Charlie was in the other room now while Jeff paced outside the door. Joel had ordered they all rotate in the bathroom and then put on dry clothes. He had enough to worry about without having someone get deathly ill, and he was willing to do anything to keep Jeff occupied. The man was walking around in circles mumbling about finding a new job.
Now Joel hovered over Lance where he sat on the arm of the couch. The stitching would have been done five minutes ago if the guy would stop jerking and hissing. You’d think he’d never been injured before.
Sure, the shot was a bit more than a flesh wound, but not much more. They all had scrapes and bruises, but Lance delivered most of the flinching. How he’d ever made it through his wife giving birth was a mystery.
With one last stitch, Joel dropped a bloody bandage in the small trash can by his feet. He kept up a running dialogue with Lance, thinking it might calm the man down. “You got lucky.”
Lance winced as Joel wrapped a clean bandage around his upper arm. “We might have different definitions of that word.”
“I’m not even going to mention that you passed out from a puny shot in the arm.” Okay, maybe he’d mention it that one time, but now he’d stop.
“I thought I was dead.”
Joel had worried a bullet hit Hope, and the punch of pain had nearly knocked him over. Although he didn’t want anyone hurt, he wasn’t upset Lance had caught it instead.
He was about to thank him for trying to protect Hope, but she broke in. “There isn’t a special prize for the least amount of tears when shot.”
“I didn’t cry.” Lance’s voice rose as if swearing under his breath didn’t telegraph his disgust for the suggestion.
“Because you were unconscious,” Cam said without ending his surveillance on the world outside the cabin.
Joel chuckled. He could go a lifetime without seeing whiny Jeff again, but Joel liked Lance. Charlie, now, he was an enigma. Joel had no idea what to think about that guy.
When Lance glanced down at the white bandage and the line of red seeping through, the color left his face. Joel rushed to reassure him. It was either that or risk having the guy pass out again. “The bullet went through and didn’t knick anything important.”
“It hurts like a—”
“I have some painkillers,” Hope broke in as she left her position by the window and squatted down to drag a bag out from under the bed.
“That would be good.” Joel pointed at Jeff. “You’re next.”
The guy stopped mid-pace. “I wasn’t hit.”
“I meant answers.”
Hope frowned at Joel. Took a second and shot most of the men in the room a frown, even Cam, and he wasn’t looking at her. “Now might not be the time for a chat.”
This topic was not up for debate. Joel’s patience had expired. So had his willingness to sit around and wait to become a target. “Someone is shooting at us and we have two unskilled men missing in this miserable weather. So if Jeff here knows something, it’s time to speak up.”
“I don’t.”
Hope got to her feet and grabbed a water bottle on her way over to Lance. Her gaze never left Jeff. “Why did you fight with Mark?”
“It has nothing to do with...” Jeff exhaled as he ran a hand through his wet hair. “Look, it was a work issue.”
That got Lance’s attention. “What was it?”
Whatever Jeff heard in Lance’s voice or saw on his face had his shoulders slumping. “He had these private meetings with Tony—”
“Who?” Cam asked.
“Tony Prather, Baxter’s CEO.” Jeff kept up the steady stream of sighing. “It felt like Mark was making a play. Going around my back.”
“Doesn’t Mark rank above you in the corporate scheme?” Hope asked. “He’s the vice president, not you.”
Leave it to her to point that out. Joel wished he had. “Exactly my question. Jeff?”
“I had some ideas about positioning the company moving forward. One of the divisions had a down quarter but seemed to be bouncing back, and I wanted to capitalize on the upswing.” Jeff leaned against the wall and let his head fall back. “I give Mark some notes, he studies them and all of a sudden he’s having private meetings with our boss.”
Joel could see it all playing out. Jeff, with his oversized ego, wouldn’t accept being pushed out. He’d want every ounce of credit he could squeeze out of an idea. “That ticked you off.”
Jeff looked around the room. “Wouldn’t it do the same to you?”
“Don’t know since I’ve never worked in an office,” Cam said.
Joel reached into the specialized first aid kit for another bandage roll as he turned over Jeff’s comments in his mind. The man had just handed them a motive. Not a compelling reason to kill in Joel’s view, but for Jeff’s type it could be. Always looking for an angle, expecting to rise in the ranks at record speed, wanting the perks and big title. Watching someone grab that away could be a brutal ego blow for someone like Jeff.
Reading people was not his strength. Joel glanced at Hope, looking for her take on the situation. She had good instincts. But because she stood right at Cam’s shoulder, looking out the window instead of at Jeff, Joel couldn’t tell what she was thinking.
Now Joel wanted to know what had caught her attention and held it so long. “Cam, can you take over for a second?”
“Sure.”
The men passed each other in the middle of the room, exchanging gun for bandage. By the time Joel got to the window, Hope stood right in front of it. Talk about becoming a target. With her damp, freshly showered hair pulled in a ponytail and clean white shirt, she stuck out among the group.
Without making a big deal of it, he shifted her out of the direct firing line through the window and lowered his voice. “You okay?”
“You’re very handy with a first aid kit.”
He noticed she skipped his question, but he decided to let it slide. “One of the many skills demanded by my father.”
“He brought about so much bad, but every now and then there’s something positive.”
“I think you’re reaching for a silver lining.”
Joel remembered every minute of the last day as a family—protective services ripping his sisters away, the standoff with the police, the shot his dad fired that finally landed him in jail—so he knew the truth. Nothing good happened. Joel couldn’t point to one decent thing about the way he grew up either before or after the final takedown of the Kidd family.
She bit her lower lip. “I keep hoping to find something positive about your upbringing.”
“That’s not an easy task.”
She clearly tried to get it. She listened and shook her head at all the right places.
The pain in her eyes as he relayed the facts, some of them anyway, was genuine. It bordered on pity, and Joel hated that. Knew it was human nature but still despised it. Connor and Cam and the few other people in his life who knew bits and pieces also tried to reason it out, but Joel knew that without living it you could never really understand.
Hope had grown up in a loving home with a father who doted on her. Not every day was easy, of course. She’d lost her mother to cancer when she was a young girl, but Hope never worried about having food or running a drill about how to escape the police. She loved her dad. Joel had seen the bond. It bordered on overprotective, but it beat strong.
“I assure you that if Dad had known I would use my abilities to work for any government agency or a team that helps governments, he likely would have shot me on the spot.” That was the threat—disappoint me and you’re dead.
Hope froze. “Why do I think you’re not kidding?”
“If only.” She’d moved in closer, which put her head back in the line of fire, so he shifted her to the side again. “You need to stand away from the window.”
She looked at him and then to that spot outside that seemed to capture her attention. Through the driving rain and storm that had whipped up right when it looked as if it woul
d taper off, she’d focused in on that area.
“What is it?” he asked.
“You know about trajectories, right?”
If this had anything to do with his dad, Joel lost the track on how. “Sure.”
“One of the ways I perfected my aim in archery was to track the trajectory of my arrow. First I played with my stance and did all this math to figure out the proper draw length, and then I got this fancy computer program. Point is, I figured out I was starting out too high and then the drop off...” She smiled. “You should see your face.”
“You have to admit this is an odd conversation in light of being trapped in a cabin and all.” He put his body in front of her and brought up the binoculars to scan the area.
“True, but the bottom line is Lance’s entry wound is higher than the exit.” She drew a diagram in the condensation on the window. “I felt Lance get shot. We were on the ground and the bullet came from above, so the angle isn’t a surprise, but it’s off.”
Something had clicked together in her mind. He could see the light go on and hear the growing excitement in her voice. The energy bouncing off her was contagious.
But he still wasn’t sure about her point. “That leads you to believe what?”
“I think the shots came not just from someone standing above Lance but from someone in the trees. The trajectory is that steep.”
The comment hung there. Even Cam looked up from finishing off Lance’s arm. Jeff was the only one who’d missed the discussion. He was too busy trading places with Charlie as he came out of the bathroom in a set of clean clothes that looked exactly like the dirty ones he had just shed.
Hope’s intelligence focused all the pieces. As usual, she found a way through the confusion and came up with a reasonable explanation. She was smart and sharp and didn’t hide it.
He loved that about her. Of course, he loved pretty much everything about her.
Still, he wanted to make sure they were on the same page. “So you’re saying this guy is sitting up in a branch shooting?”
“I think it’s a good possibility the shots came from there, but that doesn’t answer every question.”
“Okay.”
“If I’m right about the position, the shooter should have been able to pick us off one by one because we were all truly vulnerable.” She stabbed her finger against points in the diagram on the glass. “That leaves us with a bigger problem.”
That’s what they needed. More problems. “Which is?”
“Neither Perry nor Mark is the athletic scaling-trees type.”
Joel hadn’t met either man, but he totally trusted her view on this. He could climb and she could probably do it faster than he could, and that was saying something. That didn’t mean two businessmen who spent most of their time sitting behind desks had a chance at getting up there. There was a slight possibility that one of them, or one of the men in the cabin, pretended to be clueless and really had sniper tree-climbing skills, but Joel doubted it.
“We’re talking some random guy out here shooting for fun.” Joel glanced at Cam. His grim expression mirrored Joel’s thoughts—that was the absolute worst case scenario. A pure risk and someone they couldn’t get a handle on.
Lance made a strangled sound but didn’t say anything.
“Unfortunately, the theory leads to more questions. I mean, how would the random guy get down without you or Cam seeing him?” She pointed to the open space outside as she asked.
Joel had that exact question. There were possible explanations, but none of them proved all that convincing. Cam and Joel were trained. They were on high alert. Even as worrying about Hope getting hurt occupied part of Joel’s mind, Cam stayed fully focused.
“It was raining and we were being shot at,” Cam said from across the room.
“And you stood out there like a human shield.” Hope stopped whispering and went back to her normal voice. “All I’m saying is if someone wanted to kill you, someone with the level of skill to balance in a tree with a gun and then sneak away unseen by two covert agents, he would have killed you.”
Charlie stopped running the towel over his wet hair. “What are you guys talking about?”
Hope ignored the older man and talked to Joel. “All the advantage goes to the person in that position. If that were you, you’d hit the target without trouble.”
“So would you.” Joel knew that was true because she was the most competent woman he’d ever met.
“Where does that leave us?” Cam asked.
Joel fought the temptation to handle the issue now. He just needed the weather to give him a five-minute shot at testing her theory. “With lots of questions and something to do as soon as the storm breaks.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Which is?”
“Go out there and look around.”
* * *
TWO HOURS LATER the rain had morphed into a steady fall, but the dark sky gave way to white and the wind died down. While Charlie watched from the porch with a gun in his hand, Hope ventured outside with Cam and Joel.
They fought to have her stay behind, but she refused. Because she threatened to follow them the minute they stepped outside, they gave in and brought her along.
They trudged along on either side of her until they walked a few feet into the wooded area and well within shouting distance of the cabins. Both men had guns and she carried the binoculars but had a gun and her knife within grabbing range.
Cam shifted into the lead as they got close to the tree they’d staked out as the best contender for climbing. “Remind me again why we’re doing this?”
“A hunch.” That’s all she had, but she’d calculated all the angles and run through all the alternatives, and this was the only one that made sense.
“Seems like a dangerous hunch.”
“Not if Hope is right.” They stopped at the tree and Joel tapped his palm against the bark.
“Which is why I get to be out here, too.” No matter what they thought, she didn’t plan to stand around and watch. “I’ll climb.”
Joel snorted. “No way.”
“You two are better to guard and I can—”
Joel broke her concentration when he snatched the binoculars and flung them around his neck. Next came the standing jump where he grabbed the lowest branch, which wasn’t all that low. The move stretched him out and had his T-shirt riding up and showing off his flat stomach. With an impressive pull-up, he was up and gone in a matter of seconds, leaving her sputtering.
Cam laughed. “He’s fast when he wants to be. He’s also smart enough to know you’re likely better at that than he is and he had to beat you to the punch.”
Joel’s voice reached them from above. “Maybe less talking since we could be wrong about this and have a guy stalking us even now.”
That reality check had her back teeth knocking together. She’d pushed the fear out, insisting she could handle this...somehow.
With that warning, Cam backed her up against the tree and put his body in front of hers until no part of her was exposed. The bulletproof vest Joel made her wear before he opened the cabin door gave her added protection.
If someone came shooting, Cam would go down and she’d have a shot. The mere idea of that had her stomach flipping around.
She cleared her voice and looked up. Beads of rain fell, hitting her face and running under her hood and into her hair. “See anything?”
From this position she spied a flash of blue jeans and the bottom of Joel’s hiking boots. His voice sounded distant and the rain muffled every sound.
“It would help if it stopped pouring.” That grumble came through loud and clear.
Cam kept watch as his back pressed into her chest. “Take that up with another department.”
Joel shifted and she could make him out as he balanced on a branch. He faced deeper into the woods.
She pushed the panic out of her mind. Others might wobble or slide off. Not Joel. He could probably live up there if he had to.
His arms went up and she knew he was taking a look around. “I want a pair of those binoculars.”
“We’ll get you a pair,” Cam said.
“Hold on,” Joel called out.
“What?” She looked up and Cam joined her.
“There’s something in the trees about thirty feet out.”
Hope’s body threatened to break into a full shake. She clenched her hands into fists to keep from fidgeting and shifting around. “A person?”
“A rigging of some kind.”
She shook her head as the constant thudding of rain against her jacket had her talking louder. “I don’t even know what that means.”
“A platform and a gun set-up to fire either at specific times or via remote.” Cam spared her a quick look before he went back to checking out the area around them. “A human might not be pulling the trigger now, but a human built the rigging.”
“So we’re back to everyone being a suspect.” She didn’t know if that was good or bad. With the businessmen as suspects she at least knew something about her potential attacker.
A rogue sniper terrified her. That suggested someone with skill and put Joel and Cam at greater risk because she knew they would shield the rest of them with their bodies if it came to that. The thought of watching Joel go down almost drove her to her knees.
“Move.” A loud whoosh followed the warning. Joel shouted as he dropped out of the branches and landed with a slight bend of his knees as if he’d been practicing the move his entire life.
She heard a thud and saw the binoculars land in the mud. Adrenaline pumped through her as she spun around, looking for the danger that had set him off.
The forest blurred in front of her. Joel grabbed Cam’s shoulder and turned him toward the cabins while Joel shoved her behind him and brought up his gun. The men took up positions behind two trunks and faced in the same direction, this time toward camp.
Despite the dizzying few seconds, she stayed locked behind Joel with her fingers slipped through his belt loop.
“Hands up,” Joel yelled in the direction off to the side of the far cabin.
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