Books by Linda Conrad

by Conrad, Linda

  After he paid the garage guy a deposit on the repairs and called his insurance adjuster, Cisco talked his way into the fenced backyard so he could get his stuff out of the Charger.

  “Well, the damage doesn’t look too bad,” Sunnie said when they came close.

  He wasn’t willing to concede that yet. The daylight was rapidly waning and shadows covered everything on the east side of the garage.

  After a moment’s inspection, he found the side window was busted out and the front bumper damaged, but other than that the car really didn’t appear to be in too bad a shape. It could’ve been a lot worse.

  Junior, the garage owner, had told him they’d found the car with the keys still in the ignition. With them in hand, Cisco headed for the trunk.

  It took him seconds to see that his laptop had been stolen. Hell. Double hell. The thieves could be anyone. Tow truck driver. Cops. Anyone.

  Thank goodness his notes had been encrypted. Losing them was the real tragedy, but no use crying over their loss now.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Cisco turned at the sound of Sunnie’s voice. She was staring down into the trunk with her hands on her hips.

  “Someone bagged themselves free electronics at my expense.”

  “You’ve been robbed?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “We’ll notify the police. But I can guarantee you right now that none of Junior’s people had anything to do with it.”

  Turning to check over her shoulder, she appeared to be a woman who was worried about something—or someone. “We need to leave so Junior can go home before dark. Let’s take your duffel and get out of here.”

  Nodding his agreement, he waited until she leaned away and then covertly reached under the driver’s seat to grab his spare cuffs. They went easily into his pocket. Sunnie was definitely not going to sneak away from him before she answered a few questions honestly for once—even if he had to chain her to him to prevent it.

  He slammed the passenger door and turned back to help with his duffel. But he found the view of her bending over the trunk to work his duffel free so hypnotic that he could only stand there for a second and watch. Treated to a first-class glance of a firm female bottom clad in tight jeans, he began to revise his opinion of the woman who’d shot him. She wasn’t looking so stark at the moment.

  Pulling the duffel free of the trunk, she turned to face him. Then he really looked again. A lush, sensual mouth turned up at the corners when she caught him staring.

  “You going to keep on standing there?” she asked with a roll of her eyes. “Let’s move.”

  A small smile crept over her lips and Cisco’s body reacted. She was tough but sexy as hell, and he’d never been quite so turned on so fast by anyone in his life.

  His pent-up anger vanished in that instant, replaced by more questions and an irrational need to protect her.

  Crap. He’d be a lot better off getting his head together and finding his edge again. She had answers. That’s all he wanted from her.

  Taking her job as nursemaid seriously, Sunnie made sure Cisco was buckled in, then stepped on the gas and took off on the backstreets of Shiprock. Her nerves were shot to hell. Something didn’t feel right.

  “Where are we headed?” he asked.

  “I have a small apartment. But it’s on the other side of the rez. Maybe two and half hours from here. I’ve got a computer setup that you can probably make do if you need to check e-mail. And I know you’ll get the rest you need there, too. You mind the long ride?”

  “Whatever. I’m fine.” He was staring at her profile in the flaming glow of the setting sun and making her more nervous than ever. “What about you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You look pale. Want me to drive?”

  She couldn’t help the nervous laugh. “Let’s wait until we get out of town at least.”

  Her unease increased as they drove farther away from the garage. What was going on around Shiprock on this late afternoon that seemed so different? She couldn’t see anything wrong. But something was.

  One of the things about Shiprock she hated the most was the fact there were only two main roads leading out of town. The main route of Navajo Route 666, now U.S. 491, going north and south. And the two-lane Route 64 going east and west.

  Both highways were far too wide-open, too exposed. Remembering her promise to Ben that she would keep them out of sight, Sunnie racked her brain for alternate routes. She’d been raised near here and knew the shortcuts, but there simply wasn’t any way around it—for at least a few miles they would have to drive on one of the main roads.

  But they couldn’t afford to be spotted.

  She found herself holding her breath as they drove south on 491. At this time of day, the view of the monolith called Shiprock was framed in crimsons and magentas from the western sun, setting abruptly in the desert. Whenever she passed this way at sunset, the sight always made her catch her breath.

  This time fear trapped the air in her lungs. She put her foot down harder on the gas pedal and hoped she wouldn’t be stopped by one of the two traffic lights in town.

  Sliding through the main intersection on a yellow light, she took a breath. And then she heard it. Clearly.

  The buzz of the Skinwalkers.

  Right here at the edge of town? Oh, man.

  On pure instinct, she reached over and shoved hard at Cisco’s back. “Get down!”

  “What the hell?”

  “Try to stay out of sight.” Checking her rearview mirror, she spotted a huge SUV on their trail.

  She downshifted the Jeep and floored it. The whine of the transmission competed with the buzzing in her ears as she shot down the nearly empty highway.

  Damn, damn, damn. Where could they go to get away?

  “Mind telling me what the hell you’re doing?” Cisco asked with a snarl in his voice.

  “Trying to save our butts,” she yelled over the screaming engine and the wailing wind.

  Up ahead on the two-lane part of the highway she saw a short line of cars also going south. Traffic must’ve recently been stopped by the red light back in Shiprock. Maybe those cars could be her answer.

  She roared up behind the last car in the line, took a breath and crossed the double yellow line to pass. It took guts, but she managed to force her way back in between the last car and the poky one in front of it.

  “That’s enough. I’ve had it. Pull over,” Cisco shouted. “You’re crazy. I’m driving.”

  Sunnie shook her head. “Not yet.”

  Something had to give. She could still see the headlights of the tall SUV lumbering behind them menacingly and bringing up the rear of their line of cars.

  Putting every bit of her currently shaky intelligence to work, she tried to figure a way out. She knew Dead Man’s Wash was a few miles up ahead and decided it was a chance she would have to take.

  If only they could get a little lucky.

  Praying that the SUV wouldn’t play the same game of chicken as she was, Sunnie wished for a lot more traffic, only this time coming from the other direction. When the sign for the upcoming bridge over the wash appeared, she also saw the break she’d been hoping for.

  A long line of headlights was coming toward them. She couldn’t wait for a better opportunity. Flooring the old Jeep once again, she passed a couple more cars, barely making it back into her lane before the oncoming cars thundered alongside them, traveling in the opposite direction. Thanking the Yei, she was grateful to have put a few more vehicles between her Jeep and the SUV.

  Hitching her breath, she slowed and waited for the opposite line of cars to cross the bridge that spanned the dry wash. The minute her Jeep was across and the last car in the oncoming line of traffic had passed, she turned the wheel hard to the left and zipped across the other lane. She held on as the Jeep bounced off the highway and down into the desert on the far side of the bridge. Slamming on the brakes as she felt the sand beneath her tires, she fought the s
teering wheel.

  The ride was rough, through poisonweed and sagebrush, and she glanced over to check on Cisco. But it was too dark to see him clearly. She twisted the wheel left once again as they flew down the embankment and into the dry wash under the bridge.

  Praying her sudden maneuver had been hidden from behind by the line of cars going the opposite direction, she stood on the brake pedal and doused the lights.

  “You are nuts,” Cisco growled. “I swear…”

  “Shush. Quiet.”

  His deadly silence told her how he felt about things.

  Her mind whirled, filling with useless thoughts and adrenaline rushes. She’d wait ten minutes and then double back. There was a way off the highway a few miles back that would take them in the other direction and give them time to disappear.

  “Tell me what this is all about,” he muttered.

  “Not now.”

  “Sunnie…”

  “I told you—I’m saving your ass.”

  “From who?”

  Her shaky nerves finally got to her. She couldn’t help the sudden frustration and irritation. She’d saved his damned life. Shouldn’t that count for something?

  Sunnie turned to look at him in the starlight as words spilled out of her mouth. “From the Skinwalkers, dammit. Now shut up and be still before we both end up dead.”

  Chapter 4

  C isco sat in stony silence, intent on watching her while they drove out of the wash. They’d apparently lost the SUV, at least temporarily. But had she really said what he thought he’d heard?

  Skinwalkers? He’d done a little research on the Navajo before he’d made this trip and knew Skinwalkers were supposedly evil Navajo men who dealt in witchcraft and who could change their form into animal shapes. Is that what she was talking about?

  Similar tales of black witchcraft had been spun by his old Mexican grandmother. His abuela claimed to have actually seen animals change form. The stories she’d told seemed so real he’d ended up half believing in them. But, then again, maybe he had been as crazy as his grandmother.

  Maybe Sunnie was crazy. Maybe that’s why none of the locals they’d met had been thrilled to see her. But if she were nuts, surely that Navajo doctor would have found a way to warn him. Right?

  “Where are we going?” he asked as she pulled the four-wheel-drive Jeep off the sand and onto the highway.

  “There’s a local road, not well marked and not as far back as Shiprock city limits. It’ll take us in the opposite direction from my apartment, east off the reservation. It ends up in the outskirts of Farmington. I’m hoping we can get lost in city traffic.”

  “Farmington isn’t much of a bustling city.”

  She gave a slight shrug. “I doubt they’ll follow us off the reservation even if they manage to spot us leaving.”

  He wanted to shout that he couldn’t help her if he didn’t know everything. “What’ll we do in Farmington? Notify the police?”

  Shooting him a dark glance, she shook her head. “You can call Hunter if you want, but neither the Farmington Police nor the San Juan County Sheriff will be able to help us any. This trouble is strictly a Navajo problem.”

  There was no shot in hell of him calling Hunter Long. “But you think that SUV was following us because of me. Why? I’m not Navajo.” At least he didn’t think he had any Navajo blood. Though at this point in his life he wasn’t too sure of the complete details of his background.

  In the glow of headlights from oncoming cars he spotted her setting that pretty little jaw. “Duh,” she ground out. “You could’ve fooled me. But you’ve managed to wade into a big freakin’ Dine problem all the same, haven’t you?”

  “I’m not getting this. How come you’re so sure the guys who were following us weren’t after you?”

  “Because they don’t know I exist.”

  Hunter gave himself a mental shake. Why bother to talk to her at all? She never gave him a straight answer.

  But life was what you made of it. And he had vowed to make her tell him the whole story before they were done.

  Just not right now. His head was pounding, his vision blurred and fuzzy. He needed to get inside and out of the wind before he made any further attempts at getting her to talk. Cisco couldn’t think of a way under her defenses until he rested.

  “You’re the driver,” he said grudgingly. “So drive on. But I’ll need someplace to lie down soon.”

  She flicked him a worried glance and nodded her head. “I know an out-of-the-way place, an old motel on the far side of Farmington. Twenty more minutes. Can you make it?”

  Oh, he’d make it, all right. And when he did, and after he’d caught a short nap, the next sound he would hear would be her spilling secrets about what had been happening and why he was stuck in the middle. She wouldn’t maneuver around talking then.

  Grateful for the peace and quiet, Sunnie sat on the rim of a rusted tub in the tiny bathroom of the motel room she’d rented for cash, considering her new opinions on the subject of trust. Once upon a time, she’d trusted everyone. But as of six months ago, she’d gone through a complete transformation and no longer trusted anyone. Not people she’d known all of her life and certainly not strangers.

  The stranger asleep on the bed in the next room was injured and needed her nursing help for a while. But she couldn’t find any valid reason to trust him.

  When the Skinwalker SUV had caught up to them so easily after they’d left Junior’s, she’d been positive Cisco had somehow signaled them. Now she wasn’t so sure. He had been completely surprised when she’d mentioned the Skinwalkers. Really at a loss as to what she’d meant. She’d seen it in his expression.

  His shock had dulled her edge of fear. In the beginning Sunnie hadn’t cared if Cisco turned out to be one of the bad guys. Or even if he’d been sent to finish the job and murder her. Her life was not the point.

  The point was to kill the Wolf. And she was determined to live long enough to see the bastard dead. Then it simply didn’t matter.

  Bending to riffle through Cisco’s duffel, she contemplated her odd but automatic reactions to the man. Perhaps, as she’d helped him out of his coat and boots and onto the double bed, she’d lingered over the musky scent of him just a little too long. And just maybe she’d relished combing his deep brown and mink-soft hair off his forehead a little too much. Maybe.

  But the thick stubble on the carved angles of his face had been fascinating. The men she’d known well in her life—her fiancé and her family—none of them had had much in the way of facial hair. The mysterious shadow was what made Cisco look so dangerous. Perhaps that was why she got an electric sizzle whenever he looked her way.

  Thinking about his watchful gaze for a moment, she remembered the disdain in those intelligent ebony-colored eyes when the two of them were being questioned by Hunter back at the clinic. Clearly Cisco hadn’t cared for Hunter Long. The unknown reasons for his animosity toward a tribal policeman made her curious.

  Some of his words also sounded as though he hadn’t cared much for her, either. But his gazes told a whole different story.

  In the bright florescent lights he’d studied her with a blatant physical assessment. She might be naive to many of the sensual ways of men and women, but those looks had most definitely been sexual as they’d slid down her body. Her nipples had even tightened in response. Which in turn had caused a myriad of strange feelings to swim inside her. But they also gave the first clue that she was actually lusting after a complete and potentially dangerous stranger.

  Returning her attention to his duffel, Sunnie ran her hands under the folded underwear and extra pair of jeans and tees. First she came across a loaded magazine, buried under shaving cream and deodorant. The bullets and the fit seemed right for a handgun the size of about a .38. That made her remember the “concealed” weapon she hadn’t thought of since they’d been at the clinic. Did he still have one on him?

  She wasn’t afraid. But she didn’t like the idea of him being arme
d when she wasn’t.

  Hurrying through the rest of his duffel, she came up with only one other interesting thing—a small manila envelope containing old news clippings. They were from the local Navajo newspaper, dated about fifteen years ago. She didn’t take the time to study them carefully, but all of them concerned a body that had been found in a burned-out car on the reservation.

  Interesting. Almost familiar. But she had a more pressing problem at the moment. She needed to find that gun before Cisco woke up and once again had the upper hand.

  Cisco awoke with a start. What was that noise and why had it brought him up from a sound sleep? It took him a second to orient himself to his surroundings. Oh, yeah. He was in the cheap motel room Sunnie had rented.

  Sunnie. He shot a glance around the darkened room and past the open doorway into the small lighted bath. Easy to see Sunnie was among the missing. Damn. Had she left him asleep and gone for good?

  Again he heard the same noise that must’ve awoken him. Only this time he knew what he’d been hearing. The door to the outside parking lot rattled lightly. Someone was trying to get into the room.

  He exploded erect out of bed, reaching for the chair and the coat lying across it at the same time. Dipping his hand into the inside coat pocket and searching for his .38, he came up with nothing but air. What the hell? The weapon was gone. Sunnie. Dammit. She’d taken his .38 and left him without so much as a word.

  Gritting his teeth and vowing to catch up to her or die trying, Cisco decided to defend himself from his immediate adversary by picking up an old standing lamp that was heavy enough to dent a man’s head. He ripped the cord from the wall. With it hefted above his shoulder, he stepped to the side of the doorjamb and waited.

  If nothing else, he would have surprise on his side.

  The lock clicked and the doorknob turned. Not long to wait now. He tensed and bounced on the balls of his stocking-clad feet, ready to spring at whoever came through the door.