Hunted

by Karen Robards

  “Oh, shit.” Even to someone as hard of hearing as Reed currently was, Holly sounded terrified. But he did as he was told, picking up his side of the can just as Reed did—one hand on the handle, one hand on the can’s bottom—and taking off on cue. Seconds later they burst through a door into the side yard on the opposite end of the house from the pool.

  “Run,” Reed growled at Holly, and they did.

  The inky glimmer of the lake stretched out seemingly endlessly beyond the lush landscaping that marked the edge of the property. Lugging the can a little awkwardly between them, he and Holly galloped straight toward the cops who had been deployed around the mansion to form a perimeter designed to keep him—and Holly—from escaping. Behind them, explosions could still be heard coming from the house. Smoke billowed skyward in vast plumes of pale gray feathers. The air smelled of sulfur. Shouts and sirens and what sounded like gunfire (could still have been the M-800s for all Reed knew) and all kinds of other noisy commotion created an atmosphere of pure bedlam. The perimeter line, which Reed was certain had just a couple of minutes before been as stalwart and steadfast as any police commander could have wished, was now ragged. The cops had broken ranks. Some ran toward the house, weapons drawn. Others stayed in place, clearly uncertain where their duties lay, attention focused on the chaos unfolding in front of them. Pounding straight toward the onrushing cops and what was left of the perimeter line, acutely aware that he and Holly were coming under the scrutiny of many armed men whose job it was to catch them, conscious, too, of the weight of the garbage can and Holly’s panting terror as he held up its other side, Reed sent one more prayer winging skyward and employed his last bluff.

  “SWAT,” he screamed. “Stay clear! We’re carrying a bomb.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  WHEN THE LID CAME OFF the garbage can, Caroline sat there for an instant blinking up at the deep soft black of the night sky. Her pounding heart was just starting to slow. Her racing pulse was just easing off a bit. There was a low-grade ringing in her ears. The moon—God, was it fitting or what, that almost the first thing that met her eyes was that big, fat yellow globe?—shone steadily down. The smell of brackish water, of mud, of decaying vegetation invaded her nostrils as she drew in a lungful of fresh air.

  It beat the smell of plastic by a country mile.

  “You okay, cher?” Reed loomed over the top of the can, no more than a tall, dark silhouette with the moon at his back, looking down at her. The relief of knowing that he was not a deranged would-be killer with a bomb was swamped immediately by a wave of anger. Unable to reply because of the duct tape across her mouth, she had to make do with a glare. It seemed to reassure him. “Come on, stand up.”

  Well, she actually would have stood up if she could have gotten her feet beneath her. But bent like a paper clip and wedged in as she was, there wasn’t much room to maneuver. In fact, there was no room whatsoever. Space was so tight that the whole time he and Holly had been running with the garbage can and she had been getting jostled around inside it her chin had kept banging into her knees. At one point she’d even bitten her tongue, and it hurt.

  Plus her hands were zip-tied together behind her back. Not having the use of her hands definitely hampered her ability to stand up.

  Either her lack of compliance with his command, or the baleful stare she was giving him, must have clued Reed in to her absolute inability to do as he wished. Reaching in, he slid his hands beneath her armpits and pulled her upright. Grimacing at the discomfort inherent in being thus forcefully unfolded, Caroline swayed a little as, when she was upright at last, the blood rushed from her head toward her feet, which had gone to sleep.

  Right along with her poor bound hands.

  “She looks pissed,” Holly observed as Reed wrapped a hard-muscled arm around her waist, slid the other beneath her thighs, and lifted her out of the can and into his arms.

  Pissed? Really? She did? How surprising. Looking up at his handsome, familiar face, she discovered that she was no longer afraid of him. Didn’t mean she liked him.

  “Get the stuff out of the bottom of the can, put it in the backpack, and let’s go,” Reed told Holly as he strode with Caroline toward the water. She glared at his chiseled profile: the tension in his face was unmistakable, and she didn’t care. Also, so the man was strong. So what? At the moment, as far as she was concerned, he could eat dirt. “As quick as you can.”

  “Like the speed of light,” Holly promised. “Oh, man, I thought we was for sure gonna die in a hail of bullets back there. That was like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or something. Only we lived.”

  “Yeah, well, we haven’t survived the night yet, so don’t get cocky. The can?”

  “I’m on it,” Holly said, and, tilting the can, leaned down inside.

  Caroline could have told him that there were several items at the bottom. Some of them were hard and uncomfortable, like the EMP device that Reed had stored in the pocket of his discarded tux jacket. She knew, because she’d been sitting on them. She was pretty sure their shape was immortalized by the bruising on her butt.

  “That had to be uncomfortable,” Reed said. He was looking at her now and sounding all sympathetic, which was a hoot considering that, oh, yeah, it had been and he was the cause of it. He had an arm around her shoulders and the other beneath her knees, which meant that she was curled against the solid wall of muscle that was his chest. She could feel the outline of his gun in its shoulder holster pressing against her upper arm. A turn-on? She knew a man with a gun was a turn-on for some girls, but, see, she carried one herself. Usually. Except when she was walking unarmed into a dangerous situation that her gut had told her from the outset was going to end badly, the point being that, for ignoring her instincts, she guessed she deserved what she’d gotten. A glance told her that her skirt had shimmied up. Way up. She was decent, but just barely. Her bare legs looked slim and pale curved over the solid black bar that was his arm in the misappropriated SWAT jacket. His large, warm, unmistakably masculine hand lay lightly along her uncovered thigh. It annoyed the hell out of her to discover that, despite everything, she actually liked the feel of his hand on her skin. In fact, the situation annoyed her on so many levels that she didn’t even try to sort them out. Since she couldn’t talk, she narrowed her eyes at him.

  “I almost crapped my pants when those bombs started going off. There must’ve been a thousand of them. They were you, right? Yeah, they had to be.” Holly was chattering, probably from nerves. His head had popped out of the can, and he was looking at the two of them—well, Reed really. “I thought you said you didn’t have no bombs.”

  “They were flash bangs,” Reed replied over his shoulder, which explained a lot to Caroline, who’d likewise had an extreme anxious reaction when the explosions had begun. To wit, her first, horrified thought had been that he’d blown up the hostages. She’d managed to rationalize it away before she’d had a complete nervous breakdown, but she still wasn’t quite recovered from the trauma. “Noisy, disorienting, but harmless.”

  “That was awesome.” Holly dived back into the can. “Man, them cops parted for us like the Red Sea.”

  Awesome wasn’t quite the descriptive word Caroline would have chosen.

  “The explosions didn’t scare you, did they?” Reed asked her, apparently perceptive enough to read something in her face. “If I’d thought about it, I would’ve given you a heads-up, that they were only flash bangs.”

  The look Caroline gave him was positively evil.

  His eyebrows contracted in response. His expression changed subtly, but she couldn’t read it. The moonlight cast the hard planes and angles of his face in harsh relief. His eyes gleamed darkly down into hers. For an instant, as she took in his black hair and sensuous mouth, registered her own bound hands and the unfamiliar sensation of near helplessness she was experiencing as he schlepped her around like a bride on her wedding night, she was reminded of the pirate ancestry that ran heavy in the Creole bloodlines.

 
Thing was, there was no captive maiden ancestry in hers, which she meant to spell out for him first chance she got.

  “We taking all this stuff with us?” Holly asked, causing Reed to glance around. Although she could no longer see him, his voice made it apparent that he had surfaced from the depths of the can again.

  “Yes,” Reed replied. “The fewer things we leave behind, the longer it’s going to take them to figure out where we went.”

  They had reached the very edge of the lake, Caroline saw as he set her back on her feet. The ground beneath her was marshy and wet. She could feel the brush of weeds around her bare legs. Cattails were all around them, standing taller than even Reed, hiding much of their surroundings—and undoubtedly them—from view. The buzz of insects—or maybe that was still the ringing in her ears—seemed inordinately loud. He kept his hands on her waist to steady her, which was probably a good idea. She felt a little dizzy, a little light-headed. Her tongue hurt where she had bitten it. Her feet and calves tingled. So did her fingers.

  And, yes, it was probably fair to say that she was pissed.

  Tilting up her chin, she fixed Reed with what she was certain had to be the most speaking look she had ever given anyone in her life.

  It wasn’t saying nice things.

  “If I take off the duct tape, you can’t scream,” Reed warned. “You can’t even talk loud.”

  She nodded once to indicate her acquiescence. Leaning toward her, wincing preemptively, she presumed on her behalf, he began to gently peel away the tape.

  It felt like a layer of skin was coming off along with the tape.

  Pissed no longer even began to cover it.

  Behind Reed’s head, she saw a hazy cloud of smoke drifting skyward. The distant roar she had been vaguely aware of since the lid was lifted from her plastic prison began to differentiate itself from the ringing in her ears, which was gradually subsiding. She realized now that it was a medley of shouts, sirens, and the thwump-thwump of the helicopters she could see swooping around like dragonflies in the near distance. A searchlight from one of those helicopters swept down out of the sky over the roof—the roof was the only part that she could see—of the mansion from which she had just been hijacked.

  Incredible as it was for her to process, Reed’s scheme had actually worked. He and Holly had managed to get through a police net that was as tight as anything she had ever seen. Alive. And apparently undetected.

  By using two stolen SWAT jackets and a garbage can.

  What that said about the efficiency of her colleagues left her aghast.

  Having been sent in to disarm the hostage-taker’s bomb, she had wound up being kidnapped.

  What that said about her own efficiency made her want to hang her head, and that in turn made her furious.

  The last of the tape came off. Her lips felt dry and slightly swollen. The skin around them stung a little. She licked her lips, worked her mouth. Reed watched her, his expression impossible to read. They stood face-to-face. He had one steadying hand still on her waist. With the other, he was rolling up the duct tape between his fingers into a little ball.

  “Better?” he asked her.

  She looked him straight in the eye and snarled, “You jackass.”

  He blinked, clearly surprised.

  She followed up with a fierce, “You brain-dead son of a bitch, what the hell did you do to the hostages?”

  His eyes widened a little. Then his lips twitched, and he smiled. A real, genuine, amused smile. White teeth flashed. A dimple—she remembered that dimple; a long time ago she’d thought it was mega hot—appeared in his right cheek. His eyes danced. Okay, so the man was handsome. At this point she didn’t give a flying—

  “Locked them in a couple of upstairs closets. Except for the ones I let go. No real harm done to any of them. Unless somebody actually crapped his pants when the explosions started going off.” He paused reflectively. “Which is a possibility. I left your father and the mayor with what they thought was a bomb.”

  “You’ve got to be absolutely bat-shit crazy.” She was so mad her voice shook. “A lunatic. A reckless, selfish, stupid jerk. Some of those hostages could have had a heart attack. You could have gotten two innocent people—and by that I mean Holly and me, because you’re sure as hell not innocent—killed.”

  “You are pissed,” he said.

  “You stuffed me into a garbage can at gunpoint.” She was talking through her teeth now. “You bound my hands. You put duct tape over my mouth. You scared the hell out of me. And for what? You want to tell me? For what?”

  “I had no choice,” he replied, sliding a hand around her elbow. Even through the sleeve of her windbreaker, she could feel the size and strength of that hand. “About any of it. Like I said, you have no idea what’s going on here. And keep your voice down.”

  She tried to jerk free. He wouldn’t let go. Fine. With his long fingers fastened immovably around her arm, she stood her ground and verbally lambasted him. “If your Butch Cassidy thing had gone wrong, I could have been shot. Holly could have been shot. Of course, you could have been shot, too, but that would just be a matter of getting the inevitable over with. You know what you are? You’re a dead man walking. You’re going to get caught. You’re going to get killed. You’re—”

  “Much as I’m enjoying this conversation,” he said, interrupting, “we’re going to have to save the rest of it for later.” He looked past her at Holly. “Get in,” he told Holly. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  It was then, as she followed Reed’s gaze to find Holly, who’d left the can behind to beat them to the water’s edge, that she saw the boat. It was a small, flat-bottomed, open fiberglass vessel barely visible among the weeds. Having apparently just finished tossing things into it, Holly was clambering into the bow.

  “Really? You think nobody’s going to hear a boat?” Caroline’s eyes snapped back to Reed as he pulled her toward it.

  “It’s electric. It’s silent. It’s used for bird-watching,” he replied. “So, no.”

  “They’ll see it. Helicopters, remember? They’ll sweep the lake. And, by the way, you want to cut this zip tie off my hands?”

  “They won’t search the lake until they figure out we’re not in the house. It’s a big house, so I’m guessing we’ve got a little time. And I’ll cut the zip tie off later. When I’m sure you won’t dive overboard. See, I remember how well you swim.” His eyes caught hers. In their sudden reminiscent glimmer she saw full evidence that he remembered tossing her into the pool after she’d kissed him, then standing there watching as she’d surfaced and swum with swift, powerful strokes to the edge. He’d waited until she’d pulled herself out, probably because letting the superintendent’s daughter drown could not be considered a career enhancer, then said, “Don’t try that again, little girl” in the teeth of her spluttering outrage. “Get in the boat.”

  “No.” She shook her head. And planted her feet. And figuratively dug in her heels. “You’ve escaped. Not for long, probably, but that’s for you to worry about it, not me. I’ve done everything I can to try to save your life, but if you’re determined to commit suicide by cop there’s really nothing I can do about it. Except to not be around to watch when it happens. And I want this zip tie off.”

  “You could still get your chance to save me.” His tone was soothing. His mouth curved until it was dangerously close to breaking into another smile. “Who knows when I might need to hold you up in front of me as a shield?”

  “You think that’s funny?” She was seething. “It’s not. You’re in denial. It’s pathetic. You are going to get hunted down and killed. But, bottom line, you are no longer holding any hostages, so you are officially not my problem anymore. I’m not going anywhere with you. If you’ll cut this zip tie off—or even if you won’t—I’ll find my own way back.”

  He seemed to sigh. His hand on her elbow tightened. “Caroline, I know you’re mad, and I don’t blame you. But I really don’t have time for this. I’ll cut t
he zip tie off as soon as I can, I promise. For now, I need you to get in the damned boat.”

  “No.”

  They stared measuringly at each other. Then Reed solved the impasse by scooping her up off her feet again.

  That caused her to leave pissed so far behind that it was like she was looking down on it from another planet.

  “Where the hell do you get off manhandling me, anyway? You think you can just pick me up and carry me off and there won’t be any repercussions?” Caroline growled, struggling, as he took two long strides and stepped into the boat with her. Screaming for help occurred to her, but the thought of the duct tape plus the maddening truth that she really, truly, when all was said and done didn’t want to bring the hunt down on him kept her volume reasonably low. “Next time I’m with someone who wants to put a bullet through you, I’ll give them a big thumbs-up. No, wait, screw that. How about I just save everybody a lot of trouble and do it myself, first chance I get?”

  “Quit squirming or you’ll tip the boat,” he warned.

  “This is kidnapping,” she snapped as the boat rocked and she stopped struggling because she really didn’t want to drown, which, if she went in the drink with her hands tied behind her, she just might. “A federal crime.”

  He laughed. “At this point, the feds will have to get in line.”

  “Careful, Dick,” Holly warned as the boat rocked some more, and then Reed put her down on the narrow seat in the center of the boat. His arms dropped away from her and he sat down himself in the stern. Caroline looked at her long slim legs, bare to the tops of her thighs because her skirt had ridden up some more and she didn’t have the use of her hands to pull it down, and felt steam figuratively coming out of her ears.