The planner.
But then he’d given Melanie a nod that told her he wanted to speak with her in private.
Kyle unbuckled his belt and ripped it off his pants. “Jo Harper and Elijah Cameron are a problem.”
“Then deal with them,” Melanie said.
He dropped the belt onto a chair. “Did Nora or Devin ever see us together?”
“No. Impossible.” She shook her head, as much to reassure herself. “We’re safe.”
“What about your would-be client who came to a bad end?”
“We’ve been through that, Kyle. There’s no way to connect him to me. You’d never have taken me on as a partner if there had been. Nora and Devin don’t know anything. They’re just looking for something to break Thomas and me apart.”
“You should never have invited Nora’s scrutiny by getting involved with her father.”
“Spilled milk, Kyle.”
She felt a sudden chill. She’d never liked the cold—she certainly hadn’t wanted to hike up that stupid mountain in April. Kyle had insisted. They’d been instructed to make Drew’s death look like an accident, an old man who’d miscalculated the elements and went to sleep in the snow.
Kyle unbuttoned his pants. She didn’t know, really, if he wanted a quick round of sex or just wanted to go to bed. “Why did we kill Drew Cameron?” she asked in a low voice.
“You’re asking for trouble with that kind of question. We do a job. We don’t get to know who wanted it done or why.” He stepped out of his pants and folded them onto the chair. “You’re caught up in a fantasy. You think you’re two different people, but you’re not. Your life this past year was for real. You can’t erase it. You did what you did.”
“I’m not in denial. I’m moving on.”
“I never should have let you get involved in my business. It was a mistake.”
“You needed a partner. Even with what I got paid, you earned far more these past eight months than you would have on your own. Don’t you have hopes and dreams, Kyle?”
“Yeah. Living through this mess we’re in up here.”
But Melanie could see he had a level of calm that indicated he believed he had a solid plan. “You’ll miss me when we’ve gotten through this mess.”
“No, I won’t, Melanie.”
He continued to stare at her. She shivered, not with the cold—with fear, with excitement. “What?”
“We have to get this right or we’ll be on the list for one of our colleagues. We’ll be a liability.”
“Drew and Bruni got too close to our people, didn’t they?”
“I know as much as you do. You have to stop, Melanie. Just stop.”
He pulled off his shirt and laid it neatly on top of his pants, then took off his socks. There was nothing erotic about his movements.
“If you got an assignment to kill me,” Melanie said, “you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”
His eyes were slits on her. “Would you tell me?”
“I just want to be Mrs. Thomas Asher.”
He stood in front of her and took her hand, pressed it against his crotch. “Do you?”
“Yes.” But she cupped him, stroked him. “I do.”
“Then help me make sure his daughter doesn’t get off that mountain. We have to deal with Elijah Cameron and Jo Harper. You’re a rookie compared to them. You have no idea.” Kyle shook his head, even as he thrust himself against her hand. “You’ve never gone up against real professionals.”
“They just want to find two kids in over their heads and get them safely down off the mountain.”
“I searched Harper’s cabins last night. If the feds are onto us and sent her up here undercover, she’s doing a good job hiding it.”
“If she’d caught you—”
“She didn’t.” He lowered his boxers and threaded his fingers into her hair. “I couldn’t get into Elijah Cameron’s place. No time. But he suspects his father had help dying up on that mountain.”
“He can suspect all he wants. It won’t do him any good.” She raised her eyes to him. “We just have to deal with Nora and Devin.”
“I could go up there in the dark and look for them, but I need rest. I need to give the snow a chance to develop.”
“What do you want me to do?”
He cupped the back of her head with his hands and produced a nasty smile. “You know what to do.”
“I mean tomorrow. More deaths on Cameron Mountain will be hard to explain.”
“That’s where planning comes in.”
It was a dig at her, but she shrugged it off and moved her mouth closer to his erection. “Was this planned?”
Her sarcasm was ill timed. He’d retaliate for her snottiness, and she’d have no satisfaction tonight. She’d service Kyle and be sent on her way, back out into the cold night. Thomas awaited her, but it wasn’t the same.
“I feel like the wicked stepmother in a fairy tale,” she said when he didn’t answer.
“It’s not a fairy tale. You’re the real deal.”
“There’ll be a happy ending for me.”
“You’re something else, Melanie. I wish I’d never met you.”
She raised her eyes to him. “If you’re getting squeamish, walk away. I’ll take care of everything.”
“There’s no walking away.” Kyle’s grip on her head eased. “You need to forget Thomas. Once we’re finished here, you Dear John him. Say you didn’t bargain for all this tragedy.”
“You don’t tell me what to do, Kyle.”
He gave her a supercilious smirk. “Sure.”
But even as she opened her mouth and did his bidding, she knew the power she had over him. She and Thomas were getting married. She was walking away from her life with Kyle stronger, better. He would remain a work-for-hire killer.
Of course, he had power over her, too. He could ruin her.
Or kill her. She didn’t want to end up on his list of targets.
He moaned, threading his thick fingers into her hair, and she smiled to herself. She could kill him, but Kyle could never hurt her.
All would be well.
* * *
When she arrived back at the farmhouse, Melanie decided she’d absolutely have to talk Thomas out of a Vermont wedding. It would be frigid on New Year’s Eve. It was cold now.
She sat next to him on the couch in front of the fire, welcoming the warmth, the elegance of the beautifully decorated room. As wealthy and well-connected as Vivian and Lowell Whittaker were, Melanie wasn’t sure if she and Thomas would want to maintain a friendship with them after Nora and Devin were dead. It would be just too awkward.
No one seemed the least bit curious about how long she’d been gone. She’d been right, Kyle had refused to satisfy her. She was still all tingly with wanting him. But he’d been adamant—cruel, even. He’d taken her out to his car and given her a gun, a 9-millimeter Browning that she rather liked.
“Be prepared to cut your losses,” he’d told her.
She’d tucked the Browning into her handbag. Thomas was too much of a gentleman ever to paw through any of her things without her permission. She would do what she had to do to protect herself.
But so would Kyle. How much hadn’t he told her? She couldn’t count on his loyalty. If he had a client who’d pay him to do it, Kyle would kill his own mother. An apt cliché in his case.
Melanie trusted her own instincts. She had succeeded in her violent work this past year not just because she enjoyed it and understood her strengths and weaknesses, but also because she didn’t defer to Kyle or anyone else. She had her own mind. Her own plans.
Melanie snuggled closer to Thomas in front of the fire. She sensed his worry and grief—and guilt—and held his hand. Lowell Whittaker offered her a brandy, but she didn’t dare accept. Alcohol in her hyperalert state would be dangerous.
Lowell and Vivian told a funny story about Alex almost falling into the duck pond on a visit to Vermont, and Thomas managed a smile. Melanie nudged him. “Tell us what he was like
in law school,” she said. “I can just imagine what you two were like then.”
It took a bit more prodding, but Thomas finally reminisced about his and his dead friend’s days together at Yale. Melanie mumbled a few appropriate comments, but mostly listened sympathetically. He was still in shock, the poor thing. She hated to think what he’d be like after his daughter was dead, too, but nothing to be done about that now. They might have to postpone their wedding. Never mind the cold, New Year’s Eve might be too soon.
Melanie felt her heartbeat quicken with irritation at the position Nora had put her in. She deserved to die—and to suffer before she gave up her last breath. Kyle never concerned himself with making a target suffer. Get in, get out. Do the job. That was his philosophy. Melanie wasn’t that noble.
Maybe a Valentine’s Day wedding would work. It could be fun. More fun, even, than New Year’s Eve.
She smiled inwardly, already visualizing venues and decorations.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Elijah was loading his backpack on the kitchen counter when Jo got up and eased onto a stool at the breakfast bar. It wasn’t quite light out, and it was cold. He wasn’t much on keeping the thermostat up and hadn’t yet lit a fire in his efficient little woodstove.
He had the look of a man with a mission.
She’d slipped his nightshirt back on but was barefoot, her toes already cold. “You could hand me over a pair of your wool socks,” she said.
“Top drawer of my dresser. All the socks you need.”
He hadn’t even looked up from his array of supplies. He was fully dressed—wool pants, fleece pullover atop an army-green undergarment of some kind. Not cotton, Jo thought. Cotton was a poor insulator when wet, dried slowly, and therefore tended to promote hypothermia.
He’d made coffee. She’d smelled it while she lay snug under his soft wool blanket and down comforter, warm and loose from their night of lovemaking. She’d heard him get up, run the shower, dress and head to the kitchen, and she’d debated whether it would be better to get up herself and go find out what he was up to, or if it was better that she didn’t.
He had food, water, a tent, extra clothes, a sleeping bag that would keep him warm on Mount Everest. Snowshoes. Basic rescue equipment. If he had to spend the night in the elements, he’d be fine. If he had to dig a snow cave, he could.
“Only thing missing there is a mule,” she said lightly.
He didn’t answer. His hair was still a little tousled from last night. She remembered coursing her fingers through it as he’d spun her into orgasmic ecstasy.
“Where are you going?” she asked him.
He tucked a couple of protein bars into an outer pocket on his pack and zipped it up. “To find Devin and Nora or meet them coming down off the mountain. Out. Doesn’t matter.”
“Your route?”
“I can handle myself.”
“Elijah.”
He lifted the pack onto one shoulder, grabbed his coat off the back of the bar stool next to hers and finally looked at her, his eyes resigned, as if he’d known he wouldn’t get out of there without having to deal with her. She hadn’t disappeared in a poof with the coming of dawn. “I’ll start on the falls trail and take it from there,” he said. “I’ll probably end up taking the saddle around to the back side of the mountain. Ten to one that’s the route Nora and Devin took.”
“To where your father died.”
“Correct.”
He headed out of the kitchen and down the short hall to the front room. Jo jumped off her stool, grimaced at the feel of the cold wood floor on her bare feet and went after him.
The view down the hill through the trees and out across the lake was, indeed, breathtaking. Mist rose up from the water, and frost clung to the rust and burgundy oak leaves as the sun burned through in places, sparkling.
But Elijah didn’t seem to notice. He shoved open a slider and stepped onto the deck, looking back at her with a harshness she hadn’t experienced last night and knew had nothing to do with her. “Devin should have told us that Pop had cooked up something with him.”
Jo’s heart broke at the way he said “Pop.” Drew had been a commanding force in the lives of his four children—in the lives of the people of Black Falls—and now he was gone. Elijah, in particular, had never had a chance to say goodbye.
But she nodded to the milky sky. “The weather isn’t going to be good today.”
“More reason to get moving.”
She crossed her arms against the draft. “I can go with you.”
“You’re not dressed, and I’m not waiting.”
“All right. I’ll meet you.”
Some of his intensity eased, and she thought she saw a spark in his very blue eyes. “Bring your own sleeping bag.” But he sighed as he eased the door shut a little ways. “You need to go back to your life. You don’t belong here, Jo. You never did.”
“Nothing like waking up with regrets.”
“I didn’t say I had regrets. Jo—we’re not right for each other. We weren’t right fifteen years ago and we’re not right now. Let’s not break each other’s hearts again.”
“I didn’t break your heart, Elijah.” She moved right up to the slider screen and focused on the man in front of her and the old hurt deep inside her. “I’d have followed you to the army. Leaving me behind made it possible for you to do what you wanted to do.”
“Saved me from your father having me thrown in jail.”
“That, too. Elijah…I’m sorry.” Jo saw it now, what needed to be said. “I should have let you go. I shouldn’t have held on the way I did.”
“Jo, Jo, Jo. Sweet pea. You didn’t do anything that needs forgiving, including falling for me.”
“Did you get my letters?”
She saw the muscles in his jaw tense and knew he hadn’t expected her question.
Then his gaze softened, and he said, “Every one of them.”
He shut the slider and headed down the deck stairs, his mind, she knew, back on his mission of the day. She shivered in the draft, thinking back to herself at eighteen, sitting on a boulder on the lakeshore and pouring out her soul in letter after letter in those first weeks after he’d left Black Falls for the army.
She hadn’t let go easily.
She returned to the kitchen, splashed more coffee in her mug and sat at the breakfast bar as she debated her options, none of which involved leaving Elijah Cameron to his own devices.
Everyone in Black Falls had always known he would end up back there.
Everyone except Elijah—he had never expected to come home alive.
That was what Drew had tried to make her understand on their walk among the cherry blossoms. Elijah didn’t court death. He wasn’t reckless or pessimistic. He was forward looking and had a strong, positive mental attitude.
“But he’s a realist,” Drew had said. “He understands the dangers. He’s looked death in the eye, and he knows if he makes it home, it’s a bonus. It’s not something he counts on.”
Jo let the coffee warm her insides and soothe her soul.
Bad boy Elijah Cameron and good girl Jo Harper…She’d been a little bad last night. And he’d been good.
So good, she thought with a smile.
His phone rang, and she picked up the extension on the counter next to her.
“I’d like to speak to Sergeant Cameron, please,” a male voice said.
She frowned. “Who is this?”
A gasp of shock. “Special Agent Harper?”
Charlie Neal. Jo almost knocked over her coffee. “Charlie, what are you doing?”
“Uh. Just checking on the flowers I sent. Were they pretty?”
“Very. Thank you.” She spoke crisply, noting the time—just after 7:00 a.m.—and figuring Charlie was at, or almost at, school. “I know you’ve been in touch with Elijah. How did you find out his name, rank and home phone number?”
He ignored her question. “The stove fire. With Marissa. Was it the work of these assassins
? Are you trying to protect us by not telling us?”
“Listen to me. Don’t—”
“Marissa said it was just an accident.”
Jo heard the fear in his voice. “You need to stop this, Charlie. Just stop.”
“I have to go. I have play practice. Conor and I are on the production crew. In fact, we are the production crew.”
Conor Neal was Charlie’s first cousin, the second of the four children of the vice president’s older brother, and, Jo suspected, a coconspirator in the airsoft prank and the source of the incriminating video.
Charlie disconnected quickly, and Jo immediately dialed her boss. “You all are watching my young friend in D.C. like hawks, aren’t you?”
Francona didn’t answer right away. “Maybe he has a crush on you. If he were fifteen years older, you two could have a Rose Garden wedding.”
“He didn’t call me. He called a friend of mine up here in the cold.”
“It’s seven o’clock in the morning, Harper. Do I want to know where you are?”
She looked down at her nightshirt and her cold feet and thought of last night. “No.”
“I didn’t think so,” Francona said, then blew out a breath. “By the way, your young friend got a sixty-eight on a calculus test yesterday. That’s the kind of grade I’d get. He always aces his tests. Doesn’t matter what subject. He doesn’t get D’s.”
“Did someone ask him about it?”
“Yeah. He said it was a D-plus.”
Francona disconnected, and Jo poured herself more coffee and headed for Elijah’s bedroom and a pair of his socks. But his phone rang again. She snatched it up and said a tight hello, expecting her boss or Charlie on the other end.
“Elijah isn’t answering his cell phone,” a man with an easy Southern accent said. “Special Agent Harper, I presume?”
“And you would be—”
“Elijah’s friend Grit.”
She eased back onto the bar stool with her coffee. “The SEAL.”
“Yes, ma’am. I saw your Internet video. You’re as cute now as you were at seventeen.”
“How would you know?”
But he’d hung up.
Jo slipped back into her clothes, grabbed her Sig, left her bath salts and got out of Elijah’s house before she gave in to temptation and looked for old pictures of them together. Not only would it be a violation of trust, she didn’t want to know. What would be worse, finding out he’d carried her picture off to war, or finding out he hadn’t thought twice about her after he’d left Black Falls?
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