by Paula Graves
He released a pent-up breath and opened the driver’s door, tossing the duffel bag on the bench seat at the back of the extended cab. “You stuck around. Even though I’m a whole minute late.”
“I was in a forgiving mood,” she murmured as he slid behind the steering wheel. “Any trouble?”
“Not a bit.” He started the truck and backed out of the parking spot, checking for traffic before he eased back onto the main road.
“How do you know there’s not a tracking device hidden in there?” she asked a few minutes later. Only then, after they’d cleared the main part of town and headed onto the winding, wooded mountain road leading south to Bitterwood, the next town on the map, did she uncurl herself from the floor and climb back into the passenger seat.
“Who would have put it there?”
She buckled her seat belt. “You said your brother-in-law was a cop, right?”
“A county sheriff’s deputy in a little bitty town in Alabama. He’s not exactly the FBI.” As she opened her mouth to protest, he shot her a quelling look. “And if you tell me to trust no one, I’m going to ask you to hand over your tinfoil hat, as cute as I’m sure it looks on you.”
To his surprise, she gave a soft huffing sound of laughter. “Tinfoil would only conduct the mind-control rays, idiot.”
He couldn’t stop a laugh in response.
“They haven’t been in possession of your bag this whole time, have they?” she added in a more serious tone a moment later. “It’s been in your hotel room, right?”
“Right. But who’s going to put a tracking device in it? I am nobody, believe me. I’m not going to show up on anyone’s radar.”
“Didn’t your brother-in-law say Quinn had been in touch?” she reminded him.
“You think he’d break into my hotel room and put a tracking device in my stuff? Which, I should point out, I left behind when I hared off on the run with you.”
“He didn’t survive two decades in the CIA without planning for all contingencies.” She reached back and grabbed the duffel bag from the bench seat, dragging it forward.
The bag clipped Jack in the side of the head. “Ow.”
“Sorry.” She didn’t sound too bothered about it, he noticed.
“Tell the truth. You really just want to get your hands on my unmentionables,” he joked, trying to remember if there was anything potentially embarrassing packed in the duffel. He didn’t think so; since the bull-riding accident, his life had more resembled a monk’s than a cocksure rodeo cowboy’s.
“Yeah, because these really crank my engine,” she shot back in an arid tone, waving a pair of blue plaid boxers toward him before she shoved the shorts back into the duffel.
“Not so hasty there, Agent Mulder. Are you sure the government conspiracy hasn’t sewn a listening device in the waistband of those shorts?”
“Laugh it up, cowboy.” She zipped the bag up again and shoved it back into the space behind their seats. “At the office, Quinn has detection equipment that can sniff out GPS trackers and radio frequencies—pretty much any way you can be tracked electronically, that detector can find it. Which tells me if they can detect that kind of remote surveillance, they’re more than capable of remote tracking themselves.”
“Why would Quinn want to track you, though? You’re working for him, aren’t you?”
She sighed, slumping against the back of her seat. “He has his reasons. He’s not paranoid just for the hell of it.”
He felt a tug in his gut. “You’ve been following your own agenda, not Quinn’s?”
She looked up sharply. “No. I’ve kept Quinn entirely in the loop until what happened yesterday.”
“Then why would he be suspicious of you?”
She tucked her knees up to her body, assuming porcupine position again. He saw a strange vulnerability in the way she held her head, rigidly still but angled slightly downward, as if ready to tuck herself into an even more defensive attitude.
“I wasn’t always a white hat,” she said finally.
* * *
THE SOUTHERN TIP of Deception Lake was little more than a narrow strip of shimmering water that fed into the Caugaloosa River just south of Bitterwood, Tennessee. It seemed to meander haphazardly through the mountains, more like the river it fed than a lake. But the cabin rentals that dotted the southern shore still called themselves “Lakeshore Cabins,” Mallory noted as Jack parked in front of the rental office and cut the truck’s engine.
“I’ll be right back,” he said. “Don’t lose your train of thought.”
Mallory slid lower in the seat until she could barely see over the dashboard, tracking Jack’s movements through her narrowed gaze until he disappeared inside the rental office.
She should grab her bags and get the hell out before he came back, she thought. But she couldn’t seem to coax her weary limbs to move.
She wondered where Jack was getting the money to pay for a pricey cabin rental. Had bull riding really paid that well? And even if it had, surely after years of hospital bills and not being able to ride anymore, most of his money would be gone by now.
She sat up straight, a new thought occurring to her. As she fumbled with her seat belt, Jack came back out of the rental office and shot her a brief smile as he opened the driver’s door.
“We’re paid up for three days—”
“How’d you pay for it?”
He frowned at her urgent tone. “Credit card.”
She swore, earning a raised eyebrow from Jack. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“What?”
“Credit cards, Jack. They’re just about the easiest thing to track in the world.” She tugged her seat belt back into position. “Just get us out of here. Any direction—it doesn’t matter.”
“Stop it, Mallory.” He closed his hand over hers, his grip tight. He turned, catching her chin with his other hand and making her look at him. “You may be on all sorts of radars, sweetheart, but I’m not. I played it your way back at that cheap motel, but this place requires a little more accountability.”
“So let’s find a place that doesn’t.”
“We’re here already. It’s a place to hunker down, get a little sleep and get you set up to do your hacking stuff. Stop seeing trouble everywhere.”
If her nerves weren’t stretched as tight as a snare drum, she would have smiled a little bit at the awkward tone of Jack’s voice when he talked about her “hacking stuff.” What she did for a living was as alien to him as riding in a rodeo was to her. They were about as mismatched a pair of conspirators as she could imagine.
But, strangely, the urge to catch his face between her hands and draw him into a hot, deep kiss was almost more than she could resist. She clenched her hands into fists to keep them from following their instincts. “At least tell me you haven’t been using that same credit card this whole trip.”
“I haven’t,” he answered, but she could tell he was lying.
“Damn it, Jack.”
“Look, it’s done.” He let go of her face and buckled his seat belt. “Even if someone is tracking my card, surely it’ll take a little while for them to actually show up and—do whatever it is you think they’re going to do to us. Right?”
She pressed the heels of her palms to her gritty eyes. Maybe she was being paranoid. As intrusive as surveillance was these days, even in a free society, not everybody was the target of nefarious forces. Jack was right about one thing—a retired rodeo cowboy wasn’t likely to be on anybody’s watch list. Only Quinn and two other agents at The Gates even knew her history as a hacker, and as far as she knew, only Quinn knew about her tenuous connection to Jack Drummond. And she certainly needed to catch up on some sleep...
“Mallory, I won’t let anything happen to you.” Jack’s voice dipped to a soft rumble. “You know that, don’t you?”
She wished she could believe him. She wished she could relax her own guard for even a minute, let someone else take up the watch.
Jack’s had yo
ur back. Every step of the way.
She dragged her hands away from her face and turned to look at him. He gazed back at her with warm, dark eyes that invited her in, tempted her to put her life in his hands.
Maybe it would be okay to let go, just for a little while, a quiet voice in the back of her mind whispered.
“Okay,” she said.
Jack brushed the back of his hand against her cheek, the touch light but warm. “Just another quarter mile to the cabin. Then we can rest.”
Rest, she echoed silently.
If only she believed it was safe to rest.
* * *
THE TWO-STORY mountain cabin was small but well appointed, with a refrigerator, two cozy bedrooms, a large and open main room on the first floor and a luxurious bathroom with a roomy whirlpool tub that put all sorts of highly tempting images in Mallory’s brain as she and Jack stood in the bathroom doorway, taking in the decadent sight.
“I might be willing to kill to get first dibs on that tub,” she warned.
“I might be willing to share,” he murmured.
She slanted a look at him, heat rising up her neck. She couldn’t tell if the offer was in jest or serious. She decided to assume the former. “Magnanimous of you.”
“That’s one word for it.” Shooting her a lopsided smile, he tightened his hold on the bag of groceries they’d picked up—with cash, of course—at the resort’s small market. He backed out of the bathroom. “I’ll put away the groceries. Save me some hot water.”
She’d been joking about killing to take a bath, but now that she was alone with that tub, the temptation was more than she could endure. She closed the door and turned on the water jets, searching the small wicker basket that sat on the sink counter until she found a small bottle of peach-scented bubble bath. She poured a capful into the bathwater, and the smell of sun-warmed ripe peaches rose in a fragrant cloud around her.
She stripped off her clothes and sank into the bath, releasing a sigh of pure pleasure as the hot, scented water embraced her.
Maybe it was going to be okay, she thought as she slipped lower beneath the frothy bubbles. Maybe they really were safe for now.
She should have known better.
* * *
JACK HADN’T MEANT to fall asleep, but the second Mallory finished the sandwich she’d made for her dinner, she’d set up her computer on the dining room table, leaving him to fend for himself. When he woke later, the cabin was dark and he could remember maybe a couple of minutes’ worth of the basketball game he’d been watching on the cabin’s wall-mounted flat screen before he dozed off.
The television was still on, the sound muted. An infomercial was playing in flickers of bright colors and overly animated acting. Jack pushed himself up to a sitting position on the sofa and checked his watch. Just after midnight. He’d been asleep nearly four hours.
The kitchen was dark, the table now empty. Mallory must have taken herself and her computer to bed.
Jack rose slowly from the sofa, grimacing at the protest of pain in his reconstructed pelvis. The doctors swore the pain would eventually subside to nothing, but Jack suspected they were trying to put a positive face on his slow recovery. He’d talked to a few former bull riders who’d suffered similar career-ending injuries. He knew the pain and weakness might never really go away. But he was still alive. Still able to walk. The injury could have been so much worse.
He grabbed the television remote and hit the power button, waiting a few seconds to let his vision adjust to the total darkness before he started toward the stairs to the second floor.
He had reached the bottom step when he heard a rattling noise behind him. Freezing, he held his breath and listened.
There. The rattling noise came again.
Someone was trying to open the cabin door.
Chapter Twelve
“She’s not just being paranoid, is she?” Nick Darcy’s deep baritone rumbled in Alexander Quinn’s ear as the two men stood side by side at a safe distance from the smoldering ruins of the Resurrection Point cabin, watching the investigators busy at work trying to discover its cause.
“I never believed she was,” Quinn replied, though he wasn’t telling the whole truth. He had, in fact, thought Mallory Jennings had an overdeveloped fight or flight instinct, from both her troubled childhood and the time she’d spent as a young woman navigating the Wild Wild West of the internet—not to mention a few dangerous places in the offline world, as well. Every connection in the part of cyberworld she’d frequented could be a potential threat. No one was truly a friend in a realm that secretive and fiercely competitive, and over time, she’d made some dangerous enemies.
“Any leads on her whereabouts?”
“She’s with the cowboy. That’s all we know.”
“And you’ve no leads on the cowboy?” Darcy’s faint British accent seemed to wrestle with the word.
Quinn tamped down a smile. “We’ve got someone monitoring his credit card use.”
Darcy arched an eyebrow at Quinn. “Extralegally, I assume?”
Quinn knew better than to answer a question that incriminating. “They’re unlikely to go far from here. Jack Drummond may be restless and looking for adventure, but he’s not going to follow her to the ends of the earth out of some misbegotten sense of guilt about her sister’s heartbreak.”
“Perhaps not. But there might be a motive other than guilt.” Darcy turned his back to the ruins to face Quinn. “Mallory Jennings is an attractive woman. And from what I’ve learned about Drummond since you assigned me to investigate his background, he’s not immune to beautiful women.”
“He’s also not prone to committing himself to any of them.”
“People change,” Darcy warned.
“I know.” Better than most, Quinn added silently.
“How serious are you about finding Ms. Jennings?”
Quinn met Darcy’s curious gaze. “Very.”
“Then why are we here instead of watching the Pattersons’ hotel room?”
Quinn smiled. “Who says we’re not?”
* * *
FOOTSTEPS COMING UP the stairs stopped after the second tread. Freezing in the middle of closing the laptop, Mallory listened.
She heard a faint rattling noise, so soft and distant she couldn’t be certain she hadn’t imagined it. Easing the laptop onto the mattress beside her, she swung her legs over the side of the bed and put her bare feet on the hardwood floor. She donned her jeans, grabbed the Smith & Wesson pistol on the night table and shoved her feet into her untied sneakers on the way out of the bedroom.
A rush of movement up the stairs caught her flat-footed, and she pressed her back against the wall, lifting the pistol and aiming for the noise.
“God!” Jack’s harsh whisper barely registered over the pounding pulse in her ears. In the milky moonlight filtering in from the window down the hall, he was a lean, dark silhouette standing at the top of the stairs with his hands up.
She lowered the pistol. “What’s going on?”
“Someone’s trying to come in the front door.” Jack moved closer, the welcome heat of his body washing over hers. “It could be a guest trying to get into the wrong cabin, but—”
“But we can’t take chances,” she finished for him. “Don’t suppose you have a weapon?”
“In my room.” He edged past her and disappeared for a moment into the other bedroom, returning seconds later with a pistol in hand. “Ready?”
“No, but I don’t think we have a choice.”
Jack led the way down the stairs, his body positioned squarely between her and the door. The rattling of the doorknob had stopped.
On the first floor, they paused at the bottom of the stairs, listening. The only sound she heard was the rush of their quickened respirations.
“Maybe they went away?” she whispered.
“Can’t assume that.” He reached back and caught her hand, drawing her with him as he edged sideways toward the living area. “Get down beh
ind the sofa, and stay put.”
“While you do what?”
“I’m going to check the porch.”
She shook her head. “No. Do you want to be shot where you stand?”
“It was probably just a guest who went to the wrong cabin. Realized the key didn’t work and moved on.”
“Or it’s someone with a rifle who doesn’t mind shooting you where you stand to get to me.”
He flashed her a smile so cocky she felt like punching him. “Think a lot of yourself, don’t you?”
“Jack, this is serious.”
The smile disappeared. “Believe me, I know that. And you never did tell me what you meant about not always being a white hat. I have to assume, however, it has something to do with what’s been going on, because I’m just not buying that a missing hacker and some terrorist plot that may or may not be in the works is reason enough to send a hit man gunning for you.”
She feared he might be right. Something about the most recent attacks felt way too personal to be connected to the probing internet searches she’d conducted over the past few months.
God knew, she’d done some stupid, reckless things when she was younger, things that had sent her running to a man like Alexander Quinn for protection long before their most recent association. Things not even Mara had known about.
She’d run afoul of people who put no value on human life at all, people who wouldn’t hesitate to kill anyone who got in the way of their goals. And one of their goals, she knew, was making her pay for crossing them.
“Please don’t go out there yet,” she whispered. “Not yet.”
He turned toward her, the darkened room hiding his expression. But in his voice she heard a gentleness that stung her eyes with unexpected tears. “Tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.”
“We need to go. Now, before it’s too late.” She started up the stairs at a run, taking them two at a time.
Jack caught her at the top of the stairs, closing his fingers around her arm. “Wait.”
She swung to face him, panic swelling in her chest. “There’s no time.”