Time to Run

by Marliss Melton

  He drew her lips toward his and kissed her in a way that indicated that he wasn’t going to stop this time.

  She thrilled at the silent, possessive message. She wanted to be claimed by him, utterly and completely taken. With a groan of surrender, she fitted her body to his, optimistic that their union would bind them in a deep and mysterious way, keeping him in her life.

  Cradling her close, he kissed her as he eased into her welcoming wetness. She could sense his restraint. He was being gentle with her, penetrating inch by slow inch, as if she might otherwise break.

  “More,” she begged, hips surging to meet him. She wanted to be overcome, to be whisked away to another world, stolen from the past and made his.

  Still, he held back, permeating her senses with ecstasy, one layer at a time until, at last, there wasn’t any question that she was his. With a cry of relief, Sara gave rein to her sexual expression. After years of repression, nothing felt more intensely satisfying than Chase cradling her, straining to get closer, deeper. Surely, they’d return to this again and again.

  It was a homecoming.

  He even went the extra mile to ensure that she was with him at the end, sliding a hand between their bodies to coax her over the edge. They tumbled together, bound in a way that defied explanation.

  Chase was afraid to move. He was still inside of Sara, subject to aftershocks, following a tsunami of a climax.

  The vulnerability that hit him in the wake of that natural disaster had him holding his breath. If he moved, something around his heart would shift like tectonic plates on the earth’s crust, bringing more calamity.

  Her chest rose and fell beneath him, faintly damp, incredibly soft. “Oh, my goodness,” she breathed a note of discovery.

  He forced himself to speak. “You okay?”

  She gave an incredulous laugh. “Okay? Oh, yes, I’m okay.”

  He grunted, still afraid to move. He just clung to her.

  She smoothed the hair from his face, quietly content to let him hold her. “I have to say something,” she finally whispered, mimicking his sentence structure earlier. “And I don’t really want to say it but, if something were to happen to you . . . I’d want you to know.”

  He swallowed convulsively.

  “I think I love you,” she said on a note of wonder.

  He flinched instinctively. In the past, when his lovers said those words, he’d carefully withdrawn his warmth and passion, making it gently clear that he had no heart with which to love them back.

  Only this time, he could feel his heart expanding, rising toward his throat. Agony and euphoria raked through, digging through the crust that hardened him.

  For no reason that he could comprehend—except that it’d happened right here in his mother’s bed—he relived his earliest childhood memory.

  It was the night of his father’s death. His mother held him in her arms. He remembered her tears falling onto the backs of his hands as she held him close and sobbed.

  Years later, he’d been the one to hold her, as Linc covered the baby’s grave with dirt.

  They’d had each other. Up until the day they rushed her to the hospital where she’d died.

  The day they’d brought her body home and put her in the ground next to the baby, Chase realized, with relief, that he couldn’t feel a thing.

  He’d turned his heart off, flipped the switch.

  It was exactly that ability that made him good at what he did. He killed for a living, untouched by torment or remorse.

  How could a simple I think I love you bring back all the loss and pain that his mother’s death should have caused him?

  To his horror, it hit him with crushing force, dragging him under waves of despair. A sound like a sob ripped out of him. He hid his face against Sara’s neck, mortified.

  “It’s okay,” she soothed. It was as if she understood. “I’m here.”

  He couldn’t make it go away. The grief that he’d buried when he was fifteen years old was suddenly resurrected, prompted perhaps by Jesse’s death. The pain was staggering.

  Sara held him fiercely, wordlessly, as he choked on his sobs.

  After a long, long while, the agony receded to manageable proportions. Chase rolled to his side, and held his breath to regain his composure. Mortified, he kept his eyes closed.

  Sara turned to face him. He could tell, even with his eyes closed, that she was looking at him in the moon glow.

  He was unable to explain himself, so he pretended to sleep. What did she think of him now? he wondered. Was she brokenhearted that he hadn’t returned her words of love? Or did she think that he was certifiable?

  He felt her move and quelled his startle reflex when she reached out to stroke his cheekbone and the line of his jaw. She looped an arm around him and snuggled closer.

  Still mortified, he didn’t think he’d sleep at all. At the same time, a blessed calm stole over him, followed by bone-deep contentment, and he fell asleep in an instant.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Drugged with the lethargy of sexual release, Sara slept through the rooster’s crowing. She opened her eyes to find the room awash with sunlight. Chase was gone, but that came as no surprise. Last night was the first time she’d ever seen him sleeping.

  Straining her ears, she sought a clue as to what he was doing. The house remained quiet. A lark twittered in the pecan tree outside.

  Sara tossed back the covers. Stepping into her bathroom, she brushed her teeth and hair while gazing dreamily into the mirror and wondering how last night was going to change things, if at all.

  Chase would still head back East on Tuesday. He’d still function as the sniper of his SEAL team. His work was dangerous, and he could die.

  But surely something had changed. Last night, he’d revealed himself to her in a way that he hadn’t before. He’d wept in her arms—something she was certain had never happened with any other woman. That certainty gave rise to tenderness that crested the walls of her heart.

  She’d said that she loved him, and though he hadn’t answered her with words, his actions had conveyed a depth of feeling that went beyond mere friendship.

  So, where was he now? Putting down her brush, she left the bathroom to seek him out.

  He was not in the kitchen making coffee. Sara peered toward the barn, but the doors were tightly shut. His car and the truck were both parked out front. Where could Chase be?

  The sound of a gunshot rent the peaceful quiet. Sara gasped, spinning in the direction of the sound. The skinheads! Her first thought was that they’d come to the ranch to seek reprisal for fact that the law was now actively hunting them down.

  Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat.

  The burst of gunfire had Sara stifling a scream. What should she do? The buck rifle was locked inside Linc’s truck, mounted to the gun rack. Should she endanger herself by running out of the house to get it, or should she call the police for help, then lock herself in Kendal’s room with her son, to wait?

  But could Chase hold them off all by himself?

  Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat.

  Peering in the direction of the gunfire, Sara realized that she was panicking for nothing. Chase stood just beyond the pecan tree, firing down the driveway. She squinted in the direction that he was firing and made out the target that he’d put together the other day, standing way back by the tree line.

  He was just practicing his shooting.

  Panic gave way to anger. How dare he scare the daylights out of her by holding target practice at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning!

  “Mom?” Kendal called from his bedroom.

  “Go back to sleep, honey. Chase is just practicing his shooting.”

  She pushed angrily through the front door, not stopping to analyze that her upset might have more to do with the fact that Chase wasn’t doing something tamer, like cooking breakfast. She was about to shout his name when he lifted his submachine gun and fired again.

  With a cry of frustration, she rushed down the steps and along the
pebbled driveway, wincing as the rocks gouged the bottoms of her bare feet. He had to have seen her. Nothing ever escaped his notice.

  “Chase!” she said, as he lowered his weapon to assess his aim.

  He turned his head in her direction, and she faltered, rethinking her approach.

  He looked angry. Truly angry, though not necessarily at her, because his gaze slid with appreciation to her breasts, which jiggled freely beneath the material of her gown.

  She stopped about fifteen feet away from him. “Must you do that at seven in the morning?” she asked him, smoothing the frustration from her voice. “I thought that the skinheads had come here to fight it out!”

  He propped the butt of the wicked-looking rifle on the toe of his boot. “The skinheads?” he repeated, arching one eyebrow.

  She regarded him more closely. It was obvious to her that he’d donned some sort of emotional armor. It hardened his facial features, making him inscrutable.

  Sara’s arms stole across her midsection. The cool morning air settled damply on her bare limbs. She stood there, stunned by the aloofness in his gaze, wondering if she’d imagined how close they’d been the night before. “Is that so unreasonable?” she heard herself ask. “They’re still at large, right? They must know that we’re the ones who told the police about them.”

  With a nasty smile, Chase snatched up his gun again. “They wouldn’t dare come here,” he said in a voice that made the hair on Sara’s arms prickle. He sighted down the driveway again.

  “Don’t!” she said with a renewed burst of anger.

  He lowered the tip of the rifle but continued to glare at the target like he wanted to annihilate it.

  “I wanted Kendal to sleep in today. Just stop it!” With that, she whirled and ran, ignoring the shooting pain of rocks on her tender soles. Tears blurred her vision as she ran up the front steps and into the house. Stop behaving like nothing happened.

  That was what she’d really meant. How could he withdraw from her so thoroughly, after opening up to her last night?

  Moving past Kendal’s quiet bedroom, Sara locked herself inside her own room, half-fearful, half-hoping that Chase would pursue her. She threw herself onto the bed, hugging the pillow that Chase had used last night. It smelled like him, like fresh-cut cedar. Hot tears leaked between her tightly shut eyelids.

  She had known it would come to this. Chase might be the laid-back, considerate soul she’d always thought him. But, as he’d revealed that night on the front porch, he wasn’t like other men. He’d been driven into a profession that few could stomach. He’d reenlisted for another four years. A man like Chase didn’t settle down into loving relationships, didn’t work a farm, didn’t raise a family.

  But he could, eventually, when his enlistment is up, insisted a stubborn voice inside of her.

  With a sharp sniff, Sara sat up and wiped her cheeks. The Chase she’d fallen in love with wasn’t a calculated killer. She remembered how he’d smiled when they’d surprised the doe in the woods. She thought of how he’d taught both her and Kendal to trust again.

  He’d never to this day failed her expectations of him.

  Which meant that, in time, he would come home to them. She had to believe it.

  But could she wait four agonizing years for that to happen? That would be foolish. No, she needed some indication from him now—a promise—that he’d come back. Back to the childhood home he couldn’t wait to leave in the first place. Such a promise would be hard to coax from him, a man who buried his heart deep inside of himself.

  But there was a way. He’d expressed an enormous quantity of feeling the last time they’d made love. Obviously they needed to make love again so he would open up to her. Perhaps then he’d offer the promise of a future she was looking for.

  Dean Cannard didn’t ordinarily work on Sunday mornings, but with members of the FOR Americans still at large, and wanting to redeem himself in Captain Lewis’s eyes, he dragged himself into the office at 8:00 A.M.

  The FBI agent, Hannah Lindstrom, had managed in one day to dig up more on Willard Smith than Dean had in nearly a week. In order to uphold his reputation in the department, he intended to find out everything else there was to know about Willard Smith, including his criminal history, if there was one.

  With a cup of black coffee within reach, Dean put his fingers to his keyboard, and by midmorning, he’d traced Willard’s history from his boyhood in Stillwater, Oklahoma, though his years of service with the Army Rangers. He’d seen twelve years of combat in the Vietnam and Gulf Wars combined and received the Bronze Star for meritorious service. Following his retirement in ’94 from Ft. Belvoir, Virginia, he disappeared off the map.

  If the man had no criminal record, he was bound to get a slap on the wrist and nothing more when the police apprehended him—provided they captured him before his planned “demonstration.”

  In the state of Oklahoma, Willard’s record was clean. Dean directed his search to Virginia’s databases, where he learned that Willard was wanted for using a firearm in the commission of a felony. “Got you now, bastard,” he muttered, taking notes.

  Clicking on the Web site’s homepage, he looked for a point of contact in Virginia. Even as he jotted down a name and number, his eye was caught by a flashing link: AMBER ALERT.

  Professional curiosity made him click the link.

  Photographs of a mother and son and a composite sketch of their abductor held his attention for a scant second. Closing the screen, he went back to the home page.

  Halfway through jotting down the contact number, he hesitated.

  Just one minute. He never forgot a face, and he knew those eyes.

  With a stab of shock, Dean hit the Amber Alert link again. It couldn’t be Serenity Jensen. The woman in the photo had unremarkable hair and blurred features. But the eyes were Serenity’s. Or was that possibly a coincidence? Every person in the world had a look-alike, it was said. His gaze fell to the name of the woman: Sara Garret. Her son’s name was Kendal.

  Sara. That cinched it. Chase had used that name the day when Dean called his cell phone. He’d been expecting her to call him.

  Dean had never actually laid eyes on Serenity’s son—though wasn’t that a telltale sign? She hadn’t wanted Dean to see the boy.

  Dean focused on the composite sketch of the stranger who’d supposedly abducted them. It had to be Chase McCaffrey, even though the man in the sketch had a full beard.

  “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” Dean murmured, his heartbeat quickening. He read the news articles linked to the sight, thoroughly distracted from his original search.

  Authorities had started off labeling the case a stranger abduction. Since then, they’d backed away from that theory. It was now believed that Sara Garret had run off with her son, enlisting help from the bearded stranger. The case would soon be demoted from an Amber Alert to a mere parental abduction.

  Dean was damn glad to hear it. Otherwise, he would be duty-bound to arrest Chase McCaffrey, something he really didn’t want to do. Not only had they gone to school together, but the man was way too dangerous to try to arrest. Besides, he needed McCaffrey’s help to take down the skinheads.

  Dean sat back, reviewing the information at his disposal. For Serenity—Sara Garret—to have run away from her husband, a Judge Advocate General in the Navy, and a captain at that, life had to have been pretty awful. He wasn’t about to reunite the two.

  The smart thing to do was to keep her true identity a secret—one that he wasn’t above using to his benefit at the right time. Once Chase was gone, Dean would reveal that he’d known who she was all along; that he’d protected her identity. That ought to win him a few points.

  Maybe once she trusted him, he’d stand a chance to steal her heart.

  More than anything in the world, Chase longed for concealment, but there was nowhere to hide. He felt like he’d parachuted into the middle of a war zone with no Ghillie suit for camouflage. He’d be dead before he blinked his eyes.
/>   Firing his MP5 earlier had helped. It had summoned the unfeeling warrior in him, until Sara flew out of the house to berate him.

  Glimpsing the disillusionment in her eyes, he’d wanted to banish it. Only he knew what would happen if he did: He’d find himself in even worse condition than he was.

  He couldn’t let that happen.

  For the next four years, he needed to remain what he was before: more machine than man, aloof and detached. Otherwise, he was doomed to fail, to suffer the remorse that plagued other snipers. Resurrecting his buried heart was not an option.

  At all costs, he had to avoid a repeat performance of last night. And since he couldn’t count on himself to be that disciplined, he had to avoid Sara.

  Fortunately, there was still much to be done before heading back on Tuesday. He had to stain the shutters, fix the leaking faucet for the hose, organize the tools in the barn. It shouldn’t be too hard to steer clear of her for two short days, especially if the skinheads acted on their threats. On the third day, he’d be gone.

  He was kneeling in the weeds beside the house, working a pair of needle nose pliers into the faucet, when Sara appeared on the porch with Kendal in tow. She had her new purse dangling from one shoulder and the truck keys in her right hand.

  “Hi,” she said. Her gentle smile put him immediately off-balance. Where was the disillusionment he’d glimpsed this morning?

  “Where you goin’?” Chase asked, sitting back on his heels. She looked amazing in jeans, sexier than she’d ever looked. She’d put on a little bit of makeup, too. She was going to set the town on fire, going out looking like that.

  “I’m taking Kenney to Eric’s house to spend the night,” she said, swinging the truck keys. “Then I’m going to Lowe’s to buy mums for these pots. Remember, you said I could?”

  “Sure.” He experienced a stab of envy, wanting to go with her to pick out the plants. Envy was followed shortly by panicked recognition of the fact that they would be alone tonight. “I thought we were gonna sleep on the porch tonight and look for bobcats,” he said to Kendal, who jammed his hands into his pockets.