Pulling the Trigger

by Julie Miller

  “So I won’t miss a step.” Ben’s sunglasses were long gone, but the keen, assessing eyes remained. “Can you pick up Watts’s trail again once we get past this mess?”

  Ethan splayed his hands at his waist, opening up his chest to take in a deep, fortifying breath, giving Ben a chance to do the same. So far, their solitary hike up Ute Mountain had been an endurance trek that burned through the muscles in his legs. But from what he could see, the real climb was about to begin. Automatically checking the gear strapped to his vest, belt and pack, he swept his gaze back and forth, up and down, familiarizing himself with the changes in the landscape.

  “I think so.” He nodded toward the split in the rocks about forty yards ahead where the softer sandstone on either side of the gray granite outcropping had eroded away to form a natural fork in the trail. Going up and over the granite would lead them to Rising Sun Creek and the summit beyond, while climbing down would take them into the gorge and onto the narrow or possibly nonexistent riverbank.

  Unfortunately, between their location and the fork in the rocks lay forty yards of do-not-try-this-at-home terrain. Gravelly soil and a few larger boulders had tumbled down with the trees, obscuring the path worn by wild animals, a few intrepid hunters and hikers—and most likely—one whiskey-steeped, resourceful fugitive on the run.

  “You don’t say much, do you, Bia?” Ben teased. “Don’t tell me we’re turning back.”

  “Wouldn’t think of it.” Ethan unhooked a rope and a clip of carabiners and tossed them to the FBI agent. “But we are going to tie ourselves off before we cross here.” He glanced over the broken treetops below them. “That’s a mighty long way to fall if you do miss that step.”

  Ethan secured a rope around his waist and looped his climbing hammer around his wrist before moving through the fallen trees and crawling up the steep, crumbling incline to find solid rock where he could anchor a series of pitons and run a guide rope through. He rode the miniature slide of loose gravel his descent created back down to Agent Parrish and secured his rope to the mountain face, as well.

  “Ready? We’re going up and over the slide. Remember to sit back on the line and walk up the slope. Step where I do.”

  Ben pulled his rope taut. “Lead on, MacDuff.”

  Twenty-five painstaking minutes later, they’d reached the fork in the rock. Ethan had broken out into a sweat and Ben was visibly breathing harder. He ordered the agent to take another drink while he secured their lines.

  “You think Watts got caught in this mess?” Ben asked, sucking his water bottle dry.

  “No way to know until I scout up ahead.” Ethan inspected the diverging paths, running his hands and eyes along the crags and lichens of the bluff wall, and stooping down to search the scrub vegetation that clung to the rock face leading down to the river, looking for signs left by man, not nature. “I haven’t seen any evidence of scavengers, or vultures overhead. They’d find a dead or wounded man before we would.”

  “You’re a laugh a minute, big guy. You want me to radio in our progress? What the hell…?”

  Ethan felt the first cold drop on his cheek even before he glanced back to see Ben’s upturned hand.

  “Rain?”

  “Rain.” Ethan took note of the slightly pale cast to Ben Parrish’s skin. Tough was tough, but even he was beginning to feel the exertion of their ascent. Sherman Watts had taken two days to climb the ground they were covering in one. Rather than push Ben so far that he wound up collapsing from exhaustion, Ethan ordered a longer break. “Call it in. Tell Bart that we’ve reached Cougar Fork. Martinez will know where we are.” A line of thick clouds rolled over the sun overhead, casting the late afternoon into twilight and darkening the shadows among the trees. “Tell them we’re staying the night. Unless we find Watts and need the helicopter to fly us out, we’ll resume contact at first light.”

  “Will do. Ute Base—this is Scout One. Ute Base, come in.” Static crackled over the radio in response. “Damn. Have we lost the frequency?”

  “The weather must be interfering. Try another channel.”

  Ben nodded, turning the volume down, adjusting the reception through a series of piercing pitches, trying to find a working band. “I’ll ask if Bart can soup up the power at his end so we don’t lose contact.”

  Ethan took a few steps along the lower path. There was plenty of mud and enough foliage in the crevasse to mark the tracks of a group of foxes—probably a mother and her kits. But nothing human. As he suspected, Watts’s trail meant they had more mountain to climb.

  Ben tinkered with controls until the shrill tones narrowed into silence. “Bingo.” He raised the two-way radio to his mouth again. “Ute Base—this is Scout One. Do you read?”

  “Scout One—this is Ute Base.” Bart Flemming’s voice sounded small and distant. “You sound like you’re all the way down in New Mexico. What…your position?”

  “Cougar Fork.” Ben raised his voice to be heard. “Hey, Bart. Can you work some of your magic from that end? You’re breaking up. Could be the atmosphere with this storm. How hard is it going to hit us?”

  “The Weather Bureau…” While Bart and Ben exchanged and repeated pertinent information, Ethan explored a few yards ahead.

  Lightning streaked across the sky, and for the next half a moment, reception completely cut out. In that one beat of silence, Ethan heard it.

  The crunch of gravel beneath a foot.

  Thunder rumbled. Static answered, masking the sound. Another man might think he’d imagined it.

  “Be apprised, Agent…arrived.” Then more static.

  “Sounds like Tom and Dylan and your men are back at camp.” Ben stood as he relayed the message to Ethan and signed off. “Ute Base—this is Scout One. Out.”

  The radio crackled. The sky rumbled. Ethan braced his feet and closed his eyes and listened to the world, sorting through the sounds around him.

  “I hate to say it, big guy, but we may be incommunicado until after this storm—”

  Ethan raised a fist beside his ear and Ben instantly fell silent. He turned to meet the agent’s eyes. Good. Their communication was clear.

  Man approaching.

  In one smooth, noiseless movement, Ben set the radio on the ground beside his pack and pulled his gun.

  Ethan pointed down the path to the gorge, indicating the direction from which the footstep had sounded. He could hear them clearly now. The steps were soft, steady, slow to approach.

  Their unsuspecting quarry was coming to them.

  He wasn’t on a battlefield, and Ben wasn’t a soldier under his command, but the two of them instantly reacted as though they’d suddenly found themselves in enemy territory.

  After exchanging a few cryptic hand signals, Ben retreated behind a stand of scrub pines while Ethan hoisted himself up onto the rocky ledge overhanging the path. Drawing his knife and turning it in his fist, he crouched low and waited for their man to appear.

  Come on, Watts, he urged silently. Let’s get this damn mission over with and get you back to Joanna.

  Lightning split the sky overhead, charging every nerve, flashing in his retinas. The answering thunder ripped through the air, loud and fierce, right on top of them.

  The footsteps neared. Slowed. Retreated.

  Damn. Watts must have heard a sound or—hell, Ben’s gear was right there in the middle of the path. Watts must have seen it.

  Ethan didn’t wait to find out if that click and whisper of sound was a gun being drawn.

  He jumped.

  Springing like a mountain lion from his perch, Ethan tackled the tall figure that crept beneath him. With a startled “oof,” their visitor went down. They hit the ground hard, rolled, smacked into the rocks.

  Watts wasn’t about to make this easy. With a growl, he twisted beneath Ethan, a sharp elbow catching him in the gut. Something harder clipped him in the chin. The blow rang through Ethan’s skull. And in the moment it took to blink the dots of light from his eyes, Watts grabbed his wrist an
d shoved the knife away.

  Ben charged their position, gun drawn. “FBI! Drop your weapon!”

  “Oh, my God…E—”

  Enough! Watts was fast for an older man. Scrappy. Tough. But Ethan was stronger. And that hellish night Joanna had been raped was still so fresh on his mind…

  “Ethan! Bia!” Ben Parrish was shouting at him. “Back it off!”

  Ethan flicked the knife into the brush and shifted his grip to pin his opponent’s wrist. He captured the other wrist and knocked it against the ground. Once. Twice, dislodging the gun Watts had clobbered him with. He pinned that wrist.

  “Ethan?”

  His opponent had gone slack in his grip, giving him an easy advantage. He kicked the perp’s legs apart, pinned the left leg. Pinned the right.

  “Ethan,” his slender attacker wheezed. “Please!”

  The haze of adrenaline cleared his system enough to recognize that precious voice. It took another second to focus in on the man spread-eagled beneath him.

  Not a man.

  Breasts—small, pert, proud—thrust up to meet every deep breath of his chest, again and again as his captive breathed in deeply, trying to catch her breath.

  Hell. Oh, hell.

  Ethan looked down into deep brown eyes and a swath of midnight-colored hair, tangled with pine needles, mud and gravel.

  He’d attacked the very thing he’d so fiercely wanted to protect.

  Joanna.

  “DID I HURT YOU?” Joanna asked, brushing the muck and gravel off her jeans as she bent to retrieve her weapon. Just as quickly as Ethan had leaped from the heavens and tackled her, he’d rolled off her and put a good ten feet of space between them.

  “I’m sorry, Nüa-rü. I’m sorry. I had that knife…What you must have thought…” His black-eyed gaze swung over to Ben Parrish and Ethan fell silent.

  She could well imagine where Ethan’s thoughts had gone. For a split second, she’d gone back to that night, too. But for only a split second. She’d had fifteen years of self-defense training to make the instinct to fight back second nature. Yes, a man had forced her down. Had held a knife to her throat. Had even trapped her in that completely vulnerable position beneath the heavier weight of his body. She hadn’t allowed herself the time to think of the rape, to compare, to fear. She’d simply fought for her freedom.

  Now she was fighting to reassure the one man who might give a damn that he’d reminded her of that most painful chapter of her life.

  “I’m okay, Ethan. Are you?” Did he understand that she meant more than physical pain? Ignoring the twinge in her wrist from having it pummeled against the ground, she holstered her Glock and tried to read beneath the stoic mask of Ethan’s face. “You jumped me from behind. For all I knew, you could have been Watts. I had to defend myself.”

  He scraped his palm over his jaw, wiping the moisture from his face. Yep. The spot where she’d clocked him with her gun was going to leave a mark on his tanned skin. “What part of ‘stay put’ don’t you understand?”

  Okay. Anger.

  She curbed the impulse to snap back with a What part of “you’re not the boss of me” don’t you understand? His anger was justified, and not unexpected. Knowing that she seemed to be the only one who could elicit that particular emotion in the normally gentle giant added another brick onto the weight of guilt she carried where Ethan was concerned.

  Verbally duking it out in front of an audience wouldn’t have been her first choice, but at least Agent Parrish had the decency to look utterly focused on radioing in her location to Bart Flemming down at the base camp. She was safe. All search party members had been accounted for.

  Joanna had been exhausted by her climb, but wrestling with Ethan had fired enough adrenaline through her system to give her renewed energy. She blinked the rain from her eyelashes and took a step toward him, but halted when his chiseled jaw clenched and he turned away. Fine, she’d give her explanation from here. “When Dylan Acevedo and his guide returned to base camp without any success, I knew I couldn’t sit there or in my hotel room, waiting for someone to call and tell me Watts had slipped through your manhunt. It sounds as though Agent Ryan and Garan Coons are back at camp now, too.”

  “I sent them back for their own safety.”

  Right on cue, lightning sparked on and off like a strobe in the sky. Joanna jumped as the clap of thunder, amplified by the altitude, followed just a couple of seconds later. She understood that if the lightning came much closer, exposed on the mountainside like this, they’d make prime targets for a strike.

  Did the man think he was invincible? That he was so one with nature that the storm would somehow spare him? She ignored the invisible fortress of solitude he’d erected around himself and crossed right up to him. “You’re in danger up here, too. How is it okay for you to worry about the rest of us, but I can’t worry about you?”

  And she had been worried. But that wasn’t what this discussion was about, apparently.

  “Parrish and I have Watts’s trail. He’ll be forced to take shelter on the mountain tonight, too.” With a sigh that sounded almost as if he was disgusted that he couldn’t keep himself from touching her, Ethan plucked a twig from her hair and tossed it to the ground. “There’s no reason for anyone else to risk their lives when we’re this close to catching up to him.”

  “You can’t leave me behind. This case is too important to me.” Would he welcome her touch if she reached up and brushed away the debris that clung to the nappy collar of his green-and-tan flannel shirt? The instinct was there, but she fought off giving in to the temptation. Instead, she busied her hands by unhooking her fraying ponytail and smoothing all the damp, wayward strands around her face. She bound them back into place at the back of her head. “There’s nothing for me to do down at base camp. Flemming is monitoring all the communications and coordinating with the crime unit. I told Martinez I was familiar with the area and wanted to do some exploring on my own and he okayed it.”

  “He let you come up here without a survival pack or radio?”

  She wasn’t a fool. “I took my pack off and left it on the trail up to the fork when I heard a man’s voice up here. I wanted to be able to defend myself if I needed to. Looks like I did.”

  “Does he know how far you were planning on going? How dangerous it is to hike along the river with it cresting like it is? Night’s falling. The storm’s almost here. You could have been injured or kidnapped, or just have gotten lost, and no one would have known it.”

  “I’m not going to sit down there and twiddle my thumbs when I can be doing something useful up here.”

  “You don’t think I can do my job?”

  “I’m not implying that.”

  “The hell you aren’t, Superwoman. You can’t give up control of one damn thing, can you? You can’t trust anyone to do you a favor or help with your job or…protect you.” He hunched down to bring his face eye level with hers, dropping his voice to a low-pitched whisper. “Accepting help is not a sign of weakness. It doesn’t mean you’re going to fall apart or fail or be hurt if you can’t control every last detail of your life.”

  Joanna frowned. “Is that really how you see me?”

  “Am I wrong?” He straightened to his full height, forcing her to tilt her chin to read every nuance of his next taunt. “Tell me exactly who you trust, Joanna. Give me a list of names of people you rely on without question.”

  The wind picked up, splashing cold raindrops across her upturned face. But Joanna couldn’t look away. She was too stunned to realize how much she hated—how much it hurt—that he was right.

  “I didn’t think so.” He spun around, spotted his knife at the roots of a gnarled pine bush and strode over to reclaim his weapon.

  She followed on his heels, forgetting for a moment that they had an audience. “Who the hell was I ever going to count on, Ethan? My parents? The family friend who raped me? The sheriff who let him get away with it?”

  But Ethan hadn’t forgotten the other a
gent who was with them. “Ben. Pack your gear and climb on up to that next ledge. There are some caves up there where we can take shelter for the night. Make sure there aren’t any visitors before you go in. The snakes and smaller predators will be looking for a warm, dry place, too.”

  “Got it. You two, um, take your time.”

  From the corner of her eye, she saw Ben gear up and disappear above the granite overhang. But her gaze was glued to Ethan, as she waited for an answer, waited for understanding.

  When he faced her again, the anger was gone. Something ancient and hard and cynical had replaced it. “How about the man who loves you? You ever think about giving him a chance? Trusting him?”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “What? Don’t throw my pride to the wind and beg you to let me back into your life? Or don’t…?” He shook his head, uttered a sound that was not quite a laugh. “Hell. Haven’t you figured it out? I never got over Joanna Kuchu. Once the big guy fell, it stuck.”

  “No.”

  But it was there, clearly stamped on his honest, careworn features. It was the love they’d once shared—twisted and neglected and beaten down into something far different than the innocent hope and endless desire they’d found in each other at eighteen and twenty-one.

  A shiver—of guilt and sorrow and the love she missed trying to break through—rippled down her spine. “I’m sorry, Ethan. I’m just not that girl anymore.”

  “You don’t want to feel a thing, do you? You’re the uncompromising lady FBI agent. All business. All the time. You even changed your name to erase a past that didn’t fit in with this newer, tougher version of you.” He gentled his tone, but the truth of his words was still hard to stomach. “You don’t want to let another person in because you’re afraid Joanna Kuchu will get hurt again.”

  She pressed her lips together in a thin, taut line, afraid of what might come out if she tried to answer.

  “That’s real strength, Nüa-rü. To love. To trust. To allow yourself to need someone.” He stuffed that long, wicked knife back inside its sheath and tied it off with the leather cord at the top. As her emotions were surfacing, his appeared to be shutting down. “Someday, I hope you find that again. I hope you find friends. And someone who’s more than a friend. Your life’s going to be empty until you do. And that…truly breaks my heart.”