his hands and stared hard at her.

  “This may not be the last law we’ll have to break before this is over,” he said somberly. “You can still bail out, you know. I wouldn’t blame you for that.”

  She shook her head, grateful he’d said it, even though it pointed out the fragile nature of their relationship.

  “Have we made a mistake?” he asked in that same quietly serious tone. “What happened last night was my fault, Charlie. I just lost control.”

  “What happened last night—and this morning—was mutual, Zach. I wanted you, and I still do.”

  He dropped his arms and looked away from her. “I, uh, I’m not very good with words sometimes, but it was more than sex. It’s just that I have nothing to offer you—except more trouble, that is.”

  She smiled, thinking how very strange it was to see this normally confident man so uncomfortable. Perhaps he thought he wasn’t good with words, but she thought he was being very eloquent.

  She touched his cheek, drawing his face to her. “I don’t expect you to offer me anything, Zach. And it isn’t just sex for me, either.”

  He nodded, then searched her face for a moment before gesturing to her car. “Let’s get it into the garage.”

  A short time later, they set off into the woods in the old Jeep. C.Z. cast him a covert glance as he drove slowly on a barely discernible track that led along the base of the hill behind the A-frame. As she stared at his hands on the wheel, memories of his lovemaking inundated her, and she smiled. Zach Hollis was the most eloquent man she’d ever known—in his own way. She thought about telling him that, but decided it wasn’t necessary. She remembered very well the look in his eyes after they’d made love, a look that said he knew he’d turned her world upside down and inside out.

  They made their way slowly through the woods, sometimes on narrow, deeply rutted roads and sometimes lurching through the dense undergrowth. Finally, she asked how he could possibly know where they were going.

  “I’m just heading northwest,” he replied without turning to her. “Sooner or later, we should come to an old road I remember that will take us nearly to my place.”

  She decided she would have to trust that he knew what he was doing. Her sense of direction was so poor she regularly lost her car in shopping mall garages.

  Sometime later, they crested a small hill, and Zach exclaimed with satisfaction when they saw a road. It was nothing more than a narrow, deeply rutted dirt path, but compared with what they’d been driving on, it looked like an interstate highway to her. She commented on the footprints that were visible in places. It was hard for her to believe they could run into anyone out here, but still she was uneasy.

  “It’s probably Davy Crockett,” Zach said in an unconcerned tone. “I’ve run into him a few times. But I don’t think we need to worry about him even if we do run across him.”

  When she heard the name, she assumed he was joking, but it seemed that he wasn’t. “Davy Crockett?”

  He nodded. “Didn’t your father ever mention him? He’s kind of a local legend. No one knows what his real name is, so they call him Davy Crockett because he’s always wearing this old buckskin jacket with fringe and he carries a rifle that looks like it belongs in a museum. He’s got a shack out here somewhere, but I don’t think anyone knows where it is.”

  She frowned. “I think I do remember Dad mentioning him. But why did you say we wouldn’t have to worry even if he sees us?”

  Zach turned to her and grinned. “He isn’t much for talking. In fact, I’m not really sure that he can talk. He might be mute.”

  “How does he live?” she asked, curious.

  “Off the land. He comes into town once in a while for supplies, so he must have some money stashed away. According to Colby, he showed up about ten years ago. Periodically, the folks from the county’s Adult Services Unit get riled up and insist that the police do something about him for his own protection. But he seems to be doing okay and he’s not bothering anyone. Your father was chief the first time they wanted to find him, and he refused to go after him, so I just followed that precedent.

  “I’d run across him before I became chief, but af
ter I took the job, I told him I was now the chief and told him where I lived, just in case he ever needed anything.

  “He just grunted, so I couldn’t be sure he understood, but a couple of days later, I came home to find an old bucket filled with wild strawberries sitting on my doorstep. I’d never had them before, and they were really great. I guessed he must have left them, so I put the bucket on the doorstep filled with cans of soup and tuna. It sat there for about a week and then vanished.”

  “He was reaching out to you, Zach. That’s a good sign.”

  “Yeah, except that I’m not there for him anymore. Colby told me that your father had some sort of arrangement with him while he was chief. Apparently, he made it to keep the social services people off his back. He’d meet him once a month somewhere, just to see if he was okay. But I thought my arrangement would work out just as well. Your dad lived in town, and Davy wouldn’t come there, but since I lived in a more remote location, I figured just letting him know where he could find me was enough. I hope he’s okay.”

  A few moments later, Zach brought the Jeep to a halt, then turned off the engine. “This is as close to my place as I want to go with the Jeep. It’s only about a mile or so. You wait here. Give me an hour, and if I don’t show up, just follow this trail until it comes to a paved road. Then turn right, and that will take you into Neff’s Mills. You can find your way back to the A-frame from there, right?”

  His tone was casual and matter-of-fact, but it still sent a chill through her, reminding her of the danger of what they were doing. “I’m coming with you,” she told him.

  “Somehow, I knew you’d say that, but at least I tried. Life must sure have been a whole lot simpler when women let men tell them what to do.”

  She grimaced. “Ah, the good old days, when men were men and women knew their place.”