Desert Ice Daddy (6 page)

She couldn’t think of anything else on the way back to the boulders but of the shootout, of Christopher, of how close they’d been and how scared he must be. She didn’t cry. Energy expended on crying would be much better used for fighting for her son when they reached him again.

“He probably wasn’t in the first pickup,” Akeem said once they reached the boulders and he’d dropped the bags. He was walking around in a wide circle. “They knew a chopper would take off after that.”

“And I doubt he was in the last,” she said. “They knew we would be staying here, waiting.”

“The first truck went this way.” He pointed. “The last pickup drove that way.”

“And the one that went the way we came passed right by us. It didn’t have Christopher.”

“Right.” Akeem nodded. “And it wasn’t driven by Jake Kenner. I have a feeling he would stick with the boy since Christopher knows him. He’d have the easiest time getting Christopher to do what they wanted.”

She bit her lips at that. “So that leaves us with two sets of tracks.” After the fight she’d been looking for nothing else but a chance to find Christopher’s shoe prints in the dust. Now she registered the shells and the bullet holes drilled into the boulders all around them.

And the blood. But not where Christopher had stood. She gave God thanks for that.

She nudged a spent shell with the tip of her shoe as the realization came, and she took her time digesting it,
accepting it. Akeem hadn’t been holding her back from Christopher. He’d been saving her life.

“We have a fifty-fifty chance. Either this way, or that.” He circled back and hooked his bags over his shoulders again. “You choose. But we better get going before the cops get here.”

H
ER ARMS WERE BREAKING
, but Taylor wouldn’t have let go of the briefcases for anything. They meant Christopher’s life.

Akeem carried the duffel bags without complaint, dragging a large sagebrush behind them to cover their tracks. If the cops found them, they could mess up the exchange once again. She didn’t think she would get another chance from the kidnappers.

As if by unspoken agreement, they talked about things unrelated to the current situation. Not that she could shut her mind off from obsessing over every second of the failed exchange, or over what would happen when the next call came in.

“So you like it at Diamondback?” Akeem asked. “Settling in?”

“I don’t want to get too settled in. I want to get my own place eventually, but I’m loving it.”

“Flint loves having you there.”

“Flint wants to wrap me up in cotton and keep me in a velvet box.” She gave a wry smile. She couldn’t blame her brother, really. She’d messed up with her marriage pretty badly. But the solution was not to trade Gary’s obsessive need to control her for Flint’s obsessive protec
tion, or any other man’s. Her goal was to make it on her own, stand on her own two feet and show the world, herself and her son that she was done being a victim. Taylor McKade was a strong, independent woman.

“Nothing wrong with Flint wanting to take care of you and look out for you,” Akeem was saying.

“Spoken like a true sheik.”

He gave her an unreadable look. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“How many wives did your grandfather keep locked away in his harem?” she teased.

“I’m not my grandfather.” His voice had an edge all of a sudden.

It made her do a double take. Touchy subject? “I know. I didn’t mean that.” She stopped and set the briefcases down to rest her arms for a second. “You never talk about him.”

He shrugged and dropped the sagebrush. They were coming into an area that was all stone and little dirt, the track barely visible this close up. Nobody would be able to pick it out from a helicopter. They were safe unless the police brought dogs. “He’s dead.” His voice was toneless.

“Flint says you refused your inheritance.”

He said nothing to that, just swung both duffel bags over his right shoulder and picked up the two briefcases with the left and began walking again.

“I didn’t mean to—”

“He didn’t have a harem,” he said. “He had four wives, each with their own kids in their own tent.”

“Didn’t you think that was strange when you were there?”

“Everything was strange. The wives were the least of it. I was born and raised in Houston. Not much here prepared me for the Bedu of the desert.”

She hadn’t known him back then. Neither had Flint. But he’d told her the few stories he’d heard from Akeem, back in the days when she had her first serious crush on him and had endlessly nagged her brother for every bit of information about his mysterious friend.

Akeem was fourteen when his mother died, no other relatives in the States. He would have gone into the foster-care system if not for his grandfather, the sheik, who had sent for him. He’d told Flint once that he had almost refused to go. It’d been hard for him to swallow that the old sheik had cast out his mother.

“Was it like this?” She nodded toward the barren land that surrounded them.

“Much bigger. In some places it’s all stones, other places it’s brush like this, even grass, then there are vast areas with nothing but sand. No TV, no video games. It was a shock to my fourteen-year-old system at first.”

“And then?”

“And then I started to see the beauty of it, the honor of the men of the desert. I’d never seen the place before, but I still felt a connection.” He shook his head. “Can’t explain it. It was like…The best I can explain is collective memory.”

“But you came back.”

“First chance I got.” He gave a lopsided smile. “I’m American.”

He was unlike any man she had ever known: strong, honorable, carried himself with dignity, had always been there for the others. Flint considered him his brother, more so than the half brother they shared and hated discussing. Like Flint, Akeem had achieved great success. But sometimes she wondered if he ever felt at home anywhere.

She hadn’t. Not in a long time. Not even at the ranch, despite the best efforts of Flint and Lora Leigh and Lucinda.

They walked on in silence, stopping only to drink. Akeem had brought along several bottles. Hopefully enough to last them until tomorrow.

Tomorrow, she would get Christopher back. She had to believe that.

They sat out the noon heat under a group of acacia trees and talked about his business. When the temperature cooled to bearable, they resumed walking again. They stopped for the night early, could have walked more given the light but decided it was better to save some energy for the next day. Who knew what it would require of them?

She helped him pitch the tent. They ate cold rations of smoked meat, bread and apples, courtesy of Lucinda, then drank sparingly.

“Should we light a fire?” she asked, not that it was that cold yet, but might get chilly toward dawn. Unless, by some miracle, Flint found them. He would be looking if they didn’t get back to the ranch in a couple of hours.

“Better not.”

Which meant, heaven help her, that they were going to have to snuggle for heat. She wasn’t sure she was ready for that.

Okay, so she’d thought she’d been ready back when she was seventeen, when Akeem had first come home from Aggie, Texas A&M University, with Flint on a visit. He’d starred in the overwhelming majority of her girlhood fantasies. Which culminated on that fateful night at nineteen when she’d been so summarily rejected.

The whirling sound of a helicopter interrupted the flow of memories before they could have made her blush.

A
KEEM WATCHED AS
T
AYLOR
cocked her head, her blond hair falling in waves over her shoulder.

“Police?” she asked.

“Either that or one of Jackson’s choppers, or Flint’s Falcon. We shouldn’t call attention to ourselves until we know for sure.”

The tent was small and a nondescript beige color that blended into the desert like camouflage. There were bushes around that were bigger. They had a fair chance that they might be mistaken for another boulder from a distance.

But as the chopper dipped low to scan the flat land, it did come to hover right on top of them. Akeem looked through the mosquito netting of the window. “Cops.”

“Oh, man.”

He waited for them to set down, trying to figure out what to say. They were about to catch some serious
trouble for not telling the authorities about the ransom demand, for coming here alone. And they’d be summarily taken out of Hell’s Porch, questioned for as long as the cops saw fit. When the next call could come at any second.

Akeem swore under his breath and got up. He would grab one of Flint’s pickups and bring Taylor back here as soon as they were let go again. It was the best they could do; no point in wasting energy on what-ifs.

But after a moment of lingering in place, the chopper banked to the left and took off. His instincts prickled.

“Why didn’t they stop to pick us up?” She came over to the window to look after the helicopter.

He ran his tongue over his teeth. Good question. Plenty of flat land to put the bird down. Why hadn’t there been a more concentrated rescue effort, for that matter? And back at the boulders, why had the choppers attacked without waiting for ground support to get there?

It’d looked almost as if their purpose had been to bust up the exchange rather than to capture anyone or save Christopher. Just like right now their purpose seemed to be to locate Taylor and him, but not actually rescue them. Odd.

“You think they’ll come back?”

Damned if he knew. If they had wanted to help or harm, they could have done it already.

“Let’s move on.” He was picking up the sleeping bag, not wanting to waste time.

“We just got settled in.”

“I don’t like this.”

“I don’t want to move.”

He could more than understand. She had to be sore and exhausted.

“Just a couple of miles. We’ll find someplace where we can spend the night without being visible from above.”

“What if we lose the tracks in the twilight? We could end up going in the wrong direction.” That panicked determination was back in her eyes again, like it had been during the firefight.

He understood. She was afraid that whatever decision they made might turn out to be the wrong one for Christopher. She was holding up admirably, all in all. She had every right to be worried and emotional.

“If we get off track, it’ll only be by a short distance. We can backtrack tomorrow. It’s a chance we’ll have to take,” he said.

“Because of one lousy chopper?”

“Because if they weren’t here to rescue us, then why were they here? Who needs our location? The location of the money.” He stuffed his gear back into the duffel bags, leaving the small tent for last.

She watched him quietly. And after a moment, she moved to help.

She’d been right, he thought an hour later as they walked northeast, the direction the pickup had seemed to be heading, judging by the tracks. Tracks he hadn’t seen for the past five minutes. If the ground had been muddy, or made of soft sand, the twilight would have been enough to pick out the tire tracks. Instead, the area was a combination of dirt and small rocks, the shallow
impression the tires had made difficult enough to follow even in full light. They were losing the trail.

So he made a point in not going too far, not looking for the perfect place, just the nearest clump of acacias that was large enough and thick enough to hide the tent. Another ten minutes brought just such a stand of trees and bushes into view, but another half an hour passed before they reached it.

They set up the tent in silence. The leaves above filtered what little light was left.

He didn’t understand how the cops had found them in the vast desert with such unerring certainty. It was as though the chopper had been headed straight to their tent. And how had they found them in the first place, at the boulder?

Even if Gary had tipped them off to the exchange, Gary hadn’t known where exactly the exchange would take place. Taylor had been given that information little by little, over the phone the kidnappers had left for them. There had to be a locator. He hadn’t found one in the Thermos, and in any case, the Thermos was no longer with them. Chances were that the locator had been someplace else all along.

He went still with the thought. “Come over here.”

T
HE TENT WAS SMALL
and dim, and she didn’t know what he wanted from her, but she was too emotionally exhausted to worry about it.

“If the tracker wasn’t in the Thermos Gary gave you, did he touch you?” His voice was slightly off.

“He gave me a hug when he showed up.” And she’d been so relieved that he was sober and cooperating that she had let him that close, if only for a second.

“He could have planted a tracker on you then.” Akeem was already reaching for her collar, running his sure fingers across the material, the back of his hand brushing the sensitive skin on her neck. “I don’t want to turn on the flashlight in case anyone is out there looking for us. We can check by feel.”

That Gary would betray her like this when their son’s life was at stake defied belief. She stood still for the search, seething with anger.

Until Akeem’s fingers brushed against her collarbone.

She held her breath.

When he didn’t find anything there, he moved on, giving her clothing a thorough examination, down her arms, her waist, her legs to the cuffs on her pants, leaving a tingling path in his wake. But since stripping out of her clothes was the only alternative, she couldn’t very well protest, not even if he was awakening some long-dormant sensations that made it difficult to remain motionless under his hands.

She felt nineteen again, except that she no longer needed beer in her system to dull her inhibitions. She was a grown woman. A woman who could still remember how she had thrown herself at Akeem, had touched him, pulled him close, had pressed her lips to his. She had wanted him with all the passion and desperation of youth.

And she wanted him still.

The realization came as a surprise, leaving her annoyed and embarrassed. And aching for more of his touches. But no way would she ever proposition him like that again. She’d just as soon not repeat the most embarrassing night of her life.