She glanced back at her bed. If he were sprawled there right now, sheets draped over a body she’d felt pressed against her so intimately last night, and yet nowhere near as intimately as she wanted…yeah. She might find herself wanting a bit too much.
She slapped her thigh and scuffed into the bathroom. “Come on, Bagel. Let’s brush my teeth and get your leash.”
Trudging through the main room minutes later, feeling only slightly less subhuman, she did her best to ignore the remains of dinner that still littered the dining room table as she turned on the coffeemaker and grabbed Bagel’s leash off the back of the chair by the door. She did manage to notice that Donovan had wasted little time before leaving last night. Finn’s report was right where he’d left it. All neatly stacked and waiting for her on the kitchen counter. Great.
She dragged on her rain gear and mud boots. He was certainly making it clear it was all business now. “I get it, already,” she muttered. She snapped on Bagel’s leash. Not that there was any real reason out here for him not to run freely, but he liked to chase things, and he had zero sense of direction. She’d cut him loose, and within fifteen minutes she’d hear his mournful howl from somewhere on the property. Which inevitably led to her plunging into the woods to untangle him from something. She’d realized early on he was probably meant to be a city dog, so she treated him like one. Especially on wet, rainy, muddy mornings.
She stepped out onto the porch, and the drilling sounds got exponentially louder. They were coming from somewhere beyond the main lodge building. It was only drizzling now, so she flipped her hood up and purposely set off in the opposite direction with Bagel, refraining from giving in to the childish urge to stomp through the mud puddles. Still, she didn’t exactly avoid them either. Her emotions were pretty muddied at the moment. Might as well have the boots to match.
She continued on down the outer boundary route, not even glancing in the direction of the lodge. She wasn’t quite ready to deal with Donovan just yet. She needed to shake the cobwebs loose first. Getting rid of that image of him sprawled naked in her sheets was probably a good idea, too. The path looped in and out of the trees, meandering its way along the base of a ridge, eventually giving out on the opposite side of the lake. There were no cabins over here, only another dock and a service shed where canoes and paddles were stored in the off season.
It wasn’t until she passed the shed that the Day-Glo color caught her eye. She turned back and read the message sprayed there, all loopy with drips running from every letter. RICH BITCH, GO HOME!
Same color, same amateur paint job. Same message.
She tucked her arms around herself, pulling Bagel in closer in the process. She should be used to them by now. Irritating, but mostly because of the expense involved in removing them. Now? Now it gave her the creeps. And suddenly made her feel way too far away from her cabin.
She shrugged off the feeling and forced her arms down to her sides. It was simply everything that had been going on for the past forty-eight hours making her so jumpy. She hadn’t been over on this side of the lake yet, so she had no idea how long it had been here. For all she knew, this could have been the first message sprayed. Though why put it on the far side of the lake, on the back side of the shed, where no one could really see it from any vantage point, save the close one she had right there, she had no idea. It made no sense. All the others had been painted where anyone entering the property or traversing any main path could easily see from a distance.
Then, as she stared at the message, she realized something. The running paint drips hadn’t dried that way; they were still actively running down the side of the shed.
She froze, and her throat closed over. She instinctively tugged a resistant Bagel to her side. But rather than run—or call for help, not that Donovan would hear her over the sound of power tools—she stepped closer and touched the paint. Sure enough, her fingertip came back Day-Glo orange. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end, and she had to forcibly keep from spinning around and looking for somebody watching her. It just felt as if there were eyes drilling holes in the back of her head. It was her imagination. Besides, maybe the spray was water based and the rain was making it run.
She shivered, and not entirely from the chilling rain. Somehow she doubted that was the case. Spray paint was meant to stay where it was put. She looked down at the ground, looking for any other clues, although what those would be, she wasn’t clear on. Footprints maybe. As it was, with the rain, the mud, her two feet and Bagel’s four, they’d already obliterated any footprints that might have been right there. She scanned the immediate area, but saw only mud puddles and fallen pine needles.
Then the sound of drilling stopped. And the sudden quiet, disturbed only by the soft sound of rain pattering on the tall trees overhead and plopping against the otherwise calm surface of the lake, sounded altogether too eerie and somehow sinister. Like those horror movies where the kids all went camping…and the lunatic always stalked them in weather just like this.
Surely no one had just been by the shed, or she’d have heard or seen something. Wouldn’t she? The drilling sounds had echoed through the trees, bouncing around and distorting the usual forest noises, but certainly not enough to mask something like that.
Except, just how much noise was an interloper with a spray can and mud boots going to make?
Keeping Bagel close to her heels, she started moving along the path that bordered the lake edge, which was the most direct route back to camp and the relative safety of her cabin. Who was she kidding? It was the most direct route back to Donovan.
Now she actively scanned the campground across the lake, trying to locate him. Another month and the leaf canopy would be too heavy, the underbrush, too, and her view that far up the hill would be mostly blocked. Only the roof of the main lodge in the center and her own cabin farther up the ridge would be noticeable.
But it was early enough in the season that from back on the far dock, she’d have been able to look across the lake and more than likely see what Donovan was doing. Or at least hear exactly where he was doing it. She’d had a vague idea that maybe if she watched him from afar for a bit, she could steel herself against the effect he so effortlessly had on her. “Right,” she muttered.
Yep. A little time spent standing in a chilly drizzle would surely have numbed the heated attraction right out of her. Instead, she was all but running toward him. She looked down at her fingertips, but the paint had dripped back off. It had to be the rain making the paint run.
Didn’t it?
Then another thought occurred to her. If she could see Donovan through the sparse tree cover, so could anyone else. Had someone been watching him install his equipment? Had that same someone watched as she set out around that side of the lake and decided to leave her a message to find when she got there?
There was no will strong enough to shut down the little spurt of pure fear the very idea shot through her. Bagel hustled his stubby legs to keep up with her quickening gait.
The sudden sound of hammering made her heart skip a few beats. She paused just long enough to focus on the sound and follow it…adjusting her view upward as the ringing echo continued. And upward farther. Dear Lord, he was halfway up a forty-foot pine tree. Hanging on by…his wits, from the looks of it. She skimmed her gaze downward and noticed there was no ladder leaning up against the trunk, then shifted her gaze immediately back to him. Is he crazy?
She checked that question. Of course he was. All three of them had been daredevils, to a degree anyway, growing up. Rafe and Donovan had taken great pleasure in besting the rich boys at whatever ridiculous testosterone-measuring event they came up with. That was, when Donovan and Rafe weren’t trying to best each other. Usually with Finn right there, devising the competitions. Finn being the most fearless of the three, they usually involved risking at least several limbs, if not life itself.
She’d watched them shimmy trees like young forest creatures. Rafe being the fastest, with Donovan
a close second. But that was shimmying for the sake of seeing who could get the highest…then they slid back down. Clinging tenuously twenty feet above the ground while hammering stuff? That was idiocy. He was gripping the trunk with two legs and one arm, while he hammered something with his free hand. No one clinging to a tree that high up in the air should have a free hand.
Her pace increased as she drew close. It was harder to see him that high up now, too many trees in her line of vision. There continued to be alternating hammering and silence. Hammering. And silence. Every time she heard the hammer again, she realized she’d been holding her breath…and speeding up until she was all but dragging Bagel through the mud puddles. Of course, given that the dog’s belly had the clearance of a vacuum cleaner, he wasn’t going to arrive home clean no matter how slowly they walked.
She finally passed the dock they’d been on last night and started up the trail directly to the main lodge. She was less than twenty yards away when a grunt, followed by a string of curse words, rippled through the damp air, followed by the thud of a falling hammer.
Better than the thud of a falling man, she thought, arriving at the base of the tree as Donovan began gingerly scaling down its trunk. He pushed off about twelve feet up and landed in a wincing crouch, before slowly straightening.
“What in the hell do you think you’re doing up there?” Kate demanded. “You could have killed yourself.”
“Good morning to you, too.” He lifted his hand and closely inspected his finger. “Just mangled it a little.” He shot her a tight grin. “I’ll live.”
“Not if I catch you hanging off of pine trees again, you won’t.”
He looked down at Bagel. “She cares about me.”
Bagel wagged his stub and went immediately to Donovan’s side, sitting dutifully next to his foot and leaning his mud-encrusted tubby body up against his hero’s equally mud-encrusted jeans. He wriggled in ecstasy when Donovan leaned down and scrubbed him behind the ears. “Now, that’s a proper greeting.”
“Men,” she stated, glaring at both of them.
“And what would you do without us?”
She wisely chose to ignore the question. “What were you doing up there?” She framed her eyes and squinted up into the trees, but the falling rain made the angle impossible to maintain without getting water in her eyes. All she could make out was that some kind of metal bracket had been attached to the trunk.
“Installation.”
She looked back at him. “Of?”
“Security system. It’s wireless and solar powered.”
“There isn’t much solar today.”
“Doesn’t matter. It stores the energy over a long period of time.”
“Like winter?”
He smiled. “It’ll do the job.”
She squinted back up again, but quickly gave up. “So what is that, some kind of sensor? Won’t the wildlife trigger it?”
“It’s a camera, not a sensor. Well, more a monitor than a camera. It doesn’t film anything, just projects back to the command control center.”
“The command control center,” she repeated. “What, exactly, is a command control center? And where, might I ask, is it going to be located?”
“A command control center is just what it sounds like, a main console base that monitors the entire system. It will be located in your office in your cabin, and it’s the size of a laptop.”
“While that sounds very…Mission Impossible, I can’t very well sit at a computer all day watching the campgrounds. And I don’t have the money to hire—”
“Slow down. The central com is, in fact, similar to a small notebook computer. Not only so it takes up less space, but it’s portable. So you can take it with you to the lodge, or even down to the stables and the lake.”
“Do you really think that’s necessary? And how often would I need to look at it? Will it store images, or just beam them live? Because someone could sneak in and vanish and I’ll be too busy overseeing construction or something to—”
“That’s something to consider later on, yes. But right now, the only thing you’re overseeing is finding out who is sabotaging your camp. And why Shelby isn’t signing the papers to make your ownership official. Once we get that resolved, you’ll be able to keep the system, and you can use it however you want, whenever you want. Right now, we’ll keep track continuously, until we figure things out.”
“We?”
“Unless you want to pull twenty-four-hour shifts.”
Her eyes widened. “You mean one of us has to sit and watch the monitor all day long?”
“Unless you want the night shift.”
She looked closely at him, but he didn’t seem to be referencing last night. For that matter, he seemed to have forgotten it altogether. Which should have reassured her. For some reason, it just irritated her instead. After all, he might have been right that they needed to back off from getting physical with each other, but he could at least act like it was costing him a little.
“You wanted to be involved,” he reminded her. “But don’t worry, there is a backup alarm system.”
“Alarms? Out here?”
“It triggers silently, inside. So we know and they don’t.”
“How will the alarm know to trigger for an intruder and not some forest animal. It could be going off every five minutes.”
“It’s set to mass and body temperature.”
That set her back. “Oh.”
He smiled. “Technology is cool, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said, somewhat absently, once again shaken by the seriousness with which he was tackling her problem. Which reminded her about what had sent her scrambling up here in the first place. “So, do you have any set up yet that could scan across the lake?” She glanced back that way, shivering all over again as visions of the running paint skipped through her mind, and that sensation she was being watched crawled down her spine.
His grin faded a notch, and he stepped closer and turned her to face him. “Kate, listen, I promise, that while this is state-of-the-art stuff, it’s not as intimidating as it sounds.”
“There’s something I need to tell you. The reason I came up here.”
“I thought it was to yell at me for playing in trees.”
“That, too, but…”
His smile faded completely now. “What’s up? What happened?”
“Someone spray painted the side of the boat shed across the lake. Same spray, same message as the others.”
“How long has it been since you’ve been over—”
“I haven’t been over there since I moved in. It’s not high on my to-do list. So I have no idea how long ago it was done. Except—” She looked down at her fingertips to see if any remnants of the paint remained, but it was all gone. “Does spray paint usually run in the rain?”
Donovan shifted his gaze to one of the nearby trees that still had one of the GO HOME messages sprayed on it. Kate followed his gaze. The tree trunk was glistening wet. The message was intact. He looked back to her. “Not usually. Why?”
“The message on the shed…the paint was running. I thought maybe—”
Whatever she’d been about to say was cut off when Donovan took her by the arm and began moving them swiftly up the path to her cabin.
“Hey, wait a darn minute! You can’t just bodily move me—”
“The hell I can’t. Don’t talk. Move. You can yell at me later.”
“I can yell at you just fine right now.” She tried to tug her arm free, but to no avail. Bagel barked and followed them up the path. “You’re scaring the dog.”
“At least he’s smart enough to be scared.” He glared at her over his shoulder. “Unlike his owner.”
“Who said I wasn’t scared? But I’m pretty sure if someone was still out there, he or she would have made their move when I was alone on the other side of the lake, don’t you think?”
“We can argue about this in about five minutes.”
She gave up, but p
ulled her arm free with one good tug. “I can imprison myself for no reason on my own just fine, thanks.”
He tugged open the screen door on her porch and hustled her and the dog inside, closing the door behind them in short measure. “Bagel, sit,” he commanded, and to her shock, though why he did it at this point, she had no idea, the dog plopped his muddy butt down right inside the door. “Got any rags? I’ll clean him off while you go change.”
“Change into?”
“Whatever won’t track mud through your home.” He looked pointedly down at her pant legs and boots.
She looked down to discover that Bagel wasn’t the only one who’d adversely suffered from her march around the lake. “Right. Rag towels are around the side of the porch. If you think it’s safe enough.” She didn’t wait for his retort, but toed out of her boots and tiptoed gingerly across the main room, not stopping until she was in her bathroom. She closed the door and locked it behind her. More for her peace of mind and to make a statement, than anything else.
When she came out again, clad in sweats and a Boston University sweatshirt, Donovan was standing by the door punching numbers into a cell phone. A familiar-looking cell phone.
“Hey, what are you doing with my cell—”
“Catch,” he said, then tossed it to her.
She stopped talking to focus on catching. Cradling her phone, she looked up in time to see his hand on the door. A toweled-off Bagel trotted over to him, not exactly clean, but not trekking muck through the cabin either. “Where are you going?”
“To check the boat shed.”
“You won’t find anything. By the time I realized what was happening, Bagel and I had pretty much mucked up the area. The rain did the rest. I’m sorry.”
“Not a problem. I’m still going.” He motioned to her phone. “If anything, or anyone, pops up that makes you the least bit nervous, press two on your speed dial.”
“Why would I want to call my friend Amy in Boston?”
“I don’t know. But if you dial two, you’ll get me.”
The Black Sheep and the Princess Page 19
