Back in his truck, he drove to the back of the store, where a Dumpster was enclosed by a wood fence.
“This might take a while,” Jamie said.
“Yup.” Reese sighed and reclined her seat a little, closing her eyes.
“How did it feel hugging your dad?” Jamie asked.
She opened one eye and rolled it toward him. “You’re asking me that now?” She closed both eyes again.
While they were tracking a suspect? “Why not? It’s something to talk about. Pass the time.”
“Not something I want to talk about.”
“Did it scare you?”
Both eyes came open, dark lashes accentuating their striking beauty. She sat up, her blond hair swinging as she turned to look at him fully. “Why do you think that?”
“You hold back with me out of fear. Fear of the unknown. You have set plans and nothing will deter you from them, but what you haven’t paid attention to is I’m not the one who’ll steal your dreams. You’ll do that all on your own. You’ll rob yourself of opportunities by not being open to them.”
“Are you still mad about before?”
“I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at myself for trusting you.”
Her eyes lowered at that comment. He watched her swallow as though the truth had gotten stuck in her throat.
“I told you I wasn’t ready for a serious relationship,” she finally said.
She’d cling to that excuse until she lost him. No one could show her the way. She had to find it on her own.
“Nobody plans on when they meet someone who could be their soul mate.” He already knew she was his. “Plans can change. Life is about change. If you can’t change with it, you’ll be stuck in the same place your entire life. Just look at your parents if you don’t believe me.” He didn’t have to meet them in person to know they were those kind of people.
Slowly her head lifted and she looked at him.
“Hugging your father felt good.” He didn’t need her to tell him. He hoped she’d have the courage to admit it. She didn’t. “You also know deep down inside that you’d love working for him. The light in your eyes gave you away when he showed you that case.”
Her eyes began to mist. “Don’t.”
“Do you think he left those files on the table by accident?”
“Jamie...”
He couldn’t believe he’d breached her iron wall. “He knows that part of you better than you know it yourself. You’re his daughter. Look at him. A born detective, just like you.”
A tear slid down her cheek. Inside she must be cracking. Everything she’d originally believed no longer held up to this new reality.
“I have a life here.” She sounded choked.
“You have a life with your father, too. Forget about me. Kadin wants you in his life, Reese. Are you going to shut him out? Why did you find him if you didn’t plan on that?”
A tiny sob broke from her. “I don’t know.” She banged her fist on her thigh. “I don’t know, okay?” She turned her tear-streaked face to him. “I don’t know.”
The woman had some serious soul-searching to do. She thought she knew herself but the act of reaching out to find her biological parents without deciding whether to have them involved in her life said she didn’t, not wholly and completely. She only knew the independent her, the part of her that had come out being raised by aloof parents.
“I don’t want to hurt you.” Jamie felt as though he had to rip out who she really was to make her see what she missed.
She sniffled a few times without responding. But finally he heard her quietly say, “It felt good.”
He dug behind the passenger seat for a box of tissues.
“The hug did?” He handed her a few tissues.
She nodded as she took them, dropping most in her lap and using one to wipe her eyes and blow her nose.
“It felt real,” she continued. “Like he meant it. Like it came from his heart.”
Touched beyond measure, thrilled that she’d poked her stubborn head out for this glimpse of true love, Jamie put his fingers beneath her chin and lifted.
Her teary eyes met his.
“Do you mean it when you kiss me?”
Her soft inhale, a sign of warming passion, gave her away before she said, “Yes.”
“Do you feel that I mean it when I kiss you? Do you feel it coming from my heart?”
She closed her eyes for several seconds. Then opened them. “I don’t know.”
Jamie fought his disappointment. She cut herself off to love so stoutly that he had no way in. But her wall was down right now.
Putting his face closer to hers, he said, “Relax and let me in, Reese. Close your eyes and let me in. Just for one kiss.”
She met his eyes and didn’t pull back.
He touched his lips to hers. Their quickening breaths filled the cab of the truck. He restrained himself from devouring her. He kissed her with a message. A sweet, pure message.
In her vulnerable state, he felt her sink into the kiss a lot softer than before. Rather than passion leading the way, their hearts did. He felt closer to her now than ever, and rejuvenated that she met him as an equal, even if just this once.
Her hand came to his chest and upward, to the back of his neck. He moved his hand down to the middle of her back. This wasn’t about sex. He kissed her only with his heart, drawing hers out, keeping her wall open to loving light. Fighting for her love. He’d fought many battles, but this one would be the toughest one. She had him thinking tender notes that had never before entered his mind. He wouldn’t call himself soft, but right now, he felt as light and feathery as a cloud.
At last he pulled back. Her eyes fluttered open and peered up at him with naked emotion, skin flushed and breathing heavy.
“I love you.” The words tumbled out unbidden, too late to take them back and keep them to himself until he was more certain of her. “I’ve loved you since that first night.”
“Oh, Jamie.” Another tear slid down. She put her hand on his face.
Would it be enough to bring her home with him? She had a life in Never Summer. And her desire to become sheriff couldn’t be easily dismissed. Would she be able to embrace a change as big as coming to live with her new family?
When she didn’t say she felt the same as him, doubt engulfed all hope.
Chapter 15
After digging in the trash and finding the coffee cup, Reese gave the sample to Kadin, who would rush testing. Now she and Jamie could concentrate on finding Stankovich before he made his next move. They began searching the remains of the burned mine house, which had been nearly destroyed by the fire.
Reese picked through the rubble inside on the off chance they’d find a clue. They had lost the trail on Stankovich. Shadow Mountain Ranch reported he’d stayed there one night, but then left. No one had seen him in town and he hadn’t traveled by plane from any of the nearby airports, private or public.
The weather had turned sour overnight, bringing in colder air and gray clouds. The forecast called for more than a foot of snow by tomorrow. Snow fell heavier as flakes sprinkled down through the giant hole in the roof and slanted outside through the sections of walls.
She looked over at Jamie going through what had once been Ray’s office. She was still disconcerted over the things Jamie had said, the things he’d made her consider. She didn’t want to face them right now. She wasn’t sure she ever would.
“I doubt he would leave without finishing his business with me,” Jamie said. “That isn’t like him. He’d never pass up an opportunity to make money, which he did through Virgil, and he wouldn’t leave while I still breathe.”
“Where could he have gone?”
“Somewhere strategic. Somewhere he could safely draw me out. And you, proba
bly.” He said the last in disgust.
Reese thought of what Stankovich might have done if his first attempt to lure Jamie hadn’t failed. She stopped searching through charred debris and arched her aching back, looking around. Where the mine tunneled into the mountain was dark. The door that had once been there was gone, burned to a pile of ash and pieces of blackened wood.
To think she’d once been locked in a room near there made her shudder. Her gaze went back to the opening of the mine shaft.
“Ray said he was working on turning his house into a museum. The mine should still be intact.” She started to walk over there.
After removing her flashlight from her gear belt, Reese switched it on. Shining the beam over jagged rock drilled out of the mountain, she stepped into a bulbous kind of space and saw an opening to the right, flanked by metal stairs leading up to a machine.
Jamie appeared beside her. “Mine elevator shaft.” He climbed the stairs to the hydraulic drum and moments later the elevator rumbled to life.
He came back down the stairs to her.
“Ray was going to make a museum of this?” she asked, watching the cables move as the elevator lifted.
The metal elevator car came to a clanking stop.
She glanced at Jamie. “Why was the car at the bottom?”
“Let’s find out.” He removed his gun as he opened the metal door and stepped into the car. Reese stepped on after him, taking out her gun, as well. After closing the gate, he reached for the car control panel and started them lowering.
Light from the opening disappeared as rock surrounded them on all sides. Only Reese’s flashlight provided illumination.
“Maybe Ray came back,” she said.
“Maybe.”
Through the darkness she saw him turn to her. The way he looked at her said he didn’t think so and he probably wished he could tell her to stay up top.
The rock wall opened at the bottom, the elevator coming to a noisy stop. No lights were on. Reese shined her flashlight into a mostly square space where miners used to load ore onto the elevator. Old railroad tracks still ran from the elevator opening and branched off to vanish into the darkness of three tunnels.
Ray had begun to set up a display, a mannequin dressed as a miner standing beside an ore cart. Another stood beside another cart inside the opening of one of the tunnels, eerily lifelike. They gave her an impression of the lonesome, hard-living miners they represented, ghosts from the past. Nothing stirred. The mine was utterly silent and dark.
Reese put her pistol away and went to the mannequin at the tunnel, having to tip her head up to look at the marvelously realistic replica. The mannequin’s blue work pants with suspenders and tan shirt were dirty.
A sound carried from somewhere down the adjacent tunnel. She looked there and saw only darkness.
“What was that?”
Jamie was looking toward the tunnel, too. “I don’t know.”
“It sounded like...moaning.”
“We’ll—”
Something moved in the tunnel where Reese stood at its threshold. Alarm snapped her into action. She turned the light in that direction and reached for her gun, but before she could draw it, a man sprang up from behind the cart with the barrel of his weapon aimed at her. He moved in front of her and pressed the pistol to her forehead. She found herself staring up at a tall, lean man with pale blue eyes shadowed by the rim of a baseball hat, holding the same impassiveness she remembered from the last time they’d met.
Stankovich.
“Drop your weapon,” he said, looking past her at Jamie.
With dread and terrible foreboding churning, she turned her head just enough to see Holcomb and Bishop had emerged from another tunnel and had him at gunpoint. He hadn’t put his gun away and must have seen Stankovich before she did, because he aimed his pistol right at him.
Stankovich slid her gun from its holster and tucked it into the waist of his pants.
“Do it now or I will kill her.”
“Then you’ll never get the photos I have of you doing business with the Russians,” Jamie said.
“I will have all I require, one way or another.”
What would he do? Torture Jamie until he talked? Kill him and take the chance the evidence he had would never surface?
“Not from me you won’t,” Jamie said with a dark, certain curve to his mouth.
Stankovich grunted cynically. “Oh, yes I will. Unless you prefer to have the death of your boss’s son on your conscience?”
Reese drew in a startled breath. He’d kidnapped her half brother? “He’s just a baby!”
“Then I suggest you talk your lover into dropping his weapon.”
Unable to stop the sting of tears, she saw Jamie looked equally bleak and disgusted. Stankovich would go to any lengths now.
“How do I know you kidnapped Clayton? Kadin would never allow anyone to take his son.”
“He wasn’t there when we broke into his rented cabin. His wife put up a valiant fight but she was outnumbered and outgunned.”
“I swear if you hurt her or anyone—”
“No one has been harmed and no one will be as long as you do as I say.”
Jamie’s cell phone began to ring. That had to be Kadin.
Still holding his gun, Jamie pulled out the phone.
“Do not answer,” Stankovich said.
Jamie pressed something on the phone and put it away. “How do I know you kidnapped Clayton? I demand proof of life.”
Stankovich nodded once to Bishop, who took out his phone and showed Jamie what must have been a video clip. Next, he called a number and held the phone to Jamie’s ear. When Jamie closed his eyes in dismay, Reese knew it was the baby. And now they also knew there was more than these three in Never Summer. Stankovich had a team.
Jamie dropped his gun. “I’m not the monster you are. In that you’ll always come out ahead. Men like you are cowards. You use the innocent because you’re no match against men like me and Kadin.”
“Enough talk. You know what I require for the safe return of the boy and the woman.” He gripped Reese’s arm painfully.
Craning her neck, she watched Jamie turn to Bishop and Holcomb, no doubt weighing his odds. They didn’t look very good from her vantage point.
“Come with me.” Stankovich forced her into the tunnel.
She held her flashlight and Stankovich turned on the one he had clipped to his hat. Deeper into the tunnel, thick log trunks formed supports for the rock ceiling and walls. Jagged edges of rock cast eerie shadows, the darkness ahead an abyss. She craned her neck to try to see Jamie, but the path behind her was also complete blackness.
Where the tunnel widened, Stankovich shoved her toward one of the log supports. She stumbled and stopped herself from bashing face-first into the hard wood. She dropped her flashlight and it illuminated a roll of duct tape on the ground.
“Sit down,” he ordered.
She hesitated. The idea of being bound and helpless disquieted her.
He pressed the gun against her temple. “My patience wore thin after you escaped my first attempts to rid Knox from my life. Do not attempt to escape again.”
Seeing intense menace in his eyes, she listened to the veiled threat and sat on the hard ground. He picked up the duct tape and handed it to her.
“Put that around your ankles.”
She slowly unwound some of the tape.
“And do a good job or I’ll shoot you where the tape should go. You won’t be able to walk.”
She could do without gunshot wounds to her ankles. Reese wrapped two layers of tape around her ankles.
“Now put your hands around the log.”
Reese scooted so she could fit her arms around the log pole. Her elbow rubbed against the rock wall a
nd she sat on her hip with her legs bent.
Holding the gun, he wrapped her wrists.
She tested her bonds as he straightened. She’d have a difficult time getting free. At least he hadn’t gagged her.
“Now. You will wait here for me.”
“What are you going to do?”
He walked back down the tunnel without answering.
* * *
Jamie could kick himself for not remaining more vigilant. Stankovich had what he wanted. With Reese, he’d force Jamie to do his bidding. Jamie felt the same as he had when he’d worked for the heartless criminal. Watching Reese disappear into the tunnel had taken a few years off his life. He had to restrain himself from engaging in a fight with these two goons and going after her and severing his ties with Stankovich permanently.
Stay calm. Stankovich may have the upper hand now, but he wouldn’t for long. Jamie would die before he allowed anything to happen to Reese. As it happened, he wouldn’t have to. He’d sent a message to Kadin, one he’d written prior to coming to the mine. Unbelievably he had cell service down here. Though an old mine, it was close to the highway. Plan B. If Stankovich did happen to be hiding somewhere at the mine, all he had to do was press Send. The video Bishop had shown him showed Clayton in a car seat somewhere in this mine. The sound he’d heard must have been him.
“You,” Stankovich said to Holcomb. “Go watch the woman.”
Holcomb strode off into the tunnel, disappearing in darkness until he flipped on his flashlight. But he quickly vanished as he rounded the turn in the tunnel.
“I do not think I have to tell you how this is going to go,” Stankovich said. “I shudder to think what might have happened had I not learned what you had on me and I executed you too soon. You have cleaned yourself of anything I have on you. Do you not think it is only fair that I have the same allowance?”
“You don’t know the meaning of the word fair. So my answer to your question is no.”
Taming Deputy Harlow Page 20
