The place was quiet, the other women and children having gone to sleep and the men either in the woods on security duty near the entrance of the cave or out foraging in the woods to see what might lurk there, keeping danger away from the safe house.
Never had Olivia felt so alone, and in the silence, in the utter loneliness, her thoughts turned to Ethan and she felt as if her heart was being ripped from her chest.
She should have never left without him. Somehow she should have pulled it together, hidden out until Samuel had left and then searched for her missing son. If only she’d done that, then the three of them would all be here together.
Instead she’d panicked and left her precious boy behind and if something happened to him, if she never saw him alive and well again, she’d never, ever be able to forgive herself.
She’d had a sorry excuse for a mother and she’d always vowed that she would be the kind of mother she’d longed for when she had children of her own. Jeff had certainly been a mistake in her life, but Sam and Ethan had been like two little miracles she’d been gifted with to make up for a crummy youth.
She finally stopped her nervous walking and sank down on the edge of the mattress in the small room where she’d slept the night before.
The oil lamp flickered and created dancing shadows on the walls. Was somebody feeding Ethan? Did whoever had him know that he was afraid of the dark? That she always kept a night-light burning in his bedroom? Was somebody kissing his forehead at night before he fell asleep, waylaying his fears and wishing him happy dreams?
The idea of him alone in a room, in the dark and scared shot an excruciating pain through the very center of her. She squeezed her eyes shut to staunch a flood of useless tears.
If only she knew for sure if Samuel had seen her when he’d killed that man. If he hadn’t seen her, then she might take a chance and go back to town with some wild story to explain her absence. She’d get Ethan and then leave town forever.
But if he’d seen her and she returned, she knew not only would she be lost but both of her boys would be, as well. Samuel would never allow them to leave the town alive knowing that she had information that could potentially get him arrested.
She jumped off the bed with a gasp of surprise as Micah staggered into the room. He dropped the rucksack to the floor and leaned weakly against the wall, his face blanched of all color.
“Micah, are you all right?” she asked in alarm.
“Headache.” His deep voice was faint as he reached up and placed a palm against the left side of his head. “Migraine.”
She grabbed him by the arm and led him to the bed where he collapsed on his back, his eyes closed as he pressed both hands to each side of his head, as if trying to keep his skull together.
He said nothing and she stood next to the bed trying to think of something she could do to help him. She knew that making noise by talking to him would probably only make it worse.
He needed quiet and as much darkness as possible and he had both with just the faint flicker of the oil lamp lighting the space.
She left the room and hurried to the kitchen where she grabbed a clean dishcloth and ran it under cold water. Her mother used to have migraines, although they were usually after a night of too much booze. Even as a little girl, Olivia could remember ministering her mother in the mornings with a cool cloth on her head.
She hurried back to Micah and found him in the same position where she’d left him. He dwarfed the double mattress, but the pain that sharpened his features, that tightened all of his muscles, made her hurt for him.
She carefully lowered herself on the edge of the mattress next to his head. He squinted open one eye and winced in pain. “I have a cool cloth,” she explained softly. “It might feel good across your forehead.”
He closed his eye once again and dropped his arms to his side, allowing her to tend to him. She placed the cloth across his forehead and gently ran her fingers back and forth across the cool cotton.
Immediately his muscles began to relax and he released a deep sigh. After a few minutes had passed, she knew the cloth had warmed with the contact from his fevered brow and she flipped it over and once again moved her fingers slowly, smoothly over the cloth, hoping that the gentle massage might be helping.
She felt the tension ebbing out of him, his body relaxing into the mattress and before long she realized he’d fallen asleep.
She stopped her massaging and removed the cloth and leaned back and stared at the man sprawled on her bed. How often did he get the migraines? Had something specific happened that had brought this one on? She felt responsible for his pain, that somehow by sending him into her home she’d given him too much stress.
As she sat there, a weary exhaustion played through her. It had to be at least two or three in the morning. She didn’t want to disturb Micah, but she also couldn’t stay up for the rest of the night and had no idea where else to go to sleep.
There was just enough room on the edge of the bed for her to stretch out without bothering the sleeping, wounded warrior who had carried in a rucksack of diapers for her son.
She placed the cloth on the table next to the oil lantern and then tentatively lay down next to him, not touching him in any way and closed her eyes. She could smell him. The wild scent of the night and the forest clung to him, a pleasant scent that filled her head with an odd comfort.
She must have fallen asleep for when she awakened again she found Micah spooned around her back, one of his arms flung around her as if to keep her trapped against his warm, firm body.
Her internal clock told her she hadn’t been asleep for just a few minutes, but rather a couple hours. Still, it was early enough she heard no morning wake-up cry from Sam.
The cave was utterly timeless, with no sunlight to allow anyone to know if it was day or night. At least she had her wristwatch but at the moment it was on the nightstand and she wasn’t inclined to move a single muscle.
She figured it was probably around four or five in the morning. She also knew she should roll away from Micah, somehow extract herself from their intimate position, but she didn’t move. She scarcely breathed.
He felt warm and strong and utterly male and she felt herself responding in a way that was completely inappropriate and yet she remained in place, her heart beating way too fast.
For just this single moment in time, she felt more safe than she’d ever felt in her life…in the arms of a virtual stranger. How pathetic was that? How well that spoke of the choices she had made so far in her life, choices that had led her to a man who’d left her alone with one child and pregnant with the other, and then to another man who was a cold-blooded killer among other things.
She had no idea who Micah was beneath his skin. She didn’t know what forces drove him or what demons he might be battling. She only knew that there was a solidness about him that called to all the insecurities inside her. There was a directness to his gaze that made her believe she could trust him despite all the reasons she might have not to.
But you’re just a pawn to him, a tiny voice whispered inside her head. You’re simply a tool to help him bring down the brother he hates. And she would do well to remember that fact.
“Are you awake?” His deep voice was a soft, heated whisper against her neck.
For a brief instant she thought about not responding, pretending to be still asleep so she wouldn’t have to move away from him. But instead she whispered yes, a bit guilty that she hadn’t moved the moment she’d first awakened. As he raised his arm from around her, she rolled over to face him. “How’s your head?”
“Better, thanks.” He made no move to get off the mattress and so she remained where she was, warmed by the heat that radiated outward from his firmly muscled body.
“Do you get migraines often?” she asked. She liked the way he looked in the faint glow of the la
ntern, his features relaxed in a way she hadn’t seen them before, making him look not as daunting and less like his brother.
“I didn’t start getting them until five months ago after my brother sent one of his hit men, Dax Roberts, to put a bullet in my head. Unfortunately, he succeeded.”
Horror swept through her at his words. How could a man be evil enough to send anyone to try to kill his own brother? And Samuel was the man she’d believed was going to help her build the life she’d always dreamed about. She’d been so deluded.
“Fortunately, it didn’t kill me,” Micah continued. “But, it did put me in a coma for three months. Eventually I got back on my feet and the only lingering issue is the occasional migraine.”
She eyed him curiously. “What happened to Samuel? I mean, what made him the way he is…so dangerous?” she asked.
He leaned up on one elbow and reached out to push away a strand of her hair from her face. The soft touch shot a flare of heat in the pit of her stomach. He dropped his hand between them and released a deep sigh.
“We could have a long discussion about nature versus nurture. Our father was a brutal man who beat both of us on a regular basis, that is, when he wasn’t beating our mother. But, from the time we were young kids, I knew there was something off about Samuel.”
A frown tugged across his forehead. “He was a quiet kid, always watching, observing people around him. When we were young kids, he had no friends and seemed quite content to be alone.”
“The two of you were never close?” she asked.
Tension rolled off him. “No, never. I realized early on that he was an evil little boy. Anything that was important to me, he broke or stole. Any friendships I tried to have, he’d ruin in one way or another. He liked torturing stray animals. I’d wake up sometimes in the middle of the night and find him standing next to my bed just staring at me.” He hesitated a moment and then added, “He scared me more than my father.” He released a rusty laugh. “I’ve never admitted that to anyone before.”
She wanted to reach out and touch him, to assure him that his secret was safe with her. She wanted to hold the child he had been and tell him he was safe and nobody, not his father or his brother, could ever harm him.
“My old man and his beatings were pretty predictable. I could tell by the sound of the weight of his footsteps on the wooden porch when he got home after work if it was going to be a night of beatings. I knew when he drank he was always a mean drunk. I learned fairly early how to recognize the danger signs when it came to my father and avoid him whenever possible.”
“A child should never have to learn to recognize danger signs in their father,” she replied. “What about your mother?” Olivia knew in her heart and soul that she would never be able to stay with any man if he raised a hand to her or her children. She’d rather be homeless and alone than allow any man to harm her babies.
“My mother was a timid woman who rarely spoke and seemed too weary for the world all my life. She died of heart failure when Samuel and I were seventeen. I think she willed herself to death because it was the only way she had the courage to leave my father.”
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered and this time followed through on her need to touch him in some way. She covered his hand on the mattress between them with one of her own. “So, you said that Samuel scared you more than your father did,” she said, wanting to understand the dynamics that had created a Micah, the same dynamics that had also created a Samuel.
“Like I said, my dad’s rages were predictable. But Samuel was a different kind of animal.” His eyes narrowed slightly. “He was impossible to read, and even when he displayed appropriate emotions it felt forced to me, like he was mimicking how he’d seen others react in the same circumstances. As far as I’m concerned, he’s a narcissist without a soul, a sociopath with illusions of grandeur and he really started coming into his own in high school.”
“What do you mean?” Her heart lurched a bit as he turned his hand to encase hers. This all felt so intimate…the semidarkness, the early hour, his touch and the secret of his past that he was sharing with her.
“It was as if, when he got into high school, he’d honed all the skills he needed to manipulate and fool people. He recognized weaknesses in others and exploited them.” His hand tightened on hers and his eyes seemed to transform from forest green to black with his memories.
“There was only one person I ever really cared about in my life. She was my high school sweetheart, Johanna Tate. She was pretty much everything to me, but on prom night I went to the bathroom and I came back to find that she was gone, along with my brother. He took her away from me that night and she never spoke to me again. She became his. She’s one of the five women we believe Samuel has killed. She’s one of the reasons I’m here now. I want to avenge her death and I want to make sure my brother never has a chance to create a Cold Plains again, to hurt anyone else ever again.”
He withdrew his hand from hers and sat up. “Now, tell me how you came to be in Cold Plains and exactly how close you were to the devil before I found you in the woods.”
* * *
There was a sudden hint of steel in his voice that made her realize he’d withdrawn into himself and she had now gone from a friendly face who’d heard his confessions to a suspect in the breadth of a heartbeat.
She sat up as well, both of them sitting Indian style and facing each other. She wanted to meet him eye-to-eye as she told him her story and she had no intention of mincing the truth. “I grew up in a trailer park in Oklahoma with a sickly, alcoholic mother. I had no friends and no place I felt I really belonged.” She told him this not to gain any sympathy but merely as a statement of fact.
“My mother died when I was twenty-two and six months after that I met Jeff Winfry. He was basically a drifter, living out of a camper on the back of his pickup. He was handsome and charming and was making his way toward California with grand schemes for his
future. I bought into him and his silly dreams and before I knew it, I’d sold my mother’s trailer and hitched my star to Jeff.”
She swallowed against the self-disgust that rose up in the back of her throat as she thought of the incredibly stupid choices she’d made so far in her life.
“Soon after that I got pregnant with Ethan.” Her voice broke as she spoke the name of her missing child. “Jeff kept telling me we were going to get married and settle down someplace and like a stupid fool, I believed him as we went through small town after small town. In each place he’d work side jobs for cash and made me believe he was checking it out to see if the area was good enough to settle down with a family, but he rejected each town and we’d move on.”
She frowned, remembering her feeling of helplessness, of hopelessness and the self-recriminations that had filled her with each day that passed.
“When I was six months pregnant with Sam, we hit Cold Plains. Jeff pulled up next to a bench along the sidewalk on Main Street and told me that he’d realized he really wasn’t cut out to be a family man, that Ethan and I were cramping his style. He left us there with a suitcase full of clothes and a hundred dollar bill and then he drove away.”
She could still remember the utter terror that had consumed her at that moment. She was six-months’ pregnant and with a two-year-old, abandoned in a strange new town where she knew absolutely nobody.
“Did you love him?” Micah asked.
She didn’t answer immediately, but instead took the time to really think about it, about Jeff. “I thought I was in love when I left Oklahoma with him, but I realize now that I was really in love with the idea of escaping the place that had been such an unhappy home, I loved the idea of an adventure with a man who I thought loved me. And then once I got pregnant with Ethan, I thought I loved him because he was the father of my baby and I wanted to build a family. But, now I recognize that it wasn’t love that drove me, but
rather need, the need to belong to something…to someone.” She released a humorless laugh. “God, I sound so pathetic.”
“No, you sound human,” he countered with a gentle tone. “When I was eighteen, I joined the navy for the same reason. I needed a place where I felt like I belonged. I was a Navy SEAL for five years before I went out on my own. You’ve probably heard I’m a mercenary. I take money to get rid of problems that our government doesn’t want to touch.” He studied her, as if waiting for a negative reaction.
She was in no position to judge anyone for the choices they had made in their lives. Besides, she didn’t care what he’d done in the past. All that mattered was that he was here now to take down his brother and hopefully help her get her son back.
“So, you were dumped in Cold Plains. What happened next?” he asked.
“I was still sitting on the bench crying when, a half an hour later, Samuel found me. He got me to tell him what had happened and he was so kind to me. He told me not to worry, that I’d landed in the right place where people would help me get on my feet and that he could teach me how to live a healthy, happy and productive life in a wonderful town.”
She felt the burn of tears in her eyes as she thought of how easily she’d allowed herself to fall under Samuel’s spell. “He was so soothing, so persuasive and he immediately took control of the situation. He led me to a small furnished house where he said we could stay for the time being. Several men brought in food and then Samuel told me about his workshops, that there was one that night and I should attend. I did and I almost immediately bought into everything he proselytized. He gave me my job and allowed me to remain in the house.” She felt the warmth of heat in her cheeks. “I even named Sam after him.”
“A perfect town where there’s no crime, no illness, no drug or alcohol abuse. A perfect town where everyone is healthy and happy and a leader who is willing to work and see that come to fruition, of course you bought into it. You were all alone and afraid, a perfect victim for my brother.”
Perfect Wyoming Complete Collection: Special Agent's Perfect Cover ; Rancher's Perfect Baby Rescue ; A Daughter's Perfect Secret ; Lawman's Perfect Surrender ; The Perfect Outsider ; Mercenary's Perfect Mission Page 97
