Secret Men: a Hunter Dane Investigation (Hunt&Cam4Ever Book 6)

by Adira August

  It was the first time Cam Snow thought of himself as himself in terms of competition. With that one conversation, he was no longer a student—part of a class learning something. He was a skier vying with other skiers for the same top tier.

  He mounted his first podium three months later, climbing past the adults to first place. He’d always credited the win to the critical alteration in his mindset that intensified his focus during practice. And that change happened when it did, as early as it did, because he’d been treated as credible threat to other skiers by the ESPN reporter.

  Today, Miranda Waller got the only live interview. The agreement was ESPN would have it exclusively for twelve hours. The questions were pre-screened, and she agreed not to stray from script.

  But Cam did. At the end of the pre-planned interview about his engagement, Cam reached out and Hunter took Cam’s hand in both of his own.

  Ben Hart’s publicity chief caught the movement and started forward, but Ben put a hand on his arm.

  “There’s one more thing, Miranda.”

  A real pro, she simply looked interested. The director at the side of the room had one of two cameras move in on Cam.

  “A lot of people know I’ve been recovering from an injury. And while we’re celebrating, while I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life”—he looked directly at Hunter before he went on—“I want to tell everyone I’ve retired from competition. I actually made the decision last year.”

  Miranda Waller put a look of concern on her face. “Everyone will be sorry to hear this. Is it the injury that brought you to this?”

  “Call it a catalyst,” he answered. “Mirada, I’ve been on skis pretty much since I could walk. My career has been amazing to me, my coaches, my team, my family, the press—there’s nothing I’ve accomplished that I’m not grateful for to so many people. There’s nothing I wanted to achieve that I haven’t. But now it’s time to get to know the world off the mountain.”

  She swallowed hard and camera two caught her eyes welling. “We’ll miss you. I’ll miss you, Cam. Watching you grow and fight and win, never giving up, bringing so many innovations to the sport has been a privilege.” She smiled. “So what’s the plan for the coming years?”

  Cam shook his head. “Right now, all I’m planning is a wedding.”

  HART SECURITY HAD DRIVEN Cam’s R8 to RiverHart. Allowing someone else to drive his beloved silver car to surprise Hunter was as genuine a sign of his love as any engagement party.

  Cam drove them west toward the darkening sky, the sun just behind the mountains.

  “Your retirement announcement was a diversionary tactic, wasn’t it?” Hunter asked.

  Cam shrugged. “The thing about my so-called ‘fame’, is that it’s only real inside the group of people who form the Alpine ski fan community. No one outside the sports page is going to give a crap if I’m engaged. And anyone inside is going to be a lot more interested in my retirement than my engagement.”

  “Which means they won’t be interested in me.”

  “Hopefully. That thing they faked in the office was Diane Natani’s nightmare scenario.”

  At ninety-three miles per hour, Cam didn’t dare take his eyes off the road long enough to glance at Hunter. “I thought it would be yours, too. I hoped this would head it off.” His brows came down. “Should I have discussed it with you first? Shit. I should have, shouldn’t I?”

  Hunter put a comforting hand on Cam’s thigh as they left the highway to wind through Morrison to Bear Creek Canyon. “I was about to thank you. But if you want to hang onto the guilt, I could use it as a trump card in an argument some day.”

  Cam smirked. “Guilt expires at midnight.” He turned up the canyon road.

  “Talk to me about wedding plans and dates,” Hunter said. “I was thinking maybe Christmas? Your family gets together, anyway, and we’d kill two birds with one memorable stone.”

  “You think we’ll forget our anniversary?”

  Hunter shrugged. “Do you remember the date we met?”

  “You mean the first time I came to the club?”

  “Yeah.”

  Cam slowed just after a curve and turned onto the road that took them into the hills to the private enclave where the A-frame was.

  “It was late June. Right after I closed on the A-frame,” Cam said. “I’d have to look up the date.”

  “Friday, June twenty-seventh. Twenty-fourteen.”

  “You remember that?”

  “Can you wait until spring?”

  Cam ran his hand up the inside of Hunt’s thigh. “If we do, you’ll have doubts and pick fights with me.”

  Hunter’s cock stirred. “I suppose picking fights would be a bad thing for me to do?”

  “You teasing me, sub?”

  “Just anticipating the benefits of a long engagement.” Hunter felt for Cam, who was already hard. Of course. When was Cam not ready?

  Cam took his hand back and turned into his long drive. Once inside the garage, he unsnapped and turned, removing Hunter’s hand.

  “Maybe I didn’t recall the exact date, but I do remember what happened. You walked away from me. You stayed away. For years.”

  He got out and walked around to the passenger side, where Hunter was just unfolding himself from his seat. Cam grabbed him by the front of his coat and pulled him upright.

  “You denied me”—his hands slid down and cupped Hunter through his slacks, skating one finger along his confined and turgid column—“and ignored me until you had no one else to give you what you needed. You made me wait.”

  He spun Hunt around and bent him over the top of the car, arms twisted up behind him. Locking the fingers of one hand around Hunt’s wrists, Cam opened his sub’s pants with the other. He slipped a hand inside and stuck his thumb unceremoniously into Hunt’s ass.

  Hunter’s head jerked back when Cam’s thumb found his prostate.

  “Hold still,” Cam ordered.

  Hunter complied with a high moan, his cock still trapped, leaking, burning.

  “This is teasing, Hunter.” Cam moved his thumb in a circular motion, while his fingers worked, pressing up, just behind and into his sub’s sac.

  “Cam!” Hunt gasped. Everything heated and filled. Shots of energy ran from his balls to the base of his cock and—oh Jesus he couldn’t - couldn’t stand it.

  His knees gave way. But Cam had him locked down over the top the car. He lay helpless against the cold metal, while Cam built up the aching, itching fire inside.

  “I will not be reminded of you passing me by every year for the rest of my life. Do you understand?”

  “Yes… Cam.”

  “You knelt for me and what did you get? What you expected?”

  “No, Cam.”

  “Then, what?”

  “You took everything from me …”

  “Until?”

  “You were all there was,” Hunter gasped, saliva dripping onto the car top. Only Cam could make him this way—this helpless, this insane with needing him. … oh, God, anything … anything …

  Cam stopped moving inside Hunter and bent over him. “It was here, Hunter Dane. Here in this house, in my bed, that you asked me to own you.”

  He pulled out and turned Hunter around again to face him. “November second. That was the day I made you love what you’d never given anybody before. You’ll marry me in one month, Hunter Dane.”

  “Yes, Cam.”

  Cam took Hunt’s jaw in one hand and kissed him hard and fast.

  “Follow me.” Cam let him go and headed for the door. “I’m going to fuck you for a while and listen to you beg and I want to be comfortable doing it.”

  Hunter followed. Because what could be better than Cam?

  Want of Care does us more damage than Want of Knowledge.

  Poor Richard's Almanac

  The Room

  Russell Robl wasn’t in pain. He wasn’t cold or hungry or thirsty. He didn’t have things stuck in his arms, anymore. There was a toilet th
at worked. There was a sink that gave water. There was a blanket. The best blanket he ever had. It was heavy, very heavy. There was fear.

  But there was always fear. Something would happen. He didn’t know when. Something always happened and he would not be allowed to stay curled under his blanket in the dark anymore. He didn’t know why he wouldn’t be. He ate what they gave him and drank what they said to and swallowed pills and used the toilet and washed himself.

  They cut his hair. They gave him clothes to wear. He wore them. He changed them. And he lay under his blanket in the dark and it was almost like being not afraid. He imagined things to make himself less afraid. He imagined he’d die under his wonderful blanket and that would be the end of fear. Maybe he would. Maybe he would before they took his blanket away.

  The thoughts made him peaceful inside for a while.

  But something always happened. He had to eat or use the toilet. He’d have to get up then for a while. It wasn’t as bad as when they’d take him and do things to him. They’d put him inside machines. Poke him and stick things in him. So far they always let him come back and be under his blanket in the dark and think, just for a little while, that maybe the next time wouldn’t come.

  Sometimes he’d have to talk to the doctor who wore a suit. He knew the names of people and things. It just seemed too much work to think of them. And the doctor let him stay under his blanket to talk.

  It was hard at first to remember how to make sentences. He never was good at it. Why can’t you be like your sister? Speak up? Are you stupid? The doctor didn’t say those things. He’d just ask more. For more words.

  Once the doctor asked him if there was anything he wanted to know.

  “How long can I stay?”

  “We have a lot to talk about. It’s going to take a long time.”

  Russell Robl wasn’t stupid. It was like the story of the princess who would be killed except she kept the king entertained with stories. He learned the doctor only came for set times, and if Russell used more words he could say a lot less in the time the doctor stayed. That would mean he had to come back more. Russell could stay longer.

  And he could mostly lie in the dark an and be warm and not in pain and not hungry and flush his waste down a toilet.

  After a while he began to wonder if he had died and this was where he reviewed his life and was hardly afraid and they only hurt him a little sometimes.

  There were much worse versions of an afterlife.

  WHEN CANDACE HORTT FARLEIGH opened the door to Hunter’s knock, she looked so little like the put-together woman in the tailored pantsuit with precisely cut bangs he almost didn’t recognize her. But the greeting was familiar, if less demanding.

  “Did you find out who killed my mother?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I believe we have.”

  She swung the door wide and led Hunt and Twee through the house. She wore faded jeans and a loose fisherman’s sweater and her hair was gathered simply at her nape with a clip in the shape of a butterfly.

  They’d made an appointment this time and there was coffee ready in the kitchen and cups on the table.

  “How are you Mrs. Farleigh?” Hunter asked as she set a plate of cookies down and took her seat across from them.

  “I don’t know, exactly,” she told him, putting sugar into her coffee. “What I’ve heard so far has been in bits and pieces and I seem to be retroactively terrified.” She gave him a wry smile. “It sounds ridiculous. My therapist—a new acquisition for me—says it’s not. But my logical self can’t get a handle on having nightmares about living in a house with a …. a what? Not a demon, I suppose?”

  Hunter just shrugged. Robl was certainly a demon to her.

  “I have pills now. I have pills or I want to scream all the time,” she said. “I feel like the horror of it all will crush me.”

  “Mrs. Farleigh—”

  “Call me Candace, would you? I’d like to feel more connected. What can I call you?”

  “Hunter’s fine,” he said. “Or Hunt. Or whatever you like.”

  She studied him for a moment, taking a cookie. “You’re really exceptionally good-looking, do you know that?” She took a bite.

  He nodded.

  She smiled, amused. “Do you know why I said that?”

  He cocked his head at her and smiled back. “To feel more in control, possibly?”

  “I think it’s the pills. Or something. I don’t seem at all interested in social niceties, anymore.” She ate some more cookie. “And the control thing. Wanting to know but not wanting to hear anything else that would make me want to scream.”

  “We don’t have to do this now,” he said. “And you don’t have to hear anything you don’t want to.”

  Twee had been sitting quietly. But now she got up and moved to the chair next to Candace. “Okay?”

  The woman seemed to relax and lean a little toward Twee, her shoulder touching. But she addressed Hunter.

  “Okay. I’d like some facts, I think.Tell me about the … person.”

  He opened his notebook.

  “Russell Stephen Robl was born in 1953 in Reno, Nevada. He was the second child with an older sister Jennifer. His father is deceased his mother is in hospice care. His sister lives in Florida. When contacted she said she hadn’t heard from him or about him since he went into the Army. Then she hung up.

  “We tried and failed to build any kind of real history of him. His father was a licensed taxi driver. The last known address for Russell and his father is a mobile home park that no longer exists. In his effects were a military I.D. and separation papers. He was given a General Discharge.

  “We also found his travel orders. In a telephone interview, your husband confirmed that your father and Russell Robl traveled from Vietnam to Lowry Air Force Base here, on the same flights on the same days. That was August of 1972.”

  “Yeah, I have a box with all Daddy’s papers and things.” She sat back, holding her cup in two hands. “I wasn’t even born until the next spring. Daddy never talked about the war, my mother said.” Her brows wrinkled in concentration. “She did say sometimes he’d be on the porch talking to someone for a long time. Said some Army buddy would visit.”

  “ ‘Some’ as is one person or as in different people?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Would you be willing to look at a picture? It’s from his military I.D.” Hunter made no move as if he would retrieve a picture.

  She seemed to shrink into herself.

  “It’s a black and white headshot of an eighteen-year-old boy with really short hair,” Twee said.

  Candace nodded. Twee took out her phone and pulled up the image. She laid the phone on the table.

  Candace craned her head over gingerly as if the photo might leap out at her. She leaned closer and pulled the cell toward her.

  “This is just some sad boy,” she said. “He killed my father?” She pushed the cell back to Twee.

  “Candace, please understand ten days is very little time to try and communicate with him. His doctor believes, from what few words of sense he can get, that Robl was looking for a place to spend the winter. That he was probably homeless. He thinks, speculates really, that your father tried to take away a gun Robl had. The idea of it, of losing the gun, panicked him when about it asked a week ago. We’re not sure the shooting was intentional. We’re also not sure he was legally of sound mind at the time.”

  “So it wouldn’t be criminal?” she asked.

  “I’m so sorry I don’t have better, simpler answers for you.”

  “But you do know”—her voice was very strained—“he stayed.”

  Twee put a hand on Candace’s on the table. “We don’t know that. Not then. We don’t know if he came when it was cold and left when it was warmer. I’ve been all over the space and there’s no way to tell how much he was there until after the house was empty.”

  Twee exchanged a look with Hunter. She picked up her phone and found a different image. “I wa
nt to show you something not scary. It’s the doctor sitting at Robl’s bedside yesterday. You can’t see Robl.”

  She put the cell back on the table as before. Candace Hortt pulled it over. “He’s not there.”

  “He’s under the blanket,” Hunter said. “He won’t come out unless he’s forced to. If no one else is in the room, he’ll use the toilet or grab food that’s left for him and take it under the blanket to eat. The doctor is talking to him while he’s under the blanket.”

  “What are you saying? That’s he’s harmless?”

  Hunter shook his head. “Not at all. When found, he attacked one of my detectives. But when restrained and covered in a blanket, he reverted to what you see. I’m saying that while he was in the house, I believe he would have been as silent and secret as he could possibly be and feared human contact.”

  “There’s evidence he killed your parents,” Twee told her. ”He was in possession of an old gun made by Ruger that some military used. It was old and bent and had no more ammunition. But we’re satisfied he was responsible for their deaths.”

  Candace got up and refilled her cup. “But he’ll never stand trial.”

  “I doubt it very much,” Hunter said.

  She turned around to face him but didn’t sit down. “But he’ll never be free again?”

  He stood up and so did Twee. “Before we go, would it comfort you at all if his attorney entered a not guilty by reason of mental impairment to the charges of killing your parents? That is, would it help if he admitted he killed them?”

  She looked at Twee’s phone, still on the table. “Sometimes I wish I could live in a cell and lie under a blanket and never have to come out except to pee and eat.”

  She sighed.

  “You figured it out, Hunter. Someone finally did whatever it took and figured it out. You gave a damn. That’s what helps me. Thank you.”

  “You’re more than welcome.” He handed Twee back her phone. “You know how to reach me,” he told Candace.

  She didn’t answer and they found their own way out.