by Paula Graves
But he held on to her arms, keeping her close. The last thing he needed was for her to run out of the cave and back into that phalanx of men in black carrying big weapons. “I didn’t call anyone.” He peered into the gloom, trying to see her face. “Maybe if you’d stayed put like I asked you to—”
“I stayed put for three years, and fat lot of good that did me.” She gave another push and broke free of his grasp.
He shot after her as she dashed toward the cave entrance, catching her as she neared the light. “Stop it, Amanda.” He didn’t dare raise his voice above a whisper, but he infused the soft exhalation with as much force as he could. He could practically smell the panic rising off her skin in waves. He couldn’t blame her for losing her grip on her emotions—nothing quite like becoming a killer’s target to get the adrenaline pumping in overdrive.
He could see her better, now that they were closer to the fading light seeping through the cave entrance. She looked pale and exhausted, as if the same adrenaline that had kept her on her feet this far had finally sucked her dry of energy.
He couldn’t stop himself from cradling her face between his palms. “Stop running. Stay with me.”
Her gaze lifted to meet his, her pale eyes wary. “I can’t trust you.” She looked away. “I can’t trust anyone.”
His chest ached with sympathy. “Believe me, I know the feeling, baby. But we need each other if we’re going to get out of this mess alive.”
“They’re probably already at the motel, waiting,” she growled, pulling away from his touch again. This time, however, she moved away from the cave entrance instead of toward it. “We don’t have a chance in hell of getting anywhere near your car.”
“I moved the car,” he said, smiling slightly as her gaze snapped up to meet his again.
“You thought I’d double back and take it while you were hunting the woods for me?”
She wasn’t so tired that her whip-smart mind couldn’t cut to the chase, he thought. “The idea crossed my mind.”
Her lips flattened with annoyance, but she didn’t protest. She could hardly argue with his reasoning, given what had actually transpired. “They could be waiting out there for us right now. Just biding their time.”
“I’d like to know how they found us,” he said.
“And why there are so many of them,” she added, edging toward the cave entrance again.
He caught up with her, keeping his hands to himself for the moment. But if she made a run for it, he’d be ready.
She didn’t try to run. She just crept to the edge of the opening and took a quick look outside. She backed up until she bumped into Rick’s chest. “I don’t see them out there anymore.”
“They didn’t have a clear line of sight once I pulled you behind the bush,” he murmured, enjoying the feel of her small, round backside pressed against his thighs. For a second, he found himself immersed in the memory of that moment they’d shared back in the motel room, when years had seemed to melt into nothing, taking them back to a time where finding pleasure in each other’s bodies had seemed as natural as breathing.
He eased away from her before his body betrayed him. “Do you want to take a shot at locating the car? If it’s still where I hid it, and they haven’t located it, we could get out of here before they found us.”
“I’ll go. You head for the highway—go to the hamburger place where you got dinner. I’ll find the car and come get you.” She held out her hand. “Keys?”
He couldn’t hold back a soft chuckle. “Not on your life.”
One eyebrow arched. “You don’t trust me?”
“You haven’t exactly given me any reason to.”
“I could say the same of you,” she pointed out. “You call me and within hours, I’m getting shot at and chased away from my own home—”
“Funny—I’m the only one who actually took a bullet.”
She made a small sound of frustration. “So we go together, then. Probably smarter that way.”
“Together,” he agreed. He looked at the cave entrance. “I’m going to scout out there first, make sure the coast is clear. The last thing we want to do is walk into an ambush.”
She looked as if she wanted to protest, but she finally gave a nod. “Okay. Hurry.”
Outside, night had already begun to fall, casting the evening sky in deep shades of crimson and purple. It was almost 6:00 p.m., he saw with a quick glance at his watch. He edged toward the mountain-laurel bush where he’d hidden before, stopping at the sound of a faint snapping noise ahead.
Crouching behind the bush, he waited.
There. Movement about fifty yards ahead through the trees and underbrush. In the twilight, the man in black almost blended in with the woods.
Almost.
Moving at a snail’s pace, Rick edged backward toward the cave entrance, keeping his eye out for more men in black. He finally reached the narrow slit in the rock and hurried back inside. “There’s at least one of them still out there,” he whispered to Amanda.
He heard her soft exhalation. “Damn it.”
“We could be in worse shape,” he pointed out. “You’ve got water in your pack. Probably more food. We have extra clothes if the temps drop overnight. A roof over our heads.”
“So we’re staying in this cave tonight?” She sounded so defeated, he thought. Pushed to her limit.
“Can’t be much worse than the motel room,” he pointed out, deliberately keeping his voice light.
Her gaze slanted his way, and in the faint light from outside, he saw her lips curve. “I’ll give you that,” she answered, sounding stronger.
“Let’s figure out what supplies we have,” he suggested. “Ration it out so we have some food and water left over for tomorrow if we have to stay here beyond the night.”
With a nod, she picked up the duffel bag and backed deeper into the cave. Finding a place to sit, she unzipped the bag and started digging inside.
“Four twelve-ounce bottles of water,” she whispered as he sat down across from her. “Six protein bars.”
“Okay—that’s one bottle apiece for tonight and one bottle tomorrow. We had protein bars earlier, so we’ll save those for tomorrow. Two a day—that’ll get us through tomorrow and into the next day.”
“I have one of your boxes of ammo.”
“I know. I have another box, and if we can get to the car without incident, I have more packed in the trunk.”
“What if they find your car?”
It was a possibility, he had to concede. The Charger was hidden from sight on the road, and he’d covered it with some loose limbs he’d foraged from the woods around where he’d parked. But if someone was out there scouring the woods for Amanda, it wouldn’t be hard to find the Charger in its hiding place. “We’ll deal with that if it arises.”
“Are you sure there isn’t a tracker of some sort on your car?” she asked a few minutes later.
“Short of tearing it down and putting it back together, I can’t be sure,” he admitted. “But I looked at all the obvious places, and a few not so obvious ones. I didn’t see a thing. And the GPS signal detector I used didn’t spot anything.”
“If we get out of here, we should check again.” She barely got the sentence out past an enormous yawn.
“Why don’t you try to get some sleep?” Rick suggested. “You’ve got to be beat.”
Though the light was nearly gone from the cave, he could see her just well enough to notice her back straightening as she spoke. “I’m fine.”
She wasn’t fine, but if she needed to maintain that facade in front of him, he wasn’t going to take that away from her. “Okay. Not going to be much else we can do in here, though. No candles, no books.”
“You can sleep if you want to,” she said, her tone indifferent.
He wasn’t sure he bought the nonchalance, however. There was a faint thread of tension in her voice that made him wonder if she was hiding something from him.
Of course, the more obvi
ous question at this point was, what wasn’t she hiding from him?
THE NIGHT SEEMED ENDLESS, and despite her determination not to, Amanda fell asleep sometime deep in the morning hours. Following her into her slumber, bleak memories chased her through her dreams, a jumble of horrors and regrets that had been her constant, unwelcome companions almost every night for the past three years.
The dreams always began with no sign of threat in sight. In this dream, she was ten years old again, sitting on the front stoop of the house in McComb, sketching pictures of dragons and unicorns in colored pencils in the sketch pad her Aunt Debbie gave her for her birthday a few days earlier.
She wasn’t unaccustomed to the sounds of voices raised in anger. Her mother drank too much, and she tended to pick men who were cruel-mouthed bullies. How much those unpleasant attributes fed on each other was something Amanda had never really been able to decide.
By the age of ten, she’d grown to ignore the fights for the most part, so when the shouts rose over the sounds of birds chirping in the trees and the lawn mower buzzing busily in the neighbor’s yard down the street, Amanda blocked out the noise and concentrated on achieving the perfect shimmery green required for a dragon’s wing.
The gunshot, however, had ripped through her self-protective cocoon, setting her nerves rattling.
She’d learned not to be afraid of the fights, because none of her mother’s boyfriends ever struck blows or made threats. The words that passed between them could be violently ugly, but there were lines they never crossed.
But not that morning.
Slowly, her ten-year-old self turned toward the open screen door and peered through the mesh, telling herself that her mother’s boyfriend, Jerry, had turned on the television. That’s all it was. He’d turned on the TV to watch one of his favorite cop shows. She listened hard for the sound of voices coming from the set in the kitchen. But all she heard was a low, keening noise that sounded as if hell itself had opened a window to let a song of suffering escape.
She made herself go into the kitchen. Made herself look at the mess her mother had made. Jerry was on the floor, still alive, feebly swinging at her mother with a butcher’s knife even as his life blood poured out onto the grimy linoleum—
Amanda woke with a start, that sound still ringing in her ears. All around her was darkness and cold. Beneath her aching side, the ground was hard stone.
She was in a cave, she remembered. She was decades older than the ten-year-old in her dream, and in the intervening years, she’d seen worse than the scene she’d walked in on that morning in the kitchen of her mother’s home.
Much worse.
She felt movement next to her, and her heart skipped a beat. Then she remembered more about where she was and why she was there. Rick Cooper lay on the cold ground beside her, his large, hard-muscled body radiating heat like a furnace. She felt a powerful urge to scoot closer to him, to bask in his warmth. She held herself in check, however, remembering how easily she’d fallen into his arms at the motel the previous day.
Some mistakes didn’t need to be repeated, however tempting they might be.
Rick shifted next to her, making a low groaning sound deep in his throat. His breathing, harsh and rapid, didn’t sound like normal sleep respiration.
It sounded like a man having a nightmare.
A flutter of sympathy dancing in her chest, she reached to her side and found the small survival kit she’d taken from Rick’s bag before she fled the motel. She took the compact flashlight from inside and snapped it on, letting the narrow beam glance across Rick’s face.
His eyes were still closed, but there was nothing peaceful about his expression. Deep furrows creased his forehead and the skin around his eyes, making him look ages older than his thirty-five years. Despite the cold, sweat beads had formed on his brow, glittering in the flashlight beam.
Was he ill?
Edging closer, she laid the back of her hand against his forehead and found him warm but not feverish. Releasing a soft sigh of relief, she started to sit back.
Like a striking snake, Rick reached out and grabbed her hand, his eyes snapping open.
For a second, even though she knew she was strong enough and well-trained enough to hold her own in a fight, Amanda felt a flicker of fear. Because the cold light in Rick’s dark eyes was nothing short of lethal.
“It’s me,” she whispered, not because she was trying to be quiet but because her voice failed her.
His expression softened, though he didn’t let go of her wrist. “Turn off the light,” he commanded softly, sitting up.
Her finger trembled on the switch, unwilling to extinguish the only thing keeping this cave from once again becoming a cold, black void.
“Amanda?” His voice remained quiet but with a harsh edge that made her stomach knot. “The light.”
She forced herself to push the button, plunging them into inky nothingness. For a second, she thought she felt icy fingers crawling down her spine, trailing goose bumps. She felt the immediate jump in her pulse and tried to slow her breathing to compensate. But the only thing she succeeded in doing was making herself feel light-headed.
“Rick?” she whispered, not because she had anything to say but just to reassure herself he was still there.
“I’m here,” he answered, his voice little more than a breath in the dark.
She reached for him, her fingers colliding with the rock wall of his chest. She felt his heartbeat quicken beneath her touch, and for a moment, the urge to curl herself around him was almost more than she could resist.
“How’s your arm?” she asked.
“Hurts like an SOB. But I think I’ll live.”
“I could put some more ointment on it.” Anything to take her mind off the gaping maw of blackness.
“You can’t see it in the dark.” Humor tinted his low murmur. “I don’t think I want to risk you poking me right in the wound.”
His voice was so familiar, even after almost three years apart. Of course, she’d held on to his voice, trapped it in her mind during the worst of those days in Kaziristan, when the icy night winds rattled the eaves of the mud house where they’d kept her prisoner.
For the first days, she’d been kept utterly in the dark. Al Adar’s version of sensory deprivation, she supposed. For the first couple of days, she’d even kept her spirits up. They hadn’t raped her, and she considered that fact a good sign that she’d be able to get through the ordeal without coming apart.
But that had been before she realized just how many ways there were to rape a person that had nothing to do with sex.
After the first session with a man she’d known only as Raa Baber—The Tiger—she’d conjured up Rick’s soft voice, bathing her wounds in the remembered sound of his faint Southern drawl.
He’d told her, just yesterday, that living back in the South had reanimated her Mississippi accent. His was stronger now, too, richer and more fully formed, as if he’d rediscovered a missing piece of himself when he left MacLear behind.
“How long have you been back home in Alabama?” she asked.
There was a long pause, as if the question caught him by surprise. She had the strange sensation that he was staring right at her, even though there was no way he could see her in the dark.
“A little over a year,” he answered. She heard his body shift in the void beside her, as if he’d stretched back out on the hard cave floor. Tempted to curl up next to him and let his heat drive away her bone-deep chill, she dug her fingertips into her palm and turned her gaze in a different direction.
Though she expected to see no variation in the unrelenting gloom, she spotted a faint lightening a few feet away, diluting the dark. The cave entrance, she realized. Moonlight must be drifting in from outside. She felt the tug of that soft whisper of light as if it were a living thing.
“Maybe I should check to see if someone’s outside.” She sat up on her knees, preparing to stand.
“Where are you going?” He ca
ught her arm, holding her in place. She bit back a soft gasp as his fingers tightened on a sore place on her arm. Had she injured herself during her mad dash through the woods?
His fingers loosened and fell away. “Did I hurt you?”
“No,” she said, but the burning in her arm hadn’t subsided. She lifted her fingers, pressing the sore area. She felt a rip in her jacket and a sticky wetness. “I think I cut myself—”
She heard a rustling noise, then a snick. Light cut through the gloom, making her squint.
“Let me see.” Rick pointed his flashlight at her arm.
Looking down, she saw a ragged furrow in the arm of her olive-drab jacket, just above the elbow. The edges were singed and damp with drying blood. She knew exactly what it was, even before Rick spoke.
“They shot you,” he said in a strangled voice.
Chapter Six
Amanda stared at the groove in her flesh, feeling a little queasy. She forced steel into her spine and lifted her chin to meet Rick’s worried gaze. “Must have grazed me—I don’t remember feeling anything.” Of course, she’d been hauling butt through the woods at the time—any number of branches and limbs had caught her clothing and skin as she ran, leaving plenty of scratches and bruises.
“I didn’t hear any gunshots from where I was,” Rick remarked.
She also didn’t remember hearing a gunshot, but she’d been running at full tilt, her pulse thundering in her ears. “Sound suppressors?” she suggested. She might not have heard the flat, muffled blat of suppressed gunfire in the chaos.
“If they’re former MacLear Special Services Unit agents, I wouldn’t be surprised,” he admitted, turning the flashlight to the ground, searching for something. “The SSU didn’t exactly want stories about what they were doing to get around.”
She watched the faint beam settle on her duffel bag. “What did they do, exactly?”
“Well, the rest of us didn’t know the SSU existed until everything blew up a little over a year ago.” Rick opened her duffel bag and withdrew the first-aid kit she’d packed inside. His first-aid kit, she thought with a touch of embarrassment. The arched-eyebrow look he gave her only exacerbated her sense of guilt. But he said nothing.