Cornered

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

  “Don’t you ever scare me like that again,” he whispered savagely against her ear.

  Hannah latched onto his shoulders and held on for a split second, absorbing his hard strength, sharing her own. “I’m okay, Rafe. I hooked up everything the way you taught me. I’m okay.”

  “I know. I know.” He repeated the words as if he didn’t quite believe her, but he was already setting her down. Her feet touched the rope and took her weight. “Can you make it across on your own?”

  There was an almost desperate quality to his bone-deep voice. He was pushing her away, though he didn’t want to let her go. But she understood his urgency. There were other lives to save. Hannah nodded, reassuring him by taking the ropes into her own hands and moving toward the shore. “Help Lydia.”

  Though she couldn’t watch Rafe behind her, she could tell by each gasp between Lydia’s screams that he’d grabbed the hysterical woman and was carrying her across the bridge. Hannah’s legs wobbled like jelly by the time she set foot on solid ground. Irene was there to help her to a flat, broad rock where she could collapse, catch her breath and watch Rafe step off behind her.

  Carrying Lydia tucked to his side like a football, he set her down and barked an order to the closest person, Rowdy Trent. “Get a blanket and cover her so she doesn’t go into shock.”

  Then he was off and running, shedding his pack as he dropped down between the rocks and out of sight below the bridge. Hannah found the strength to stand and started stripping off her own gear. No one should be alone. That was the rule, wasn’t it?

  “Honey, you should rest, too.” Irene tried to push her back to her seat. “Let the men handle this.”

  “No.” There was concrete in her legs now. An untapped strength of will and purpose coursed through her, firing her up from the inside out. “I’m helping Rafe.”

  Keith and Ed had already climbed down to the river and were running alongside to keep Charles Defoe’s bobbing head and flailing arms in their sight. “He’s down here, man!” Keith yelled.

  Hannah hit the flat, gravelly bank in time to see them pull up beside a nest of gray-green boulders, worn round and smooth by eons of the river hitting them at full force before veering to the south. The bend in the river at the wall of rocks formed a swirling eddy that sucked Charles’ bald head beneath the water, then flung him back to the surface where he smacked into the rocks.

  “Help!” He swallowed a mouthful of water and spat it back out. “Help me—aagh!”

  He grimaced with pain and was pulled under again.

  “Charles!” Hannah yelled.

  When he resurfaced, the water came up to his chin and swirled around him. He sputtered again. He wasn’t bobbing up and down anymore. He was trapped, his head tipped back, his nose barely above the rushing waterline.

  Ed climbed out onto a rock, but the moss covering it was slippery and he slid off, landing knee-deep in the water well beyond Charles’s reach.

  “Stay on the bank!” Rafe hollered. He unhooked his long nylon rappelling line from his belt and dropped it to unwind behind him as he knotted the other end around his waist and waded into the river. “Tie it off!” he ordered, pointing directly at Keith who was helping Ed climb to shore. Rafe waded in, his powerful thighs parting the water until the current caught him and he was swimming toward the rocks.

  Hannah ran up beside Keith and Ed who stood by in dumb shock, ignoring the rope snapping past their feet.

  “Grab that line!” she yelled, stomping on the end with her foot while all three of them scrambled to pick it up and hold on until they could get it knotted and hooked around an angular rock. When she was confident it was secure, she left Ed and Keith behind and scrambled around the boulders to keep Rafe in sight. “Don’t let that go!” she shouted over her shoulder as though the other two professors always listened to what she had to say.

  “C’mon, Charles.” Rafe had reached the drowning man. “Give me your hand.”

  “I can’t,” Charles sputtered as water flooded into his mouth. “My foot’s caught.”

  “Ah, hell.” With Ed and Keith holding the line so he didn’t crash against the rocks himself, Rafe dove beneath the surface.

  Fear fisted around Hannah’s heart. He was down way too long. Too many seconds had passed. “Rafe? Come back, Rafe.”

  He’d just kissed her for the first time, awakening every needy, hopeful thing inside her. She didn’t want that kiss to be their last.

  He shot back up to the surface and sucked in a huge gulp of air. “Too tight. Too small.”

  Gripping a rock for balance, Hannah inched out over the whirlpool. Rafe was pale as a ghost, and muttering to himself. “What’s wrong?”

  Treading water, he spun around and stared at her with wide eyes that frightened her. “His foot’s wedged in a tiny little space beneath the rocks. I’ll have to swim underneath.”

  “Are you too big? Do you need me—?”

  “No!” he barked. “I will do this!”

  Something in his tone told her this wasn’t entirely about keeping her out of harm’s way. He wasn’t balking at the physical challenge of saving Charles. This uncharacteristic hesitation was about facing something else. Something inside him.

  “Rafe?”

  With a roar of determination and a deep, deep breath, Rafe dove beneath the surface again. Hannah held her own breath. After too many endless seconds, Charles popped free. But she felt no relief until Rafe surfaced behind him. She jumped to her feet and splashed through the water toward their position. “Pull them in! Pull them in!”

  A minute later, Ed and Keith were hauling Charles up onto the bank. “My ankle,” Charles moaned. “Oh, my ankle.”

  Rowdy had come down with another blanket the three men wrapped around Charles. But Hannah reached for Rafe as he stumbled across the rocks, gasping hard. His arms wound around her and he sank to his knees, dragging her down to the ground with him.

  “Rafe? Oh my, God. Rafe.” She ran her fingers along everything she could reach, checking for head injuries, cuts, scrapes, broken bones.

  His knuckles were battered, his skin cold, his eyes dazed. “I hate that. I hate it.”

  “Hate what?” She tried to reverse their positions, to wrap her comparatively warm body around his colder one. “I need a blanket!” she shouted to the others.

  “It was so dark and small. I couldn’t breathe.” Rafe’s ragged voice trailed away as his eyes regained focus. They were spicy brown as they bored into hers, and she didn’t guess his intent until his arms tightened around her and he fell back, pulling her into his lap and covering her mouth with his.

  His rough hands swept the cap off her head and freed her soggy ponytail so he could tunnel his fingers into her hair and clasp the back of her head. His tongue plunged into her mouth, deeper than before, seeking, demanding, taking.

  Hannah wrapped her arms around him and held on, letting him anchor her even as his kiss led her on a wild thrill ride. The moans in his throat hummed in her ears like erotic music. Every move he made—every touch, every taste—she tried to learn and give back to her teacher. Rafe leaned back even farther and Hannah sprawled across his chest, sinking into him in a way that reminded her of all the stunning, wonderful differences between a man and a woman. His hands slid down her back, creating a delicious friction as he squeezed here, rubbed there. He palmed the hips that had always given her self-conscious fits and dragged her up against a part of him that was very warm, very solid.

  He groaned against her mouth. “You’re killing me. This is crazy to need you this—”

  “Well, at least this trip hasn’t been a complete waste of time for some of us.”

  A shadow fell across them and Hannah froze as if she’d just been tossed into the river herself. Rafe’s hands stilled and his expression hardened like granite. “Go away, Butler.”

  Hannah tried to roll off Rafe, but he trapped her in his arms and sat up with her, spilling her into his lap again.

  All the heat that h
ad blossomed inside her at Rafe’s fiery kiss rose to the surface and dotted her cheeks with embarrassment. But Rafe held on, giving her no opportunity to run and hide or regroup.

  Ed Butler pushed his hat back on his head and held up his hands in mock surrender. “Don’t get me wrong, Kincaid. I’m all for gettin’ some whenever a woman throws herself at me, too.”

  “You jerk.” Rafe’s grip on her arm was the only thing that kept Hannah from falling when he abruptly jumped to his feet. All his fear was gone, all his passion spent.

  He made a move toward Ed, but Hannah shoved against his chest. “Rafe, please. Don’t.”

  Unlike Ed himself the evening before, Rafe listened to her request and held himself in check.

  But his steely glare over the top of her head was enough to send Ed into retreat. Rafe Kincaid was clearly not a man to be messed with. Not now. Not ever. “Sorry, pal,” Ed apologized, leaving off the insinuations. “I just wanted to know what the next move is.”

  Though the tension in him never eased, Rafe looked over to where Charles sat on the ground, moaning about his ankle. “Can Defoe walk?”

  Ed shrugged. “I’m no medical expert, but I think his ankle is twisted pretty good.”

  “There’s a first-aid kit in my pack. We’ll need to get his ankle wrapped,” Rafe instructed. “You two help him back up to the others. We’ll make camp at the bridge clearing. Find an extra shirt and soak it in the river. We’ll use that for an ice pack.”

  “Roger that, big guy. You want us to get wood for a fire?”

  Rafe shook his head. The rain had let up to a steady drizzle, but the sky wasn’t clearing. “Everything will be wet. I’ll take care of that.”

  Ed doffed a salute, then went over to help Keith carry Charles between their shoulders. Hannah pried herself free and picked up her ball cap. The rubber band she’d secured her hair with was nowhere to be found, so she finger-combed her curly mop as best she could and plopped the hat on top. The three men were gone by the time she bent down to retrieve the blanket Charles had used. “Where’s Rowdy?”

  It was a rhetorical question, whispered out loud as she realized the graduate assistant had disappeared. But Rafe answered. “Hopefully, he went back with the others.”

  A now-familiar unease crept in to mingle with the lingering sexual tension she felt. “We’d better go check. He shouldn’t be by himself.”

  “Hannah.”

  He’d said her name. Not Kansas. That alone was enough to make her stop and turn. And worry. “What?”

  Water glistened in the stubble of his day-old beard. But she didn’t think that was why he swiped his hand across his jaw. “I’m sorry. Kissing you like that was crass. Going from ‘pleased to meet you’ to making love on the rocks… I’m sure that’s not your style, you being a teacher and all. But the adrenaline was still kickin’ through me. I shouldn’t have—”

  “Kissing me was a mistake?”

  “I shouldn’t have done it here. Not like that. Not with an audience.” He spoke the words over her worried speculation, emphasizing his point. He reached out and tucked a stray curl beneath the brim of her cap. “A classy lady like you? I should have waited for someplace more private. Read you some poetry or something.” He pulled away and busied himself with the rope still tied at his waist. Now he seemed to be the embarrassed one. “Not that I’m any kind of a poet. I should’ve minded my manners, been a little more civilized about it.”

  He thought kissing teachers was uncivilized? She pressed her lips together, suppressing a self-conscious giggle that threatened to turn into tears. He thought she was dignified. Yeesh. Apparently, her klutzy maneuvers hadn’t impressed him. She wasn’t sexy or irresistible like her sister. She wasn’t the kind of woman a man lost control with. Hannah Greene was classy. Scholarly. A man should be a little more restrained with her.

  Sort of like an old book.

  “I’m glad you weren’t so civilized.”

  “Yeah?” He almost smiled. Almost. Maybe he sensed that some of the heady pleasure she’d gotten from that life-affirming embrace had already been tainted by his apology.

  “You weren’t the only one who was scared. I needed that assurance that we were alive and safe right at that very moment myself.” But those long-ingrained feelings that she was a little too plain, a little too plump, a little too smart had her making a joke out of what had passed between them. “I’m just glad I was here to help out.”

  “Help out?” He definitely wasn’t smiling now. He reached for her. “Look. Maybe I didn’t say that right. I didn’t want just any warm body to get me through the moment. I know that’s how it might have seemed—”

  Hannah pulled away, but summoned a smile to try to alleviate any guilt or concern he might feel. She was the one who didn’t measure up. “We’d better get back to the others and help set up camp. I have a feeling it’s going to be a long night.”

  “The superhero has to go.”

  The man with the piercing eyes looked down from his vantage point among the trees and watched his colleagues move around the flickering fire like weary moths drawn to a flame. The clouds had moved past to the east, leaving the horizon painted with the strokes of a lavender and gold sunset.

  But he had no interest in the beauty of the sky; he was only here because the setting was so convenient. They all should have fallen into a deep hole or broken their necks by now. But Rafe Kincaid had gotten in the way.

  And now his accomplice was having a damned panic attack, forgetting the roles they were each supposed to play. He hated that his companion had risked this conversation before darkness could cloak their meeting. The fool was getting nervous. More mistakes could happen. “Did you get his radio?” he asked.

  His companion held out the portable transmitter and headset. “I took it out of his pack while he was playing hero and rescuing Charles.”

  The man with the piercing eyes took the radio. He was tempted to grind it beneath his boot, to take symbolic satisfaction in imagining it was Kincaid’s head. But his plot for righting the wrongs these people had committed wasn’t about impulsiveness; it was about careful preparation, striking in ways that would hurt the most. Eliminating anyone who might be lucky enough to decipher the truth. The terror and distrust and rampant suspicions brewing among Randolph’s finest were almost as satisfying as the end result would be.

  He tucked the radio into his bag, wondering when Kincaid would first miss it. Certainly there’d be no chance to call in back-up or an early helicopter to rescue them once they reached the high, flat meadows of Bridger Pass tomorrow evening. He’d have one more night to complete his task. He’d need it. Thanks to the mountain man and this one’s spineless incompetence, he had already fallen behind schedule.

  He picked up his binoculars to get a closer look at the camp. “I could have gotten rid of Defoe today. Maybe even that Greene woman if it weren’t for him.”

  His companion lacked his patience. The fidgeting was getting annoying. “I could have been on that bridge. It could have been me drowning in that river. Is that what you want?”

  “Calm yourself. You know what I want.” He lowered the binoculars. Even if the risks changed, his goal remained the same. “All we have to do is get rid of Mr. Kincaid, and everything will fall back into place.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Relax. Take a deep breath. There’s still a full day’s hike and another night ahead of us. If they last that long.” He let his gaze slide to the sheer drop-off behind him. There were easier routes to get to the meadows, but he’d made friends with a little C-4 explosive, and had kept abreast of the rock-slide and avalanche warnings. The erosion caves and wash-out gulleys that pockmarked this side of the mountain would make a much more interesting route for the group. “I’ve spotted his weaknesses.”

  “He doesn’t have any.” His companion halted as the light of comprehension dawned. “You mean her?”

  “Do exactly as I tell you and I promise you’ll be home counting your money a
nd gloating over our triumph in a matter of days. I’ll take care of my end of things. You take care of yours.” He pulled a neatly folded paper from his bag. “Here’s the note. And here’s this.” He handed over a small plastic box. “Be very careful. I trust you know what to do with it?”

  “You sure you don’t have something like this planned for me?”

  “You know I need your help to do this.” He smiled in a way that had never failed to put others at ease. He’d fooled all the others, he’d fool this simpleton, too. “We’ll be just fine. We’re a team, remember? No one suspects we’re in this together.”

  Rafe lay on top of his sleeping bag, looking up at the stars and listening to the mountain. He’d left his jeans on, but had draped the rest of his clothes over some rocks to dry beside the fire. He dozed on and off frequently enough that he’d pass for rested come morning. But even though his body ached with the physical strains of the day, he couldn’t find deep sleep.

  Sure, a part of him would always be on guard against whatever was out there—or closer to home—that wanted these people dead. But there was more to his restlessness than his years of training with the Watchers. There was more than Charles Defoe’s snoring or the music of the mountain after midnight that kept him awake.

  There was Hannah.

  Hannah Greene from Kansas with the mystical eyes that spoke more than words. The woman with the sweet, sweet lips and luscious body that didn’t know when to quit. The woman with more brains and guts than a dozen good men he could name.

  A woman had never kept him awake before. And yet, after little more than a couple of days, all he could think about was the sound of her voice, whispering to him with the same earthy magic as the mountain itself. All he could think about was her dangling over a rushing river by a single rope. All he could think about was that narrow black shelf beneath the water he’d had to swim into to free Charles Defoe, and how he’d crawled out to see Hannah on the shore, running to him, calling his name, caring about his hurts and fears. She’d unleashed a powerful need in him to claim her. To absorb her strength. To renew himself in her eager passion.