by Carly Bishop
Every slippery, claustrophobic step defied her. Her heart pounded. Her calves burned. Thunder rumbled far away, but she could still feel the electricity in the air. And within minutes, the rain spilling through the cover of trees had drenched the towels covering her head. They became a leaden weight bearing down on her without giving her any protection.
She shivered hard, then cast them off and kept doggedly jogging.
Level for the first few minutes of her run, the grounds began to dip and climb in the rolling way of backwoods Massachusetts. Over and over again, she stumbled and fell, unable to see where she was going in the black night and dense, smothering rain.
Time and again, she got up and pushed herself on. Her clothes were soaked and heavy with mud. Whatever advantage she might have had from living at a higher altitude had vanished with her blood loss.
She lost track of the road. It had to be to her right, didn’t it? Yes. It must. It had to be. She hadn’t crossed the pavement, so the road must still be to her right. But that was only if her course had followed the road. Confusion came close to overwhelming her. She felt panicky and uncertain, disoriented and perilously close to tears.
She pulled herself together with a jerk and plunged to her right, crashing through a tangle of brambles and undergrowth. A deer startled from behind her, bolting within a few feet of her. She cried out, then lost her footing and took a treacherous slide down the steep terrain toward a brook swollen now to the edges of its banks by the hours of rain.
The jarring slide knocked the breath out her but she fought back and managed to grab and keep hold of a small shrub, then pulled herself back up a few feet from the cresting, roiling brook and clung to the trunk of a young tree.
Shivering so hard that her teeth chattered, she wrapped her arms around the tree and rested her forehead against its smooth, wet bark. Soaked to the skin and badly battered by her fall, tears welled in her eyes, hopelessness in her heart, and she began to cry.
She badly needed a break, but the rain kept coming down hard. Shoving her dripping hair out of her eyes, she wiped her face with the soggy sleeve of her sweater and forced herself to buck up one more time.
The more hopeless things became, the harder she would fight. Grit filled her. She would not give up. It would take more than the wretched cold or rain or black of night or all the mud in the commonwealth to keep her down.
She would have to climb back up the bank.
Then she heard it, all but obliterated by the swollen brook crashing against its banks. The low thrum of a car engine.
Her head came up, and she struggled to listen, to find its direction. A bird screeched and thunder rumbled far away, but she managed to hear the distinct sound of car tires splashing through the water on the road.
Relief coursed through her. She would make it now. Somehow, she would make her way to the roadside.
Eden stood and turned. Almost blinding her, the rain fell in sheets over her face, but she ignored it. She was going to make it. Hand over hand, ignoring the now-familiar pain in her shoulder, clinging to undergrowth and branches, she scrambled up the steep incline.
She would have made it, too, but either she misjudged the ledge or it collapsed beneath her. As her feet slid out from beneath her, she fell hard to the ground on her stomach. Crying out in shock, she lurched for a handhold, missed and began to plunge down the treacherous bank again when something clamped hold of her.
A man’s hand. Chris Tierney’s hand.
She screamed and jerked hard but he kept a firm grasp and sank to his butt on the ground. Planting his feet against oak saplings, he held on to her tightly enough to haul her back up the slippery slope between his legs. He had on nothing but his jeans and boots.
The solid, muscled wet wall of his chest mocked her heart. In the midst of the fiercest storm and black of night, in the midst of running from him so Broussard wouldn’t kill him, all she wanted to do was give in to him and lay her head on his chest. Once. Just once.
“Let me go!” she cried fiercely.
“You promised, Eden.”
Lightning split the sky again and thunder exploded, but neither matched the storm of fury in his eyes or the anger in his voice. He lifted her as if she weighed nothing at all and planted her hard on her backside with her body braced against a sturdy sapling.
His jaw went rigid. Steam rose from his back and shoulders. “You gave me your word.”
Her heart hammered. “I changed my mind! Tierney, you have to let me go!”
“Tierney again?” he grated. “Lady, you are one coldhearted selfish little bitch.”
“You idiot...bastard ... stupid man!” she cried. Rage tore through her, and lightning fast, she slapped his face. “Don’t you dare judge me! Broussard will kill you,” she shrilled, bordering so close to hysteria now that she hardly knew what she was saying. “He’ll kill you!”
“No.” He grabbed her wrist as fast, far more in control of himself than she was of herself, and he shook her. “No. He won’t.” His eyes glittered with a dark passion so furious it terrified her.
“Then someone else will! They will. His underlings ... and if they don’t—”
“Do you think I care? Do you think I give a good goddamn what happens to me afterward?”
“That’s what you want?” Water streamed off her face, but whether tears or rain she couldn’t tell. Her skin felt afire with her anger at him. “That’s it?” she shrilled again.
“Eden, stop it!”
“No!” She was completely, desperately, madly, profoundly in love with him when all he really wanted was a way out of his own pain? “That’s what you want, isn’t it? To take out Broussard and get yourself murdered so I’m the one left alone again? You miserable excuse for a man!” she cried, tears streaming from her eyes. She tried to get to her feet, to lash out at him and escape, but he jerked her back down and cupped the back of her head with his hand, tightening his fingers in her hair.
“What are you saying, Eden? Spit it out.”
“I’m saying I won’t have it, Tierney! I’m saying I won’t be left alone by you. I’m saying—” She broke off. His were fixed on her, staring at her as if he were seeing her for the first time. His brow was creased, almost in pain.
His beautiful dark eyelashes were wet with rain and she thought they were tears. Her throat constricted and she began to shake.
“Say it, Eden,” he urged, his voice low and strained.
Her knees slid in the mud and she clung to him, but she was not so suddenly helpless as to refuse to meet his eyes when she laid herself bare.
She took off the backpack and hurled it under a bush. Her heart thundered, louder now in her ears than the real thing. “I’m saying...Christian Xavier Tierney, that I want to make love with you and I don’t ever want to stop.”
“Oh, my God, Eden. Eden.” He shut his eyes, and the groan that came from deep in his chest stirred her blood beyond any sound she had ever heard. He fell back against the drenched undergrowth and pulled her down with him. “I want you, and want it never to stop.”
Mouth open, he kissed her, drew her in, stroked her lips with his tongue, and Eden thought she would die with the keen, smothering pleasure of that kiss alone.
He held her face m his hands and moved his lips over every part of it, kissing her eyes, her forehead, sucking the rain from her cheeks and chin and neck, and when he brought his lips back to hers, her heart lurched painfully with sensations too new and intense and sharp and inciting to bear.
“We’ve only begun, Eden,” he uttered harshly. She knew that what he said was true when he only had to stroke the side of her breast before her nipple puckered tight in a rocketing swell of pleasure so shattering and exquisite that it bordered on pain. “We have only begun.”
In the torrential downpour with the roar of the swollen brook in her ears, she returned his kisses. Heat flared between them and the bitingly cold rain on her back and bottom and thighs made her crazy with need. She seemed driven, toward s
eeking to get closer, toward willing herself to be consumed in Christian Tierney’s fire.
Kissing her, absorbing her, he slid his hands down her sides, lingering at the flattened swell of her breasts, but he wanted more and reached to pull off her sweater, to have no barriers between them.
“Let me.” Her idyllic, sterile dreams of candlelight and violins and satin paled, fading to nothing. She pulled back and sat up, alive, electric with need and instinct and the power of her choice, to make love with this rugged, reckless lawman in this fearsomely elemental and primitive forest, beneath storm-blackened skies opening up in thunder and lightning and in torrents of rain.
She stripped the clinging, sodden sweater from her body. The drenching rain poured over her bare back and her small naked breasts and the ugly black stitches. Her nipples tightened into hardened buds, in the cold of the night air. She didn’t know just how sensitized they were before he raised himself up on one elbow, touched her face with his fingers and then sipped the rain from one and then the other of her beaded nipples.
When his lips closed over one of them, desire exploded in her. Deep inside, her muscles clenched and throbbed, making her cry out. Her pelvis began to rock unwittingly and Chris drew her rhythmically deeper and deeper into his mouth, stroking her with his tongue, knowing now for himself that what she’d said was true.
Eden Kelley was untouched ... and already, so soon, so sweetly, on the brink of her first climax.
His sex burgeoned painfully against his fly. His body hummed with incredible tension. She held his head to her breast and cried out again when the powerful sensations took her over the edge.
He grabbed the sweater she’d shed and laid it out before turning her on her back. Frantically, she lowered her jeans till she could spread her knees. Just as needful, he lowered his. When he entered her for the first time, when the pain receded and the pleasure washed over her in torrents, when he brought her again and again to spiraling, soaring heights, Eden was still mindful of the exquisite moment when she knew what it was to be taken care of and treasured and to know that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
To know that once, she had belonged to Christian Tierney and he had belonged to her.
TIFFER BANCROFT was messing with the VCR, playing his little brother Jake’s Power Rangers tape. At eleven, he thought they were as lame as all get-out, but Jake would whine his head off when the tape wasn’t in the right place and that was just fine with Tiffer. Jake wasn’t all that bad, but a little guerrilla action their mom would never believe Tiffer had done anyway wouldn’t kill the little rug rat.
But when Tiffer heard his dad come in the back door off the garage, he grabbed the remote control, shut off the VCR fast and changed the channel to the morning news. His dad walked through the family room to the kitchen where his mom was making breakfast. Tiffer acted as if he was listening hard to the news, the only acceptable reason for the TV to be on in the Bancroft prison, and the only reason for not standing to attention when his dad walked into the room.
He didn’t know what made his dad such a creep, but it didn’t matter. Tiffer just steered clear. He was always teed off about something, especially when he came back from having been called out to the hospital in the middle of the night—like now.
His mom had been real jumpy since the day before yesterday. Usually, he didn’t catch her puffing on a cigarette and he could never come up to her and make her jump out of her skin. He knew she didn’t have eyes in the back of her head, but lots of the time, he could swear she did. But not in the past two days.
His old man was yelling about the alarm system being turned off at the eighth zone when the TV newsman started talking about that hospital in western New York. The news graphic snagged Tiffer’s attention. It was the FBI seal superimposed over the federal building in Boston where his Uncle Chris worked. Tiffer paid attention because it was just like his dad to demand a full account of the news stories he’d seen over their meal. Something stupid about how what was good enough for the Kennedys was good enough for the Bancrofts.
Tiffer tuned in.
“The story just keeps growing more and more interesting. The hospital has been under a great deal of scrutiny in the past several weeks —first for the transfusion of a unit of donated blood to the wrong patient, then again ten days later when an elderly patient was found dead in a whirlpool bath. Now, as we reported on the ten o’clock news last night, a woman was admitted with a gunshot wound under a Jane Doe alias, which admission was then itself purged from the records of the hospital emergency room. For more details, let’s go live now to our reporter on the spot. Thea?”
Yeah, Thea! Tiffer thought. Enough of the old fart....
“Last night, the FBI apparently took an interest in the bizarre claims made by an anonymous caller. This morning, the ER chief physician met with agents of the FBI. It’s clear now that our first reports of last evening concerning a Jane Doe gunshot victim were accurate and provoked this joint statement by the FBI and local police:
“ ‘We believe that the identity of a witness relocated in the Federal Witness Protection Program has been compromised. That witness is, in all likelihood, the Jane Doe treated and released by this hospital for a gunshot wound almost forty-eight hours ago. In the hopes of protecting the witness from further incident, the physician in charge made the decision to purge all records of her admission here. We appreciate that gesture.
‘However, the witness is now believed to be in the custody of United States Deputy Marshal Christian Tierney.’ ”
A photo of his uncle flashed on the screen. Tiffer sat up, excited. “Mom, listen to this!”
His dad raised his voice, something lame about Tiffer coming to the kitchen if he wanted to talk to his mother. Secretly, in his lap, he flipped his dad the bird. It was apparently all right for him to yell. But Tiffer went from thinking it cool that his uncle was on TV to being freaked out when he heard what Thea-the-babe newswoman said next.
“Tierney is believed to have taken this witness hostage after a shoot-out in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where he appropriated a U.S. government jet to make his escape with the witness. He is acting outside his authority and is urged to return the witness to protective custody and face the unofficial charges.
“An all points bulletin has been put out for a 1985 maroon Ford Mustang. Tierney must be considered armed and dangerous. Information leading to his whereabouts and/or the whereabouts of the Jane Doe gunshot victim, is being sought and a reward offered. ”
“Liars!” Tiffer snarled, totally disgusted they would say those things. His uncle would never do anything like they said. Tiffer turned off the set and threw down the remote control. His mom called him to breakfast. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t believe those creeps on TV, but he didn’t know what to believe.
He went to the table and jerked out his chair. His mom shot him a warning look while she put a plate of toast and another filled with scrambled eggs on the table.
He glared at the food. He didn’t even want to eat. He hated eggs. He wanted to go kick his soccer ball through the stupid garage door. How could they say that crap about Chris? He ought to sue their pants off.
His dad didn’t even notice how pissed Tiffer was. He was still going off about the alarm system being useless if people couldn’t remember to keep it turned on... which was when he knew why his mom was so jumpy.
She had turned it off on purpose.
He choked down a few bites of egg and asked to be excused. He had to get to his uncle Chris before his dad figured it out, too.
Chapter Twelve
Chris awoke from the best sleep he’d had in two years to the most gut-sick, hollow feeling he’d ever known. Curled against his body, Eden was shaking him, her beautiful sleepy-eyed face frozen in anxiety.
He stiffened. “What is it?”
“Listen.”
Stock-still, he heard a pinging sound, a pebble striking the window.
He swore, trying not to overreact, trying to con
vince himself that in these few hours of letting down his guard, he hadn’t sealed his own and Eden Kelley’s death warrants.
He touched her face. If he never saw that kind of resignation in her wide, stormy gray eyes again it would be too soon. He murmured softly, encouraging her to roll off the other side of the bed and stay there. Another pebble hit and bounced off the window.
He went for his gun, rolled off his side and slipped on his boxers. Crouching low to the floor, he moved into the kitchen, then rose slowly in the corner beside the door. Twisting the doorknob, he shoved the door open so that it banged against the wall.
He sank down against the other wall. Crouching on the cold tile floor, he worked the action on the Mac 10 and aimed with both hands. He stretched out his arms and waited.
He heard footsteps approaching warily. The first thing he saw was a sneaker, then a stick-thin leg, finally a knobby knee.
“Uncle Chris?” came a scared voice. “Is that you?”
Relief poured through him and his eyes fell closed for the briefest interlude. An assassin was hardly likely to announce his presence or intentions with pebbles bouncing benignly off the windows, but Chris couldn’t afford to take anything lightly.
He disarmed the automatic and came upright in one swift, effortless motion. Tiffer Bancroft stood on the stoop, trying to see in. Relief swam through Chris and he let out his breath.
“It’s all right, Eden,” he called softly. Then, “Tiff. You scared the crap out of me, kid.”
“Chris!” The boy’s face lit up when he heard Chris, and he grinned widely when he saw him, but then the pleasure disintegrated. He bounded over and gave Chris a fierce hug. “Chris, you gotta get out of here. There’s stuff on TV. Is there some lady here? There’s this hospital and the cops and they know you ran away a couple days ago and they’re saying—”
“Whoa, wait a minute.” Chris took his nephew by his narrow shoulders. Tension knotted the boy’s small, immature features, and the tendons of his thin little neck were stretched tight. For a moment, Chris felt violently angry at himself for exposing his nephew, this child, to this sordid mess. “Tiffer, listen to me. Does your mom know you’re down here?”