Killer's Prey

by Rachel Lee

  “Or the perpetual pregnancies.”

  “That, too. It takes a lot out of a woman physically. Anyway, as time went on, her entries got shorter and less coherent. You can almost feel fatigue in the pages.”

  “Makes you wonder how they did it at all.”

  “The same way most of us live, putting one foot in front of the other. Taking one step at a time. Looking too far ahead can be dangerous.”

  He shifted a little, turning so that he could see her better. In the process, he pulled away so that she was no longer leaning on him. She missed the contact instantly. Heavens, after all these years she still had a case of the hots for him? Still wanted him? Now, wasn’t that stupid? Here he was just being a friendly protector, and once again she wanted more than he was prepared to give. Not good. She mustn’t fall into that pit again. She didn’t trust herself not to act the fool once more. Not when it came to Jake.

  “Someday,” he said, “I hope I see your eyes bright with excitement about the future, glad to look forward, no longer looking back.”

  Before she could respond to that astonishing statement, he asked, “Feel ready to ride back?”

  She nodded and let him help her to her feet and back onto Daisy. As she did so, she had the unhappy feeling that she’d revealed too much about herself, and now he just wanted to escape all the ugliness that surrounded her.

  She couldn’t blame him for that.

  Chapter 7

  She woke sweating, icy and shaking all at once. Vestiges of the nightmare clung, horrific, terrifying. All the elements were there, from running and being unable to escape her pursuer. Except this time her pursuer had a face.

  She reached around desperately for the switch and turned on the bedside lamp. At once the room evolved into familiar territory, wood beams overhead, papered walls surrounding her and a window covered by heavy drawn curtains. A cheerful room, warm in the bath of lamplight.

  God, she had thought she was done with the nightmares. At least it had been weeks since the last one. Her daytime fears were enough, she didn’t need them while sleeping, too.

  It must be because that man had escaped. He was once again a threat. Even rest would be denied to her now.

  Still shivering, she climbed out of bed, jammed her feet into warm moccasins and wrapped a fleece robe tightly over her flannel nightgown. She crept across the wood floor and pulled the curtain back just enough to give her a slit to peer through. The night was moonless, pitch-black, except for a few snowflakes that glistened in the little bit of light that escaped through the crack in the curtain. If there was anything out there, she would never see it.

  She closed the curtain carefully, and stood with her arms wrapped around herself. Rosa was fattening her up, she thought irrelevantly. She could still feel her ribs, but they no longer protruded as much. That meant she was regaining her strength.

  About time, she thought. She’d even gone on a short trail ride today, and riding a horse took more energy than she’d expected.

  But none of that helped with the terror. Being alone in this room wasn’t comforting, either, pleasant though it was. Maybe some milk would help her get back to sleep, because she certainly felt entirely too wide-awake now. Although getting back to sleep apparently no longer promised escape.

  God, she hated that that man had turned her into a wuss again. Surely she had grown tougher than this during the years since she had left home. She couldn’t possibly let that awful man turn her back into the old, frightened Nora. That would be handing him a victory even if he never came near her again.

  Feeling a burst of determination, she decided to head downstairs to the kitchen. Warm milk. A book. Jake had plenty of books lying around, from nonfiction to fiction. And ranching magazines. Something ought to distract her. At the very least maybe she could learn something about what he was doing so that she could be more than a cipher around here. Carry on a conversation with him about something besides herself.

  She rummaged in the kitchen until she found a small saucepan. She poured a cup of milk into it and turned the gas flame on low. It made her a little uneasy that the kitchen window wasn’t covered, merely framed by a cascading curtain in bright colors, but it did have the advantage of letting her see the slowly falling snowflakes. They were beautiful. When she’d lived here, winter had merely meant cold and drudgery for her, and one cold after another as sick people came into the pharmacy.

  But in Minnesota, she had learned to love it. Back there she’d splurged on cross-country skis and had loved to go out on some of the groomed trails, along with her friends or alone. There was something so soothing about swishing along on the snow in regular, comfortable movements, pausing frequently to admire the sights.

  Those skis sat in her storage room now, a room on which she was paying rent. Most of her things were back there, and while part of her resented the hell out of having to leave her life behind, right now she was very, very glad she had. At the time she had accepted her father’s offer, all she’d been concerned with was getting away from the nightmare and taking time to regain her health.

  Well, she hadn’t escaped the nightmare. But she figured Jake was doing more to help her back to health than her father ever would have.

  She looked back to that encounter, so long ago now, and realized that whatever had possessed Jake to react that way, she had forgiven him. They had been so young, after all. Only youth and silliness had pushed her to ask such a thing of him, and his reaction had probably been born of the same youth. Plus, there was Beth. Even when she had asked him, she had known he was seeing Beth. How was he supposed to respond?

  More kindly, perhaps, but there were enough years behind her now to see all the times he had been kind, even when it meant facing down his friends and other students. He could have been ostracized for that, but he hadn’t seemed to care. He’d stood up for her, whenever he’d happened to witness her being bullied or picked on.

  That should count for more than a few minutes when shock had probably goaded him.

  Regardless, he hadn’t wanted her then and probably didn’t want the ghost she had become, the one with all the emotional baggage. They could be friends, nothing more, and she felt she ought to be adult enough to deal with that.

  Her milk was ready, and she poured it back into the mug she had used to measure it. She put the pan in the sink and ran cold water into it to soak it, then sat at the kitchen table, cradling the mug and sipping slowly.

  She still felt that attraction to him. More than she’d ever felt for any man. Maybe that was why her relationships had never gone very far. At the back of her mind, she’d always been measuring the guys she dated against Jake.

  They’d lost. The thought brought an almost impish smile to her face, even as her heart ached a little about what that might mean. Getting over Jake hadn’t happened in all these years, and now being with him all the time wasn’t going to make it any easier. With each passing day, she liked the man he had become more and more. What had been a childish crush based mostly on how handsome and kind he was to her seemed to be blooming again, and was based on a whole lot more. Not that she would ever act on it even if he showed interest. Her body was so scarred now from the attack and all the operations that she couldn’t even bear to glimpse herself in the mirror.

  Oh, well. She’d deal with that mistake when the time came. For now she had bigger concerns. Like that man finding her again.

  She felt her shoulders sag, and a chill ran through her. God, would this never end?

  “I thought I heard someone stirring.”

  At the sound of Jake’s voice, she looked up, rattled that she’d been so inattentive that she hadn’t heard his approach. He stood in the kitchen doorway, bare chested, hair tousled, jeans zipped but not buttoned, barefoot. He looked as if he had leaped out of bed to investigate.

  She caught her breath, whether from being startled or from being greeted by a sight that would have done well on a cheesecake calendar. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake
you.”

  “I wasn’t sleeping well.” He must have caught something in her expression because he looked down at himself. “I’ll get a shirt.”

  “Not on my account,” she hastened to say. “Your house. Be comfortable.” And she didn’t mind the sight in the least.

  He did reach down and button his jeans, though, maybe one of the sexiest gestures she had ever seen a man make. She closed her eyes a moment, telling her heart to still.

  “What woke you?” he asked, moving into the kitchen and starting a pot of coffee.

  “Nightmare,” she admitted.

  “Do you have a lot of them?” His back, broad shouldered and well muscled above narrow hips, was all she could see as he scooped coffee into the brewing machine.

  “I did. I thought I was past them.”

  “This news must have brought it back. I’m sorry.”

  “You have nothing to apologize for. Besides, that may have had nothing to do with it. Maybe I was wrong to think because I hadn’t had any in a few weeks I was over them. Maybe I’ll have them periodically for years.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.” He turned and leaned back against the counter, folding his arms and crossing his ankles. She took a mental snapshot, feeling almost helpless before the force of the attraction she felt. She needed to squelch this. Life was complicated enough.

  She tore her gaze away and stared down into her mug of cooling milk. “Coffee at this hour?” she asked, hoping to divert the conversation.

  “It won’t keep me awake if I get sleepy again. I can drink it any hour of the day or night.”

  “Oh.” Any hope that the milk would put her back to sleep was rapidly fading. Maybe she’d have coffee, too. In fact, staying awake seemed safer than risking another nightmare.

  Silence reigned except for the hiss of the drip coffeemaker. Finally it popped a few times, and he turned to get a mug out of the cupboard. “Would you like some?”

  “Yes, please.” Stupid, but maybe not so stupid.

  The coffee smelled far better than the milk when he placed it in front of her. She pushed the milk to one side as he sat across the table from her and raised his own mug to his lips.

  “It’s snowing,” he remarked.

  “I saw. Not very much.”

  “Not yet. I don’t think we’re supposed to get more than an inch. It’ll look pretty for a while.”

  “I love snow.”

  “I guess I need to find a way to appreciate it. For me it just increases my workload, both here and as a cop. The first snow is especially bad for car accidents. It’s like everyone has to learn to drive on it all over again.”

  “I’ve noticed. It’s amazing how fast you get used to dry roads.”

  “So what is it you like about snow?”

  “Honestly? I didn’t learn to like it until I moved to Minnesota. I go cross-country skiing all the time there. It got so I was impatient for winter to begin.”

  “What about camping?”

  “I liked that, too, after the summer bugs let up. The mosquitoes up there are awful, but once bug season passes it’s gorgeous. I loved going to the Boundary Waters area, I loved going to the shore of Lake Superior. It’s a beautiful state.”

  “This must seem awfully bland after all that.”

  “Not really.” She lifted her gaze cautiously, trying to focus on his face and not his chest. “I missed the mountains here. Missed watching them change with the seasons. Some people get addicted to the water. I was addicted to the Rockies.”

  “Really? I wasn’t aware you got much time to go hiking up there.”

  “I didn’t. But I still loved being near them.”

  “You were pretty hemmed in, weren’t you?”

  She just nodded. “But you must have been, too. I worked at the pharmacy. You worked here.”

  “Not all the time. My folks made sure there was time for fun. You remember that hayride, right? And other times some friends and I would go hiking and camping over a weekend. Horseback riding. We did a lot of things.”

  Staring into her mug seemed safer just then. Her therapy had taught her how much she had missed. In fact, the therapist had once remarked that she had been denied a childhood. Perhaps. But as she had discovered while working with kids, an awful lot of children missed what most people called a childhood. Sometimes she wondered if that was all just a myth, if any child really lived out those golden days or if people simply remembered them that way.

  “They way I grew up,” she said finally, “would have seemed perfectly normal in another century. Childhood, at least our current notion of it, is a relatively recent invention.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “No, really it is. Working-class families put children to work as soon as they were able. Upper-class families turned the kids over to nannies, saw them once a day then sent them away to boarding school. I don’t think the way I was raised was unique.”

  “Except in comparison to something else.”

  She nodded. “Only then.”

  “So you’re excusing it?”

  “No. Because the level of abuse I endured sometimes went beyond simply asking me to earn my keep. That was where it crossed the line.”

  “Way across the line,” he answered. “And this isn’t a happy path for you to be following.”

  “I don’t seem to have one right now. Sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize. You’ve been through a hell I can barely imagine. It’s only natural you can’t be brimming with all kinds of happy thoughts. I was just looking for some subject that wouldn’t drag you down. If there isn’t one, just say so.”

  At that she managed a crooked smile. “I am so much fun to be around right now. My friends don’t know how lucky they are that I decided to bail.”

  “But before all this, you were happier than when you lived here, right?”

  “Much. I wouldn’t say... Well, no life is all perfect and no one is happy all the time. But I was better. I felt better. I laughed more often. Happy might not be the right word. Contented, maybe. I felt useful, I had friends, I had things I liked to do. What more does a person need?”

  He frowned faintly and she wondered why. He didn’t illuminate her. “I always admired you for having the guts to get up and leave. Maybe you don’t remember, but a lot of us talked about it in high school. You were one of the few who actually did it.”

  “I don’t know if it was guts or desperation,” she answered honestly. “Did you think about leaving?”

  “No. Never. I really like ranching. I like working with animals. I even like working in the dirt. I’m outdoors a lot, always busy. And then I discovered a taste for small-town policing.” He smiled faintly. “Note that I said small town. I don’t think I’d like working in a bigger place, but here I pretty much know everyone, and it mostly feels like helping out neighbors. Or occasionally scolding them.”

  She laughed, a quiet sound. “The scolding part could be interesting.”

  “Sometimes you gotta get their attention.”

  Her laugh grew a bit more relaxed. “Old joke.”

  “Very. And misogynistic so I won’t repeat it. But yeah, sometimes I have to scold people for minor infractions. I’m sure that you heard enough about the occasional drunken brawls and things like that. We’re not in a hurry to make arrests unless things get really bad. Most folks around here don’t act up too much.”

  “So you wag your finger at them?”

  “Metaphorically. The stern voice, badge and gun seem to do the job.”

  “I’m not surprised.” She had to drag her thoughts away from her own arrest and all the anger and sense of injustice that went with that.

  “I guess that’s not a good topic, either,” he said.

  “I don’t seem to have any good topics.” A sorry thing to admit. She cast around, looking for something, anything, that wasn’t related to the distant past or recent events. It was as if she had a brain lock, though. Nothing else seemed to want to come up.

  “God, t
his is awful,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t seem to be able to think about anything else. Or talk about it. I had a pretty good life going and then all this stuff happened, and it’s like I’m stuck in it.”

  “Hearing that he’s on the loose probably didn’t help, either. You know we’re working on it, both here and back there. And by now, maybe at a lot of points in between. There was some talk just yesterday of declaring him an interstate fugitive, which would put the FBI on his tail. For whatever that’s worth.”

  “They’re pretty good, aren’t they? But they must have more important things to worry about.”

  “Every life is important, and yes, they’re pretty damn good.”

  He surprised her by reaching out slowly and gently covering her hand with his. His touch was warm, his palm rough from work. It felt good, and didn’t frighten her at all. Maybe she was getting past at least one hang-up.

  Tentatively, she turned her hand over and their fingers clasped. Considering his musculature and all the hard work she’d seen him do, it was amazing he had a touch so gentle.

  “He’s coming,” she said finally. But this time the fear didn’t choke her. “He’s coming. I want to be ready. Can you help me get ready?”

  “Ready how? Do you want a gun?”

  She shook her head. “I wouldn’t know how to use it. I’m not sure I could. But maybe some self-defense moves? Could anyone around here teach me?”

  “I know just the guy.”

  “Who?”

  “Me.”

  When her eyes flew to his face, he was smiling. He shrugged one shoulder. “It was a hobby that somehow turned into teaching a few days of self-defense classes every semester at the community college. I can teach you enough to escape his hold, and even to temporarily disable him so he can’t chase you.”

  “Do you think I’m strong enough? I mean...”