by Julie Miller
But Whooping Trigger-Happy Man cleared his gun and stormed down the trail Jason had made no effort to hide. “You won’t get the drop on me twice, soldier boy. Where’s my money, honey? Come out, come out, wherever you are,” he taunted, firing random bursts into the forest around them.
Pine needles and bark and tiny branches paid the price for every gunshot, sailing through the air and dropping like fallout from anti-aircraft fire. Bullets thunked into trees, exploded drifts of snow.
“I got ’em, boss! This way!”
“Watch your target! I want her alive. She’s mine!”
“The hell with that! That bitch isn’t gonna take a chunk out of me again.”
Jason needed a rifle. Air support. A miracle.
This mountain is the only ally I need.
They weren’t going to outrun well-armed mercenaries. Trees didn’t stop bullets. But granite did.
Jason abruptly changed course and pulled Sam toward the lip of the rocky overhang.
“What are you—?”
“Hold on!” She tightened her grip and Jason squeezed his fingers around her wrist, dragging her to the very edge of the gorge. “Hug the rocks as soon as your feet hit.”
“Hit what?” She screamed as he swung her over the cliff face and let go.
Jason spared a quick look at the men in black changing course in pursuit before he scrambled over the edge, catching a grip with his left hand and right toe, righting his equilibrium before dropping the last couple of feet to the narrow granite ledge.
Sam shivered against the rock face. “I can see all the way down to that creek from here. Oh, hell. That’s a river, isn’t it.” Her voice was little more than a rasp of air. “My calculations say that gorge is about a thousand feet—”
“We gotta move.” He pried her hand off an exposed tree root and pulled her along behind him as the rapid-fire staccato of automatic weapons tore through the air above the cliff edge they’d just vacated. It had been more than a year since he’d scaled the north face of the canyon, but he was praying that winter weather and rock slides wouldn’t work against him. The opening where he’d rested before that last pull over the ledge should be about twenty feet ahead.
More bullets pinged off the granite at their feet. The men followed their path around the rim of the canyon, firing over their heads. The angle wasn’t right to hit them yet, but they were getting close. If one of them figured out to run in the opposite direction, getting clear of the rocky overhang, he’d have a clean shot from the side.
Jason wasn’t waiting for any of them to grow some brain cells. “Look at the rock face and step where I step. Don’t look down.”
“Don’t look down,” she repeated. “There is a way off this ledge, right?”
“Trust me.”
“You can’t just tell me yes or no?”
Six feet. Three. Two. Jason ducked into a recess beneath the rocky overhang as a final fusillade of whoops and gunshots filled the air with the stink of sulfur and anger. He hugged Sam to his chest, palming the back of her head and smoothing his hand down over her hip to pull the flare of her skirt between them, keeping any part of her body out of the line of sight. She huddled beneath the point of his chin, averting her face from the snow and tiny pebbles cascading past them into the canyon as their pursuers gathered above them. Her fingertips dug into skin and muscle, clutching him tightly as he moved farther into the darkness that neither the morning sun nor enemy eyes could reach.
“Get them!” That had to be the voice in charge. His order echoed off the canyon walls.
“I’ve got no shot from here.”
“I don’t want excuses. I want a dead body.” Was it just his imagination, or did the boss’s voice sound familiar? “Ten grand to the man who brings down that thief!”
“Ten? You promised us ten times that.”
“For the Marine, you idiot. You won’t get any money if we don’t get her back.”
“I’m not climbing down there. You think I have wings, Buck?”
“He killed Jimmy. All the more reason to end him.”
Sam’s fingers curled into the front of Jason’s jacket. “Buck? That’s the guy behind all this. The boss they kept talking about.”
Jason nodded. The seed of understanding tried to take root. But solving mysteries wasn’t high on his priority list right now. “Do you recognize that voice? How does he know I was a Marine?”
Sam was in survival mode, too, clinging to him as he moved them farther into the cave. “I’m just trying to not get shot right now. Is it important?”
The shooting stopped, and the voices grew indistinct as they put more distance between them and the makeshift army above them. But Buck’s orders were clear. “Grab the rappelling gear. We’ll trap them inside. Smoke ’em out. You—get me anything that will burn. You—if that guy pops his head out? Shoot it.”
“What about the girl?”
“Wing her if you have to. But I’m the one who gets to cut out her heart and serve it to Daddy.”
Sam’s weight sagged against him at the venomous directive, as if her knees were suddenly too weak to stand. “That sounds a little hateful.”
“I didn’t sign on for cold-blooded murder, Buck,” one of the men groused.
Buck didn’t seem to hear the protest. “You get me Walter Eddington on the phone. I don’t appreciate him playing games like this. He needs to know the price for getting his daughter back just went up.”
“That means hiking back to the truck and driving down the mountain.”
“Then get to it!” Buck shouted. “He needs to know I’m carving up another piece of his daughter now for thinking he could get away without paying me. And I want to tell him in explicit detail how much I’m going to enjoy doing it.”
“I don’t want to kill anybody. Jimmy’s already dead. Plus, that guy in the chopper.” There was a buzz of conversation overhead, the shuffling of men and equipment. But the man who wanted out was louder than the rest. “Cut me out of the money if you want to. She can’t ID us, and you know I won’t talk—my pledge is still good. But I’m headin’ home.”
Jason heard a brief, unexpected moment of silence. Then even he jumped at the crack of a bullet. A corresponding thump gave way to another shower of gravel at the mouth of the cave.
Ah, hell.
“Anybody else want to argue with me?” Buck challenged.
A man’s limp body splatted onto the ledge at the lip of the cave. Samantha screamed at the bloody, blank-eyed face that stared at them for a few seconds before his momentum carried him over the edge into the abyss.
She turned her face into Jason’s chest, muffling her next screaming sob. Yeah, these guys were a whole different kind of crazy than poor Marty had suspected when he’d signed them up for this rescue mission. Buck had no regard for human life, even a friend’s. He was mission-oriented, with his own agenda. And Jason seriously doubted that this was about the money for him. At least, it wasn’t just about the money. Kidnapping Sam was about pain and punishment. Although if Sam or her father or some other cause was the source of his rage, he couldn’t tell. But he understood one thing—the only way Buck wanted this sortie to end was with Sam and Jason dead. And he had the numbers and firepower to do just that.
Judging by the way she clung to his jacket and sagged against him, Sam understood that, too. Tightening his hold around her waist to keep her on her feet, Jason pulled her deeper into the cave. “This way.”
“I’m comin’ for you, Samantha,” Buck’s fading voice taunted. Buck’s men were scrambling to obey his commands now. “Get those torches lit. I want a rope here, now!”
Jason still had Sam tucked beneath his arm, their deep, ragged breaths falling into sync as a snowmobile fired up, kicking up another fall of snow and debris beyond the mouth of the cave. The voices faded. Jason paused to unzip a cargo pocket on his
thigh.
“I can’t see anything,” Sam whispered. Thankfully, she hadn’t collapsed into tears, and the screams had been more about shock than debilitating fear. “It doesn’t sound like they’re all going away. Are you sure you know what you’re doing? We can’t hide in here forever.”
“They only think we’re trapped.” Jason pulled out his flashlight and clicked it on, shining the light into the space between them, quickly assessing the pallor of her skin and how well she was breathing, before covering one of her hands where it rested against his jacket. “I won’t let anything happen to you,” he promised. “I can’t let anything happen.”
A frown puckered the skin above the bridge of her glasses. “Can’t?”
“I’m not losing anybody else on my watch. Come on.” Lacing his fingers through hers, Jason turned the light farther into the cave and led her over a formation of broken rock that blocked them from view of the cave opening. They shimmied through a narrow crevasse before reaching an opening where the cave branched off in three different directions. One led back to the cliff face, and the other was a dead end. He paused a moment to orient himself to the correct option.
“My dad must be paying you an awful lot of money to risk your life like this for me,” Sam suggested, adjusting her glasses to peer into the darkness with him.
“I’m not doing it for the money.” That way.
She planted her feet, tugging him to a halt. “Then why?”
Jason swung the beam of the flashlight back to her face. “Let’s just say I’m repaying a debt I owe.”
“To Dad? To Marty? Is this a Band of Brothers kind of thing?”
“Partly.”
The frown reappeared. “I don’t understand.”
And this wasn’t the time or place to explain. Buck wasn’t all that different from the terrorists who’d taken hostages over in Kilkut. And though he blanked the worst of the memories from his mind, the essence of the danger they were facing remained. He had to think like a Marine. He wouldn’t resort to Buck’s extreme methods of persuasion, but he needed Sam to obey every order.
With a faint pink coloring her skin again, and the distant din of men and gear overhead reminding him they had only a few minutes to rest, he slipped his fingers beneath the necklace hanging at the front of her coat, catching the carved silver locket in his palm. “This means you’re supposed to trust me. Remember?”
She wrapped her fingers around his hand, capturing him and the locket he held inside. Even in this dim light, he could see her eyes were far from certain. “I take it there’s another way out of this cave? And you’re not just leading me down into the dark, scary place so we can die later?”
Jason nodded. “I need you to go on being tougher than you ever thought you could be, and do as I say for a little while longer.”
She glanced toward the narrow slant of blackness leading into the deepest part of the cave. “No hibernating bears or other surprises?”
“Can’t promise that. That passageway is too narrow for bears. It’s coming out the other side where we’ll have to be careful.”
“Do you have bear spray?”
“I do. And you have me.”
She nodded, looking not at all convinced that either his word or his plan were good. He leaned in, obeying instinct, even though an inner voice of experience warned him this was a dangerous miscalculation, and pressed his lips against the cool skin of her forehead. He lingered there until he felt the pucker of her frown relax. And before that voice of reason could scream any louder, he dipped his head and brushed his lips across the soft curve of her mouth. He breathed in her startled gasp and tugged at the fluttering pulse of her full lower lip.
Her lips closed around his bottom lip, capturing it for a moment in her gentle grasp, waking something dormant and faintly animalistic in response to her tender acceptance. He traced the lean line of her top lip with his tongue. And while he took little nibbles along the same path, she stroked that decadent bottom lip against the scruff of his beard and captured his lip again and again. A sound, like the whimper of a baby animal, hummed in her throat, and she smiled against his skin, as if she was enjoying learning the texture of his face as much as he was enjoying this brief respite from danger, guilt and grief.
But the distant rumble of a snowmobile speeding away across the mountain above them was far louder than any voice inside his head, and he pulled away. “We’d better go.”
“You kissed me.” Her voice was a breathy sigh that revealed curiosity rather than surprise.
“Yeah? You kissed me back.”
“Wasn’t I supposed to? I mean, I wanted to.” Sam shook her head. “I don’t understand you,” she admitted, testing the feel of him on her lips with the tip of her tongue. It was an unconsciously sexy gesture that warmed his blood all the way down to his toes with the urge to stamp a more thorough claim on her mouth and discover what she’d be like if he tapped into the passion he suspected was locked up inside her.
An imaginary hand slapped him up the side of his head as he remembered something important. “Sorry. I know you have a fiancé or boyfriend or something.”
“Not anymore.”
Jason frowned. “What was his name? Grazer? He was at the meeting where your father hired me.”
“Scumbag,” she muttered. “I suppose he was acting all brokenhearted at my disappearance.”
His gaze narrowed at the roll of her eyes. “I’d say pissed off was more his reaction. He was adamant that your father pay the ransom to get you back.”
“My father should pay him the money to get him out of my life. Lousy excuse for a man. He undermined my confidence... When I broke up with him, do you know what he said to me?” Her gaze dropped to the middle of his chest. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
There was something out there she wouldn’t discuss? While her condemnation of her ex triggered both relief and concern—neither of which he should be feeling—and reinforced his low opinion of the hotheaded Grazer, Jason was getting used to her rambling tangents filling up the dead space when he had nothing to say. But who was he to urge anyone to talk about things they didn’t want to. “Fair enough.”
“I’m grateful that you came for me. If I question too many of your dictates, or it seems like I’m arguing, it’s just because it’s my nature.” She twirled her finger beside her head in a universal sign for crazy. “Logical, science-y, engineer brain. I like facts. Not real good at trusting my instincts and reading people, though. But I trust you.”
That was what he wanted, right? Her complete faith in him so she wouldn’t question any command required to keep her safe? Elaine had trusted him to come to her rescue and save her. Every man in his unit had trusted him to have their back and lead them safely home.
Jason tilted his head to the cave’s damp, black ceiling, taking a moment to get his head back in the survival game before he blew this mission, too. “All right, then. Let’s move out before Buck and his men rappel down the cliff and figure out which of these passages cuts through to the other side of the gorge.”
“You know, though, right?” She waved off that moment of doubt. “I said I trust you, and I do. How many rules are we up to now? Six or seven? Keep moving? Step where you step? I’ve got them memorized now.”
“Don’t let go of my hand.” He couldn’t risk her getting turned around and wandering away down the wrong passage.
“No problem with that,” she assured him, latching on with both hands. “Lead on.”
As Sam willingly followed him into the darkness, he wondered if her ready trust in him would be an even more dangerous mistake than that kiss.
Chapter Seven
Samantha’s feet felt like stones at the end of her frozen, boneless legs, dragging through the snow and tufts of brown grass peeking through along the ridge above the South Fork of Cascade Canyon.
Her nose was
an ice cube in the middle of her face. Her body was bruised; her skin was chapped. Her shoulder where she’d been cut open to remove her tracking chip ached, and she was certain she was never getting the body-hugging undergarment she wore tugged back into the right places after that last stop to relieve herself, and so things were chafing in uncomfortable places. Her stomach growled with hungry protest. And Jason wasn’t talking.
Not that he’d proved himself to be a brilliant conversationalist in the twelve hours she’d known him thus far. But she preferred him barking orders or laying down rules or tossing her over the edge of a cliff without a proper warning to this stoic silence.
No. She preferred him kissing her. Swallowing up both her hands in one of his. Hugging her so tightly to his chest that she knew every bump and hollow of equipment, weapons, clothing and muscle the man carried with such sexy, unapologetically male ease.
She wondered if Jason Hunt even owned a tie. She couldn’t imagine the rugged outdoorsman and former Marine wearing anything close to the tuxedos and tailored suits Kyle favored. Not that he needed any fancy adornment to draw her eyes to those broad shoulders and the tight lift of his butt in those cargo hiking pants she’d followed the last countless miles since leaving the claustrophobic chill of the cave.
It had taken just one of those twelve hours for her to admit she was attracted to him. Even a nerd like her could appreciate tall, dark and not-quite-handsome. Another hour and she’d learned to appreciate his unique skill set as a survivalist, sharpshooter and bodyguard. After only a few hours of knowing him, she felt compassion for the shadows that went beyond the loss of a former comrade that haunted his granite-colored eyes, along with a curious need to know what had put those shadows there and how she could make them go away. His praise was sparing, but genuine, instilling her with more confidence than any of the pretty poetry Kyle had used on her. Patience might not be his strong suit, but he made an effort to explain most of his actions and teach her a few survival skills of her own, rather than telling her to grow up and get a clue about how the real world worked or to fix herself. At least he had up until he teased her skin with his ticklish beard stubble and claimed her lips in a kiss.