by Jenna Ryan
“Yeah.”
His eyes assumed that remote cast they got when his mind slid out of the moment. To keep it from wandering too far and her own from straying in the wrong direction, she shook her foot free and adopted a crossed-legged position on the sleeping bag.
A deceptive smile played on his mouth. “You look good in your boxer shorts and tank, darlin’, but unless you want a rerun and then some of last night’s bathroom scene, you should think about getting dressed. And yes, the shower works.”
Despite the sexual overtones and his lazy drawl, she smiled. “I’m not that predictable, McBride, or that fanatical.”
“Uh-huh.” When she didn’t move, he raised a brow. “Shower or rerun. Choice is yours, Alessandra. For about three more seconds.”
She took two of them to think, then went with her better sense and stood. “I should never have told you I was moving to Rapid City.”
He watched her collect her bathroom supplies, but beyond that didn’t move. “You never told me how the relocation came about or why. You had a good job in one of the best animal hospitals in Chicago, and I’d already promised to keep my distance.”
She moved a shoulder, pulled out the last of the clean towels they’d bought in Dead Lake. “Joan’s sister, Lottie, worked at the same animal hospital. I met Joan through Lottie, and Dr. Lang through Joan. I wanted a change, he wanted a partner. Things just sort of fell into place from there.” She paused with a hand on the bathroom door. “Not to change the subject, but do we have a plan for today, because I assume we’re not going to be hanging around here for much of it?”
When McBride reached for her BlackBerry, she sighed. Talk about sexy in boxers…
“You’ll know when I know, Alessandra.” Vague amusement entered his tone. “Don’t worry about the hot water. I’ll go with a cold shower this morning.”
Alessandra took that as her cue to leave. And not dwell, she promised herself, because God knew she’d done plenty of that already and still hadn’t worked out a thing in her head.
She had a life, she had a practice, she had friends and a house. Okay, she also had a bull breeder who’d been angry enough to threaten her. But at least he hadn’t been the one wielding a rifle outside Ruthie’s motel last night.
The water was still running warm when she finished up her abbreviated morning ritual. She emerged from the bathroom fully dressed in jeans, a snug white T-shirt and her new hiking boots. She knew there was no way McBride’s truck would be fixed and, with Eddie in town, lingering in Ben’s Creek wasn’t an option.
“Joan says her nephew and his girlfriend were bushwhacked in her Dead Lake cabin two nights ago.” McBride traded Alessandra the BlackBerry for her damp towel. “She thinks I’m into something more dangerous than usual, and you’re supposed to tell me to make sure I know she’ll bust my balls—literally, she swears—if anything happens to you.” His eyes took on a wicked gleam. “I gather Joan’s not aware of your prowess with firearms.”
“I could shoot an apple off your head and send her some before and after pictures.” When he merely grinned and closed the bathroom door, she added, “I didn’t think so.”
Five minutes later, McBride was back in fresh jeans and an open, untucked plaid shirt.
He looked like a hot lumberjack. He took a drink from the orange juice bottle in her hand, then turned his head and set a finger on her lips. “Someone’s coming.”
Let it be a bear, she prayed, and took the gun he gave her.
They stood one, two against the wall. McBride watched through the window next to him. “Footsteps are heavy. It’s not Eddie.”
She couldn’t see around his arm or read anything other than his trap-waiting-to-spring body language.
When he swore, her muscles cinched into knots. They tightened even more when he said, “Stay inside.” Then, catching her arms, he dropped a hot, hard kiss on her lips, and took off, without sound or warning, through the door.
SHE WANTED TO PUNCH someone, specifically McBride for scaring her half to death. As for his kiss, which had startled her into immobility, that just plain pissed her off.
She had no similar feelings of malice toward Larry Dent, perpetrator of the heavy footsteps, who now stood with them outside the trailer. How could she be upset with a man who was doing everything possible, and more than he safely should, to help them?
“I brought your pack,” he told McBride, “and stocked you up on the supplies I figured you’d need most.” His twinkling eyes told Alessandra he was enjoying himself immensely. “We’ll get to the what and where of that later. I got Morley to take my old Dodge out and run it around town. Then I snuck over to Moe’s place and woke up the big black monster he’s way too weak to drive these days. Don’t be thinking slick, shiny and all-powerful, but don’t be fooled by the dings and scrapes, either. Moe’s monster truck’s got muscle and stamina, and, at this moment, a lot more going for it than the truck you rolled up in. Questions so far?”
“Yeah,” McBride tucked his gun away. “You wanna sign on with the U.S. marshals?”
“Shave thirty years off my birth date, and you got a deal.” Larry eyed the bunched gray clouds overhead. “Rain came down hard in the night, but me and Morley took a walk around the motel this morning between showers. We saw traces of blood. Could be animal, could be human, but it was mostly in the gully where I told you the shots came from.”
“Eddie?” Alessandra suggested, and McBride nodded.
“Anything else?” McBride asked Larry.
“We found some slugs and bagged them for you. Three of Ruthie’s windows took hits, so she’s a little steamed about that.”
“McBride’ll mail her a check,” Alessandra promised, and earned herself a level look that brought a laugh to her throat.
It was probably hysteria, she reflected. To fight it, she trudged around the trailer and disengaged the generator.
“I heard once that weird stuff happens in clumps,” Larry was commenting when she returned. “Maybe it does at that. We got shots fired, we got blood, we got broken windows, we got a scared hippie camper who hightailed it in the middle of the night, then to top it off, we got a break-in at Doc Dyer’s place.”
McBride hoisted Alessandra’s backpack as they began their trek along the creek. “Home or office?”
“One and the same in Ben’s Creek.”
“What was stolen?”
“Bandages, a couple sharp instruments, two bottles of Jack Black.”
“Sounds like someone—back to Eddie again—needs a metaphorical bullet to bite.” Alessandra sidestepped a large puddle, grateful that the rain had stopped. “Were there any witnesses?”
Larry chuckled. “I hate to admit it, but we generally roll up our sidewalks by nine o’clock. One more thing, though.” When he started to puff, she dropped back a pace to observe. “Ruthie wants to know, after the hoopla’s over and the right people get caught and sent to jail, is this story gonna be in People magazine? If it is, she says to tell her ahead of time so she can get her hair done.”
Alessandra couldn’t help it. The picture of Ruthie with “done” hair made her laugh. It even coaxed a grin out of McBride and a wheezy chortle out of Larry.
“The monster’s parked over the ridge,” the old man said. “Morley’ll be waiting for me in my truck at the crossroad.” He accepted the hands Alessandra and McBride offered for the climb. “Don’t know if People will work out, but you be sure and let me know how things go for you two from here. Your truck’ll be ready for sure by midweek. I want to hear all the details when you come to pick it up.”
Alessandra pulled hard so the old man wouldn’t over-exert. Then she halted and hitched in a sharp breath when she spied a shimmer of movement on a boulder twenty yards behind Larry’s shoulder.
Chapter Eight
“Stop glaring at me, McBride.” Alessandra felt his eyes on her as she completed her text to Joan. “Nothing happened. We’re all safe and that mountain lion that didn’t attack us is probably r
eaffirming his territory as we speak.”
He shot her a dark look. “Or sleeping off the breakfast we were fortunate not to be. I know a thing or two about big cats, Alessandra. Humans aren’t their first choice as meals go, but it happens.”
“I didn’t expect you to let him take a bite out of anyone, only to give him a moment to decide. He decided we weren’t worth attacking, or he didn’t want to take on three of us. End of problem. Pothole ahead.”
“I see it.”
Their route today involved more semiabandoned roads and highways. McBride hadn’t spoken much for the first three hours of their drive. Yes, he was annoyed because she hadn’t wanted him to shoot the mountain lion, but she sensed that wasn’t the cause of his protracted silence.
A glance at the dashboard clock told her it was almost 1:00 p.m. She decided he’d mulled long enough.
“You’re trying to get inside Rory’s head, aren’t you?”
He rested an arm on the open window. “In a way. I’m also thinking about an email I got before Larry showed up. It said, Try Loden.”
“Is that a person or a place?”
“It’s a place in seventeen states, one of them being Wyoming.”
She regarded the distant swell of mountains. Not the Black Hills, according to McBride’s laptop map. These were the Laramie Mountains.
“I’m never going to get home, am I?”
“Good things come to those who wait, Alessandra. I’ll have you back in Rapid City by Christmas.”
“Hey, I’m open for sugarcoating here. You do realize that unless Loden’s population is under twenty, you could have a very difficult time finding Rory through what I assume is another contact.”
“It’s Cheech’s cousin.”
“Ah. Does he have a name?”
“Billy.”
She waited for more, didn’t get it and arched a brow. “That’s it? Just Billy?”
He adjusted the cowboy hat that Larry had included with the supplies he’d crammed into the truck. “Billy’s better than nothing, and on a positive note, it’s possible we’ll get to Loden on Rory’s heels, which is closer than we’ve been so far.”
“Uh-huh. What makes you think that?”
A small smile played on his mouth. “Gut feeling, darlin’. He’ll be confused right now, on the verge of panic. Unless he was one of the shooters, which I doubt, he has to know he has two, possibly three people after him. It’s also a good bet he’s running out of cash. I make it a point to know my quarry. Planning for the long haul’s not Rory’s strong suit.”
“And using an ATM would be like sending up a flare.”
“To more than one person.”
“What does that leave?”
“Theft or some other kind of decent-size score. My source says Rory’s got a weakness for craps and blackjack.” For the third time in a minute, McBride’s gaze flicked to the rearview mirror.
Twisting around, Alessandra regarded the two-lane road. “Is someone behind us?”
“A couple big rigs, maybe a smaller truck. They’re keeping their distance.”
As Alessandra knew she should be doing, but foolishly wasn’t. Not with enough determination, anyway. Her thoughts kept taking detours, dredging up memories, flashing pictures of other times and places. A skiing trip in McBride’s home state of Colorado. Their honeymoon adventure in Africa. A beach vacation in the Bahamas.
The last memory made her sad. Her mother would have loved McBride, but then her mother had possessed a huge capacity for love.
She must have to have married a man like Alessandra’s father.
Her brow furrowed when he checked the mirror again. “McBride, what’s behind us that’s riveting your attention so completely? All I see is a long stretch of nearly empty road.”
“The land’s opened up, Alessandra. My guess is Eddie has a faster truck than us, and if that blood Larry and Morley saw this morning was his, he’ll be on a tear.”
Not a pretty picture, she decided with a shiver. “Tell you what. I’ll watch, you drive.”
The sun peeked out the farther west they went. A single-seater plane dusting masses of swaying cornfields glimmered in the distance. She’d had a date with Cary Grant and a similar cornfield back in another lifetime, one where sanity had more or less prevailed.
Moe’s big black truck had a radio that worked. She turned it on and tuned it to a country music station.
In his thorough way, Larry had sent along sandwiches, cookies and bottled water. They ate while they drove. Alessandra alternated between scanning for trucks and stealing glances at McBride’s inscrutable profile.
She did not want to jump him, she promised herself, then released a breath and let her head drop onto the seat back. “Yeah, right,” she murmured. “Just call me Pinocchio.”
Beside her, McBride chuckled. “Talking to yourself means you need exercise and fresh air. The truck needs gas. We can get both in Rosewater.”
Unfortunately, reaching Rosewater required thirty more minutes of highway driving followed by an obscure dogleg and five miles of low hills and shallow valleys.
Very slowly, cropland gave way to thin clumps of trees and, beyond that, a scattering of weathered houses. On the edge of town, Alessandra spotted a tired supermarket and—what a surprise—another run-down rest stop, this one with three fuel pumps and an attached café.
“Not a rosebush or drop of water in sight,” she said, noting the irony of the town’s name. Sliding out, she stretched her arms and arched her body sideways. “It does feel good to move, though.”
“Looks even better.” McBride came up behind her. As he had before, he stuck his hat on her head.
She tipped her sunglasses down. “You know this unobtrusive thing never works, right?”
“First time for everything.” He squinted through the café window. “It’s not busy. Want a burger and fries?”
“I just had a ham sandwich.”
“Sign says there’s homemade gravy.”
“Your arteries must hate you, McBride. I’ll pass. Larry sent another message. I’ll read it while you fill up on grease.”
Reaching past her, he shoved the creaking door open. “Stay where I can see you.”
“Bathroom doesn’t count. Otherwise, I’ll do my best.”
When she followed him into the café, it took a moment for her eyes to adjust. The café’s worn wooden walls belonged to another century and boasted equally old photos of bedraggled prospectors, dusty cowboys and trappers hefting lines of pelts.
Not very appetizing, she thought. But history was history, and not much could be worse in her opinion than the sight of the whippy female currently slapping burgers on the grill while a cigarette dangled from her mouth.
Deliberately averting her eyes, Alessandra turned to read Larry’s text.
He and Morley had apparently tromped around the motel, beating bushes and searching every hidey-hole they could find. They’d discovered tire tracks under a wide rock ledge and more bloodstains, but nothing that told them what they wanted to know.
When Alessandra glanced up, she saw a man at one of the tables picking his teeth and leering in her direction. She circled him and kept to the shadows.
The grill sizzled and spat. Country music twanged. Flies and mosquitoes buzzed. Three teenage girls and a boy sauntered in with a droopy basset hound at their heels.
Two of the girls detached from the group and headed for the counter where McBride sat chatting with a man in a stained white shirt. The girls giggled. McBride glanced over, smiled, then returned to his conversation with the man.
That had to sting, Alessandra reflected. Gorgeous stranger sees a lot of skin, and his eyes don’t drop out of his head.
She continued to wander. The toothpick man thumped his empty beer glass down on the table and let out a loud belch.
Alessandra slid her BlackBerry into her shoulder bag and sighed. “You bring me to the nicest places, McBride,” she murmured.
She didn’t see a t
hing and only heard one quick footstep before a hand slammed across her mouth and another one wrenched her left arm up behind her back.
“Move with me, lady,” said a man’s voice behind her as he jerked her around and shoved her forward.
She hadn’t noticed the hallway at the rear of the café. Short and narrow, it had a sharp right turn that led to a door. He booted it open and carried her, struggling and kicking, into a graveyard of broken appliances, metal garbage cans and a derelict cube van with no wheels.
“Inside, hellcat,” he snarled. Unwilling to wait, he hefted her through the open back doors.
It wasn’t Eddie, her terrified mind realized. She remembered his voice. The rifle guy, maybe?
The man gave one last mighty shove. He released her arm but sank his hand into her hair before pushing her head into the metal wall. Spinning her around, he yanked.
“Stay the hell away from me,” he grated through his teeth. “Do what it takes, but get McBride off my ass.”
Alessandra’s head swam. He had something long and silver pressed to her windpipe now. A knife?
A single ray of light sliced across his filthy moon face. Shock and a fresh bolt of fear coursed through her. “You’re Rory, aren’t you?”
“Who else d’you think?” He shook her. “I don’t want to kill you, okay? I never meant to kill Laverne. She got hold of my gun. I only ever carried one because— Aw, what does it matter?”
“It doesn’t.” Needle-sharp splinters of pain caused Alessandra’s voice to hitch. “It doesn’t.”
“Then make McBride stop and go back to Chicago. Hell, sure, kill Eddie first, I don’t care about him. I just want to be gone. That’s what Casey wants, too, don’t you see? Eddie’s after McBride, not me. McBride dies, I slip away. Poof, gone forever. Family stays whole. Secrets stay secret. Everyone’s happy. So go home and live. You keep chasing me, you and McBride’ll die. Simple, simple.”
Her head cleared just enough for her to counter, “If you want McBride to go home, why did you shoot at us last night with an assault rifle?”
“A what? Are you nuts?” He barked out a laugh. “I’m crap with guns, lady. It’s all hype. My sister put out the word, and suddenly I’m a ruthless sharpshooter. Big, bad Rory Simms. Built like an ox, with brains and balls to match.” He stuck his face close to hers. “I wanted to write poetry.”