Hunter's Desire

by Meg Ripley

  “They’ll be here soon, I think,” Dylan said, and Rachel deliberately kept her eyes in front of her. She didn’t want to see him; even if the effort in his voice implied that he was struggling in some way.

  “Were you followed?” James asked. “I see they caught up with you at some point at least.”

  “Cracked rib, not much of a thing; I don’t think they could get their hands on legal guns, felt like a bean bag.” Rachel felt her stomach lurch—Dylan had a cracked rib? She turned her head almost involuntarily and watched as he approached the table in a slow, slightly staggering walk, with little of his usual upright cockiness. “Hello, Love,” Dylan said, smiling. “You learned well from me, picking an out-of-the-way place like this.”

  ****

  “So,” Rachel said, looking from Dylan to James as they watched her. They had managed to get Dylan to a hospital using James’ car, and after a five-hour wait, Dylan’s cracked ribs—both of them—were taped down, and he had taken some ibuprofen for the pain, not wanting to dull his senses with narcotics. “What’s next?” She tried to focus more of her attention on James rather than on Dylan. He’s being paid. The galling thought that he might only have started having sex with her due to convenience or because it would keep her close still hovered in her mind.

  “We get you out of here,” James said, glancing at Dylan. “I can pay someone else to take over guarding you.”

  “I’m fine, James,” Dylan said, shifting slightly in his chair. Rachel saw him wince as the movement sent pain through him and couldn’t quite help feeling a flicker of guilt and remorse that he’d been hurt tracking her down.

  “You have two cracked ribs, Dylan. You don’t have a gun, and Jeff’s people are going to want to take you out as much as they do Rachel.”

  “I said I’m fine,” Dylan said, setting his jaw in a way that Rachel immediately recognized. He was going to be stubborn about it. She didn’t know why; he had already made plenty of money from protecting her—something that James had confirmed while they were waiting as the doctor saw to Dylan’s injuries. Dylan was not making quite as much money as the amount that Rachel was seeing, but it was enough that he could take a good, long vacation once his service was over.

  “You’re sure you can keep her safe?” James asked Dylan.

  “As long as she doesn’t go running off without me,” Dylan answered, glancing at Rachel.

  “Maybe if people would have given me the full information I kept asking for in the beginning, I wouldn’t have run off,” Rachel countered, pinning him down with a scowl. It wasn’t entirely true, and they both knew it; she had run off not only because she didn’t know who to trust—but because she didn’t want to be around Dylan, sleeping with him, being protected by him, when she didn’t know what his motivations were or whether she herself mattered to him as a person at all.

  “Well, Love, you’ve got all the information now. Jeff wants the money back, and he wants you out of the way so that he can clean up this mess that James here made.” Dylan gestured to her benefactor and Rachel rolled her eyes. She could understand that James had made decisions about her—about his company—with self-interest in mind, but it had certainly made her life a lot more difficult, being the person who apparently was going to keep his company from going out of his control.

  “I wouldn’t say I have all the information, but I have enough to know that running to Brock isn’t going to prolong my life any.” Dylan held her gaze steadily for a long moment and smiled slightly.

  “So, where are we headed, boss?” he asked, glancing away from her to look at James.

  “You can’t go to Geneva, that’s for damned sure,” James said. “I’m going to make a few calls and arrange for the two of you to get on a train at Annecy, head north towards Belgium. That probably is not going to be your destination, but it’s a start.” James stood and stepped away from the table, taking his phone out of his pocket and moving towards the other door to step outside, leaving them alone.

  “Are you hungry, Love? You seem cranky.”

  Rachel narrowed her eyes, frowning. “I am not going to get sucked in by that ploy again,” Rachel told him firmly. “Besides, I ate while you were in the hospital.”

  “Aw, Love,” Dylan said, smiling slightly. “I will say that you picked a good hideaway. I don’t know how James figured it out, but I’d have had a hard time finding you here if he didn’t give me your address.”

  “That was kind of the point,” Rachel told him. “I didn’t want to even be part of it at all anymore. Just… alone for a while. To think.”

  “Well, you’ve had a bit over a week, and now Brock is after you.”

  “It seems to me he’s after you,” Rachel pointed out.

  “Both of us, then. It’s not a competition, Love.”

  “Stop calling me that.”

  “Why? You are a little Love, you know—with your scowl and your arms crossed over your chest like I don’t know what’s underneath, looking like you’d love to rip my ankles to shreds.” Rachel found herself letting out a sound like a growl. “See? There’s that Pekingese growl I’m so fond of.”

  “What if I don’t want you to protect me? You’re busted up and I can’t trust you anyway.”

  Dylan shrugged, wincing only slightly at the pain the movement caused. “Told you the day we met: I will follow you anywhere. Even if James stopped paying me.”

  “That makes you sound a little bit like a stalker,” Rachel said.

  Dylan smiled broadly. “If you didn’t have any feelings for me at all, you wouldn’t have stormed out when I couldn’t answer your questions fast enough.” Rachel gritted her teeth, irritated with Dylan. She stood quickly, not even entirely sure of what she actually intended to do. “You like me, little Love. Admit it.”

  “Liked,” Rachel said, turning to go into the bedroom and pack the few possessions she had managed to acquire since her arrival in the Alps. Dylan didn’t follow her, and Rachel wasn’t sure whether she felt relieved or disappointed.

  Rachel fought back the urge to fidget, glancing at Dylan occasionally as they strode through the train station at Annecy. She told herself that she didn’t want to trust him; that she didn’t even want to be in his company. But she had to admit that she felt slightly less jumpy with him around, even if she knew that he was injured.

  “Shame we couldn’t take in the old town,” Dylan said, acting as if there was absolutely nothing amiss.

  “I’ve heard it’s beautiful; the lake, too.” Rachel had passed through Annecy on her way to her secluded village in the Alps, a tiny little town in the Haute Savoie region called Tannings.

  “Maybe once you’re all good, we could come back.” James had ordered additional security efforts around them, saying that while he appreciated Dylan’s dedication to the contract, he wasn’t going to trust Rachel’s safety solely to a man who was barely able to walk upright.

  “When are you going to give up?” Rachel asked him, her irritation rising once more.

  “When you tell me flat out and honestly that you have no feelings for me. And trust me, Love, I know when you’re lying.”

  Rachel had no response for that; she couldn’t honestly say that she didn’t have some kind of feelings for Dylan, even if a large component of her feelings at present was confusion. All she wanted at the moment was to keep living, to get out of the mess she was in, and have something approaching a normal life.

  Dylan winced as they descended the stairs to the platform and Rachel shifted her backpack to one shoulder, wrapping an arm carefully around Dylan’s waist to cushion him against the jarring. “See? I knew you cared.”

  “I don’t want my body guard to have a punctured lung,” Rachel retorted.

  “That would, in fact, make it harder for me to keep you from getting killed,” Dylan admitted. “But I think you mostly just wanted an excuse to get close to me.”

  “You’re infuriating,” Rachel muttered lowly.

  “Says the woman who took five trains
so I wouldn’t be able to track her.”

  “If you had left me alone you wouldn’t have two cracked ribs.”

  “Ah, but I also wouldn’t have this story to tell about chasing after the woman I love, following her from one country to another and then back to the original country, risking life and limb.”

  Rachel stopped, her grip on Dylan tightening convulsively in surprise. He groaned, taking a deep breath. “The woman you love?” she asked him, ignoring his discomfort for the moment.

  “Did you really think I’d keep protecting you after getting shot just for money? I’m greedy, but not that greedy, Love.”

  Rachel stared at Dylan for a long moment. “If you’re just saying that,” she said, holding his gaze. She couldn’t think of how to finish the threat.

  “I thought we’d agreed that I don’t disclose information that isn’t important to you?” Dylan said, raising an eyebrow.

  “No, our agreement was that you don’t disclose information that isn’t vital to you doing your job.”

  “Same thing. Wouldn’t you say it’s vital to me doing my job for you to know I will keep protecting you until someone ends me? I’d say it is.”

  Rachel bit her bottom lip. “We have a train to catch,” she said, turning to look away from Dylan’s probing stare. She heard his chuckle but pretended to ignore it as she helped him the rest of the way down the stairs and towards the voie.

  The feeling of being watched didn’t leave her as they boarded the train carefully, finding their reserved seats and settling in them. Dylan had suggested that they travel as if they were tourists, backpacking their way through the country; their tickets were first-class, but the distinction was not as obvious as it was on a flight. Rachel looked around her constantly, even as the train pulled away from the station. “Don’t look so nervous, Love,” Dylan said, sitting back in his seat heavily.

  “Where are the guys James is tailing us with?” Dylan shrugged.

  “Tailing us, I would suppose.”

  “Ha ha. You trust James?”

  “I wouldn’t work with him if I didn’t trust him.” Rachel absorbed that for a moment. She looked around again. There was something that wasn’t right; some sensation, some presentiment she had. “It’s unlikely that they’ll attack us on a moving train, Love. They’d want to get the drop on us.”

  “Unlikely isn’t the same thing as impossible. They could be getting desperate. You got away from them and they shot at you in a train station.”

  “With a bean-bag gun.”

  “Which only means that they’ll want to use a real gun next time.”

  “Are you worried for me, or for you?”

  “Both of us.”

  “They’d have a hard time bringing a gun on a train. Be more worried when we get to our destination.”

  Rachel sat back in her seat, but couldn’t quite shake the feeling—the near-certainty—that Brock’s people were there, waiting for them. Halfway into the trek, the ticket-takers came into the car, and Rachel got her ticket out irritably. I won’t even know what to do with myself when I’m no longer running away from people, she thought. She handed her ticket and Dylan’s to the man, barely looking at him.

  “Ma’am, I’m going to need to see your passport,” the ticket-taker said. Rachel rummaged in her purse; Dylan’s hand came down on hers, and she looked up. The uniform was just close enough to pass inspection from jaded, harried passengers on a train; the look the man was giving her was not the bored, ready-for-an-argument expression of a ticket-taker, but something more interested. It occurred to her then that not a single other ticket-checker on any of the trains she had been on had been the least bit interested in her passport.

  “Can I see your credentials?” Dylan asked in French.

  “Sir, Ma’am, please stand and we can discuss this situation in private.”

  Rachel looked from the fake ticket-checker to Dylan. He held her gaze for a moment before nodding. She was surprised to see that as he stood, Dylan did not cringe or even wince, despite his pain.

  The man grabbed her arm as they moved away from the incurious first class passengers, pulling her towards the door between cars. Rachel twisted, digging her heels in. “I know who you are, asshole,” Rachel hissed.

  In an instant, they were surrounded by fake uniforms, pretend ticket-takers blocking them from the view of other passengers who probably thought that they were just in the wrong section or had counterfeit tickets. She heard a ratcheting clink, the snick of a knife flicking out of its handle. “Mr. Brock said to take care of him first,” one of the men said, and Rachel saw a flurry of movement.

  Dylan dodged a blow, and Rachel saw his reactionary wince for the instant it flickered across his face. “How exactly are they getting all these uniforms, do you think?” Rachel asked as she tugged her wrist free of a man’s hands, aiming a kick with her heeled foot into another man’s shin.

  Dylan’s hand closed on her wrist and he pushed forward, hitting the toggle to open the door between cars. The pretend authorities crowded them, and she heard one person mutter that Brock hadn’t said they had to kill the girl right away; they could take their time with her. There was something sinister in his voice, something that implied that they weren’t just going to ask her nicely to give up the money before killing her. She felt a flash of cold and then hot rake along her arm and Dylan shoved her through the door, following her into the second class passenger compartment.

  They hurried up the aisle, luggage and over-spilling passengers slowing their pursuers. “As long as we can keep them in front of other people, they can’t do much,” Dylan said lowly. Rachel felt hot liquid streaming down her arm and looked down to see a flash of red along her sleeve.

  “Motherfuckers cut me!” she said with a gasp. Dylan nodded hurriedly, shoving her through another door. Rachel glanced at him and saw that he was holding his already-cracked ribs. “They got you too, didn’t they?”

  “It’s nothing. Keep moving.” But their progress into the adjoining car was blocked by more fake ticket-takers. Rachel turned; they were surrounded again.

  “Shit,” she muttered. “What do we do?” Dylan looked from one group to another.

  “Keep fighting. Try and snatch a knife. Protect your middle.” Brock’s henchmen surrounded them in the space between cars, and everything became a blur to Rachel. She kicked, she punched, she grabbed for flashes and glints of metal. Next to her, she heard Dylan’s grunts of effort, crunching sounds, gasps. She clenched her teeth as she felt a burning, searing pain along her hand, and the next moment, it seemed her hand was full of something hard and cold—a knife.

  Figures crumpled around them, to be replaced by other figures, and Rachel struggled to stay upright as she felt blows land along her ribs, against her arms and legs. She felt hot, sticky blood—her own, and that of henchmen—as she fought to keep her organs protected, as she dodged and collided with phony ticket takers and Dylan alike. She felt the train shifting underneath her, slowing down—it was coming into the station they were going to change at. “You okay?” she called out to Dylan.

  “Keep it up,” he told her. “I’m still alive and so are you.”

  “That’s something at least,” she agreed, slashing at yet another phony ticket taker. How many of them were there?

  The train’s brakes squealed, and through the window Rachel saw the station flashing into view. More people were arriving—but they were not in phony uniforms. “We got you; we’ve got you. You’re all right.” Rachel felt her head swimming as the world spun and swooped around her and wondered just how many times she had been cut, how much blood she had lost. She staggered against Dylan and struggled to keep her eyes open, to know just what was going on as they arrived at their destination. A bland voice announced their location in both French and English. Rachel realized that the people who had come were the backup, the extra security that James had sent to tail them, as a failsafe.

  “Took you long enough,” she said, as darkness swirled ar
ound her. “Dylan, you okay? Dylan?” There was no answer from the man and she tried to pull him around to see his face, but her hands were nerveless and heavy. As the train came to a stop, the floor seemed to rise up underneath her even as her knees turned to jelly.

  “I’m okay, Love. Let’s get off this damn train.”

  Epilogue

  “Is it incredibly cliché of me to notice how incredibly green everything is here?” Rachel asked, turning to look at Dylan; he lay on a dinosaur of a couch, sprawled and looking as at-ease as ever.

  “Even if it is, it’s not like it’s a cliché for no reason,” Dylan pointed out. He opened his eyes and looked at her, smiling slowly. Rachel felt a rush of heat flash through her at the sight of the smile, accompanied by the tantalizing view of his nearly naked body, barely covered by a blanket.

  They had arrived in Ireland a week before; it was, as Dylan pointed out, the safest place for them to wait things out. After the narrow escape on the train, they’d both had to spend a little time at a tiny hospital in Belgium; the struggle had earned Dylan another cracked rib, and a few broken bones in his hand, and a few of the cuts that Rachel had received had required stitches to heal properly. But between them and the backup that James Whitley had set up, they had more than enough evidence to link the henchmen—dead and alive—to Jeffrey Brock, and enough witnesses to attest to multiple crimes. The henchmen who were alive were rotting in a Belgian jail, while Brock himself had gone into hiding.

  When it hit the presses, James had called Rachel directly. “You and Dylan should go to Ireland,” he had suggested. “Dylan has informed me he still has friends there, and you could lie low while I sort out the rest of this mess.” Rachel had only been too glad to get moving again.

  “You’ll catch a chill like that, Love,” Dylan said from the couch, extending one arm invitingly towards her. Rachel reluctantly left the window, walking across the living room to where Dylan sprawled. She sank down onto her knees next to the couch, looking at him intently. Dylan coiled his arm around her, drawing her closer, his hand sliding up along her back to cup the base of her skull.