Strangers in the Night

by Linda Howard

  “You can’t. The phone lines are down too. I just checked.”

  “What rotten luck.” The blue eyes twinkled as he pulled the shower curtain closed. “Marooned with a sexy blond.” From behind the curtain came the sound of cheerful whistling.

  Hope felt like whistling a tune herself. She listened to the wind blow and hoped it would be days before he would be able to leave.

  She remembered something. “Oh, I meant to ask, are you hurt anywhere? I didn’t see any blood last night, but your uniform is torn and has blood on it, or at least I think it’s blood.”

  A few seconds lapsed before he answered. “No, I’m not hurt. I don’t know what the stain is.”

  “Your pistol and holster are missing too. Do you remember what happened to them?”

  Again there was a pause, and when he spoke, he sounded as if he had his face turned up to the spray. “I must have left them in the Blazer.”

  “Why would you have taken off your gun belt?”

  “Damn if I know. Ah … do you have any weapons here? Other than the rifle I saw last night, that is.”

  “A pistol.”

  “Where do you keep it?”

  “In my nightstand drawer. Why?”

  “I might not be the only person to get stranded in the storm and come looking for shelter. It pays to be careful.”

  5

  When he came downstairs, he was freshly shaved, with her father’s borrowed razor, and he looked alert and vital in the sweat clothes she had provided. The big sweatshirt had been in the other closet after all, and it fit him perfectly, just loose enough to be comfortable.

  She would normally have just eaten cereal, but with him there she was cooking a breakfast of bacon and eggs. He came up behind her as she stood at the island, turning bacon with a fork, and wrapped his arms around her waist. He kissed the top of her head, then rested his chin there. “I don’t know which smells best, the coffee, the bacon, or you.”

  “Wow, I’m impressed. I must really smell good, if I rank up there with coffee and bacon.”

  She felt him grin, his chin moving on top of her head. “I could eat you right up.” His tone was both teasing and serious, sensual, and a wave of heat that had nothing to do with embarrassment swept over her. She leaned back against him, her knees weak. He had a serious swelling in the groin area, and she rubbed her bottom against it.

  “I think we need to go back to bed.” There was no teasing at all in his voice this time.

  “Now?”

  “Now.” He reached around her and turned off the cooktop.

  Ten minutes later she was naked, breathless, trembling on the verge of climax. Her thighs were draped over his shoulders, and he was driving her, with his tongue, to absolute madness. She tried to pull him up and over her, but he pinned her wrists to the bed and continued what he was doing. She surrendered, her hips lifting, her body shuddering with completion. Only when she was limp did he move upward, covering her, sliding his erection into her with a smooth thrust that took him all the way in.

  She inhaled deeply, having already forgotten how completely he filled her.

  He began a gentle back-and-forth movement, gripping her shoulders, watching her face.

  Guilt and her innate honesty nagged at her. “I’m not taking birth control pills,” she blurted, knowing this wasn’t exactly the best time to bring up her lack of protection.

  He didn’t stop. “I’m not wearing a rubber,” he said equably. “I would stop, but that would be like closing the barn door after the horse is out, wouldn’t it?”

  Afterward, while she was in the bathroom, he finished dressing—again—and called out, “I’ll go down and start breakfast again.”

  “I’ll be there in a minute.” She still felt incredibly weak-kneed, and relieved. She stared at her face in the mirror, her brown eyes huge. She was going to get pregnant. She knew it, sensed it. The prospect both terrified and exhilarated her. From now on, her life would be changed.

  She went out into the bedroom and collected her scattered garments, pulling them on again. After a lifetime of caution and careful behavior, taking such a deliberate risk was nerve-racking, like climbing on board a space shuttle without any previous training.

  It pays to be careful, Price had said, but sometimes it paid to be careless too. And, anyway, she was doing this deliberately, not carelessly.

  One of her socks had ended up between the bed and the nightstand. She got down on her knees to retrieve it, and because she was there, because she had just been remembering what Price had said, she opened the nightstand drawer to make certain the pistol was there.

  It wasn’t.

  Slowly she stood, staring down at the empty drawer. She knew the pistol had been there. When her dad had left, she had checked to make certain it was loaded and returned it to the same place. Living in such an isolated place, where self-defense was sometimes necessary, she had learned how to use the weapon. Idaho had more than its share of dangerous wildlife, both animal and human. The ruggedness of the mountains, the isolation, seemed to be a magnet for nut groups, from neo-Nazis to drug runners. She might happen upon a bear or a cougar, but she was more worried about happening upon a human predator.

  The pistol had been there, and now it wasn’t. Price had asked where she kept it, not that finding it would have been that difficult. But why hadn’t he simply said he wanted it close to hand? He was a cop; she understood that he was more comfortable armed than unarmed, especially when he wasn’t on his own turf.

  She went downstairs, her expression thoughtful. He was standing at the island, taking up the bacon. “Price, do you have my pistol?”

  He slanted a quick, assessing look at her, then turned back to the bacon, “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were getting it?”

  “I didn’t want to worry you.”

  “Why would I be worried?”

  “What I said about other people coming here.”

  “I wasn’t worried, but you seem to be,” she said pointedly.

  “It’s my job to worry. I feel more comfortable armed. I’ll put the pistol back if it bothers you.”

  She looked around. She didn’t see the weapon lying on the cabinet. “Where is it?”

  “In my waistband.”

  She felt uneasy, but she didn’t know why. She herself had thought that he would feel more comfortable armed, and he had said so himself. It was just—for a moment, his expression had been … hard. Distant. Maybe it was because he worked in law enforcement and saw a lot of things the average person never even dreamed of seeing that he expected the worst. But for a moment, just for a moment, he had looked as dangerous as any of the scum with whom he dealt. He had been so easy and approachable until then that the contrast rattled her.

  She shoved the uneasiness away and didn’t say anything more about the pistol.

  Over breakfast she asked, “In what county do you work?”

  “This one,” he said. “But I haven’t been here long. Like I said, I knew this place was here, but I hadn’t had time to get up here and meet you and your dad—and Tinkerbell, of course.”

  The dog, lying on the floor between their chairs in obvious hopes of doubling his chances of catching a stray tidbit, perked up when he heard his name.

  “Table scraps aren’t good for you,” Hope said sternly. “Besides, you’ve already eaten.”

  Tink didn’t look discouraged, and Price laughed.

  “How long have you worked in law enforcement?”

  “Eleven years. I worked in Boise before.” His mouth quirked with amusement. “For the record, I’m thirty-four, I’ve been divorced eight years, I’ve been known to have a few drinks, and I enjoy an occasional cigar, but I’m not a regular smoker. I don’t attend any church, but I believe in God.”

  Hope put down her fork. She could feel her face turning red in mortification. “I wasn’t—”

  “Yes you were, and I don’t blame you. When a woman lets a man make love to her, she has a
right to reassure herself about him, find out every detail right down to the size of his Fruit of the Looms.”

  “Jockeys,” she corrected, and turned even redder.

  He shrugged. “I just look at sizes, not brand names.” The amusement turned into a grin. “Stop blushing. So you looked at my briefs; I looked at your panties this morning, didn’t I? I bet you just hung mine over the railing to dry, instead of sniffing them the way I did yours.”

  He had sniffed, drawing an exaggeratedly deep breath and rolling his eyes in pretended ecstasy, making her laugh, before he had tossed the garment over his shoulder with a flourish.

  “You were goofing around,” she mumbled.

  “Was I? Maybe I was turned on. What do you think? Was my dick hard?”

  “It was hard before we went upstairs, so you can’t use that argument.”

  “It got hard when I thought about sniffing your underwear.”

  She began to laugh, enjoying his teasing. She was beginning to suspect arguing with him would be like swatting at smoke.

  “I do have a really bad habit,” he confessed.

  “Oh?”

  “I’m addicted to remote controls.”

  “You and about a hundred million other men in America. We can pick up one station here—one—and when my dad watches television, he sits with the remote control in his hand.”

  “I don’t think I’m that bad.” He grinned and reached for her hand. “So, Hope Bradshaw, when conditions are back to normal, will you go out to dinner with me?”

  “Gee, I don’t know,” she said. “A date, huh? I don’t know if I’m ready for that.”

  He chuckled and started to answer, but a sunbeam fell across their hands. Startled, they both looked at the light, then out the window. The wind had stopped blowing, and patches of blue sky were visible.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said, getting up to walk to the window and look out. “I thought the storm would last longer than this.”

  “So did I,” Hope said, her disappointment more intense than she wanted to show. He had asked her out, after all. The clearing weather meant he would be leaving sooner than she had anticipated, but it wasn’t as if she wouldn’t see him again.

  She went over to the window too, and gasped when she saw the amount of snow. “Good heavens!” The familiar terrain was completely transformed, disguised by drifts of snow that appeared to level out the landscape. The wind had piled snow to window level on the porch.

  “It looks like at least three feet. The ski resort operators will love this, but it’ll take the snowplows a while to clear the roads.” He walked to the door and opened it, and the frigidity of the air seemed to suck the warmth from the room. “Jesus!” He slammed the door. “The temperature has to be below zero. No chance of any of this melting.”

  Oddly, the improved weather seemed to make Price uneasy. As the day progressed, Hope noticed several times that he went from window to window, looking out, though he would stand to one side as he did so. She was busy, as being confined to the house didn’t mean there weren’t any chores to do, such as laundry, but doing it without electricity was twice as hard and took twice as long.

  Price helped her wring out the clothes she had washed by hand, then braved the cold long enough to carry in more firewood while she hung the clothes over the stair railings to dry. She checked his uniform, picking up the shirt and feeling the seams, which would be the last to dry. Another hour would do it, she thought, as hot as Price was keeping the fire. The temperature on the second level had to be close to ninety.

  She started to drape the shirt over the railing again when her attention was caught by the tag. The shirt was a size fifteen and a half. That was odd. She knew Price was bigger than that. The shirt had in fact been tight on him; she remembered how strained the buttons had been last night. Of course, he had been wearing a thermal shirt underneath, which would make the uniform seem tighter than it was. But if she had been buying a shirt for Price, she wouldn’t have looked at anything smaller than a sixteen and a half.

  He came in with a load of wood and stacked it on the fireplace. “I’m going to clear off the steps,” he called up to her.

  “That can wait until the weather’s warmer.”

  “Now that the wind isn’t blowing, it’s bearable for a few minutes, and that’s all it’ll take to clear the steps.” He buttoned his heavy coat and went back outside. At least he was wearing a pair of her dad’s sturdy work gloves, and if his boots weren’t completely dry, at least he had on three pairs of socks. Tink went with him, glad for the chance to do his business outside instead of on a pad.

  With the weather clearing, perhaps she could pick up something on the radio now. Going downstairs, she switched it on; music filled the air, a welcome relief from static, and she listened to the song as she got the beef stew out of the refrigerator to warm it up for lunch.

  The weather was the big news, of course, and as soon as the song ended the announcer began running down a list of closings. Her road was impassable, she heard, and the highway department estimated at least three days before all the roads in the county were cleared. Mail service was spotty, but utility crews were hard at work restoring service.

  “Also in the news,” the announcer continued, “a bus carrying six prisoners ran off County Road Twelve during the storm. Three people were killed, including two sheriff’s deputies. Five prisoners escaped; two have been recaptured, but three are still at large. It is unknown if they survived the blizzard. Be alert for strangers in your area, as one of the prisoners is described as extremely dangerous.”

  Hope went still. The bottom dropped out of her stomach. County Road 12 was just a few miles away. She reached over and turned off the radio, the announcer’s voice suddenly grating on her nerves.

  She had to think. Unfortunately, what she was thinking was almost too frightening to contemplate.

  Price’s uniform shirt was too small for him. He didn’t have a wallet. He had blown it off, but she was certain now that the stain on his pants leg was blood—and he had no corresponding wound. There were bruises on his wrists—from handcuffs? And he hadn’t had a weapon.

  He did now, though. Hers.

  6

  There was still the rifle. Hope left the stew sitting on the cabinet and went into her father’s bedroom. She lifted the rifle from the rack, breathing a sigh of relief as the reassuring weight of it settled in her hands. Though she had loaded it just the night before, the lesson “always check your weapon” had been drilled into her so many times she automatically slid the bolt—and stared down into the empty chamber.

  He had unloaded it.

  Swiftly, she searched for the bullets; he had to have hidden them somewhere. They were too heavy to carry around, and he didn’t have pockets in his sweat clothes anyway. But before she had time to look in more than a couple of places, she heard the door open, and she straightened in alarm. Dear God, what should she do?

  Three prisoners were still at large, the announcer had said, but only one was considered extremely dangerous. She had a two-to-one chance that he wasn’t the dangerous one.

  But he had taken her pistol and unloaded the rifle—both without telling her. He had obviously taken the uniform off one of the dead deputies. Damn it, why hadn’t the announcer warned people that one of the escaped prisoners could be wearing a deputy’s uniform?

  Price was too intelligent to get thrown in jail over some penny-ante crime, and if by some chance he had, he wouldn’t compound the offense by escaping. The common criminal was, by and large, uncommonly stupid. Price was neither common nor stupid.

  Given her own observations, she now thought her estimated chance of being snowbound with an extremely dangerous escaped criminal had just flip-flopped. What could “extremely dangerous” mean other than he was a murderer? A criminal didn’t get that description hung on him by taking someone’s television.

  “Hope?” he called.

  Hastily she returned the rifle to the rack, trying to be as quie
t as she could. “I’m in Dad’s room,” she called, “putting up his underwear.” She opened and closed a dresser drawer for the sound effect, then plastered a smile on her face and stepped to the door. “Are you about frozen?”

  “Cold enough,” he said, shrugging out of his coat and hanging it up. Tink shook about ten pounds of snow off his fur onto the floor, then came bounding over to Hope to say hello after his extended absence of ten minutes.

  Automatically she scolded him for getting the floor wet again, though bending over to pet him probably ruined the effect. She went to get the broom and mop, hoping her expression didn’t give her away. Her face felt stiff from strain; any smile she attempted must look like a grimace.

  What could she do? What options did she have?

  At the moment, she wasn’t in any danger, she didn’t think. Price didn’t know she had been listening to the radio, so he didn’t feel threatened. He had no reason to kill her; she was providing him with food, shelter, and sex.

  Her face went white. She couldn’t bear having him touch her again. She simply couldn’t.

  She heard him in the kitchen, getting a cup of coffee to warm himself. Her hands began shaking. Oh, God. She hurt so much she thought she would fly apart. She had never been more attracted to a man in her life, not even Dylan. She had warmed him with her body, saved his life; in some primitive, basic way he was hers now. In just twelve short hours he had become the central focus of her mind and emotions, and that she didn’t yet dare call it love was an effort at self-protection—too late. Part of her was being ripped away, and she didn’t know if she could survive the agony. She might—dear God—she might even be pregnant with his child.

  He had laughed with her, teased her, made love to her. He had been so tender and considerate that, even now, she couldn’t describe it as anything except making love. Of course, Ted Bundy had been an immensely charming man too, except to the women he raped and murdered. Hope had always thought herself a fairly good judge of character, and everything Price had shown her so far said he was a decent and likable person, the type of man who coached Little League teams and danced a mean two-step. He had even, good-humoredly, given her his “stats” and asked her out on a date, just as if he would be around for a long time, be part of her life.