Cornered

by Turner, Linda; Weaver, Ingrid; Miller, Julie

  Nightfall? “But it took us over two days to get here. Do you even know where we are?”

  “Trust me.” He was moving again. “I’ll find you.”

  Rafael Kincaid ran his canoe aground on the western shore of Leigh Lake, stowed his paddle and climbed out onto the grassy bank. With his eyes tilted toward the flat-topped peak of Mount Moran rising above him, he breathed in deeply, assessing the temperature of the air and the scents on the wind.

  The sun was high in the sky, the breeze light, the ground marshy beneath his boots as the spring thaw gave way to summer heat. He tossed his pack onto a patch of gravelly mud and hoisted the canoe onto his shoulders, carrying it to the framed-up rack of logs where six other canoes had been dry-docked. He slid the canoe onto the top rack and paused a moment to inspect the knots before readjusting the protective tarp to cover his boat as well.

  “Frank’s been here, all right,” he muttered out loud, recognizing the distinct handiwork of a left-handed man with army Special Forces training.

  Skewered by a piton. Not an easy thing to accomplish against a man with Frank’s unique background. In order to get close enough to drive a stake into his heart, Frank would have to have been unconscious, overpowered—or duped by someone he trusted.

  None of those possibilities endeared the staff of Randolph College and their spiritual guide to him. He mentally flipped through the list of names and backgrounds he’d quickly researched before departing. Everything from a retired widower to a Forbes 500 millionaire had popped up in his search. A college president with the slick charm and influential connections of a politician. A former showgirl who’d worked her way through an accounting degree. Two professors—one with a series of sexual harassment complaints filed against him, the other with ties to a graduate student who’d been missing for almost three years.

  And the young woman who belonged to that sweet voice on the radio. Are you all right? The dulcet tones of her concern for him had him thinking of starlit nights and intimate conversations between a man and a woman.

  “Sounds more like a twisted version of Gilligan’s Island.” He chided himself before his neglected hormones and angry heart could take that image any further.

  He had a job to do—for his friend, for his company. He’d damn well better get to it.

  Rafe pulled the tarp tight and retied the knots, thinking of the last time he’d seen Frank Brooks. They’d tossed back a couple of beers at a bar down in Jackson, Wyoming, celebrating the success of their last mission together. That had been what, two weeks ago? Rafe had been called out of the state after that, to assist with a search and rescue in Utah. By the time he’d gotten back home, Frank had departed with Hannah Greene and her cohorts from Kansas on one of the challenging climbing and camping excursions that Extreme, Inc., was known for.

  And now Frank was gone?

  Gripping the top log in his long, nicked-up fingers, Rafe inhaled a deep breath, urging the resentment from his bones and clearing his head. There’d been too many people in his life he’d never gotten to say goodbye to before losing them. Starting with his own mother all those years ago.

  Rafe adjusted the long hunting knife he wore on the side of his belt beneath his cotton sweater, and scooped up his gear. Equal weights of regret and determination settled on his shoulders as easily as the backpack.

  He would have liked to have said goodbye to Frank—if Hannah Greene’s claim was true and his friend was truly dead. He would have liked to have gotten closure on at least one relationship in his life before fate or his job or his own charming personality forced him to watch the people he was close to leave.

  And if Hannah Greene was lying—if the woman who belonged to the soft, husky voice was manipulating him in any way…

  Rafe tipped his nose into the air as the wind shifted, a symbolic portent of his own dark mood should this hike turn out to be some kind of a game or trap. The suspicions brewing inside him receded a notch. The mountain was trying to tell him something.

  Hurry.

  Unlike a woman, the mountain didn’t lie. Rafe heeded that warning.

  He slipped on the dark sunglasses that hung from a lanyard around his neck, and in long, sure strides, headed toward the rocky path at the base of the tree line.

  Thank God the sun was still shining.

  The gathering clouds and shifting winds warned Rafe that his good fortune wouldn’t last long past sunset. Still, he gritted his teeth, counted his blessings—however temporary they might be—and forged ahead.

  Dropping his pack by a tow line so that it hung low beneath his hips, Rafe turned and squeezed his shoulders through the narrow crevasse, keeping his eyes focused on the shards of sunlight filtering in above him. He secured his boot on a blind toehold and pushed himself upward. The passageway was little more than a yard in height, but the granite closed in around him like the hug of an angry grizzly bear. Trapping him. Pinning him down.

  The shadowed walls were cold to the touch, and the dampness that clung to the rock face soaked through the cotton of his T-shirt and chilled his skin. He closed his eyes and flashed back to a memory of cold, utter blackness. His nose crinkled, remembering the suffocating stench of stale air and dirt and decay. His heart pounded with the recollection of all he had lost that day.

  Swearing as the stupid childhood fear tried to sink its claws into him and snatch him from the reality at hand, Rafe thrust his arm through the opening. He scraped a strip of skin off his elbow before finding a knob of rock for his fingers to latch onto.

  The sting of pain was brief, but it was enough to clear his head. He clung to the warmth of the sunbathed rock above him until he could bury the dark memories. His size and strength became his ally once more as he pulled himself up and out of the crevasse. He braced his feet on the crowning ledge and leaned back against the pillow of the sweater he’d removed and tied around his waist. Drawing his pack up through the crevasse and setting it at his feet, he unhooked the tube from his water pack and swallowed a few sips to rehydrate himself while the sun re-warmed his body.

  Ignoring the tight passageway below his feet, Rafe scanned the horizon and breathed deeply. Though travels with his archaeologist father had taken him all over the world, he’d always come back to the mountains of Wyoming. Something about the vast expanses, the unspoiled air, the lack of man-made walls and the confinements of civilization had always appealed to him. Maybe, as his younger brother liked to tease, the size and space of the Tetons was the only place in the world big enough to accommodate all six-foot-four, two-hundred-and-fifty pounds of him.

  Or maybe, as his mother might have told him in a bedtime story decades ago, there was simply a wildness to the land that spoke to the untamed spirit inside him. He liked that explanation best because that meant he still shared a bit of a link to the mother he’d lost down in that black hole twenty-five years ago.

  Rafaela Sanchez Kincaid, a native Indian of Central America, had possessed some sort of mystical powers, according to Rafe’s father. She’d been more in tune with the earth and its treasures and the history of its peoples than any map or textbook or university could put together. Rafaela and Lucas, Sr., had been a happy couple. Adding two boys, they’d become a happy family. They’d shared adventures and love, created good memories and weathered bad times together. They’d lived a charmed, if not quite typical, life, until that fateful summer day in the middle of the jungle when Rafe had learned what hell truly was.

  As a boy, he’d loved exploring the tombs and secret passageways of the archaeological expeditions on which his parents had taken him and Luke. But an earthquake and cave-in at the Mayan ruins on Isla Tenebrosa had forever changed that love into fear and bitter memories. As the ancient stones and weakened support beams collapsed on top of him, his mother had pushed him into a sarcophagus and sealed the lid. He lay trapped inside that black stone box for hours, running out of air and hope. He’d nearly suffocated that day. But when his father’s workmen finally unearthed him, Rafe knew he’d been s
aved.

  And he knew his mother hadn’t been so lucky.

  “Hello? Mr. Kincaid? Are you there? Hello?”

  The muffled female voice was sharp enough to cut through his thoughts, stalling out the darkness growing inside him.

  Miss Kansas was on the line again. Rafe grinned at the bossy insistence in her tone. Hoisting his pack onto his hip, he carefully replaced his water and dug out his radio.

  “Please, Mr. Kincaid. If you can hear me, you must answer.”

  Hannah Greene’s succinct articulation reminded him of his sixth-grade English teacher, Miss Chapman. An ageless wonder of the world, Miss Chapman had been a petite stick of a woman who hadn’t backed down from lecturing him and sending him to the office for drawing pictures on his tests instead of answering the questions, even though, at age twelve, he’d already towered over her by a good foot and a half. He’d had a lot of respect for Miss Chapman, but she’d forever forged his image of a spinster schoolmarm.

  Rafe hooked his pack over his shoulder, lifted the radio to his mouth and hit the call button. “If you’re going to use the radio, Kansas, why don’t you learn to use it right? Over.”

  “Thank God, you’re there. It’s such a relief to hear your voice.” The weight of her sigh hovered across the airwaves and settled like a shared smile into his bones. Rafe tried to recall the last time anyone had sounded so happy to hear from him. It was even harder to remember the last time a woman had spoken to him in such sweet, welcoming tones. But sweet and welcoming was followed just as quickly by a huffy sound of protest. “Excuse me, Mr. Kincaid, but I got hold of you, didn’t I? More than once. I have to be doing something right.”

  He shook his head at the foolish notion that some kind of connection had just occurred between them. She was nothing more than a voice on the radio, he warned himself—a sharp voice that baited him to respond in equally concise tones. “There’s a procedure to follow when you’re making a call. Identify yourself and who you’re trying to reach. Hannah Greene from Kansas calling base camp, for example. When you’re done speaking, you signal the other end by saying ‘over.’ Over.”

  “Oh, no,” she gasped, almost as an aside. “Please don’t tell me you’re still at the headquarters building.”

  Rafe straightened his stance, and the sprawling vista of the Teton Mountains shrank to the sound of her voice. The timbre of it had changed again. It had grown more feminine, softer—hinting at desperation, but with a backbone that kept her fear under control. For the moment, at any rate.

  Rafe heard his own voice soften in a rumbly, low-pitched effort to reassure her. “Easy, Kansas. I’m over halfway to your position already. Assuming Frank followed the climbing plan he filed, that is.”

  “I wish I knew,” she answered, without waiting for his over signal. “I hate feeling so lost.”

  The circuitous route Frank would have taken to Targhee Meadow would have provided the opportunity to teach and practice various outdoorsman and climbing skills. Rafe’s unmarked path was neither for novices to mountaineering, nor for strangers to the mountain.

  “I’ve got a pretty good map inside my head,” he assured her. He clipped the radio to his lanyard and wedged it between his ear and shoulder, freeing up both hands so he could re-position his gear and resume the climb. “I’ll be there for dinner. Over.”

  “If there’s anything to eat. I thought we had provisions for another couple of days, but we went to fix lunch and all we’ve got is a nearly empty bag of marshmallows.” She hesitated. “Um. Over?”

  Barely noticing her concession to his rules, Rafe cinched the last strap and paused. The tension in him had knotted just as tightly. Hannah Greene and her friends might be in bigger trouble than he’d first suspected. He stared hard into the rock wall in front of him, as if its craggy surface might reveal her expression and let him know whether or not she was serious. “Your food’s gone?”

  Frank wouldn’t make such a mistake in prepping for an expedition, especially with a group of first-timers. In fact, he’d pack extra rations instead of risking that they’d run short. First Frank’s death—his murder, according to Hannah—and now a missing stockpile of food? What the hell was going on?

  “You forgot to say ‘over,’” she stated, with a prickly matter-of-factness that amused as much as annoyed him. “Maybe an animal got into our supplies. Over?”

  Rafe plugged in his hands-free radio transmitter, tucked the receiver into his ear and adjusted the tiny microphone beside his jaw. “You’d know if an animal got into your food. There’d be chewed up plastic, scattered evidence. Pawprints and scratch marks.” Eyeing the steep granite slope above him, Rafe sought out a secure handhold and resumed his ascent. “You’re sure one of your cohorts didn’t panic and decide to horde the food for himself? Over.”

  “Shoot.” Hannah’s ladylike curse made him think she hadn’t considered the possibility that someone in her group might be trying to sabotage the excursion, whether intentionally or just to save his own hide. But the suggestion didn’t seem to surprise her. “I’ll see what I can find out. A couple of our members are trying to build a trap so they can catch something to grill. Thank God they don’t have a gun, or they’d be arguing about hunting. Ov—”

  “They can’t do that. You’re in a National Park.”

  “I told them that. Maybe if they heard it from an authority figure…” Rafe froze, his long limbs spread-eagled against the rock face. What the hell kind of mess was he climbing into? Apparently, Hannah Greene from Kansas was waiting for some kind of response, some kind of guidance beyond his mountain-climbing expertise. “Rafe?” Not the formal clip of “Mr. Kincaid,” but a breathy plea. “Over?”

  Her voice had faded to that husky whisper again. Its soft, rhythmic cadence took him back to starry nights and cool breezes, with nothing but hot words against his ear and hotter skin against his own to keep him warm.

  Man, he had to let that idea go!

  Shaking aside the pleasurable image forming in his mind, Rafe concentrated on the facts at hand. His friend was dead. His company was responsible for a group of inexperienced climbers stranded high on Mount Moran—apparently without any food.

  Women were not his best thing—judging by his track record of failed relationships spread few and far between the work and adventure that consumed him—but he was better at his job than just about anybody on the planet. He might fantasize about a woman who could keep up with him and accept the risks he took. But at the end of the day, Rafe knew that his satisfaction would come from pushing his body to its limits, conquering a mountain or a mission—not snuggling up against a woman who…

  “Rafe? Are you still there? Over.”

  …sounded like sex and vulnerability and a hint of attitude, all rolled into one mysterious package.

  So much for clearing his thoughts and focusing on facts.

  “I’m here.” He let a grunt of exertion explain his silence as he purposely reached for a handhold a few inches beyond his fingertips. Savoring the pull of muscles through his arms and torso, he stretched to anchor his grip and pull himself up. He spied an outcropping of granite about ten feet above his head. Once he hoisted himself up and over that, he’d be on an easier, vegetated slope, and would simply have to keep his bearing amongst the trees to complete his journey.

  “Who’s in charge of that chicken outfit up there?” His frustration came out gruffer than he intended, but that little dose of guilt went a long way toward getting his priorities straight again. “Over.”

  “That would be Dr. Copperfield. President Copperfield. He’s president of the college, not—”

  “I could figure that out.” A frustrated sense of urgency overrode communication etiquette. “Put Copperfield on.”

  “He’s not here right now.”

  Did these eggheads have a death wish?

  “I told you to keep everyone close to camp. Where is he?”

  “His assistant was a little spooked about having a dead body around, so he took
her for a walk.”

  “Get them back to camp.” Before they fell off the side of the mountain or got attacked by a bear or puma. The predators wouldn’t be out hunting in the heat of mid-afternoon, but they wouldn’t hesitate to defend their territory from neophyte hikers who wandered too far off the path. Rafe paused as he reached the outcropping. Then he leaned back, defied gravity and scrambled over the top. He rolled over onto his backside to catch his breath and speak some sense. “Do whatever you have to do to get control of the situation. If no one else is stepping up, then you have to take charge.”

  “Me? How?”

  Hell. Though she’d given him snippets of a seductive voice, he’d just assumed there was more bossy schoolmarm than damsel in distress to her. “What’s your job back in the real world?”

  “I’m an English professor, with a specialty in grammar and the history of the English language.”

  “A grammar teacher?” Rafe groaned at how perfectly Hannah Greene from Kansas was falling into his stereotyped image of her. He’d lay odds she was plain as a post, pinched her hair back into a bun and didn’t know how to smile. Of course, that image was more in keeping with his memories of Miss Chapman than with the pictures this woman’s sexy voice had conjured in his mind.

  “I also have an extensive background in literature, but that’s not what they pay me to teach. Is any of that helpful?”

  Priceless. Yeah, the ability to diagram a sentence or quote Shakespeare would come in real handy when it came to trekking down the mountain. Rafe wanted to laugh. But with the campers’ situation growing more dire by the moment, instead of indulging any sense of humor, he stood and altered his gear for hiking.

  “Yeah, Kansas. That helps. Pretend they’re your students.” Or me, he added silently, wondering if she realized how little trouble she’d had snagging his attention. “They’ll listen.”

  Chapter 3

  With the sun balling into an orange glow behind the snow-capped peak of Mount Moran, Rafe emerged from the forest that formed the jagged southern border of Targhee Meadow. Peering through the cloud of his warm breath in the cooler air, he paused to wipe the sweat from his forehead and take stock of the chaos. “Hell.”