by Paula Graves
The foghorns were a pair of long metal horns that jutted out from a flat platform about ten feet to Shannon’s left. Walking closer to the horns, she saw that whatever mechanism created their sound was back in the service room after all. She started to head back inside but paused, reorienting herself until she faced east, toward the wooded part of the island where Gideon had disappeared.
Suddenly, the air split with the booming moan of the foghorn, the sound rattling the catwalk beneath her feet. Shannon stumbled to her hands and knees, the penlight bouncing off the metal slats of the catwalk and tumbling over the side. The whole lighthouse seemed to vibrate with the horn’s basso profundo, as if the structure was about to collapse in on itself and sink into the sandy earth below.
Shannon crawled to the door of the service room, dizzy from the loud vibrations of the horn. It took a second, therefore, to realize what she was seeing in front of her.
The door to the service room, which she had most certainly left open when she went out onto the catwalk, was now closed.
* * *
THE FOGHORN’S PLAINTIVE moan finally filled the air, sending birds rising from their treetop perches and soaring into the air in a cloud of dark silhouettes against the moonlit sky.
Ahead of Gideon, the three men froze only a hundred yards from Stafford House. Gideon crouched low, keeping an eye on them from behind the cover of a palmetto bush. He squeezed himself into a tighter ball as the men started moving quickly toward him, away from the house.
“I thought you said it was handled,” the leader spat at Midwest.
“It was!”
“If that horn doesn’t stop in five minutes, there’ll be a rescue crew from the mainland,” the big man growled. “I talked to a guy at the marina this afternoon when we regrouped.”
“We can’t get back there and stop it in five minutes,” Midwest complained.
“Then we need to abort,” the leader said firmly. “Again.”
They passed Gideon’s hiding place, moving at a fast march through the woods. A fourth dark shape glided out of the woods to join them on the fast trek back to the shoreline. They weren’t even trying for stealth now.
As they moved farther away from Gideon’s hiding place, he was torn between following and heading back to Stafford House to make sure Shannon and Mrs. Ross were okay.
He couldn’t be sure there were only four men on the island. There could be a whole other intruder force holding Lydia and Shannon captive at this very moment.
He watched only long enough to see the four men pile into the Zodiac. The engine started with a low roar and then they were dark shapes moving across the moonlit Gulf.
With his heart in his throat, he started running toward the house.
* * *
GROPING TO HER feet, Shannon pressed herself flat against the stone wall of the lighthouse, covering her ears and squeezing her eyes shut against another rush of dizziness. She tried the handle of the service room door and discovered, to her profound relief, that it was unlocked.
She pushed it open and stumbled inside. The sound of the horns was still loud, but the stone walls muted it enough that her ears stopped ringing and her head quit spinning. She dropped her hands away from her ears and peered into the gloom of the service room, wishing she had the penlight back.
There was enough light from the moon outside, pouring through the service room door, to see the path to the spiral stairway. From there, she could hold on to the rail and feel her way down to the bottom.
She paused at the top of the staircase, looking back into the murky bowels of the small room. She had a strange sense, all of a sudden, that she wasn’t alone.
“Hello?” she whispered. She couldn’t hear herself over the low keening of the foghorn.
Her eyes strained to see into the deepest shadows of the small room, and for a second, she fancied she saw a hint of movement. Fight-or-flight instincts kicking in, she started down the spiral staircase with more speed than was probably wise. Nevertheless, she made it down to the bottom with only one terrifying stumble and burst out of the lighthouse at a fast clip.
Lydia was waiting for her, her hands over her ears. “You did it,” she said, her voice barely audible over the sound of the horn.
“I didn’t touch the horns,” Shannon replied as they hurried back through the sea grass to the caretaker’s house. “They just came on while I was on the catwalk—literally knocked me to my knees.”
“Let’s go inside.” Lydia grabbed her hand and pulled her to the stairs leading up to a wooden deck at the back of the caretaker’s house. The door was unlocked, offering no barrier to their entry.
“Better!” Lydia said with a sigh of relief, shutting the door, and much of the noise, behind them. “I wonder how the horn fixed itself?”
“Perhaps the connector up in the service room is loose, and wind blowing through the cracked window knocked it back into place?”
“Perhaps.” Lydia shrugged, leading Shannon through the darkened house as if she had the entire layout memorized. Perhaps she did. The house had been in her family for years, no matter who lived in it now.
It was hard to make out much in the gloom. Shannon got the impression of large furniture in sparing doses, which seemed to fit what she knew of Gideon Stone. He needed big things because he was a big man, but he probably didn’t care much for clutter taking up the remaining space.
“This house used to be my son’s. He would live here on the rare occasions he was home on leave.”
The son who had died saving Gideon Stone’s life, Shannon thought, wondering how Gideon felt, living here in a place that had once belonged to his friend. “You must miss him terribly.”
“We all do.” Lydia’s hand caught hers briefly. “We knew it was a possibility—a soldier’s family doesn’t send their loved one to war without knowing the potential costs. But we never really believed it would happen to us. We couldn’t let ourselves think about it, or we’d go insane.”
Shannon had seen two brothers go off to war. Several of her cousins had served their country as well. She’d been fortunate not to lose any of them, although she’d mourned with her sister Megan after the death of Megan’s husband, Vince, in what they’d thought at the time was a combat death.
Thoughts of Vince’s death led her mind straight to Gideon, who was still out there in the woods somewhere, surrounded by at least three men whose motives for being on this island were suspect in the extreme. “Do you think we should go back to the house?” she asked Lydia. “If Gideon doesn’t find us there, what will he think?”
“Nothing good,” Lydia admitted. For the first time since the ordeal began, Lydia sounded like a woman in her late sixties. “I am almost afraid to hope he’s survived unscathed,” she said in a weak voice. “I’m afraid I have become more accustomed to loss these days than not.”
Shannon put her arm around the older woman. “I don’t know Gideon very well, but if there’s one thing I’m pretty sure about, it’s that he’s a big, tough guy who knows how to take care of himself. They don’t call marines Devil Dogs for nothing, right?”
Lydia managed a smile. “My husband was appalled that Ford—our son—joined the Marine Corps. Edward was a soldier, through and through. Only the army was good enough for him.”
“One of my cousins was in the navy, and two of his younger brothers were marines. He thinks they’re lower than pig snot.” At Lydia’s surprised laugh, Shannon chuckled a little herself. “Not that he really thinks that—Sam and Luke are both the best, and J.D. knows it. But families are like that, I guess. Got to keep everyone in the right pecking order.”
“I wish we’d given Ford a brother or sister. Perhaps it would be easier—” Lydia stopped and shook her head. “I don’t suppose anything would make it easier.”
Shannon started to respond, but a faint scrape outside the door stopped her in mid-breath. She tugged Lydia behind her and pulled her GLOCK, edging her way forward.
There was no peephole in t
he front door, only a narrow pane of glass about five and a half feet above the ground, clearly placed there by a tall man, because she had to rise on tiptoes to see anything.
A large, shadowy figure climbed the last porch step and scooted out of sight, moving quickly and smoothly.
“Someone’s outside,” she whispered to Lydia.
“Is it Gideon?”
“I can’t tell,” she whispered back. “You need to find someplace to hide, Lydia.”
“My Remington and I will stay right here,” Lydia retorted. She cocked the rifle for emphasis, making Shannon grin in spite of the terror rising like bile in her throat.
A faint rattle of the door handle set her into motion. She slid sideways to flatten herself against the wall by the door.
Like all Cooper Security employees, including clerks and interns, Shannon had undergone rigorous self-defense and crisis management courses before she’d been allowed to work for the company. One of the things she’d been taught was how to disarm an armed intruder.
Considering how much her family babied her, Shannon had despaired of ever having reason to use that particular skill. But now that the opportunity was upon her, she was beginning to appreciate just what her family had been trying to protect her from.
Tension as thick as any she’d ever known. Rage at being forced to even think about drawing a weapon on a fellow human being. And the gnawing, sickening fear that she was going to have to pull the trigger and take someone’s life.
But she had no time to dwell on any of those emotions, for the front door creaked open and the large figure pushed inside, immediately swinging his gun arm in a sweeping motion.
Shannon caught his arm as it swung toward her, bringing it downward with a sharp pull while she kept her body safely out of range. She banged her knee hard against the back of the intruder’s knee, knocking him off balance. They both hit the floor in a tangle, the intruder landing atop her with a low groan, pinning her to the hard pine.
The intruder’s left hand found her weapon hand, anchoring it in place against the floor before she could bring up the GLOCK. His right hand swept up her body, pausing for a moment at the curve of her breast, his touch firm and shockingly intimate. She tried to bring her knee up between his legs, but the intruder trapped her leg between his knees, blocking her ploy. His hand fell away from her breast.
Suddenly, light filled the room, so bright she had to squint against the painful contraction of her pupils. She peered up at her captor, her body going from hot to cold to hot again in a span of seconds, making her shiver.
“You’re not much for staying put, are you?” Gideon asked, gazing back at her with amusement in his intensely blue eyes.
Chapter Five
“Are you certain you didn’t touch anything in the service room that might have repaired the connection to the foghorn?” Gideon asked from his lookout spot on the widow’s walk. Lydia had gone to her bedroom to rest, although he doubted she’d be able to sleep much after all the excitement of the evening. But Shannon had insisted on staying with him on watch from his perch atop Stafford House.
Despite the continuing danger and his lack of a foolproof plan to combat it, Gideon’s mind kept returning again and again to the feel of Shannon’s firm, softly rounded breast against his palm. He had never had quite so much trouble focusing on an imminent threat before. He didn’t like feeling out of control.
“I didn’t touch anything. I barely walked into the service room before I went out on the catwalk,” Shannon insisted. “I didn’t know what I was looking for, and I thought the connector might be on the outside, where the horns are.”
She stood at the opposite end of the front railing from him, her voice carrying lightly on the night breeze. She looked alert and businesslike, her GLOCK in its holster on her hip, the snap unfastened for easy retrieval. If she was tired from her earlier exertions, it didn’t show. Must be nice, he thought wearily, to be young.
“That must have been loud, having it go off right by you.”
“Scared the hell out of me,” she admitted with a sheepish grin. “And going out on that catwalk already had me on edge. Literally.”
He followed her troubled gaze to the lighthouse, not sure whether he should feel angry that she and his boss had ventured out into the night against his express orders or glad that she’d managed, however accidentally, to sound the alarm just in time.
“They knew the horn was a signal to Terrebonne Fire and Rescue,” he murmured. “They’ve done their homework.”
Shannon moved closer to him, wrapping her arms around herself as if she were cold. He clenched his fists on the balcony railing, quelling the urge to pull her close and warm her with the fire burning low in his own belly. “I’m sorry about earlier,” he said.
Her eyes flickered up to meet his. “In your house?”
He nodded. “I wasn’t sure who was attacking me in the dark.”
Her lips curved slightly, her eyelids lowering until she was looking at him through a veil of dark lashes. “Same here.”
“You did a good job,” he added. “Taking me down.”
She looked down at her hands where they gripped the rail next to his. “You pinned me, so I guess it wasn’t that good a job.”
“I was Marine Special Operations. There are few men in the world who could take me down hand to hand,” he said flatly. “You did it well.”
She looked up again. “Thanks. I learned from a marine.”
“Your brother?”
She nodded. “Everyone who works for Cooper Security goes through training. Jesse thinks we should all be able to acquit ourselves in a way that brings honor to the company.”
He could tell from the dry recitation that she was parroting her brother’s words. “He has a point.”
“I know.” There was a plaintive tone to her voice. “He’s just not very good at allowing people to use what they’ve learned.”
“And by ‘people,’ you mean you?”
She smiled sheepishly again. “Megan—that’s my sister—says he’d probably let me do more things if I didn’t whine about it quite so much. Sorry for the pity party.”
“I’ll put in a good word for you if I ever talk to him.” He couldn’t quite hide his irritation.
Her gaze snapped up to his. “You don’t trust us, do you?”
“It seems a small job for such a big company.”
“We do small jobs,” she said defensively.
He knew they did. After dinner, when Shannon had gone up to her room, he’d checked up on Cooper Security, via the internet and a couple of calls to old friends from the Corps. He’d learned quite a bit about the way the company did business. “Most of those small jobs are for people who can’t pay for the services you offer. Pro bono. Lydia Ross is no charity case. Which makes me wonder exactly what your brother hopes to get out of this job besides the paycheck.”
Shannon’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t know. Maybe Jesse knew General Ross personally or something.”
Gideon considered the possibility. “Unless your brother was pretty high in the Marine Corps command, he wouldn’t have had much contact with an army general,” he said.
She shook her head. “He retired as a captain. Didn’t mix much with the upper brass.”
“And you didn’t think it strange he sent you on this job?”
A self-conscious smile darted across her face. “I was just glad to get out from under a computer for once.”
He arched an eyebrow at her comment.
“Along with my archival science degree, I have a computer science degree. I’ve been Cooper Security’s head of Information Technology.”
He grinned. “You’re an IT geek?”
“You got it, big guy. Wanna see my pocket protector?” she asked with a waggle of her well-shaped black eyebrows.
She was damn cute, he thought, with her big brown eyes and infectious grin. About ten years too young for him, and eons too innocent. If he had any sense, he’d put those thoughts
right out of his idiotic brain.
Right now, however, he seemed to have no sense at all, for despite the serious danger they had been in tonight—were still in, regardless of Terrebonne Harbor Patrol’s promise to keep an eye out for any further incursions—he was overwhelmed by the urge to kiss her.
“What do they want from Lydia?” she asked, interrupting his thoughts.
“The general’s archive,” he said. It was the only thing that made sense.
Her brow furrowed. “You mean his collections?”
“I suppose those would be a robber’s likeliest target,” he admitted, although it wasn’t what he’d meant. “The general owns some unique items—things he bought during overseas tours of duty, art he’s collected over the years. Mrs. Ross owns things as well that must be quite valuable.”
“But you said his archive, first,” she noted, her gaze narrowed.
He sighed. Cute as a button and smart as a whip. “I suppose some of his writings have intrinsic historical value.”
“Enough to warrant an armed invasion?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” He looked to the east, where he’d last seen the intruders as they piled aboard a Zodiac Bayrunner motorized raft with carefully controlled haste and skimmed across the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, heading directly south. They must have had a boat anchored out there somewhere, just beyond the sight horizon. He’d been tempted to hop aboard the Lorelei and chase them down, but he’d had Mrs. Ross and Shannon Cooper to think about.
Not to mention, after the sabotage this morning—yesterday morning, he amended mentally, noting the first pinkish-gray lightening of the eastern sky—he couldn’t be sure the Lorelei was even seaworthy at the moment.
“We’re not safe here,” Shannon said quietly. “And short of ringing the island with armed guards—”
“Mrs. Ross will understand if you want to leave.”
She rounded on him, her expression fierce. “And leave the two of you here to deal with this mess alone?”
He couldn’t hold back a smile. “You and your pocket protector gonna keep us safe?”