Boneyard Ridge

by Paula Graves

  He pulled open a drawer and handed her a manual can opener.

  “Oh, we’re going old-school.”

  “No, old-school would be an awl and a hammer.” He slanted her an amused look. “You’ve been away from the hills too long, Ms. Marsh.”

  “What makes you think I was ever in the hills?”

  He turned to look at her, a hint of payback glittering in his light eyes. “Scars on your legs, the kind you get from shinning up trees and climbing rocky hills. Your nails are—were—perfectly manicured, but you can’t hide the scars on your knuckles or that rope-burn scar on your palm. You’ve worked with those hands. Used them for more than typing.” He was ticking off the clues in the same way she’d added up her conclusions about his time in the military, she noted with a mix of irritation and grudging appreciation.

  “And no matter how high-priced an accent you’ve adopted, you still slip into a mountain twang now and then.”

  She closed her eyes to shut out the sight of him, wishing she could make him disappear as easily. All her hard work to completely erase her former life, and he’d seen through her in hours. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Right.” He took the can opener out of her nerveless fingers and opened the can of chicken and dumplings.

  But her appetite had fled. “I think I’m too tired to eat,” she said quietly, already moving out of the kitchen.

  His hand closed around her wrist, pulling her to a halt. “A minute ago you were hungry enough to eat this stuff, can and all.”

  “Let me go.”

  He released her wrist. “Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  Damn him, she thought. “I just spent three hours running from men with guns who want me dead. I’m being held captive in a backwoods cabin by a former soldier who won’t tell me his last name. What kind of trouble could I possibly be in?”

  His lips thinned to a flat line. “You should eat something. You’ll sleep better.”

  He was right. She knew he was right. Even though her appetite was gone, her body still needed fuel, especially after her adrenaline-fed mountain hike. Relenting, she sat in one of the kitchen chairs and rested her chin on her hand, watching as he turned his attention to heating the soup.

  When he was done, he poured the chicken and dumplings into the two bowls and carried them to the table where she sat, sliding one in front of her. He took a couple of spoons from a nearby drawer and handed her one. “Careful. It’s hot.”

  She stirred the creamy soup before dipping up a spoonful and blowing to cool it. She noticed he wasn’t eating any of his own soup. “Not hungry?”

  He dropped his spoon back in the bowl. “No.”

  She threw his own words back at him. “You should eat something. You’ll sleep better.”

  He leaned back in the chair, his chin dropping to his chest as he eyed her through a fringe of dark lashes. He looked tired. Despondent. And for the first time since he’d dragged her into the woods that night, she was beginning to believe his story.

  Nobody could feign the kind of misery she saw in those green eyes.

  * * *

  THE RAIN ENDED OVERNIGHT, and a watery dawn seeped its way through the thicket of evergreens surrounding the cabin and slanted across Hunter’s face, tugging him out of a light sleep.

  He hadn’t thought he’d sleep at all, given his hyperalertness when he’d finally tried to lie down and doze the night before. But after a while, even his Army training had been no match for the bone-deep weariness that had come from so much exertion after so many months of relative inactivity.

  For the past couple of months, he’d been spending as much time as he could in the gym Quinn had set up in what had once been the root cellar of the old Victorian mansion that housed The Gates. The dirt floor and walls had been reinforced with concrete and softened by a springy gym floor and, in places, spongy mats where one of the agents, Sutton Calhoun, put the agents through a series of hand-to-hand combat drills to keep their skills honed to a razor edge.

  Calhoun was a former Marine, another mountain boy, hailing from one of the roughest parts of the county, Smoky Ridge. The place where dreams not only went to die but to die in a spectacularly bloody and painful fashion, as Calhoun had put it one afternoon during a no-holds-barred combat drill.

  “Stop feeling sorry for yourself, soldier,” Calhoun had barked in his best drill-sergeant tone, throwing Hunter back to the floor and daring him to get back up.

  Rubbing the ache in his shoulders, where the heavy rucksack had taken a toll, Hunter wished he could go another round with Calhoun again. His time undercover with the BRI hadn’t done much for his stamina. For all their military posturing, the BRI was a militia in name only. They had some tough and very dangerous members, but those men dealt in guns, knives and bombs, not hand-to-hand combat.

  He pushed himself up from the sofa and padded barefoot down the short hallway to the bathroom, listening for sounds from the nearby bedroom. The door was closed, the house silent except for the hum of electricity coursing through the walls and the sound of his bare feet on the hardwood floor. He winced a little as the bathroom door creaked while closing behind him, hoping it wouldn’t disturb Susannah’s sleep.

  If she’d managed to get any sleep at all.

  She might not be the spoiled little city girl he’d assumed, but it wasn’t likely she’d ever found herself on this end of a manhunt before.

  As he stepped out of the bathroom a few moments later, the bedroom door opened as well and Susannah stepped out into the hallway, turning to face him. She was dressed in the jeans and sweater he’d provided the night before, though her hair was freshly brushed and pulled back into a sleek ponytail. “I borrowed a rubber band from your dresser drawer.”

  “Welcome to it.” He stepped out of her way, nodding toward the bathroom. “All yours.”

  “I used it earlier.” Her eyes were winter-gray this morning, the dim light of the hallway dilating her pupils until only a fleck of hazel showed in her pale irises. “You have any eggs in the fridge? I could whip up an omelet.”

  He wasn’t sure he trusted her sudden easy friendliness. She’d been downright combative most of the previous evening, and he doubted a night in a strange place, spent under the constant fear of discovery, would have altered her mood so completely.

  So she was up to something.

  But what?

  “No eggs. I wasn’t sure when I’d be back here, so I didn’t stock any perishables.”

  Her dark eyebrows ticked upward, and he could tell by the flicker of her eyelids that she was processing the meaning behind his words. He could almost hear her thoughts, the complex calculations winnowed down to the basics: he planned ahead, but not far. And this bolt-hole, while well-equipped for the purpose of lying low, hadn’t been his first choice.

  He hadn’t thought he’d need a place to hide her, if she wanted to know the truth. He’d planned to stop the plot without her ever having to know that she was on the BRI’s target list.

  This cabin had been a different sort of hiding place. Not from specific threats like Billy Dawson and his ragtag crew of soldier wannabes but from the world in general.

  But from a life that had stopped making sense over a year ago on a dust-dry road in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan.

  “So, no milk for cereal, either?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Peanut butter and a spoon?” She punctuated the question with a toothy smile that sucker punched him straight in the gut with a lust so acute, so raw that he almost doubled over from the impact.

  He nearly took a step toward her, nearly closed the narrow gap between their bodies before he had a chance to think past the pounding drumbeat of desire rattling his bones and fogging his brain.

  “Yeah,” he managed, turning away before he did something stupid. “There’s peanut butter. And you know what? I think there may be a loaf of bread in the freezer. You could toast it.” He waved her toward the kitchen while he crossed
the room in three limping strides and made a show of looking through the drapes that covered the four glass panes of the back door, even though he expected to see nothing more than morning sunlight dappling the fallen leaves that littered the tiny clearing around the cabin.

  “Want some?” She was making busy noises at the counter behind him.

  “Sure.”

  “Got any jelly?”

  “Check the fridge.” Frost covered the leaves and grass outside, a grim reminder of how close they’d come to spending the night in a cave instead of this cozy, heated cabin. If she’d succeeded in running away from him, he couldn’t have given up the hunt. Not when she was out there somewhere, barefoot and running for her life.

  “Mmm, peach preserves.”

  He glanced over his shoulder and found Susannah watching him with sharp eyes. Her gaze softened immediately when she saw him looking, but not before he caught the feral wariness in her expression.

  No, she hadn’t dropped her guard a bit. But clearly she wanted him to think she had.

  Why? So he’d drop his?

  “This is home-canned, isn’t it?” she asked brightly, giving the Mason jar lid a strong twist.

  “I think so.” Janet had helped stock the place, overruling his protest by assuring him that staying busy helping him get situated was a much better use of her time than sitting home worrying about what a Ridge County judge was going to decide about her fate.

  Susannah looked around the kitchen, her gaze settling first on the brightly colored pot holders hanging from a hook on the wall, then at the sunny yellow curtains hanging on the windows and the door. “Girlfriend?”

  His gaze snapped up to meet hers. “Sister.”

  “Oh.” She gave a slight nod, then turned as the first pair of bread slices popped up from the toaster. “So, no girlfriend?”

  “No,” he answered, trying to figure out if she was really curious or if the question was another attempt to set him at ease. If so, she’d picked the wrong topic.

  “Boyfriend?”

  Wary or not, he couldn’t stop a grin at that question. “No.”

  She shrugged and turned back to the counter to put two more slices of bread in the toaster. “You never know.”

  He stepped up behind her, noting how her body stiffened slightly as she felt his body heat wash over her. But she didn’t flinch, didn’t show any other sign of awareness, save for the slightest tremble of her fingers when she picked up a butter knife from the counter and dipped it into the open jar of peanut butter.

  “What about you?” he asked in a low tone, bending close enough that his breath stirred the tawny hair curling in front of her ear. Definitely a natural blonde, he thought as a glint of morning sunlight stole through the narrow gap of the kitchen curtains to glimmer like gold in the pale hair closest to her scalp.

  She turned around suddenly, catching him off guard. He grabbed the counter to keep from stumbling backward, and the move drew him even closer to her, so close that his hips brushed against hers.

  Her lips trembled apart, but she didn’t drop her gaze, staring up at him with fire in those winter-pale eyes.

  “What do you really want?” she asked.

  A thousand answers flooded his brain, most of them so intimate, so unsayable that for a moment, he felt as if he’d been struck dumb.

  But the fog cleared almost as quickly as it had arisen, and with an almost preternatural clarity, he knew that only one answer would suffice.

  The truth.

  “Absolution,” he said in a voice as raw as a wound.

  Chapter Seven

  There was no nuance to the word. No hint that Hunter was yanking her chain or making a joke. Just a ragged-edged openness that burrowed like an ache in the center of her chest.

  She fought the terrifying urge to cry and plastered on a mask of a smile. “Fresh out of absolution, sugar.”

  He withdrew his comforting heat from her, and the morning chill swept in to take its place. “I’d like to hike over to Bitterwood and see if I can pick up any news about your disappearance, but I don’t like leaving you alone here.”

  “Afraid someone will find me while you’re gone?”

  Keeping his careful distance from her, he glanced over his shoulder and met the challenge of her gaze. “Afraid you’ll bug out while I’m gone.”

  “I thought I wasn’t a prisoner.”

  “You’re not. That doesn’t mean I want you to leave. At least, not until I can figure out what the BRI are planning to do next.”

  “How’re you going to do that?” Alarm fluttered in her belly. “You’re not thinking you’re going to just walk into the next planning meeting and pretend you had nothing to do with what happened last night, are you?”

  “I’m not sure anyone saw me well enough to recognize me.”

  She took a couple of steps toward him before she realized what she was doing. She drew her hand back, but not before her fingertips brushed his bare forearm.

  He gave her a look so scorching she felt something inside catch flame and spread until her skin felt hot and tight beneath his gaze. She made herself look away from him, but the fire didn’t die. It just continued to smolder low in her belly.

  She didn’t trust him. Didn’t particularly like him.

  But apparently, she wouldn’t mind wrapping herself around him and riding him like a cowboy on a wild mustang, as her grandmother used to say when she didn’t know Susannah was listening.

  Well, hell.

  She somehow managed to find her voice and the unraveling threads of their conversation. “You can’t chance it. If they did see you last night, they’re as likely to shoot you dead before you open your mouth as not, right?”

  “Probably,” he conceded. He took care not to look at her this time, and she supposed he didn’t care for all this sexual electricity zipping and zapping around them any more than she did. “I wasn’t going to go stick my head in the lion’s den or anything. Just thought I could try to touch base with my boss and see if he’s heard anything about what happened last night.”

  He kept talking about his boss. What boss? Was he seriously still trying to convince her he was working some undercover angle and was actually on her side?

  What kind of idiot did he think she was?

  She decided to play along, for now, however. No need to antagonize the man who had her held captive, for all intents and purposes. “Do you think it’s possible nobody heard the gunshots?”

  He shook his head. “They weren’t using sound suppressors. The noise would have carried to the hotel.”

  “But there were only night staff on duty. And the employee parking lot is some distance from the hotel.” The more she thought about it, the more possible it seemed that the incident had passed without anyone heading down to the parking lot to see what was going on. “The woods are close, and people do go hunting out here at night, sometimes. I’ve heard the security guys complain about it, but they’re not conservation officers, so they don’t actually go out to look for the perpetrators. Most of the time they don’t even report the gunfire—”

  “They’ll look into it when you don’t show up for work this morning,” he said with grim certainty.

  “So, maybe I should show up for work.”

  His gaze snapped up to meet hers. “No.”

  “It would throw your merry band of domestic terrorists for a loop, wouldn’t it? If I showed up for work like nothing was wrong?”

  “And give them a second chance to kill you?” He closed the distance between them swiftly, all semblance of restraint gone. He caught her upper arms in his first tight grip, drawing her gaze to his. His eyes blazed with intensity, plucking her taut nerves until her whole body vibrated from the cacophony.

  “You said I’m not your prisoner.”

  “I never said I was going to let you go back there to be killed.” His grip on her arms tightened to the edge of pain. “Listen to me. I nearly didn’t get to you in time. So many things could have gone very, v
ery wrong last night and we’re damn lucky they didn’t. You’re safe here. We’ve bought time to figure out what to do next. You can’t throw it all away by being pigheaded and stupid.”

  She jerked her arms from his grasp. “Pigheaded and stupid?”

  He scraped his hand through his hair, his fingers tangling in the dark mass of waves. For a second, he seemed comically surprised by the snag, confirming for Susannah her theory that he’d worn his hair military short not so very long ago.

  He met her gaze again, but in a sidelong way, like a puppy who’d been caught chewing up a pair of $800 Jimmy Choos. “Strong-willed and recklessly brave?”

  “Better,” she relented, trying not to smile. If she smiled, she’d have to consider the notion that she liked him as well as found him smoking hot, and, well, here be monsters, matey.

  “Will you stay here and stay put if I hike over the hill to Bitterwood?” he asked after a long, tense moment of silence.

  “What do you plan to do there?”

  “Just drop in at the diner in town, put my ear to the ground and see what shakes loose.”

  “What if someone recognizes you?”

  “Not too many people in Bitterwood know who I am anymore,” he said in a vague tone that suggested he wasn’t really sure he was telling the truth.

  “But they did once?”

  His gaze slithered away. “Not really.”

  She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Okay. I’ll stay put. Just don’t be long. And don’t get caught.”

  “I’ll do my best.” He nodded at the toast that had grown cold and hard while they talked. “Meanwhile, you can eat your cold toast and think of me and a plate full of Maisey Ledbetter’s hot buttered biscuits and gravy.”

  “You’re such a tool.” She picked up one of the pieces of toast and threw it at him as he ducked out of the kitchen, heading for the front of the house.

  The second pair of bread slices popped up out of the toaster, and she snagged them before they could cool down, telling herself as she munched the peanut butter-and-jelly-slathered toast that she didn’t envy Hunter’s oh-so-fattening biscuit-and-gravy breakfast one little bit.