“You all right, miss?”
She managed a weak nod.
He took off his safety glasses, and for the first time she could see clearly that his eyes were blue. Montana-sky blue. The most striking blue she had ever seen. Eyes that regarded her with a mingling of sympathy and concern that unfortunately only added to her abject embarrassment.
“You sure you’re all right?” he repeated.
“Fine,” she said. “Thank you, Mr.—?”
“Jack. Jack Sullivan.”
She nodded. “Mr. Sullivan.”
“Jack.”
“Isn’t it past quitting time, Sullivan?” Roger put in testily.
Jack ignored him. He looked at Courtney. “You know, it occurs to me that a lady like you deserves better than this sack of—” he paused “—silk suit.”
Roger bristled, but made no move toward Sullivan.
“Please,” she said weakly, “I’m fine. Really. Maybe Roger’s right. Maybe you’d best go.”
He seemed to consider the idea for a long moment, then shrugged. “Whatever you say, ma’am.”
She let out a shaky breath. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” He turned to go.
“I, uh, I like your tattoo.” She cringed. What a perfectly inane thing to say.
Jack chuckled. “Long story behind that,” he said, his lopsided grin heart-stoppingly intimate all at once.
“I’d like to hear it.”
“I’d like to tell it.”
“Get the hell out of here!” Roger said. “Now.”
“It’s all right,” Courtney said.
Jack paused a heartbeat longer, then headed for his truck.
“I didn’t know muscle-bound types appealed to you,” Roger muttered peevishly, well before Jack Sullivan would’ve been out of earshot. “I’ll have to start working out more at the gym.”
“I don’t want to fight anymore, Roger. I...”
“Neither do I, darling,” he assured her, his voice softening considerably. “Forgive me?” He caught her hand and pressed her fingers to his lips.
The gesture might once have made her shiver with delight, but now she extricated her hand as quickly as she could manage. “I’m going to bed, Roger. Alone.”
“I am sorry, Courtney. Please believe that.”
“I do.” He was tired. Out of sorts. And a little drunk. She supposed she needed to make allowances. Besides, he really did look miserable. Like a lost puppy. She had to forgive him. After all, she loved him. Didn’t she? And she would in all likelihood marry him someday.
Then why, her conscience prodded, had she spent the past several days surreptitiously ogling a carpenter named Jack Sullivan?
A lady like you deserves better...
The man was a stranger. A summer day fantasy. Yes, he’d been kind. Yes, he had incredible blue eyes. But she didn’t even know him. He could be married. Have five kids.
She glanced toward his truck to find him watching her. Nothing intrusive, just watching. As though still afraid to leave her in Roger’s company. “You do good work, Mr. Sullivan,” she called. “Thank you again.”
“My pleasure, ma’am. See you in the morning.”
Morning. Yes, he would be back, wouldn’t he? Her pulses quickened. Surely it wouldn’t hurt to see him again.
Wouldn’t hurt...
God in heaven, had anything ever hurt more?
As Courtney sat beside the worktable in J.D.’s mountain cabin, she let the tears fall. Nothing like a trip down memory lane to hearten the soul, cheer the mind. God, what a fool she was. What a fool she had been.
Jack Sullivan had indeed been a fantasy, a fantasy that had burned hot and bright, and just that quickly had burned itself out. But not before it had seared her heart to ashes in the process.
How had she ever imagined she could spend a night in Jack Sullivan’s bed—then walk away. Forget.
Forget his hands, his mouth, his passion, his need...
“Enough!” She slammed her hand down so hard, it hurt. Enough. Exhausted, drained, Courtney pushed to her feet and took up her fire poker crutch. Hobbling back into the cabin’s main room, she made her way to the bed. She’d just about made it, when the door to the cabin slammed open.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” J.D. boomed.
Courtney gasped, startled. Her ankle rebelled, collapsed. She cried out, felt herself falling. In the space of a heartbeat, he was there, catching her up in his powerful arms.
“You all right?” he asked.
She could smell the musky, male scent of him, see flecks of snow clinging wetly to the ebony waves of his hair.
“I’m fine,” she croaked. “Please put me down.”
“I intend to.”
He eased her into a sitting position on the bed, then started to straighten. He stilled, his gaze sliding past her, his brown eyes hooded, unreadable, but his mouth set stone hard. Courtney twisted her head to follow his gaze, already knowing what she was going to see. From under the corner of her pillow, as clearly visible as a bloodred flag in a snowbank was the hilt of the knife.
Chapter 4
Courtney sat on the bed and trembled. J.D. didn’t move, didn’t say a word. He just stood there, staring at the knife. Courtney bit her lip, heart pounding. What was he thinking? What was he going to do? She wished she could see his eyes. But they remained hooded, unreadable.
Did he think she’d hidden the knife to use as a weapon against him? “I can explain,” she offered nervously.
J.D. straightened. “It’s okay,” he said. “I would’ve done the same thing.”
“What?”
“If I were you, I’d have made damned sure I found a weapon.”
“You...you aren’t angry?”
“On the contrary, I admire a resourceful woman.”
She studied his face—what she could see of it through all that hair—and decided she believed him. She felt oddly warmed by the compliment. “Thank you. I think.”
To her surprise he grinned. Courtney’s heart turned over for just a second there— No. She was being absurd again. Perhaps she’d suffered more of a head injury in the crash than she’d realized. But when J.D. had smiled like that, she could have sworn... She took a long, slow breath. An afternoon of old and bitter memories, that’s all it was.
As for J.D.... He seemed to catch himself and the smile vanished. He turned away from her, first replacing his rifle in the stocks above the mantel, then shrugging out of his sheepskin jacket. During both tasks Courtney noted that he still favored his left arm. She considered making another offer to tend it for him, but decided they had other things to settle first. Like where he’d been for nearly six hours. She was about to ask when he tugged a second weapon from the waistband of his jeans.
“Where did you get that?”
He laid the .38 on the table near the window. “It belonged to one of your friends.”
“My fr—?” Her lips thinned, as she realized he meant the kidnappers. He must regret that smile more than she’d thought. “You buried them then?”
“As best as I could manage.”
Courtney shivered. “That must’ve been awful for you.”
He shot her a curious glance, but said nothing. Instead, he crossed to the cupboards on the opposite wall and began pulling out various foodstuffs, among them cans of kidney beans, tomato paste, sauce, even a bag of raw onions. He spread out his booty beneath the cupboards on what passed for a countertop. “You hungry?” he asked.
“Starving,” she admitted.
He stalked toward the ancient wood-burning stove several feet to the left of the cupboards in the room’s far corner. “I’ll see what I can do about fixing us something to eat.”
“I’d appreciate that.” The brief connection she had felt with this man was gone or, more precisely, walled off by J.D. himself. Sighing, Courtney eased her swollen ankle into an elevated position on the bed, then settled back to watch her mysterious roommate move about
their cramped quarters. Now that the initial shock of her kidnapping was wearing off, she found herself becoming more and more curious about this man. Sizing people up had long since become an occupational hazard. Her early assessment? Isolated wasn’t just how he lived. It was who he was. Or what he had become.
“J.D.?”
He flicked a match into the wood-burning stove, then looked up at her, his expression strangely wary. “Yeah?”
“I, uh, I didn’t put the knife under the pillow specifically with you in mind. I put it there because you said that the kidnappers could have accomplices roaming about. I just wanted you to know that...that it wasn’t anything personal.”
He snorted. “I’m touched.”
Courtney folded her arms in front of her. “You don’t have to be sarcastic about it.”
“Actually, Miss Hamilton,” he drawled, “I’m just trying to get a mental picture of you engaging in hand-to-hand combat with armed thugs.”
“You’d be surprised,” she said testily.
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “I probably would at that.”
“I thought you admired resourceful women.”
“Resourceful, yes. Nuts? That’s another story.”
She slapped a hand against the bed. “Maybe I wouldn’t have had to hobble about this shack in search of weaponry if you’d been back in an hour or two as you’d promised.”
“Missed me, huh?”
“I most certainly did not!” The man was insufferable. “I think I’m at least entitled to an explanation, don’t you?”
“Not much to explain. I never tried to bury anybody before. Especially in frozen ground.”
The stark simplicity of his words hit her harder than she would’ve predicted. After all, she knew why he’d gone out. But up until this moment she hadn’t realized how much she’d been thinking of her kidnappers in the abstract, not as once-living, -breathing human beings, who might have had mothers who loved them. The whole kidnapping—but for this cabin and this bearded stranger—still seemed almost surreal, more hallucination than fact. “It’s strange, isn’t it?” she mused aloud. “Those two men died virtually sitting next to me. And I don’t even know what they looked like.”
J.D. tossed a chunk of wood into the stove. “They looked dead.”
She winced.
“Sorry.” He began opening various cans and dumping their contents into a pot he’d put on the stovetop. To it he added several chunks of dried meat. Courtney decided against inquiring about their species of origin. His concoctions now simmering, J.D. turned his attention to two raw onions and a clove of garlic. He picked up a paring knife and began chopping away, all the while keeping his back to Courtney.
She took his body language for what it was—a deliberate attempt to shut her out. But after hours of anxious waiting, she wasn’t about to be denied the distraction of a conversation—even one with her inscrutable host. “Can I ask you a question?”
“You can ask,” he said, his tone implying that that didn’t mean he was going to answer.
“Do you think those men...?” She bit her lip. “Do you think they suffered?”
He snorted incredulously. “I hope to God they did.”
“Don’t say that!”
He turned to stare at her. “You mean that, don’t you?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”
“Why?” He snatched a towel from a peg on the wall to wipe his hands, then stepped toward the bed. “I can’t think of too many people who’d give a damn if men like that died horrible deaths. I doubt their plans for you were anywhere near as benevolent.”
“Maybe not,” she allowed. “But that doesn’t mean I want them dying in agony.”
J.D. shook his head, clearly puzzled by her attitude. “No, I don’t think they suffered,” he said at last. “The one in the rear seat was thrown clear of the wreckage. His neck was broken. The pilot...” J.D. crossed to the hearth, hunkering down to add another log to the fire. “The pilot was still strapped in his seat. Internal injuries I suppose.”
“I see.” Courtney toyed with the charm at her throat. “It’s all so strange, isn’t it?”
J.D. jabbed at the blazing logs with the poker. “What’s that?”
“Fate.”
“How do you mean?”
“That both of those men should die, yet my injuries should be relatively minor. I guess my number wasn’t up.”
He angled a glance at her. “You a big believer in fate, Miss Hamilton?”
She didn’t miss the curious undercurrent in his voice. “As a matter of fact, I am,” she said. “I think things happen for a reason.”
J.D. blew out a disgusted breath and rose to face her. “Don’t tell me. There’s some mysterious cosmic purpose behind your being kidnapped, right?”
“That isn’t what I meant,” she said slowly, annoyed at his mocking attitude. “But I don’t think it hurts to be open-minded. Who’s to say? Maybe there is a reason for me to be in this particular place at this particular time.” If he could needle her, she could needle him right back. “Maybe it’s both of our karmas, J.D. Maybe every bit of this has played out just to bring you and me together. What would you think about that?”
At the very least she expected a bark of laughter or a derisive curse. She got neither. Instead, for just an instant, she could have sworn his eyes looked haunted. And maybe just a little unnerved. Then he seemed to collect himself. “I’ll tell you what I think, Miss Hamilton,” he said, leaning the poker against the hearth. “I think the cosmic purpose behind your kidnapping is dollar signs. A whole galaxyload of dollar signs.”
“I thought money was the motive myself at first,” she conceded. “But now I’m not so sure. I can’t seem to shake the feeling that if those men hadn’t died, I’d be the one in a shallow grave somewhere.”
J.D. stiffened ever so slightly. “That doesn’t even make sense. They could hardly ransom a dead hostage.”
“It’s just that I keep remembering what one of them said—the one with the gun.”
J.D. strode back to the stove and shifted the onions around in the skillet, then spooned them into the pot that held the other ingredients. To the casual eye he might have seemed unperturbed, almost disinterested. But Courtney wasn’t watching him with a casual eye. She had seen him stiffen when she’d said she felt the kidnappers meant to kill her. What struck her about his reaction wasn’t so much that he’d had it, but that he had tried so hard to conceal it. As though he didn’t want her to know. Why should it matter to him that he show a little feeling at the notion that she might have been murdered?
“Don’t you want to know what the man said?” she prodded, when he didn’t ask.
He shrugged. “Does it matter? He’s dead.”
“Aren’t you the one who told me to remember everything I could about the kidnapping? That it might help the police later?”
He turned slightly. “Okay. What did he say?”
“He said...” Courtney shivered. She’d been determined to deliver the man’s threat matter-of-factly. Instead, she remembered too well the man’s vile tone. “He said that I didn’t know the half of what the boss had in mind for me.”
The knuckles on J.D.’s hands went chalk white, but his voice betrayed no particular emotion. “He was probably just trying to scare you.”
“He succeeded.”
J.D.’s control slipped a notch. “The son of a bitch can be glad he’s dead,” he said softly, too softly.
Against her will, Courtney’s mind flashed back to another time, another place—another silken threat. Get your hands off the lady. Or I’ll take them off for you. She went very still.
Abruptly J.D. turned back to the stove.
Courtney stared at him, tried hard to stare through him. This was insane. She really was losing her mind. What other explanation could there be as to why this long-haired, brown-eyed stranger continued to rouse memories of Jack? “Can I...?” Her heart hammered and she stopped. Can I what? Can I look un
der the bandage on your left arm? Can I see if just by chance there might be a certain tattoo there that would finish off what’s left of my sanity? She coughed, choked, cleared her throat. “Can I help you with any of that?”
She expected a dismissive no. Anything to maintain the illusion of distance between them. Instead, J.D. scooped up a half-dozen brown-skinned potatoes and brought them over to her. He spread a clean towel over the coverlet and offered her a peeler. “Have a ball.”
Courtney accepted the utensil, her fingers brushing ever so lightly against J.D.’s. She prayed he didn’t notice just how badly she was trembling. The bandage on his arm was just inches away. Ragged, bloody. It wouldn’t take much effort at all to yank it free. She snatched up a potato. “You’re bleeding again,” she said.
“I’ll live.”
“You must have a first aid kit. At least let me change the bandage.”
“Not necessary.”
Why? she longed to ask, but the word wouldn’t come.
Dammit. She slashed at the potato. Why was she persisting in this madness? The man had already assured her time and again that the wound wasn’t serious. It was her own overactive imagination that was making too much of all this. And as for her memories of Jack... They were just some kind of traumatic regression brought on by the helicopter crash. If the truth be told, she wasn’t all that sorry that he had been the last thing on her mind when she thought she was going to die. Their night together really had been magic.
Until...
“Damnation!” She jabbed the potato peeler into her thumb. Muttering more curses, she stuck the injured digit into her mouth.
“I prefer bloodless spuds,” Jack said blandly.
She scowled at him, thinking diabolical thoughts about what else she might do with her trusty peeler. He chuckled, as if reading her mind. Courtney went back to mangling potatoes.
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