Hiding in Park City

by RaeAnne Thayne

  A single mom on the run and an injured FBI agent find their greatest danger is with each other in this story of secret identity, originally titled Nowhere to Hide and published in 2003!

  As an on-the-run single mother out to protect her little girls, Lisa Connors needs two things: money, and to keep her identity secret. But it is just her luck that the possibility of the former threatens the latter: as the caretaker of the hunk-next-door with two broken legs, her ability to keep her distance is shaky. When she found out said hunk’s profession—FBI agent—it was downright demolished….

  Gage McKinnon spent most of his life trying to keep away from all things familial, so the last thing he needs is to have two adorable little girls take root next door. But it’s their mother who poses his greatest threat. For with Lisa he felt that door in his heart—the one that slammed shut twenty-five years ago—start to open, just a crack.

  Hiding in Park City

  RAEANNE THAYNE

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  CHAPTER 1

  He had trespassers.

  Two of them.

  Dressed for jogging in shorts and a T-shirt, Special Agent Gage McKinnon eased open his front door just a crack and peered out into the small front garden of the house he rented.

  What were they up to? He could hear them out there, laughing and whispering together, but he couldn’t make out the words in the crisp high mountain air of the Park City summer morning.

  He didn’t think they were dangerous, but if he’d learned anything in his thirty-five years, he’d learned not to underestimate the female of the species. These two looked to be about three or four. One was slightly smaller than the other by a few inches and a little more round but besides that, they could have been twins. Same dark, curly hair, same flashing brown eyes, same little ski slopes for noses.

  Where did they come from? And what were they up to?

  He put his plans for a run up the mountainside temporarily on hold and watched them for a few moments longer. Ah, now he figured it out. Each of the girls had her pink nightie hitched up into a sort of basket, revealing small olive legs and matching Barbie panties. Into their makeshift carriers, they were both piling what looked like just about every single flower in his yard, roots and all.

  Daisies, geraniums, purple lavender. They plucked some of each.

  He didn’t care about the flowers. They could have the whole garden, as far as he was concerned. But he had a feeling his landlady wouldn’t see things the same way. In the month he’d lived here, she had been by at least three times a week to baby these and the even bigger garden in the back. He figured this wanton pilfering would not make her happy.

  Gage opened the door wider and walked out onto the porch. The sun had barely crept over the horizon of the surrounding mountains with their wide ski runs, bare of snow now but still a pale contrast to the dark evergreens covering the slopes.

  The early-morning air was cool. He hadn’t spent much time in Utah since his childhood but it hadn’t taken him long to remember that temperatures in these high mountain valleys could often dip below freezing at night, even in June.

  These girls weren’t exactly dressed for cool weather.

  “Hey, what are you doing?”

  Two dark heads whipped around as his voice sliced through the still morning. The smaller girl looked suddenly terrified, her eyes and her little mouth both open wide. She clutched her nightie with one hand and what looked like a stuffed monkey with the other as she edged slightly behind the other girl, who gave him a winsome smile that had most likely been her ticket out of far worse trouble than some plucked flowers.

  “Hi, mister. We’re picking flowers for our mama. Today is her birthday. She’s old.”

  He bit his cheek at that piece of frank information and summoned a scowl. “These are my flowers. You should have asked me first.”

  The older girl frowned. “Mrs. Jensen said they were her flowers. She said we could pick a few for Mama’s birthday.”

  Mrs. Jensen was his dour, taciturn landlady, who had yet to unbend enough to smile at him since he moved in.

  She owned the house next door, too, he remembered, a virtual match to his small, wood-sided cottage on this row of old dwellings that traced their existence back to the days when Park City was a rough and rugged mining camp, not a high-society resort town.

  He had found it odd that Ruth Jensen had surrounded his cottage with this lush, fairy-tale garden while leaving its twin to sit squarely in a bare yard of crab grass and empty flowerbeds but she explained that she’d only recently purchased the house next door and hadn’t had time for landscaping yet.

  In the last few days, he’d noticed the first signs of life over there—lights on at night, an older model Honda parked out front, a few toys in the yard. Looks like he was meeting some of his new neighbors.

  “You’re sure Mrs. Jensen said you could pick the flowers?” He had a tough time picturing her giving these little urchins free rein to romp through her beloved garden, but the older girl nodded vigorously.

  “She said it would be all right just this once since today is Mama’s birthday.”

  “Where is your mother?”

  “She’s still asleep. We’re gonna s’prise her.”

  Their mother ought to be a little more aware of what her two girls were up to. She ought to at least put better locks on the door or something so they couldn’t go wandering around town on their own.

  “What about your dad?”

  The older girl sent him a sad look. “Our daddy’s in heaven. We miss him a lot.”

  Now what was he supposed to say to that? At a loss, Gage glanced up and down the street. The three of them were the only thing moving through the early morning except for a few songbirds flitting through the trees and a plump striped cat skulking across a yard.

  This was a quiet neighborhood, but he knew that wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference to a child predator looking for prey. Quiet neighborhoods in small towns were often more attractive hunting grounds than those that bustled with people. Parents could more easily be lulled into a false sense of security, thinking nothing could touch them here, that their children faced no threat more serious than the occasional skinned knee from crashing on their bikes.

  But no place was truly safe. He knew that far better than most.

  “My name’s Gaby and my sister’s name is Anna,” the little girl confided into the silence. “I’m five years old but Anna’s only three. She doesn’t talk very much, but Mama says I talk enough for both of us so that’s okay. My real name’s Gabriella but Mama calls me Gaby because she says that’s what I am. What’s your name, mister?”

  Their mother needed to have a serious talk with them about stranger danger. This little chatterbox had just handed him all the information anyone needed to earn their trust.

  “McKinnon.”

  “You’re nice, Mr. McKinnon.”

  “Uh, thanks.” Not too many people said that about him. He wasn’t sure he liked it. “You two ought to go on inside now. I think you’ve got enough flowers, don’t you? And pretty soon your mother will wake up and start looking for you.”

  “Okay. Anna’s feet are cold. This grass is wet and icky.”

  “That’s what shoes are for,” he pointed out.

>   Gabriella just giggled and even Anna gave him a shy smile, then they raced across the yard to the house next door. The older girl paused on the porch and waved at him, then they both slipped inside.

  He watched to make sure they closed the door tightly behind them, then took off down the street toward the trailhead he’d discovered a few weeks before.

  He ought to definitely have a talk with the mother, warn her about letting two cute little girls roam free where any kind of sick bastard could get to them.

  He could tell her stories that would give the lady nightmares for the rest of her life. After ten years in the FBI’s CAC division—Crimes Against Children—he had plenty of them to share. Hell, he didn’t even have to dig into any of the cases he had worked over the years to scare her senseless. All he had to do was tell her about Charlotte.

  He reached the trailhead and ran up the steep dirt trail faster than his usual pace, grateful for the physical exertion to take his mind off the sudden, searing memory of his little sister’s cherubic face.

  If he bumped into the girls’ mother, he would warn her to be a little more careful with her daughters’ safety, but he probably wouldn’t go into details about either his cases at the FBI or about Charlotte, Gage thought, pushing himself even harder up the trail.

  He wouldn’t wish his kind of nightmares on anyone, even a woman who would let her daughters wander around at all hours of the morning.

  * * *

  On her twenty-eighth birthday, Alicia Connelly DeBarillas awoke to two horrifying realizations—she had slept through her alarm again and her daughters were standing by her bed holding two gigantic armloads of what had to be stolen flowers.

  Allie groaned and propped herself up against the pillows, wishing she could hang on to the lingering remnants of yet another dream where the heartrending events of the past two years—particularly the last six months—had never happened. But like all her other dreams, this one fluttered away like dandelion puffs on the breeze.

  “Hey, ladybugs.” She paused and cleared morning gruffness from her throat. “Where did you get those?”

  “From the pretty flower house,” Gabriella answered with her sweetest smile. “Mrs. Jensen said we could pick some for your birthday.”

  She supposed she shouldn’t find that so surprising. Mrs. Jensen might look cold and forbidding on the surface but she had treated Allie and her girls with nothing but kindness since the day Allie had met her the week before at the garage Ruth’s son owned.

  She had become their guardian angel of sorts, the best of Samaritans. Allie had been desperate and frightened and so tired when she showed up at that garage just before closing with her car that suddenly wouldn’t drive any faster than thirty miles an hour.

  She had been trying to figure out whether she dared dip into her dwindling nest egg to fix the Honda—and to pay for a hotel room in this exclusive resort town—when Ruth had arrived to drop something off for her son. The older woman had taken one look at Allie trying to keep the girls entertained in that oil-stained mechanic’s office through her exhaustion and fear and had for some unaccountable reason decided to take them all under her considerable wing.

  Before Allie realized what happened, she had a job offer cleaning houses and a place to live in this small cottage.

  She owed Ruth Jensen so much. The woman didn’t know it but she had rescued them, given Allie the time and space she needed so desperately to figure out where to go from here.

  Now it looked as if she owed Ruth for her lovely mish-mashed birthday bouquet.

  Anna smiled and held out her colorful armload to Allie. “Happy birthday, Mama,” she whispered.

  Allie’s heart swelled at the rare words from her quiet daughter. She pulled the girls to her, flowers and all.

  “Thank you! These are so beautiful.”

  “We don’t have any money to buy you another present,” Gaby said sadly. “I’m sorry, Mama.”

  She probably should have taken them shopping, Allie thought with a guilty pang. Just another one of the hazards of being a single mother. Until her daughters could handle money on their own, Allie had yet to figure out a way to deal with the whole present-buying experience when she was the recipient. It was a little hard for them to surprise her with a gift when she was the one paying for it.

  “This is perfect, sweetheart. Absolutely perfect—exactly what I wanted. Let’s go put them in water so we can enjoy them for a long time. After I shower does anybody want some super-duper birthday pancakes with chocolate sprinkles?”

  Both girls nodded vigorously, their dark eyes wide with excitement. Allie smiled and quickly picked up the robe she had tossed over the old carved oak chair next to her bed, then led the girls out of her room to the kitchen.

  After Gaby found a couple of canning jars under the sink for the flowers and they had arranged the bouquets to everyone’s satisfaction, Allie sent them into the living room to watch cartoons while she checked her blood glucose.

  It was exactly where it should be, but Allie was almost afraid to hope that things might be settling down. The last few months had been the best her levels had been in a long time. After Jaime’s death the stress and fatigue of finding herself alone with two young children had taken a heavy toll on her. No matter what she did, her insulin levels had fluctuated wildly, culminating in that terrible day she had ended up in the hospital.

  As she showered, she thought about the year that had passed since her last birthday. Twelve months ago she never would have guessed she would find herself fleeing from everything safe and secure in her life—her job, their house, her friends. She never would have been able to even contemplate her desperate fight to keep her daughters.

  She closed her eyes and let the water sluice over her. She had made the right choice. The only choice. What else could she have done? Jaime’s parents had been ruthlessly determined. Once they had been awarded joint custody, Allie realized it was only a matter of time before they found a way to take the girls back with them to Venezuela. They had the money and the resources to ensure she would never see them again.

  She could hardly believe the warm, funny man she married and loved so fiercely could come from such cold resolve.

  This was her second birthday without him.

  One of those unexpected waves of loss washed over her and she clutched at her stomach. They didn’t come with the frequency they had the first year, when she had barely been able to function, when just surviving each day—wading painfully through the ocean of grief encircling her—had been a monumental struggle of sheer will.

  Jaime had been killed in a car accident just a month after her twenty-sixth birthday, a few days shy of their fourth wedding anniversary. Gaby had been three, Anna just over a year.

  Where would she be now if not for that drunk driver on that rainy Pennsylvania road? Comfortable and secure and happy in the lovely life she and Jaime were building together. Certainly not facing this uncertain future, on the run with two young girls who deserved far more.

  Allie scrubbed her tears away, then turned off the shower and wrapped in a towel. She gazed at her reflection in the mirror over the sink, at the woman staring back at her with big eyes and a choppy brown dye job.

  She wasn’t going to second-guess the choices she had made. This was her birthday, a day of celebration. She had her girls with her and that was all that mattered, the most wonderful gift she could ever need.

  She still mourned her husband and always would, but over the past months the fierceness of it had faded from a raw, sucking chest wound to a slow ache in her heart.

  She suddenly heard a knock at the bathroom door. “Mama,” Gaby chirped. “The nice man from the flower house came to see you.”

  Ack! Allie gazed frantically around the bathroom. The only thing she had to wear in here was a worn, threadbare robe. Since visitors at the front door of the small cottage had a perfect view of the hallway and bathroom, there was no way to slip into her bedroom for something else to put on without the
man seeing her.

  Left with no choice, she threw on the robe and ran a comb through her hair, hoping the nice man from the flower house was a kind, elderly gentleman who wouldn’t notice her state of undress.

  She hoped he wasn’t angry at the girls for picking the flowers. But technically the house and its lush flower beds belonged to Ruth and she had apparently given the girls permission to raid them. Allie wasn’t about to let some renter give them a hard time about it.

  Prepared to defend her daughters, she tightened the sash on the robe and walked out of the bathroom.

  Shock hit her hard in the stomach at the sight of the man standing by the front door.

  Oh, mercy.

  This was no kind, elderly gentleman.

  The other nurses she used to work with would have said the man from the flower house looked very nice indeed, Allie had to admit. He looked to be in his midthirties, dressed in a smoke-colored suit, a crisp white dress shirt and a discreet navy tie. Beneath the suit, broad shoulders rippled with power and unyielding strength.

  He was tall, well over six feet, with cool gray eyes and short-cropped dark hair that still looked damp, as if he had just stepped out of his own shower. A part of her mind registered that he smelled divine. Like soap and aftershave and just-washed male.

  His strong, masculine features looked freshly shaved, and Allie was stunned by the sudden desire to run her fingers along the skin of that hard, tanned jawline.

  Allie swallowed hard, disconcerted and a little frightened by the unwelcome tug of awareness. She didn’t want to notice this man. She wanted to stay frozen forever in her grief for Jaime.

  “Yes?” she said, uncomfortably aware her voice sounded cold, rude. It wasn’t his fault her unruly hormones suddenly decided to wake up after two years of suspended animation.