Then he would deal with the rest. Right now, she was his first priority. And if he had his way, she’d be his first priority for the rest of their lives.
If only he could make her believe that.
The phone clicked in his ear. “Head Administrator’s office, one mom—”
“No!” Dale barked. “Janice, it’s Dale Metcalf. Don’t you dare put me on hold! I have to talk to Cage. Now. I’m in trouble.”
Janice didn’t respond. She rang him through.
“Metcalf. What’s wrong?” Cage’s voice boomed down the scratchy line, familiar and welcome, sharp with anxiety. “Why the hell haven’t you contacted me before now? Is Tansy okay?”
Dale felt an unexpected surge of relief. He’d never consciously realized how much he depended on the HFH structure. But knowing it was there gave him the strength to fly out into the field, never knowing what to expect. He took a breath. “She’s fine.” He hoped. “I need the plane and the feds here as soon as you can arrange it. We’re in trouble.”
There was a confused silence, then Cage asked, “What plane? Feds? Dale, what the hell have you two gotten yourselves into?”
Oh, God. Dale’s blood ran cold, then hot, as that nagging answer solidified to fact. Only one other person on the island had a satellite phone, and he’d called Cage for reinforcements.
At least he’d said he had.
“Metcalf? What’s going on? Talk to me!”
Dale dropped the phone.
Tansy!
Chapter Thirteen
Churchill dragged Tansy into the hot spring chamber. She dug in her heels and felt them slide on stone when he yanked her arm and snarled, “Cut it out, you—”
“I wouldn’t do that, Walter.” Dale stepped out from behind a spear of purple and green. His eyes were cool and hard, emotionless and unsurprised. “Let her go.”
But for once, Tansy could read the feelings beneath his mask—betrayal. Churchill. The one man he’d trusted. The man who’d saved him from Trask’s drunken rages and helped him become a doctor.
His surrogate father. The man he’d tried to make himself into.
The man who’d killed his parents.
“I don’t think so, Dale,” Churchill replied, sounding unruffled, though his muscles were tense and his fingers trembled where they gripped her arm hard enough to bruise. “I need to talk to you, to make you understand.” The gun barrel dug into the soft flesh beneath Tansy’s jaw, and she bit back a whimper. “I figure as long as I have her, you’re not going to do anything rash.”
“Rash?” Dale’s eyes snapped with temper. “You’ve got the gun, Churchill, which means I’m going to listen to you whether I want to or not. Let her go. She means nothing to me. We broke up months ago.”
But Tansy could see the lie in his words.
Apparently Churchill couldn’t. He grunted and dragged her back into the main cave, letting her fall near Hazel and Trask.
Dale followed, seeming calm. A subtle tightening around his mouth was his only reaction to finding the others bound and gagged. He glanced over at Churchill. “You wanted to talk? So talk.”
He stepped toward the cave mouth, forcing Churchill to turn away from the others. Tansy righted herself and slid along the wall until she reached Hazel. Unfortunately, the madman caught her motion and turned fiery brown eyes on her.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going? Stay the hell still!” He kicked her in the ribs, hard.
Black and purple pain exploded through Tansy. She gritted her teeth and rode it, glaring at Churchill through tearing eyes.
“You bastard!” Dale leapt forward and scooped the empty shotgun off the floor, ready to swing it, butt first, at Churchill’s head.
“Stop!” Churchill barked. “You don’t want to do that.” He leveled the gun at Trask, then Hazel. Fi nally, Tansy. “Which one do you want to risk? All of them?” Dale subsided and the old man smiled his cultured, out-of-place smile. “Very good. Now, let’s talk. I have a proposition for you.”
He moved to the center of the sandy cave floor and gestured Dale back, farther from the others. As he stepped away, Dale locked eyes with Tansy, and the contact whispered through her like a caress.
I love you, his look seemed to say. I won’t let you down.
And though it was probably a delusion brought on by at least two cracked ribs, Tansy let the emotion flow through her and return to him, hopeless though it was. I love you, too.
His eyes widened fractionally and she wondered whether he’d gotten her message, or whether it was all in her mind.
“What?” Churchill spun around and glared at Tansy, who curled up even tighter and clutched at her ribs.
When bone grated against bone, she didn’t need to fake the raw hurt in her groan. God. Her vision grayed and she felt a gentle touch on her ankle. She focused on the feeling, and on Hazel’s dear, scared eyes, until full consciousness returned.
“So what sort of a proposition do you have for me?” Dale asked, seeming interested in the answer, apparently willing to make a deal as he edged back towards the cave entrance, forcing Churchill to follow him. “And how much of the take from this place will I get?”
The old man chuckled. “That’s my boy.”
Ignoring the pain in her ribs and the fear in her heart, Tansy straightened as best she could, slid over beside Trask and got to work on the rope knotted around his wrists. Suddenly, from nowhere and everywhere came the memory of making love with Dale in the argent pool. Her fingers slipped, then steadied, as Dale led Churchill farther away, buying her time to free the others.
Partners to the end, she thought, and the warm glow of his trust worked its way through her, doing absolutely nothing to banish the dark danger around them.
“I’M NOT YOUR BOY,” DALE replied, forcing his voice level when he wanted to rail at the man. “I loved my parents.”
A spasm of grief passed across Churchill’s face, the face Dale had so long remembered as the man who had saved him from life on Lobster Island, a fate he’d once considered far worse than death.
But were those his words, or Churchill’s? It was hard to remember those hated, unhappy days after his parents died. He wasn’t even sure whose idea it had been for him to leave.
“Yes. I was truly sorry for their loss, my boy.” Churchill shook his head and tsked in sorrow. “But when your mother showed me the amethyst before she told anyone else about it, I knew it was a sign. I was meant to control this wealth.” His grand gesture encompassed the whole glittering cave, and Dale’s eyes locked on the gun.
Did he dare?
One part of his mind weighed the risk while the other part kept Churchill talking. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Trask working on Hazel’s bonds. Tansy was creeping across the cave, her attention divided between Churchill and something in the far, shadowed corner of the main cave.
Keep Walter occupied, her eyes seemed to say. Keep him talking.
He didn’t know what she planned, but her actions lent desperation to his plan. He had to disarm Churchill before any of the others were hurt.
Dale wouldn’t let anything happen to his family. Never again.
Luckily, Churchill didn’t need any prompting, as though all these years he’d believed that Dale would thank him for his quick thinking. “—and when the four of us, me, your parents and your aunt, reached the river, I saw right away what had happened. The big storms had washed out part of the ledge, bringing the amethysts down. We climbed up to investigate the cave, and, boom!” He clapped his hands together and shrugged. “The cave-in was a sign, you see? A sign that I was meant to have the wealth all to myself.”
A cave-in. Dale closed his eyes in quick pain. His parents had died in the cave, not at sea.
“I didn’t kill them, boy.” Churchill’s voice was quiet, and his eyes strayed toward the pile of worn rubble at the far end of the cave. “And I tried to make it up to you. I will, if you’ll let me.” He held out both hands, gun and all, and for a mom
ent he looked like a lonely, old man.
But Dale’s voice was harsh when he said, “And what about the others you’ve killed? In the pit traps, and with the fake outbreak?”
Keep him talking, Tansy mouthed from twenty feet behind Churchill as she worked her way from the back of the cave on silent feet, favoring her side only slightly. Glass flashed in her palm.
“The others?” Churchill shrugged, and his eyes shifted from lonely to not-quite-right. “What did they matter? The cave is mine. It’s up to me to protect it. These Yankees,” he sneered and spat, “don’t know a good offer when they hear one. If they’d sold fifteen years ago when I first tried to buy them out, they’d all have been safe. It was their fault, really, that I had to buy the lobster fleet and live here. I had to protect the cave.”
Tansy was mere steps away from Churchill, her eyes fixed on the soft place where the old man’s flabby neck joined his weak shoulder.
“So you’ve starved the islanders, keeping them poor and waiting for them to sell.” Dale tried to push admiration into his voice, but feared it was a failure.
Churchill sickened him. Worse, his own snobbery and desire to see himself as better than the islanders sickened him.
He wasn’t better than Lobster Island. He wasn’t good enough for it.
Churchill must have sensed his hesitation. The old man’s face twisted and he took a step nearer Dale, away from Tansy. “You understand, don’t you, boy? You know why I’ve done it. All this—” He waved around the cave, indicating the glorious streams of color that were waking up now that the sun was shining. A beam shot through an opening high above the cave and light refracted off spears of pure color. Dale saw himself reflected off a prism across the cave.
And Churchill saw Tansy directly behind him with an ampoule of saxitoxin in her hand.
“No!” he yelled, throwing up his arm to ward off the blow.
Dale flung himself across the remaining feet and tackled Churchill at the waist, bringing him down, hard. They rolled together almost to the edge of the cliff, and the gun went off, roaring like thunder in the echoing cave, again and again as Churchill fired randomly and Tansy dove for cover.
The rock, Dale. Your lucky rock. His mother’s voice seemed to echo in his head, or maybe from the back of the cave, where rain had eaten away at the rubble. Dale grabbed the broken stone in his pocket and brought it up between them when Churchill reversed the roll and sent them back into the cave.
Pain sliced through Dale’s hand, then was gone. Churchill stiffened with a wet croak. His hands scrabbled feebly at Dale’s shirt, then at his own. They came away wet with blood. Then slowly, slowly they relaxed and fell by the old man’s sides. His eyes glazed over, and a final puff of air passed between his lips, carrying one last word.
“Son…”
After a long, disbelieving moment, Dale rolled away, leaving the glittering crystal shard embedded in Churchill’s chest. He looked at his hand, where the lucky stone had cut his palm, then across the cave to Tansy. His Tansy. “Are you okay?”
With a choked sob, she threw herself across the space between them. “I thought he was going to… I thought you…”
Dale caught her close, though he tried to be careful of her ribs, where Churchill had kicked her. For that, Dale wished he could kill the evil old bastard all over again. “I know. I thought so, too.” He buried his face in her hair and felt all of the emotions he’d so often kept deep down inside bubble up to the surface. “I’m so damned sorry, Tans.”
She pulled away slightly, wincing at the motion. But her eyes were intent. Fierce. “If you apologize once more for bringing me here, I’m going to shoot you myself. I—”
“Not for bringing you here,” he interrupted, feeling the boiling emotions smooth over into one glowing, golden conviction. “I’m sorry I never told you that I—”
“Trask?” Hazel’s voice, sharp and worried, broke into the moment. “Trask, what’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
Suddenly fearing that one of the stray bullets had winged his uncle, Dale levered himself and Tansy to their feet, though he kept one arm wrapped around her, needing the contact.
Needing to know she was still there, because he had no intentions of ever letting her go. Almost unconsciously, his free hand dipped into his pocket, where his mother’s engagement ring now rested alone.
Then he saw his uncle’s face, and everything inside him went cold. Oh, God. The graves.
Trask’s eyes were glued to the rubble at the far end of the cave, which looked to have been pierced by a recent flood runoff. A beam of sunlight caromed into the small space, and something glinted near the cave-in. Something golden. With a low moan, Trask pulled free from Hazel and crossed to the spot. He knelt down by the rubble and bowed his head over what might have been a wedding ring.
With a low murmur of pain, Tansy pulled away from Dale and crossed the open mouth of the cave, intent on helping the grieving man. The sun glowed through the entrance, silhouetting her for a moment that seemed frozen in time as Dale heard a muffled, incongruous pop from outside.
Tansy stiffened, and fell without a sound.
“Tansy!” Dale felt his heart explode into a million terrified pieces. He bolted the few steps that separated them, but was kept on his feet by the dark, lean silhouette that appeared in the cave mouth. The dark green raincoat was familiar.
The woman wearing it, less so.
“Step back over by your uncle, please, Mr. Metcalf.” Frankie waved her silenced weapon over to the side, then returned it to level between his eyes. “I’m afraid I can’t let any of you leave this cave.”
Dale raised his hands and stepped back, cursing himself for having forgotten about Churchill’s bodyguard. In that instant, as he listened to Tansy’s shallow, quick breaths tailing off with a bubble at the end, Dale remembered Frankie tossing Trask’s drunken dead weight over her shoulder and carrying him home. Idiot. He’d never stopped to think that Churchill couldn’t have carried Roberts up the hill alone. Frankie had been in on it from the beginning.
Or if not from the beginning, for long enough.
Dale was aware of Trask at his back, and Hazel. He was aware of the woman he loved, bleeding into the purple sand of the cave floor.
And over it all, he was aware of a growing red haze, anger at the people and the greed that had changed his life once before and wanted to ruin him again.
Then Frankie stood over Tansy’s limp body and leveled her weapon.
And Dale broke.
“Damn it, no!” he yelled. He dove for Churchill’s corpse and scooped up the gun the old man had dropped in his death spasms, hoping against hope the bullets weren’t spent. Not caring whether Frankie shot him, caring only to protect the woman he’d sworn to save, Dale squeezed the trigger over and over again.
There were two shots, then a volley of clicks as the hammer fell on empty chambers.
Blood sprayed from Frankie’s thigh, and she staggered backward, onto the smooth sand at the cave’s mouth. She leveled her weapon at Dale and fired. Her leg buckled, and a scream of anguish stretched her mouth as she overbalanced and toppled backward.
Out of the cave and down the almost-sheer rock face.
Her scream ended with a horrible gurgle, and the occupants of the cave stayed frozen for an endless moment. Then Hazel scrambled to Tansy’s side, took one look at her and barked, “Come on, Dale. Help me over here. I need you. Tansy needs you.”
“God. Oh, God.” But for once it wasn’t a curse. It was a prayer. Dale dropped to his knees beside her and slid her limp form onto his lap. He was careful of the ribs that grated as he moved her, and lifted her slightly so her wounded shoulder was above the level of her heart. “Through and through,” he muttered when Hazel joined him. “Looks clean.”
It would be a simple fix, they both knew, with a few basic supplies. But there were no basic supplies in Churchill’s cave, and the blood was welling too fast, too thick to be ignored.
“We have to get her
to the motel,” Hazel said qui etly, a tremble in her voice betraying the stress of the last half day. “If we don’t…”
“We will,” Dale snapped. “Nothing’s going to happen to her.” He raised his voice, hating the sharp echoes of the cave, hating everything about it. “Trask, get over here. We need to carry Tansy down.”
The older man was up to his knees in rubble, pushing rocks aside with his bare hands. “In a minute. I’ve almost reached her.”
The rawness in his voice was no more wrenching than the look of defeat on Hazel’s face, but Dale would hurt for them later. Tansy was his priority right now.
She always had been. He just hadn’t wanted to admit it.
“No,” he said quietly, but there was an underlying power that gave his uncle pause. “I need you now.”
Trask stopped digging, then sighed, nodded and stood. “You’re right. I’m sorry.” And it seemed that he included Hazel in the apology.
They snapped curved branches from the trees outside and bound them together with Churchill’s tie and strips torn from his fine linen shirt. Dale saw the monograms at the collar and cuff, and winced, then put the old man out of his mind as they carried Tansy down the cliff and across the storm-swollen river. She surfaced to shallow consciousness once or twice during the four-hour trek back down to the beach.
Each time her eyelids fluttered, Dale gripped her hand and leaned close to her ear to whisper. “I love you. Do you hear me? I love you. Stay with me. You can do it. Hang tough. I love you.”
But he was never sure that she heard the words. The blood kept seeping through the crude pressure bandages, and as they neared the end of their trek, her color faded to pale, then near-white.
Then they reached the beach, and were greeted by chaos.
“What the hell happened?” Cage snapped, charging halfway up the path to meet them. “You said she was fine.”
“She was,” Dale answered faintly, trying to decide if the HFH helicopter on the beach was an exhausted delusion or not.
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