by Nina Bruhns
She'd been crushed when O'Donnaugh left her. Roman had to keep reminding himself of that. Regardless of how much it hurt. It was his own damned fault he'd lost her in the first place.
He was so wrapped up in his misery that it took him several moments to realize there was a cop car right behind him, lights flashing, sirens blaring.
What the hell?
He narrowed his eyes at the County Sheriff's emblem on the door of the vehicle as it stopped alongside the Jeep, penning him onto the shoulder of the highway. Three good-old-boy deputies disgorged from the cruiser and approached the Jeep, all of them sporting nightsticks and arrogant grins.
"Well, looky here, boys," the first silver-haired deputy taunted. "We've caught ourselves a car-stealin' redskin."
Roman's grip tightened on the steering wheel, disgust tensing his muscles. Morons.
"A car-stealin' woman-stealin' redskin," the second man, also with gray hair, corrected.
Aha. So that's what this was about. He marveled at his own naiveté, thinking the good sheriff would let him off so easily. The man just didn't have the guts to get his own hands dirty.
"What do you s'pose we otta do with the filthy scum?" the third, younger one asked no one in particular.
Roman flexed his fingers and unbuckled his seat belt.
It looked as if he was going to get that fight after all.
* * *
Chapter 7
«^»
"Roman?"
RaeAnne pushed open the door to the cabin and turned to give Philip a last wave. It had been an awkward couple of hours and she was glad to see the tail end of his cruiser.
He'd apologized for his behavior, and tried very hard to be understanding—if not exactly forgiving—of the situation this morning. And was more than surprised when she'd made it clear she didn't think a second chance would be a good idea, despite her earlier pleas and a flat-out denial that she and Roman were getting back together. Of course, having slept with her "old friend" in the meantime had pretty much squelched any further declarations of innocence.
Especially when a niggling voice told her how incredibly reckless they'd been this morning relying on the withdrawal method for protection. Stupid, stupid, stupid. They'd used it for the occasional emergency back in school, and it had been a plain miracle she hadn't gotten pregnant before she did back then. This morning, neither of them had been prepared for what had happened, and in their unstoppable passion they'd had no choice. Luckily it was a fairly safe time of month, but there was always a possibility…
No, she couldn't even think it. It wouldn't happen. It just couldn't.
"Roman?"
The room echoed back at her in the hollow way of deserted places. She knew without looking he wasn't here, even though the Jeep was parked out front in its usual spot. Maybe he'd walked up to the site.
That's when she noticed her keys sitting on the small kitchen table, holding down a piece of paper. Instantly her gaze darted in alarm to the spot where he'd kept his pack.
Gone.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, refusing to give in to the flood of emotions which clamored to be let loose.
She'd known all along this would happen. He'd never made any secret of his lifestyle. Or made any promises to change. Hell, she'd wanted him to leave. She didn't trust him, and even if she did, she couldn't be with someone who was always on the move. She'd told him to go, and apparently, he'd honored her request.
As RaeAnne reached for the note, she choked back a wave of bitterness that he'd never even tried to change her mind.
Not that she would have—but it might have made her feel better about so easily giving in to old feelings, and about the new ones that had been sewn through that surrender. Not to mention if she was carrying his child. Again.
Picking up the square of paper, she viewed it through eyes that swam out of focus. There was no writing. No message. Just a heart drawn in ink around the letter R.
Once again, she hadn't even deserved a goodbye.
Her heart hitched, and she ran out the door, dropping everything in her haste to get away, out to the trees and the flowers and the sky, and all the things that had carried her through a lifetime of disasters. They would carry her through this one, too, she knew, and heal the pain.
It only felt like she would die. Again.
* * *
Damn, he hurt.
Roman drifted in and out of a strange fog of unconsciousness, only aware of the passage of time because at one point he cracked open his swollen eyelids and it was dark. At least he thought it was dark. Or maybe it was just the blood that had dried over his eyes.
No matter. His whole body was a bundle of aches and pains, so he was content to float about in that twilight haze where dreams are real and the flesh somehow isn't so important. Funny, he didn't feel cold. He should have felt cold. Especially since it must have rained somewhere along the line. His clothes were soaked with rain. Or was it sweat? He tried to raise his hand to feel which, but couldn't manage. Hell, maybe it was just the blood again.
One thing was for certain, it wasn't that snow those shifty mountains had tried to cover his face with. Nope, he'd managed to shake all that off. Those lousy mountains definitely had it in for him. Oh, yeah, he'd seen them, bending over him, craggy faces creased with mock worry, whispering about him in their guttural granite language.
But he'd outsmarted them. Yessir. Played dead he did, while they'd spirited him to their windy lair and covered him in a layer of freezing white.
He moaned, wishing he'd thought to lick some of it into his parched mouth before casting it all off.
So tired. Gotta get some sleep. Cold now.
Rae? Where's the blanket? Never mind, the baby's wrapped in it.
He smiled, despite the sharp pain it caused.
"Sleep, baby," he whispered, and slipped back into unconsciousness.
* * *
For RaeAnne, the next two days flew by in a flurry of hard work at the site and late nights cataloging the day's finds. She rose at the crack of dawn and didn't lay her head down until she dropped from exhaustion. That was the only way she could make herself sleep in the same bed where they'd—
No. She wasn't going to think about it. About him. She would just drive herself crazy and it wouldn't do any good anyhow. She knew that from firsthand experience.
She excavated like a woman possessed. She opened three new units and took them all down to sterile soil. New boxes of artifacts and site debris were stacked nearly to the cabin's low ceiling. She found more skeletal remains, of what appeared to be two individuals, and carefully packed them up to send to Dr. Cooper for examination.
She didn't even mind when Toby and the gang showed up twice to hassle her. She just glared at them and told them to buzz off. And they surprised her by doing just that. Who knew? Maybe the Chairman had had a word with them.
On the morning of the third day, she even started the preliminary work on her final excavation report. May as well, since her time at Cleary would soon be up. She was well ahead of schedule by now, and could easily head home a few days early.
Home.
As she dragged her bucket of tools across the meadow to the spot where she'd decided to sink one more unit before lunch, she thought about the bare, white-walled bungalow she currently called home. She'd scarcely had time to rent it and stow her few possessions there before she'd had to leave for the dig. It was important to her to have a place she could call her own. Even if there was nothing in it but a few suitcases and a floor full of junk mail.
Maybe this time she'd plant a garden. She was ruminating about whether to have flowers or vegetables, when her trowel struck something hard, buried in the dirt. She hadn't paid too much attention to the fact that the soil had been much easier to dig here than in the other units. But now she sat back, noticing a definite difference in the color of the soil and the types of plants which grew in the shallow depression she'd chosen to investigate—both sure signs of human
disturbance.
"Huh," she muttered, hoping for a nice kitchen midden rather than another grave which she'd have to fill out paper-work on in triplicate.
Once again she rued the day she'd come up with the dumb idea to get her grant money by solving the mystery of Cleary Hot Springs. So far, the biggest mystery was how she'd placate the family when she couldn't come up with any evidence of what had become of their great-great-granduncle.
Heaving a sigh, she carefully stuck her trowel under the obstruction and lifted. Then let out a scream and jumped about seven feet in the air, scrambling away as fast as she could.
In horror, she stared down into the shallow pit. Sticking up from the dirt were the remains of a human hand.
But this one was no bleached archaeological find. There was still skin on it.
* * *
Something was poking him.
"Go 'way," Roman muttered and tried to move his hand to emphasize the point. It wouldn't budge. He seemed to be cocooned in something heavy and scratchy.
Annoyed, he concentrated on dragging his mind from the dense fog that gripped his whole body. What the hell was wrong with him? He felt like he'd been run over by a Sherman tank, and his mouth was glued shut and tasted like dirt.
"C'mon, man, wake up. I'm late for dinner."
Roman pondered that bit of absurd information. Late for dinner. Who did he know who might be late for dinner? That implied a family. He didn't know anyone who would be late for dinner. Except Tanya. Or Cole.
"Oh, for cryin' out loud. I know you're awake under that freakin' blanket!" The hot, scratchy weight was jerked from his face. "Snap out of it, man! I know I gave you too much of that stuff but this is ridiculous!"
Drugged.
The question was, by whom? And why?
Roman forced his eyelids up, and attempted to focus on the face that bobbed above him. A kid. An Indian kid. Toby.
"Why'd you drug me?" he asked in a rasp, sifting through the flotsam of disjointed memories that were starting to drift through his brain.
Worried black eyes peered back at him. "You got beat up. We needed to move you before they came back. You looked pretty bad."
Ah, yes. The fight.
Well, okay, the beating. He groaned, choosing not to dwell on that humiliation. "RaeAnne?"
"She's fine."
Roman grunted. "How long have I been out?"
There was a pause, then a guilty-sounding, "A day. Well, two. Two and a half."
"Two days?" Instinctively he jerked to a sitting position, then ground out a curse at the resulting explosion of pain all over. "What were you thinking?"
"Grandmother said you needed sleep to heal. She gave me some herbal tea for you to drink. When I saw how bad you looked, I doubled the dose."
Lord spare him from meddling grandmothers and well-intentioned, clueless kids. "Thanks loads."
"I'm sorry—I thought you were dying. But Grandmother says it's not serious. Mostly bumps and bruises, once we washed the blood off."
Roman scanned the area around him as best he could. It was dark, and they were sitting in some kind of shallow cave, flanked by a small campfire. Judging by the barren terrain and the scent of dust and sage, they were in the hills on the desert side of the river. He frowned. Where was the snow? He definitely remembered, snow. And something about a baby.
Baby? Ah hell.
"I need to get back to RaeAnne. She probably thinks—" He groaned again, and held his aching head in his hands. Oh, God. He could just imagine. Idly he noted the blanket that covered him was bright white. So the snow had just been a delusion.
"She thinks you left," Toby said softly.
No damn kidding. He didn't even want to think about what terrible delusions she currently harbored about him.
"We found your Harley and pack dumped off a cliff halfway down the mountain from Cleary."
Could it get any worse?
"Not a high cliff, though. The Harley's a bit dented, but still runs. Your other stuffs fine." Toby pointed out into the darkness. "They're down at the end of the trail when you want them."
Roman stared at him in surprise. "Thanks, kid." Then added, "But I don't get it. Why are you helping me? We haven't exactly been on the same side."
The boy averted his gaze and stirred the fire with a stick. Something was going on here.
"Well?"
"I know who you are." At his questioning glance, the kid explained, "They'd tossed your ID and gun next to you in the ditch where they left you." So much for the locals not finding out he was FBI. "I figure they spooked when they realized you're FBI. After they thought about it they must have gotten scared and set it up to look like you'd died crashing your bike, and were coming back to kill you."
The skin on Roman's scalp crawled at the simple logic of Toby's reasoning. Which was right on target. "Looks like I owe you my life, compadre. Thanks."
Toby shrugged as though saving somebody's life were an everyday occurrence.
"But I still don't understand why. Especially if you know I work for the FBI…"
"They need to be stopped," the boy said, suddenly displaying as much vehemence as when he'd strung up RaeAnne from a tree.
Roman's brain was just not functioning. "Who? The FBI?"
"No, not them. The poachers."
Now he was really confused. Maybe if his head wasn't pounding like a machine gun… "You've lost me."
"The poaching," the kid said, as if repeating it would make everything clear. "You're an FBI agent. I figure you're here because of what your father found out. And to finally put these guys behind bars. Here—" Roman stared in bewilderment as Toby produced yet another envelope from a pocket and handed it to him. "Here's all his notes. And mine, too."
Roman's head spun in a dull throb of perplexity. He was sure there was a simple explanation. It was just eluding him at the moment. "My father's notes?"
"Yeah. And mine."
"About poaching."
"Yeah."
"Which you think has something to do with the guys who beat me up?"
"Who want to kill you," the boy corrected.
"Tobe," he said, easing himself slowly back to lean his bruised body against the wall of the cave, "Kid, I think you'd better start at the beginning."
* * *
Cops were everywhere. In the cabin, in the meadow, down in all the units, and a ring of them surrounded the spot where RaeAnne had found the body. She was going nuts, worrying about what they were destroying in the process of preserving their precious crime scene.
"Where's Santangelo?" Philip asked.
"Who knows. Gone," she said, uneager to elaborate. "How long will this investigation take? I've got work to finish."
"Probably another day or two. When you're dealing with multiple jurisdictions things get complicated."
"Swell."
"When'd he leave?"
She tapped her foot. "Same day you met him." Philip seemed surprised, so she couldn't resist adding, "I did mention he wasn't sticking around. Or didn't you believe me?"
Philip looked away, watching the crime scene guys do their thing over the shallow grave. "So he left four days ago, and yesterday you discover a dead body on your site?"
She gave an incredulous snort. "Sheriff, the remains I deal with are generally a couple hundred years old, but even I know enough to tell that body's been dead for longer than four days. Besides—"
"Besides what? He'd never do such a thing?"
"That's right."
Philip sent her a cool look. "Even with friends, sometimes people aren't what you think they are."
She turned away, unable to disagree, unwilling to let him see how hurt she'd been by Roman's precipitous departure. She should have known better—she did know better—but knowing in advance didn't always prepare you for the pain.
She couldn't hide the bitterness in her voice when she replied, "And sometimes they're exactly what you think they are."
* * *
They were following hi
m.
Roman could feel it in the back of his neck and the incessant hum in his brain. He'd picked them up somewhere on Highway 6, and hadn't lost them yet. He hadn't had but a glimpse of the car, but it was back there somewhere. He knew it as well as he knew what they were after.
The papers Toby had given him.
He still couldn't quite believe what the kid had told him. Law enforcement officials involved in illegal poaching and trafficking of endangered species. The thought was incredible. More so because apparently it had been going on so long his father had been involved in trying to stop it thirty years ago. It was hard to credit. Then again, his own body bore the bruising evidence of just how bad these so-called lawmen had gone.
He must look like death warmed over. His whole body was one big jumble of aches and pains. Angry cuts covered his arms and face, and half his skin had turned vivid shades of black and blue, but at least nothing was broken. He'd live. His motorcycle, on the other hand, had fared slightly worse from its trip over the cliff; it sputtered and leaped its way along the highway's pavement, each jolt a punishment on Roman's tender bruises.
A flash of sun on roof sirens glinted in his rearview mirror, and he did a hurried decision. The next town he came to, he made a quick stop and had two sets of copies made of all the notes he carried. One he mailed to his boss at the FBI, the other to himself care of general delivery, Big Pine. He kept the originals with him. There was only one man he trusted with those.
As he drove the rest of the way to Los Angeles, he pondered the possible implications of what he'd learned. The Chairman had said sometimes people and situations weren't what they appeared to be. But this was really throwing him for a loop.
He knew it was stupid to read anything into a few scribbled notes about poaching written by his father thirty years ago. Just because the man cared about porcupines and eagles didn't mean he wasn't a drug dealer and a murderer.
Still, it didn't quite fit and it bugged Roman.
