Boneyard Ridge (6 page)

“This particular set of circumstances?” he answered quietly, slinging one strap of the pack over his shoulder. “About three hours.”

She eyed him nervously as he held out his free arm. “You knew there were going to be people gunning for me tonight, didn’t you?”

He didn’t see the point of dissembling. “Yes.”

“How?”

“Let’s get back in the cave and see how much damage you did to my handiwork.” He didn’t wait for her to make a move. He just wrapped his arm around her, lifting her half off her feet, and started walking toward the cave.

He hadn’t given her much choice but to stumble along beside him. Considering the flaring anger he could practically see swirling around her like a big red cloud, he was grateful she didn’t show any signs of fighting him as he hauled her into the cave.

He should have known he wasn’t going to get away with the caveman act for long. The second he let her go and turned to set the rucksack down on the floor of the cave, she sucker punched him right in the kidney.

Pain exploded through his side, shooting off shrapnel of pure agony to tear through his gut and groin. Doubling over, he wheeled to fend off her next blow, but it never came. When the stars cleared from his vision, he found himself staring into her crumpled face.

The damn woman was crying.

Before he could process the unexpected sight, she’d regained control, her expression returning to a cool, neutral mask as she dashed away the tears from her eyes as if they were mere raindrops that had slithered down from her damp hair.

“Think you could answer a question directly now?” she asked in a regal tone that sent ice flooding his veins.

There was the princess he knew.

“You gonna sucker punch me again if I don’t?”

Her mask slipped, just a bit, a hint of a wry smile hovering over the corners of her lips. The rain had washed away her carefully applied makeup, leaving her bedraggled and natural, but she still looked utterly royal and in control. “If necessary.”

He rubbed his back over the site of her blow. The skin was tender, but the worst of the pain had ebbed to a dull ache. “You went for the kidney.”

“Shameful of me.” She didn’t sound particularly regretful, but he’d seen that moment of breakdown, no matter how quickly she’d managed to don the icy mask again.

“I was working with them. But I wasn’t one of them.” He hadn’t meant to tell her even that much, but the second he opened his mouth, the words had spilled in a rush.

Her eyes narrowing, she nodded toward the backpack he’d dropped when she hit him. “Did you put the flashlight in there?”

“Yeah.”

She bent to pick up the pack, grunting a little as she encountered the unexpected weight. “How long did you pack for?”

“A few days. More if we can get to a place where we can do some laundry.”

She located the flashlight he’d tucked in one of the pack’s outer pockets and flicked on the switch. Light knifed through the darkness, piercing Hunter right in the eyes.

“You planned to kidnap me.” It wasn’t a question, and her tone was oddly neutral, as if she were merely a disinterested observer trying to make sense of a situation she’d stumbled upon.

“I knew I’d have to get you away from that parking lot, yes.”

“Because of the gunmen.”

He hadn’t really been sure exactly how they planned to kill her. Guns had seemed a reasonable option, since most of the men in the cell owned them. A whole carload of them shooting off their guns and making a lot of noise hadn’t exactly been what he’d been expecting, though. The concept of stealth apparently didn’t factor into how the BRI conducted their business.

Calling themselves an “infantry,” he thought with a grimace. They weren’t fit to lick the boots of the real warriors they claimed to emulate.

She must have seen the grimace. “You weren’t expecting the gunmen?”

“I wasn’t sure what to expect. I only knew that whatever they had planned was happening this evening, and I had to get you out of there.”

She looked at him for a long, silent moment, then walked slowly over to the stone bench and sat. It was a little high and narrow to make a proper bench, forcing her to perch more than sit. She looked bone-tired and disheartened, and one of her feet, the one that had lost whatever crazy bandage she’d put on them for her trek through the woods, was bleeding again.

At least he could help her out with that.

He picked up the pack she’d set down on the cave floor and unzipped the main compartment. The beam of the flashlight slanted toward him, and he made a show of letting her see what he was doing. “I packed some shoes for you. I figured you’d be in heels, and they’re not exactly made for wandering around the woods.”

“You don’t know my size.”

She’d be surprised what he knew. Like the fact that she kept a pair of tennis shoes in her desk drawer in case she wanted to do a power walk during her lunch hour. Or her secret addiction to dark-chocolate drops. It was remarkable how many secrets a maintenance man could uncover if he was interested enough to snoop around while doing his work.

She kept her desk and belongings more neat and inscrutable than most, but he’d been able to get her foot size from the running shoes. He’d have preferred to sneak out her actual shoes, but there’d been no chance to slip into the office that afternoon before the trouble started going down. He’d had to make a run into Barrowville to do some shopping at the thrift store in town.

Deciding on the tennis shoes over the hiking boots, he tossed them to the cave floor in front of her and kept digging for the sweater and jeans he’d bought at the same thrift store. The sweater would fit, even if it was a little big. The jeans looked as if they’d fit as well, although he might have to come up with something to use as a belt.

Susannah picked up the shoes and looked inside at the size. Her gaze snapped up to meet his, her lips tight with dismay. “Have you been stalking me? Is that what this is really about?”

He almost laughed at the thought. If she only knew how much he wished he was pretty much anywhere else but here at the moment—

“Don’t suppose you have a phone stashed in there?” she asked a moment later when he didn’t reply.

“Sorry. No.” He found the sweater and jeans and carried them over to her. She looked at the garments through narrow, suspicious eyes. “They’re warmer,” he said bluntly.

“How long do you plan to keep me out here?” She didn’t reach for the clothes.

With a shrug, he set the clothes on the stone bench beside her. “At least forty-eight more hours.”

She turned her gaze from the clothes to him. “Why forty-eight hours?”

He waited for her to figure it out.

Her eyes snapped open wider. “This is about the conference this weekend?”

He pulled one last item from the pack, a corduroy jacket. It wouldn’t be heavy enough if the temperature really dropped over the next few days, but it should be enough, with the sweater and jeans, to ward off hypothermia during their hike out of this part of the mountain.

He set it on top of the other clothes. “I’m going outside for a few minutes to scout around, see if there’s any sign of those other men we saw a little while ago. Go ahead and get dressed. We don’t have a lot of time.”

“Don’t have a lot of time for what?” she asked, not making a move toward the clothes.

He tried not to lose his patience, knowing it was a lot to ask of her to wait for events to unfold when she was cold, injured and probably scared out of her pretty wits. “We need to leave this cave and go somewhere safer and warmer.”

“Like a police station?”

He didn’t even roll his eyes that time. Improvement.

But he didn’t bother to answer her question before he walked out into the rainy night.

* * *

H
E MIGHT BE
a frustrating cipher, but the man knew how to pick warm and comfortable clothes, Susannah had to concede a few minutes later as she tugged a thick corduroy jacket over the fuzzy sweater. He’d chosen clothing a little larger than her size, but his spot-on choice of footwear suggested he’d opted for the larger size deliberately, figuring it would be easier to get around in roomy clothing than a tighter fit. The jeans were a notch too large, but not so big that she needed a belt, thanks to her stress-induced chocolate binge over the past week.

He was waiting outside the cave, his sharp green eyes scanning the misty woods. He seemed to take his sentry duty very seriously, making her wonder what, exactly, he used to do for a living before taking a job as a hotel maintenance worker.

Clearly there was more to the man than she’d assumed. His earlier show of shy deference was long gone, replaced by a stubborn implacability that was somehow both unnerving and comforting.

“Any sign of intruders?” she asked quietly.

He answered without looking at her. “No. But we can’t assume they’re not out there.”

“So we hike out of here, anyway?”

“Something like that.”

She shifted from one foot to the other, testing the feel of the shoes on her injured feet. He’d included a pair of thick, fluffy socks that padded her wounds well enough, but they made the shoes a tighter fit than she might have liked.

On the other hand, the tight fit offered good arch support, which she’d probably appreciate if they were planning to hike their way out of these woods.

Unfortunately, she realized a half hour later, leaving the woods didn’t seem to be part of the plan. They were headed into deeper forest, on a winding but unmistakable upward climb. The mist thickened, but the air thinned. They were heading higher into the mountains, which meant they were going east.

She might not be a geographer, but she knew that Barrowville and civilization lay to the west. “We’re not heading out of the woods, are we?”

He didn’t look at her. It seemed to be a habit with him. “I have a cabin about two miles from here. Not much, but it’s warm and there’s food and water there.”

“You want us to hike two more miles tonight?”

“If we wait until morning, there’ll be cops and searchers swarming this area looking for you.”

“You’re not exactly providing me a good reason to go with you.”

“Well, how about this? I know there’s at least one cop on the take in Barrowville, which has jurisdiction in this area. I just don’t know who he is. Or what he looks like.”

“And I have to take your word for that?” she countered sharply. “Because you’ve given me such a good reason to trust you up to this point.”

“I saved you from being mowed down in the hotel parking lot.” His voice was razor-edged. “I brought you clothes to warm you up and shoes to protect your feet. Hell, I carried you piggyback. Twice. And let me tell you, princess, you may not be an Amazon, but you’re not exactly dainty, either.”

She faltered to a stop, shooting him a dark look. “Clearly, you’re not looking to impress me with your gentlemanly charms, either.”

He laughed, turning to look at her for the first time since they’d left the cave. “I’m a lot of things, darlin’, but a gentleman ain’t one of them.”

As he started hiking forward again, she caught up and asked, “Does the cabin have indoor plumbing?”

She saw the slight curve of his lips but he didn’t answer her question, pushing forward at a surprising clip, given his obvious limp.

Gritting her teeth against the pain of her injured feet, she hurried up the mountain after him.

* * *

T
HE CABIN WAS
, to put it mildly, rustic. It had running water and electricity, but that was the extent of luxuries his little bolt-hole could offer, and during the winter, when the snows fell, electricity wasn’t a given.

He had a woodstove for the long, cold nights when the power failed, and a rainwater cistern if a pipe burst from the occasional deep freeze. Canned goods in the pantry could be opened by hand and heated over the woodstove.

It wasn’t Highland Hotel and Resort, and he doubted Susannah Marsh would find much to please her refined tastes, but she wouldn’t freeze and she wouldn’t starve. Considering how close she’d come to bleeding out in the hotel employees’ parking lot, she’d have to make do, at least until he figured out what to do next.

Contacting Quinn directly was out, at least for the moment, even though he had another burner phone stashed in the cabin. His second call to his boss that afternoon had gone straight to voice mail, a preordained signal that Quinn suspected their line of communication might be compromised.

Hunter didn’t know what constituted “compromised communication,” but he knew better than to doubt the instincts of his wily boss. Quinn might be borderline paranoid, but he’d managed to survive some of the most hair-raising covert ops in history. Survival skills like those meant something, even to a former Army infantry grunt like Hunter, who’d never cared much for the spooks who’d haunted the perimeters of the battlefield during major military ops.

He might not ever really like Quinn, but he trusted the man’s finely honed sense of caution.

They veered off the barely visible path as they neared the hidden cabin. Behind him, Susannah was still struggling to keep up with his long strides, though she walked with less noise than he’d expected. It was taking sheer determination on his own part to maintain as much stealth as possible, because his old war wounds were hurting like hell.

The clearing appeared almost without warning, with no discernible path to announce its existence. A ring of firs, pines and hemlocks stood sentinel around the tiny homestead, protecting the cabin from view even in the winter, when hardwood trees would shed their leaves for the season. The evergreens had been planted there nearly a half century earlier by his grandfather, who’d preferred seclusion to the increasingly dangerous world outside.

Catching up as Hunter slowed his gait, Susannah sucked in a small gasp of air, and he wondered idly what she thought of the place.

The cabin wasn’t much to look at from the outside, a low-slung edifice built from rough-hewn logs. The porch extended along the whole front of the cabin, but it wasn’t very wide because the cabin wasn’t large.

Two steps up and they were at the front door.