Cover Me (26 page)

***

Wade paced in a circle around the open main floor of the log cabin that housed Sunny’s business. Well past midnight, they had finally arrived at Sunny’s home after meeting with Flynn Everett’s father, head of the town council.

The bottom floor was sectioned off into four areas, mirrors all around and a skylight above making the small place look larger. One corner held fitness equipment. By the door, there was a check-in counter with fresh muffins, granola, coffee, and a water dispenser. Tucked behind it were two computers and some toys and kiddie tables set up with books, paper, and crayons.

And the remaining space—not much—appeared to be used for aerobics or martial arts with mats.

A narrow corridor at the end of the room led deeper inside the building. Given his view of the outside before they’d entered, there must be some sort of loft space upstairs—her apartment perhaps?

Sunny flipped on a single light over the workout equipment in a corner and stopped beside him, wearing her own clothes now for the first time since he’d seen her the day they’d met. Purple jeans hugged her legs, and a bold red sweater fit every curve. She was a splash of color in the middle of an oatmeal-colored world.

She toed an itch on the back of her calf. “That hallway leads to a couple of bathrooms that double as locker rooms. Out the back door, there’s a natural hot springs pool. My apartment is upstairs.”

She didn’t just manage this place. Apparently she also owned it with her brother.

He was impressed.

This whole little community wasn’t at all what he’d envisioned for what appeared to be a town of no more than about a hundred and fifty people. It was much more organized and technological than he’d expected. When he met Flynn Everett’s father, he’d been able to use the town leader’s satellite phone to check in with McCabe. The conversation had been short and frustrating. Nothing new about the deputy, other than that he was from Oklahoma, deeply in debt, and moonlighting as a security guard at a power plant. There was nothing in his past to suggest he was a psychopath. Just flat broke.

McCabe had apologized for being abrupt, but he was heading into a brief about the security concern he’d mentioned earlier. Wade got the message. The defense issue with Russian intel leaks must have escalated. McCabe had quickly assured him the dog—Chewie—was recovering well. Wade had turned to tell Sunny.

But she’d disappeared and stayed gone for fifteen conspicuous minutes.

Wade walked along the dumbbell rack, shifting a twenty-pound weight that had been mistakenly placed in the twenty-five-pound slot. “What did your brother have to say?”

Sunny’s legs folded and she dropped onto an exercise bike seat. “How did you know?

Never mind. I didn’t get to speak to him anyway.”

“Are you covering for him?” He leaned back against the weight rack, wishing they didn’t have all this crap between them and could just end the day the way he wanted. In bed with her, with him peeling the jeans off her legs.

“I realize you have plenty of reasons not to trust me, but all I know is that Astrid’s parents were at the house baby-sitting my nephew. They said Astrid and Phoenix had gone camping together.”

“Do you believe them?” Sounded too damn convenient to him that Phoenix would

disappear right before the lid was about to blow off their private little village hideaway.

She shrugged. “They do that sometimes, go off together for time away from the stress of being new parents, enjoy back-to-nature kinds of meditation like they used to when they were dating. Yes, the timing seems coincidental, but the behavior is in keeping with something they would do.”

“And your brother, do you think he got a warning we were coming?”

“I sent that email,” she said carefully, resting a foot on a bike pedal, her red Converse high-tops as full of personality as she was. “He could have run, although I don’t believe he would have left his son behind.”

“And his wife went along too. I’m assuming she wouldn’t leave her child either. All the more reason to assume he hasn’t run. So why is he conveniently gone now? Something’s off.”

He could sense it. “But still, I stick by my gut feeling that the wife—Astrid—isn’t on the run with her husband. Plenty of wives I know aren’t even willing to pack up and move to another state for even a job change. Your brother wouldn’t be offering a helluva lot of security.”

He knew he wasn’t talking about just her brother anymore. He’d seen more than his fair share of military relationships hit the skids because of a transfer. The crackle of connection snapping from Sunny to him said loud and clear that she was having the same thoughts, the same concerns.

He waited for her to answer, to give him some kind of indication where they could go from here. If they could. Tough to figure out when he knew so little about her and her family.

He’d slept with her, faced death with her, and he didn’t even know the most fundamental things about her. And time was running out fast to learn.

Memories of the day and her brush with death came back to scare the hell out of him when he least expected it. He was pretty sure his insides were still a little numbed out about that.

“Where did you live before going off-the-grid?” Why hadn’t he thought to ask that before? Had he been holding back too?

“On a farm in Iowa.” She spun the bike pedal with her toe. “We grew corn and soybeans.

The land was in the family for a couple hundred years. The farm barely paid for itself, but Dad had a store too, and Mom worked at a bank in town. They said moving here was the perfect way to get their priorities back in order.”

“And your brother?”

“They wanted to help him. I was twelve at the time and I didn’t ask a lot of questions.”

She looked around the small business she’d managed to build in the middle of nowhere as if seeing it with new eyes. “Maybe I should have.”

They’d cut their two daughters off from the ability to ask questions or reach out for any help, any other way of thinking. The place might not call itself a cult, but unquestionably there had been a closed society, cultish mentality at play.

Was Sunny even able to just break away from that? Sure she’d been scared of him

finding out about her brother when he first found her, but she hadn’t freaked out in the city when she was at his place. Looking back he knew now that she’d wanted to be at his apartment rather than base because of the intense proximity to the military. But she was comfortable enough there.

Seeing what she’d built here, with no help from the outside world, made him recognize how self-sufficient she was. What might she accomplish with the resources of the world he knew at hand?

He wasn’t ready to say all their obstacles were out of the way. But for tonight, it seemed he’d cleared away a few.

Above all, Sunny was alive. Thank God, she was still alive.

Wade extended an arm to her. “Let’s go up to your apartment.”

A spark lit in her eyes. “I can think of nothing better than forgetting about all the things we can’t change.” She placed her hand in his, her smile almost chasing away the shadows in her hazel eyes. “But I have a better idea than going to my apartment.”

Tugging him, she guided him toward the corridor, deeper down the hall, past the staircase leading to the second floor. Curious, he followed, his eyes gravitating to the sway of her hips, the swish of her ponytail, as she walked.

She unlocked and opened a door leading outside the log cabin. Turning, she clasped both his hands and pulled him out onto a huge deck overlooking…
Holy crap
.

The winding wood stairway with icicles led down to a bubbling pond of steaming waters.

She’d told him the survival school sported a hot springs area, but he hadn’t envisioned anything like this. A privacy fence wrapped around, stopping at the slope of a mountain wall with a waterfall trickling down over two tiers of rock slab.

Sunny peeled off her sweater and tossed it over her shoulder onto the deck. Her nipples went tight against her thin undershirt.

His jaw damn near fell there as well. “What are you doing?”

“Going skinny-dipping.” She tugged off one red high-top, then the other.

He eyed the mounds of snow around the edges. “You’re going to freeze to death before you make it into the water.”

“Not a chance.” She smiled at him with bold wickedness, the wind whipping her hair around her face. “Don’t tell me you’ve lived in Alaska all this time and you’ve never hung out in a hot tub naked to watch the northern lights?”

His gaze slid from
nature’s
hot tub to Sunny.

Best of all, the place was completely deserted. “Is that what we’re going to do? Watch a cosmic laser show?”

“Afterward, perhaps.”

“After what, exactly?” He stepped closer, closer still, until her hair brushed his chest. “I need to hear you spell it out.”

“Take your clothes off and join me. I’ll fill your ears full of exactly what I want.” She backed away, crooking her finger and making it clear that she had more in mind than lazing around. “It’s the least I can do for the man who saved my life today.”

Just like that, his body remembered the intense adrenaline surge that had accompanied that moment, the fear and fierceness that had charged through him after seeing her broken snowmobile in pieces at the bottom of the cliff.

Hunger for her, for this moment to celebrate surviving the day, had him reaching for her.

She made fast work of the buttons down his camo uniform and flung the top over the railing. “Take off your T-shirt.”

“You first.” He tugged her undershirt over her head, leaving her bared to the frigid air with only her purple jeans and red bra. Her nipples beaded in the cold.

“You’re such a guy.” She yanked his T-shirt over his head, careful of his shoulder. “Has anyone checked your shoulder since you tangled with my dog and the car earlier?”

“I’m a medic. I can look after of myself.”

“You can’t treat yourself or your family. I do have some training in basic first

aid—comes in handy on survival treks.” Staring down the icy steps, she flung aside her bra, goose bumps raising on her flesh. “And the sulfur in volcanic springs carries healing,
revitalizing
qualities.”

Her eyes as steamy as the waters, she shimmied out of her jeans and waded in,

magnificently naked.

***

Misty sat on her bed in her bathrobe, towel-drying her hair. She’d never expected to be back in this familiar shabby-chic room she’d decorated with her mother and sister, painting all the reclaimed furniture white. They’d worked together on patchwork curtains and a quilt made from outgrown clothes. Rag rugs lay on the floor to warm her feet in the morning.

Tonight should have ended so differently. She should have been back in civilization, meeting up with Ted and Madison, her heart breaking over saying good-bye to Flynn while trying to convince herself that Brett was really “the one.”

But Ted and Madison were dead. Many more were gone as well. She’d dreamed of

leaving here for so long, and now she could only mourn how the place would never be the same.

She didn’t even know what to think of her brother and Astrid disappearing. At least her little nephew was settled downstairs with his grandparents, who’d insisted on helping and staying here so he could sleep in his own bed.

She tossed aside the towel and reached for the comb beside her bed.

A cold rush of air blasted over her. She straightened, her stomach lurching with fear. The air smelled of outside, of an open window.

She started to scream just as the patchwork curtains flapped and Flynn’s big head poked through. He pressed a finger to his lips. Just like all the times he’d climbed through her window during high school. She closed her mouth, her stomach flipping with a wholly different sensation that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with anticipation.

Flynn swung his legs through and stood in her room, his head almost touching the sloped ceiling. “I’m not here to push you. I just needed to see you, to reassure myself that you’re okay, and the stuffy old watchdogs downstairs insisted you need your sleep.”

Her skin tingled with heated awareness under her robe. Her naked skin. She should tell him to leave.

But she didn’t.

“Well, close the window before we both freeze to death.” She swung her legs off the bed, waiting to take her cue from whatever he said next.

He shut the window and draped his parka over a bentwood rocking chair, then turned away abruptly to toss another log in the wood-burning stove, seeming hesitant. How strange to see him unsure, when his body and presence filled her room so vibrantly.

Abruptly, he dropped to his knees in front of her so they were eye to eye. He searched her face, his throat moving with a slow swallow.

His eyes glazing with unshed tears?

“Flynn?”

His chest pumped, his breathing ragged. “Everything’s gone so crazy, all those people dead. And it could have been you. If that deputy hadn’t died, if Sunny hadn’t come back in time”—his eyes squeezed shut tight as if to hold the tears, the emotion, inside himself—“it could have been you.”

True to his word to keep his hands to himself, his fists stayed plastered against his sides.

The pain on his face was so real, so intense, it took her breath away. She thumbed a lone tear escaping from the corner of one eye. His weather-toughened skin felt so familiar, so dear.

She cupped his cheek. “Why did you sleep with June four years ago?”

“I honest to God don’t know.”

“That’s bullshit.” Her hand fell away.

He opened his eyes, finally meeting her gaze dead on. “I was scared.”

“Bullshit.”

A wry smile tucked dimples into his cheeks. “God, I’ve missed you.”

“You have a funny way of showing it.” Her pride still stung over his silence. Sure, he’d made an effort at first, but before that first year was out, he’d given up. People who loved each other never gave up, they never stopped fighting for the people they cared about, even going to the ends of the earth. Her parents had taught her that.

“I was an eighteen-year-old idiot. I heard you and your sister discussing what kind of wedding you would like to have, and I freaked out. I self-destructed. And I would do anything to change that day, anything. I knew it was a mistake the second after—”