by Amelia Autin
She looked up at him, questioning. “What?”
“Good morning,” he said softly, kissing her forehead. Then his lips found hers and they stood there for several seconds, everything else forgotten. “Oh hell yeah,” he said when their lips finally separated. “It’s definitely a good morning.”
Her cheeks were flushed, but all she said was, “Yes, it is.”
When Liam finally let her go, Cate pulled the edges of the bottom sheet together and tied them firmly around the whole bundle. While she was doing that, he pulled on an olive green short-sleeved golf shirt and strapped on his shoulder holster. He grimaced, then added his blazer. “Can’t go out strapped without covering up, even if it is summer,” he explained, though she hadn’t asked. “Here, I’ll take that.” He hefted the bundle over one shoulder.
* * *
Liam used the GPS and had no problem finding Black Rock, although it took longer than he expected because of the speed limit in the mountains. As he’d told Cate, Black Rock was small, but they did locate a Laundromat two blocks off Main Street. And wonder of wonders, it was already open for business—the sign said it opened at seven and it was just past eight when they arrived. Cate filled two empty washing machines while Liam wandered over to the change machine and tried to insert a twenty. The machine kept spitting the bill back at him, so he tried another without any luck.
“Machine’s empty,” said a woman sitting in the next row over, reading a magazine and glancing up from time to time to check her laundry in the dryers. “The drugstore next door will give you change...if you buy something. The pharmacy counter doesn’t open until nine, but the store itself opened at eight.”
“Thanks,” Liam told her. To Cate he said quietly, “I don’t want you out of my sight, so come with me. I think it’s safe to leave the laundry here—we’ll be right back.”
Startled, she said, “You really think someone will find me here?”
“One in a million chance, but I’m not risking it.”
She gave him a somber look, as if he’d reminded her of the constant threat of danger she lived under. “Okay.”
Liam made a beeline for the back of the drugstore, Cate in tow. He knew exactly what he was going to buy. He’d used his emergency condom last night, and based on Cate’s positive reaction to making love they would need more. No way would he make love to her without protecting her. But no way would he turn Cate down if she wanted to make love again, either, just because he was unprepared. And despite the fact he had a reputation within the DSS for having a way with the ladies—just as his brother had before he’d gotten married—he didn’t carry a stash of condoms with him as a general rule. He’d been lucky he had one in the emergency overnight case he kept in his SUV—the case he’d transferred when he’d switched SUVs with the special agent from the agency. But now...
When he found the aisle he wanted he automatically reached for his favorite brand, then hesitated. He hadn’t really given it a lot of thought before, but there was quite a variety of condoms to choose from, some of which were designed more to heighten a woman’s pleasure rather than a man’s. He turned to Cate. Her cheeks were bright pink and she was looking everywhere except at him.
Her shyness over something as prosaic as this charmed him, and he said, “You probably don’t have a preference. Right?”
Her gaze flickered toward him, then away again. “Last night...” she managed before her voice trickled away.
Okay, so he wasn’t dense. She meant what he normally used was perfectly acceptable to her. He grabbed a box of twenty-four off the shelf.
At the checkout Liam added a couple of packaged honey buns since they’d skipped breakfast, then told the cashier with his most winsome smile, “I need change for the Laundromat, too. Could I get a roll of quarters, please?”
* * *
Cate and Liam headed back to the cabin near Granite Peak almost two hours later, with the clean and folded laundry sitting neatly stacked on the backseat. The drugstore bag—with its box of condoms—lay wedged in the space between their seats, and Cate’s gaze continually drifted in its direction as she thought about what that meant.
Vishenko had never worn a condom. Why would he? He didn’t give a damn about protecting her or any of the women he’d raped and abused in his life. She was profoundly grateful she’d never gotten pregnant, had never ended up with a sexually transmitted disease, either, but neither fact was a virtue in Vishenko—he hadn’t cared. If she’d gotten pregnant he would probably have forced her to have an abortion, a dilemma that had torn her apart at the time. Not that she wanted his child—the idea made her sick—but that in aborting his child she would also be aborting her own, something she couldn’t fathom.
But she hadn’t gotten pregnant. Maybe she couldn’t get pregnant at all—how could she know? Early on Liam had said his mother wanted more grandchildren, and the way he’d talked last night told her children were something he envisioned for himself, too...eventually. Which meant that even if he didn’t walk away when he found out the truth, would he still want her if she was barren?
Then other words Liam had said last night came back to her. “What do you think love is, Cate?... It’s a choice. A commitment... I haven’t just fallen in love with you. I choose to love you...”
She wanted to believe him. She wanted to believe he’d chosen to love her and always would, no matter what, just as she would always love him. But that last little doubt clung to her, refusing to go away. Because if he could choose to love her, he could also choose differently—he could choose not to love her.
* * *
“Let’s pack up,” Liam told Cate once they’d put away the clean sheets and towels.
“Okay.” Cate pulled her small suitcase from beneath the bed where she’d stored it. She didn’t have much to pack. A few changes of clothing—including what they’d just washed that morning. Her toothbrush and toothpaste. The comb and brush the Morgans had provided her with at the first safe house.
When everything had been packed she stared at the pitiful contents of her suitcase for a minute, the sum total of her possessions at this point. It wasn’t all she owned, of course. She had a few belongings back in Zakhar, in her suite in the palace. And she had some clothes and things in her hotel room in DC—which reminded her she needed to ask someone about that.
As she stood there she realized she’d spent her entire adult life expecting to move on at a moment’s notice. She’d always told herself she couldn’t afford to become attached to things she might have to abandon. And not just things. People, too. She’d made no friends in the six years she’d been on the run—for their safety as well as for her own. She’d reconnected with Angelina after Alec rescued her, and Queen Juliana had been exceptionally kind and friendly toward her once she’d moved into the palace, but Cate had made no attempt to get in touch with any of her former friends in Zakhar—she couldn’t have lied about where she’d been all these years, but she couldn’t have borne to tell anyone the truth, either, and have them look at her with disdain...or even worse, with pity.
But she wasn’t the same woman she’d been a year ago. Not the same woman she’d been a month ago, or even two weeks ago. Liam had changed her. Despite telling herself not to hope...not to dream about the fairy-tale ending, she was hoping. She was dreaming. Despite her fear that Liam would no longer love her if he knew the truth, hope refused to die.
She absentmindedly picked up her book from the nightstand and tucked it beneath her pajamas, then closed the suitcase lid and zipped it up. “I’m packed,” she told Liam in a voice that didn’t betray any of what she’d been thinking.
“Me too,” he said as he swung his duffel bag over one shoulder. “How about a late lunch on the road? I don’t know about you, but I’m a little tired of eating stuff out of a can. If we leave now we can stop in Kaycee and have a nice lunch, and still be in Casper
by two.”
“Sounds good.”
Cate realized she was going to miss the cabin as she followed Liam out the door. And not just the cabin—she would miss her life here. She would miss hiking the trails with Liam, which reminded her of hiking the mountains around Drago when she was a girl. She would miss the quiet serenity. She would miss the isolation. Most of all, she would miss the sense of peace and security that had flowed around her this past week. You were happy here, she told herself now. And not just because of Liam, although nothing would have been the same without him.
“I hope we come back,” she told him as she pulled the door shut behind her.
* * *
Aleksandrov Vishenko’s Learjet landed at the airport in Buffalo, Wyoming, and taxied toward the terminal. The two passengers—Vishenko and D’Arcy—had barely spoken to each other for the entire duration of the flight. Now D’Arcy unbuckled his seat belt and said, “I’ve arranged an agency car for myself. I knew you’d want to rent your own.”
Vishenko turned his cold gaze on the other man. “You are not taking me to Caterina? What did I pay you for?”
“You paid me for her location. And you paid me to make sure her protectors were out of the way, which I’ve done. So I’ll take you to her, but I won’t stay. I’m sure you don’t want a witness to murder.”
Vishenko’s mind was working furiously. He’d planned on killing D’Arcy first, then taking his time with Caterina. But if D’Arcy had his own transportation, if he merely pointed him in the right direction instead of taking him all the way there, that could throw a kink in the works. He would have to somehow lure D’Arcy into accompanying him to wherever Caterina was located. He would also have to assume D’Arcy would be armed, and take that into account. He wasn’t armed now—his men would never have let the other man board the plane otherwise—but D’Arcy wasn’t a fool. Just because he’d never been able to legally pin anything on Vishenko didn’t mean he was foolish.
Perhaps D’Arcy suspected a double cross, and that’s why he’d arranged his own transportation. Perhaps he suspected what Vishenko had in mind for him—he did have the reputation for being uncannily omniscient. If that was the case, Vishenko would have to postpone killing him.
The other five million was sitting in a suitcase by Vishenko’s seat. He’d brought it along just in case D’Arcy had insisted on seeing it before their departure—and he had. But Vishenko had no intention of giving it to him now...or ever.
* * *
Liam and Cate were almost all the way to Kaycee when she suddenly gasped and turned to him, dismayed. “My books! I left my books in the cabin.”
Liam eased his foot off the accelerator. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.” She pounded the heels of her hands against her forehead as if to knock some sense into her head. “I put them in the closet so they’d be out of the way. I only packed the one I was reading.” She grasped his arm. “We have to go back. We have to!”
“If we do we’ll be late getting to Casper. And we won’t have time to stop for lunch.”
“Please, Liam. I don’t care about lunch.”
“It’s likely we’ll be going back there tomorrow or the next day anyway, so—”
“But you said yourself we might not. I can’t leave my books, I just can’t.” Her voice took on a note of desperation. “You gave them to me.”
How well he remembered that moment. Cate had been as giddily happy over those few books he’d bought her as if he’d given her diamonds. If anything prevented them from going back to the cabin...
He saw an exit coming up and flicked on his turn indicator. His stomach was already growling—one honey bun while doing laundry didn’t really cut it for him—and now they would miss lunch, too. But Cate expected so little and asked for even less—he was damned if he wouldn’t do this one little thing for her.
* * *
They pulled into the dead end near the cabin just before one. Liam hadn’t even shifted into Park before Cate had her seat belt off and her door open. He snagged her arm just in time, and pulled her back. “Hang on a sec,” he told her, turning off the engine and pocketing the keys. “Don’t go anywhere without me, okay?”
“Sorry. I was just—”
“I know,” he said, cutting her off. “But just because we were safe here when we left doesn’t mean we shouldn’t exercise caution now.” He undid his own seat belt and said, “Come on, let’s get those books and get back on the road.”
They made their careful way down the path to the cabin, Liam in the lead. They were halfway there when Liam stopped abruptly, his eyes on the ground, and Cate almost ran into him.
“What’s wrong?”
His face was grim. “Something’s not right.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look.” He pointed at the dirt path. At first she didn’t know what he was talking about because all she saw were several sets of footprints crisscrossing each other, leading to and from the cabin. But then she got it—the top set of footprints headed toward the cabin, not away from it.
“Sheriff Callahan?” she suggested.
“Maybe. But if it’s him, where’s his SUV? Besides, he knows we’re not there. And he told me he wouldn’t come out here unless we were gone more than a day.”
An icy chill ran down her spine, and despite the warm summer day she shivered. And when Liam drew his SIG SAUER from its shoulder holster, she knew it was scarier than he was letting on—which was bad enough. She touched his forearm. “Let’s go back.”
He shook his head. “We need to know if someone found this place. If he tried to take this path without knowing what to watch out for and avoid, Callahan’s trap—the one right before the clearing—would stop him. If it’s Callahan, the trap will be unsprung. Come on.” Quietly, so quietly Cate couldn’t believe it, Liam moved toward the clearing. He’d gone several yards before he turned around and saw her standing frozen exactly where he’d left her. He held a finger to his lips, then waggled his fingers for her to move toward him. She wasn’t quite as stealthy as he’d been, but she was proud of the way she managed to make very little sound.
Even though Cate knew it was there, she couldn’t actually see Callahan’s trap until Liam pointed at it silently, and when she saw it was intact she let out the breath she’d been holding. She started to speak, but again he put his finger to his lips, indicating silence. His left hand pulled her close and he pressed his lips to her ear.
“Even though there’s no one in the trap, something still feels off.” It was uttered in an undertone, not a whisper. “It’s probably nothing, but stay here just in case. I’m going to reconnoiter a bit. If everything’s okay, I’ll come back and get you.”
He tugged the keys to the agency’s SUV from his pocket and started to press them into her hand, but then he must have remembered she couldn’t drive and a look of frustration crossed his face as he shoved the keys back into his pocket. Then he said in that same undertone, with his lips next to her ear, “If you hear gunfire, run back toward the SUV but keep going until you hit the main road. Don’t stop for anything.”
She started to protest that she wasn’t going to leave him if he was in trouble, but he put his hand over her mouth before she could utter a word. “Please, Cate. Just do it, okay? It’s the only way you can help me.”
She struggled with her heart, but knew she had to do this for him. “Okay.” She mouthed the word against his hand.
He slid his watch from his wrist and handed it to her. “If I’m not back in ten minutes, gunfire or no gunfire, run like hell. Promise?”
She nodded, then glanced down at the watch to see what time it was now. When she looked up Liam was gone. Her heart had already been pounding, but the minute he disappeared from sight it kicked into overdrive. She tried to calm her heartbeat by taking several deep breaths and w
atching the second hand on Liam’s analog watch tick around one full circuit, then two. But watching the second hand only made her more anxious, so after another minute she stopped and looked up instead.
A sound from the path behind her made her whirl around. Her heart skipped a beat, then accelerated into the rat-a-tat-tat of machine gun fire.
Evil incarnate confronted her. “Hello, Caterina,” Aleksandrov Vishenko said. Then he raised his pistol.
Chapter 17
Liam crept around the cabin’s perimeter, easily avoiding Callahan’s traps. Thanking God silently he knew the location of every single one. The only sounds he heard were natural to the forest, and there was no movement from the direction of the cabin. But he wasn’t convinced. His sixth sense still had him on high alert. A burst of speed brought him to the steps at the bottom of the back porch, his SIG SAUER raised, his finger on the trigger.
When there was still no sound or movement from the cabin, Liam mounted the steps slowly, cautiously, placing his feet where the nails bound the cross boards to the supporting beams, so they wouldn’t creak. Then he was at the back door. He peered through the window and spied a blonde woman sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup of something, with her back to the door.
Suddenly the barrel of a gun was pressed against his temple, and a rough voice said, “Federal agent. Move and you’re dead.”
Adrenaline jolted through Liam’s system—the body’s natural fight-or-flight response. But then he realized with shock he recognized the voice. Incredulous, he said, “Cody?”
“Liam?” A large hand grabbed his shoulder and pulled him around. Then his brother-in-law cursed, long and low. “What the hell are you doing here?” Cody demanded.
“I could ask you the same thing.”
“You’re supposed to be halfway to Casper by now.”
“How the hell do you know that?” Then Liam got it. “Callahan. Callahan told you. What the hell is going on?”