by Rachel Lee
Then, too, her dreams had been plagued. Not by fear, but by passion. She’d awakened so many times in a state of aching arousal that even as she sat up in the morning she felt astonished. Jerrod caused her to have the most unabashedly erotic dreams.
The shame of it was, she thought with sardonic self-amusement, that all that arousal hadn’t been enough to assuage her. It had just ratcheted everything up until she wondered if her own body was going to turn into her worst enemy.
He had kissed her, she told herself. He had held her a few times. Then he had backed away, and she wasn’t at all sure he had done so because he was in pain.
He might say he wanted her, but she was beginning to wonder. She’d all but offered herself on a silver platter last night, and then he had retreated.
So maybe there was something wrong with her?
She heard him in the kitchen. Impossible not to notice when she had lived alone so long. She hoped the couch hadn’t been hard on his back. She headed for the bathroom, wearing her fleece robe, and could tell by the humidity that he’d showered this morning.
It was the only way she could tell. He had cleaned up so well after himself that she wondered if the room sparkled more than usual. Fresh towels even hung neatly on the rack. Well, she thought, there was something to be said for military training.
By the time she dressed and headed for the kitchen, good smells filled the air. Apparently he’d found the stash of bacon she kept in the freezer. The aroma made her mouth water and she figured she’d work off the excess fat in a little while by hiking around a cold mountainside.
“Good morning,” he said. He stood at the stove, cooking the bacon. The carton of eggs waited nearby.
“Good morning.” The late-winter dawn wasn’t yet lighting the world, making the moment seem somehow out of time. He looked so good in his jeans and an untucked flannel shirt. She wouldn’t have minded waking to that sight every morning. “Can I help?”
“Toast would be great. Carbs for the hike.”
“So lots of it? How many slices do you want?”
“I’m a man of big appetites.” He astonished her with a wink, then returned to the bacon.
“How’s your back?” she asked as she pulled the toaster out and set it on the counter. There was a fresh loaf of rye bread in the breadbox that she suspected wouldn’t survive this meal.
“Much better.”
“Good. I was worried about the couch.”
“I was fine. You have a comfortable floor.”
Aghast, she turned to him. “Not the floor!”
“When my back hurts, a board would be welcome. The floor was great, and the blankets were warm. I slept like a baby.”
She wished she could say the same. Stifling a sigh, she popped two slices of bread into the toaster and pressed the button. “So we’re walking the grid today?”
“As much as we can or need to. I’m going to be scouting around, like I said. If this creep is watching, I’ll pick up his sign. I wonder if he realizes that taking an interest like this is the surest way to get himself caught.”
“He probably wasn’t counting on you.”
A chuckle escaped him. “Probably not.”
She switched her attention from him to the toaster. Back and forth like a Ping-Pong ball. Unfortunately, she couldn’t ignore the toaster. It had been burning her toast from time to time.
“Jerrod?”
“Hmm?”
“Seriously now, just how much danger do you think I’m in?”
She waited while he forked bacon onto a plate covered with a paper towel then started putting more in the pan.
“You know I can’t say for sure.”
“I know.”
“You want a threat estimate?”
“Is that what you call it?”
“Yeah. Okay, here it is. A week ago, after you explained how hard it would be to track this guy, I was only mildly worried. I actually got a little less so after your car was bashed.”
That surprised her. “Why?”
“Because I figured he just wanted to scare you off. Scaring people off suggests someone who doesn’t want to do anything really bad.”
She nodded and popped up the toast. It was ready. In went two more pieces, then she reached for the butter dish and a knife. “What’s changed?”
“You keep going back. That probably changes it for him, too. Maybe you’re close to finding something he can’t hide.”
“Oh, I find that hard to believe. It would be easy to remove the poison from the area.”
“But not from the animals. What would happen if you found an entire wolf pack poisoned?”
“An investigation,” she said drily. “Pretty much like the one I’m doing now. People in these parts are more worried about livestock than what happens to wolves. We have a few who’d erupt over it but I’m not sure it would get anywhere near as much attention as Jake Madison losing two cows, frankly.”
“Interesting.” He absorbed the information, and though she could see only the side of his face, she could tell that he was adding that into whatever calculations he was doing on his “threat assessment.”
“Does that change your mind?” she asked finally.
“About the threat? No.”
“Try explaining to me, please.”
“It’s hard to explain. Sorry. It’s an accumulation of things. My training, my experience. At some point it boils down to the gut. The feel I’m getting from a situation. I can’t always put it into words.”
“But you trust your gut feelings?”
“I’m still alive.”
That was a pretty stark statement. As she made more toast, she decided that given her own lack of experience in this kind of thing, she’d be safer trusting his gut than ignoring it. If he happened to be wrong, no harm would be done.
“I’ll be honest,” he said. “I can’t predict. But I’m getting a bad feeling. It’s almost like it’s in the air.”
“Because you felt watched?”
“Not just that. Something else is bugging me. I’d gladly tell you if I could. Maybe it’s just that this character isn’t going away. He really, really ought to just crawl back into his hole, don’t you think?”
“It would be smart.”
“But he’s not. Something is working on him, and he can’t let this go. That’s enough right there. But it’s more and I wish I could put my finger on it for you.”
“How in the world do you evaluate something this vague? I’m a scientist. I want my numbers. I want stuff to be orderly. I want proof or disproof.”
“You want facts, and I’m sorry I can’t give them to you. But events have shapes.”
“Shapes?”
He spread one hand as if he didn’t have the words, then began flipping the bacon in the pan. “Shapes,” he repeated. “Hard to describe. It’s almost like I see vectors.”
“Vectors, I get.”
“I’m sure you do.” He flashed a smile her way. “But it’s not just lines of force. It’s a feeling about how they might go together, adding up to what I call the shape of a situation. It’s fluid. It changes as I get new information, but right now I’m not liking the shape of this at all. So today while you’re taking samples and looking for dead critters, I’m going to do a wider sweep, looking for signs of whoever is so interested in you. That’ll be more information to add to my assessment. I promise you one thing, though. I won’t be more than a shout away from you at any time. I’ll be moving around you constantly.”
“A one-man encirclement?” she tried to say lightly.
“Pretty much.” But he was dead serious. “It’s possible, Allison. Remember, we’re up against somebody who can’t move any faster than I can. He’s no ghost. He’s a human. As such he’ll leave signs and proba
bly make noise no matter how quiet he thinks he is.”
“Unless he’s like you?”
Jerrod didn’t answer. She once again saw that stillness come over him, as if some thought arrested him, but before she could really be certain, he finished the last of the bacon and was cracking eggs into the pan.
“Just one egg for me,” she said quickly.
“Don’t be ridiculous. We’ve got a hard hike and a lot of cold ahead of us. Load up on carbs and fat. You’ll be glad you did.”
Forty-five minutes later, they were ready to leave. Jerrod ran next door and came back with a lightweight backpack. Her own was ready for short mountain hikes. She pulled out a box of energy bars and split them with him.
This time when he donned his pistol and knife, she didn’t look away. In fact, she almost wished she were armed herself. Her thoughts strayed to the shotgun that had been her dad’s, tucked away in the attic, then dismissed it. It hadn’t been touched or cleaned in so long it was probably next to useless. Not that she wanted to shoot anything. Her dad had loved hunting in the fall, but she’d never developed a taste for it.
Jerrod filled his own pack with water bottles. “I’ll keep you supplied,” he said.
Good enough for her. What a strange morning, to awaken with unsatisfied desires having plagued her all night into a world that seemed to come right out of a movie.
Well, her life had been askew almost since the moment she’d spoken to this man for the first time. She was getting a glimpse of his world, probably a very minor and mild one, but it was utterly different from her own.
No wonder he was having a problem making the transition to her world. It was almost like watching opposing forces collide.
Certainly she felt as if her entire world had upended, and as if everything she had once found so familiar had taken on an unfamiliar appearance. As if she had taken one step to the side of reality and was seeing an almost identical but parallel universe. She wondered if her world would ever feel the same again.
Jerrod once again followed her in his own truck. He seemed determined that they have two vehicles, although from her perspective it seemed wasteful. He must have a reason, though. He didn’t seem like a man who did much without a reason.
Except possibly kissing her. Given the way he had withdrawn last night, she wondered why he had kissed her in the first place. As she jolted over roads beginning to roughen with the early-winter cycle of freeze and thaw, she touched her lips and wondered if she had failed at even something as small as a kiss. Or maybe a kiss was a big deal, and she’d gotten an F.
Yeah, his kiss was a big deal, she thought almost sadly. His kiss had set her on fire like a torch, even though it had been gentle and undemanding. None of the fancy stuff that Lance had found so essential. Nope. Just the gentlest of kisses from a surprisingly warm and soft mouth.
Maybe her problem was that she needed gentleness as much as she needed kindness. Many more of these discoveries and she was going to start feeling like an open wound.
Oh, cut it out, she told herself sternly. If the man didn’t want her, he didn’t want her. That didn’t really say anything about her at all. He hardly knew her. Maybe she wasn’t his type. Maybe he got turned on by buxom blondes.
The image that popped into her head then dispelled her fleeting sadness and made her giggle. She envisioned the worst caricature of a bad dye job and an overdone breast augmentation, as if from a comedic movie. Somehow she doubted Jerrod’s taste ran to that extreme.
She took them by a different route as the sun lifted above rosy clouds to the east. Since they were going to stay on the mountain, it seemed pointless to cross the river again at the Madison place.
She had an inkling of what Jerrod had meant by the shape of a situation. Thinking about how the two poisoned cows had turned up on the Madison ranch, and how the apparent bait had been nearby, she was getting a shape in her own mind, one she wouldn’t be able to complete without knowing if that toxin was stronger somewhere else.
But she couldn’t imagine why anyone in this county would attack Jake Madison. He was generally very well liked, and between growing up here and having been a cop for the past decade, he knew just about everyone in the county. She couldn’t think of a reason anyone would want to hurt him like this. And face it, the loss of two of his cows was a hurt. He wasn’t working two jobs because he was in tall clover.
While she didn’t try to stay plugged in to the local gossip, a lot of it came her way regardless. She knew Jake’s fiancée’s father, Fred Loftis, was a nasty man, and he’d made no secret of the fact that he felt shamed by his daughter living with Jake. But Jake and Nora were engaged. Everyone knew it and kind of shrugged off Loftis’s complaints.
Given that she’d long thought of Fred Loftis as a disturbingly ugly man, she supposed it was possible he’d placed the poison. But that went right out the window considering that Jerrod was sure someone was watching them. Her. Loftis wouldn’t have time for that. He had a business to run and a church to rule. So that shape just plain didn’t fit what was going on now.
She wondered what Jerrod would say to her shaping of the events, but given that it was so hazy and incomplete, she brushed aside any thought of telling him.
They crossed a narrow wooden bridge over the creek, then drove down a snowy but still passable road on its far side. She had to drive slowly to avoid skidding, but for once in her life she was strangely reluctant to arrive.
She realized she had grown afraid of whatever was troubling Jerrod. Given what he had told her, she was sure he was a man very clued in to reality, not one to go off into fantasyland. As he said, he was still alive.
Glancing into her rearview mirror, she saw once again the shattered glass and the duct tape holding it together. At the time it had seemed easy to blame it on some weird student prank or hazing, maybe because that fit better with what she expected from the world. And maybe that wasn’t very realistic.
Bad enough that for the first time in her life she didn’t want to take a walk in the woods.
They pulled into a lightly wooded area where they could turn around, and parked. It was near enough to the area she wanted to check out, and she feared they might not find another place to turn around on this wagon track. She supposed hunters and hikers used it from time to time, but this was state land, and clearly this road didn’t get a lot of attention.
Jerrod joined her beside her car and helped her settle her backpack. Then she pulled out her small sample-gathering kit, slung the strap over her shoulder and gave him the brightest smile she could manage.
“I’m ready.”
He smiled back, but she noticed his gaze was already on the march, scanning constantly, skimming over her and returning to the woods around.
“We’re about a half mile from where you wanted to start your search,” he said. “Still up for it?”
“Absolutely. It’s essential to find out if this toxin is anywhere else other than the Madison ranch. If it isn’t, I guess that would answer some questions, too.”
“I’d think so.” They started walking along the road. In the distance, across the river, she could barely make out the small dot of Jake Madison’s barn. At least that was what she thought it was. He owned a big spread. From this distance she might be looking at some outbuilding she had never seen before.
As they walked, she paused occasionally to take a sample from the stream side of the road. God, she hoped they all came back negative. This poison was so insidious, it was terrifying to think of it being loose in the environment.
In an instant, everything that had become muddled in the past twenty-four hours snapped into clear focus. She had a mission, an important one, and everything else could wait.
The morning sun was low enough to cast light beneath the firs and shower the patchy snow of the hillside with gold. Here and there stands of decidu
ous trees stood looking like depressed skeletons, waving only an occasional flag of their autumn color. Beauty and quiet filled the morning.
But something evil might lurk here underfoot. Or in the woods, given what Jerrod suspected. She was reminded of it when they parted ways: she to begin pacing her grid and taking samples, he to scout around her.
He walked away as if they were merely casual acquaintances, turning to call back, “See you in a few hours.”
But she knew that wasn’t true. He wasn’t going to be that far from her. He had promised. A show for someone watching, maybe?
The back of her neck prickled, and frantic butterflies erupted in her stomach. Never before had she seen these woods as treacherous.
Now she did.
* * *
Jerrod turned into the woods, and soon they closed behind him. He paused, getting a feel for the air, tasting it and smelling it for human scents. He’d learned long ago that people left scents behind them, and while he was no bloodhound, it was possible to detect, however faintly, the odors of sweat or an aftershave if you trained yourself to pay attention.
He was listening, too, for any sounds that didn’t fit with the forest.
Nothing. He scanned the area, saw no movement that mattered then began a silent stalking in the woods. A few yards up he picked up Allison’s scents. Good, she was close.
He scanned the ground with every step he took, picking up signs. He could tell where animals had passed easily enough. They left small paw and hoofprints and didn’t care if they disturbed needles or leaves.
He did. He kept to the pine needles and avoided the leaves as much as he could, taking care not to even twist his feet as he moved. The ground was loamy, but when he glanced back he could see that his footprints were rapidly disappearing as the loam rebounded. If a man wanted to track him, he’d have to get close first.
Good.
He swept back and forth, looking for the dead animals that had Allison so concerned but also keeping an eye out for signs of human passage. As he went, he occasionally paused to arrange sticks or leaves in a way that would tell him if someone had passed by.