by Rachel Lee
She managed a slight negative shake of her head as she tried to cope with the fact that after running from a man for three years, she was now dependent on two of them, both of them looking as if they could do a lot more damage with their bare hands than Kevin could do with a tire iron.
Micah stepped farther into the room and settled on the one remaining chair. He seemed to know that the easy chair was Clint’s preferred perch. He held his hands out to the fire for a minute, then turned toward her slowly. She shrank back.
“Easy, girl,” he said quietly. “Nobody here is gonna hurt you.”
She didn’t exactly have any choice now except to believe him. Cold comfort.
Clint returned with two mugs and passed one to Micah.
“Thanks,” Micah said, as Clint settled into his chair. “So is this what it looks like?”
“Maybe. But maybe worse.”
Micah sipped his hot coffee, then returned his dark gaze to Kay.
What were they talking about? Her? She wished she could hide behind the sofa pillows. And yet she sensed no threat in those exotic eyes.
“My wife,” Micah said.
She managed a slight nod.
“My wife was on the run from an abusive ex-husband when I found her. There was a storm, not as bad as this, but still a storm. She was driving too fast, so I pulled her over to warn her to slow down. I got to know her terror pretty quick.”
Something inside Kay seemed to pop. Maybe the bubble of fear and apprehension. She relaxed a bit. “Did he follow her?”
“Yeah, he did.”
“Where is he now?”
“Well, he tried to kill her. So I had to kill him.”
She sagged then, as the last of the tension seeped out of her. She looked at Clint and realized he was prepared to do the same if necessary. Oh, Lord, she didn’t want any body to die, but she was beginning to think there was no other way out.
Clint spoke. “He kidnapped Kay from Texas and got her this far before she managed to escape.”
“Kidnapping is good,” Micah remarked. “Especially across state lines.”
“It is?” Kay could scarcely believe she had heard right, and fear began to trickle along her spine.
“It’s very good,” Micah said. “The Feds can usually get a maximum sentence on a case like that.”
“I’d like that,” Kay admitted, trying to relax again. “I’m so tired of running.” Her chest tightened, and she had to fight back tears. Tired. Yes she was tired. Tired to the very bone. At last she felt secure enough to settle back more comfortably on the sofa.
Micah nodded and then turned back to Clint. “So tell me what you have.”
“First, Kay doesn’t want her name on any records. Not until you catch the guy.”
“I can do that.”
Kay released another relieved sigh and let her eyes close for a minute. Thank God. She listened as Clint related the information she’d given him, Kevin’s name, age, even his social security number, and the description of the car. And then the description of her abduction and mistreatment. Brief though the account was, she found it painful to listen to. And even though she had been the victim, she could hardly believe it. It sounded so different coming out of Clint’s mouth.
Micah took the pad from Clint and turned to a fresh sheet. “Some of this can go in the record. I’ll need it to put out a BOLO.” But even as he started to write, he paused and looked at Kay. “Not your name. We don’t need your name now, okay? Nor do I need to tell anyone where you are. But he already knows you escaped in these parts so that won’t tell him anything he doesn’t know.”
“Thank you.”
Micah finished writing down the information, then ripped the sheet off the pad. “I can get this out right away. I’m going out to the car to get my camera, so I can take some pictures of you. You probably won’t want me to see everything, but the fresher the photos are, the better, and my camera is time and date stamped. It’s evidence, all right?”
She nodded, compressing her lips. “Okay.” This was going to be so humiliating. Somehow, displaying her wounds seemed like an admission of her own failures.
Micah’s face gentled. “If I could get a female deputy out here, I would. Maybe after the wind dies down. But right now it’s just me, and we don’t need lawyers arguing about whether those bruises were too old to have occurred during the kidnapping.”
She hadn’t thought about that, but she could see his point. From somewhere she found a bit of resolve. “Okay,” she said again. If she had to face Kevin down in a courtroom again, she didn’t want to be accused of lying, like last time. Or, if she was accused of it, she wanted proof that she wasn’t.
She put her hand to her head as Micah rose and went to get his camera.
“Headache?” Clint asked immediately.
“No. I don’t know. I just can’t seem to get my footing. It’s like things are changing so fast.”
“When we’ve been through a really bad time, it’s harder to adjust to changes for a while.”
“Maybe.” But it was even harder to let go of her fear. “I don’t really know how to relax anymore,” she blurted with sudden realization.
“I know that feeling all too well. It takes time, a lot of time, to realize you can climb down from the ceiling safely.”
She supposed he would know. But then Micah came back in with the camera, and she faced more humiliation. However, he didn’t ask for much. He squatted right in front of her.
“I’m going to take pictures of your face,” he said gently. “Just your face. If it’s hard to move, say so, and I’ll do all the moving.”
“I think I can do it.”
He started snapping. The flash was on, of course, which made her keep blinking, but since this wasn’t a fashion shoot, she didn’t think it mattered. He must have taken a dozen photos of her face from different angles before he said, “Anything else you feel comfortable showing me?”
“Her back,” Clint said.
She started to protest, but he spoke first. “Kay, we can get your back without offending your modesty. I’ll help.”
So she stood up, away from the furniture, and let Clint pull up the back of the sweatshirt until her entire back and shoulders were revealed while she clutched the front securely to her breasts.
“Well, hell,” Micah said again, and the flashes started. “Any more like that?”
“All over her,” Clint said. “But I think you’ve got the worst ones.” He let the sweatshirt fall back into place.
“Make a note of the others,” Micah suggested. “I’ll get Sara out here tomorrow, assuming we’ve finished rescuing fools.”
Kay made her way back to the couch and sat, resting her face in her hands again, at least as much as she could without making it hurt worse. Not that she didn’t hurt all over, but the wound to her face seemed to dominate her awareness much more than her back or the rest of her.
Micah stayed only a few more minutes, then remarked that he had to get on to other things. Kay noticed that Clint followed him out onto the porch, brutal as the weather was, and the two men stood talking for a couple of minutes.
But she was past caring what they might be discussing. Fatigue was washing over her in waves again, and she didn’t have the energy to fight it. She reached for the quilt, moving gingerly, and pulled it up over herself as she tried to burrow into the couch as if it were a private cave.
Enough, she thought. Enough.
Silent tears spilled down her face, but she hardly noticed them as she hid from the world and quickly slipped into sleep. Sleep, it seemed, was her last refuge.
Outside, Clint had more important matters on his mind. “I think this Kevin guy may have seen me pick her up along the road. A car came by as I was carrying her to my truck, and it slowed down. I thought at the time it was someone heading up to the Rivers place, but when she gave me the description of the car, I started to wonder. I didn’t take all that good a look. We were getting into whiteout conditions.�
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Micah rocked a bit on his heels. Snow whirled like tiny tornadoes just beyond the porch, and some of it blew into their faces, stinging. “Not good. You want someone out here?”
“You can’t spare anybody right now. Besides, I can keep her safe in the house.”
“Yeah.” Micah rubbed his chin. “That sumbitch probably won’t be trying to get around in this weather anyway. All right, I’ll get everyone on alert. If we’re lucky, he’s stuck in a snowbank somewhere.”
“We can hope.” But Clint wasn’t the hopeful type. He’d had too much experience with Murphy’s law. He always prepared for the worst.
“Do you have everything you need? Food? Fuel?”
“Do you need to ask?”
Micah chuckled. “No, I guess not. We come from the same school.” He started to step off the porch, then looked back. “You know, I could take her to my place.”
Clint knew exactly what he meant. Micah understood his need for solitude, at one time had even shared it.
“No,” he said. “No. I took this one on, and I’m not pushing it off on anybody else. Besides, it could put your family at risk, and you can’t be there round the clock.”
Micah gave a nod of acknowledgment, then waded through the snow to his truck. With a wave, he headed out.
Clint stood outside in the biting wind and snow awhile longer, listening to the fading sound of the deputy’s engine. The wind was fast filling in the gap left by the plow.
The world could be such a sorry place. Enough to make a man feel ashamed of being human. But not always. He might find his comfort in the basic innocence of nature. What could be purer than a world covered in fresh snow? But even as he looked out into the wrath of nature, he knew life-and-death struggles were going on all around him. The difference was most of those struggles weren’t about power, just survival.
So what did that leave a man? Atonement. Basic atonement.
And a small part of his atonement was waiting right inside his living room.
Chapter 5
Kay awoke from a miserable sleep in which both the pains in her body and nightmares had disturbed her. As her eyes opened, she was surprised to see a propane lantern on the coffee table, providing the only light in the room except for the fireplace.
Away from the light, in the darker corners, the firelight made shadows dance and flicker. She turned her head and saw Clint in his easy chair, a shadowed figure himself.
“The power went out,” he said when he saw her wake.
Since she could still hear the wind keening like a banshee, she had a pretty good idea why. “Oh.” She struggled with the quilt she had managed to tangle all around herself until she could sit up a little higher.
“Need anything?” he asked. “We’re pretty much okay, except we won’t have running water until the power comes back on. I’ve got enough stashed for drinking and cooking, but I can’t offer that shower right now.”
“That’s okay.” What else could she say? It was only now, anyway, as her injuries began to mend, that she noticed how grimy she felt. Still, she could stand another few hours.
“I was thinking, though, that if we don’t get power back soon, I can heat up some water and make you a bath. A small bath, but I can do it.”
“That’s kind of you, but maybe we better save the water.” She was touched by his caring.
“Well, I don’t imagine you got the chance to clean up during your abduction and I know how important that can be psychologically.”
She tried to smile, but mostly she was surprised by how much he seemed to understand. Understanding had been lacking in a lot of her life. For the first time since he had found her, she felt a flicker of real warmth toward him.
He stood. “Do you need something to drink?”
“I’m fine right now.”
“Okay. I’m going to go out and walk around a bit, make sure the wind isn’t doing any damage. Shouldn’t take me long.”
She nodded, but her instant response wasn’t exactly positive. Logically it made sense that he would want to look for wind damage, but emotionally she felt terrified that he might really be looking for something—someone—else.
Stop it, she told herself. There was no reason on earth to think that Kevin could possibly know she was here, or that Clint would be worried about it.
But long conditioning refused to let her relax. Fear seemed to have engraved itself on her very being.
She listened as he pulled on his outerwear to go out and face the furious elements. Then the door slammed and she was alone, and for the first time in a very long time, being alone didn’t feel safe.
God, she was a mess. And getting messier by the moment, it seemed. After living in survival mode, always looking over her shoulder, it seemed that even the hint of safety had shattered her coping mechanisms.
She couldn’t help it. She sat up completely, putting her feet on the floor, then waited tensely. Kevin had stripped her of her last sense of security, even self-deluded security.
She tried to think about Clint instead. An enigma, she decided, with a pockmarked soul. Good at heart, but damaged. Badly damaged. Like her. God knew what wounds he carried, and he didn’t seem likely to tell her.
But even in the midst of her own selfish fear, she could feel a twinge of genuine sympathy for him. Just from occasional things he’d said, she suspected that he’d put himself in his hermitage less from general disgust with people than from disgust from himself.
But maybe she was reading too much into things. Maybe he’d meant exactly what he’d said about being fed up with selfish people. Even if that were true, she didn’t believe that was the sum of it. The man had a side he kept showing in spite of himself, a generous side enhanced by a strong sense of duty.
And he was protective. Imagine him understanding her unwillingness to expose her wounds to Micah. Almost as if he understood that they were more than just external bruises but a mark of her shame. And then his thoughtfulness in the way he had helped preserve her modesty while revealing her back and shoulders to the camera.
No, he might be trying to turn into stone. He might think he’d looked into the face of Medusa and was now just rock. But that wasn’t true. Not at all. No one with a heart of stone would have cared for her the way he had.
She almost gasped when he came back in. Instinct made her turn sharply toward the door, to be sure it was him, and she almost groaned as she rediscovered all her bruises. “Oh God,” she whispered as the wave of agony passed through her.
He never paused to drop his jacket or kick off his boots. He came shooting over to her like a bullet and squatted in front of her. “What’s wrong?”
She had to struggle to get her breath back. Each time she inhaled, it hurt again. “I just moved wrong,” she gasped finally. “I think my ribs may be bruised.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. How bad does it hurt?”
“It’s going away.”
“You’re really going to have to consider seeing a doctor as soon as we can get out of here.”
“I’ll be fine.” She sounded angry, but she was actually terrified by the thought. If she saw a doctor, another person would know she was here. And how the hell would she pay for it, anyway?
He remained squatting in front of her as snow began to melt off his jacket and boots. “Okay,” he said finally. “Okay?”
He gave her a crooked smile. “There’s no point in having this fight right now, when all I could do is get us stuck in the snow.”
“Oh.” In spite of herself, one corner of her mouth lifted. “Yeah, it would be stupid to argue now.”
“We’ll revisit this in the morning.” He rose and went to remove his outerwear by the door. Then he fetched a ragged towel and mopped the small puddles he’d left on the floor.
“How is it out there?” she asked, desperate for the distraction. Breathing was getting easier, and slowly she sank back against the pillows.
“Frankly? Awful. It may have stopped snowing, but you c
ouldn’t prove it by me. The wind is a killer. It’s a good day for staying in your lair and sitting by the fire.”
“Sounds like it.” And but for him, she would be lying under a snow blanket, probably until spring, when someone found her and named her Jane Doe. She squeezed her eyes closed for a minute, seeking some kind of balance internally. No point in thinking like that. It hadn’t happened. Instead, she was warm and safe. For now.
“Pain?” he asked.
She opened her eyes and found him in his chair again. “No, not really. Just wrestling with demons.”
“Sometimes it helps to call a time-out.”
“I’m still trying to find a way to do that.”
“It can take a while.” He drummed his fingers briefly on the arm of his chair. “I’m not much of a distraction,” he finally said. “I don’t talk much. Hell, I even quit play ing poker, not that it’s much fun with only two players.”
“Trust me, I’m not complaining. You’ve done more for me than most people ever have.”
He shook his head. “I’ve done very little. Don’t build me up into something I’m not.”
Surprise washed away her other thoughts. Could he really feel that way? Even cops who were supposed to protect her had done less than this man, especially when measured against his obvious preference for solitude. “I think you underrate yourself.”
“No, I’ve just taken a good hard look at myself.”
“But…” She stopped. Arguing about the kind of man he was wouldn’t help anything at all. It might even anger him. And he certainly wouldn’t listen to her, because she didn’t really know him. “I’m grateful to you. Very grateful.”
“Probably,” he acknowledged. “And probably more than I deserve. Are you getting hungry?”
She recognized the quick change in subject as a warning and let it lie. He didn’t think he deserved her gratitude. God, talk about a pair of wounded souls!
“I run by my internal clock these days,” he went on, “and I could use a sandwich. Tuna sound good?”
“It sounds great.”
He was up and out of that chair as if he’d just been released from Old Sparky.
