by Linda Howard
“We have apple pie,” he complained. “Why do we need apples?”
“I’m going to throw them at you,” she said. “Or better yet, shoot them off your head.”
“If you come near me with an apple, I’ll scream,” he warned. “And pickled beets? Excuse me, but who eats pickled beets?”
She shrugged. “Someone does, or they wouldn’t be on the shelves.”
“Have you ever eaten pickled beets?” he asked suspiciously.
“Once. They were nasty.” She wrinkled her nose at him.
“Then why in hell did you buy them?” he shouted.
“I wanted you to try them.”
He should be used to it by now, he thought, but sometimes she still left him speechless. Muttering to himself, he stowed the groceries—including the pickled beets—in the back of the Explorer.
God, he was going to miss her.
She rolled down the window and let the wind blow through her bright hair. She had a happy smile on her face as she looked at everything they passed. Even service stations seemed to interest her, as did the old lady walking a Chihuahua that was so fat its belly almost kept its feet from touching the ground. Sunny giggled about the fat little dog for five minutes.
If it made her laugh like that, he thought, he would eat the damn pickled beets. But he’d damn sure eat something else afterward, because if he got shot, he didn’t want pickled beets to be the last thing he tasted.
The late August afternoon was hot when he pulled off the road. A tree-studded field stretched before them. “Let’s walk to those trees over there,” he said, nodding to a line of trees about a hundred yards away. “See how they’re growing, in a line like that? There might be a little creek there.”
She looked around. “Shouldn’t we ask permission?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Do you see a house anywhere? Who do we ask?”
“Well, all right, but if we get in trouble, it’s your fault.”
He carried the cooler and most of the food. Sunny slung her backpack on her shoulders, then took charge of the ground cloth and the jar of pickled beets. “I’d better carry these,” she said. “You might drop them.”
“You could take something else, too,” he grunted. This stuff was heavy.
She stretched up to peek in the grocery bag. The apple pie was perched on top of the other stuff. “Nah, you won’t drop the pie.”
He grumbled all the way to their picnic site, more because she enjoyed it than any other reason. This was the last day she would ever tease him, or he would see that smile, hear that laugh.
“Oh, there is a creek!” she exclaimed when they reached the trees. She carefully set the jar of beets down and unfolded the ground cloth, snapping it open in that brisk, economical movement all women seemed to have, and letting it settle on the thick, overgrown grass. Alight breeze was blowing, so she anchored the cloth with her backpack on one corner and the jar of beets on the another.
Chance set the cooler and food down and sprawled out on the cloth. “I’m too tired now to enjoy myself,” he complained.
She leaned over and kissed him. “You think I don’t know what you’re up to? Next thing I know you’ll get something in your eye, and I’ll have to get really, really close to see it. Then your back will need scratching, and you’ll have to take off your shirt. Before I know it, we’ll both be naked and it’ll be time to leave, and we won’t have had a bite to eat.”
He gave her a quizzical look. “You have this all planned out, don’t you?”
“Down to the last detail.”
“Suits me.” He reached for her, but with a spurt of laughter she scooted out of reach. She picked up the jar of beets and looked at him expectantly.
He flopped back with a groan. “Oh, man. Don’t tell me you expect me to try them now.”
“No, I want you to open the jar so I can eat them.”
“I thought you said they were nasty.”
“They are. I want to see if they’re as nasty as I remember.” She handed him the jar. “If you’ll open them for me, I’ll let you eat fried chicken and potato salad to build up your strength before I wring you out and hang you up to dry.”
He sat up and took the jar. “In your dreams, little miss ‘don’t-touch-me-again-you-lech.”’ He put some muscle behind the effort, twisting the lid free.
“I’ve been sandbagging,” she said. “This time, don’t even bother begging for mercy.”
She reached for the jar. The loosened lid came off, and the jar slipped from her hands. He dived for it, not wanting beets all over everything. Just as he moved, the tree beside him exploded, and a millisecond later he heard the blast of the shot.
He twisted in midair, throwing himself on top of Sunny and rolling with her behind the cover of the tree.
Chapter 13
“Stay down!” Chance barked, shoving her face into the grass.
Sunny couldn’t have moved even if she had wanted to, even if his two hundred-plus pounds hadn’t been lying on top of her. She was paralyzed, terror freezing in her veins as she realized her worst nightmare had come true; her father had found them, and Chance was nothing more than an obstacle to be destroyed. That bullet hadn’t been aimed at her. If she hadn’t dropped the jar of beets, if Chance hadn’t lunged for it, the slug that blew chunks of wood out of the tree would have blown off half his head.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered above her, his breath stirring her hair. “Sniper.”
The earth exploded two inches from her head, clods of dirt flying in her face, tiny pieces of gravel stinging her like bees. Chance literally threw her to the side, rolling with her again; the ground dropped out from beneath her, and her stomach gave a sickening lurch. As suddenly as the fall began, it stopped. She landed hard in three inches of sluggish water.
He had rolled them into the creek, where the banks afforded them more cover. A twist of his powerful body and he was off her, his big pistol in his hand as he flattened himself against the shallow bank. Sunny managed to get to her knees, slipped on the slimy creek bottom, and clambered on her hands and knees to a spot beside him. She felt numb, as if her arms and legs didn’t belong to her, yet they were working, moving.
This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. How had he found them?
She closed her eyes, fighting the terror. She was a liability to Chance unless she got herself under control. She’d had close calls before and handled herself just fine, but she had never before seen the man she loved almost get killed in front of her. She had never before been pregnant, with so much to lose.
Her teeth were chattering. She clamped her jaw together.
Silence fell over the field. She heard a car drive by on the road, and for a wild moment she wondered why it didn’t stop. But why would it? There was nothing the average passerby would notice, no bodies lying around on the highway, no haze of gun smoke hanging over the green grass. There was only silence, as if even the insects had frozen in place, the birds stopped singing; even the breeze had stopped rustling the leaves. It was as if nature held its breath, shocked by the sudden violence.
The shot had come from the direction of the road, but she hadn’t seen anyone drive up. They had only just arrived themselves; it was as if whoever had shot at them had already been here, waiting. But that was impossible, wasn’t it? The picnic was an impulse, and the location sheer chance; they could just as well have stopped at a park.
The only other explanation that occurred to her was if the shooter had nothing to do with her father. Maybe it was a crazy landowner who shot at trespassers.
If only she had brought her cell phone! But Margreta wasn’t due to call her for several more days, and even if she had brought the phone, it would be in her backpack, which was still lying on the ground cloth. The distance of a few yards might as well be a mile. Her pistol was also in the pack; though a pistol was useless against a sniper, she would feel better if she had some means of protection.
Chance hadn’t fired; he knew the futility of i
t even more than she did. His dark gold eyes were scanning the countryside, looking for anything that would give away the assailant’s position: a glint of sunlight on the barrel, the color of his clothing, a movement. The extreme angle of the late afternoon sun picked out incredible detail in the trees and bushes, but nothing that would help them.
Only nightfall would help, she thought. If they could just hold out for…how long? Another hour? Two hours, at most. When it was dark, then they could belly down in the little creek and work their way to safety, either upstream or down, it didn’t matter.
If they lived that long. The sniper had the advantage. All they had was the cover of a shallow creek bank.
She became aware that her teeth were chattering again. Again she clamped her jaw together to still the movement. Chance spared a glance at her, a split-second assessment before he returned to once again scanning the trees for the sniper. “Are you all right?” he asked, though he obviously knew she was all in one piece. He wasn’t asking about her physical condition.
“S-scared spitless,” she managed to say.
“Yeah. Me, too.”
He didn’t look scared, she thought. He looked coldly furious.
He reached out and rubbed her arm, a brief gesture of comfort. “Thank God for those beets,” he said.
She almost cried. The beets. She had thoroughly enjoyed teasing him about the beets, but the truth was, when she saw them in the supermarket she had been overcome by an almost violent craving for them. She wanted those beets. She felt as if she could eat the entire jar of them. Could cravings start this early in a pregnancy? If so, then he should thank God not for the beets, but for the beginnings of life forming inside her.
She wished she had told him immediately when her period didn’t come. She couldn’t tell him now; the news would be too distracting.
If they lived through this, she thought fervently, she wouldn’t keep the secret to herself a minute longer.
“It can’t be Hauer’s men,” she blurted. “It’s impossible. They couldn’t be here ahead of us, because we didn’t know we were coming here. It has to be a crazy farmer, or a—a jerk who thought it would be funny to shoot at someone.”
“Sweetheart.” He touched her arm again, and she realized she was babbling. “It isn’t a crazy farmer, or a trigger-happy jerk.”
“How do you know? It could be!”
“The sniper’s too professional.”
Just four words, but they made her heart sink. Chance would know; he had training in this sort of thing.
She pressed her forehead against the grassy bank, fighting for the courage to do what she had to do. Her mother had died protecting her and Margreta; surely she could be as brave? She couldn’t tell Hauer anything about Margreta, so her sister was safe, and if she could save Chance, then dying would be worth it….
Her child would die with her.
Don’t make me choose, she silently prayed. The child or the father.
If it were just her, she wouldn’t hesitate. In the short time she had known Chance—was it really just two weeks?—he had given her a lifetime of happiness and the richness of love. She would gladly give her life in exchange for his.
The life inside her wasn’t really a child yet; it was still just a rapidly dividing cluster of cells. No organs or bones had formed, nothing recognizable as a human. It was maybe the size of a pin head. But the potential…oh, the potential. She loved that tiny ball of cells with a fierceness that burned through every fiber of her being, had loved it from the first startled awareness that her period was late. It was as if she had blinked and said, “Oh. Hello,” because one second she had been totally unaware of its existence, and the next she had somehow known.
The child or the father. The father or the child.
The words writhed in her brain, echoing, bouncing. She loved them both. How could she choose? She couldn’t choose; no woman should have to make such a decision. She hated her father even more for forcing her into this situation. She hated the chromosomes, the DNA, that he had contributed to her existence. He wasn’t a father, he had never been a father. He was a monster.
“Give me your pistol.” She heard the words, but the voice didn’t sound at all like hers.
His head snapped around. “What?” He stared at her as if she had lost her mind.
“Give me the pistol,” she repeated. “He—they—don’t know we have it. You haven’t fired back. I’ll tuck it in the back of my jeans and walk out there—”
“The hell you will!” He glared at her. “If you think I—”
“No, listen!” she said urgently. “They won’t shoot me. He wants me alive. When they get close enough for me to use the pistol I—”
“No!” He grabbed her by the shirt and hauled her close so they were almost nose to nose. His eyes were almost shooting sparks. “If you make one move to stand up, I swear I’ll knock you out. Do you understand me? I will not let you walk out there.”
He released her, and Sunny sank back against the creek bank. She couldn’t overpower him, she thought bleakly. He was too strong, and too alert to be taken by surprise.
“We have to do something,” she whispered.
He didn’t look at her again. “We wait,” he said flatly. “That’s what we do. Sooner or later, the bastard will show himself.”
Wait. That was the first idea she’d had, to wait until dark and slip away. But if Hauer had more than one man here, the sniper could keep them pinned down while the other worked his way around behind them—
“Can we move?” she asked. “Up the creek, down the creek—it doesn’t matter.”
He shook his head. “It’s too risky. The creek’s shallow. The only place we have enough cover is flat against the bank on this side. If we try to move, we expose ourselves to fire.”
“What if there’s more than one?”
“There is.” He sounded positive. A feral grin moved his lips in a frightening expression. “At least four, maybe five. I hope it’s five.”
She shook her head, trying to understand. Five to two were deadly odds. “That makes you happy?”
“Very happy. The more the merrier.”
Nausea hit the back of her throat, and she closed her eyes, fighting the urge to vomit. Did he think sheer guts and fighting spirit would keep them alive?
His lean, powerful hand touched her face in a gentle caress. “Chin up, sweetheart. Time’s on our side.”
Now wasn’t the time for explanations, Chance thought. The questions would be too angry, the answers too long and complicated. Their situation was delicately balanced between success and catastrophe; he couldn’t relax his guard. If he was correct and there were five men out there hunting them—and that was the only explanation, that one of his own men was a traitor and had given Hauer the location of their supposedly impromptu picnic—then they could, at any time, decide to catch him in a pincer movement. With only one pistol, and Sunny to one side of him, he couldn’t handle an attack from more than two directions. The third one would get him—and probably Sunny, too. In a fire fight, bullets flew like angry hornets, and most of them didn’t hit their target. If a bullet didn’t hit its target, that meant it hit something—or someone—else.
His own men would have been stood down, or sent to a bogus location. That was why there hadn’t been any return fire when he and Sunny were fired on—no one was there. For that to have happened, the traitor had to be someone in a position of authority, a team leader or higher. He would find out. Oh, yeah, he’d find out. There had been several betrayals over the years, but they hadn’t been traceable. One such breach had almost cost Barrie, Zane’s wife, her life. Chance had been trying to identify the bastard for four years now, but he’d been too smart. But this time it was traceable. This time, his men would know who had changed their orders.
The traitor must have thought it was worth blowing his cover, to have this opportunity to kill Chance Mackenzie himself. And he should be here in person, to see the job done. Hauer’s two m
en would bring the count to three. Hauer made it four. The only way Hauer could have gotten into the country and moved about as freely and undetected as he had was with inside help—the FBI mole. If Chance were really lucky, the mole was here, too, bringing the count to five.
But they’d made a big mistake. They didn’t know about his ace in the hole: Zane. They didn’t know he was out there; that was an arrangement Chance had made totally off the record. If Zane wasn’t needed, no one would ever know he was there. Chance’s men were damn good, world class, but they weren’t in Zane’s class. No one was.
Zane was a superb strategist; he always had a plan, and a plan to back up his plan. He would have seen in an instant what was going down and been on the phone calling the men back into position from wherever they’d been sent. How long it took them to get here depended on how far away they were, assuming they could get here at all. And after the call Zane would have started moving, ghosting around, searching out Hauer and his men. Every minute that passed increased the odds in Chance’s favor.
He couldn’t explain any of that to Sunny, not now, not even to ease the white, pinched expression that made him ache to hold her close and reassure her. Her eyes were haunted, their sparkle gone. She had worked her entire life to make certain she was never caught off guard, and yet she had been; he himself had seen to it.
The knowledge was bitter in his mouth. She was terrified of the monster who had relentlessly hunted her all her life, yet she had been willing to walk out there and offer herself as a sacrifice. How many times in the short two weeks he’d known her had she put herself on the line for him? The first time had been when she barely knew him, when she swooped down to grab the snake coiled so close to his feet. She was terrified of snakes, but she’d done it. She was shaking with fear now, but he knew that if he let her, she would do exactly what she’d offered. That kind of courage amazed him, and humbled him.