Fugitive Hearts

by Ingrid Weaver

  “Fine. I think I might be heading that way tomorrow. Since you asked nicely, I’ll let you come this time.” She grasped his wrist and removed his hand from her leg. The ottoman rolled backward as she stood up. “And I know you were bluffing, Remy.”

  He lifted his eyebrows. “About what?”

  “About tying me up to keep me from leaving on my own.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  She shook back the cuffs of her sweater and held out her arms. “Rope burns around my wrists would be hard to explain if you want to stick to your willing-accomplice story.”

  “Not necessarily.” He gave her a long, slow look. “There are other reasons a man might tie a woman up.”

  “Remy,” she said warningly.

  “Besides, I wouldn’t have to leave rope burns. While I was at the lodge, I noticed that Derek had a collection of silk ties. Real supple, high-quality stuff. If I used them and put lotion on your skin first, I’d make sure not to leave any marks.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “What makes you think I’m joking?”

  Her stomach did a tingling little dance as she stared at him. No, he wasn’t joking. The quirk of his lips and the hot gleam in his eyes weren’t from humor.

  “Your bed is a four-poster. If I knotted a silk tie to each of your wrists I could loop the ends around the posts.” His voice dropped. “I’d make sure you were very…willing.”

  What would it be like to be tied to the bed by Remy? With strips of silk? And his large, gentle hands slicking her skin with lotion…

  Oh, hell. Where was that anger when she needed it? “Save it for town, Remy,” she said, turning away. “There’s no audience now.”

  Was this how Bonnie and Clyde got started? Dana wondered. First a minor bit of break and enter where there were no witnesses, then a daring daylight robbery? This pounding nervousness she was feeling was heightening her senses. Everything looked sharper. Sounds were amplified. If it wasn’t for the underlying fear that someone might recognize Remy, she would find it almost…invigorating.

  Only it wasn’t really a daylight robbery—they weren’t actually stealing, because it was Remy’s mail, and soon it would no longer be daylight, as the sun was skimming toward dusk on the horizon. Still, she couldn’t prevent the nervous skittering of her pulse as she walked into the post office with a wanted criminal at her side.

  A weary-looking woman stood in front of the counter, a toddler propped on one hip and a small boy hanging on to the bottom of her coat. The lone postal worker was busy weighing a package and didn’t look up as the door opened.

  Dana’s gaze darted to the bulletin board across from the counter. It was crowded with the usual community notices, some hand-lettered ads with fringes of tear-off phone numbers and what appeared to be a poster about a lost dog. Nothing about… Oh, God. Could that black-and-white sheet of paper in the top corner be a wanted poster? She squinted, trying to make out the photo, but she was too far away.

  “Go to your right,” Remy murmured, his breath warm on her ear. “To the boxes by the far wall. It’s on the third row from the top.”

  Her pulse skittered again. This time it wasn’t from nervousness, it was from Remy’s proximity. Even through her parka she could feel the pressure of his palm at the small of her back. It wasn’t just her surroundings that she was sensing so sharply. Her heightened awareness of Remy was more than invigorating, it was downright stimulating.

  She suppressed a grimace. There was probably a psychological term for this, too, she thought, as she headed toward the rows of boxes.

  Remy stayed at her side, keeping her between himself and the other people in the post office. When they reached the far wall, he took two long, thin pieces of metal from his pocket and inserted them into the keyhole of one of the boxes.

  Dana swallowed a gasp and positioned herself between Remy and the door.

  He didn’t take his gaze off what he was doing. “Thanks for the screen. Too bad you’re not a bit bigger.”

  She unzipped her parka and shoved her hands into its pockets, trying to make as wide a profile as possible. “Hurry,” she whispered.

  “You’re shaping up to be a natural at this.”

  “I don’t consider that a compliment.”

  “Just another second…ah,” he said. The lock clicked. Remy swung the small door of the compartment open and reached inside.

  Behind her back Dana heard someone else enter the post office and stamp their feet to get rid of the snow. She couldn’t prevent herself from glancing guiltily over her shoulder.

  The person who had entered paid no attention to them, instead hurrying over to another post office box. But before Dana could turn around, the woman with the children who had been at the counter glanced their way.

  The woman’s eyes widened.

  Dana averted her face immediately. “Oh, please hurry,” she whispered to Remy. “I think someone just noticed you.”

  “Stay calm.” He closed the box and turned toward her, then smoothly slipped his hand inside her coat and yanked the hem of her sweater above her waist. “Act natural.”

  “Natural? Remy, I know you wanted to put on an act but this is no time for—”

  His knuckles brushed her bare midriff for an instant before she felt the cool slide of paper against her skin. Seconds later he tucked a thin stack of envelopes down the waistband of her leggings and flipped her sweater back into place.

  “Darling,” he said, his gaze steady on hers. “Or sweetheart or Josh.”

  Everyone in the place had to be able to hear her heart beating, Dana thought. The noise from that alone would have drowned out her slip with his name. “Now what?”

  “Now we leave,” he said.

  Had she thought this was invigorating? She was nuts. Cracking up from the prolonged strain. She crossed her arms, holding the envelopes securely in place, and turned around. Remy draped his arm casually around her shoulders and guided her toward the door.

  The woman was still watching them. Her forehead furrowed briefly with uncertainty, but then she appeared to come to some kind of decision. She hitched the toddler more securely against her hip, grabbed the boy’s hand and started forward, heading straight for Remy.

  Dana felt him tense. “Oh, darling,” she said, pretending not to notice the woman drawing closer. “I just remembered we need to pick up some more cat food.”

  “No problem, honey,” he said. He coughed, turning his head aside and lifting his hand to cover his mouth.

  “And we’d better pick up some cough syrup, too,” she went on quickly. “What was the kind that worked before? It was in a red box, wasn’t it? I hope—”

  “Excuse me.”

  Dana stopped walking, not because she wanted to, but because the woman had stepped directly into their path. She forced a smile and decided to do the talking. “Yes?”

  “I thought you looked familiar, but I wasn’t sure until you turned around and…” She paused. “I’m sorry. I’m making a fool of myself. You’re D. J. Whittington, aren’t you?”

  It took a second for the question to sink in. The woman wasn’t looking at Remy at all. She was looking at Dana. So was the child beside her knee.

  Dana nodded.

  “I wouldn’t have believed it could be you but I heard from my brother-in-law’s cousin that you were staying near Hainesborough for the winter. He plows your lane.”

  “Oh.” She was still trying to take it in. “You mean Duffy?”

  “Uh-huh. I wouldn’t have recognized you from that picture on your book covers, but I saw you a few years ago when you did a reading at our branch library. We were still living in Toronto then. I had to leave early to feed the baby but I wanted so much to tell you how we all love the Mortimer books….”

  While Dana normally enjoyed meeting her fans, she wasn’t able to enjoy this encounter in the least. All she could think about was Remy. He mumbled a greeting when she introduced him as her fiancé, continuing to hide his face
by alternately coughing or dabbing at his nose. The longer they stayed here, the greater the chances of someone recognizing him instead of her. She extricated herself as soon as she could with an autograph for the woman’s son and a promise to talk to the Hainesborough librarian about arranging a reading. It wasn’t until she and Remy were back in the truck that she allowed herself to breathe freely again.

  “Oh, my God,” she muttered. “That was horrible.”

  “I think it went very well,” Remy said, pulling out onto the main street. Streetlights winked on in the gathering dusk. Traffic was busy as the stores were beginning to close for the day.

  “Are you kidding?” Dana asked. “I should have realized I could draw attention to us.”

  “To you.”

  “What?”

  “You’re the one who drew the attention. It’s exactly what I’d hoped. That woman was so busy fawning over you, she never gave me a second glance.”

  He was right. As incredible as it seemed that any woman could fail to notice a man like Remy, in this case he had been virtually ignored. “She was probably worried about catching your cold.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That was quick thinking, by the way.”

  He gave her a lopsided smile. “Thanks. You’re pretty good in a crunch yourself.”

  It was the stress of the situation that made his smile so attractive, wasn’t it? And made her pulse jump that way? Leftover exhilaration from their daring almost-daylight robbery?

  Who was she fooling? Not herself, anyway. It didn’t matter what he did, she found him attractive. His smile was so rare, it never failed to stir a response, whatever the situation.

  Belatedly she remembered the envelopes Remy had stuffed in her waistband. She opened her coat and pulled up her sweater.

  The truck swerved. Someone honked. Remy muttered under his breath and corrected the skid. “Next time, could you warn me before you start undressing?”

  She yanked out the envelopes and smoothed her sweater back into place. “Well, next time you could warn me before you stuck your mail down my pants.”

  “Inside your pants seemed like a good place at the time. It’s so snug and private. And warm.”

  “So’s your pocket.”

  He glanced at her sideways. “You thought there was another reason I was trying to get inside your pants, didn’t you?”

  “Of course not.”

  He lifted one eyebrow.

  “All right, I wasn’t sure,” she said. “I thought you might have been getting overenthusiastic about trying to play the part of my fiancé.”

  “A fiancé who was so overcome by lust in a post office that he couldn’t keep his hands off you?”

  “Let’s just forget it, okay?”

  “I don’t know if I can. Kind of hard for me to forget such a snug, private, warm—”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “Now who’s issuing orders?”

  She slapped the envelopes against her palm. “Can we stick to business here?”

  His grip on the steering wheel tightened. His smile disappeared. “Right. What did we get?”

  “Not much.” She flipped through the mail, surprised that more hadn’t accumulated. Judging from the return addresses, there was nothing here from a credit card company as Remy had hoped. “I can’t tell whether any of this would be useful to you.”

  “I’ll take a look at it when we’re back at the cabin. I don’t want to spend any more time in town than necessary.”

  Dana looked out the window. Under other circumstances, the quaint red-brick buildings of Hainesborough’s small downtown would have looked charming. So would the tree-lined streets that crossed the main road and wound their way along the contours of the river. She tried to picture Remy living in one of the houses she glimpsed down the side streets, but couldn’t quite manage it. “Where’s River Road?” she asked.

  “Why?”

  “Just wondering.”

  “Back that way,” he said, jerking his head the way they had come.

  “What happened to your house when you…” She hesitated, unsure whether or not she should be bringing this up. “When you left.”

  “When I went to prison, my father-in-law tried to sell it, but no one wanted to buy a house where a murder took place.”

  “Oh. Is it still vacant?”

  “It’s gone. Burned to the ground last Halloween.”

  Dana shifted to look at him. He’d said he had built that house. Now it was gone, like everything else in his life he had valued. “How?”

  “The police decided it was a Halloween prank that got out of hand. I heard Sibley handled the investigation, and I doubt if he tried too hard to find who did it. There weren’t any arrests.”

  “Sibley? That’s the policeman you said was biased against you because of your juvenile record, right?”

  “Right, but it was more personal than that. Sibley is only a few years older than me. He was a rookie when he tried to arrest me the first time.”

  “Tried to?”

  “He caught me hotwiring a car. When he was putting the handcuffs on me, he made a comment about how I was as worthless as my drunken old man. I broke his nose.”

  “You what?”

  “I was only seventeen. He knew my father had just died in prison and I wasn’t thinking straight.” He hesitated. “It was the first and last time I was ever moved to violence, Dana. The judge let it go but Sibley didn’t. His nose healed crooked, the woman he’d been engaged to dumped him and he’s held a grudge against me ever since.”

  “If he was the type of man to say cruel things like that, it was probably his character more than his appearance that his fiancée didn’t like.”

  “Not according to him. So now you understand why he wouldn’t have cared less if my house burned down.”

  “Do you think there might have been evidence in that house?”

  “Maybe. At least I had an ironclad alibi for the fire, since I was behind bars at the time, so Sibley couldn’t accuse me of arson.”

  A broken engagement and a broken nose explained Sibley’s grudge, but neither excused his failure to do his duty. A fire in an accused murderer’s house couldn’t have been simple vandalism. It seemed obvious to Dana that someone was deliberately targeting Remy. Couldn’t Sibley put aside his personal bias long enough to realize he was persecuting an innocent man?

  An innocent man? Was he?

  Yet again she pushed the issue aside. Her head wasn’t clear enough to deal with that question, not with the traces of adrenaline from their foray to the post office—and from Remy’s smile—still elevating her heart rate.

  All of a sudden Dana realized they were no longer moving. They had reached the edge of town, yet rather than following the road to the highway, Remy had pulled up beside a small park, angling the pickup into a space beside a snowbank.

  Cars drove past, a group of children dragging sleds walked along the plowed sidewalk, but Remy paid no attention to them.

  “What are you doing?” Dana asked. “I thought you wanted to get out of town.”

  He didn’t respond. He exhaled hard, as if he’d been punched in the stomach. Gradually the expression on his face lost its intensity. The harsh lines of his lips softened and his cheeks relaxed into the hint of a smile.

  Dana twisted around to see what had caused the change, but all she noticed was another group of people following a path that had been made through the snow in the park. There was a gentle hill on the other side. As he watched, a lone, dark-haired child slid down the hill.

  “Stay here,” he said, opening his door.

  She jerked around. “Where are you going?”

  “That looks like Chantal.”

  “Remy, no!” She made a grab for his arm. “Don’t. It’s too dangerous.”

  He didn’t seem to hear her. He pulled out of her grasp and was outside the truck before she could say another word.

  Dana flung open her door and hurried after him.

  Stre
etlights along the edge of the road spread pools of light over the snow, but the hill on the other side of the park was blue with dusk. The dark-haired child wasn’t alone—an adult stood at the top of the hill. Even from here, Dana could hear a woman call that it was time to go home.

  A child’s voice drifted faintly in reply. Remy walked toward her, stumbling over a chunk of frozen snow as if unaware of his surroundings.

  Oh, God, Dana thought. If that really was his daughter, he likely wasn’t thinking of anything other than seeing her again. She broke into a run. “Josh,” she called.

  Remy glanced at her but kept moving.

  “Darling, I’m sorry,” Dana called, quickly improvising a reason to be running after her fiancé. “Let me explain.”

  At that, he slowed just enough for her to catch up to him. She flung herself against him, wrapping her arms tightly around his waist. The only way he could keep moving would be to drag her with him.

  He stopped, but his body quivered with impatience. “Dana—”

  She bumped her forehead into his chin. She hoped that anyone watching would think they’d had a quarrel and were on the verge of making up. “Don’t do this,” she whispered urgently. “Stop and think for a minute, okay? That probably isn’t Chantal. Bundled up in those snowsuits, all kids look alike.”

  “She loves to toboggan. I could never get her to stop until it was dark.”

  “Even if it is her, she’s not alone. Who’s with her?”

  He muttered an oath. “That’s Sylvia’s mother.”

  “Your mother-in-law?” She grasped his arms and gave him a shake. “Of all the people in Hainesborough, she’d be the first to recognize you and turn you in. Don’t do this. Please.”

  “Chantal’s hat fell off.”

  “I’m sure they’ll find it.”

  “She had an ear infection last winter. She needs to wear a hat.”

  “It’s not that cold right now. And look, they’re leaving.”

  As she spoke, the child and the adult turned away and moved toward a gap in the trees on the opposite side of the park.

  “The Haines house backs onto the park,” Remy said. “That has to be her.”

  “Then she’ll be warm soon enough. Please, come back to the truck. If not for your sake, then for hers.” She gave him another shake. “You’re not going to do her any good if you get caught.”