He’d only been there a few days, but he couldn’t help but wonder if maybe he’d made a mistake in coming to this forsaken place where he was constantly shrouded in clouds and imprisoned by the brooding mountains. Everything about the ranch made him long to stretch and push the world and his thoughts away—if only it were that goddamned easy. No matter where he went or what he did, his memories of the days he’d spent in his family’s private security business, one they called STEALTH, constantly haunted him.
And here he was the bearer of bad news once again.
If he were being honest, pulling the trigger and tearing down an enemy combatant was a hell of a lot easier than what he was going to have to do. He spun the motorcycle around in the dirt, kicking up dust as he screwed around and tried to focus on something he loved instead of something he was going to hate.
After a few more doughnuts, he got off his Harley and pushed the kickstand into place with his foot. Taking off his helmet, he set it on the seat, though a part of him wondered if it wouldn’t have been better for him to wear it as some kind of shield from the battle that was likely to ensue.
Running his hand over his too-long locks, he pushed them out of his eyes and tucked them behind his ears.
There were times, just like this one, that he wished he were back in a war zone and had a staff of people under him who could handle this kind of thing.
All he had to do was say his piece, give them the letter, and he could get the hell out of there. He just had to go in and do his duty. The moment he and his brothers and his sister had purchased the land, they agreed that this would be a part of the work that would need to be done. Unfortunately, he had drawn the short straw.
He had never seen a picture of the house in question, but the shack in front of him was a squatter’s paradise and far from what he and his family had imagined. The roof was a collection of corrugated steel in a jumble of different colors, and the siding, what was left of it, had started to rot and several pieces were only half-attached. Even the front door was cockeyed, listing to the left so far that there was at least a two-inch gap at the top.
Whoever resided there must be hard up. Maybe they had been hoping they were far enough out of the way at the farthest reaches of the ranch that they would go completely unnoticed. Thanks to the neglect of his cousins, the Johansens, whoever was living in this place had pretty much free rein—and their plan for disappearing in plain sight had worked. And from the state of the house, it was clear it had been working for a long time.
The forest around the house was filled with junk, everything from antique wringer-style washing machines to the rusted-out shells of farming equipment. From the state of disrepair, it seemed likely that this had once been the dumping ground for the ranchers of years past.
He walked toward the door. Behind him a twig snapped and the sound was answered by the chatter of a pine squirrel high up in one of the trees.
He wasn’t alone.
If he turned around now, it would give away that he was aware he was being watched. For all he knew, the inhabitants of the shanty had taken to the woods at the sound of his bike as he’d made his way down the makeshift road that led up to this place. If he just kept walking, it would give him time.
He started again, looking for a window or something he could use to catch a glimpse of whoever was lurking in the shadows around him.
They couldn’t get the drop on him; he wouldn’t allow it. He’d made it through years of toeing the line between danger and death, and he wasn’t about to get tripped up and find himself on the losing side now. Not when he’d come here to make a real home and a real life for himself.
He stopped at the front door of the squatters’ shack and started to knock.
“They’re not home,” a woman said from somewhere in the distance, her voice echoing off the timber stands around them and making the source of the sound impossible to pinpoint. “And they would have been long gone regardless, thanks to your crappy driving.”
He turned in the direction the voice had come from and relaxed a bit. She probably wasn’t going to try to shoot him—if she had wanted, she already could have drawn on him—but some habits died hard, and he lowered his hand to the gun that was always strapped on his thigh.
Standing in the shadows at twelve o’clock, her back against the buckskin-colored pine, was a blonde. She was leaning back, her arms over her chest like she had been there for hours getting bored. Even feigning boredom, she was sexy as hell. She had the kind of curves he had spent more than one lonely night dreaming about. And the way her white T-shirt pulled tight over her leopard-print bra... His body quivered to life as he tried to repress the desire that welled within him.
“You know where they went?” he asked, trying to be a gentleman and look at anything besides the little polka dots that were almost pulsing beneath her shirt.
She smiled as though she could see the battle that was raging inside him between lust and professional distance. “Have you met the Cussler boys before?”
“How many are there?”
She pushed herself off the tree. “If you stop thumbing that SIG Sauer at your side, maybe we can talk about it. Men playing with their guns make me nervous.”
“You around men and guns a lot?” he asked, but the question was laced with a provocative tone he hadn’t intended.
She walked toward him, and from the way she moved her hips even he, a man who had slept with only a handful of women, could tell that she had heard the inflection in his words as well...and she intended to do something about it.
He raised his hands in surrender. That’s not what he’d come here for, not that he would have minded kissing those pink lips, not with the way they gently curved in a smile but hinted at something dangerous if they were allowed free rein. With the raising of his hands, she stopped and her smile faded. There was a small cleft in her chin, and damn if it didn’t make her look even cuter than she had before.
Once, when he’d been young, his mother had told him, “Dimple in the chin, devil within.” From the look in her eyes when she was staring at him and that damn bra she was wearing, there was plenty of devil within her.
“Are you Trevor?” she asked, not moving any closer.
He took a step back, surprised that the woman had any idea who he was. “Who are you?”
This time, she was the one to wave him off. “Your brother hired me to keep house—starting here. He didn’t tell me that I was going to need a backhoe and a dump truck.”
Either she had accidently forgotten to supply him with her name, or there was a reason she was keeping it from him.
It hardly seemed fair she should know anything about him when this was the first he was hearing about her.
“You from around here?” he asked, motioning vaguely in the direction of Mystery in hopes she would loosen up with a little bit of small talk.
“Actually, I’m kinda new. Was looking for a slower pace of life.”
“Well, it doesn’t get a whole lot slower than here,” he said, a darkness flecking his words. He hoped she didn’t read anything into his tone. He didn’t need to get into some deep discussion with a stranger about the merits or pitfalls of a place where he doubted he was going to stay.
“If you think it’s slow in town then you haven’t spent enough time in the mountains. These mountain men are about as fast as cold molasses and a little less intelligent. If you ask me, their family tree is more of a twig.”
He laughed. “So where are you from...and hey, what’s your name again?” he asked, trying to play it off like she had told him and he had simply failed to remember it.
She gave him an impish smile, and he could have almost sworn that she fluttered her eyelashes at him. “Sabrina. And I’m from all over. Kind of an army brat, but my last stop was Schofield.”
Instinctively, he glanced down at her arms. She was pale and far from th
e buttery color of someone who had spent their days in the Hawaiian sun. She had to be lying.
On the other hand, maybe he was reading far too much into her and her answer. Maybe she just valued her privacy like he valued his. Besides, if he was going to transfer into the civilian world, he would need to stop thinking everyone was out to conceal the truth from him—not everyone was his enemy, especially a housekeeper in the little town of Mystery, Montana.
But he’d been wrong before, and that failure to see danger had gotten his sister killed. He couldn’t let his guard down. Not now. Not ever.
“Your father in the marines?” he asked.
“Schofield is an army base. I wouldn’t make that mistake around a vet, if I were you.” She sent him a dazzling smile.
She had passed the first test, yet something about her just didn’t feel right—just like everything in his life since his sister Trish had died.
“How long have you been waiting on the Cussler boys?”
She shrugged. “I only got here a few minutes before you. To be honest, I was trying to figure out where to start the cleaning.”
“So, they’re gone?” His job of kicking the family out of their shanty was proving to be a whole lot easier than he had expected.
“They’re not here, but I thought you had already come to kick them out. At least, that’s what your brother led me to believe.”
He was supposed to be here an hour ago, but he hadn’t known his brother was sending a crew behind him or he would have been on it. “And you haven’t seen any sign of activity?”
She shook her head. “But like I said, I only got here right before you.”
He walked up to the door and knocked. There was the rattle of dishes as the mice, or whatever vermin it was that lived in the place, scurried over them. He went to knock again, though he was almost certain they were alone, but as he moved the door creaked open.
“Hello? Someone home?” he asked, walking in.
The place was dark and as he entered, a putrid smell wafted out—the brothers mustn’t have been there in some time, or they were even worse at keeping house than they were at building one. He stepped in and the cobwebs in the corners of the front door clung to his face. He tried not to be squeamish as he wiped them away. No matter where he went in the world or what he was doing, he’d always hated that feeling. No amount of training or conditioning could get rid of the instinctual revulsion—and that was to say nothing of the inhabitants of the webs.
“Trevor,” Sabrina said breathlessly from behind him. “Look.”
He dropped his hands from his face and gazed into the dark shadows where she pointed. There, sitting against the corner, was a man. His face was bloated and his lips were the deep purple color of the long dead.
Trevor clicked on the flashlight on his cell phone and pointed it toward the man as he moved closer. Above his right ear, at the temple and just below the dead man’s ruddy hair, was a small bullet hole. There was no exit wound on the other side. The man’s eyes were open, but they had started to dry and shrink in the socket, in sharp contrast to the rest of the man’s features.
“Do you see a gun anywhere?” Trevor asked, flashing the light around as he looked for the weapon that could have killed the man.
“No,” she said, but she stood in the doorway staring at the man. She covered her mouth with the back of her hand as though she were going to be sick.
Trevor rushed over to her and wrapped his arm around her. “Come with me. Let’s go back outside. It’s going to be okay. You’re all right. Everything is going to be fine.”
She turned her body into him, letting him pull her into his arms as he moved her out the door and to the fresh air of the forest. He had been right—she would be just fine; from the way she felt in his arms, he was the one who was truly in danger.
Chapter Two
Sabrina had no idea why she had reacted that way. The man was hardly the first dead body that she had come across, and yet it felt like the first time. Maybe it was the way he seemed to be looking at her through those cloudy eyes or the smell of the body that had been left sitting in the heat of the fall, but she just couldn’t control her body’s reaction.
Damn it. Every time she started to think that she was strong, she did something like this.
Although maybe it wasn’t a bad thing that she had reacted as she had. She had gotten to play up the lady-in-distress angle. If she had to be undercover for any amount of time, it was going to be immensely easier if she had one of the brothers under her spell.
She just had to remember to keep him at arm’s length; the last thing she needed to do was let her emotions come into play. Emotions only had a way of getting her into trouble, and she was in enough as it was. They were the reason she was stuck in this place...and out of the direct line of sight of her superiors. Though she was certainly under their thumb.
Trevor was just another case, another investigation she had yet to complete. In a month, if everything went according to plan, she would be out of here and set down in a new little nowhere town in the middle of America investigating another possible threat to homeland security.
Trevor rubbed her back and as he held her, his chest rose and fell so rhythmically that she found herself mimicking his movements. He was like a man version of a white noise machine, and just as soothing.
If she had to guess, between his dark brown hair, his crystalline blue eyes and a jawline that was so strong that it could probably cut glass, he was all women’s kryptonite. He probably was the kind of man who had a woman every time he went downrange.
She pushed herself out of his arms and sucked in a long breath as she tried to completely dissociate herself from him. The last thing she needed was to share anything with him—even his breath.
“Are you feeling better?” he asked, looking at her like she was a bird with a broken wing.
She nodded. “I don’t know what that was about. I’m sorry.”
“That was about a dead man,” he said, shock flecking his voice. “It’s not something one sees every day. I would have been more worried if you hadn’t reacted that way. Shock can be more dangerous than most flesh wounds.”
Crap... She couldn’t give herself away. Of course he would think she was a newbie to this kind of thing. She had to remember the role she had been sent here to play. A role that required that she be seen little and heard even less. What a joke for her superiors to play...they knew just as well as she did that silence wasn’t her strong suit. She wasn’t the kind of woman who was going to let anyone push her around, tell her what to do or require that she “let the men do the real work.”
Her skin prickled at just the thought of the last time she had heard someone mansplain to her.
Trevor touched her arm. “Sabrina, you with me?”
“Huh? Yeah.” She looked at him and forced a smile.
“Why don’t you go and sit down,” he said, pointing toward his motorcycle. “Or I guess you can lean.” He gave her a guilty smile, realizing what an absurd idea that was.
“I’m fine. Do you think you should call the police?” She motioned toward the shack with her chin.
She would rather not have any local officers running around the place and mucking up her investigation or compromising her position.
Yet they couldn’t hide a dead body...
Or could they?
If they swept this under the rug, it would give her more access to Trevor and his family without the threat of outside interference. It would definitely speed things up for her. If the police started poking around, the Martins would clam up and go even deeper into hiding.
And really, who would care about one mountain man who had turned up dead? He was totally off the grid, and as far as the government was concerned he was a nonentity. In fact, the only thing that his brothers, and folks like him, were known for were extremist ideals and a penchant
for causing trouble.
Yet she couldn’t be the one to bring up the idea of hiding the very dead Cussler brother.
Trevor stared in the direction of the shack. “We should call somebody...”
The way he spoke made her wonder if he was thinking along the same lines as her. No doubt, he didn’t want anyone poking around, either.
“But?” she asked, prodding him on.
“I bet his family would go bonkers if we brought law enforcement out here. And the last thing this ranch needs is more craziness from the locals.” He frowned. “We are just trying to fit in here. We don’t want to draw unnecessary scrutiny from our new neighbors.”
“Well, if you think that the Cusslers would appreciate us not—”
“Yes, I’m sure they would want to keep this a family issue.” Trevor sounded sold on the idea.
She wanted to point out the possibility that the other members of the Cussler clan may be lying dead somewhere out in the timber as well. Otherwise wouldn’t they have already buried their brother’s body?
Yet she didn’t want to press the issue. Not if it meant there was a possibility he would change his mind and call the police. Not that he would. She had the definite feeling he wanted to sweep this man’s death under the rug just as much as she did.
“I’m going to go back in and take a look around,” he said.
“Why?” she asked, before thinking.
He looked at her as though he was trying to decide how much he should open up to her. “If we’re not going to call someone out here, we need to make sure that this isn’t the work of some serial killer or something. You know what I mean?”
“You think he was murdered?” she asked, trying to play up the innocent and naive angle.
Hidden Truth Page 2