Nyght's Eve

by Laurie Roma

  The group split up. Hunter headed back to the boarding house to get his own pack, while Francesca ran to her own apartment to grab her own. Dare followed Evie into her house and watched as she pulled two large backpacks out of a cabinet in the mudroom. “I always keep these ready to go. It’s everything we need for a search, like first aid supplies, food and stuff if we have to stay out overnight.”

  Evie left the packs in the hallway, then ran upstairs to change clothes. When she turned around, her mouth dropped open when she saw the gun Dare had strapped to his hip. His face was hard and his eyes were like dark-gray shards of ice. They were the eyes of a warrior.

  “Ahh...”

  “Don’t you give me any shit. She’s got the kid out there, and she’s fucking crazy. I’m not taking any chances with his or your safety.”

  She could do more than nod to him, then he turned and left the room, leaving her to follow him back downstairs. It wasn’t as if she objected to him taking his gun with him. It was a stark reminder of the darker side of his life, and she had just been surprised to see it. She started to lift her pack, but he took it from her and lifted his own. They were heavy, but he lifted both as if they weighed nothing.

  Taking a deep breath, she nodded. “Okay, let’s go.”

  ****

  Dare was silent as he followed Evie and Gawain through the forest.

  They had been walking through the woods on the edge of town for a few hours, and hadn’t found Shane yet. The search party had started out from where they found Mara Diaz’s car. They kept in touch with the other teams locations via Madeline and Amelia on their radios. Each search dog had been given something of Shane’s to sniff before they started out. Nate had brought the clothing with him when he showed up with Hammer, and the poor kid’s face had been ravaged with grief.

  Dare half listened to Evie as she explained about scent cones and search grids, but his real focus had been on Shane. He was worried, thinking about what that little boy was going through, and Dare was determined that they find him before that crazy bitch of a mother did anything to hurt the kid.

  Evie held up her hand to stop them when her radio signaled and Sheriff Wyatt’s voice sounded. “All teams. We’ve got Mara Diaz in custody. Repeat, we have Mara Diaz in custody.”

  “My brother,” Nate’s anxious voice said over the radio. “Where is my brother?”

  “Shane is still in the woods. She said she left him behind. Both of them were injured when the car went off the road, and she left him behind to try and get away. Listen, Nate. Shane fought back. He fought back in the car and that’s why they crashed. You’re brother did good.”

  “But he’s hurt! Oh God, we have to find him!”

  “We’ve got a medivac team on standby,” the sheriff said. “They are a few minutes out. We’ll find him, Nate.”

  “Where are you?” Evie demanded. “Give me the location where you found her.”

  Sheriff Wyatt answered, and she and Dare searched their map. “We’re close,” she murmured after she surveyed their position.

  “Not close enough,” Dare countered. “The kid is hurt. We have to find him.”

  Evie nodded. “We’re going to continue the search,” she said into the radio. “We’ll cross over and start heading your way, Sheriff.”

  “Copy. We’ll head west to meet up with you, Evie,” Hunter replied.

  “All teams head to the sheriff’s location. If we don’t find Shane by the time we reach them, we’ll fan out from there and continue to search.”

  All the teams gave their acknowledgement of the new plan, and Madeline gave each team directions from their current locations since she had been keeping track of all the search party members. Evie turned the volume down the radio again, and they started walking again after she gave Gawain another scent of Shane’s shirt she had brought with her in a Ziploc bag. Both Evie and Dare felt a new level of anxiety.

  If Shane was hurt, they needed to find him.

  Fast.

  She was bombarded by haunted memories of the past as she followed her dog through the dense trees. She couldn’t help but remember the terror she’d felt when she had been kidnapped all those years ago. She knew exactly what Shane was going through, what he was feeling. Although there was a measure of relief knowing that Shane’s mother had been caught, that little boy was out there somewhere.

  Lost, alone, and hurt.

  Evie held up her hand to signal Dare as Gawain gave an alert. The dog took off to the left, and they followed him until they came to a path of crushed branches and drag marks in the dirt. Dare knelt down to study the terrain. “We’ve got blood.”

  Dare gave the dog a quick rub on his head as Gawain leaned against him. The dog’s body vibrated with barely restrained energy. He was on the scent now and wanted to go. “Find Shane, Winnie. Go find Shane!” Dare commanded.

  The dog gave a happy bark, then took off following the scent trail. Dare looked around, slightly confused as Gawain came to a stop, then his breath caught in his throat as he saw they were standing on the edge of a small ledge that dropped down a few feet below. At the bottom lay Shane, still as death. “He’s here!”

  While Evie got busy relaying the information over the radio to the rest of the teams, Dare carefully made his way down to Shane, using an area few feet away where the drop off was more gradual. He felt the bite of rough bark on his hands as he climbed down to the boy, then fell to his knees when he got to Shane.

  The boy was a mess. Covered in dirt and blood, his body showed evidence of the car accident and signs of being dragged through the forest. Shane must have lost his footing on the ledge and gone over. He was lucky though, as it seemed his fall had been cushioned by a pile of dead leaves. Still, Shane’s arm had suffered in the fall. The bone had broken, probably when the boy had tried to brace himself in the fall. Checking for a pulse, Dare felt his body go slack with relief as he felt Shane’s slow and steady heart beat.

  “Shane! Shane, can you hear me?”

  Blood covered the thin arm, seeping out from where the bone had perforated the skin, but that didn’t bother Dare. For the first time in longer than he could remember, the sight of blood didn’t make him sick. Instead, his only focus was doing what needed to be done to make sure Shane was okay. He pulled out the medical supplies from his backpack and got to work on Shane’s arm.

  When Evie fell to her knees beside them, Dare snapped out, “Don’t move him!”

  “I won’t. Tell me how to help,” she said softly.

  Dare knew that Evie was well versed in first aid, but he was too busy to think clearly at the moment. He grabbed her hand and put it over the large gauze pad he had been holding over the wound to staunch the bleeding. “Hold this. We need to stop the bleeding, but don’t put too much pressure on the bone. Good. We don’t know if he has any other injuries to his back or neck so I don’t want him moved until the medivac gets here. Did you call it in?”

  “Yes, they’re on their way.”

  “We have an open fracture of the radius. I need to wrap this and keep it stabilized until we can clean the wound and get him into surgery. Can you...yeah, that’s good.”

  Dare began to wrap a large sterile bandage around the piece of padding Evie held in place against Shane’s arm. The boy stirred, and dark-brown eyes filled with pain opened to stare up at them. “Dare...?”

  Dare barely heard the boy’s whisper, but the sound of the weak voice still managed to put a relieved smile on his face. He’d never heard Shane speak before, but he was damn glad to hear it now. “Yeah, kid. I’m here. Now, hold still while I fix you up.”

  “My mom...”

  Dare’s mouth tightened into a scowl. “You don’t have to worry about her anymore. She can’t hurt you, ever again.”

  The boy nodded slightly. “You...you came for me.”

  “Of course I did,” Dare said gruffly as he brushed a comforting hand over Shane’s head. “Now, don’t move. I don’t want you screwing up my bandages before we get
you to the hospital.”

  Despite the pain he was feeling, a small smile tilted Shane’s lips up as he closed his eyes again. Dare could feel Evie there with him, and her presence comforted him in a way he never thought possible. She reached out and placed her hand over Dare’s where it rested on Shane’s head, and he looked at her. A thousand messages were exchanged silently as blue eyes met dark-gray. His hand turned over, linking his fingers with hers as they waited for help to arrive. They glanced up at the sound of a helicopter flying overhead, and both of them breathed out a sigh of relief.

  “Hold on kid, help is on its way.”

  ****

  Dare glowered down at the glass of beer he was holding in his hand.

  He was sitting at a table in The Fox Hole surrounded by his friends, but in his mind, he was drifting. No wonder, since he had a lot on his mind. Dare jerked as Dante knocked his elbow off the table, and cursed as his beer sloshed over the side of the glass.

  “Hey, enough brooding. The kid is doing well. You said so yourself.”

  “I know. It’s just...fuck.”

  Hammer, Dante, Malcolm, Tony, Hunter and Beckett silently nodded in agreement at Dare’s statement. Or rather his implied statement. Dare thought back to that nerve-wracking flight to the Breakers’ hospital after the helicopter had picked them up. Evie had insisted Dare go with Shane, and he was glad he had. Shane’s blood pleasure had dropped while they were in flight, and no matter how skilled the medics were, Dare’s training as a trauma surgeon had come in handy. He had Shane stabilized by the time they reached the hospital, and then the doctors had taken over. Dare had wanted to scrub in, but he knew he didn’t have privileges at the hospital.

  So, he’d had to wait, like everyone else.

  Anna had cried all over him in thanks, and Dare was extremely glad when Evie showed up in the waiting room with the others since the search was done and took the crying woman off his hands. He was extremely uncomfortable by all the attention he had gotten from Tim, then from Nate when he arrived with Hammer and Kali. Evie had changed her clothes when she had returned home with her dog, and Dare was grateful for the change of clothes she had brought him since he had still been covered with Shane’s blood.

  The surgery had gone well, and everyone in the waiting room had breathed a sigh of relief when they were told that Shane would be fine. Nate went into the recovery room with Anna and Tim to see Shane first, but Anna came back out to say that Shane had asked for Dare. Holding tight to Evie’s hand, they went into Shane’s room. Anna had begun weeping all over again as Shane had spoken to Dare, asking when he could come back to the rescue center to be with him.

  “Get better first,” Dare had told him. “Then you and I can get back to work.”

  Shane had been released from the hospital two days ago, and he was home resting with his aunt and uncle. His brother Nate hadn’t left his side since he had gotten out of surgery, and Kali, Becca and Madeline had been taking turns bringing them food so they wouldn’t have to worry about anything but Shane.

  Dare had realized a few things while he had been waiting in that room to hear if Shane would be okay. He had been caught off guard by the overwhelming desire to be inside that operating room, utilizing his skills to make sure that the boy would be okay. The sight of Shane’s blood hadn’t bothered him. He had been too damn worried to feel nauseous or panicked, and instinct and experience had taken over. Dare thought he’d never get that feeling back again after his time in Spain, but knowing that his issue had worked itself out had been...liberating.

  Still, he had been broody and irritable since Shane’s kidnapping. The only time he wasn’t was when he was around Evie. He couldn’t count the times he had dragged her away from whatever she was doing and made mad, desperate love to her. He wasn’t sure why he was so determined to fuck her into a coma, but she had finally had enough and had sent him to town to hang with Hammer and his other buddies while she had a girl’s night with her friends.

  The only reason Dare could come up with was he needed Evie to want him as much as he did her. He wanted to claim her in a way that made it impossible for her to even think about any other man. It was a primitive desire, driven by the knowledge that things would be changing soon. He was no longer the broken man he had been when he arrived in Breakers, but what did that mean for them?

  Dare could no longer justify hiding out at the rescue center. He needed to figure out what he was going to do with the rest of his life, and how that would affect what he had with Evie. When he had been waiting for Shane to come out of the surgery, one of the administrators of the hospital had stopped by to introduce herself. Alda Hertz was a friend of Malcolm Fox’s, and Dare had absently remembered the older man had encouraged him to go speak with her. Alda had made it clear they would like to speak with him about taking a position at the hospital, and Dare had to admit he was interested.

  There were a lot of details Dare had to work out in order to have a life with Evie in Breakers. There was no question he was willing to do whatever he had to in order to be with her, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized that he actually liked the damn town. There was a sense of community that he had never been a part of. Even in the Army, Dare had a specific place within the structure and confines of the hierarchy. When he had started working for the taskforce, Dare had found a team he could count on without fail, but the work itself had left him drained.

  Breakers was a town that seemed like it was its own little world. The people took care of one another, but they also protected the town itself. Dare liked the idea of living in a place where he didn’t constantly have to have his guard up. Naturally, he would always have an edge to him, but knowing that his six was covered by friends made it the ideal place for Dare to settle down.

  “He’s brooding again,” Beckett observed as he sipped from his own beer. “Or maybe he is just sulking because Evie kicked him out for the night.”

  “I don’t blame the girl,” Hunter said, his eyes narrowing on Dare. “Considering you’ve been nailing my cousin against every flat surface you can find for days now.”

  “Hey!” Tony snapped. “I don’t want to hear this shit. I like to tell myself my girls are virgins, and will remain so until they get married.”

  Hunter snorted. “Ha! You can say that with what Frannie writes?”

  “I don’t want to think about that either,” Tony growled.

  “You think I do?” Beckett asked darkly. He was more civilized than the other men at the table, but when he was riled he could be just as dangerous. “And you weren’t the one who walked in on Dare and Evie in one of my exam rooms!”

  “You were supposed to be gone for the day,” Dare shot back, but even he had to admit that excuse sounded weak.

  Dante laughed evilly. “I have to say I have a new respect for you. Eight times in one day? Even I’m impressed.” Both Malcolm and Tony reached out and slapped Dante on the back of his head. “Damn it. What? At least he’s getting some.”

  “That’s our cousin you’re talking about!” Hunter groused.

  “Son, you need to handle this shit with Zoe. She’s making you lose your mind.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Dante muttered.

  “How the hell did you hear about that?” Dare said, hoping like hell he wasn’t blushing. He really had been out of control lately.

  “The people at the center talk. Did you know they have a daily bet going about how many times you drag Evie off to your cave?”

  “You and your goddamn bets,” Dare snarled under his breath so only Dante could hear.

  Dante’s face darkened. “Don’t fucking remind me.”

  They looked up as Sheriff Storm Wyatt came over to join them. Malcolm leaned back and signaled to the waitress to bring them another round of drinks, and Dare was pleased with the distraction. Just thinking about sex with Evie had made his cock throb, and the last thing he needed was a hard-on while he was sitting at a table with the men of her family.

  “I jus
t stopped by to visit Shane and Nate.” Storm sighed as he sat down. “Poor kids. They’re really nervous about the upcoming trial. I’m not sure Shane is going to be able to handle being up on the stand so soon after this last clusterfuck.”

  “About that,” Dare said slowly. “I had an idea...hell, actually it was Tony and Malcolm that gave me the idea, so—”

  “Really?” Malcolm and Tony exchanged a look. They might be older, but the wicked gleam in their eyes gave a hint to the hell raisers they still were. “Then it must be good.”

  Dare glared at both men. “As I was saying...I think I have an idea that might help Shane and Nate get through their testimony.”

  “Does it involve just taking that son of a bitch Hollis out? Because I could get behind that,” Dante said. Hammer raised his fist and tapped it against Dante’s.

  “No, but it will require your help. All of you.”

  The men sobered as Tony nodded and said, “Tell us what you need, son.”

  “We only have a week, but I think we can pull it off, if everyone helps.” Dare blew out a breath, then began to explain. “I think it’s time we put the name Breakers’ Bad Boys to good use...”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Evie stood on the porch of Anna and Tim’s house.

  It was the afternoon before the trial was to begin, and Dare had been adamant that she should be there waiting with Anna, Tim, Nate and Shane. He had rolled over her protests that she had work to do with an impatient wave of his hand. “Just be there.”

  So, there she was.

  At least she had Madeline, Kali, Becca and Anna for company out on the porch while Tim was inside with Nate and Shane. Anna folded her arms across her chest nervously. “I still don’t understand what we’re doing out here.”

  Evie sighed. “Dare made it clear he wanted us waiting here.”

  “So did Jared.” Kali sat down on the porch swing next to Becca. “He’s been so secretive about all this. What in the world have our men been up to?”