“Sorry, girl,” he whispered to her, patting the mare on her glossy head.
Sam rarely thought clearly these days. His fiancée had been killed almost two years ago. His life had felt scattered and empty since. Lauren. He felt the familiar gut punch as he thought of her. Grief surrounded him like cold air, sapping his energy, slowing him down. He could practically feel its chilly clasp on his heart.
After her death, Sam had tried to resume his normal life, but he just couldn’t do it. He'd been a doctor in the Army Medical Corps, working at a hospital near Washington, D.C., or on-site with Special Ops forces like the Rangers. But he’d resigned his post recently. Too many times, he’d found himself staring at a pile of paperwork with no memory of how it had gotten on his desk, or worse, tuning out patients in the middle of them describing their medical complaints. He’d lost enough sleep to concern even the residents at his base hospital in Bethesda, who were perpetually sleep-deprived.
Sam had begun to worry that he might harm someone with his inattention. The career he’d worked so hard to achieve had come to feel like a millstone around his neck. One day, after stressing over the matter for months, he’d gone to his commanding officer and asked to retire his commission. His CO tried to talk him out of his decision and into grief counseling, but Sam had been determined, and even Lieutenant Colonel Simms had eventually conceded that he was in no condition to practice medicine.
In the end, Sam had walked out of the hospital without even saying goodbye to his coworkers. He had turned his back on a promising career into which he’d poured his heart and soul. It hadn’t even bothered him. His life felt surreal and distant, as if it were happening to someone else. He knew it was a coping mechanism, but had no interest in turning it off. If he felt numb to the world, so much the better
And, at least he didn’t need the income. Sam fell back on his family money, taking what he needed from a trust set up for him at birth, which was how, at thirty-two, he had a winter lodge in one of the most exclusive parts of the country.
The lodge was the last place Sam remembered feeling happy, so he’d come here hoping to recapture a glimmer of that joy. Instead, memories of time spent here with his fiancée bore down on him. That’s why you’re out for a nice canter on a subzero day, Sam reminded himself.
He cracked a layer of ice from the cashmere muffler across his mouth, then urged his horse on a bit faster. It was too cold to even admire the stunning landscape. The mountains, covered with thick conifer and aspen forests, were blanketed in deep snow. All the waterfalls and streams were frozen over. Only the soft gurgling of the streams, still running under the ice, marred the wintry silence. People paid millions for these views. Sam hardly noticed them.
Something in him must have been alert, though, or he’d never have noticed the person lying in the snow. The person wasn’t moving, made no noise, and wore a black sweatshirt that stood out in the fresh blanket of snow.
For a moment, Sam thought his mind was playing tricks on him. There was nobody around for miles, after all. But his horse gave a loud whinny as he debated his sanity. “You see them, too?” he asked his horse, urging her off the path toward where the person lay. She whinnied again, eagerly moving toward the body.
Sam’s heart thudded as he called out.
“Hey! Are you okay?”
He immediately felt stupid. Of course she -- he could see it was a woman now by her thick waves of light blonde hair and petite figure -- wasn’t okay. People didn’t just lie in snowbanks for the heck of it. The woman wasn’t responding, making Sam fear he might have stumbled across a body rather than a person.
Sam dismounted and knelt beside the woman to check her vitals. Her flesh was icy cold to the touch. Her pulse was slow and hard to detect, but still there, thank God. She didn’t open her eyes when he touched her, but Sam talked to her just the same, in case she could hear.
“You’re going to be all right. I’m a doctor.” Still no response.
Sam looked her over more carefully. She was young, around twenty-two, he guessed. Her skin was incredibly pale, her lips the same color as the flesh around them. Her body had pulled blood to her core in an attempt to fight the cold, leaving a tracework of blue veins stark against her ivory skin. She was wearing nothing but a thin sweatshirt and the remains of a tattered skirt, with thin white socks on her feet. No shoes in sight, which made him shiver. Why was she out here without fucking shoes?
Sam had checked her pulse at her throat before, not her wrists. Now, as he looked, what he saw made the hairs on his arms rise. She had ligature marks along her wrists and her feet, too. Someone had bound her. The unpleasant yellow of fading bruises contrasted with the deep violet and greens of fresh bruises ringed around the marks. She’d been bound for a long time, then.
So she’d escaped. Whatever she was running from - or whoever, Sam corrected himself - must have been pretty terrible if she’d run into the freezing snow without shoes or even a coat. She must have known she’d likely die and ran anyway. That, or she’d been left here to die.
Adrenaline was pumping through him now.
He’d have to move her, and on horseback, too. Sam slipped his hands under her sweater to check for wounds or broken bones. The woman opened her eyes as soon as he did, but it took her a few seconds to speak.
“Don’t fucking touch me,” she hissed, as she weakly batted at his hands.
“I’m a doctor. I can help you. Do you know where you are?” Sam asked, holding his hands up so she could see he wasn’t touching her.
“Don’t touch me,” she repeated. She shut her eyes and began to fade out. Shit. She was further into hypothermia than he’d thought.
“Wake up! You can’t go to sleep now or you’ll die!”
“Fine, I’ll die,” she mumbled.
Sam looked around. There was nobody in sight, but whoever she’d run from couldn’t be too far.
“I’d rather you didn’t,” Sam said.
He kept a cool head in crisis, the product of over a decade of military training. He called his horse over and commanded her to kneel. Then he took a blanket from under the horse’s saddle, wrapped it around the woman, lifted her and placed her in front of him in the saddle.
His horse didn’t need commands, but he urged her to hurry anyway. His lodge was only a mile away, but Sam had no idea if the poor woman was injured; he couldn’t exactly do a full body exam in the freezing air. Sam ignored the woman’s weak attempts to shove him away at first. Hypothermia was best treated with body heat, he muttered to himself. As she warmed up though, her strength began to return, and she pushed even harder at him. It was becoming difficult to stay in his saddle. Finally, she shoved him hard enough to put Sam and herself off balance. He gripped the horse with his strong thigh muscles and pulled the woman roughly to him to avoid them both falling off.
“Would you please stop trying to shove me off my horse while I’m saving your life?” he asked her exasperatedly. He forced her chin up, making her meet his eyes for the first time, and said in a slow, clear voice, “I am trying to help you.”
The woman glared at him with green eyes like fire, but stopped pushing. She was shivering now, which Sam took as a good sign. It meant she was warming up a little, less close to the dangers of hypothermia than before when she’d been fading out like a zombie.
“Thank you,” Sam said politely. Steeling himself against the rush of cold air, he took off his coat and wrapped it around her.
“Look, see ahead, that black speck? That’s my cabin. I’m taking you there. We’ll be safe there, and I can treat you.”
She mumbled something into his coat collar, but she spoke so low, and through such chattering teeth, that he couldn’t hear her. Sam leaned closer to her.
“What?”
“Do… doors… lock?” she managed to get out.
Sam felt his heart squeeze. Did his cabin doors lock? What the hell had happened to this woman? Who was after her?
“The cabin has heavy doors. The do
ors have several locks. I have an alarm system. Trust me, you’ll be safe there.”
Sam left out another fact: he was well-supplied with guns and ammunition, and he was also an expert marksman. He wasn’t sure this woman would want to hear that the man who’d just rescued her was packing heat, though.
Instead he said simply, “You’ll be safe with me.”
“My name… in case I don’t make it,” she mumbled. “My name is Kat Green, from Clover, Virginia.”
“I’m Sam Montrose, Kat, but you are going to make it. I’m going to make sure of that.”
The woman didn’t say anything in reply, but Sam felt the tension leave her body. He wrapped his left arm around her, using his right to hold the reins. She made no effort to resist now, instead snuggling closer to his body. Sam felt a rush of tenderness toward this poor woman, who so clearly needed care and protection.
He urged his horse on again toward the cabin. Sam wasn’t a particularly religious man, and he’d lost the last traces of his faith when his fiancée had died, but he found himself praying now that his doctoring skills would be enough to keep Kat Green from Clover, Virginia alive.
Chapter 2
Kat Green dreamed of the day she met her captor. She was seventeen back then, with a mess of pale blonde hair and deep emerald eyes, all skin and bones. All the other kids that lived in the Two Rivers trailer park looked down on Kat, because her father was a junkie. Cyril Green made his living working nights in the Pull-A-Part car lot, shooting dope between rounds of security patrols.
The other kids' parents might live in the trailer park, and they might not have enough to eat or new clothes to wear. But at least they had never been actually starving, fed by kinder souls who worked at the school during her father’s binges. At least they had never worn hand-me-downs from their dead mother’s outdated wardrobe because it was all they had to wear and they were too poor to buy new clothes, even at the thrift store.
It wasn’t much, but everybody had to look down on someone, give themselves someone to feel richer than. And in Two Rivers trailer park it was Kat Green, her fucked up absentee father, and her crumbling trailer.
She remembered that day, little details about it. It was mid-afternoon, the spring breeze tinged with a hint of humidity. She wore a pastel green printed dress, with ties instead of straps at the shoulders. A secondhand outfit from her mother, who’d died four years before from endocarditis.
She was hungry, but the sensation was distant. She sat in her dingy bedroom and looked in her mirror, a funky little hand mirror she’d found on the ground. She’d French braided her blonde hair, and when she looked in the mirror, her bright green eyes and sharp cheekbones stood out.
She smiled at herself. For all the terrible things that surrounded her, she was genetically blessed. Perfectly straight teeth, tallish for a girl, thin as a whip. She didn’t quite know what to make of it yet, but she had the idea she would escape to New York, maybe become a model or an actress. Kat fell into a daydream about what it would be like to live there, get rich, buy some new clothes for a change and eat all kinds of fancy foods...
The front door opened, slamming against the wall with enough force that the whole trailer rattled. She heard a voice through her closed door. She hated when her father brought his friends here. As soon as they knew she was around, they would touch her, grope her, playing it off as a laugh.
She didn’t think it was funny. Neither did her father, really, but he didn’t want his buddies to have a bad time. So he went along with it, the spineless jerk.
She went still, praying that her father wasn’t so high that he would commandeer the living room, sleeping in front of the TV. The bathroom was on the other side of the trailer, and she would have to wait until he and his friends were deep in the clutches of heroin to escape.
“Kat!” her father bellowed.
All the hair on her body stood straight up. She thought that maybe if she didn’t answer, he would think she was out. She held her breath as heavy footsteps headed her way.
The doorknob rattled, then turned. Her father flung the door open, his blond head appearing.
“You need’ta comm’here,” he slurred, moving toward her.
She couldn’t help but slink back, but there was nowhere to go in her small, windowless room.
“No!” she protested, but her father grabbed her arm and wrestled her to her feet. “Dad—”
“Get out here,” he said, twisting her arm behind her back and frogmarching her into the living room.
In the living room stood a handsome man in his late thirties, clean cut and wearing a nice suit. He was dark haired and dark eyed, and he looked at Kat appraisingly.
“Is this her?” he asked, looking her up and down.
“This’s her,” her father said, releasing her to brace himself on the wall. “I told you I had a daughter. She’s a looker, ain’t she?”
The other man said nothing, only circled around Kat, measuring her to some standard only he knew of. After a minute, he nodded to Cyril.
“Alright. I’ll take her,” he said, pulling out a manila envelope, like mail was sent in. It had an odd shape. Kat would later figure out that it was a payment in exchange for her.
“Take me where?!” she asked, her voice going tight with emotion. “I don’t want to go! Dad…”
She watched the man hand the envelope to her father, who took it and turned away, presumably counting his reward. The man turned to her, smiling coldly. He moved toward her, his smile growing bigger as she backed into a wall.
“Let’s go,” he said, gripping her arm. His grasp was much too tight already. She looked toward her father for help.
“Dad…” she said. The man started pulling her out of the trailer, and she grew desperate. Tears stung her eyes. What had she done to deserve this? “Dad! Dad, help me!!”
Her father looked up from the envelope. Her last memory of him was of his wan smile.
“It’ll be all right. Just go with Ted, baby,” he said.
“No! No! Noooo!” She shrieked as Ted tried to pull her out the front door.
Ted released her, only to punch her in the stomach as hard as he could. She doubled over, nauseated and in pain.
“I said let’s go,” Ted said, looking at her without remorse. “That’s two times I’ve asked. You don’t want to know what happens when I have to tell you again.”
He grabbed her by the arm and forced her outside, where a black SUV waited. He flung the back passenger side door open, shoving her in. Once he closed the door, she tried the handle, but there was no escaping.
“Put on your seatbelt,” he said as he climbed into the driver’s seat. “You’re going to be my girl, so you have to be safe.”
As he pulled out of the Two Rivers trailer park, Kat finally started to genuinely cry. As soon as her tears dried up, Kat had practiced clearing her mind, making it a blank slate. The meditative state that resulted helped her through some of the worst times over the next few years, taught her to withdraw inside herself.
In her dream, things shifted from the past to the present. She’d been Ted’s ‘girl’ for four years now, living in his house just outside D.C., close to Arlington. The house was big and nice, and she kept it clean for him. She slept in the basement, on a dirty old mattress. It seemed odd at first, considering the cleanliness Ted expected in his house. But she soon learned that things and people in D.C. were rarely what they seemed.
Ted was squeaky clean on the surface, but if you dug a little, all his dirt could be seen. Luckily for her Ted was mostly impotent, so she dealt with his sexual frustrations and rages. In truth, it wasn’t that much different than being confined to the trailer.
Well, it was like the trailer if her father had beaten her freely, over and over and over again. At first she’d resisted, then she had learned to make her mind a clean slate. If she didn’t flinch or make a fuss, the beatings would be over faster.
At least Ted bought her things. She had clothes that had never b
een worn by anyone else, and food. Under Ted’s cruel tutelage, she quickly became adept at running the household just how he liked it and having dinner on the table at the right time.
Occasionally he would throw parties, where his friends would show up with their girls. She’d kept her eyes down, not wanting to see the marks of servitude on another person’s flesh. Ted usually gloated over how perfect she was, how well-trained.
She just blanked her mind and stared emptily into space, glad at least that he was too jealous to let anyone else touch her. Other girls were not so lucky, it seemed.
Ted said that she was a step up from his last girl. It has given her pause when he said it, but she couldn’t question what that meant. At least she was safe here, as long as she followed Ted’s exacting rules.
After the first year, Ted had taken off the shackles, said he knew she wouldn’t run. Said she’d go to jail. She had learned that Ted was close with a lot of the local police, so she believed him. She’d settled into her life, wretched though it was, until ten days ago.
Ten days ago, Ted had looked at her sourly and declared that he was bored with her. She’d given him her neutral, unblinking expression, but apparently it was too late.
Everything had changed.
Ted had put her in an SUV and drove to the coast. He had only explained that he needed a change of scenery. She’d been grateful for a break from cleaning and cooking, and a chance to look out of the car windows for a long time.
When he’d offered her a couple of pills, saying they were something to help her relax, she took them. They made everything fuzzy, gave the scenery outside the window blurry edges.
She fell asleep, rousing only when she felt handcuffs closing around her wrists. She opened her eyes and saw a rough-looking hunting cabin, one story and made of dark wood.
Ted had told her to get out, to go inside. She bit her lip, but did what she was asked. She felt so, so tired. He rushed her past a basic kitchen and into a bedroom, then locked in her there. She looked around, but there was nothing to see except a naked, stained mattress.
Begging for Bad Boys Page 49
