by Sandra Brown
Just as she had, he’d come in from outdoors, bundled up as he’d been before. He’d been carrying an armload of firewood. Seeing her, he’d paused on the threshold, then closed the door with a backward kick of his heel, wiped the soles of his boots on the jute doormat, and carried the wood over to the hearth. He was conscientious about keeping the wood box filled.
Once he’d added the fresh logs to it, he removed his outdoor garments, shaking ice pellets from his coat before hanging it on the peg. “It’s started to sleet.”
“What a lucky stroke for you. The worse the weather, the easier for you to hold me prisoner.”
Matching her wryness, he said, “Look on the bright side, you won’t starve. I have enough food to last us for several days.”
After that exchange, he’d gone about preparing canned chicken noodle soup and the cheese sandwiches, which up till now she’d been picking at. But, in fact, that simple fare tasted delicious, and the more she ate of it, the hungrier she became. Following her run yesterday, she’d been carb-depleted. The soup replaced sodium. She finished the meal.
He noticed her empty dishes, but didn’t comment on them as he carried them to the sink. “Coffee?”
“No thank you. Do you have any tea?”
“Tea.” He repeated it as though he’d never heard of it.
“Never mind.”
“Sorry.” He carried his mug of coffee to the table and sat back down across from her. “I’m not a tea drinker.”
“You should keep it on hand. You never know when a captive will request it.”
“You’re my first.”
“First captive or first tea drinker?”
“Both.”
“I don’t believe you.”
With supreme unconcern, he raised one shoulder and blew on his coffee before taking a sip. When he returned his mug to the table, he caught her looking up at the metal bar suspended between the rafters. When she looked back at him, and their eyes connected, she felt a jolt like a sock in the belly. She wasn’t about to ask him about that bar, afraid of what the answer would be.
Feeling the weight of his stare, she traced the wood grain on the tabletop with her thumbnail. “What did you do?”
“When?”
“Your crime. What was it?” She held off looking at him for as long as she could stand it. When she dared to meet his eyes, they glittered like multifaceted gemstones. She would have thought them beautiful if she hadn’t been afraid of them. “‘I’m keeping them out.’ That’s what you said.”
“Uh-huh.”
“The police? You’re hiding from the authorities?”
“You’re batting a thousand, Doc.”
“Stop calling me that. It sounds like a pet name. And I’m not going to be your pet.”
“Not a docile one anyway. You scratch.”
She’d tried to avoid looking at the long, bloody mark across his cheekbone. The blood had clotted, but it looked painful and nasty. “You should put some of your peroxide on that to keep it from getting infected.”
“Yeah, I should. But I didn’t want to breach the wall of Jericho over there to get into the bathroom.” He tilted his head toward the screen. “I was afraid of being set upon again.”
“I didn’t hurt you that badly.”
“I wasn’t afraid of you hurting me. I was afraid of hurting you.” At her shocked expression, he clarified. “Not on purpose. But if I have to defend myself from you, you could wind up hurt because I’m so much bigger than you are.”
His size would have been intimidating if she’d been standing behind him in the checkout line at the supermarket, or sharing an elevator, or sitting beside him on an airplane. He didn’t have to work at being imposing, his height was sufficient. Today’s cream-colored cable-knit sweater was form fitting and emphasized the breadth of his shoulders and chest.
His hands, folded around the earthenware coffee mug, made it look as delicate as a cup from the china tea service she’d played with when she was a little girl. Even dormant, his hands intimidated her. From the knob of his wrist bone to the tips of his long fingers, they looked capable of doing…
Lots of things.
She remembered how gently those fingers had explored the skin on the back of her neck. You’re sopping wet. Her cheeks grew hot over the thoughts that flickered through her mind. She drank from her glass of water, then picked up her interrogation where she’d left off. “Were you in the military?”
“What makes you ask?”
“Your tidiness. Everything folded uniformly, stored neatly. Boots lined up in pairs.”
“You must’ve given the place a thorough search.”
“Didn’t you expect me to?”
“Yeah.” He stretched his long legs out in front of him, at an angle to the table. “I knew you’d snoop.”
“So what did you hide in advance of my search? Handcuffs? Leather straps?”
“Only my laptop. Not well enough, as it turns out. But I didn’t think you’d have the strength to move the locker out from under the bed.”
“It took every ounce of energy I had.”
“You had enough to pounce on me.”
“But not enough to hold on.”
“You should have thought of that.”
“I did.”
“Oh, right. The butcher knife.”
“Little good that did me.”
“It poked a hole in my best scarf.”
He had the gall to look amused, which irked her. She tried to catch him off guard. “Tell me about the war.”
Her probe had found a sore spot. He pulled his legs in, sat up straighter, took a sip of coffee. Normal, inconsequential actions, but in this case, revealing.
“Well?” she said.
“What do you want to know?”
“What branch of the service were you in?”
Nothing.
“When did you serve?”
Nothing.
“Where?” When he didn’t answer that, she said, “Nothing to say on the topic of warfare?”
“Only that I don’t recommend it.”
They eyed each other across the table. In his steady gaze she read a warning that he wanted the discussion to end there. She didn’t press her luck. “The boxes of bullets on the shelf in the bathroom…”
“I thought they’d be out of your reach.”
“I had to stretch on tiptoe. If you have bullets, you must have guns.”
“My arsenal didn’t turn up during your search?”
She shook her head.
“Too bad. Otherwise you could have shot me instead of attacking with your fingernail and a butcher knife. It would have taken less energy.”
Again, he was making fun of her. She struck back. “Was yours a violent crime?”
His grin dissolved. No, not dissolved, because that denoted a gradual fade. His levity vanished in an instant, that corner of his mouth dropping back into place to form the firm line it usually was. “Extremely.”
His blunt reply filled her with desperation and a wrenching sense of despair. She wished he had denied or mitigated it. Still clinging to a vain hope, she said, “If it was something you did during wartime—”
“It wasn’t.”
“I see.”
He gave a harsh laugh. “You don’t see a bloody thing.”
He stood up so suddenly, she nearly jumped out of her skin. In reaction, she shot to her feet, sending her chair over backward. When it crashed to the floor, she cringed.
He stepped around the table, picked up her chair, and set it upright with angry emphasis, banging the legs against the floor. “Stop jumping every time I move.”
“Then stop scaring me.”
“I’m not.”
“You are!”
“I don’t mean to.”
“But you do anyway.”
“Why? I’m not going to hurt you.”
“If that’s true, then let me call my husband—”
“No.”
“—and tell him that I’m al
l right.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“We’ve been through this. I’m tired of talking about it. I’m also tired of going outside to pee against a damn tree, which I’ve been doing all afternoon so I wouldn’t disturb your rest. But now I’m going into the bathroom to use the commode and grab a shower. Make yourself at home. Snoop to your heart’s content,” he said, spreading his arms wide at his sides. “The place is all yours.”
He collapsed the screen with several loud claps of wood against wood and set it in its original position against the wall. “It stays here.”
At the door of the bathroom, he switched on the light, but before going in, he turned back. “You wouldn’t make it ten yards beyond the door before getting lost, and I don’t feel like going after you tonight. So deep-six any plans you have to bolt.”
Then he went into the bathroom.
As soon as he’d closed the door behind him, she retrieved the laptop from the sofa, where he’d placed it when he set the table for their supper. She sat down with it at the dining table, raised the top, woke it up, and placed the cursor in the box for the password.
Her fingers settled on the home keys. And stayed there. How could she possibly guess what his password was when she knew absolutely nothing about the man? Not his name, birthday, hometown, occupation, hobby. Nothing.
She tried dozens of combinations anyway, some with military themes, most of them ridiculous, but, as expected, none was successful in unlocking the computer.
“Damn it!”
“No luck?”
Startled, she turned around in the seat of the chair, not having heard him leave the bathroom. He was wearing only his jeans and was carrying his boots, socks, and sweater. If she’d thought he was intimidating before, he was even more so like this. Damp hair. Barefoot. Bare-chested.
Flustered, she turned back to the laptop, none too gently lowered the cover, and stood up. “Go to hell.”
“You said that already.”
“And I meant it.”
She walked around him and headed for the bathroom.
“I saved you some hot water.”
She slammed the door and went to flip the lock, only to discover there wasn’t one.
Longing for a shower, lured by the clean smell of his soap and shampoo but afraid of being naked, she settled for washing out of the basin with one of his damned neatly folded washcloths. She dabbed it against her blood-matted hair, but it did little to break up the scab and, besides, it hurt.
Hanging on a hook on the back of the door was the flannel shirt she’d slept in last night. She’d changed back into her running clothes before he’d returned that morning, but now she couldn’t resist replacing them with the shirt.
She also yielded to the temptation of using his hairbrush on the parts of her head not affected by the sore goose egg and scab. However, the intimacy implied by that was unsettling. She cleaned her teeth with her index finger.
She switched out the light before opening the door. He was sitting in the recliner, reading a paperback book by the light of the lamp. In her absence, he’d put on a plain white T-shirt and white socks. He didn’t raise his head or otherwise acknowledge that she was there.
She slipped between the sheets and removed her tights, then rolled onto her side to face the wall.
A half hour later, he turned out the lamp. She was still wide awake and acutely aware of him as he approached the bed. She squeezed her eyes shut and held her breath.
Wild with fear, she mentally chanted, Please don’t, please don’t, please don’t.
But alongside that silent plea for him not to molest her, not to kill her, was another, equally strong, that he not disappoint her. It was stupid and inexplicable, but there it was. For reasons that had nothing to do with fear, she didn’t want him to be a degenerate, a rapist, a murderer, or in any way deranged or evil.
“I know you’re awake. Look at me.”
Except for her heart hammering against her ribs, she lay unmoving.
The mattress dipped when he placed his knee near her hip. Alarmed, she rolled onto her back and gasped when he planted his hands on either side of her shoulders, bridging her body, blocking her view of the rafters, that worrisome metal bar, everything except his face.
“When the weather clears, I swear to you that I’ll take you down the mountain. I’ll see to it that you’re safe. Until then, I won’t hurt you. Understand?”
Incapable of speech, she bobbed her head once.
“Do you believe me?”
With absolute honesty, she whispered, “I want to.”
“You can.”
“How can I, when you won’t answer the most basic questions?”
“Ask me a basic question.”
“What’s your name?”
“What’s it matter?”
“If it doesn’t matter, why won’t you tell me?”
“Trust me, Doc, you go meddling in my life, you won’t like what you find.”
“If you didn’t want me to meddle you shouldn’t have brought me here.”
He came as close to smiling as he ever did. “You’ve got me there.”
She analyzed his features, searching for clues into the terrible thing he’d done. It was a strong face, unrelievedly masculine, but evocative of mystery more than menace. “Why are you hiding from the authorities?”
“Why does anyone?”
“So they won’t get caught.”
“There you have it.”
“As a law-abiding citizen, I can’t simply—”
“Yes you can,” he said insistently. “You can simply leave it alone.”
Suddenly she was tired of his veiled threats and decided to challenge him. “Or what? What will you do? You’ve promised not to hurt me.”
Even had she not been able to see his eyes in the darkness, she would have felt them, taking in her mouth, throat, the open neck of the shirt. They moved as low as the vee of her thighs before coming back to hers.
She held her breath.
He whispered, “It wouldn’t hurt.”
Chapter 7
Emory let the curtain drop back over the window. “It’s hopeless out there.”
The weather had worsened overnight. It had begun to snow, and it was accumulating over a thick layer of sleet. Which, of course, was in his favor.
He was seated at the dining table, tinkering with the toaster that had failed to pop up the slices of bread at breakfast.
“How old is that thing?”
Her cross tone of voice brought his head up. “I don’t know. It came with the cabin.”
“Why don’t you just buy a new one?”
“This one can be fixed. Besides, I enjoy working on things.” He’d already glued the broken piece of stem back onto her sunglasses. He’d set them carefully on the table for the glue to dry.
“You’re a born handyman?”
“I manage.”
No doubt he was being modest and that he was, in fact, a good fix-it man. He would have to be to live the way he did, alone in an isolated area, relying on no one except himself.
Jeff wouldn’t know how to set the controls on a toaster, much less repair one. Although to think so uncharitably of him was unfair. He’d never been required to fix a household item and would have been surprised to know that she would find such an effort endearing even if he failed at it.
To her recollection she had never asked him to help her with something around the house. Perhaps she should have. If she hadn’t been so self-reliant, and had instead asked small favors of him, maybe they would be happier.
The rift between them had started a year ago when he had failed to make partner in the investment firm in which he was an associate. He had assumed an air of indifference, but she knew that being passed over had been an enormous disappointment to him and a blow to his ego.
Wanting to reassure him of her support, she’d made a concerted effort to call him throughout the day, sometimes for something silly, j
ust to let him know that she was thinking about him. However, rather than buoying his spirits, the extra attention seemed only to irritate him. At one point, he’d even asked her, with chilly politeness, to please stop patronizing him.
In an effort to get them back on track, she had switched tactics, suggesting weekend getaways, pursuing things she thought he would enjoy. A wine-tasting weekend in Napa. An indie film festival in Los Angeles. A bed-and-breakfast in the French Quarter.
Her ideas were met with lukewarm responses or outright derision. Their sex life dwindled until he complained about the infrequency, while at the same time, he stopped initiating it. Her pride wouldn’t let her attempt to entice him. They reached a stalemate. The gap continued to widen. Months of increasing tension culminated in an argument over his indifference to the upcoming marathon. It was a charity fund-raiser that she had initiated and helped to organize. Beyond showing a lack of interest, he had developed a hostile attitude toward the event and what he called her “obsession” with it.
His rejection of something so important to her was symptomatic of his emotional withdrawal in general, and when she had cited that last Thursday evening during their stilted dinner conversation, the situation quickly became combustible.
What she hadn’t said, what she’d held back, was that she suspected him of having a lover. Customarily, when a man’s ego had been trampled, wasn’t more adventurous sex the restorative he sought?
But lacking evidence to support her suspicion, she’d kept it to herself. She’d left on Friday afternoon, angry but hopeful that spending a night away would realign her perspective and, if she was being honest, ignite a fighting spirit to keep their marriage intact.
She hadn’t counted on falling and getting a concussion and being “rescued” by a nameless man who, without even touching her, had aroused more sexual awareness last night than Jeff had aroused in more than a year.
“Are you cold?”
His question jerked her out of her reverie. “What?”
“You’re chafing your upper arms. Are you cold?”
“No.”
He left the eviscerated toaster and got up to go to the fireplace. When the logs he added began to flame, he replaced the screen and motioned her forward. “Move closer. Warm up.”
“Who supplies your firewood?”