Deadly Sins

by Lora Leigh

  John shook his head, his eyes suddenly warning, his expression stilled, emotionless. “Information didn’t get her killed, Archer,” he said quietly. “She was more than a friend. Just as the other girls were. I don’t know who and I don’t know why, but someone is damned determined to make sure those boys have no one but themselves. And no information possible could have stopped it.”

  “Unless she knew who it was,” Archer said softly. “What if she knew who the Slasher was, gentlemen? And if she did, don’t you think she would have found a way to hide the information?” He turned to Saul then. “Help me, Saul. Where would she have hidden the information?”

  Saul shook his head. “I worked with her, Archer, I wasn’t her best friend.”

  Archer nodded again. “Well, I better be going then.” He smiled tightly as he stood to his feet. “Enjoy your lunch, gentlemen.”

  “Archer.” John stopped him before he rose from his chair. “No one needs to know anything about this meeting other than the fact that you asked about that text,” he warned quietly. “Not your impressions, no attitude you may have detected. As far as your concerned, we’re cold, hard bastards.”

  What had John seen? Archer wondered, as he watched them.

  “Anyone?” he asked. “Who would question it?”

  “I’m sure it will go in a report,” John said coolly. “And you want to be real careful what you say in that report, or to anyone else.”

  Archer leaned closer. “What do you know, John?”

  “I know I don’t want my grandson dead any more than Saul or Marshal does,” he stated. “And I know I’d prefer to stay alive myself for a while longer. That would definitely help both ventures. Just as I said. We’re stone-cold bastards that don’t give a damn what happens to those boys. You got that?”

  Archer almost sneered back at all of them. “Funny, John, I’ve rarely doubted otherwise.”

  He turned and left the restaurant, feeling their gazes on him as he left the dining room. Oh yeah, they knew something, he just wasn’t certain what, and he wondered if they even knew for sure what they knew.

  One thing was for damned certain though, he’d just caught that little warning. Someone close to his office could be a spy, leaking information.

  Now, Archer just had to figure out who.

  A lifetime had been wasted by those men. Three boys had grown to mature, deserving men any father or grandfather could be proud of. Instead, they had disowned them, filed suit after suit against them and their inheritances. They had done everything to destroy them, but Archer knew for a fact, sitting there staring at those three old bastards, he knew, they cared much more for their grandsons than they had let on.

  Moving outside the resort, he was almost at the SUV when his cellphone rang.

  Pulling it from the case at his side, he flipped it open and brought it to his ear. “Sheriff,” he announced.

  “Sheriff, it’s Deputy Caine.” Caine’s tone was cold, hardened steel.

  “Go ahead.”

  “We’re at Riker’s Ravine outside town,” he stated. “You better get here. We just found another girl.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Logan finished his coffee that night, watching as Skye emptied the dishwasher of dinner dishes and fed Bella a treat.

  It had taken Logan himself hours to get the pup to take food from Skye. Finally, Bella had done so with a little puppy yip and a wag of her tail.

  The little bit of nothing canine was growing fast. She’d almost doubled her size, but she was still, and always would be, far too tiny.

  “Old Mrs. Jenkins thinks you and your cousins should invest in bodyguards,” Skye stated as she stacked plates out of the dishwasher in the cabinet.

  “Does she now?” he grunted as he rinsed his cup and watched as Bella collapsed on the floor with one of her favorite toys.

  They were waiting, and the waiting was nerve-wracking. Crowe was on Crowe Mountain trying to track the code name King Arthur using his own computer, while Resnova had Cami on his estate and one of his bodyguards was preparing to drive Rafer back the next day.

  So far, everything was quiet. Too damned quiet.

  “Old Mrs. Jenkins just likes to make Mr. Jenkins jealous,” Logan told Skye with a grunt. “Besides, we have enough damned excitement around here without giving the gossips something to watch as well as talk about.”

  “How do you think I got the majority of my information before I made it into your bed?” she informed him with a wink. “Mrs. Jenkins was my main source.”

  He shook his head with a grin as she leaned against the counter and crossed her arms over her breasts and as she watched him with a sassy smile.

  Damn, he liked being here with her. He had liked having her go to bed with him in the afternoon and wake up with him in the evening.

  Holding her, waking up with her in his arms, feeling her warmth, knowing her heat, was something he didn’t want to lose.

  It wasn’t that he hadn’t had a few relationships before. It was that those relationships had always remained short. If Skye walked out on him, walked out on what he was discovering with her, he wasn’t certain how he would handle it.

  The danger was there. The risk. He could feel it getting ready to move in, and it was making him damned nervous.

  It was making her nervous as well.

  Lifting his hand, he rubbed at the back of his neck before pacing to the living room and staring into the shadowed expanse of it.

  “You feel it too,” she said softly.

  “Yeah, I feel it.”

  Turning back to the kitchen, he rejoined her, a frown on his face as he watched her fold the dish towel before turning back to him.

  “You should have gone with Resnova,” he told her then. It was a thought he’d been considering since the bastard left. Hell, before he’d arrived. It had been Logan’s intention to send Skye with the other man until Resnova had shown an interest in just that.

  “No, I shouldn’t have,” she pointed out. “This is my fight too, Logan. I’ve told you that.”

  Because of Amy and now because of him.

  Skye considered it her fight because her foster sister had died at the hands of a murderer, her battle because Logan was now her lover and the stalker was crashing even further into his life.

  “It doesn’t need to be your fight, or your risk,” he told her as his gaze roved over her expression, only to have his gaze caught by the small love bite on her neck.

  Where he’d marked her. Where he’d placed his stamp of ownership on her. Proof that she was his woman.

  There was a primal thrill in that mark totally at odds with the fact that he knew keeping her with him was only endangering her.

  “Don’t start,” she warned him as his lips parted again. Pointing a finger in his direction as she stood next to the center island, she all but wagged it at him in disapproval.

  Every time he thought of her in this fight his gut tightened in warning, and he’d learned to heed his instincts.

  Tomorrow he’d call Resnova, he decided. Tomorrow he’d have to make her leave. No matter what it took.

  For now.

  He touched her.

  As though he needed her touch.

  As though to hold the claim he had made on her heart, he had to.

  He didn’t dare want anything as much as he wanted this woman.

  As he had needed her more than six years ago when he’d seen her and realized who she was, and again six months ago when he’d seen her in his rental.

  But he hadn’t recognized her. The shy girl of six years before had been replaced by the confident, perhaps a bit innocent, woman she was now.

  As he stared into her sultry, heated gaze Logan realized he’d wanted her since about the second glimpse he’d had of her. And he remembered where and when that had been. At Carter Jefferson’s gubernatorial celebration party in D.C. six years before.

  She would have been twenty-one.

  And he’d known she was Carter’s fost
er daughter, just as he’d known she’d been watching him just as closely as he was watching her.

  He’d wanted her until he’d ached with it that night, but he’d left instead.

  He wanted her with a need that made no sense and an overwhelming hunger that he couldn’t seem to control now.

  A hunger that shattered with the explosive, passion-destroying retort of bullet striking through glass to bury itself in the wall across from the center island.

  Only inches from where it would have first struck his delicate, too-short, too-alive lover directly in the back of her head if he had been just a breath slower. Just a breath in the wrong direction as some internal alarm screamed through him a heartbeat before the glass shattered.

  With the first crack of the window Logan was moving.

  The obvious sniper rifle had discharged, shattering the window with the first impact of a bullet as Logan reacted.

  Instinct. Survival. Twelve fucking years of training, of killing, tearing through his senses.

  The assassin had to reload.

  Logan had Skye to the floor, rolling his fingers, burying them in a quivering scruff as he jerked a terrorized Bella from her spot next to the center island and rolled, his larger body bracing over the two too-delicate forms as he fought to reach safety.

  Discharge. The bullet struck flesh by the barest glance.

  It drew first blood from Logan’s shoulder as he rolled, bracing it against Skye’s head to protect her, the pup now between them.

  A few seconds to reload.

  Logan all but threw Skye’s delicate weight over the short step into the living area before following her, Bella held securely in the crook of his arm, silent and trembling.

  Discharge.

  The third bullet tore a hole in the wood. Once again, the exact position of Skye’s head less than a heartbeat before.

  With each shot Bella growled, a babyish little snarl of immature fury that matched each curse that spilled from Skye’s lips.

  Once the sniper no longer had line of vision, no longer had a target to draw on, Logan was on his feet, jerking Skye against him and all but carrying her and the furious Bella, as he ran.

  The door to the garage slammed against the wall as he tore through it, Skye held tight to his side as she now gripped Bella in desperate arms.

  “I can run!” Skye screamed, and Logan realized it wasn’t the first time she had made that declaration.

  He ignored her, just as he had the first time. Son of a bitch, she was his; he wasn’t taking a chance with her or Bella. Or any child Skye might be carrying.

  God help him. Had he been insane?

  Wrenching open the driver’s side door of the black four-wheel drive where he’d pulled it in, in reverse, he all but threw her in, pushed the growling, furious puppy into her, then followed. Twisting the key, he wrenched the stick into neutral, hit the clutch and then the gas, and tore through the garage door that hadn’t had time to open more than a bare few feet after he hit the remote.

  Wood and glass shattered around the vehicle as it shot into the street, drawing the shocked gazes of his neighbors, as they were drawn from their homes by the sound of gunfire.

  Tires screamed, gripped asphalt, then like a black bullet tore down the street as the puppy gave two excited little yips and turned an expression of pure puppy excitement toward him. Bella seemed to suddenly be infused with adrenaline. And she was loving the feel of it surging through her little body, if her expression was anything to go by.

  Fuck! Son of a bitch. This had to stop. It had to fucking end before he lost the two most important parts of his life. Before he lost his heart and soul.

  “Oh my God, how many weapons do you have in here, Logan?” Skye declared, her voice rising to be heard over the sound of the motor, the scream of tires and the flight out of town.

  And what the hell did she have her gaze locked on? What he assumed was a match to the very weapon that had attempted to take her head off.

  His sniper rifle.

  The one loaded, locked, ready, and in its specially designed mount across the front of the dash.

  Along with it was a sawed-off shotgun so illegal he swore Archer had paled when he’d caught sight of it a few months before. That didn’t count the Velcroed Glock, the Beretta, and the six shot his grandfather J. R. Callahan, had owned.

  Skye had the Glock in her hand, twisting, turning, her gaze constantly moving as she held the weapon with both confidence as well as experience.

  She was Logan’s match. That didn’t mean he wasn’t scared the fuck to death right now. Accidents happened. As Skye had said, there were monsters in the dark.

  Twisting the wheel, he took a side road as they shot out of town. Pushing the truck as fast as he dared for the next mile, he then veered from the narrow road onto another and raced deeper into the mountains.

  Jerking his emergency cell phone from the dash mount where he’d put it weeks before, he hit the speed dial for Crowe’s number.

  “Crowe.” He answered the phone before the first ring ended.

  “We have trouble,” Logan snapped. “Where are you?”

  “Home,” Crowe answered quickly. “What happened?”

  “Our fucking King Arthur,” Logan snarled. “The fucker shot the house up, stayed about a quarter of an inch from a kill shot with each reload, and I have no idea if he’s on my ass or not.”

  “Get up here,” Crowe ordered, his voice cold now. “I’ll contact Rafer and Resnova and we’ll have to change plans.”

  “ETA thirty minutes,” Logan told him.

  “Ten if you keep this speed up,” Skye stated as he took a curve nearly on two tires. “Or we’ll see heaven first.”

  “I’ve taken it faster,” Logan assured her as he kept the speed on, desperate now to get her as far away from those bullets as possible.

  “You’re a wild man, Logan.” She laughed, amusement, warmth, love, so many emotions, sparkling in her voice, but with them concern and regret that it was danger she and Logan were facing rather than a life they were beginning.

  Barely a quarter of a mile down the stretch of road, with a twist of the wheel and a flip of his thumb to throw the vehicle into four-wheel drive, he felt the tires tearing into grass and rock as he began to climb above the valley.

  Crowe Mountain was partially in Corbin County and partially in Pitkin. It bordered the Callahan ranch as well as the Ramsey ranch. Once the plans for the resort they had in mind were completed, the three properties would be merged along with a smaller piece of land Logan still had possession of through the same individual listed on the house in town.

  It was almost as though Logan’s parents had known him too well. Or perhaps they had feared he would be too much like his mother, who had nearly given her trust back to her father when she’d received it.

  If she had, would she have still been alive?

  “This is crazy,” Logan muttered as he started up a back road onto Crowe’s property, lights off and the four-wheel traction tearing into the dirt of the incline. “God, Skye, if something happened to you—”

  “Stop; don’t borrow trouble,” she warned him as she held Bella close now, rather than the gun. “We’re in this together, and I wouldn’t be anywhere else right now.”

  He could hear the truth in her voice, hear the determination and the love of life, the love of him, that echoed in the declaration.

  But it didn’t change what they were facing, and it didn’t change the fact that without her, he doubted he’d even want to fight any longer.

  She was the reason he hadn’t taken the suicide assignments in the small unit he’d been a part of. She was the reason he’d fought, daily, to find a reason to fight for an inheritance that had brought nothing but blood and death. She was the reason he lived; it was that simple.

  “We’re heading into Crowe’s now,” Logan told her long minutes later as the truck bounced onto a smoother, though no less narrow path leading to the top of the mountain. “We cut these path
s onto the mountain ourselves; to make sure we had access other than the main road.”

  Their lives were such a daily fight for survival in this county that they couldn’t even trust using the main road to enter or leave one of their homes.

  The thought of the lives they’d lived since they were no more than babies, before and after their parents’ deaths, broke her heart.

  Logan had had no one, and now she knew he was second-guessing the decision to allow her into his life. Not that he’d had much choice, she thought smugly.

  But perhaps they’d both lost themselves to such an extent that they had made the same mistake his parents had.

  She pressed her hand unobtrusively to her stomach, knowing the chances that she’d conceived were high. Neither of them had enough control once they touched to even think about protection or the danger their lives would bring to a child.

  All Skye could think about when she thought about a baby was whether it would look more like Logan or her. A boy or a girl? And seeing Logan’s joy in the pup Skye had seen forced into his life, she wondered how much more joy he would find in a baby.

  The Callahans hadn’t known a lot of happiness in their lives. It had been one battle after another, one fierce fight to survive after another. Adapting to a measure of peace would be a pleasant change for them.

  “We’re going to beat this.” She turned to him as she glimpsed the lights of Crowe’s house through the trees in the distance. “You watch, Logan. We’ll beat this. And when it’s over, we’ll have all the things we’ve both lost out on in our lives.”

  He reached over, his hand gripping hers, before he turned and placed a gentle kiss against her palm. The warmth of his lips, the feel of them, sent a wave of heat that wasn’t entirely sexual rushing through her.

  “I’ll hold you to that,” he warned her.

  “You do that.” She smiled back at him despite the tightening in her stomach, the instinctive primal warning that it wasn’t over yet. “You’ll see. We’re going to make it.”

  Pulling into Crowe’s drive, Logan slammed the truck into park before turning to her. “Leave Bella in here until we see if that wolf bitch has made an appearance again. Crowe’s been expecting her any day to return to have her pups. Bella would make a nice little snack.”