by Paula Graves
Oh, for the days when life was so simple that her biggest worry was crash-landing a herkie jump in front of twenty other judgmental preteen girls.
“I know you’re about ready to squirm out of your skin,” Owen said quietly, slipping his hand into hers, “but I have a plan.”
She curled her fingers around his. “Okay. What is it?”
“As soon as I’m pretty sure our kidnappers have retreated, we’ll head for the cabin.”
She looked up at him, narrowing her eyes. “The one you stayed in twenty years ago when you were eleven?”
“I think it’s still there.”
“Maybe, but in what kind of condition?”
His lips flattened with exasperation. She felt his grip on her hand loosen. “Must you always be so negative?”
She tightened her fingers around his again. “Yes. But sorry.”
He gave her fingers a light squeeze. “I suppose it’s part of your charm.”
“Sweet talker,” she muttered.
“So we’re agreed? We head for the cabin?”
“If it’s still there.” She looked up. “Sorry. Negativity.”
“If it’s still there,” he agreed. “And we’d better hope it is.”
The dark tone of his growly voice made her stomach turn a flip. “Why’s that?”
“You know how the wind has picked up?”
“Yeah?”
“I think the rain may be getting here a little earlier than expected tonight.”
Owen was right. Within a few minutes, the brisk wind began to carry needles of rain from which the spring growth overhead provided only partial shelter. Owen tried to tuck Tara under his coat, but the rain became relentless as daylight waned, darkness falling prematurely because of the lowering sky.
Tara wiped the beading water from her watch face. Nearly six. The wedding would have long been over by now, if she’d gone through with it. Robert must be going crazy, wondering what happened to her. Her car would still be in the parking lot, her purse in the bride’s room. The only thing missing was the bride and her puffy white dress.
Would everyone realize something had gone very wrong? Or would they assume that Tara had succumbed to cold feet and bolted without letting anyone know?
Was Robert thinking he’d just made a narrow escape from a lifetime with a lunatic?
Stop it, Tara. This is not your fault.
Owen was right. She was way too negative. She added it to her mental list of things she needed to work on, right behind cellulite on her thighs and—oh, yeah—running away from dangerous, crazy kidnappers.
“You’re thinking, aren’t you?” Owen asked. “I always worry when you’re thinking.”
“I’m thinking I haven’t heard anything from the kidnappers back there recently. I’m also thinking that there may be ants crawling up my legs. And I’m thinking if I have to hide behind this tree for a minute longer, getting soaked to the skin, I’m going to run crazy through the trees, screaming I give up! Come get me! at the top of my lungs.”
Owen turned toward her, cupping her face between his hands. His fingers were cool, but the look in his eyes was scalding hot. “I know you’re scared. I know wisecracking and complaining is how you show it. And you’re right. We haven’t heard those guys recently. I don’t think they were eager to spend the rest of their day hunting you down in the woods when they know who you are and can take a chance on grabbing you another time.”
She stared up at him. “You really think they’ll try this again?”
“You said they asked for you by name.”
“But why? I’m not rich. Robert’s not even rich, not really. Not enough to warrant a risky daylight abduction.”
“I know. But even if you can’t think of a reason, they clearly had one.” He dropped his hands to his sides. “It’s time to make a run for it. You ready?”
“Born ready.” She flashed him a cheeky grin, even if she felt like crying. It earned her one of Owen’s deliciously sexy smiles in return, and he touched her face again. His fingers were cold, but heat seemed to radiate through her from his touch.
He grabbed her hand and started running, pulling her behind him.
Even though she’d convinced herself that their captors had given up and made their escape, every muscle in Tara’s body tensed as she zigzagged behind Owen, her heart in her throat. Every twig that snapped beneath her feet sounded as thunderous as a gunshot, even through the masking hiss of the falling rain.
Two hundred yards to the cabin, Owen had said. Surely they’d run two hundred yards by now. That was two football fields, wasn’t it?
Owen jerked sideways suddenly, nearly flinging her off her feet. He grabbed her around the waist as she started to slide across the muddy ground and kept her upright. “There,” he said, satisfaction coloring his voice.
Tara followed his gaze and saw what looked to be a ramshackle wooden porch peeking out from the overgrowth about twenty yards away.
“You have got to be kidding me,” she muttered.
His lips pressed to a thin line. “Shelter is shelter, Tara.” He let go of her hand and started toward the wooden structure with a brisk, determined stride.
She stood watching him for a moment, feeling terrible. The man had saved her life, and she’d been nothing but a whining ingrate.
Lighting flashed overhead, followed quickly by a bone-rattling boom of thunder that shook her out of her misery and sent her dashing through the muddy undergrowth as fast as her ruined pumps would carry her. She skidded to a stop at the edge of the porch and stared at what Owen had called a cabin.
It was tiny. She didn’t have any idea how Owen and his fellow Boy Scouts had managed to squeeze themselves inside the place. The three shallow steps leading up to the porch looked rickety and dangerous, though apparently they’d managed to hold Owen’s weight, for he was already on the porch, peering inside the darkened doorway of the small structure.
“I remember it as being bigger,” he said quietly.
“You were eleven.” She made herself risk the steps. They were sturdier than they looked, though the rain had left them slick. At least the stair railing didn’t wiggle too much as she climbed to the porch and joined Owen in the doorway.
Years had clearly passed since any Boy Scouts had darkened the door of this cabin. What she could see in the gloom looked damp and dilapidated. The musty smell of age and disuse filled Tara’s lungs as she took a shaky breath. “The roof leaks, doesn’t it?”
Owen took a step inside. Almost immediately, he jerked back, bumping into Tara. She had to grab him around the waist to keep from falling.
Something small and gray scuttled out the door past them, scampered off the porch and disappeared into the undergrowth.
“Possum,” Owen said.
Tara grimaced. “So that’s what I’m smelling.”
He whipped around to look at her. “I’m sorry I’ve disappointed you. Again.”
She grabbed his hand. “You saved me. I wouldn’t have gotten out of there without you.”
He gave her hand a little squeeze before letting go. “If it weren’t for you, I’d have never gotten loose from that duct tape.”
And he’d never have been in trouble if she hadn’t called him to share her doubts about the wedding. Which maybe she wouldn’t be having if she didn’t still find Owen so darn attractive.
They could play this game forever, going all the way back to sixth grade when she saved Owen from a bully and he’d helped her pass math.
They were darn near symbiotic at this point.
“You’re thinking again,” Owen murmured.
“I am,” she said. “I’m thinking if we’re planning on hunkering down here until the rain passes, I’d like to make sure there’s no possum surprises waiting for me in ther
e. Any chance we could find a candle or two in this godforsaken place?”
“Maybe.” Owen entered the dark cabin. A moment later, she heard more than saw him scrabbling around in a drawer. “Ha.” He reached into the pocket of his tuxedo pants and pulled out something. A second later, a small light flickered in the darkness.
“You had a lighter in your pants pocket?”
“I wanted to be sure your candle lighting at the wedding went off without a hitch.” He shot her a sheepish grin. “I take my man-of-honor duties seriously.”
Her insides melted, and she crossed to where he stood, wrapping her arms around his waist and pressing her face to his chest. “You’re the best man of honor ever.”
He rubbed his free hand down her arm. “Oh, Tara, you’re freezing. You really need to get out of those wet clothes.”
“And into what?” she asked, her voice coming out softer and sultrier than she’d intended.
He stared back at her, wordless, his eyes smoldering as strongly as the flickering candle in his hand. The moment stretched between them, electric and fraught with danger.
And forbidden desires...
A loud thud sounded outside the door, and in a flash, Owen extinguished the candle and pulled Tara behind him.
There was another thud. Slow. Deliberate.
Someone was outside the cabin.
Chapter Three
Owen tucked Tara more fully behind him, squaring his shoulders in an attempt to look larger than he was. What he wouldn’t give to have the pecs and deltoids of Mike Strong, who’d instructed him in hand-to-hand combat during his first grueling weeks of probationary training at Campbell Cove Security Services. Strong had insisted that Owen’s lean, wiry build didn’t mean he couldn’t hold his own in a fight, but until today, he’d never had a reason to test that theory.
And given how badly his attempt to save Tara outside the church had gone, he wasn’t confident that Strong would be proven right this time, either.
He could hear his father’s voice, a mean whisper in his ear. “You’re weak, Owen. Life ain’t kind to the weak.”
Grimly shutting out that voice, he searched the shadowy interior of the cabin for something he could use as a weapon, but the place had been stripped mostly bare a long time ago, from the looks of it. There was a rickety camp bed left in one corner, and the mattress of another lying on the floor nearby, but that was all. What he wouldn’t give for one of those cheap little bow and arrow sets he and the other Scouts had learned to use that summer twenty years ago.
Not that he’d remember how to use it.
The footsteps on the porch moved closer, the steps careful. Deliberate. There was an oddly light touch to the sounds that didn’t remind him much of the hulking men who’d shoved him into the side of the van earlier that day. These footfalls sounded almost—
A face peered around the edge of the door. Small, pale, freckled and terrified.
A kid, no more than ten or eleven. He froze there, his face framed by the bright red hood of his rain slicker. A second later, a second face appeared next to the boy’s, smaller. More feminine. She had big, dark eyes and frizzy curls framing her face beneath her pink rain hood.
Owen took a step toward them. “Hello—”
The boy opened his mouth and screamed, triggering an answering shriek in the girl. They sped off into the rainy woods, their terrified wails turning to hysterical giggles of pure adrenaline rush before they faded from earshot.
Owen felt Tara’s forehead press hard against his back. “Kids?”
“That could have been us twenty years ago.” Owen turned to look at her. “Sneaking around Old Man Ridley’s cabin, trying to catch him red-handed at murder.”
Tension seeped slowly out of her expression, a faint smile taking its place. “Remember that summer he almost caught us?”
“One of the top ten most terrifying moments of my life.” He laughed softly.
“Do you think those kids will come back with grown-ups next time?”
He shook his head. “Are you kidding? They’d probably be grounded for life just for sneaking around this old cabin.” He pulled out the lighter and relit the candle he’d extinguished. “Come on, let’s see what kind of shelter we can make of this place.”
The place was grimy and drafty, but the tin roof seemed to have weathered the years without springing leaks, which had kept the interior dry and mostly free of mildew. The cot mattresses were a disaster, but Owen uncovered an old military footlocker half hidden by the remains of one of the cots. Inside, he found a couple of camp blankets kept well preserved within the airtight trunk. They smelled of the cedar blocks someone had placed inside the trunk to ward off moths.
“Here, wrap up in this.” He unfolded the top blanket and wrapped it around Tara’s shoulders, not missing the shivers rattling through her. “I wish we could risk starting a fire in that fireplace,” he said with a nod toward the river stone fireplace against the near wall. “But the chimney’s probably blocked by now, and besides, we don’t want to risk smoke alerting anyone to where we are. Not yet.”
She stepped closer to him, curling into him like a kitten seeking heat. “Just hold me for a minute, okay? They say body heat is the best heat.”
Owen quelled the instant reaction of his body to hers, a talent he’d honed since their early teens, when Tara’s femininity blossomed in time for his hormones to rev up to high gear. She’d put deliberate boundaries between them, first unspoken ones and then, later, when he’d wanted to push those barriers out of the way, spoken ones.
“I’ve never had a friend like you, Owen,” she’d told him that night after the high school football game when he tried to kiss her in the car after he’d driven her home. “I need you to be Owen. My best friend. We can’t risk changing that. Do you understand? Boyfriends are complicated. Relationships are volatile. I have enough of that in my life.”
He couldn’t argue with that. Motherless since just before they’d met, Tara had struggled to connect with her rough-edged, emotionally conservative father, who’d had to give up the military life he’d loved to take care of his daughter. Tara had felt as if he resented her for the end of his Marine Corps career, which had added to the existing friction between them right up until his death.
Owen had swallowed his desire and given Tara what she needed, as much as it had cost him to do so. But the desire had never gone away, married as it was to his enduring love for his best friend.
And at times like these, with her slender body pressed so intimately to his, what was left of her clothing clinging to her body and leaving little to his imagination, tamping down that desire was a Herculean task.
“Maybe the rain will stop soon,” she mumbled against his collarbone, her breath hot against his neck.
“Maybe,” he agreed. “Those children must live nearby, which is promising, because when this was a Boy Scout camp years ago, there were no houses in easy walking distance at all.”
She burrowed deeper in his embrace. “I wonder how I’m going to explain walking around in the woods wearing a slip, half a wedding dress and my ruined silk pumps.”
“Very carefully,” he answered, making her chuckle. The sound rippled through him, sparking a shudder of pure male need.
“I don’t think the rain is supposed to end before morning,” she said with a soft sigh that heated his throat again. “We’re going to need to find somewhere to sleep tonight. And I have to say, I’m not thrilled about sharing a cot where a possum was probably nesting.”
“The blankets from that chest are pretty clean. We could cover the mattresses with those.”
“Mattress,” she corrected.
“Mattress?”
She looked up at him, her expression serious. “It’s too cold in here for us to sleep apart. Right?”
He stared a
t her, his heart rattling in his chest like a snare drum. He swallowed hard and forced the words from his lips. “Right. Body heat is the best heat.”
He was in so much trouble.
* * *
BAGLEY COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT investigator Archer Trask walked slowly around the small groom’s room, taking in all the details of the crime scene. There was less blood than one might expect, to begin with. The victim had taken two bullets to the base of his skull—double tap, the big-city cops would call it. A sign of a professional hit.
But who the hell would target a groom on his wedding day?
“Vic’s name is Robert Mallory. The third.” The responding deputy flipped a page in his notepad. “Mallory Senior works in the Lexington DA’s office, and he’s already screaming for us to turn this over to the Kentucky State Police.”
“Any witnesses?”
“No, but the bride is missing. So’s her man of honor.”
Trask slanted a look at the deputy. “You’re kidding.”
“Nobody’s seen either of them since about an hour before the wedding.”
“Bride’s name?”
“Tara Bentley.”
Didn’t sound familiar. Neither did the groom’s name. “Have you talked to the bride’s parents?”
“She’s an orphan, it seems.” The deputy grimaced. “Her side of the aisle is a little sparse.”
Trask rubbed his forehead, where a headache was starting to form. Why didn’t he ever get a cut-and-dried case these days? “I want the groom’s parents kept apart so I can question them separately. And any of the wedding party who might have seen anything. Do we have an estimated time of death yet?”
“Last time anyone saw him was around three, about an hour before the ceremony was supposed to start. Last time anyone saw the bride was round the same time.”