Trusting a Stranger

by Melinda Di Lorenzo

  For one second, she looked offended.

  But her eyes were already growing glassy and unfocused. Graham took the cup from her hands and placed it on the tray, opened the vodka, dabbed it onto the square of fabric and reached for the wound on her leg.

  Keira batted at his hand, and when Graham frowned irritably, she just giggled and threaded her fingers through his. Startled, Graham didn’t pull away immediately. Instead, he stared down, admiring the way her hand looked in his. Small and delicate. Soft and comfortable. In fact, it fit there. Just the way she’d fit in his lap.

  “Hey...Mountain Man?”

  Graham dragged his gaze up to hers. Her eyes were far too serious.

  “You’re not exactly my type,” she said. “But if—if—I went for the angry, brooding hero kinda thing. I’d pick you.” She paused, frowned a little, then added, “I don’t think I meant to say that out loud. Am I drunk?”

  She wobbled a little, almost slipping from the bed. Graham caught her. He eased her back onto the bed, smoothed back the mop of hair from her face and waited for her eyes to close.

  Chapter Seven

  Keira woke slowly, feeling slightly unwell.

  Which should have alerted her to the fact that something was wrong even before she remembered where she was and how she got there.

  She’d always been a morning person, awake and ready to go before the coffeepot finished brewing. When she’d lived at home with her parents, she and her dad got up at the crack of dawn. The two of them often watched the sun rise together. Then he would read the paper while she made breakfast for her mom, who would get up a solid hour after they did.

  Keira valued those early hours, and when she’d finished her degree three years earlier and taken a job in social work, moving into her own place, she continued with the rise-before-dawn ritual.

  So if she felt sluggish, as she did right at that moment, she was either hungover or seriously sick.

  Which is it now? Keira wondered, somehow unable to recall quite what she’d been up to.

  Then she pried her eyes open, and the sight of the cabin sent a surge of recollection and panic through her. A half a dozen thoughts accompanied the memory.

  Calloway and his cider. Calloway, holding her hand, easing her back onto the bed.

  And worse...Keira telling Calloway he wasn’t her type.

  Keira blushed furiously as she recalled the last few moments before she passed out. She’d been distracted by the way his palm felt over top of her hand. It was warm. Warmer even than the mug. And rough in a way she’d never experienced before. If she took the time to think about—which she now realized she hadn’t—she supposed that Drew’s hands were probably soft from the hours he spent sitting in an office and the occasional indulgence of a MANicure.

  But not Calloway’s. He had calluses on top of calluses, and Keira had had a sudden vision of him actually wielding an ax. Chopping wood for this very toasty fire. Topless. Because even in the snowy woods, that kind of manual labor worked up a serious sweat.

  And there was no denying the potentially romantic ambience.

  Secluded location. Check.

  Tall, dark and handsome stranger. Check.

  The gentle crackle of a fire. Check.

  So maybe it wasn’t that she couldn’t recall what she’d been up to. Maybe it was that she hadn’t wanted to remember it.

  Clearly, what she needed was a minute to collect her thoughts and assess her surroundings. So she held very still and took stock of everything she could.

  She was on her side, lying with her back pushed to the wall and her hands tucked under a pillow. She had a blanket wrapped around her, but there was an empty space beside her. The last bit made Keira swallow nervously. There was no denying that the spot was just the right size to hold a big, burly man.

  Had he slept beside her?

  Keira’s face warmed again—both with embarrassment and irritation—at the thought.

  Somehow, lying in the bed beside him seemed much more taboo than curling up beside him in a desperate attempt to keep warm postaccident in a snowstorm.

  Still without moving, she scanned the limited area that she could see, hoping to find proof that she hadn’t actually spent the whole night cuddled up next to Calloway. But it was a one-room deal—not huge, not small—with a table and chairs in one corner, and the still-burning woodstove in another. She supposed the bed where she lay was in a third corner. So, unless the fourth and final corner was home to a recliner or a second lumpy mattress, her fears were true.

  She’d officially slept with the Mountain Man.

  An inappropriate giggle almost escaped her lips as she pictured telling her best friend that she had no problem getting past the failed, so-called sign that was supposed to lead her to Drew. At all. She’d simply climbed into bed with the next man she met instead.

  Keira knew her cheeks were still red, and she was glad Calloway wasn’t there to see her reaction. If just the idea of sharing a bed with him made her feel so squirmy, actually confronting him about it would be a nightmare.

  Where was he anyway?

  “Calloway?” she called.

  Keira wasn’t expecting a spoken reply from the thus far mute man, but she did half anticipate his looming presence to step from some hidden alcove so he could stare down at her with that smirk on his face. But right that second, the cabin was completely silent. Which wasn’t too terrible, considering the dull ache in her temple. The rest of her hurt, too, and she wondered if she needed medical attention beyond that of a serving of liquored-up cider, a questionable dose of penicillin and the makeshift care of a bona fide mountain man.

  She pushed herself to a sitting position, and was pleased that her head didn’t spin and that the ache eased off a little. But when she stood, her legs shook, and she realized she was still far weaker than she was used to. With a dejected sigh, she glanced around the room in search of something that would approximate a crutch. She spied a fire iron beside the stove, decided it would do and hobbled toward it.

  Maybe there was something in the cabin itself that would answer her questions. She took another slow look around the single-room cabin.

  Most of what she saw appeared to be pretty basic. The kitchen contained a wraparound cupboard, an ancient icebox and a rubber bin full of cast-iron pots.

  She walked over and opened the icebox. It held the required slab of ice, several flat, wrapped packages that looked like steaks and—

  “Beer?” Keira said out loud, surprised.

  Calloway seemed more like the moonshine type than Bud Light. But there it was anyway. She closed the icebox and moved on to the cupboards. She didn’t know what she thought she’d find, but it definitely wasn’t instant hot chocolate and packaged macaroni and cheese. A bag of oatmeal cookies peeked out from behind a stack of canned soup.

  So he wasn’t that much of a survivalist after all.

  As Keira let her gaze peruse the cabin a third time, she took note of some of the more modern accoutrements.

  Sure, there was no television or microwave, but there was a dartboard and a current calendar and a digital alarm clock. A stainless-steel coffee mug sat on one windowsill, and a signed and mounted baseball adorned another.

  For all intents and purposes, it was a middle-of-nowhere man cave. Minus the requisite electronics, of course.

  Her curiosity grew.

  Keira took a few more steps and banged straight into a dusty cardboard box, knocking it and its contents to the ground.

  Dammit.

  She reached down to clean it up. And paused.

  A notebook—no, a scrapbook—lay open on the floor. An ominous headline popped up from one of the newspaper clippings glued to its page.

  Heiress and Son Gunned Down in Ruthless Slaying.

  A gruesome c
rime scene was depicted in black-and-white below the caption, and Keira’s fingers trembled as she reached for the book. She flipped backward a few pages.

  Home Invasion Turns Deadly. And a photo of a tidy house on a wide lot.

  She flipped forward.

  Debt and Divorce. Police Close in on Suspect in Henderson Double Murder. A grainy shot of a short-haired man covering his face with the lapel of his suit jacket.

  Something about the last headline struck Keira as familiar, and she frowned down at the page, trying to figure out if it was a case she’d heard about. She scanned the article. It was enticingly vague, just the kind of sensationalist journalism that baited the reader into buying the next edition. The suspect was listed as someone close to the victims and the words unexpected twist were used three times that she could see with just her quick perusal, making her think the “twist” was probably not “unexpected” at all, but that the reporter wanted to play it up anyway.

  Then she clued in.

  Derby Reach.

  A chill rocked Keira’s body. It wasn’t just a familiar case. It was the case. The affluent community where she’d grown up, home to doctors, lawyers and judges—like her father—had been blown away by the double murder.

  Keira remembered the day it occurred, but embarrassingly, not because of the tragedy itself. She’d met Drew that day. While the neighbors stood on their porches, gawking and gossiping, Drew had been walking through the street, totally clueless, as he searched for an open house he’d been booked in to view. She’d been the one to explain to him why no one was thinking about real estate at that moment. And his casual romantic pursuit of Keira started the moment he knocked on her parents’ door by accident.

  Now Keira wished she’d paid more attention to what was happening in her own backyard.

  But why did Calloway have the scrapbook in his house? What connection could a man like him have with a wealthy socialite’s death?

  With the book still in her hands, Keira took a cautious, wobbly step back to the window.

  Across the snowy yard stood Calloway. In spite of the subzero temperature, he hadn’t bothered zipping up his coat. The wind kicked up for a second, tossing his thick hair and ruffling his beard. Calloway didn’t seem to notice at all.

  As Keira squinted through the glass, she frowned. A narrow figure in full protective gear—helmet, fur-lined hood, thick Gore-Tex pants and knee-high boots—stood facing Calloway, his hand resting on a parked snowmobile. Something about the way the two men faced each other made Keira nervous. And as she tried to puzzle out the source of her distinct but unspecific unease, the wind changed and a loud voice carried in her direction.

  “I’ve had a change of plans.”

  The breath Keira had been holding came out with a wheeze, and she stumbled back in surprise.

  Calloway.

  It was he who’d spoken.

  Even though he’d turned so that his back was to her and he was blocking her view of the other man, Keira knew it was him. The deep, gravelly nature of the voice couldn’t have suited him more perfectly.

  Keira pressed her face almost right against the glass, and gasped again, this time not at Calloway. The other man had a gun, hooked menacingly to his side.

  Keira took a step back. Her head spun. She needed to get away. From Calloway and his armed friend.

  “My phone,” she murmured, then looked toward the window again as she remembered.

  It was in the pocket of the coat Calloway wore right that second.

  Chapter Eight

  The silence of the woods, combined with his habitual alertness, usually gave Graham plenty of notice whenever someone got even close to near to the cabin. More often than not, he could hear them for miles out.

  This afternoon had been an exception.

  A stupid exception, considering you knew he was coming.

  But Graham had spent the whole night lying awake beside the girl, worrying about every pause in her inhales and exhales, overthinking every shift of her body, and second-guessing both his stitching job and his decision to ply her with the booze.

  Was the fishing line too coarse to be effective? Were the stitches evenly spaced? Would the alcohol worsen the side effects of her concussion?

  Graham had been so distracted by his concern that he didn’t hear the approaching snowmobile until it was so close he could actually look outside and see it. He’d barely had time to close the door behind him before the man in front of him—who was currently struggling to unfasten his helmet—parked his vehicle at the edge of the house.

  Graham worked at fixing something like a smile on his face.

  As much as he trusted and relied on Dave Stark, he had a feeling that the girl’s presence might jar the man’s loyalty. It was one thing for the two of them to keep Graham’s hideout a secret—adding an innocent unknown would be a whole different story.

  So Graham stood with his hands in his jeans’ pockets and waited with as much patience as he could muster for the familiar man to unclip and remove his helmet, and was careful to keep his gaze forward. He didn’t let his eyes flick worriedly toward the cabin. Toward her.

  The other man finally got his helmet free, and when he whipped it off, Graham frowned. A deep purple bruise darkened one of Stark’s eyes, and a long abrasion led from his left eyebrow to the corner of his lip. He seemed indifferent to the damage.

  Graham gave the other man’s appearance a second, more scrutinizing once-over. Even aside from his injuries, he did look unusually worse for wear. His jacket was dirty and torn in a few places. When he turned slightly, the cold sun glinted off a metallic object at his waist.

  A pistol.

  Graham’s eyes skimmed over it, then went back to Dave’s face. Never before had his friend seen a need to bring a gun to the cabin. He wasn’t brandishing the weapon, but he wasn’t trying to disguise its presence, either. There was something about the way he wore it that Graham didn’t like.

  “What the hell’s going on?”

  “I was about to ask you the same thing,” Stark countered.

  “Me? I’m not the one who looks like he just rolled out of a bar fight.”

  Dave shrugged. “Occupational hazard. You wanna tell me what you meant by ‘change of plans’?”

  “I meant that I’ll make my own way into town.”

  Dave couldn’t hide his surprise. Or the hint of fear in his eyes.

  “Why would you do that?” he wanted to know.

  “Few loose ends to tie up.”

  “Four years, we’ve been waiting for this. You’ve sunk every available penny into finding the man. What loose ends could possibly—” The other man cut himself off and narrowed his eyes shrewdly. “What’s this about?”

  Graham held his gaze steady. “I can’t just walk away from this setup, Dave. If things go south with Mike Ferguson, I need to know that my space isn’t in danger of being compromised.”

  Dave sighed. “It’s already compromised.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Been an accident up on the road that comes in from the resort town,” Dave replied. “Happened to catch it on the radio right before I left town. Car went over a cliff yesterday. Burned to a crisp. Couldn’t even get a discernable VIN.”

  A dark chill crept up Graham’s spine. “Not sure what a car accident’s got to do with me. Or you, for that matter.”

  Dave’s eyes strayed to the cabin. “You wanna rethink that?”

  Graham refused to follow the other man’s gaze. “Why? I’ve been up here four years and nothing has ever turned the radar my way.”

  “Is this how you want to play? Because if you can’t trust me...”

  It was Graham’s turn to let out a breath. He trusted Dave about as much as he trusted anyone.

  Which isn’t muc
h at all.

  But there was no way he was admitting that. The man had been his best friend for two decades, and the only person he could count on for the past few of those.

  “Explain it to me, then,” Graham said instead. “Tell me how the accident affects me.”

  “I know cops, my friend. That radio chatter—it’s suspicious. They think the burn was a little too perfect.”

  “So?”

  “So, the only thing I know better than cops is you. And I know exactly what was going through your head yesterday when we talked on the radio. You were champing at the bit to get to Ferguson. I spent the whole day assuming you’d show up at the resort and that I’d have to hold you back. So I think maybe you did leave the cabin yesterday. And I think maybe something stopped you. Something that started out as a vehicle and ended up as a burned-up piece of trash.”

  “The road is forty miles from here. You think I could’ve trekked through that and made it back here already?”

  Dave shook his head. “I don’t think you took the traditional route. The back way is only ten miles. Really rough terrain. But again...this is you we’re talking about, isn’t it? You’ve never done things the easy way.”

  Graham refused to take the bait. “The road is the last place I want to be. So I’m still not seeing what the accident has to do with me.”

  “It wasn’t just a little crash. They’re going to be looking for answers. And this isn’t all that far to look. Come with me now. Unless you have some other reason for staying...”

  As Dave trailed off, all the hair on the back of Graham’s neck stood up.

  “Get on your snowmobile, Dave,” he replied, just short of a growl. “I’ll come to you when I’m ready.”

  “C’mon, Graham—”

  “Now, Dave.”

  “All right. This is your deal.”

  The other man slipped on his helmet, swung one leg over his snowmobile, then flipped up his protective visor and met Graham’s cool stare.

  “One other thing,” he said. “She’s a neighbor.”