Men-of-Action-Seres-04 -Saints and Sinners (2 page)

When they were far enough away from the hut for her to resume talking she attempted to get answers. First on her priority list was where was he taking her? They weren't headed toward the river; she was more sure of that now than she had been before.

"The river isn't in this direction, so where are we going?"

"Some place safe."

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"Safe? Right." She wasn't so sure he was safe. After all, he had shot her.

"What does it matter as long as you're not there anymore?"

"Believe it or not they weren't that bad to me. Not perfect gentlemen, but better than I expected. After Edita...well I guess I just expected them to kill me too."

"Edita?"

"Long story." She didn't want to recap events for him. She didn't want to do it at all, but she was sure once she reached the States she would have to answer to somebody.

"So, are you going to tell me your name now?"

He walked silently. The light of day was starting to fade into night.

She was scared to keep going, even more afraid to stop. They would have to stop eventually. He may have been able to keep walking without sleep, but she couldn't.

"Sully Masterson."

"What?"

"That's my name." As quickly as he had spoken he was quiet again.

"Oh, thank you. Why did they send you? My mom is CIA, not military."

He said nothing in response.

"I do not doubt your abilities...other than the fact that you shot me, but I'm just curious."

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"Don't be. I'm sure you're aware that things work on a need to know basis."

"Oh and I don't need to know?" She studied his expression the best she could with the fading light and their steady pace. The last thing she needed was to trip over a branch and fall down a hill. "Or you didn't?"

There was the possibility that Sully knew less about his mission than one would have assumed. He had been sent to retrieve her, and that may have been all he knew.

"I know what I need to know."

"You see I couldn't live like that. You're risking your life and you're okay with "I know what I need to know". I'd want to know everything. The who, the why, the where and the what of the situation. My dad always said I was too inquisitive for government work. Honestly it never appealed to me—"

"What gave you the impression that I wanted to converse with you?"

She stopped walking and looked up at him. He didn't stop walking, and showed no signs of doing so, so she followed behind him once more.

"If answering your questions leads to conversation I can stop answering them. I don't need to talk with you."

Apparently rude and tactless were two of his dominant qualities.

She didn't need to know more about him, and she certainly didn't want to.

"I've been without conversation for the greater part of three weeks…or Capri Montgomery 11

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more,” she had tried to keep track, but maybe she had lost some days along the way. “I just needed to talk with somebody."

"You'll have plenty of people to talk with when you get back to the States."

"Forgive me for trying to be civil," she said. "It won't happen again." She had no intention of trying to be peaceable with a man who had shot her, dragged her around like a rag doll and been unbearably rude to her. He didn't want to talk, she wouldn't talk. She had no problem with walking in silence.

"Why are you so cruel?" Maybe she did have a problem with silence because two seconds ago she was assuring herself she wasn't going to talk to the man.

He grunted his disapproval. She wasn't sure if he disapproved of the question, or of her inability to be silent. "I haven't done anything to you, yet you've been abrasive from the start. And now we're going the wrong way, and I'm tired, my feet hurt and I could really use some water."

He stopped walking and turned toward her. One look in his eyes reminded her of his promise. "Shutting up," she held her hands up in surrender.

"Stop complaining. You're half way out of danger and if you'd just keep your mouth shut and keep walking we'll be out of here soon."

"Complaining? I'd like to see you walk through rocks, sticks and God knows what else without your shoes." In fact, she wanted to suggest Saints and Sinners 12

he kick off his shoes and give it a try; they could see how tough he really was then.

He looked down at her bare feet. The blank expression on his face told her nothing of what he was thinking, or feeling—if he had any feelings.

"Where are your shoes?"

"They took them the first day. I think they didn't want me running away; not that I had much opportunity for that." Even if she did have the opportunity, she wasn’t sure she would know which direction to go. They had walked in circles, or what seemed like circles, for hours before getting to the hut.

Sully hadn't noticed before that she was barefoot. She didn't blame that on a lack of observation because when Mr. Chavez was holding her at knife point she noticed he had fully assessed the situation. No, he hadn't noticed her lack of shoes because her pants were more than an inch too long and depending on the way she stood the hem fell just over the tip of her toes. He probably assumed she was wearing sandals, which meant he probably assumed she was the typical unprepared city girl.

"Sit down."

She didn't protest his choice of words; she simply sat on the rock beside her, happy in the brief reprieve he had allowed her. He knelt beside her, roughly took her ankle in his hand and pulled her leg up so that the bottom of her foot was visible to him. She had to brace her hands on the edge of the rock to keep from falling backwards.

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"You're bleeding."

"You shot me."

"Your foot is bleeding," he countered.

"Oh. That explains a lot." She looked up to the trees. She could barely see the sky above, just a hint of light still peeking through the leaves made her surroundings visible. Sully seemed to be doing just fine with vision even if she wasn't. She watched as he pulled tweezers from his pocket and commenced snatching shards of pebble and wood from her feet. "Ouch," she tried to jerk her foot back, but he held on with a death grip.

"Be still."

"Easy for you to say," yet she tried to sit still, flinching only at the harshest pain. He pulled a bandage from another pocket and wrapped her foot before carrying out the same treatment on her left foot. When he was finished he stood, towering over her.

"We need to keep moving."

She sighed in desperation before willing her legs to help support the rest of her body.

"It won't be much longer. We're almost there."

She didn't know where "there" was, but she was glad she was almost to it. She wasn't a weak woman by most counts. She spent three days a week rock climbing indoors and outdoors. She danced four days a week, Tango, Salsa, anything that got her cardio up and kept her interest Saints and Sinners 14

longer than five minutes. She was in shape, but for some reason this walk seemed like a lifetime hike.

Alaina stood up straight, shook the tired, desperate feelings from her mind and nodded her consent. She would not be the weak link in the equation. No matter his reason for being incessantly rude to her, Sully had saved her life. He had rescued her from the hut and he was guiding her to safety. The least she could do was try to make his job easier.

His rapport hadn't changed. He was still as silent as he was before.

She had just tuned into herself and locked herself away in her own thoughts. As a child, when her father had business to attend to, she would sit in his office and draw or shoot with the little pink 110 camera he had given her. After she had exhausted those activities she would sit on the floor and think about nothing in particular. She never wanted to disrupt him, she just wanted to sit and be with him. In her mind he really was the only parent she had. Her mother was never interested in her as a child. She wasn't even sure Liz wanted her. It wasn't Liz's work that was the problem. Working women had children and somehow they managed to fit it all in. She went to school with children who had mothers who worked, but still managed to take interest in their grades, their homework, even their life. Liz never seemed to do that, and after Alaina's father was murdered things got worse.

Liz had taken her out of school and opted for home schooling.

Alaina liked home schooling, but she missed having somebody to talk with. She hated the first nanny, even the second, but the third nanny Capri Montgomery 15

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showed promise and even she didn't last long. By the time Alaina turned fourteen she was staying home by herself, cooking her own meals, and the only thing she had for company was her art. On some level she was thankful for her isolation. Had she had friends in the neighborhood, or gone to school, she wouldn't have spent as much time as she did perfecting her craft.

She tried to see the positive. She never wanted for anything other than love. Her art supplies were provided, food was always on the shelves and in the refrigerator. The bills were always paid, and when she turned sixteen she received a little Ford pickup truck. Of course Liz had found a way to get even that gift mentioned in the paper, and somehow the woman who was "single handedly raising a child after the murder of her husband, and running a major intelligence agency," had managed to seem like she should be nominated for mother of the year. Alaina never complained; she simply counted the days until her eighteenth birthday when she could strike out on her own. She had saved money, had work shown in student art shows and emerging artists shows throughout the country all so that she could be prepared to live without financial assistance from her mother once she was legally able to leave home.

She finished school at sixteen, and two years later she left for Seattle. Washington was far away from her mother and even farther away from the chaos that her mother's job seemed to bring into her life. At twenty-four she moved to New York where she spent most of her time working as an artist and instructing seminars at art schools throughout the Saints and Sinners 16

state. By the time she reached twenty-eight she was ready to move on again and that's when she found home. Portland Maine had been her father's favorite place to vacation and being there made her feel closer to him somehow. Between art shows and seminars she hadn't broken out of her shell. She truly was an island all of her own making. And then, Troy Christianson came into her life and she felt as if she had found what she had silently been searching for.

Troy wasn't drop dead gorgeous like some of the models she had worked with in New York, but he was smart, and funny, and a little brazen. He had been covering an art exhibit her pieces were being featured in and he wasted no time in introducing himself. He strolled over at a leisurely pace and stopped near inches from her before saying, "I'm Troy Christianson, reporter for The Daily News. I cover entertainment for now, but I'm working my way up to the hard stories, murder, conspiracy theories, aliens." He laughed.

"Well I'm not a murderer, and as far as I know I'm not an alien, but as you can tell from some of my work I have plenty of conspiracy theories to keep you busy." She laughed, he laughed and from there the relationship took off at an alarming rate. He had been trying to assure her he was ambitious, with goals and he wasn't trying to get in on her money, but she never once even considered the possibility that he was. He had blue eyes, short cut blonde hair, and at five foot nine he seemed safe. He was neither muscular nor skinny, fat nor perfectly lean. He wasn't her type, although she didn't really know she had one.

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There was something about him that took hold of her heart and he became her world outside of the one she had created within herself. And then he too died, too soon and too young. He had left her life as abruptly as her father had—without warning, without reason.

Troy was the first person in her life, since her dad, that she felt actually cared about her, loved her. It wasn't that he listened when she talked, although he did do that. It wasn't that he cooked her dinner, although he did that too. It was how supportive he was, how freely he shared his world with her and how incredibly at peace he made her feel.

She loved him. For the first time, in a long time, she remembered what love felt like, and how much she missed having love in her life. When he died she felt that empty, lonely feeling again. She immersed herself in her work in an effort to move on, and she did move on. She still missed him, she still missed being loved the way he loved her, but she filled that void with her art and it somehow made everything else in her life feel bearable.

Being held captive was her wakeup call. She needed something more in her life than work. She was in essence becoming a nicer version of her mother. She wasn't neglecting a family; she was neglecting herself, her needs. Work wasn't all there was to life, no matter how much she loved what she did. She needed to make friends, to date, maybe even fall in love again. Two years was a long time to grieve, it was time to allow herself to open her heart again. When she got home she would try to remind herself of that promise.