Kiss and Tell

by Cherry Adair

  As the words left his mouth he remembered the moment when she'd put her own life on the line by holding him until he could regain his balance. "That was a damn foolish thing you did, grabbing me like that. You could have fallen yourself."

  "Too bad I wasn't thinking that way. I just figured it would be tough for you to swim with broken bones."

  She hadn't taken a breath for that one. Jake stared at her. She couldn't work for the bad guys—unless she was their secret weapon, he thought morosely. "Let's go."

  "I'm quite capable of walking by myself, thank you."

  Jake felt as though he'd kicked a puppy for bringing him his slippers. Shit.

  "Fine. Let's see you do it, then. Those guys aren't going to wait forever before they try again."

  "They think we drowned. Why would they still come after us?"

  "They'll keep coming until they see my body. I don't plan on hanging around for a sighting, do you?" he bit out. "And just in case it slipped your notice, my weapon is floating somewhere downstream on its way to Sacramento."

  "Maybe you could just look at them and freeze them to death." She turned around smartly and marched ahead—dignity personified in saturated clothing, remnants of mud still streaking her face.

  Obviously danger was a turn-on for her. He understood only too well what she was experiencing. He got a high from the adrenaline rush, too. He also knew without a doubt this situation wasn't going to be a pleasant rush for him. Not this time. Because his wasn't the life he was playing chicken with.

  The burning question of the moment was which side these guys were on.

  Who had given the order to off him?

  The bad guys?

  Or, as he was starting to suspect, his own team?

  Chapter Six

  « ^ »

  Jake pulled himself up a rise using the same small fir tree for leverage as Marnie had. She was several paces ahead, back stiff, eyes straight ahead. Under her breath, very, very softly, she called for her dog.

  Jake came alongside her. "No talking. Sound carries."

  "You promised you'd keep my dog safe." She narrowed her eyes at him but kept her voice below a whisper. "I want her back. Now."

  "Too damn bad. Right now I'm trying to save our human asses. Keep walking."

  She gave a smart salute, spun on her booted heel, and trudged forward.

  Jake sensed no one around them as they scrambled for handholds on the steep, rocky incline. Not the dog, not the bad guys. The bastards were probably congratulating themselves on an easy job.

  Behind them the river, now swollen with the unexpected flood, rushed over boulders and swept trees and shrubs in its muddy wake. Soon it would be back to normal, but for now it was impossible to cross. Another barrier between them and civilization.

  Snow continued to fall as the sky darkened. The air was crisp and icy with the sharp scent of pine stinging his nostrils. Marnie's breath plumed as she grabbed at bushes to keep her balance. Jake worried about her wet clothes. They had to get to shelter before hypothermia set in. He had to get her safe and out of the line of fire before he could retaliate. Being reactive wasn't his style.

  Jake's skin burned with the cold. He hastened his steps, urging Marnie to a faster pace. The shadows lay long and cold on the ground now. It got dark fast in the mountains—faster with this snowstorm brewing. In fifteen minutes it would be blacker than pitch.

  The terrain varied extremely. One moment the going was soft and steeply inclined, the soil slippery with mud, moss, and pine needles; the next, stone broke through in outcrops or buried boulders. Both were treacherous.

  Jake closed the gap between them, ready to give her a hand if she needed it.

  He could see her hunched shoulders under her wet green parka. She had her hands jammed into her sodden pockets. And she was still frantically whispering for the damn dog.

  The bad guys might have failed to drown them, but if they didn't get to shelter soon, the mountain would take their lives in the darkness with silent snow. The air seemed to freeze his lungs. He pulled up the collar of his coat just as Marnie did the same, not that that would do much good.

  At least ten men, maybe more.

  Overkill.

  Jake pushed ahead with a frown. Why so many? It wasn't practical or logical. He was only one man. And it had been purely by chance that he'd had advance warning of their arrival at all. Whoever they were, they would have no way of knowing what his resources were up here.

  If he'd been safely in his lair, they wouldn't have known where to find him at all. Which led him to another question: How had they found him on this mountain in the first place? Only a handful of people had even known he owned property up here. The few that had were all dead now. And he would have staked his life that none of them would have divulged his whereabouts to anyone.

  Which brought him right back to the delectable Miss Marnie Wright and her unlikely presence.

  Marnie had forgotten how dark it got in the mountains. And cold. God, she was cold. The moon played coyly between the clouds, but at least it had stopped snowing.

  At the best of times she had an abysmal sense of direction. Up here, where every tree looked pretty much the same as the last, she was hopelessly lost. It didn't help her sense of direction much when she kept anticipating a bullet slamming into her spine.

  There'd been no sign of the bad guys. No shots, no voices. They'd walked for what seemed like hours.

  When she ran smack bang into a boulder, she stayed where she was, cheek resting against the cold stony face, arms limp at her sides.

  "I'd love you forever if you got us somewhere warm and dry, PDQ," she mumbled under her breath.

  "You're in luck," Jake said quietly, so close he barely had to raise his voice above a thought. "We're here."

  Here was an enormous outcrop of rocks, similar to the ones in the clearing where they'd been shot at earlier.

  Marnie dragged her cheek from the cold stone pillow to glance around. In the sharp moonlight she could see the little hairs on the back of his hand as he indicated the beginning of the formation.

  She frowned. "What am I looking at?" All she could see were the usual shrubs and a narrow wedge-shaped gap between the boulders. The opening was too narrow to squeeze through. Not that she had any desire to do so.

  "There's shelter back there. Come on." He extended his hand. "We have to climb a bit. You stopped shivering a while back—we've got to get dry and warm."

  "Didn't I just say that?" Marnie took his hand. His strong fingers closed securely around hers.

  Jake set one large foot in the crevice and pulled her up. She clambered after him. He turned, saw she was steady, and dropped her hand. She flattened her palms on the frigid surface, parallel to her shoulders, and imitated Jake as he braced a foot on either side and straddled the gap.

  It was slow going, but eventually the vee widened sufficiently for them to drop to the ground and walk normally. To the right and left loomed black, menacing rock faces, towering high above their heads. The scene gave the word claustrophobia new meaning.

  Ahead Marnie saw a narrow split in the mountainside. She gave it a dubious look. "What was this? A mine?"

  "Yeah, silver, back in the late eighteen hundreds. It was played out before this slide covered the entrance."

  "I'm not going down a hundred-year-old mine shaft."

  "Okay."

  "I'm serious, wh—" Marnie stepped on a hard object in the sand and paused to regain her balance. She looked down and felt herself pale. "Ah, Jake?"

  He didn't turn around, just kept walking. "What now?"

  "I just stepped on a bone," she said in as reasonable a tone as she could muster.

  Keeping her gaze fixed to the ground, she saw a trail of bones between Jake's boots and her own. Large bones. Bones that had been picked clean.

  Human bones?

  "Woman, do you want to freeze to death, or what? Move."

  "Jake, there's something in your cave."

  "He'll
move. Get the lead out, will you? I'm freezing my ass off."

  Marnie stepped over a single bone. "Do bears eat humans?" She sidestepped a small pile of bones gleaming white in the moonlight. A chill that had nothing to do with cold raced down her spine.

  "Only if provoked." At the mouth of the cave Jake turned to wait for her. She swore his lips twitched.

  "What about wolves?" Whatever animal had dined here had a voracious appetite. She flexed icy fingers. "Do you think they like their meat frozen?"

  Jake snorted. "The second any animal hears you coming, he'll be long gone." He gave her a look she couldn't fail to interpret. "Want to stand out here all night chatting about the haute cuisine of the animal kingdom, or do you want to get warm?"

  With a great deal of trepidation, Marnie followed him into the mine. The darkness swallowed her whole, and she grabbed the back of his jacket with both hands.

  "Steady there." Jake sounded amused, darn his hide, but he didn't slow down. Marnie had to keep up with his pace or lose her grip on the back of his jacket.

  Between the railroad tracks imbedded in the dirt floor were several more piles of bones. Marnie stepped over them quickly. She could have sworn she spotted two unblinking red eyes glaring at her from the distance.

  Her voice came out a wispy croak. "Jake. Jake? There's something in here with u—"

  A low, throaty growl rumbled through the cave.

  She shrieked, almost pulling Jake over backward as she clutched his jacket like a shield.

  The growls became louder. Deeper. Scarier.

  All the blood drained from Marnie's head. She'd worry about shrieking like a sissy later. Right now all she could manage was a small moan. The snarls changed pitch. While less amplified, they now sounded considerably more menacing.

  And a lot closer.

  "Jake… ?"

  "Relax," he said, sounding amused. "There's nothing in here but us. The sound effects are noise-activated. The second we stepped inside, the show started. Something I was fooling around with in my spare time." The amusement left his voice. "I never intended to have to actually use it."

  It was hard to talk with her heart still lodged in her throat. "There's no animal?"

  "Nope."

  The "no animal" growled low and long.

  Marnie mentally strung together several of her brothers' favorite curse words, then said reasonably. "Would you mind terribly much unplugging your imaginary pet? He's giving me the willies."

  "The growls were a nice touch, don't you think?"

  "I was thinking that whatever was in here would take ages gnawing on your tough hide, so I would have had plenty of time to get the hell out of Dodge."

  Jake shifted. The next minute he turned on a powerful flashlight.

  Marnie squinted against the sudden glare. "Where did that come from?" she demanded, leaning weakly against the jagged rock wall because her legs had turned to water.

  Still smiling, Jake held up a nasty-looking gun. "Same place as this."

  "Wipe that smile off your face this instant," she snarled, her hand covering her still frantically palpitating heart, "or I'll use that thing on you. What's going on? How did a flashlight and a gun suddenly appear out of thin air?"

  Jake shone the powerful beam on a control panel faux painted to look like rock and all but invisible against the wall. He opened the housing and deactivated his pet. Silence echoed down the tunnel.

  "I didn't want anyone in here but me. I figured the audio, coupled with the bones outside, would make an effective deterrent."

  "Trust me, Jake, it's very effective. Even knowing it's pretend, I still don't like being in here."

  Jake closed the control panel and resumed walking, the flashlight illuminating the narrow, roughly hewn corridor.

  She didn't grab the back of his jacket again, despite the urge to do so. Apparently the most dangerous animal in this tunnel was Jake Dolan.

  At a fork Jake turned right without slowing. The ceiling, a couple of feet above his head, looked solid enough. It was repulsively softened by cobwebs, which, by the size of them, housed Godzilla-sized spiders. There was no sign of the occupants, thank heavens.

  "What kind of spiders make such huge webs?" she asked, trying to sound casual as she came up beside him.

  "I made them."

  "You are one strange man, you know that?" Marnie ignored the webs to shoot a skeptical glance at the heavy wood beams, which presumably supported the entire mountain resting above the mineshaft. The image of an elephant sitting on upright toothpicks didn't instill her with confidence.

  "So this creepy mine shaft is just for effect? You have nice strong steel supports holding everything up?"

  "Nope, the beams are the originals."

  "I'm sure the historical society would be thrilled to know that." A few of the cross struts they passed looked to be in fairly reasonable shape. Insects, animals, or time, however, had chomped on the rest. The air, while considerably warmer than outside, was stale and damp.

  Jake walked so fast Marnie almost had to run to keep up. "They won't find this place, will they?"

  "In the unlikely event they do, I have a few more tricks up my sleeve."

  "Duchess couldn't find her way inside here, either."

  "Your dog's a whole hell of a lot smarter than a lot of humans I know. She'll find us."

  When the light illuminated a sturdy metal door, Marnie wasn't surprised. Dully she watched Jake flatten his hand on a pad embedded in the rock. Seconds later the door slid open without a sound.

  Marnie followed into another long passage that sloped steeply downhill. As the door whooshed closed behind them, small, dim bulbs every ten feet or so lit up to illuminate their way.

  Jake deposited both gun and flashlight on a shoulder-high ledge beside the door. He gave her a searching glance before striding off again.

  Wet boots dragging, Marnie followed. The air seemed fresher, not as cold, and the rock walls were smoother, too. Exhaustion dragged at her like a drug.

  She'd had a tree fall on her cabin, hiked a zillion mountain miles, been shot at, survived a perilous near-death experience under a tsunami, and braved a woman-eating, computer-generated wild beast. It was enough.

  Other than the crunch of their footsteps, there was nothing but throbbing silence. Marnie found it unnerving. Her boots weighed a ton. Her eyelids felt scritchy, and she wanted to lie down so badly, she was prepared to do so on the sandy floor.

  "This is a nightmare, isn't it? It's that canned chili I ate for breakfast."

  "Almost there." Jake turned to get a good look at her. It wasn't surprising that she was about to keel over. She was crashing from the adrenaline high. He couldn't believe she'd made it this far. Her hair had dried into a wild tangle around her parchment-pale, mud-streaked face. Her shoulders were hunched; her eyes were glazed, and bruised by fatigue.

  Despite the bulk of her jacket, she looked fragile. He remembered vividly why that should totally nullify any arousal he might feel for her. Might? Hell, he imagined what she'd look like naked. Warm and naked. Under him naked. Satiated and naked.

  Damn it. I'd better get a grip here. He cleared his throat.

  She frowned. "Are you all right?"

  He craved his bottle of Crown Royal. The whole bottle. No glass. No ice. "Couldn't be better. You?"

  She didn't answer.

  He strode back to her. She just stood there, her eyes heavy-lidded and sleepy, her arms hanging limply at her side.

  "Want me to carry you?" he asked gruffly.

  "Yes."

  Surprised by her easy acquiescence, Jake picked her up. She wasn't as light as she looked. Marnie wrapped her arms about his neck, and her head flopped onto his chest.

  "Run out of juice?" Impossible. She'd still be chatting if she were fast asleep.

  "Yeah, somewhere between extinction by drowning and termination by your imaginary friend."

  He grunted and continued walking. Her hair tickled his nose. Her heavy hiking boots thumped h
is thigh with each step he took, and despite the bulk of her jacket, he could feel the underside of her breast.

  "Mmmm, this is nice."

  Yeah. It's great. Just freaking great.

  She stroked a light finger along the ridge of scar tissue at the base of his throat. The fairy-light touch shot like a rocket to his groin.

  "Who did this to you?" Marnie whispered, her breath warm, and annoying, on his neck. "Someone like those guys out there?"

  "No." Thank you, God, for the reminder. "Someone a lot more dangerous. A sweet-faced blonde with big, innocent blue eyes and a wicked knife with her initials engraved on the hilt." Long after the physical wound had healed he'd felt the sharp bite of betrayal.

  "A woman did this to you?"

  I did this to me, Jake reminded himself. "Oh, she wielded the knife. But I was the dumb bastard who let her get close enough to use it."

  "That's terrible."

  "That's freaking terminally stupid."

  "No, I mean that it was—"

  "No talking." Jake cut her off as they came to a dead end. In the unlikely event anyone got this far, they'd find it the end of the line. The door before them contained an impenetrable titanium shield.

  It was fortunate the elevator utilized a retinal scan, as his hands were full of woman. Jake paused just long enough for the device to recognize him. The door slid open soundlessly, then just as silently closed behind them.

  He thought she'd fallen asleep, but she said quietly against his throat, "We aren't moving."

  "We're going down."

  "Is that a Bond, James Bond thing?" she asked, voice slurred by exhaustion, eyes closed. "Like in the movies?" She deepened her voice. "We're going down, Guido, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it."

  Jake couldn't help the chuckle. Damn. She never ran out of juice. "We're in an elevator."

  "Ah. How far dow—"

  "Phoenix two-two-one-two-zero clear." Jake waited a beat for the door to glide open, then stepped into his lair.

  He'd never brought anyone down here. No one even knew of its existence. Too late now for second thoughts.

  He was taking a risk. A huge risk. If it was the wrong choice, one of them would end up dead.