The Groom's Stand-In (Special Edition)

by Gina Wilkins

  “What?”

  “I need to talk to take my mind off my problems.”

  “So you want to talk about my problems instead?”

  “Is being called a bodyguard a problem for you?”

  “It’s just inaccurate. Bryan didn’t ask me to serve as your bodyguard when I picked you up the other day. I was simply supposed to drive you to his house and wait with you there until he arrived.”

  “I know. You’ve explained all that. But you still haven’t explained why you get all tense when I use the word. Have you worked as a bodyguard before?”

  “Briefly.” He looked out at the rain and hoped his short reply would discourage her from asking more.

  It didn’t, of course.

  “What went wrong?”

  “The person I was guarding got killed. I ignored my instincts, and went along with him when he insisted that I leave him alone with his girlfriend for a few hours. He was tired of being guarded all the time, thought he would be safe for a while in the hideaway we had selected for him, and he convinced me that he would be safe there—but he wasn’t.”

  “You were working for the man who was killed?” she asked, trying to follow the terse story.

  “Yes.”

  “And he asked you to leave him alone for a few hours?”

  “I shouldn’t have listened. I should have insisted I stay with him.”

  “Donovan, you can’t blame yourself for following your employer’s orders. It sounds as though he made the mistake, not you.”

  Staring blindly into the rain, he shook his head. “I was hired to protect him. I failed. He died. I’m not the only one who blamed me for that failure.”

  “The only person who should be blamed is the killer. Was he ever caught?”

  “Yeah. Lot of good that did my client.”

  “Who was your client? A friend?”

  “No. A man who’d made some powerful enemies on his way to fame. You would probably know the name if I mentioned it, but it doesn’t matter now. That ended my bodyguard career.”

  “Was that when you went to work for Bryan?”

  He shrugged. “I bummed around for a few years after that, taking some assignments I’d just as soon not discuss now for some people who operated just barely within the range of the law. My reputation was going downhill fast when Bryan tracked me down and convinced me to join him.”

  He hadn’t planned to tell her all that. But maybe now she could understand the intensity of his loyalty to Bryan. Why he wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize that relationship.

  Maybe she could also understand that he wasn’t exactly what anyone would consider a hero—just in case she had made the mistake of thinking of him in that light during the past few days.

  “No more talk,” he said abruptly, twisting to arrange his injured leg in a slightly more comfortable position—which meant sticking it straight out into the rain. “Get some rest. You’re going to need it.”

  Donovan waited until he was sure the rain had stopped for a while before he suggested they move on. It took all the strength Chloe had to make herself climb to her feet and start walking beside him. He hovered nearby to give her support, though he leaned so heavily on his walking stick that he looked as though he needed a great deal of support himself.

  They made a pathetic sight, she couldn’t help thinking as they pushed on one halting step at a time. She didn’t want to think about what she must look like with her stringy hair, assorted bruises and clothes that would go straight into a trash can if she made it out of here. Donovan was unshaven, his hair limp and damp from the rain, his black clothing dirty and torn, his leg bound in boards and scraps of coral-colored cloth. Beneath his whiskers, she could see a dark bruise on his left cheek from his fight with the kidnapper.

  Yet as battered as he looked at the moment, she had a feeling there wasn’t a woman alive who would dismiss him without a second glance. He was bruised and weary, but competence and power still seemed to surround him like an invisible mantle. A battle-scarred warrior, she mused. Battered, but unbroken.

  And then she made a face and shook her head in response to her fanciful mental ramblings. Maybe her fever was climbing again.

  “Is something funny?” Donovan asked, proving how closely he’d been watching her.

  “Look at us,” she retorted. “Don’t you find us a funny sight?”

  He glanced down at himself, then at her. His mouth twitched in that little smile she found herself watching for so often. “Not many women would find anything about this picture amusing.”

  “I’ve decided to attribute my amusement to fever. I seem to be suffering delusions.”

  “Don’t suppose you could hallucinate us a cup of coffee?”

  “I’ll try. Having a caffeine attack?”

  He reached out to push the low-hanging limbs of a tree out of their way. “There are a lot of things I’d like to have right now, but a cup of coffee definitely tops the—”

  His words ended abruptly. From behind him, Chloe studied his suddenly still back. “What is it?”

  “A road.”

  “A road?” She hurried to catch up with him, hardly even wincing when she stepped on a rock. “Where?”

  He nodded ahead. “An old logging road, from the look of it. But it’s been used recently. Four-wheelers, at a guess. ATVs.”

  She stared in some dismay at the rutted dirt track Donovan had generously called a road. “How do we know which way to follow it?”

  Limping forward, he studied the tracks, then pointed. “That way. South.”

  Frowning, she looked in that direction. Trees, hills, and more trees lay ahead—both directions. “Why south?”

  “It leads out.”

  She looked again at the track. “And you know this how?”

  He shrugged.

  She studied his impassive face for a moment before asking, “Do you really have a reason to choose that direction, or are you just making a guess?”

  “Look at it this way. I have a fifty-fifty chance of being right.”

  After a moment, she nodded. “Okay. We’ll go south.”

  Making a gallant motion with his left hand, he said, “After you.”

  She drew a deep breath as she stepped onto one hard-packed track and turned to follow it. It was a road, she reminded herself. It had to lead somewhere.

  It was no easier making their way along the old road than it had been across the forest floor. Thick mud made walking slippery and brush and vines tangled around their ankles.

  Chloe was hit with several more dizzy spells, forcing her to stop and rest several times. Donovan stumbled twice, almost falling, and scaring her half to death. She was so afraid he was going to further hurt his leg, shatter the cracked bone so that it pierced the skin or caused him some permanent disability. Both times he managed to catch himself with his crutch.

  Her steps slowed to a near-crawl, and she suspected she couldn’t walk a straight line in a sobriety test. The world was doing funny things around her, the lines waving, merging, creating a surreal landscape straight out of a Dali painting. She wasn’t hallucinating—exactly—but she wasn’t exactly coherent, either. She hoped it was a good sign that she was aware of her condition.

  “We’re going to have to stop,” Donovan said, sliding his left arm around her. “You can’t go any farther.”

  “I can keep going,” she said, staring fiercely at the road ahead.

  “Not without collapsing. Come on, we can sit beneath that big tree if it isn’t too muddy.”

  She shook her head, irrationally afraid that if she sat down she wouldn’t get up again. “We have to keep walking or we won’t get out.”

  “We’ll get out, Chloe.” His voice was unusually gentle. “You just need to rest a little while. And so do I, okay?”

  “What time is it?” she asked as he led her toward the tree he’d indicated.

  “I don’t know. It’s so cloudy it’s hard to tell. It was about seven when we started walking, and th
e rainstorm lasted maybe an hour—it’s probably around noon.”

  “It feels later. Do you think it’s going to rain again?”

  He glanced at the sky before turning to help her sit down on the damp moss beneath the tree. “Probably. There were predictions for a lot of rain this week.”

  “I know. Grace pointed it out to me several times, asking me how much fun I thought it would be to spend a week of vacation watching rain fall.”

  “I’m sure you’d have found something more interesting to do than that.”

  He’d kept his voice uninflected, but she bristled a little, anyway. Or she would have, if she hadn’t been so tired and so sick. “Bryan and I were going to talk,” she murmured, leaning her head back against the tree. “Just get to know each other better. That’s all there was to it.”

  “You’d have had a nice time. Bryan can be very good company.”

  Donovan’s bland tone was starting to annoy her. She decided to let the conversation end before exhaustion and fever made her say something she might regret later.

  He didn’t seem to be listening to her anyway.

  After their awkward conversation, Donovan seemed impatient to start hiking again. He allowed only a short rest before he asked Chloe if she felt like moving on again. She didn’t, of course, but she struggled to her feet. Donovan believed they were close to rescue, and she had learned to trust his instincts.

  The walk seemed to get harder as they pressed on. The ground grew progressively muddier and slipperier as the grass on the packed-dirt trail became sparser. Chloe hoped that meant the road had been used more in that area recently, which could mean they were getting closer to a populated area.

  And then the rain began again, this time a slow, misty drizzle that was just heavy enough to make them soggy, chilled and uncomfortable.

  Chloe had walked almost as far as she physically could when she heard Donovan growl something incomprehensible—something she was probably better off not asking him to clarify, judging by his tone. Looking forward, she saw what had upset him.

  The torrential rains of the past two days had flooded a fast-running section of the stream, causing the roiling, tumbling water to completely cover the road ahead of them. The road had fallen off into a deep ditch dug by previous floods. In late summer, the stream was probably quite shallow here, just enough to give the ATV riders a good splash. Now it might as well have been a river blocking them from the other side of the road.

  For several long, silent moments, Donovan stood unmoving, staring at the rushing water as if he could hardly believe he was really seeing it. And then he erupted in fury, slamming his walking stick to the ground and letting loose a string of colorful curses that made Chloe’s eyebrows rise.

  So Donovan could lose his composure occasionally. She’d wondered about that. This latest setback was apparently the last straw for him.

  She stepped in to soothe him before he hurt himself. “We’ll find a way around it,” she said, laying a hand on his arm.

  “There is no way around it. Look at the bluffs we’d have to climb if we go upstream. Or the steep slopes we’d have to descend downstream. Why do you think this road runs where it does? It’s the only relatively level path.”

  He’d spoken through clenched teeth, obviously trying to get himself back under control. “Then we’ll wade through it,” she suggested. “We’ll help each other across. It couldn’t be that deep.”

  “It isn’t how deep it is, it’s how fast it’s moving. One misstep and we’d be swept downstream.”

  “We could wait here, find a place to take shelter until the stream goes down some.”

  He looked up at the sky. The drizzle was becoming heavier now, and showed no signs of ending soon. “That could be a while. Days, maybe.”

  “We don’t seem to have a whole lot of choices.”

  “That thought has occurred to me.”

  She stepped to the edge of the erosion-carved ravine and looked down, watching the increasingly heavy rain merging into the surging flood waters. The temperature was falling again; or maybe it just felt that way because she was so wet and tired. She shivered and wrapped her arms around herself in a futile attempt at warmth.

  Donovan stepped beside her, placing a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice calmer now. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you just because I’m frustrated.”

  She offered him a tentative smile. “You deserve to blow off steam sometimes.”

  “Still, I shouldn’t have—”

  Their combined weight must have been too much for the waterlogged ground at the edge of the gully. Before Donovan could finish his sentence, the earth gave way beneath their feet.

  Chapter Twelve

  Maybe they could have caught themselves if they hadn’t already been in such weakened condition. Or maybe not. The ground literally fell from under them, tumbling into the hungry stream which took them with it.

  Chloe went into the water on her back. She was immediately swept downstream, crashing against rocks and the dirt sides, struggling to get her face above the surface. Her first gasp for breath ended with a mouthful of water. Choking and gagging, she went under again.

  The water was no more than four feet deep but running so fast she couldn’t keep her feet beneath her when she tried to stand. She slammed hard into another large rock, tried to grab it, but had her grip torn away by the force of the water. The current was too strong, the ground too uneven and slippery to give her a grip. All she could do was go with the flow and try to gulp air whenever her face broke the water.

  Something snagged her shirt, jerking her to a stop. She scrabbled to catch hold of it, her hands closing around something hard and slick. Tree roots, she realized as she gulped air, trying to focus through water, rain and tears. The flood had washed the dirt away from the bottom of a large tree, leaving long, bare roots extending out into the water.

  It took all her strength to cling to the roots and keep herself from being swept away again. She didn’t know how far she had been carried by the flood-waters, or how long she’d been battling them. The heavy gray sky pressed down above her and rain fell in windswept sheets around her. All she could see was the forest and the bluffs rising around her.

  She couldn’t see Donovan.

  Whipping her head from one side to the other, she searched desperately for any sign of him. “Donovan?”

  She could barely hear her own voice over the sounds of the rain and rushing water. She called louder, “Donovan!”

  She couldn’t help thinking of his injured leg. What if he’d been pushed under the water when they were first swept in? Even now he could be trapped, struggling to get his head above water, slowly losing consciousness…

  “Donovan!”

  She tried dragging herself out of the water, but her hands kept sliding on the slick roots. She lodged herself firmly into a notch among them and rested a moment, panting.

  Her head was spinning now, and she felt as though she could very easily faint again, but she fought off the dizziness. She had to find Donovan.

  She tried calling him again. “Donovan!”

  “Chloe?”

  She jerked her head around so quickly that dizziness almost overwhelmed her again, loosening her grip on the roots. She scrambled to regain her hold, clinging so tightly her hands ached.

  “Donovan?” Had she only imagined she’d heard him? Was it only desperate, wishful thinking?

  “Chloe—where are you?”

  It was definitely his voice, she thought with a choked cry of relief. He was all right. Somehow he’d gotten out of the water.

  She tried again to pull herself out, but she was unsuccessful. She called out to him again and waited, hanging on while Donovan made his way to her. She could hear him now, crashing through the brush, his occasional muted curses drifting to her on wet gusts of wind.

  It took him a while to reach her. When she finally saw him, she understood why.

  The left side of his face was c
overed with rain-streaked blood from a cut at his temple. His right leg dragged so badly that he was almost hopping on his left. He looked as though he was in terrible pain, but he also looked as close to frantic as she had seen him to this point.

  He didn’t see her at first. “Chloe?”

  “I’m here.”

  He limped toward her. She called out again.

  Finally spotting her, he stopped, his shoulders seeming to sag in relief for a moment. “Are you all right?”

  “I think so. But I can’t get out.”

  “Hang on.” He made his way carefully toward her. Stopping on the bank, he rested a hand on the trunk of the tree and looked down at her. “I’m going to try to pull you out. You’ll have to hold very tightly to make sure you aren’t swept away again.”

  “How did you get out?”

  “I hit a shallow area, grabbed a tree branch.” His foot slipped on a patch of mud, but he caught himself quickly. He steadied himself with one hand wrapped around a sturdy limb and leaned toward her, his other hand outstretched. “Brace your foot against the root and push toward me. Catch my hand and don’t let go.”

  The position he was in had his weight almost fully on his right leg, which had to be causing him agony. Yet she knew he wouldn’t falter as he helped her out, no matter how bad the pain. Once again, she trusted him with her life.

  He hadn’t let her down so far.

  Somehow, she managed to place her hand in his. Somehow, he found the strength to drag her out of the water.

  They stumbled away from the crumbling edge. And then they fell limply to a wet, grassy patch of ground, both too tired to stand, clinging to each other as though they were afraid to let go again. Lying there in the rain, Donovan buried his face in her dripping hair, while she burrowed into the wet curve of his throat. She felt heavy tremors running through him. She didn’t know whether to attribute them to cold, pain, exhaustion, reaction or—as in her case—a combination of all those things.