Once again he’d surprised her. She scanned it eagerly, and found a small story near the back of the main section. It was brief, and said little more than what she’d heard on the radio.
As they turned onto the business loop, Valeri voiced the question that had been bothering her for some time. “What I don’t understand,” she said, “is why Sabhad hired you to pick me up instead of sending one of his own men.”
“He probably couldn’t afford to take the chance. Kidnapping is a pretty risky operation. If something went wrong, he couldn’t afford to have one of his men involved. Whereas I’m expendable.”
“How would he know you wouldn’t reveal who’d hired you?”
He gave her a sardonic smile. “I wouldn’t live long if I did. Men like Sabhad have a long reach. In any case, he was pretty confident I could pull it off.”
“I thought you’d never met him before.”
“I hadn’t.”
“Then how could he be so sure?”
He grinned at her. “Because my reputation speaks for itself. I’m good. You have to admit that.”
She rolled her eyes in disgust. “That’s not the word I would have chosen. If I hadn’t been recovering from a bump on the head and wrestling with a lost memory, you wouldn’t have stood a chance of getting me in this car.”
“Oh, yeah?” He slowed in front of a gas station and pulled up in front of the pumps. He cut the engine, then leaned toward her. “You were lucky—I treated you nice because you’d just come out of hospital. You should see me when I really get tough.”
She gave him a sweet smile. “I’m sorry I missed the experience. I’m sure it would have been memorable.”
“Well, just in case, I’d better warn you. Double-cross me, and you’ll find out how memorable I can be.”
Dismay wiped the smile from her face. “I thought you believed me now. Isn’t it time you started trusting me? After all, I’m trusting you enough to tell you everything I know about my father.”
“So you said.” He opened the door and swung his legs outside.
She felt a flash of irritation. What was wrong with the man, anyway? “You mean you still think I’m lying?”
“I don’t think anything. It’s safer that way.” He closed the door before she could answer.
She sat in resentful silence while he pumped gas, then watched him stroll over to the store to pay for it. The view of his back reminded her vividly of when he walked away from her in the motel room, naked and unconcerned.
He was the crudest man she’d ever met, and the most infuriating. Just wait until they found Alex. Her father would soon set the man straight. Then she’d see that Nathan Thorne ate his words, if it was the very last thing she did.
Chapter 7
After paying for the gas, Nat climbed back into the car and reached across Valeri for the map in the glove compartment. She shrank back, making it clear she was trying to avoid any contact with him.
He knew he’d upset her. He was sorry for that, but the questions kept buzzing around in his head like angry flies. Her latest bombshell had been a real doozie. Not only was he involved in kidnapping, but he was also mixed up in a murder.
If he had any brains at all, he thought darkly as he unfolded the map, he’d dump this woman back in front of her apartment, hightail it out of town, and forget he ever heard of Valeri Richmond or Ahmed Sabhad.
Except he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t let a helpless women walk into a hornet’s nest like that. The cops would be all over her, and they wouldn’t give up until they’d squeezed her dry.
They’d find her father, arrest him and he wouldn’t stand a chance against someone like Sabhad. Which was probably why he was still in hiding. Whatever he knew about Sabhad obviously wasn’t strong enough to protect him.
That’s if Sabhad’s target was Alex Forrester and not Valeri, which seemed to be the most probable scenario given that Valeri couldn’t remember ever meeting the man.
If she was telling the truth.
Nat frowned as he studied the map. So many damn ifs. He didn’t like being mixed up in a murder case. The whole story was so wild that it was hard to believe. There were too many holes, too many unanswered questions. Maybe if he asked her a few, he could fill in some of the gaps.
Much as he wanted to believe her, his instincts were too strong too ignore: never accept anything without proof. So far he had little else to go on except her word. Any proof they might have found in her apartment or office was inaccessible now, thanks to the police.
“It looks as if there are three campgrounds around the Sylvan Springs area,” he said, refolding the map. “I guess we’ll take them one by one.”
“All right.”
Her voice was tight, and he winced. It wasn’t often he cared about stepping on someone’s toes, but in this case he genuinely regretted his bluntness.
He drove out of the gas station and once more headed for the highway back into Nevada. After several long minutes of tense silence, he glanced at his passenger.
She sat stiff-backed, staring out of the window as if she’d like to demolish every living thing out there. Knowing he was responsible, he felt a twinge of guilt.
“We should be there in a couple of hours,” he said in an attempt to open the conversation.
She nodded, but didn’t look at him.
He tried again. “So how come you got divorced?”
This time he’d startled her into looking at him. “What?”
He shrugged. “Just asking. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
“I don’t want to.” She looked back at the road.
“Okay. So tell me about your father.”
He thought at first she wasn’t going to answer him, then she said in a resigned voice, “What do you want to know?”
“I don’t know. Anything that might help us track him down. What does he like to do? What is he good at?”
“A lot of things. I can tell you one thing, though. Alex is no camper. He’s a city man, through and through. The closest he comes to roughing it is spending a night in a motel room.”
“Well, that’s a great help.”
“It tells me that he wouldn’t be caught dead in a campground, unless he had no choice.”
He glanced at her. Little lines of tension creased her brow. As he watched, she caught her bottom lip between her teeth and chewed on it for a moment before letting it go. “You’re really worried about your father,” he said quietly.
She took off her sunglasses and laid them on the dash in front of her. Her voice wasn’t quite steady when she said, “He’s all I’ve got. I never knew him when I was growing up. They were divorced when I was five. My mother never let me see any of the letters he wrote, or the gifts he sent. We lost so many years...if anything happens to him now...I—”
“Nothing’s going to happen to him,” Nat said fiercely. “Not if I’ve got anything to do with it. We’ll find him.”
He surprised himself at how sincerely he meant that. He realized that he no longer doubted the truth of her words. Whatever the game was here, her father’s disappearance was genuine—and definitely not part of the plan.
“I hope so.”
She lapsed into silence for so long that he thought she’d drifted off to sleep. Then she startled him by saying, “I guess you must do a lot of traveling around in your job.”
He didn’t answer her at first, unsure of how much he could tell her without arousing her contempt again.
She must have thought he was ignoring the question because she added, “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
His mouth twitched. He enjoyed the way she had of getting back at him. It wasn’t often someone scored the way she could. “I don’t mind talking about it. I’m not sure you’d find it all that interesting, though.”
She shrugged, pretending indifference, but he noticed her fingers playing with a loose thread on her seat and knew she was wound as tight as a guitar string.<
br />
“I’ve seen pretty much every part of the world—the good and the bad,” he said, squinting against the shimmering heat that created imaginary lakes in the middle of the road.
She must have been turning that over in her mind. After a while, she spoke again, her voice deceptively casual. “That must make it hard to establish friendships.”
He almost laughed out loud. “Men in my profession don’t make friends. Only enemies.”
“That’s sad.”
“It’s sensible. That way I only have myself to worry about.” He glanced at her, and felt his body quicken. She was watching him with a look in her soft brown eyes that made him want to crawl between cool sheets with her and take her until his passion was exhausted.
Women had looked at him that way before. Experienced women, who knew full well what they were doing. With Valeri it was different. Now that he knew her better, he was willing to bet that she wasn’t even aware she was giving away her thoughts with that hot invitation in her eyes. He wondered if she knew what that could do to a man.
That’s what made her so exciting. He ached to show her. His body cried out to answer that challenge, to watch her writhing beneath him, caught up in her own rising tide of passion.
He jerked his gaze back to the road, reminding himself again why that would be a bad idea. He’d almost given in to his need in the motel room, and she’d stopped him. Judging from that look in her eyes now, she might not do that the next time. He couldn’t afford a next time. Not with this woman.
“Didn’t you ever want to get married and settle down?”
The question unnerved him. He took a moment to answer. “From what I hear, marriage could be a worse hell than anything I’ve ever gone through.”
He risked another look at her. She was slumped in her seat now, with an expression on her face that reminded him of a dog he’d found injured on the roadside. He’d never forgotten the look in its eyes. Valeri had that same look on her face. She’d been hurt. And badly.
He wanted to stop the car, hold her close and promise her she’d never be hurt again. What was he, crazy? He was the last person in the world who could promise her that.
Nathan Thorne, the man who’d never stayed the entire night with a woman in his life. The man who’d locked up his heart against emotions long before he was old enough to really understand what it was all about.
Uncomfortable with his thoughts, he leaned forward and switched on the radio, tuning in to a country station. There was something about Valeri Richmond that made him look deep into his soul, and that was something he would rather not do.
For the next hour or so, he kept the conversation down to the odd comment or two. Valeri seemed perfectly content to sit there, gazing pensively out the window. He would have given a great deal to know what she was thinking.
Finally they passed the sign he was looking for, and he pointed it out to her. “The campground should be about a mile or so down the road.”
She sat forward, her hands pressed between her knees. “I hope Alex is there. I just hope he’s all right. I keep trying to remember the last time I saw him—” She broke off with a little gasp.
Nat tightened his hands on the wheel as they took a curve. “Remember something?”
“Yes...I think so.”
When he looked at her again, she sat with her fingers pressed against her forehead. He kept quiet, giving her time to wrestle with her erratic memory.
“It’s gone again....” she said at last. “But I seem to remember something about computer disks.”
Nat pursed his lips. “Wonder if that’s got anything to do with Sabhad’s pictures of you.”
“I don’t know.” She uttered a growl of exasperation in the back of her throat. “Oh, why can’t I remember?”
“Because you’re trying too hard.” He leaned forward to peer at another sign. “You know how sometimes someone asks you a question, and you’re certain you know the answer but you just can’t think of it, no matter how hard you try? Then when you’re not thinking about it at all, up it pops in your mind.”
She nodded. “I’ve done that. Sometimes I’ll say the answer out loud when I’m in a store or something, and people think I’m talking to myself.”
“Exactly.” He stepped on the brake, slowing the car. “Well, just stop thinking about your memories and they’ll come back when they’re ready.”
She leaned forward. “Is this the campground?”
“It’s the closest one to Sylvan Springs.” He turned off the road and drove up a steep trail that wound around a murky-looking lake. A handful of boats was tied up at the long deserted dock. At the top of the rise a narrow dirt trail—barely wide enough to accommodate a boat trailer—plunged sharply down to the lake and ended at a weathered, run-down boat ramp.
“It doesn’t look that busy,” Nat said, pulling up at the top of the slope.
She looked down to where campers were dotted around a clearing in the sparse trees.
“I guess we could just drive around and see if there’s anything worth checking out.”
She nodded, eyeing the trailers parked below. “He could be in any one of those.”
“Maybe. But if he told you not to talk to anyone, I doubt if he’d ask strangers for help.”
“He could be in an empty one.”
Nat sighed. “I guess we have to start asking questions. I was hoping to avoid that.” He cut the engine and wound down the window. Blue jays screeched at each other in the dried-up branches of a pine tree, and somewhere a dog whined for its master. Otherwise, nothing seemed to be moving in the entire camp.
The sun was losing its power as it crawled toward the horizon, and the first cool chill of the approaching night brushed Nat’s arms as he climbed out of the car and stretched his legs. “You’d better stay here,” he said, shielding his eyes from the glare of the sizzling sunset. “I’ll go down and ask around. What does your father look like?”
He bent down to hear her answer through the window.
“He’s five-eleven, kind of rugged looking. Thick gray hair, tanned face, stocky build, glasses—” She broke off, her hand going to her mouth. “He broke his glasses,” she finished in a near whisper.
Nat pulled the door open again and climbed in. “Go on. What else?”
She blinked, staring at his face as if he weren’t there. “Alex...stole the disks back. He was injured trying to get away. He called me. He said he wasn’t badly hurt, but he couldn’t drive. He was wounded in the shoulder and couldn’t use his arm, and he’d smashed his glasses and he couldn’t see.”
“He stole the disks from where?”
She shook her head with an impatient gesture that at any other time would have made him smile. “Not stole them. Stole them back. They were his disks.”
Nat frowned, trying to make sense of it all. “Did he keep his work on disks? Like the fuel project, for instance?”
She grabbed his arm, her fingers digging into his flesh. “That’s it! The project. Someone stole the disks and he had to get them back.”
Nat eased her fingers off his arm. “Someone like Sabhad, for instance?”
She looked down at the imprint of her fingers in his flesh. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay. I liked it.”
That conjured up a tiny smile. “So that’s why Sabhad wants my father. He wants the disks back again.”
Nat nodded, sobering at the thought. “And he’s willing to kill to get them.”
Valeri’s eyes widened. “Kill my father?”
“Possibly. Think about it. There was a murder. If your father didn’t do it, then someone else did.”
“Sabhad.”
“Or one of his men. I assume someone got killed when the disks were stolen in the first place.”
“But there was nothing on the news about the stolen disks.”
“Maybe no one knows they were stolen.”
“Except Alex and Sabhad.”
“Right. Sabhad’s not going to tell anyo
ne. And your father can’t.”
Valeri sat up with a look of alarm on her face. “Nat...if Alex was injured while he was trying to get away from Sabhad, he must still be close to the house. He couldn’t have gone far on foot. He might even have called me from the house.”
“You don’t remember where he was when he called?”
“No, I—” She broke off again, her eyes growing wider.
He thought she’d remembered something else. He was about to ask her, when she pointed a shaky finger down the road behind them. He followed the direction she was pointing. Creeping up the slope toward them were two big, black sedans.
Cursing himself for his carelessness, he grabbed the wheel and twisted the key in the ignition. As he did so, two more cars burst out between the campers on the road below them, and headed straight for them.
Nat didn’t have time to think. There was only one avenue of escape and he took it. He wrenched the wheel around, stepped on the gas and pointed the car straight at the lake.
Valeri didn’t utter a sound as the car careened down the bumpy slope, but Nat caught a glimpse of her terrified face as he fought the wheel. With one foot hovering over the brake, he waited for the precise moment to slam it down.
He spared one quick glance in his rearview mirror and saw the sedans parked at the top of the rise. One of them was already backing out, probably to head back down the road to cut them off.
Nat smiled. He had no intention of trying to reach the road.
The water seemed to race toward them as the Volvo headed for the boat ramp. Valeri’s hands were on the dashboard, fingers curled in a tight grip. “Hold on,” Nat muttered, and slammed on the brake, turning the wheel just enough to bring the rear wheels around.
The little car rocked violently, paused on two wheels, then skidded another twenty feet. They came up just short of the edge of the ramp, facing away from the road.
Ahead of them were trees, rocks, slopes and God knows what else. He couldn’t worry about that. Already the sedans were circling the lake. This was the only way out, and he had two minutes start at most.
The Mercenary And The Marriage Vow Page 11