Survive the Night

by Marilyn Pappano

  Her hand trembling, she reached out to him. "Dillon, I love—"

  He moved away so abruptly that the centerpiece of dried flowers in a pottery vase fell to its side and rolled onto the floor, the vase breaking with a hollowthunk . Detouring to the bed to pick up his shoes and socks, he went to the fireplace, sat down on the hearth and slipped his arm free of the sling, then began the task of putting on his socks, working quickly even though it sent sharp needles of pain through his shoulder.

  He'd never been so clumsy—knocking the flowers over, fumbling with his socks, with his shoes and the laces. It was because his hands—his entire body—was shaking. Because he didn't want her to touch him. Because he couldn't let her say those words. He couldn't let her tempt him, torment him. He couldn't listen to any more of her lies.

  He had thought when he'd come here that he knew all there was to know about betrayal, that his mother, his father, Russell Bradley and others had taught him everything. But he'd been wrong. They had never taught him how badly it could hurt. They had made him feel unwanted and unimportant, stupid, foolish and expendable, like a nuisance best dealt with harshly or an embarrassment best dealt with not at all. But they had never made him feel so lost, so hopeless, so disillusioned or so achingly sorrowful.

  He felt all those things and worse as he tied his second shoe,then stood up.

  Ashley stood up, too, from the floor where she'd knelt to pick up the vase. Her hands filled with chunks of pottery, she faced him. "You can't leave," she pleaded. "Seth is on his way up here right now. The mountains around here are still filled with search parties. You can't take the van, you don't know your way through the forest, and your shoulder isn't healed enough to risk that kind of travel. Please, Dillon, please wait."

  "Wait for good ol' Seth to lock me up?" He made a derisive sound as he retrieved the handcuffs and keys from underneath the middle sofa cushion, then fished Deputy Coughlin's pistol from the bottom of a basket filled with bits of fabric left over from other projects and no doubt intended for one of her quilts. He tucked it into the waistband of his jeans,then started for the door. On the way he paused, the table between them. "You know, if any woman in the world could have persuaded me that she was worth going to prison for twenty-five years, it would have been you. I could have convinced myself that giving up half my life was more than a reasonable price to pay for spending the rest of it with you. But I would have been so wrong."

  "Dillon…"Once more she reached out. This time he didn't jerk away. He stared at her hand for a moment, so strong and delicate,then deliberately turned his back on her. He refused to hear the soft, anguished cry she gave as he crossed the few yards to the door, refused to wonder if the tears that had filled her eyes earlier were spilling over now, refused to even consider how much she might be hurting. With each step he forced himself to concentrate on the hard, cold facts. She had lied to him. She had turned him over to the authorities, knowing that he would rather die than go to prison. She had betrayed him.

  This was one betrayal he feared he might never get over.

  Taking a deep breath, he unfastened the lock he had automatically secured when she had returned from town. He didn't want to do this, didn't want to head back out into the rugged mountains, didn't want to leave the cabin where, for the first time in his life, he'd felt a sense of belonging. But it wasn't the cabin that had given him that feeling of home, but rather Ashley, who had misled him, who was helping to send him to prison, who hadn't thought twice about risking his life andhis freedom on the remote chance that she might gain whatshe wanted.

  He hesitated before opening the door, aware that there was something he needed to say.I'm sorry, maybe, because he certainly was. He was sorry he had trustedher, sorry he had given her the chance to let him down, sorry that he'd made love with her and sorry that he'd fallen in love with her. Or he could tryThank you. For taking him in, for nursing him, for making him trust her, for seducing him into a moment of sheer idiocy, for reminding him once again of Russell'slesson—Never trust anyone—and for sending him to prison. Yeah, thanks for nothing.

  I love you.Notloved, not past tense, not over and done with, but right now and in the future—with his luck, probably forever. But telling her now would serve no purpose but to underscore the futility of it.Damn you served no purpose, either, except possibly to vent a little of his anger.

  Apparently he was wrong. Therewasn't anything he needed to say. He simply needed to open the door and walk out of her life.

  His fingers closed around the knob, and he twisted it, pulling the door open at the same time. He didn't take a single step, though, because the barrel of a pistol identical to the one secured in his waistband was pointed right between his eyes. He drew a small breath but otherwise didn't move so much as a muscle as Sheriff Benedict softly asked, "Going somewhere, Boone?"

  Feeling lower than he'd ever felt before, Dillon exhaled. "Yeah," he answered just as softly. "Straight to jail." Then he followed the sheriff's glance to Ashley, still standing beside the table, her hands clenched tightly around the shards of pottery, and he silently amended his response.

  Straight to hell.

  * * *

  Chapter 10

  «^»

  "Where's the gun?"

  Ashley watched as Dillon lifted his shoulders in the slightest of shrugs. "In my waistband."

  "Get it, Ashley," Seth commanded, his own gun never wavering.

  She remained motionless for a moment, unwilling to get so close, all too painfully aware that Dillon certainly didn't want her so close. But she had to cooperate, had to do whatever Seth said; otherwise, he might decide that in her custody wasn't the best place for his prisoner to be. Dropping the hardened clay on the table, she moved around between the two men, awkwardly lifting the hem of the sweatshirt Dillon wore, and pulled the pistol free. The entire time—only a moment, maybe a lifetime—he watched her with such an unforgiving gaze. When she moved away after handing the gun by its grips to Seth, she could actually feel it the instant she stepped out of his line of sight.

  Seth came into the cabin, closing the door behind him before gesturing for Dillon to sit down at the table. He claimed the chair at a right angle for himself and directed Ashley to sit at the opposite end. "Ashley says you have a story to tell."

  Dillon shifted his gaze slowly to hers, making her shiver. "Ashley lies," he replied sardonically.

  "She says that breaking into the vault at the bank was part of a test of the new security system, authorized by your boss and the bank president." Seth waited a moment, but when Dillon offered no response, he went on. "She also says you didn't shoot my deputy."

  Finally Dillon looked at him. "You've got the gun. Check the ballistics."

  "While you're at it," Ashley added, "check Steven Vickers's, too." When Seth sent an annoyed glance her way, she simply shrugged, then watched as he picked up Dillon's—or rather Tom's—gun. He removed the clip, unloaded it, then pulled back the slide and ejected a single cartridge that hit the table, bounced, then rolled toward Dillon.

  "I'll do that," he said grimly, glancing first at her, then at Dillon. "There are fifteen rounds here—one in the chamber, fourteen in the clip. That's the max this model will hold."

  "Which shoots down—pardon the pun—your theory that Dillon shot Tom after Tom shot him, each firing the same gun," Ashley replied. Unless, of course, he believed that Dillon had just happened to be carrying with him a couple of shells of the exact type the sheriff's department used and had reloaded the pistol. She felt a tremendous sense of relief. All it would take to get Seth seriously started on a new investigation was an inconsistency or two like this. Now he knew that there had to be a second gun involved and—with no evidence to suggest that Tom carried a second pistol—also a second man. Now he wouldn't stop until he found out who shot his deputy … thereby proving that Dillon didn't.

  Gathering the bullets, Seth reloaded the clip, pushed it back into place in the pistol,then looked at her. "How about making som
e tea? We've got some talking to do."

  Without hesitation, she went into the kitchen and put water on to boil. Behind her Seth began asking Dillon questions and, judging from the time he was taking, probably making notes, too. She had been so sure of his ability to clear Dillon's name, but she had no idea how he would go about it. She supposed his first act would be to run ballistics tests on both the pistol Dillon had taken from Tom and whatever weapons Steven Vickers had, along with checking phone and financial records of everyone involved. She seriously doubted that Russell Bradley and Bill Armstrong had risked robbing the bank of nearly half a million dollars so that they could tuck the money away someplace safe for use in their retirement years. Surely they had spent at least some of it—part of it, maybe, to pay off the med who had tried to kill Dillon last week.

  Of course, once the ballistics tests proved that it was Steven Vickers who had shotTom, that would make things so much easier. The past day or two had proved that she didn't really know Steven at all, but she didn't imagine he would be willing to go to prison for the rest of his life—or to face death, if Tom didn't recover—without giving up his accomplices. Once he knew he'd been caught,all the money in Armstrong's bank wouldn't be enough to buy his silence.

  Unless Dillon was wrong, and the bullet that had hit Tom hadn't come from the black-haired man in the Wildcats letter jacket. There had been three men, all of them shooting; Tom had lost control of the patrol car, and Dillon must have been scared as hell. Could he really have seen which one of the three had been responsible for Tom's injury?

  As the water came to a boil, she added a half-dozen orange pekoe and black tea bags, along with a bag of mint tea,then set the pot aside to steep. Seth would be so grateful that she wasn't giving him chamomile, elderberry or ginger tea that he would forget he was one of those rare Southerners who didn't like iced tea, and Dillon… He didn't like her herbal teas, either—god-awful, he'd called them—and he wouldn't like this any better. Right now there probably wasn't a single thing associated with her that he did like, except the fact that he would soon be free to leave her.

  This morning she had thought chances were good that he would understand why she had betrayed his trust, that he would recognize the benefits as far outweighing therisks, that he would forgive her. Now she doubted that that was ever going to happen. She was going to have to live with his anger and hatred and without him.

  But she had known the risks and had taken them anyway. She had no one to blame but herself—and Russell Bradley and Bill Armstrong, damn them.

  She had to admit, though, that faced with the same decision, knowing what she knew now, she would take the same action again. Her living alone wasn't important. Dillon living free was.

  When the tea was ready, she filled two glasses with ice and tea, placed them on a tray along with honey, sugar and spoons and carried it to the table. Immediately she retreated to the kitchen once more, busying herself with unnecessary cleaning and with preparations for a special dinner that she wasn't sure she could eat, before finally deciding to bake. She was on her third batch of oatmeal muffins when Seth called her name.

  When she turned, he gestured for her to go outside with him. She picked up a paper bag holding the first two dozen muffins,then followed him out. He was standing at the top of the steps, staring across the fields, when she joined him.

  "You're an idiot," he announced, sliding his arm around her waist and drawing her close to his side.

  "I know."

  "You live way up here where no woman should live alone. You eke out a living with crafts that require a ton of work for very little return. You don't have a telephone or any way to call for help if something happens. Now you go and fall in love with a wanted fugitive—and then you turn him in to the sheriff. You just can't do things the easy way, can you?"

  She rested her head against his chest. "I never said I was in love…"

  His chuckle interrupted her. "You forget,I've known you all your life. You've never speeded, never gotten a parking ticket, never even cheated on your taxes. Yet here you are, breaking every law in the book to protect a wanted felon. There's got to be some explanation for it."

  "I was his hostage," she murmured in her own defense.

  "So he told me. And how long did that last? Twenty-four hours? Twelve? However long it took you to decide that a handcuffed prisoner who gets shot in the back while in police custody is deserving of your protection?" He paused, but she made no effort to answer. "Besides, honey, I saw you look at him. You never looked at me that way, not even on our wedding day."

  Her eyes got teary, her voice thick. "It doesn't matter. He's never going to forgive me for this."

  "He trusted you, and you let him down. You can't expect him to see past that right away to the fact that you had good reasons for betraying his trust. But he'll get over it someday. He'll come around and you'll be here waiting."

  "I don't want to wait for someday. I've already waited all my life." She wiped away a tear that had slipped free, then sniffed. "Can you help him, Seth? Can you prove that he's not guilty of taking all that money?"

  His shrug reverberated through her. "I think so. If it's worth anything, I believe him. We know at least two shots were fired up at Sadler's Pass—the one that took out Tom and the one that got Boone—and neither of them came from Tom's gun. And he's right about the woman who called in the accident. She did have two kids with her, and they did report seeing a black van with three men who left as soon as they arrived. Then there's the photo. While you were moping in the kitchen, I showed him some photographs from our files, including one of Steven out of uniform. Boone identified him as the man up at the pass."

  "So what will you do now?"

  He grinned down at her. "I've got so many things to do that I hardly know where to start. I'm going to do as you asked and leave him here for the time being … unless you've changed your mind. If you have, I can jail him over in the next county, where he would be safe."

  Wondering if he'd made the same offer to Dillon, she shook her head. He probably hadn't. As much as Dillon hated the idea of going to jail, she was pretty sure he hated the idea of staying there with her even more. If Seth had given him the option, he would be leaving with him.

  "Are there still search parties up here?"

  "Maybe." Catching the chastising look she sent his way, he shrugged. "I'm coordinating the search for my department, the state police and SBI. As far we're concerned, this area has been cleared. But there are lots of private citizens out there looking, too, and most of them probably know that the Briggs brothers tracked Boone to the bluff out back." Releasing her, he leaned against the porch railing and faced her. "How is it they managed to miss his tracks right here?"

  "Luck. A lot of rain. My own big feet. So you think some of them might be around."

  He nodded. "Armstrong's reward still stands, you know, and every hunter and local boy who knows these hills could put that ten grand to good use. You be careful. Citizens don't operate under the same constraints we do. Some of these boys will be quicker to use deadly force than a cop. Stay inside and keep those sheets over the windows."

  "We will."

  "I warned Boone about trying to escape again. I also warned him about you." Grinning again, he lifted his hand to brush over her hair. "I told him that if he harmed one hair on your pretty little head, he would have to answer to me. I figured it was too late to warn him about breaking your heart."

  "Gee, thanks," she said, hoping her dry tone concealed the ache in her throat. "You're such a good friend."

  "It's just part of the job." Bending, he pressed a kiss to her forehead,then took the bag of muffins. "TheCatlin County Sheriff's Department thanks you. Stay inside. Stay locked up. I'll be back tomorrow."

  She waited until his Blazer disappeared in the trees below before reluctantly returning to the cabin. Dillon was lying on the couch, an open book resting on his stomach, but he wasn't reading. His gaze was fixed and distant. After a moment's hesitation, sh
e crossed the room and sat down in the armchair, right on the edge of the seat. "I'm sorry," she ventured.

  The look he gave her was cold and damning. "Not half as sorry as I am."

  She clasped her hands together in her lap. "I—I don't know if he told you, but Seth believes you."

  "And that's what matters to you, isn't it?Your precious Seth."

  "No, Dillon,you matter. You'reall that matters."

  "Oh, that's right." He tapped the heel of his hand against his forehead as if remembering some great truth. "Youlove me. You love me so much that you can't wait to see me in prison."

  Tears welling again, she had to clear her throat to speak and even then managed only a whisper. A plea. "Dillon, please don't do this. I only did what I thought was best—"

  He sat up, swinging his feet to the floor, dropping the book, facing her with an intimidating scowl. "Who gave you the right to decide what's best forme?" he demanded. "We spent a few days together. We had sex twice. You think that entitles you to destroy my life?"