High-Stakes Playboy

by Cindy Dees

  “Had smoking-hot sex?”

  “Yeah. That.” Crud. Her cheeks were getting hot. Worse, though, Archer was frowning for real now. What was that all about? What had she said to put that deep crease between his eyebrows?

  He whirled and headed out into the main room. His voice, a bit on the clipped side, drifted into the bedroom. “Hungry?”

  “Yes. I’ll cook if you’d like.”

  “Nah. I got it. You get dressed and pack your stuff. I want to leave as soon as possible.”

  A hot, nasty little dagger of pain slipped between her ribs and fished around inside her guts. Little bastard found a number of soft, ready to bleed organs, too. Why was he suddenly in such an all-fired hurry to get out of here? Was he bored with her? Already? God, and to think she’d been fantasizing about a long-term relationship with him. Who was she kidding?

  Glum, she climbed out of bed and shivered as the nippy air chilled her through in a matter of seconds. She raced to the bathroom, jumped into her warmest clothes, and packed as he’d suggested. It was sad to feel this magical interlude coming to a close. In a wistful frame of mind, she zipped her rucksack and carried it to the bedroom doorway.

  Archer was sitting on the hearth, staring pensively into the dancing flames, as she approached him. What had him looking so serious? She had worked with enough guys to know better than to ask him outright. In her experience, men didn’t like to talk about their feelings unless they initiated the conversation in the first place.

  She sat down in the big armchair in front of the hearth and he silently passed her a pan that turned out to have hot oatmeal in it. Not her fave food, but it was warm and sweetened with plenty of melted brown sugar. She dug into the cereal silently.

  He moved to the door and fished in his coat pocket, coming up with a jangly key chain. “My truck has an automatic prewarming and defrost feature. I’ll get that going now, and by the time you’re done eating, it’ll be thawed enough for us to head out.” He pressed a button on the key fob.

  Kaboom!

  A brilliant flash of light blinded her from outside the cabin and a concussion wave shook the entire cabin. The windows rattled, ash rained down from inside the chimney and the china rattled on the kitchen shelves.

  The sound was deafening. It actually hurt her ears, as though someone had slammed their hands against each side of her head. Hard.

  Something big and fast moving shot toward her. It grabbed her out of the chair and threw her to the floor, then smashed her flat beneath its weight.

  Archer. He’d tackled her like an NFL linebacker. He was staring down at her like the end of the world was upon them and he was bracing himself for a fatal blow.

  “What was—” She stopped. Huh. She couldn’t hear herself talking. She tried again, louder. “What was that?” Her ears rang ferociously, and she could barely make out her own voice.

  “Explosion,” Archer answered loudly.

  “Of what?” she demanded in disbelief.

  “My truck. It just blew up.”

  Chapter 12

  “Stay down, Marley.”

  She stared up at him in dismay. He pressed up and away from her abruptly. She sucked in a deep breath as his weight lifted away from her rib cage. How on earth had his truck blown up? That was crazy.

  Archer sidled up to the wall beside one of the windows as if he expected someone to shoot him if he showed himself. He must be having another one of those combat flashbacks of his. Curiosity to know how and why his truck had just exploded overcame her shock and she climbed to her feet to have a look out front.

  Something was definitely burning out there. A bright glow flickered beyond the front porch. That and debris was starting to rain down on the cabin. It sounded like a storm of hailstones plinking off the metal roofing.

  She headed toward the window and Archer, and he bit out, “Get back!”

  But she’d gone far enough. She could see the source of both explosion and fire. His truck was, indeed, entirely engulfed in flames. The doors and roof of the cab were gone, the hood over the engine was nowhere to be seen and the remaining parts of the frame were mangled and twisted almost beyond recognition. Wow. That was some blast to have completely torn the sturdy vehicle apart like that.

  “Oh, my God!” she cried. Horror flowed over her. Her breath and pulse accelerated, sending blood careering wildly through her veins. Her legs felt shaky and her knees were physically wobbling.

  “Keep your voice down,” Archer growled.

  What was his problem? Shouldn’t he be racing outside to put out the fire and see if he could salvage his truck? Instead, he was acting like a squad of terrorist commandos was about to break down the door and kill them both.

  In an attempt to lighten the moment, she said drily, “Um, Archer, while that preheating and defrosting system is incredibly effective, I might not use it again until your truck’s manufacturer works the bugs out of it a little more.”

  Archer snorted for a single instant of humor, but then he was right back to his terse, tightly wired self. “Get back from the window, for God’s sake,” he hissed.

  Startled, she lurched and took a few steps away from the window and slid more behind him and the front door. “What in the world is going on?”

  “Someone just blew up my goddamned truck. Tried to kill us. Bastard’s probably out there right now, watching his handiwork.”

  Tried to kill them? What? No. She glanced out the sliver of window she could see from here. Archer’s truck was a blazing fireball. No question about it. Had the two of them been inside it when that explosion happened, they would both have died. Surely it was an accident. His high-tech prestarting system had malfunctioned.

  “C’mon,” Archer muttered. “We’ve got to get out of here before the bastard moves in to confirm the kill.”

  She took one step to follow him and he glared back at her. “Get down. He can see in the windows. And if he can see you, he can shoot you.”

  All at once, the gravity of their situation penetrated the haze of shock that had come over her when his truck exploded. Bomb. Killer. Shooting. Dead.

  Adrenaline slammed through her, making her entire body feel hot and cold by turns. They could die. What in the hell was going on? She dropped to her hands and knees, mimicking Archer.

  He crawled to the bedroom door and grabbed her rucksack, then back over to the fireplace to grab his. That gave her enough time to mostly catch up to him and follow closely on his heels to the back door.

  “What are we doing now?” she whispered, fully in panic mode now.

  “We’re heading into the woods. Whoever blew up my truck will be back, assuming they’re not outside right now, getting their sick jollies watching my truck burn, presumably with us in it.”

  “They wouldn’t know for sure that I would be in it with you. Why would someone try to kill you?” she asked, confused. Her mind just wouldn’t seem to operate at full speed, and his logic escaped her. Or maybe it was just denial making it impossible for her to accept that someone was trying to kill her.

  Archer ignored her question. Instead, he said tersely, “Once I open the door, don’t make a sound. We’re sneaking out of here as silently and covertly as we can. Stay right on my heels and hang on to my coat. I’m going to be moving fast at first. If you can’t keep up with me, let go of my coat and I’ll slow down until you catch up and grab it again. Got it?”

  “Yes, but...”

  “Hush, baby. We’ve got to go. Now.”

  He eased the back door open just far enough to slip outside onto the little porch. It was awkward staying low and sidling through the cracked door behind him. As soon as she cleared it, he eased the door shut behind her again. He checked to make sure it was locked and then he nodded grimly at her.

  She nodded back, although she felt none of the r
eadiness to head out into the woods that her nod conveyed. One second she’d been eating a pot of oatmeal, and the next second, someone had apparently just tried to assassinate her and Archer. The whole idea was so surreal as to border on absurd.

  Crouching low, Archer darted into the woods behind the cabin. She followed, disbelief raging through her terror. She struggled to concentrate on even moving her feet, let alone keeping her balance, staying right on Archer’s heels like he’d told her to and remembering to hang on to his coat.

  He wasn’t kidding. He did move fast through the heavy woods. Branches laden with snow whipped her in the face, dumping powdery snow all over her. It got in her hair and down the neck of her coat, into the crease between her mittens and coat sleeves. And it melted. And got cold. And miserable.

  While Archer had been running around at high altitude in the mountains of the various war zones he flew in overseas, she was a sea-level baby. In a matter of minutes, she was huffing and puffing behind him.

  It was a dilemma whether to breathe hard and have enough oxygen not to pass out, or to try to control the noise of her breathing so the hypothetical bad guy chasing them wouldn’t hear them and shoot them dead. She alternated between holding her breath and panting like a dog on a hot day.

  Her lungs burned and then her legs burned. She felt light-headed and spots danced in front of her eyes before she finally had to let go of his coat out of sheer inability to hold her fist closed any longer.

  Archer stopped immediately. He pulled her down into a crouch under the spreading branches of a big fir tree. The snow was not deep under its thick canopy of branches. It took her an embarrassingly long time to catch her breath.

  While she huffed and puffed, Archer tried his cell phone, but there was no signal up here in these isolated mountains.

  Finally, as her respiration approached normal once more, Archer mouthed, “Ready?”

  She nodded resolutely.

  He headed out at a slightly more reasonable pace. But again, the altitude got to her eventually, and she had to let go again. They fell into a pattern of moving for about fifteen minutes and stopping for her to catch her breath for about five.

  She thought of herself as a relatively fit and strong person. After all, shoulder-held cameras weighed upward of forty pounds and she had to be able to walk around with one on her shoulder, holding it steady with one hand and dragging around a power cord with her other hand. And she might be required to do it for hours on end with only short breaks for rest. But running around in these mountains while scared out of her mind was kicking her butt.

  They must have run and walked through the woods for two hours before Archer finally halted under yet another huge pine tree. This pocket of shadow was almost entirely devoid of snow. Archer used his gloved hands to gather a big pile of pine needles together. He sat down on it and gestured her down beside him. She sank gratefully to the impromptu cushion and leaned into the crook of his arm that he held out for her.

  He spoke in a low mutter that wouldn’t carry five paces. “How are you?”

  “Terrified. Who blew up your truck?”

  “No idea.”

  “Are they following us?”

  “I haven’t heard the sound of any pursuit whenever we’ve stopped. I’m betting we bugged out of there much faster than the bastard thought we would. I think it’s safe to assume we slipped away unseen.”

  She probably ought to feel relieved at his assessment, but she couldn’t work up much of a sense of safety while hiding in the woods in the middle of winter in the mountains, far from civilization. She felt exposed and tremendously vulnerable out here. “Now what?” she asked in a small voice.

  “Now we find civilization. Another cabin or a passable road where we can flag down a car and get a ride to somewhere with a working phone. Cell tower coverage is nonexistent out here.”

  She glanced around at nothing but trees and more trees around them. “How do we find a way out of here?”

  His arm tightened around her shoulders. “I happen to have a decent sense of direction. We’ve been paralleling the main road the cabin was on. All we have to do is cut to our right and go a quarter mile or so, and we should hit the road. Then we follow it to another driveway or until a car comes along.”

  “How will we know the driver isn’t the same person who tried to kill us?”

  “We’ve been walking uphill, away from the nearest town. Odds are that the would-be killer headed back to town after supposedly frying us extra crispy. I don’t see him driving higher into the mountains and higher into the snowfall line.”

  His logic made sense. Still, deep paranoia about any other human being overwhelmed her at this point. Although it wasn’t like they could just stay out here forever. They rested for perhaps fifteen minutes this time, and it felt like heaven to relax her entire body like this.

  But eventually, Archer murmured, “Ready to head out?”

  “As I’ll ever be.” She sighed.

  He helped her to her feet and they headed out again, blessedly at a much more sane pace this time. However, now they were cutting across the direction of the prevailing winds of the past few days, and they had to slog through drift after drift of snow. It was slow, cold and wet going, and all she had to do was follow in the path Archer made for her. She didn’t envy him having to forge his way first through the chest-high mounds of snow. She did offer to take her turn going first, but he was having no part of that.

  She didn’t know how long they trudged through the snow. She just knew she was exhausted and hungry, and wet and cold, when Archer stopped so abruptly in front of her that she ran into his back.

  Startled, she peered nervously over his shoulder. There. Through the trees. A strip of relatively flat, white snow. With tire tracks in it. A road.

  Archer eased forward slowly, and she followed behind, being as stealthy as she could manage on her limp-as-noodles legs. He stopped just under the cover of the last trees by the edge of the road.

  “Now what?” she breathed.

  “Now we wait for someone to drive by.”

  She got the distinct impression that he thought this could take a while. Great. If they stopped moving, she suspected the cold would catch up with them quickly and make their misery complete. But miserable was better than dead.

  She was, in fact, shivering so hard her teeth physically chattered by the time Archer went tense and alert beside her. She clamped her jaw shut to hear past her tap-dancing teeth and listened hard. There it was. A rumbling noise in the distance.

  It sounded like it was coming from above them on the mountain. Archer moved closer to the road after muttering to her to stay under the trees until he waved her over.

  Tense, she waited where he told her to, watching the road a hundred yards or so to their left where it disappeared around a curve into the trees.

  Her breath caught as a huge dump truck rumbled into sight, a snowplow blade mounted on its front bumper. Archer leaped out of the trees and into the road, waving wildly for the driver to stop.

  The vehicle ground to a stop and the passenger window came open. “You folks in some trouble?” the driver shouted.

  Archer waved her over and she stumbled through the snow frantically. It wasn’t as if the guy was going to drive off and strand them out here, but she was so grateful to see another human being who obviously wasn’t going to kill them and could take them away from this nightmare that she could cry.

  In fact, as Archer hoisted her up the steps into the high cab of the truck, she did feel tears tracking down her cheeks, leaving icy cold trails behind. Archer piled in behind Marley and slammed the door shut gratefully behind himself.

  The warmth in the heated cab struck her like a physical blow. It had been days since she’d felt room temperature air surround her. Ahh, the comforts of modern civilization. God bless them, on
e and all.

  “You folks have car trouble?” the snowplow driver asked.

  “You might say that,” Archer answered wryly. “Any chance we could get a ride to town, or at least someplace with a working phone so we can call for help?”

  “Yeah, sure. But I can plow your car out and give you a tow back onto the road if you want.”

  Archer shook his head. “Car’s dead. Gonna need more than plowing and a tow, I’m afraid.”

  “Okay. Well, sit tight. It’s gonna take me a little while to plow my way down this road.”

  She leaned forward to ask, “Has this road already been plowed? I see tire tracks.”

  “One of the guys went through here last night. Did the initial clearing and got one lane open. I’m opening up a second lane.”

  “What about the tire tracks?” Archer asked, obviously seeing where she was going with her line of questioning.

  The driver downshifted as the road went downhill more steeply. “Some of the locals have been out on four-wheelers playing in the snow. Had to tow one out already today.”

  So. It was possible that their would-be killer had driven in on a four-wheel-drive vehicle, sabotaged Archer’s truck and then driven out. She sincerely hoped the guy was long gone.

  “Lean back,” Archer muttered to her under his breath. “And turn your head toward me.”

  She did as he instructed, but looked at him questioningly. He had slouched deeply into his seat and pulled his watch cap way down over his eyebrows as she stared at him.

  He murmured, “Your driveway’s just ahead. In case our friend’s watching the road, we shouldn’t be visible.”

  Oh, God. She yanked her hood forward over her face and pulled her neck scarf up over her mouth and cheeks.

  She couldn’t see the driveway from her position, with her back toward the window, but Archer eventually released a long breath and sat up straighter. He grinned ruefully at her. “You look just like the guy who tried to run us off the road last week.”