Manhunt in the Wild West

by Jessica Andersen

  Sinking down until she was sitting on the floor with her spine pressed up against the entryway wall, she cried for Jerry and his girlfriend, and for Rickey, even though he didn’t deserve her tears. She cried for the four dead guards laid out in the morgue, two of whom had been a father and son working together. And she cried for herself—for the fear and confusion of being abducted and then rescued by a man she’d been attracted to, a man who’d been called a monster by people she trusted.

  Above all, she cried because when it came down to it, she’d frozen. She hadn’t struggled or fought, had only survived because of a series of events she didn’t understand. She hadn’t saved herself. She’d just curled into a little ball and let bad things happen.

  It didn’t matter what 007 or any of the others would’ve done. She’d done nothing.

  A long time passed before her tears dried up, but eventually they did.

  When that happened she swiped her hands across her eyes and drew a deep breath. “You’re okay,” she told herself. “You’re going to be okay.”

  Thinking things might look a little less grim if she ate something—the breakfast sandwich she’d had seemed aeons in the past—she stood and headed for the kitchen.

  She was almost there when a man stepped into the kitchen doorway. She saw his silhouette first, big and muscular, then his dark hair, the lines that cut beside his mouth, and piercing blue eyes that seemed to bore into hers. He was wearing tough-looking black cargo pants and heavy boots, along with a thick sweater and scarred leather jacket, rather than the guard’s uniform from before, but she recognized him instantly.

  Fairfax.

  Heart jolting into her throat, Chelsea screamed. At least she tried to. But he moved too quickly, getting an arm across her collarbones and pressing lightly on her throat while he clapped a hand across her mouth, holding her body motionless as effectively as he trapped the scream in her lungs.

  “Don’t,” he ordered. “I won’t hurt you.”

  Rationality said she should fight, but she hesitated instead, still caught up inside her own skull, torn between attraction and logic, between gratitude and fear.

  When she stilled, his grip loosened a fraction. “Good girl,” he said, which was patronizing yet somehow soothed her, for reasons she promised herself she’d analyze later. “You going to behave if I let you go?”

  She nodded as her pulse hammered in her veins.

  “Okay. Here goes.” He let his hands fall away, and stepped back.

  Chelsea bolted for the front door, screaming, “Help! Help me!”

  She heard his bitter curse, heard his footsteps too close behind as she grabbed the knob and twisted. Before she could get the door open, she found herself hanging midair, suspended by her belt and the back of her shirt.

  “Damn it.” He half hauled, half carried her into the living room, where he tossed her on the sofa. Then he loomed over her, cold blue eyes snapping with temper. “I said I’m not going to hurt you. Settle down!”

  She glared back. “Why should I do anything you say?”

  “I—” He snapped his jaw shut and exhaled. “Because you owe me one. I saved your life.”

  Of all the things for her to feel at that moment, disappointment probably wasn’t the most logical. But that was what flooded through her, alongside a flare of anger and disillusionment at the realization that he was no different from the others, after all. He hadn’t saved her because she’d aroused some soft emotion in him. He’d saved her so he could use her.

  “You want me to help you escape,” she said, voice flat with anger.

  “I managed that one on my own, thanks.”

  “Then what—” She thought of Rickey’s body and shuddered. “You’re going to kill me after all.”

  He shook his head, managing to look both frustrated and vaguely insulted without a change in his cool blue eyes. “No, I’m not going to kill you. I need you to sneak me inside the ME’s office.”

  That confused her enough to dampen some of her panic, especially given that he hadn’t made a move in her direction since tossing her on the couch. He was keeping half his attention on the windows—being careful not to cross between them and the light—and the other half on their conversation. He wasn’t concentrating on her, wasn’t making her feel any immediate menace.

  He was treating her like a means to an end, nothing more. Like the way one of her fictional spy heroes would treat an asset.

  “Why do you want to break into the ME’s office?” she asked, not sure if she’d stopped trying to escape because she was frozen in shock, or if it was because of the way the inexplicable events of the day were realigning themselves in her head, shaping themselves into an impossible hypothesis.

  “I need information on Rickey Charles’s murder.”

  Which either meant that Rickey hadn’t been killed on al-Jihad’s order…or Fairfax was clandestinely working against the terrorists somehow.

  That might explain why he’d been unable to kill her in cold blood, and why he’d had a death-mimicking drug hidden in the heel of his shoe, one that hadn’t shown up on any of the tests the doctors had run, and had left her feeling energized rather than half-dead. It was a high-tech, classified drug of some sort, one that—

  She stalled her train of thought before it went off the rails, because the scenario was too Hollywood to be real.

  Still, she couldn’t help asking, “Who…who do you work for?”

  Surprise flashed in his eyes, one of the few emotions she’d been able to read there during her brief association with the escaped convict—or whatever he really was.

  “The group doesn’t have a name,” he said carefully.

  She felt a spurt of something that shouldn’t have seemed like excitement. “Who signs your checks?”

  “No checks. I’m paid in wire transfers from shell companies held by other shell companies.” But he knew what she was asking, and finally said, “If you go deep enough, the money comes from the U.S. government.”

  “You’re undercover.”

  He nodded to the bookshelves that lined most of one wall of her living room. They were filled with paperbacks and DVDs. “You read too many spy novels.”

  “You’re telling me I’m wrong?”

  “No, just that you shouldn’t confuse fiction with reality.”

  “Did you kill those FBI agents? The ones in Montana?”

  He shook his head. “No. That was part of the cover.”

  “But you have killed people.”

  “Yes,” he said calmly. “But right now I’m not looking to kill anyone. I need to get into the ME’s office, and I need someone to translate Ricky Charles’s autopsy findings into lay English for me.” He paused, and seemed reluctant to admit, “You’re right, I’m one of the good guys, more or less. I’m part of a unit that’s so secure we don’t even know each other. We only know our handler, who goes by the name Jane Doe, and doesn’t appear in any government database that I’ve ever accessed. Anyway, I haven’t been able to get in touch with Jane since late last night, which means I’m low on options here. I’m asking for your help.”

  “Why can’t you reach her?”

  “My guess? Because she’s dead.”

  Chapter Four

  Chelsea thought she heard something in his voice—pain, maybe, and anger—but she couldn’t be sure. He was so brutally controlled that very little broke through.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and there was a serious quaver in her voice, because the whole conversation seemed patently unbelievable. Handsome undercover operatives just didn’t break into the homes of people like her and ask them for help. They just didn’t.

  Then again, people like her didn’t normally get kidnapped, drugged and rescued either.

  “Will you help?” he asked, holding her eyes with his.

  “Why me?” she managed to ask, her voice sounding thin and strange. “How did you find me? How did you get in here?”

  They weren’t the most important questions, bu
t they were the only ones she could manage right then, as a whirl of thoughts jammed her brain and her inner wimp told her to stay the hell away from Fairfax, while her spy-loving self wanted to know more, wanted to know everything.

  “The first two questions have the same answer,” he said. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a flat plastic square, and flipped it to her.

  She caught it on the fly. “My name tag. Which answers how you found me—I’m in the phone book, on Google, however you want to look me up. But it doesn’t explain why you came to me.”

  “Because you work in the ME’s office.”

  “Oh. Right. And that was the only reason?” She knew it was stupid of her to ask, and even stupider to feel a spurt of disappointment.

  “The only one I’m admitting to.” His lips tipped up in a faint, sad smile, there and gone so quickly she might’ve thought she’d imagined it if she hadn’t seen the unexpected hint of a dimple on one cheek. It didn’t exactly make him look boyish and approachable—she had a strong feeling he didn’t do boyish or approachable very well—but it definitely stirred her juices, bringing a flare of warmth where such a thing should never have existed.

  At best, he was an undercover fed with so few outside ties that he’d willingly gone to jail for an op. At worst, he was lying through his teeth, and really was a murderer, and an escapee.

  She knew she should run far and fast. Somehow, though, she couldn’t. Instead, she stood and crossed to him, stopping just short of where he stood in the shadows cast by the single lamp that lit the living room. “What, exactly, do you want me to do?”

  He glanced at her TV, where the digital display on the cable box showed that it was nearly 7:00 p.m. He muttered a curse. “I don’t have time tonight. I’ve stretched the supply run as long as I can. They’ll be expecting me back soon.”

  At the mention of the others, she looked around in sudden panic, locking on the woods beyond her yard. “Where are they?” Images of al-Jihad and the others crowded her brain. “Are they out there?”

  “No.” But he didn’t elaborate. “Will you help me?”

  “Why are you protecting them? Why not tell the cops where they are?”

  “Because I’m the one who helped them escape, remember? Why else do you think I had the knockout drops?”

  “You—” She broke off as a sinking sensation warned her that she was way out of her depth. Making a sudden decision, she said, “I can’t deal with this.” She turned for the door. “You have until the count of ten to get the hell out of here. When I hit ten, I’m opening the front door and screaming bloody murder.”

  This time he didn’t try to stop her physically. Instead, he said, “Didn’t you wonder why you recovered from the drug so fast and why the doctors couldn’t find any trace of it in your blood? Didn’t you wonder who called in the nine-one-one and gave the cops your location?”

  She stopped, but didn’t turn around. “I suppose you can explain that?” She cursed herself for giving him the opening, but he’d nailed the questions she’d been asking herself all day.

  “Look at me.”

  Still cursing herself for a fool, she did exactly that, only to find that he’d moved, so silently she hadn’t known he was coming until he was inside her space the way she’d been inside his only moments earlier.

  She wanted to back away, but something told her now was not the time to let him know exactly how much his physical presence—and the feelings he kindled inside her—intimidated her. So instead of retreating, she stood her ground and lifted her chin. “Well?”

  He leaned in, until their faces were too close together and his breath feathered across her skin. “I planted a homing device on you, along with a data pellet. Jane—or more likely, one of her people—retrieved the information and the bug, gave you the antidote to the injection, and rearranged the scene a little before calling it in.”

  Her mouth had gone dry during his recitation, which was too far-out to be true, too consistent with the evidence to be a lie. Heart drumming against her ribs, she said, “If you’ve got other people on your team, why do you need me?”

  His voice was flat when he said, “I only know how to contact Jane. It’s safer that way.”

  Until she gets knocked out of the picture, at which point you’re on your own, Chelsea thought, but didn’t say. It seemed like a very lonely way to live, and was the sort of detail the movies skimmed over in order to hit the action and danger.

  “You’ve got to have some sort of backup plan, right?”

  “Wrong.”

  Chelsea exhaled a frustrated breath. “There’s nobody who can confirm your story?”

  “Nobody I trust.”

  She got the feeling the number of people he trusted could be counted on one finger, and that person was out of commission either temporarily or permanently.

  “Why not turn them in?” she asked again. “If you’re cut off, then your plan’s already shot, right? There’s no need to keep going. If you help recapture the escapees, then—”

  But he was already shaking his head. “Even in captivity, al-Jihad is threatening this country. He’s got people inside Homeland Security. He got to people inside your office. We suspect his network extends much farther than we ever guessed, which is why I had to break him out. He’ll make contact with his conspirators now, and he’ll be planning something big. I can guarantee that much.” His expression went grim and determined. “When those plans are in place, we’ll bring down his whole godforsaken network, not just a few players.”

  “But who is ‘we’?” she protested. “You just said you’re on your own. If you don’t have anyone else you can trust—”

  “That’s not your concern.”

  Chilled by his flat pronouncement, Chelsea wrapped her arms around herself. “What about me?”

  She didn’t know what she wanted him to say, didn’t know that anything could possibly make this entire conversation any less unreal than it felt at that moment.

  “I saved you,” he said flatly. “Now I need your help. Tomorrow, I want you to ensure that the office will be deserted and the security off-line after hours.”

  Chelsea couldn’t figure out which was worse: that he was asking her to betray Sara and the others by breaking more laws than she could immediately name…or that she was actually considering doing it.

  What was wrong with her? She had no proof he was who he said. In fact, logic said he was a criminal and a liar.

  “If you were really an undercover agent working for the U.S. government,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper, “then I can’t imagine you’d come here and tell me that to my face.” She looked up at him, baffled, wanting to believe him, but not sure she dared. “You haven’t even sworn me to secrecy or anything.”

  The corners of his mouth twitched, the almost-dimple making it seem as though there was a younger, happier man trapped inside his unemotional shell. “Go ahead and tell your friends about this,” he said, daring her. “You don’t believe me and you’re standing here. What do you think they’ll do?”

  “Put me on the head-shrink express,” she said. “Damn it.” He was right. She couldn’t tell. Not unless she had proof, and there was only one way to get that proof. She tilted her head, shot him a look from beneath her lashes, and felt her heart begin to pound with fear, with excitement. “Tomorrow night, you said?”

  His look was long and slow, until finally he nodded. “Tomorrow. Make sure the place is going to be clear.”

  “I can do that.”

  “Yes, but will you?” It was a direct challenge.

  She met his eyes, and nodded, unspeaking.

  “Good.” He moved, but instead of moving away from her, as she might have expected once he’d gotten his way, he moved in, closing the gap between them. “You wanted to know why you.” It wasn’t a question.

  Her blood sped in her veins, and prickles of awareness shimmered to life. “Yes.” The word was barely a breath, more an invitation than a question as the attr
action that she’d felt earlier in the day, when their eyes had connected through a pane of tempered and meshed glass, sprang to life full-blown, even stronger now, and with no glass separating them.

  “Yeah,” he said, as though she’d answered him far more fully than she’d intended to. “That’s why.”

  Then he leaned in and kissed her, and although she’d seen it coming, knew what he’d intended, she didn’t move away, didn’t stop him cold. Instead, she uncrossed her arms and flattened her palms on his chest, not to push him away, but to draw him close, her fingers twining in the material of his shirt and holding him fast.

  And, even though she knew better, damn it…she kissed him back.

  TEMPORARY INSANITY. That was Fax’s only excuse for initiating the kiss, and it wasn’t much of an excuse to begin with. Then, about three seconds after he’d lost his mind and gone in for a taste of her lips, those very same lips parted and a soft sound escaped her, and she started kissing him back.

  After that, there was no excuse. There was only insanity.

  She tasted of sweetness, sunshine and laughter, and so many other things he hadn’t known in a very long time. Her skin was soft beneath his fingertips when he raised his hands to frame her face, to touch her neck and hair, relearning feelings he’d left behind.

  Heat came, and lust. But even the lust was tempered with sweetness. It stole inside him and buoyed his heart, making him feel light and free, while the heat warmed him from within, thawing parts of him that had been cold for so long.

  Which wasn’t a good thing, he realized with a sudden dash of icy reality. Not where he was going.

  “Wait.” He broke the kiss, only then realizing that he’d moved in very close to her, that they were plastered together against the living-room wall, his body pressed against hers, hard and needy.

  Her face was upturned to his, her lips parted and moist, her eyes bright with arousal and self-awareness, letting him know she knew what he was—or thought she did—and she’d kissed him back anyway.