by CINDI MEYERS
She stopped in front of him. “Well, I’m not going out there with you,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense to me to go stumbling around in the dark in the freezing cold instead of staying in this nice warm cabin behind locked doors. We’re bound to be more vulnerable outside than in.”
He nodded. Leaving shelter didn’t make sense, especially with no obvious assailant. “You’re right. It was probably just someone who was lost or something. I can check in the morning.”
“Good. I found some sheets and blankets in the bedroom closet, and a pillow you can use.”
He took the items, though he doubted he’d sleep. He’d sit up and keep watch. “Try to get some rest,” he said.
“You, too.” She started to turn away, then turned back and added, “I’m glad you were with me tonight. Not only because you saved my life, but because I’m glad I don’t have to do this alone. That was always the worst part, when I was making my plan—knowing I’d be running away alone, with no one to tell me I was doing the right thing, that I wasn’t crazy or paranoid.”
“You’re not crazy or paranoid. And I’m glad I’m with you, too.” As horrible as the events of this day had been, the one good thing was that he’d been able to help her. He’d begun to make up for the way he’d let her down before.
* * *
ANNE WAS TOO EXHAUSTED, emotionally and physically, to change into a nightgown, so she crawled into bed in her clothes. She expected to lie awake, worrying about whoever had been in that car up near the road, and about where Patrick planned to send her next, and where sticking with Jake might lead. But weariness won out over worry, and she fell into a fitful sleep.
She awoke to pitch darkness, and the disorienting feeling of not knowing where she was. She stared into the darkness, awareness slowly returning, and the memory of the man who had attacked her at her home in Rogers. She didn’t like to think what would have happened if Jake hadn’t shown up when he did.
Something tickled her nose, and she sneezed. Then she sat bolt upright, fear making her heart pound. The smell of smoke filled the room, and she heard the unmistakable crackle of flames. “Jake!” she shouted as she threw back the covers and shoved her feet into her boots. “Jake, wake up! The cabin’s on fire!”
Chapter Eight
Anne groped her way to the bedroom door and pressed both palms against the wood. The door was warm—too warm. Local firefighters had given a fire safety talk at the school earlier this year. She remembered their warning to never open a warm door in a fire, that doing so could send the flames rushing into the room. If the door was warm, you were supposed to find a window and escape that way.
But Jake was on the other side of that door. The love seat where he slept was near the woodstove, where the fire had likely started. Had he awakened in time and fled out the front door—or was he already dead, overcome by smoke? She pushed the thought away and hurried to the window. She’d go around to the front of the cabin and try to reach Jake that way. Or maybe she’d find him outside, safe and trying to reach her.
She tugged hard at the window, until it opened with a screeching protest. Bitterly cold air rushed in—air that might feed the fire and engulf the bedroom. She started to climb out, then reached back and yanked the heavy wool blanket off the bed. Maybe she could use it to beat out flames, or as an extra layer of protection if she had to go in after Jake.
Dragging the blanket behind her, she jumped out the window and made her way through the snow to the front of the cabin. The brilliant glow of the blaze momentarily blinded her as she rounded the corner of the house. She shaded her eyes with one hand, and stumbled on, but when she reached the front of the house, she drew back, gasping. The entire front wall of the cabin was ablaze, flames licking at the windows and door, and swiftly devouring the wooden shingles of the roof. “Jake!” she screamed above the roar of the inferno.
No answer came to her cries, and she saw no sign of him in the area illuminated by the fire. He must still be inside. Reaching him through the front door would be impossible. But the side walls remained intact. There was a chance she might get to him through the window. Still dragging the blanket, she ran back the way she’d come, and stopped at the window that opened into the cabin’s main room. The sash refused to yield to her tugging, so she raced to the wood pile, grabbed a length of stove wood and ran back and swung it at the window, shattering the glass. Then she draped the blanket across the sash and boosted herself inside.
The flames that engulfed the front of the cabin illuminated a cavern of swirling smoke and shadows. “Jake!” she shouted.
Harsh coughing answered her. “Over here!” said a hoarse voice.
She wrapped herself in the blanket and shuffled toward the voice, trying to hold her breath, but unable to avoid the choking smoke. “Jake!” she called again, and began to cough.
“Here!”
She stumbled forward once more and almost fell over him. He pulled her down beside her. “Stay low. The air is better down here.”
Not much better that she could tell, but now wasn’t the time to argue. She handed him a corner of the blanket. “Use this to shield your face. We’ve got to get to the window.”
“I was trying to get to you in the bedroom, but I couldn’t find the door in the smoke and darkness.”
“Don’t talk. Just move.”
Together, they crawled across the floor, toward where she hoped the window was situated. A current of colder air told her they were getting close, so she stood, and helped Jake to stand also. They rushed to the window and half jumped, half fell onto the snow outside.
They lay side by side, wrapped in the singed blanket and gasping for breath. She felt Jake’s hand, heavy on her back. “Are you...all right?” he gasped.
“I’m fine. The smell of smoke must have woken me and I climbed out the bedroom window.”
“I planned to sit up all night, keeping watch, but I must have drifted off. I didn’t wake up until the front wall was on fire. By then the smoke was so thick, and I was disoriented.” He raised himself up on his elbows and looked at her. “I don’t think I’d have made it if you hadn’t come after me.”
“I couldn’t leave you.” She blinked, trying to hold back a sudden flood of stinging tears. She’d been alone so long. Jake was the first person in a year who really knew her story, who had some inkling of what she was going through. For that reason alone, she couldn’t turn her back on him, not yet.
He sat and helped her to sit, too. “Should we call 9-1-1?” she asked.
“With what? My cell phone is in the cabin.”
“Mine, too. And my purse and, oh no—the car keys.”
“I have the keys.” He pulled them from his pocket. “I must have automatically stuck them in my pants when I came back from getting your bag.”
A section of the cabin roof collapsed in a shower of sparks and she flinched. Even from a distance of ten yards, she could feel the intense heat of the blaze. “I hope it doesn’t spread to the other cabins,” she said.
“I don’t think it will.” He stood and offered her his hand. She grasped it and pulled herself up. “This cabin is set away from the others, and there’s no wind. I think when the fuel—the cabin—is gone, the fire will burn itself out.”
“I don’t understand what happened,” she said. “I checked the woodstove before we went to bed and everything seemed fine. But I guess all it takes is one spark—”
“The fire didn’t start from the woodstove,” he said.
She stared at him. “Then how?”
“Come on.” He grabbed her hand and u
rged her toward the front of the cabin. “The fire started in the front.”
She nodded. “The whole front wall was burning—that’s why I had to come through the window on the side.”
“For a whole wall to burn like that, so quickly, blocking the main exit, I’d think it would take some kind of accelerant.”
“You mean—someone deliberately set the fire? But who? How?” She looked around, fighting rising panic. She’d chosen this place because it was safe. Now he was telling her danger had followed her even here?
“Look.” He pointed to twin lines of tire tracks in the snow. “They weren’t here earlier, I’m sure.”
“But you heard a car earlier, and footsteps.”
“Maybe the same people, checking to make sure we were here. They waited until we fell asleep and came back. Or maybe there was no connection at all.”
She stared at the tracks, anger quickly overtaking panic. “You think someone planned the fire, knowing we were the ones in the cabin?”
“Yes, but they probably haven’t gone far. They’ll be back soon, to make sure the fire did its job.”
“They must have followed us here.”
“If they did, they’re much better at tailing someone than anyone I’ve ever seen. I was watching and I never saw anyone, and you didn’t either. On these deserted roads, any other vehicle would stand out.”
“They couldn’t have known I’d be here. I never told anyone—not even Maggie.”
“We can’t worry about how they found you right now. The point is, they did. And we have to leave before they come back.”
“You’re right.” She headed toward the car. He put his hands on her shoulders and steered her toward the passenger side. “I’ll drive.”
She didn’t argue. She was too shaken to face negotiating the narrow, snow-choked Forest Service road. She hoped Jake was up to the task; she had no idea what kind of driver he was. In New York, they’d taken taxis or the subway, or her father had sent one of his drivers to take them wherever they needed to go. She kept her convertible for weekend trips upstate or to the coast.
“Is there another way out of here?” he asked as he started the car. “I meant to check the map, but I never did.”
“You have to take this road up to the gate, but there you can turn right instead of left and take another series of forest roads that come out near a little town called New Richmond. It’s a lot farther back to the highway than the way we came in.”
“We’ll take it. I don’t want to risk running head-on into the arsonist on these narrow pig trails.”
At the gate, he stopped and waited for her to dial in the combination, but she’d only taken a few steps from the car when she saw there was no need. The chain hung loose, the lock lying in the snow. She forced herself to move forward and swing open the gate, then closed it and climbed in the car again. “Someone cut the lock off,” she said.
“Whoever followed us didn’t have the combination.”
She hugged her arms across her chest and shivered. “We’ll buy coats in Telluride,” he said. “Meanwhile, turn the heater up.”
“It’s not the weather making me cold,” she said. “I just can’t believe someone followed us—and tried to burn us to death.”
“I’m guessing they think two accidental deaths would be easier to deal with than two obvious murders.”
“They weren’t very smart,” she said. “An arson investigator would have spotted the accelerant.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. We don’t know what they used.”
“And we don’t know who they are.”
“Except they probably work for your father.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Do you have other enemies?”
“No. Do you? Maybe we’re looking at this wrong. Maybe they’re not after me at all. If my father knew you were still alive, he’d be very happy to see you dead.” The idea that Jake might be the target of her father’s wrath—that Sam Giardino might not even know anything about her—flooded her with relief. Not that she wanted Jake to be in danger, but she dreaded starting life over with yet another new name and profession.
“I don’t think you’re right,” Jake said.
“You don’t know that I’m wrong.”
“All right. I’ll concede it’s a possibility that whoever set the fire was after me, and you were only a secondary target—a bonus. That still leaves us with the same problem. Until your father is behind bars again, neither one of us is safe.”
“He was behind bars before—I testified to put him there. But he didn’t stay there for long.” Despair had engulfed her when Patrick had told her of her father’s escape from prison. She’d given up everything in order to see him convicted; his escape made her sacrifice worth nothing.
“He’ll stay there this time. The authorities won’t risk being made to look like fools twice.”
“People will do a lot of foolish things when confronted with the kind of money and power my father can offer.”
He fell silent, negotiating a particularly bad section of road. Anne clenched her teeth, and prayed they wouldn’t end up stuck in a snowdrift here in the middle of nowhere, with an unknown assailant out to silence them.
She let out a sigh of relief as Jake turned onto a slightly wider, smoother section of road.
“You’re right,” he said. “I can’t guarantee your father won’t get out of prison again. But if we do nothing, he definitely won’t be arrested, and he’ll continue to do everything in his power to see that both of us are dead. You can go back into witness protection and hope he doesn’t find you again, but he’s already beat the system once.”
Denying his words wouldn’t make them any less true. And if she ran away again, without even trying to change things, she’d have one more thing to regret. “All right,” she said. “I’ll do what I can to help. But only for a few days. I can’t give you any more time than that.”
“And I won’t ask for any more.”
His words should have made her feel relieved; instead, they filled her with sadness. That’s what she got for thinking about regrets. Surely she would regret the love she and Jake had had, and could never regain, for the rest of her life.
“Patrick told me I should be careful of you,” she said.
“Oh? When did he tell you that?”
“When I talked to him last night. He said you’d been asking about me and he thought you were looking for revenge.”
“I am looking for revenge, but on your father, not you.”
“I know that now.”
“How do you know that?”
“Setting a fire that you almost died in would be a pretty stupid way to try to do away with me.”
“Thanks for agreeing that I’m not stupid.”
“You’re stubborn and reckless—but not stupid.” And the same might have been said of her, once upon a time, back when she was daring Elizabeth, not quiet and cautious Anne.
“Nil opus captivis. Do you still believe that?” he asked.
The idea of doing whatever she had to in order to get what she wanted had appealed to her when she was a young, spoiled socialite, to whom very little had ever been denied. From the perspective of a woman who had paid the price for that kind of ruthlessness, the words she’d once had tattooed on the base of her spine struck her as a sick joke. “I’m ashamed I thought those words were important,” she said.
“We’re both a little older and I hope a lot wiser now,” he said. “Suffering an
d loss make you understand what’s really important in life.”
But what if the really important things—love and home and family—were all the things you had lost? “What’s important to you?” she asked.
“Right now, what’s important is seeing that your father is back behind bars, where he can never hurt anyone else again.”
So revenge was most important to Jake—not home or family or love. For all he’d suffered after her father’s attack, he didn’t value the things that were most precious to her. She shouldn’t have been surprised, really. How could a man who had made a living out of lying and pretending to be someone he was not ever be happy with simple truths?
She had to remember that, for all her strong feelings for Jake, she hadn’t really loved him. She’d only loved a mirage he’d created to fool her. The man she loved didn’t exist, and he never would.
* * *
AN HOUR BEFORE DAWN, Jake stopped the car at the intersection of the Forest Service road and the highway. True darkness had receded, and the trees along the side of the road looked like black smudges against a gray sky. They hadn’t seen another car since leaving the burning cabin; maybe they’d lost whoever had been tracking them. “Which way do I turn?” he asked.
Anne pointed right. “Telluride is that way.”
“How are you holding up?” he asked. Her hair was disheveled and she wore the same clothes she’d had on last night, reeking of smoke. She had to be tired and hungry, yet she hadn’t made one complaint. He couldn’t imagine Elizabeth enduring such discomfort gracefully. She’d been used to living like a princess and taken for granted she should be treated like one.
With all that finery and privilege stripped away, Jake could see that Anne was made of stronger stuff.
“I’m fine.” She offered a weary smile. “Before we reach Telluride, we’ll go through New Richmond.”
“What’s in New Richmond?”