by Nicole Helm
Surely if her parents really were adept spies, though, they’d know whatever information they gave would be the end of all three of their lives.
The sound of water running stopped. Holden braced himself. He had to focus. He had to keep his normal, unbiased, analytical, intelligent wits about him. He was going to have to bandage her up and keep his hands to himself. What they both really needed was sleep. They didn’t have a ton of time, but a couple hours would put them both on better footing.
Willa waltzed back into the room, wearing nothing but a towel.
“What the hell are you doing?” he demanded. Horrified that he couldn’t seem to make himself look away. Her legs were long and toned, a creamy white that must have rarely seen sun. Her arms were tanned and impressively muscled. Her hair was free, an even redder gold when wet with little drops of water trickling from the ends of it over down to the towel. Freckles littered her shoulders and he...
His tongue felt well and truly twisted and stuck in his dry throat.
“Well, I’m not going to put those gross bathroom-fight clothes back on now,” she said dismissively. She smirked at him. “Do you have anything I could wear?”
He stalked to the closet and pawed around for something that might fit. He tossed a T-shirt and some sweatpants at her.
She began to drop the towel, and he whirled away. Oh no. No, no, no, she was not going to play this game with him. He wouldn’t fall for it. “Do you really think now is the time for this?”
“No. I don’t. But I get some enjoyment out of you being all huffy and uncomfortable and if you don’t find a way to enjoy things even in the toughest circumstances, life can be a real pain.”
He happened to agree with her. Or had before he’d taken this job. She’d seemed to take all the humor out of him. She made him feel stiff and uptight. She made him feel like Reece, and that was unacceptable.
He was loose. He was fun. He was charming. What kind of spell had she put on him?
Still, he didn’t turn to face her. He kept his back to her, his eyes on the ceiling and his thoughts on the fact he had to somehow handle this when he’d never felt so tested in his life.
“Do you have a plan?” she asked. When he didn’t answer, she huffed out a breath. “I’m dressed, you big prude.”
He turned around slowly, cautiously. She was indeed dressed and back to sitting on the bed. He crossed over to her, reluctantly taking a bandage from the first aid kit.
He did have a plan. But he hated the plan. Worse, he knew she’d be all about it. Maybe if he talked it out, he could come up with an alternative. Something that didn’t involve putting her in any more danger. “Did you hear what the guy was saying?”
“Not really. Something about it not being enough money to kill over?”
“He said it was an open call.” With as much space between them as he could manage casually, Holden adhered the bandage to the cut on her temple. “Which is basically where someone sends out a job to the kind of people who do stupid things for money and says they’ll pay whoever does the job.”
“Like Craigslist for bad guys?”
“Something like that.” He held up a finger so she’d sit and wait and went to the kitchen to grab an ice pack. When he returned, he handed it to her, and she put it on her temple without needing the directive to do so.
Her expression was thoughtful. “He had a gun and he didn’t shoot me. So the job was, what? Kidnapping me?”
“Seems like.” But it didn’t add up to the ammunition being sent to Evening. Holden doubted very much if the guy from the bathroom had been the man who’d gotten the ammunition. Now that he’d had time to think it through, the man in the bathroom had been much shorter than the man in the post office video. Also not the brightest or meanest man he’d ever met, which meant he didn’t fit for hit man. He was just some moron who liked to get paid for hurting and scaring people.
“What are you thinking?” Willa asked.
“I’m not sure yet. Something doesn’t add up here.” But he didn’t need to tell her all the different ways. Why so cheap if the kidnapping was important? A few thousand bucks wasn’t much for an offense with a pretty steep punishment.
“You know what we have to do, Holden. I know you do.”
Chapter Fourteen
Willa could see by his expression that he did. He didn’t like the idea, obviously. She couldn’t say she was too keen on it either, but what other option did they have? She’d checked to make sure her parents hadn’t returned her message when she’d been on Holden’s phone.
Nothing.
They wouldn’t ignore her SOS. They were either continually busy or in serious trouble. There was only one way to get to them.
She watched Holden pace, clearly trying to find another way out of this. She gave him a few minutes to do so. After all, she’d like to do the one where the chances of her ending up dead weren’t quite so high.
So, she watched him pace and think from her seat on the bed in the cute little cabin. Was it his? It didn’t seem like it. Too utilitarian. It didn’t suit him. It probably belonged to his secret group.
She sighed. She was clean, bandaged, wearing no underwear under clothes there were a little too big for her. Holden had kissed her, then acted like seeing her naked would be a personal assault. She refused to let the gravity of the situation undercut her enjoyment of that.
“You have to take me to the drop-off, Holden.”
He scowled at her. “It’s not the only option.”
“It is. You have to pretend to be one of these guys who took the job, and succeeded. You could do that, right? Whoever these guys are wouldn’t know you work for some group?”
“No, they wouldn’t,” he said bitterly. “It could be done, but—”
“No buts. That’s the plan. You drop me off, like the guy said.”
“Then what, Willa? What do you think happens then?”
“They probably take me to my parents and torture me in front of them until my parents tell them what they want to know.” She shrugged. She didn’t want to think too deeply about the specifics, even though she knew it was something of an inevitability. “But I’d have you.”
He looked a little bit like she’d shot him. She was surprised he didn’t crumple to the ground.
“I know it’s risky, Holden. I understand enough of what my parents do to understand the dangers. But if we work on this together, maybe you could figure out where they are. Or who they are. You and your group could save us.”
“Or you could end up dead,” he said flatly.
“Yeah. And so could you and my parents and anyone.” She knew he wanted her to take this more seriously, but she’d always known this very situation was possible. What and who her parents were had been a shadow over her entire life. Part of why she’d leaned so hard into independence and her own farm was that she’d known her life expectancy could very well be very short.
What she’d never thought possible was help. Someone by her side. Her parents would save her if they could, lay down their lives. She was sure. But Holden could actually help her accomplish something. He was her partner now. It gave her an optimism she could only be grateful for.
“You’ll drop me off where the guy said,” Willa said resolutely. “I don’t think my parents will be there, do you?”
“No,” he said, an acidic bitterness to the word.
“We’ll have to play it by ear, of course. Maybe you let them take me. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you follow them. Maybe you bring in your team. I’d trust you to make the right decision in the moment. It really depends on who’s there and what the setup is.”
He whirled away and began to pace, muttering to himself. There was emotion there. Waves of it. The kind her parents had always warned her about. The kind she’d never been able to fight.
And still, she trusted him to do the right thing
. Maybe he’d made a few missteps to his way of thinking—her chaining him to a bed, her fighting off the kidnapper on her own—but he’d handled the kidnapper in a way that never would have occurred to her, getting information out of the guy. They were closer to getting somewhere than she would have been on her own.
“It’s the plan you had in mind, isn’t it?” she asked gently.
He stopped pacing, and she watched fascinated as he reined all that energy and anger and—she thought maybe—a little fear in. He was cold eyed and tense when he faced her, but not emotional. “Yes,” he said through gritted teeth. “That doesn’t mean it’s the best one.”
She smiled at him. “You know it is.”
He stood there, still as a mountain. His gaze was blank, but his jaw was tense. He was waging an inner battle. “We need some sleep.”
Irritated he wouldn’t admit it, she started to get off the bed. “My parents’ lives—”
He pushed her gently back onto the mattress. “Willa, you haven’t slept for over twenty-four hours, and it’s been longer than me. If we’re going to face this down—and I’m not so sure we should—the least we need to do to prepare is sleep for a few hours. Not twelve. A few. Brains don’t work without sleep.”
She knew he was right. She was exhausted. But how did she sleep knowing her parents could need her immediate help? How was sleep supposed to solve anything?
She blew out a breath. “For how long?”
He pulled out his phone, tapped the screen. “We’ll get four hours. I’m sending a message to my team. They’ll scout the area and see what they can figure out before we get there.”
She had to suppress a smile. He might want there to be another way, but clearly he knew they’d end up doing this. They had to.
“Go to sleep.” He started to walk out of the room.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Where are you going?”
“To sleep on the couch.”
“Yeah, right. You’re going to go out there and work. Not gonna fly, buddy. Lie down in here.” She patted the bed next to her.
He frowned at the spot but crossed over to it. “Maybe I don’t want you taking advantage of me,” he said, but he lowered himself onto the bed. With as much room between them on the mattress as possible.
“Of course you do.”
He snorted, but he settled his hands over his chest and closed his eyes. She had the sense he went to sleep almost immediately. But as she stared at him, the dark blond lashes against his cheek, the strong jaw she was half tempted to run her fingers across, he turned away from her.
“Go to sleep, Willa,” he ordered.
On a sigh, she set out to follow orders.
For now.
* * *
HOLDEN SLEPT FOR two hours. It was more than enough with the mixture of worry and adrenaline coursing through him. He eased out of the bed and let Willa continue to sleep.
He pored over the maps Elsie had emailed him, texted with his team as they arrived on-site and started a preliminary sweep of the area. When Shay phoned him, he considered ignoring the call.
He knew she was going to tell him things he didn’t want to hear. Worse, he knew he wasn’t as in control of himself as he needed to be. Shay would see it. Read into it. Correctly read into it.
But he had a job to do, and he wanted his boss on board.
“Hey.”
“We got ID on the guy at the gas station. Some penny-ante, low-rate thief. Can’t imagine he’s much of a threat.”
Holden explained what the man had told him. He didn’t outline his concerns about things not adding up. Shay would come to that conclusion on her own, and he didn’t want Willa trying to eavesdrop if she woke up.
“What’s Elsie got?”
“Not much,” Shay said. “Computer is pretty encrypted, but she thinks she’s making progress.”
“Someone needs to be watching her. If there are multiple men trying to kidnap Willa, Elsie isn’t safe at that farmhouse alone, even if she is in the bunker.”
“She isn’t alone.”
“I thought you sent my whole team to the wildlife refuge.”
“I did, but I called in a favor. You don’t worry about Elsie. You worry about how you’re going to get to these supposed spies.”
“I’m going to have to let them take her, Shay.” He had to say it out loud. He had to hope to God someone had a good reason for him not to do it.
But Shay wasn’t that person. “Probably.”
Holden bit back an oath. “How am I supposed to do that?”
“Would you do it if it was me? Or Sabrina? Or any of us, quite frankly?”
“She’s not North Star.”
“No, but she’s not just any civilian either. Girl’s got chops. Trust her to use them. Then do everything in your power to make sure it doesn’t get her killed.” Shay paused. Meaningfully. “I can send someone else in if you don’t think you’re emotionally detached enough to—”
“I’ll handle it. Over and out,” Holden muttered, hitting the end button with far too much force. If there was going to be blood on someone’s hands, it was damn well going to be his own.
He got to his feet. The safe house had an array of weapons, and he picked what would be best for this mission. He picked out a few for Willa too. She could fight like the devil—no doubt her parents had trained her in how to shoot a gun as well.
Then he pushed away his guilt at pawing through her things and found the papers she’d been trying to make sense of before the gas station stop.
The code was complex, and he spent far too long trying to beat his head against it before his phone alarm went off, telling him to wake up Willa.
When he woke Willa up after her four hours of sleep, he foisted a sandwich on her. “Wake up. Eat. We leave in fifteen.”
She blinked at him, sleep clouding her eyes. “Dream you was much nicer,” she muttered.
He didn’t let himself dwell on that comment. He left the sandwich on the nightstand and went back to getting ready. When she emerged from the room a few minutes later, she was pulling at the shirt she was wearing.
“I can’t wear this.”
The T-shirt was white and dangerously close to see-through. The sweatpants were baggy and loose. Holden wrenched his gaze away and went to the mudroom. He pulled her clothes out of the dryer then returned to the main room and handed them to her. “Washed and dried.”
“Well, aren’t you handy.”
“Something like that.”
She frowned at her own clothes, clean and warm from the dryer. “Did you sleep? You were supposed to sleep.”
“I slept. Just not the full four hours. I had plans to make. Now, we need to go. We don’t want to wait till dark. Get dressed, and eat that sandwich.”
She grumbled but did as she was told. She still had shadows under her eyes, bruising that made his stomach clench into nasty knots. But she was awake and alert and...
Hell, he didn’t know how he was going to do this. Only that he had to.
When she returned, they loaded up the car in silence. Holden didn’t tell her the plan or where they were going. She didn’t ask. She pored over her papers.
“Any luck?”
“Not really. Part of me wonders if it’s...purposeful. Too hard for me to crack so I can’t help them.”
“I don’t know anything about cracking codes, but I’ve got one of my men on it.”
She frowned over at him. “Huh?”
“I sent a picture over. We don’t have any code experts right now, but we have a few people with those kinds of brains.”
“I didn’t say you could do that.”
“Are we on the same team or not, Willa?”
“We are, but these are codes my parents put together. This was for me. For me alone.”
He couldn’t say she sounded angr
y. Maybe closer to betrayed. Which he could hardly let bother him. “I have a job to do, Willa.”
“Yes. I’m very well aware. I shouldn’t have...” She shook her head and blew out a breath. There was still something she wasn’t telling him.
It, along with his own ridiculous reactions, grated. The whole thing grated. He flicked a glance at her. She’d stopped looking at the code and stared very hard out the window. She twisted her fingers together, clearly lost in her own secretive thoughts.
“Sometimes I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing,” she said very quietly, and the sadness in her tone had that frustration twining into something closer to guilt.
“No one ever knows if they’re doing the right thing, Willa. We just do our best guess.”
She shook her head. “I just don’t know if they would have wanted me to take that code. They gave me no clear SOS. It’s just, I didn’t think they ever would. Maybe I should have left it. Maybe I’m making things worse.”
She was nervous. He was nervous. Which was fine. Nerves weren’t something to conquer. They were something to control. He supposed any other emotions plaguing him at the moment were the same. He’d accept them.
He’d control them.
“We can’t second-guess at this point, Willa. We have to move forward, armed with the information we have. I have a team in place, but they have to stay pretty far back to avoid detection. They won’t intervene unless I give them the signal. Mostly, I want them there so if we do have to let these guys take you, I have more than just myself following the trail.”
“But what if the guys suspect something?”
“One of two potential outcomes. One, they close up shop and head back to wherever they’re headquartered. Not a bad option because we can follow them that way too.”
“The other option is bloody shoot-out?”
Holden spared her a look. “They might try the offensive, but I have five guys on the area. From all my scouts, they’ve only got three.”
“Three?”