Survive By The Team (Team Fear Book 3)

by Cindy Skaggs

  “I don’t like that plan.” Given the last twenty-four hours, escaping without him seemed dangerous. He was the only thing standing between her and Echo.

  “Ellie needs you.”

  Mandi shivered from the cold and the stark reality of his words. “Low blow.”

  He shrugged. “The truth doesn’t have to be pretty.”

  She wrapped the scarf around her neck and pulled the gloves on. “It’s a ridiculous plan. If anything happened to you, I wouldn’t make five miles.”

  “You will,” he insisted. “Drive to town. Head straight for the police station. The team will find you.”

  “There are a dozen holes in your plan.”

  He sighed. “Look. We’re in the middle of nowhere during a blizzard. It’s unlikely anyone will find us, but we need a contingency plan. Unless you have something better, the plan is for you to get out and get gone.”

  The cold slowly leached the warmth from the SUV until she had to clench her jaw to keep her teeth from chattering. She still didn’t like the plan, but arguing served no purpose. Besides, few people knew about the cabin. It was safe enough. She grabbed the groceries, thankful when her back didn’t twinge with pain. Much. “Can you grab firewood?”

  She pointed him in the direction of the woodpile beside the garage before heading into the cabin. Within fifteen minutes, they had a fire going and Mandi had turned on the baseboard heaters in the bathroom, bedroom, and the loft. “You can have the bedroom or the upstairs bunkroom,” she offered.

  “The bunkroom is fine.”

  “That’s really not fair,” she admitted. While she really didn’t relish sleeping on one of those hard twin beds, it made more sense for her to take the upstairs. “The bunks were made for kids and I’m much shorter.”

  “Take the bedroom,” he insisted. “I don’t sleep much anyway.”

  Like Danny. She sighed. “There are some of Danny’s clothes in the dresser upstairs. And in the closet over there,” she said, pointing to the little closet by the door. “Is all the winter gear.”

  He climbed to the loft and started searching the dressers without a word. Once the fire and the heaters had chased away the cold, Mandi grabbed clothes from the dresser in the bedroom downstairs and headed to the shower. The water pelting her felt glorious after ten hours in a car. She wasn’t sure what time it was, but she wasn’t sleeping until the team called to say Ellie was safe. She pulled on flannel PJs and wool socks before joining Dean in the main room.

  The large square room had an old sofa with a split pine frame and reupholstered cushions her mother had covered in hunter green. Added to the seating were a couple old chairs with mismatched covers and an old cedar chest they used as a coffee table. Next to the potbelly stove was a short run of cabinets with a wood top. An old kitchen table and chairs made up the rest of the downstairs. They’d played more than their share of cards at that wobbly old table. A ladder opposite the stove led to the loft upstairs where only the wooden railing was visible from below. Darkness beyond meant Dean had turned off the lights before coming down.

  He still wore his original clothes, but his boots and socks were drying by the heater. He stood with his back to her stirring SpaghettiOs in a metal pan on the stove. He’d set the table with mismatched bowls and silverware. He looked up when she walked in and the hungry look on his face nearly sent her running back the way she’d come. There was a raw look to him that sent her pulse racing. He wasn’t as good-looking as the doctor back in Tucson, or as beautiful as the deputy, but the rough masculinity stamped on his features took her breath away. They stared at each other long enough to make the silence uncomfortable.

  She tucked a wet strand of hair behind her ear. “Dinner smells good.” Her voice rasped, but it wasn’t the accident that made it rough. It was attraction, bold and complicated attraction.

  He downed a glass of tea before responding. “There’s still pain meds if you need them.”

  “The pain’s not so bad.” Scrapes and bruises didn’t keep her down for long, and the lozenges really had helped with her sore throat.

  He set the pill bottle in the middle of the small table as if she’d change her mind, but Mandi was determined to stay up until news got to them. Giving him a wide berth, she walked the long way around to the opposite side of the table. The intimacy of ten hours cooped up together in a vehicle couldn’t prepare her for the scene spread out on the table before her. She was a sucker for the illusion of domestic tranquility. Add a hot guy—Dean was built like the half-naked men in her Colorado Fire Fighter calendar—and she was toast. Dean was bodily perfection with muscles highlighted by the soft blue cotton of a shirt that hugged his pecs and hinted at six-pack abs. She’s never seen a man like him in real life and found herself tongue tied. Talking to him was easier when she didn’t know what kind of body he was hiding behind the hoodie.

  The doomed relationship with Maurice taught her to be honest with herself. She was attracted to Dean on a primal level. Didn’t have to make sense. When he’d pulled off his hoodie, she’d nearly swallowed her tongue. She did swallow a throat lozenge and nearly choked on it when she stepped into the cold. It wasn’t his looks, but his essence. He was the kind of man who promised a rough, sweaty good time. The air around him snapped and hummed with sexual tension. Everything about him was out of her league.

  Once they sat down to eat, Dean regaled her with stories of Danny. They’d been a good team, or so it seemed. The look on Dean’s face and the animation in his voice showed how much he had loved her brother. Dean grinned as he spoke, not a flirty smile, but an honest, fun, heartfelt smile that devastated Mandi as much as the tall tales.

  The loss was still raw for both of them, so she lapped up the stories as she spooned down the SpaghettiOs and gulped down her tea. The stories were mild ones but Mandi knew her brother well enough to know they were the condensed versions because Danny hadn’t become a baby daddy by keeping things PG-13.

  The stories were fun and light, but more than learning about Danny, what lifted her spirits was the knowledge that someone else missed Danny. Someone else had cared. And finally—finally—she wasn’t alone. She leaned back after the last story and wiped away tears she hadn’t known were there.

  “Thank you,” she said, her throat a painful knot, but Dean shrugged and slid back from the table.

  Lines tightened around his eyes and he wouldn’t meet her gaze. Instead, he turned his back and rinsed their dishes. His profile was all hard angles defined by shadows. The line of his jaw was strong and covered in scruff. His chin jutted out in a physical representation of his stubborn personality. From the side, his lashes cast shadows.

  Mandi turned away before she said something stupid. The silence brought back the ache of grief. A knot of panic twisted in her gut when she thought of Ellie. She rarely spent time apart from her niece, and after this, probably even less. Poor Miss Connie. As good as she had been to them, Mandi would never trust her to babysit again.

  The overwhelming heat from the stove sent her across the room to the couch where Dean covered her with her mother’s orange and brown afghan. Moments later, her eyes drooped closed. She blinked and struggled to keep her eyes open, but in the end, the long day won. Dean lifted her and carried her into her parents’ room. She nuzzled her nose against his neck. He smelled like pine with a hint of smoke. The combination was sexy in a very masculine way. She pressed a soft kiss to his jaw. “You smell good.”

  “You’re loopy.”

  Loopy? Her eyes popped open. She hadn’t wanted to sleep until Ellie was safe. He’d tricked her. She reared back her head. “Was the pill in the tea or the spaghetti?”

  “Tea.” Gently, he pulled back the covers and tucked her in. “I warned you. I’m not a nice guy.”

  She twined her arms around his neck before he could leave. “That’s more of a challenge than a warning.”

  A wistful expression crossed his shadowed features. Regret shadowed his eyes. “A smart girl like you knows better.”


  Right.

  Every girl on the planet thought she was “the one” who could tame the bad boy, but bad boys didn’t change. Smart girls knew that. The reality didn’t douse the fire of attraction. Not that she wanted it to. She liked to play with fire.

  They met in the middle. He lowered until his breath brushed her lips. She levered up and tilted to the right. One tiny move until their lips would touch. Day-old scruff teased the nerves in her right cheek. The arms he wrapped around her flexed like a bodybuilder’s. So damn sexy. The pulse in her neck ticked faster as delicious anticipation warmed her belly.

  The kiss was inevitable. The delay excruciating. Intoxicating. Absolute perfection.

  His breath warmed her skin. Holding her weight, his arms didn’t even shake. Denial and desire fought for dominance in his expression. Her lungs squeezed and forced a shallow breath.

  Right there. His lips were right there.

  The pupils of his eyes dilated before he breached that hair’s breadth of air separating them. Their lips met and the chemistry exploded, racing through her body like wildfire. Need burned hot as his lips owned hers.

  The press of his lips was hard and commanding. As rough and dominant as she hoped. And she loved it. Everything about this moment exceeded her expectations. Mandi arched her back to press her chest closer. She needed to feel him. All of him.

  “Stop.” It was his voice, harsh and rough. Breathing her in, he traced his nose along her jawline.

  Chills erupted on her skin at the heat of his breath and the light brush of his nose. A thrilling spark erupted down her neck and across her collarbones. Her nipples tightened.

  He groaned and pressed a kiss to the pulse at the base of her throat.

  She shivered as the delicious thrill moved south. She rubbed her hands over the soft cotton of his shirt, but he pulled away before she could burrow under and find out if he was as ripped as he appeared. He disentangled his arms and stepped back.

  She wanted to cry at the loss. The light from the outer room turned him into a silhouette. A massive, hot, sexy silhouette. And then he stepped away from the bed.

  “Dean.” She didn’t recognize the breathy voice as her own.

  He paused in the doorway, his back to her.

  “Thank you for...” The best kiss of her life. “For saving me today.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “And Dean?” She struggled to keep her eyes open, because he needed to hear what she had to say. She had heard the conviction in his voice when he said he wasn’t a nice guy. The man actually believed it, but he’d been nothing but helpful and respectful with her. Maybe too much so, to be honest. Her body still craved his touch, but she understood why he walked away. She was on pain meds, and even though she knew her own mind—knew what she wanted, and that meant Dean—he walked away because his sense of honor demanded it. “A bad guy wouldn’t have stopped.”

  “You’re delusional.”

  Her head melted into the pillow. “Guess I’ll have to prove you wrong,” she mumbled. She drifted to sleep with him keeping watch over her.

  Loose springs jabbed Stills in the hip every time he turned. The couch wasn’t the most comfortable bed he’d ever had, but he’d had worse. Bitter cold seeped through the log walls as the night wore on. He got four hours of rack time before his gut started screaming. The whiteout outside was as bright as noon in the desert, but it wasn’t daylight that woke him. Nor the cold. It was the persistent feeling that being at Gault’s cabin wasn’t an accident. Some elusive thought was poking at his brain like a fucking ice pick, accompanied by the mother of all headaches. Fowler had been to this cabin after Gault died, because Gault had told him about the laptop with Madigan’s autopsy, but...

  Shit, he couldn’t figure out what had woken him, so Stills added logs to the banked fire and started a pot of coffee. He opened the front door, but a drift had piled snow up midway. The rockers on the porch were covered in snow and last night’s tire tracks were obscured. They weren’t going anywhere.

  He winged off a text to the team and got an instant reply. Few words passed between them. He let them know they were at Gault’s cabin and in return they had some answers for Mandi.

  The cabin was the same size and type as his uncle’s, but this was nicer. More feminine, he guessed, with touches like the afghan and rustic pictures on the log walls. There were dishes and silverware, which was the exact opposite of his experience. Stills was used to eating cold food out of a can when he went hunting with his uncle. This place had the kind of warmth no amount of money—no logs in the fire—could emulate. And the whole place smelled like Mandi. She was sweet and he was the sugar addict who wanted to lap her up, even knowing it was wrong, knowing she was too good for him.

  Fuck. The sooner he figured out why his internal radar was pinging, the better. They could head back down the mountain and meet up with the team. And get him the fuck away from the temptation of Mandi’s soft skin.

  The kiss had been a mistake. A tantalizing mistake. She tasted like sweet tea and forever, and he knew damn well he didn’t have that much time left in this world. Added to it, she was Gault’s sister, which meant off limits. There were rules for this sort of thing. So he packed her into a mental box as he had Shelley and started to search the cabin.

  He started in the bathroom where he looked in every cabinet and poked every log, looking for a hiding place. Gault wasn’t killed just for the autopsies. Sure, the autopsies were a problem, but the company had to figure they would get them eventually. Plus, his gut was never wrong. He turned the main level of the cabin upside down but didn’t find a scrap of evidence. He was on his third cup of coffee when Mandi padded out of the bedroom, her thick socks thwacking against the hard floor.

  The red and black flannel PJs she wore were at least two sizes too big, hanging over her hands and feet. It was a miracle she didn’t trip as she headed straight for the coffee pot on the potbelly stove.

  “Good morning,” he said as she passed.

  She raised a hand like a traffic cop but didn’t say a word. Her hair stuck out like porcupine quills and her cheeks had creases from the pillow. There was a hazy, unfocused look in her eyes. Standing next to the stove, she drank the cup of coffee black and hot as lava. When she finished, she rinsed the cup in the sink and left it upside down on the counter. “You make terrible coffee.”

  “But it’s strong.”

  She dumped out the pot and measured water and grounds for a fresh pot. “Not the same thing.”

  “You’re not a morning person.”

  “Danny got the morning gene.” The foggy glow of sleep left her eyes and she blessed him with a smile that rivaled the sunshine outside. “Have they gotten Ellie yet?”

  He grabbed his phone to show her the text. A look of panic crossed her features and he made a step toward her before stopping himself. “It’s good news. Take a look.”

  “They got her.” Mandi launched herself at him, wrapped her arms around his waist, and made him forget the very solid reason for keeping his distance. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” She repeated the words like a mantra while tears wet his shirt.

  “Like I said yesterday, they’re good at their job.” This is why he’d given her the pain pill last night. She needed the rest and now she could wake to good news. She nestled in his arms that he’d wrapped around her without him giving it a second thought. The warmth of her right there, pressed against his chest—in his arms—felt right. He needed to put an end to that shit right now. He cleared his throat. “If Danny wanted to hide something out here, where would he put it?”

  She wiped the tears from her face before leaning back to look at him. “What kind of something?”

  He shrugged.

  “Bigger than a book, smaller than a car,” she prompted.

  “I don’t know. He sent Fowler out here to get the laptop. That’s how we found the other autopsies, but I don’t think that’s the only card your brother had up his sleeve.”

/>   “Well, there’s our hideout from when we were kids.”

  “Where?”

  “I’m not even sure he’d fit anymore.”

  Stills straightened. Sounded like the perfect place to hide something. “Where?”

  “You do realize I haven’t had my second cup of coffee yet.”

  “So?”

  “That’s a hanging offense around here,” she teased.

  That she could smile and joke after losing her brother blew his mind. She was the strongest woman he’d ever met. She might not have the power to kick Echo’s ass, but she had a strong, indomitable spirit that even Echo could not destroy. One more reason to keep his distance. He stepped back a pace. “It’s important.”

  “Fine.” She walked across the room to the wooden ladder that led to a loft. “Follow me.”

  The mistake he made—and he realized immediately—was following so close. She smelled like some girly soap, and the flannel pants hugged her backside showing off shapely curves. Right in front of his face as he climbed the ladder. Abstinence had never been his thing and he hadn’t had much chance for action since he joined the team at The Manor. Lauren was married to Ryder, Debi and Rose had been a thing from the first moment, and Camy was Rose’s sister. Completely off limits. Janet was Fowler’s mom, plus, Stills was pretty sure she would kick his ass if he got out of line. So the sight of Mandi’s tight ass sent blood rushing to his nether regions. He paused at the landing to take a breath.

  A railing separated the loft from the open living room below. There were a couple chairs up there that looked the perfect place to read. Behind them was a door leading back to what Mandi called the bunkroom.

  She reached the door before she realized he wasn’t behind her. She glanced over her shoulder. “Coming?”

  “I’d like to,” he muttered too low for her to hear.

  “Sorry?”

  “Give me a second.”

  “Out of shape?”

  “Climbing a ladder is hardly a physical challenge.”

  “And yet you’re out of breath. I think you’ve gotten out of shape after leaving the military.”