by Meg Cabot
It wasn’t until the shower of flaming snowmobile parts was over that Jack dared raise his head. And when he did, the first thing he saw was Lou’s face, pale but resolute, beneath him.
But if he’d expected any womanly display of emotion—tears, or even hysterics—he was destined to be disappointed once again. Because all she said, when she parted those deeply pink lips, was, “Jeez, you weigh a ton. Get offa me.”
It was right about then that Jack decided he could sort of see why Bruno di Blase had left Lou for Greta. A guy like Bruno—or Barry, or whatever his name was—didn’t have a chance in hell of ever impressing a girl like Lou. Greta, on the other hand, had been awed merely by Jack’s ability to correctly read a map.
Slowly—though not really painfully, since except for some snow that had made its way down his charcoal black cashmere sweater, he appeared to have been unscathed by what had occurred—he peeled himself from her. The minute he did so, she rolled over, the gun still poised in both hands, and pointed it in the direction the explosion had come from.
“I think,” Jack observed wryly,“you got him.”
She had, too. Snowmobile and driver were both gone. All that was left was a black gouge in the earth, right in front of the enormous pine tree the snowmobile had plowed into, full speed. Black, acrid smoke, like the kind pouring from the helicopter, floated up from a few of the larger chunks of charred rubble. Jack felt no desire to approach these chunks to investigate more fully just what, exactly, they might be.
Lou, on her knees in the snow, let Sam’s gun drop to her lap, as if it had suddenly grown far too heavy for her to comfortably hold. But she didn’t sit that way for long. That was because, off in the distance, they both heard a sound that had once been welcome, but which now had an ominous ring to it.
Snowmobiles.
More of them.
A lot more.
“Come on,” Jack said, reaching down to take her arm. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Wait,” she said, even as he was dragging her to her feet. “Wait a minute. You don’t know who it is. Maybe this time it’s the good guys.”
“You want to stick around to find out?” he demanded.
With a little moan, she followed him as he began once more to streak down the mountainside. But not without a final word of complaint.
“Just who in hell,” she grumbled, in a voice he was pretty sure she was trying to keep from shaking, “did you piss off so much, Townsend?”
He only wished he knew.
9
Seven thousand and twenty-six.
That’s how many miles were on the speedometer of Lou’s treadmill back in LA. Seven thousand and twenty-six miles she had alternately walked and run in the past six years, since moving to the West Coast with only a BA in creative writing and a newly completed script—the first Copkiller—to her name.
And Barry, of course. She’d had Barry, too.
Almost five hundred of those miles she’d put on her treadmill just in the months since she and Barry had split up. She had had a lot of nervous energy to get out, and what better way than to pound it off on her treadmill while watching “Judge Judy”?
But that was different. Running in her own home, on a treadmill, in her Nikes, was completely different than running through the woods in two-inch heels, through yard-deep snow and in freezing temperatures, with a laptop and purse strung over her shoulders. Her feet weren’t the only things that felt as if they were going to burst. She was pretty sure her lungs were going to, too.
“Wait,” she gasped, grabbing onto the closest pine tree for support, and clinging to it as she tried to catch her breath. “I…can’t.I…can’t…run…anymore.”
Thankfully, Jack looked as winded as she was. And he, as she well knew, was in top condition. It was in his contract, of course, that he had to be. Detective Pete Logan was many things, but out of shape was not one of them.
“We…gotta…keep…going,” he panted, leaning forward to rest his hands on his knees. “Come on, Lou. They’re right behind us.”
“Were right behind us,” she corrected him. Now that her breathing was growing more even, she strained her ears, but could hear nothing save the sound of their breathing. “I think…I really think we might have lost them.”
It would have been hard not to. With the sun all but gone from the sky, and the snow coming down more thickly than ever, it was difficult to see more than a few yards ahead of them as they’d run. Snow and trees. That was all Lou could see. Snow and trees.
And as they raced between those trees, Lou could not help thinking that they must have been as difficult to distinguish against the snow as the fallen logs and bracken they were forced to leap over in their mad dash for safety.
As if there were such a thing in this godforsaken place.
“Listen,” Lou said, reaching out to lay a hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Do you hear them?”
They were silent for a moment. There was no sound—no sound at all save the hiss of snow landing in their hair and on their shoulders. The snow and the wind, as it moved through the pines around them. It wasn’t gale force yet, but it was a cold, strong wind. A wind that indicated, to Lou, at least, that things were going to get worse before they got better.
She could barely make out Jack’s features. It wasn’t yet nightfall, but what little sun there had been was gone, leaving only a dank gray sky overhead, growing ever darker as the minutes passed. Still, she had seen his face often enough—in dailies, on the big screen, and on her own television set, back in his “STAT” days—to tell by his expression that he, too, was listening for the whine of a snowmobile engine.
“I don’t hear anything,” he said, finally.
“Me neither,” Lou said. “Do you think we lost them?”
“Might have.” He squinted at the snow that was rapidly filling the footprints they’d left behind…but not rapidly enough. “Trees are kind of thick here. Be hard for them to follow, except on foot. And that. Well, that wouldn’t be difficult, given the tracks we’ve left.”
Lou let go of both the tree and his shoulder, and started looking around for a low-lying branch.
“We can use it to wipe out our footprints,” she explained to him. “Like in A Simple Plan.”
“Oh, sure,” he said. “So instead of following our tracks, they can follow the branch marks.”
Lou felt something hot well up unpleasantly inside her. Much to her chagrin, it was tears, brought on by anger and fear.
“Look,” she said to him in a loud whisper. “I could do without the sarcasm, okay? We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you, so just try not to be such a jerk about all of this, okay?”
“Jerk?” He straightened and eyed her. “What’d I do?”
“I don’t know,” she shot back, thankful that the cold wind provided her with plenty of excuse for why her eyes were watering. If he should happen to notice, that is. “But something to get someone mad enough to kill you. Not just kill you, Townsend, but hunt you down like a dog. Now find a branch. Preferably one with the needles still on it.”
Jack, much to her relief, said nothing more and began to look around for the branch she’d requested. Lou was glad, since she could barely see, her eyes were so filled with tears. God, what had she ever done to deserve this? Stranded in the middle of nowhere with a prima donna movie star who’d apparently never seen a single survival movie in his life. She’d be lucky to get out of here with just a few toes and fingers lost to frostbite. The way things were beginning to look, they would not survive the night.
At least, not unless they built an igloo. In Shoot to Kill, Sydney Poitier and Tom Berenger survived a night in a blizzard by burrowing under the snow and huddling together for warmth. In the movie, it had been a comical scene. In reality, the thought of huddling under the snow with Jack Townsend even for a few minutes made Lou’s skin feel strangely hot, despite the fact that she was convinced she was half frozen. There were millions of women in America to whom the thou
ght of passing a night in an igloo with Jack Townsend might not seem like such a chore. Lou, however, was not one of them.
Dear God, she prayed. Let it not come to that.
And then, a second later, it appeared her prayer might have been answered.
“Hey,” Jack said, from a dozen yards away, where he’d gone to look for branches. “C’mere. Look at this.”
Lou, thinking at first that he’d spied more snowmobilers, nearly collapsed in the snow with an I give up already. But Jack wasn’t looking in the direction from which the snowmobilers had come. Instead, he was squinting ahead of them, his eyes narrowed against the snow and wind.
“What?” Lou demanded, coming to his side and attempting to follow his gaze. But all she could see was trees. Trees, and snow, coming down harder than ever. “I don’t see anything.”
“There,” he said, pointing straight ahead. “Do you see that?”
Lou shook her head. “All I see is snow.”
“Not there,” Jack Townsend said, and abruptly, he moved behind her, clapped two hands over her ears, and turned her head in the direction he’d been peering. “There.”
Until Jack put his hands on her ears, Lou had not realized how cold they were. Her ears, that is. They were numb with cold, since she had no hat, only her thick red hair to protect them. Jack’s warmth seemed to sear her through the leather of his gloves. She could feel a similar warmth emanating from him all down her back, though only his hands were touching her. Suddenly, the idea of staying the night with him in a hole dug into the snow didn’t seem all that unappealing. Not if it meant she could have more of that warmth, all to herself.
Good God! What was she thinking? This was Jack Townsend. Jack Townsend, movie star, heir to Townsend Securities, actor. Actor, Lou. Actor. Which meant vain, incapable of loyalty, and as Vicky could attest only too well, terminally commitment-shy.
The alarm bells clanging full pitch, Lou ignored the welcome warmth flowing from those hands, and looked in the direction Jack was pointing her face.
And then she saw it. A rectangular shape, silhouetted black against the gray sky, stuck out against the treetops. She couldn’t tell what it was. Not a house, surely, because it was in the air, not on the ground. But it was rectangular. There was no doubt about that. And rectangular meant man-made.
“What is it?” Lou asked, all thoughts of snuggling under the snow with Jack Townsend mercifully wiped from her mind. “What could it be?”
“I don’t know,” Jack said. “I thought I was hallucinating,but if you see it,too….” Abruptly,he dropped hishands from her head and wrapped those warm, strong fingers around one of her arms. “Let’s go find out.”
Lou noticed the hand on her arm. How could she not? Much as she might have disliked him, she could not deny that Jack Townsend had a magnetic quality that made it difficult for people to drag their gaze from him when he was on screen, and even harder for anyone—well, all right, Lou—to shrug off any hand he might happen to lay upon her.
But this time she happened to be grateful for the hand. Because in his eagerness to investigate the mysterious rectangle in the sky, he was propelling her through the snow. And it was a lot easier, she discovered, to slog along in her heels, with that laptop weighing her down, when someone was pushing her. Towrope, she thought. That’s what they needed. A towrope…
And then they were standing at the base of the rectangular thing, craning their neck and blinking against the thickly falling snow to get a better look at it.
“It’s a ranger station,” Jack said finally.
It was, too. Built on long wooden supports, the dark green shack hovered like a child’s tree house above them, with only a rickety-looking wooden ladder leading up to the trapdoor in its floor. It looked gloomy and uninhabitable, as if it hadn’t been used in years.
It also looked like a perfect place for spiders and other creepy crawly things to hang out.
“Come on,” Jack said, releasing her arm and starting to climb.
“I’m not going in there,” Lou declared.
“Fine.” Jack didn’t even glance down at her. He’d reached the trapdoor, and was pushing on it. “Stay down there and freeze. Personally, I’m getting in out of this wind.”
And then the trapdoor swung open with a groan from its rusty hinges and Jack pulled himself inside. She had a glimpse of his long, denim-clad legs, then just his cowboy boots—cowboy boots! Perfect—and then he was gone.
Standing beneath the treehouse, the snow beginning to blow sideways into her eyes because of a sudden shift in the arctic wind, Lou waited for the structure to crumble to pieces beneath Jack’s weight. She could hear the floor-boards creaking as he walked across the small—surely only nine feet by nine feet—space.
But nothing collapsed. Nothing—Jack, for instance—came hurtling down to the ground.
Jack’s face appeared in the opening for the trapdoor.
“Hey,” he said, looking genuinely celebratory. “You’re never going to believe this. There’s a cot up here. And blankets. Come on. We can wait out the blizzard in here. You can bet that’s what our friends on the snowmobiles are doing, too. We should be safe enough for a while.”
Blizzard? Lou blinked. The wind whistled around her, slicing through the wool of her slacks. She was wearing hose beneath them, but they didn’t help to keep out the bitter cold. Her eyes were watering. The snow fell in a steady white curtain around her.
Oh, yes. Blizzard seemed about right.
“Lou.” Jack leaned through the trapdoor, peering down at her bewilderedly. “What is wrong with you? Didn’t you hear me? We can sit out the storm in here. And all this snow will cover any tracks we made. With any luck, they’ll think we froze to death behind some tree. Come on.”
Getting dark out. Perfect. Night was falling. Well, not really. It was probably only late afternoon. But in Alaska, in winter, it was pretty much dark all the time, just like in the summer it was almost always light out.
And she was going to spend the night in a ranger’s station with Jack Townsend. Jack Townsend, one of America’s hottest Hollywood idols.
Great. Just great.
“Lou?” Jack was beginning to sound pissed off. “Are you all right?”
She took a deep, shuddery breath.
“Are there spiders?” she asked, her voice sounding thin even before it was snatched away and tossed around by the wind.
“Are there what?” Jack’s face, which she could not see all that well through the snow and the quickly descending darkness, appeared to wear an expression of incredulity. “Spiders?”
Lou nodded, not trusting herself to speak again. She did not want him to hear the fear in her voice. Though which she feared more, the potential for spiders or spending the night in a small shack with Jack Townsend, she could not say.
“Lou,” Jack said, in his usual ironic tone. “There are no spiders, okay? Spiders can’t generally exist in sub-arctic temperatures.”
Lou had known that, of course. She’d just wanted to be sure. She stepped forward and put her foot on the first rung of the ladder, then reached up and grasped the one above her head. She disliked spiders more than she disliked heights, but the truth was, she wasn’t wild about either.
Jack, however, was still chuckling as he grabbed her by both arms the minute she climbed within reach, and pulled her into the dark shack.
“Spiders,” he said, swinging the trapdoor shut behind her. “You’re perfectly all right about shooting people, but spiders you’ve got a problem with.”
“I shot that guy in self-defense,” Lou said, as she stood in the semi-darkness. The only light came through the small observation windows set at regular intervals in each of the four walls. Fortunately they were glassed-in, though the glass was incredibly dirty. “He was going to kill us.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t approve,” Jack pointed out. “Only that your fear of arachnids isn’t in keeping with your Annie Oakley aim.”
Jack, after digging Sa
m’s lighter from his coat pocket, lit it.
The orange glow the tiny blaze created was enough for Lou to get a really good look around the room in which she found herself. It was impossibly small, but mercifully did manage to shelter them from both the snow and the wind, which had risen to shrieking pitch outside. There wasn’t much in the way of furnishings, just a single army-issue type cot, a bookshelf with a few copies of National Geographic on it, and a file cabinet.
But it was dry; it was out of the wind; it was clean enough; there certainly weren’t any spiders. And for now, it was home. It was all Lou could do to keep from collapsing in a heap where she stood.
Instead, she managed to make the few feet of distance between where she stood and the cot, and then collapsed onto it. Fortunately, it managed to hold together beneath her weight, despite some ominous creaking.
“I want you to know something,” Lou said as she sat there, shivering.
“Oh, yeah?” he said, distractedly, yanking open the file cabinet and drawers and peering into them one by one by the glow of Sam’s lighter. “What’s that?”
“If we get out of this alive,” Lou said, feeling her cheeks and ears begin to tingle, sure signs she’d been suffering from the first stages of frostbite, “I am going to kill you myself.”
Jack only smiled. Though not as if he found anything funny. The smile was rueful. And of course, since it was coming from Jack, it was sinfully attractive.
“Why am I not surprised?” he wondered. “Look, Lou. If you’re thinking I did something to make these people come after me, I’m telling you right now, I didn’t. I don’t have the slightest idea what I could have done to get somebody mad enough to kill me.”
“Oh,” Lou said, disentangling herself from the straps to her laptop and purse, and setting them carefully aside. “You know.”
“I’m telling you,” Jack said, in a less than patient tone, “I don’t.”