by Penny McCall
“So . . . You’ll let us go, right?”
“We’ll do better than that.”
THE YOOPERS LIVED IN A TINY COLLECTION OF BUILDINGS Conn hesitated to call a town. A dozen or so houses huddled around a gas station/market/pizzeria, all in one small structure, with a potholed dirt road running in front of it. Jonas’s wife was at her sister’s in Munising for the week, he’d said, helping with a new baby. So Jonas bunked at Billy’s for the night, graciously surrendering his home to Conn and Rae.
Conn didn’t like it. There was no way in hell these guys didn’t know the local heat. Hell, they were probably cousins or something. That didn’t mean they liked each other, but they’d close ranks against outsiders, and he and Rae were definitely outsiders. Rich trolls. Just look at the car they were driving, and the clothes they were wearing probably cost more than the Yoopers made in a month. His certainly did; he’d seen the price tags, and while that might not have made an impression on the floater he’d been, he got it now, and it wouldn’t be lost on people who spent a lot of time in outdoor gear.
Put it all together and it spelled one thing: Reward. It might look like Jonas had made a neighborly gesture, but Conn would bet his left nut they were being watched, and once enough time had passed, Jonas was going to contact his cousin the county sheriff and play Let’s Make a Deal.
He went to the tiny square window in the front door and peered out. There wasn’t a lot of light in the small settlement, but he caught the slight silver shimmer of someone’s breath steaming on the cold night air. There was a man hunkered in the shadows against the house across from Jonas’s, and when he shifted to find a more comfortable position, Conn saw the unmistakable silhouette of a long gun barrel, probably a hunting rifle, lying across the crook of his elbow. Conn wasn’t sure they’d actually shoot, but then he wasn’t willing to stake his life on it.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” Conn said to Rae. There was no point in alarming her until it was necessary. She did fine once they were in danger, but she didn’t have the nerves for waiting out a threat.
“I’m tired,” she said around a yawn. “Let’s go to bed.” And right there was the other problem with having Jonas’s house to themselves. That whole balancing act, where he needed to establish some distance from Rae while seeming to do just the opposite, was kind of difficult when they were alone together.
“I’ll join you in a few minutes,” he said, but when Rae disappeared into the bedroom, he went into the kitchen instead, searching through the cupboards and drawers and having no luck.
He was forced to admit to himself that what he wanted would most likely be in the bedroom. He didn’t mean Rae, although she was the first thing he saw, lying back against the pillows, still fully clothed, thankfully. She smiled when he came in, and it wasn’t easy, but he went to the dresser and started to rummage through the drawers.
“What are you looking for?”
Conn all but jumped out of his shoes, the sound of Rae’s voice and the light touch of her hand on his back a complete shock since he’d been trying so hard to ignore her.
“If you tell me, maybe I can help.”
“I’d tell you if I knew,” he said tightly.
“Oh. Sure.”
He heard the hurt in her voice, but he didn’t look at her. If he saw the hurt on her face he was a goner. He moved on to the closet, finally coming across something useful, a hunting knife—a well-balanced hunting knife, he thought, hefting it.
“Okay,” Rae said, “what’s going on?”
Conn had intended to wait, but on further consideration he decided it would be best to move now, and not just to defuse the bedroom situation. He had no idea what the Yoopers were planning, or how often they intended to change the watch. Waiting meant risks he couldn’t begin to guess, but he knew one thing: He’d need all the facts before they could make a clean getaway.
“Conn!” Rae snapped. “Talk to me.”
“Something feels . . . wrong,” he said.
“Oh, thank God. I mean, I felt that way, too.” She looked up, her eyes narrowing in on his slight smirk. The color came up in her face again, and suddenly all the danger didn’t seem to be outside.
He pulled her into the front room, easing the curtain aside on the window. “There, at the corner of the house directly across from this one.”
“I don’t see anything.”
“Look again. His breath is steaming.” He didn’t point out the gun barrel.
“Got him,” she said, glancing over her shoulder. “What are they up to?”
Her face was close to his, too close, and it took a second or two for Conn to remember what was at stake and resist the temptation.
“They’re watching this house, right?”
And here was the tricky part, Conn thought, focusing back in on what was really important. He had to get Rae to figure it all out for herself without letting on that he was nudging her in the right direction.
“That would be my guess.”
“Do you think they told the sheriff we’re here?”
“If they had, we’d be in jail by now.”
“So, they haven’t told the sheriff, but they’re keeping us here. Why?”
“In my time, there would be a demand for ransom,” he said carefully.
“Even if they knew who to ransom us to . . . Damn.” She slipped away from him, pacing across the small room as she worked it out. “They’re trying to get a reward. Which means they told the sheriff they know where we are. And since I doubt the sheriff is a fool, that means he’ll be around before too long to check it out.”
Shit, even he hadn’t considered that. “Then we’d better be on our way.”
“How?”
“This I know how to accomplish,” he said. “Get our things together, stay here, and wait for my signal.”
“You’re not going to . . .” She pointed at the knife in his hand. “You know.”
“I won’t kill him, but he’s not going to cause us a problem anytime soon.”
For once she followed instructions, taking off to get their bag. Conn headed straight for the kitchen. The house had two doors, both the front and a side door visible from the watcher’s vantage point. There was a window over the kitchen sink that looked out the back of the house, the panes sliding right to left. Conn boosted himself onto the edge of the counter, lifted out both panes, and set them inside, then forced the storm window out of the frame.
He climbed through and circled around, coming up behind the Yooper on guard and cracking him at the base of the skull with the handle of Jonas’s knife. The guy slumped against the side of the building, out for the count. Billy.
That meant Jonas was alone in Billy’s house, probably negotiating their worth. Trouble was, Conn didn’t know which building that was. So he slipped from house to house, keeping to the shadows and peeking in windows. The third house was a tiny, honest-to-God log cabin that turned out to be one room for everything: bedroom, kitchen—even the bathtub was out in the open, just a curtain that probably hid a toilet in the corner. And Jonas was there.
Conn backed up two steps and kicked in the front door. Jonas spun around, saw him, and lunged to the right. Conn flipped the knife, caught it by the tip and let it fly, pinning Jonas’s sleeve to the wall, his fingers inches from the rifle propped in the corner of the cabin, not far from where he’d been sitting.
Conn snatched the gun before Jonas could snag it with the other hand. He tossed it on the bed across the room. By the time he turned back Jonas was trying to lever the knife out of the wall with his left hand. He wasn’t having much luck.
Conn returned to Jonas and pulled the knife out of the wall. “Looks like I got more than sleeve,” he said, wiping the knife on Jonas’s pants.
Jonas rolled his sleeve back and examined the slight gash in the meaty part of his forearm, halfway between his wrist and his elbow. “Just caught the edge of my arm. I’ll live.”
Conn grunted a commentar
y, one that didn’t include any level of apology. “So what are we worth?”
Jonas smirked a little. “That ain’t been decided yet.”
“Because the sheriff is on his way here to take us off your hands,” Conn informed him. “What, not smiling anymore? Did you really think we were going to be held up by you?”
Jonas took that for a rhetorical question.
Conn tied Jonas to the chair, using electrical cords ripped from every appliance in the place.
“You can’t leave me here.”
“You won’t be alone for long,” Conn said. “But the sheriff is going to be pissed when he gets here and finds out we’re gone because you got greedy.”
“Maybe you should worry about yourself,” Jonas said.
“A backwater sheriff is no trouble.”
Jonas laughed. “I meant you lying about your memory problem. Your lady friend isn’t going to be happy when she finds out. And women are way scarier than the law any day.”
chapter 19
RAE HAD BEEN HALFWAY THROUGH THE KITCHEN window when Conn came in the front door, Billy slung over his shoulder like the week’s dry cleaning. He slammed Billy into a chair, hard enough to knock him out, if he hadn’t already been unconscious, then collected Rae off the windowsill.
“Predictable,” he said, setting her feet on the floor and stepping away, all in one quick move that reminded Rae of the way he’d avoided her in the bedroom moments before.
Well, if he wanted a fight, she’d give him one. “What do you think ordering me around is, if not predictable?”
“What exactly were you planning to do?”
“I don’t know, stop Jonas from shooting you?”
“He wants to ransom us, not shoot us.”
“Then I probably would have been successful.”
Conn shook his head, taking the bag from her, going back through the house, and opening the front door.
“What’s wro—”
He put a hand over her mouth, pulling away almost immediately. “Yell at me later. I’m going to push the car far enough so it doesn’t alert attention when it starts. You’re going to steer it.”
“So much for not ordering me around,” Rae said, but she kept her voice down, as he had.
As soon as they stepped outside, Conn all but disappeared into the night, moving so silently in his dark clothes she wouldn’t have had a clue where to go if not for the occasional light and the fact that she remembered where they’d left the car.
When they arrived and she’d coded it open, he tossed the bag in and went to the back of the car. Rae slid into the front seat and put the car in gear. It began to move almost immediately. They’d gone more than a mile, and Rae was about to risk Conn’s anger again when he jumped in the front seat.
He wasn’t even breathing hard. “You can start the car now.”
She did, resisting the urge to floor it and get the hell out of there. Instead she brought up the GPS. “What about the bridge? Do you think the sheriff will still be waiting there?”
“I doubt it. They think Jonas has us stashed somewhere, so why would they lose sleep waiting for us to cross the bridge?”
He had a point, even if he did get it across in that superior man-is-the-master-race tone of voice that always ticked her off, not to mention making her want to argue with him just because he was being an ass. Which always ended up biting her in hers, because he was almost always proved to be right.
And of course he was. They crossed the bridge with no problem, but Rae left I-75 as soon as the GPS gave them an alternate route that didn’t mean wandering around the Upper Michigan backwoods any longer than necessary.
“Best not to push our luck,” she said to Conn. “The sheriff may know we’re gone by now. If they put out an alert every state cop between here and the Ohio border will be on the lookout for us.”
“I’m not arguing,” Conn said, settling back into his seat and closing his eyes.
“Not unless you count the passive-aggressive kind of argument.”
She glanced over at him then back at the road, doing a double-take and finding his face as calm as ever. She told herself it was just the faint wash of dashboard light that had canted his expression toward pissed off for a second, since he couldn’t possibly understand a term like passive-aggressive.
“Is everything all right?”
“I don’t know.”
He exhaled heavily. “It’s been a long day.”
It had been a long three days. As apologies went it wasn’t the most eloquent, but she got his point. They were both tired and touchy.
“We can’t go back to your house,” Conn said, “and we can’t keep running.”
“And that leaves what? The Renaissance festival?”
“Do we have any other choice?”
“But that’s where all this started . . . Oh. My parents.”
“They may know something that will help me,” Conn said, not sounding all that happy about the prospect.
Rae could identify. Facing her mother after . . . everything . . . wasn’t on the top of her list of fun activities.
“It’ll be after midnight by the time we get there.” Conn’s gut was telling him to get on with the mission. But his gut wasn’t talking loud enough. “If we arrive after your parents retire, we’ll have to sleep in the car.”
“Not very comfortable.”
“No, and I do prefer to be comfortable.”
“I think I can find you a bed,” Rae said.
“If you can find me a bed, I’ll do the rest.”
She looked over at him, smiled. “Not if I have anything to say about it.”
He tried, really tried, to get that picture out of his head, but even if he could’ve managed it and fought off the craving that came along with it, he just didn’t see how he could avoid spending the night in her arms without telling her the truth. But then, he’d always known he had the kind of job that required sacrifice. Sometimes you had to take one for the team.
RAE KEPT TO THE BACK ROADS, WORKING HER WAY steadily south. They passed dozens of motels, but she thought they’d be too memorable in a small town where everyone knew everyone else on sight. So she kept driving until she got to Frankenmuth, where there were several large hotels and, due to the huge outlet mall close by, even in the fall there were decent-sized crowds.
Founded in the mid-1800s by a Bavarian missionary and his congregation, Frankenmuth had become a tourist mecca, famous for tulips, Christmas ornaments, and home-style chicken dinners. Tulips were out of season, they bypassed Bronner’s, the world’s largest Christmas store, and Conn had worked his way through a mountain of fried chicken, buttered noodles, mashed potatoes and gravy, stuffing, and the vegetable of the day.
Rae had made a fairly good rendering of Snoopy in mashed potatoes, with a gravy Woodstock. The rest of her dinner migrated from one side of the plate to the other. Not much of it made the trip to her stomach, but not because of nerves. Because of anticipation.
For once in her life she was living in the moment, accepting Conn for who he was. Just for tonight, she hoped his memory never came back. She had plans for him tonight, plans that had begun with her sliding her hands under his shirt, smoothing her palms over his back as he struggled to unlock their hotel room door with suddenly clumsy hands.
Now she slipped her arms around him, took the key card, and swiped it. Conn hit the door handle, pulled her into the room behind him, and had her up against the door before it closed all the way. He took her mouth, his hands on her everywhere, his body hard and hot against hers. She went under between one heartbeat and the next, aroused on so many levels there was no choice but to taste and smell and feel.
And then he was gone, the absence so shocking it took her a second to realize he was pulling her clothes off, and then she returned the favor, hands fumbling, pulse racing, tripping over her own feet because his mouth was back on hers, feasting as he backed her across the room. They fell on the bed, rolling together, legs tangling, a
nd then Conn was driving her to peak, knowing how and where to touch her so it felt incredibly good, unbelievably perfect, until she came apart, helpless under his hands and his mouth.
Then he was inside her, before she could begin to recover, pushing her again, impossibly higher but drawing it out, too, making every stroke an event, his mouth on hers, at her breasts, both hands under her bottom, scooping her up so she had to take him deeper, so deep she would have screamed at the sheer bliss if she’d had any breath. And then the orgasm rolled over her, rocketed through her, and she did cry out because it was too much, a million bits of heat and light and waves of pleasure before she collapsed, spent, breath and heart racing, skin slick and tingling from head to toe.
Conn sank down beside her. The air was cold on her bare skin, but she laughed because her bra was still hooked and peeled down inside out, the straps pinning her arms to her sides. Conn was only half out of his jeans and boxers, one shoe and sock still on because he’d only taken the time to peel one leg out.
Rae sat up and took off her bra, running a hand over his clothed thigh. “I’m flattered,” she said.
Conn laughed, too, getting rid of the rest of his clothes, then gathering her close. “I like hearing you laugh,” he said, sounding bemused, probably, Rae thought, because she wasn’t a laugher.
It sobered her a little, realizing how much she’d changed in the few short days since Conn had invaded her life. And she wasn’t the only one. “I guess we’re both a little bit different.”
“Are we?”
She shrugged, tucking her head under his chin. It had been different this time, making love with Conn. He’d been intense, driving her to peak, not giving her a moment to catch her breath before he took her again. Not that she objected to being taken. What women didn’t want to be overpowered once in a while by a man who knew how to temper his strength?