Passion to Protect (3 page)

And if any living creature threatened—whether it was an agitated bear, a rabid coyote or one of the rattlesnakes common to the area—Deke would pull out the .50 caliber revolver he always carried on trips and take care of the situation. He would probably be mad enough to shoot Jake, too, if he let anything happen to Liane.

They continued pressing forward, making better time as the storm diminished. The horses’ steel shoes rang against stone and the leather of their saddles creaked. The air, too, became clearer as the wind shifted direction

“See, this isn’t so bad,” she called to him. “Maybe the weather people got it wrong and the worst is past already.”

“I hope so,” he said.

But the respite didn’t last much longer before a new storm rolled in, the dry wind rising until showers of golden-brown pine needles rained down on their heads. With no other warning, lightning forked across the sky, followed by the distinctive smell of ozone and a boom that shook the air.

At the crash, both horses started, and Jake had to shift his weight abruptly to stay seated.

“You all right?” Liane called, even as her own mount danced and snorted, tossing her head nervously.

“I’ll be fine,” he said, though the healed fracture in his back ached, jarred by the sudden movement. The leg throbbed, too, the phantom pain of severed nerves sending false reminders of the shattering injury. But during his years of wilderness firefighting, Jake had learned to shove his physical discomfort to a locked compartment of his brain where it could be dealt with sometime later. “I don’t know how much more of this these horses will put up with, though.”

As the wind gusted, there was another loud crack, and a large branch hurtled down only steps away. This time the buckskin dropped his head and kicked up, his body twisting with such sudden force that Jake went flying from the saddle.

He landed facedown with a grunt, the shock of the impact rattling every bone and filling. Before he could react, Liane was kneeling beside him, and the dog was in his face, whining and licking at his forehead.

“Jake, are you all right?” she asked. “Out of the way, Misty.”

Pushing himself up on his elbows, he registered the concern in her words—along with the clatter of both their horses’ hoof beats, receding down the trail.

“I’m in one piece, I think,” he said, reaching for his leg to confirm it. Finding the prosthesis still in place, he added, “But I’m sorry about losing the horses.”

“Not your fault—I should’ve known to hold on to my reins, but when I saw you lying down there...” She raised her voice to be heard above the wind as the shepherd paced around her nervously. “Here, let me help you up.”

Under other circumstances, he might have bristled at the offer, but tonight he was grateful to use her for balance. Accepting the hand she offered, he pushed himself upright and held his breath until he was certain he could stand unassisted.

Another bolt of lightning lit the sky, and thunder crashed even closer.

“We can’t keep going in this weather—or risk going back, either!” he shouted. “We need to find one of those caves or overhangs you mentioned before we get fried—or killed by a falling tree.”

Mingled with the smell of smoke, the piney tang of fresh-cut evergreens filled the air around them—an all-too-sharp reminder of the tree that had struck him last year.

“You’re right.” She stooped to pick up his high-impact flashlight where it had fallen, its beam still shining brightly. “But are you sure you’re up for the hike?”

“If you can do it, I can,” he vowed, despite his aching body.

Nodding, she linked her arm through his and started walking, both of them bent low against the smoke-laced wind.

Chapter 3

T
he climb to the closest of the caves Liane remembered would have been daunting for an able-bodied hiker on a sunny day. With tonight’s wind and darkness, it was a nightmare, but Jake kept up with her far better than she would have expected, even managing to hold her upright when she slid on loose rock.

As they made their way upslope, she soon found herself gasping with exertion. Spent, she stopped to rest, and fresh doubt crept into her mind.

“Jake,” she said, “I’m not—I’m not so sure about this anymore. I thought I knew the way, but—”

He found her hand and took it. “Take a moment. Get your bearings.”

Even now, with the wind whipping and the thunder echoing around them, there was something calming in his voice, something that steadied her, just as her mare had responded to her touch.

“I’m pretty sure you’re right, if that helps,” he said. “I remember the cave. It’s the one you took me to that time.”

She shook her head, her face heating. “No, not that place. It’s—that was such a long time ago. I don’t even remember where that was, exactly.”

But of course she
did
. She would never forget untying the rolled blanket from behind her saddle, would never forget leading the boyfriend she’d been so certain she would be with forever by the hand and...

She remembered every moment of it in such vivid detail that she was relieved it was too far to walk to in these conditions, even though, for all she knew, her dad might still stash emergency food, water and raingear there the way he once had. She told herself she couldn’t allow her focus to get mired in the past, not with her family out here somewhere, under this same unsettled sky.

“You were right before,” she said, raising her voice to be heard above the rush of wind. “Everything looks so different in the dark.”

Even the man she’d been avoiding all these months.

As his flashlight’s beam caught a distinctive, chair-shaped rock, she murmured, “This is right, yes,” and started uphill again, this time moving so quickly that he had to struggle to keep pace.

But all too soon she froze, hearing a new sound from a higher elevation—the splintering crash of a tree falling, then spearing its way downhill, its branches snagging and snapping as it picked up speed and sent rocks plummeting.

“Run, Jake! Hurry!” she cried, adrenaline slamming through her system. “Avalanche!”

* * *

Sure enough, Sheriff Harry Wallace found the lines down in not just one but three places along rural Black Oak Road, where trees had fallen across the power and phone wires, effectively cutting off the Mason ranch and a scattering of vacation cabins. The road, too, was obstructed, but he was able to get around or over everything that stood in his way, thanks to four-wheel-drive.

When he reached the homestead, he didn’t see so much as a candle burning or hear the generator running, though he found a silver Jeep he recognized as Liane’s parked next to Deke’s truck. A sinking feeling in his gut, Harry took his flashlight and checked out the perimeter, with a pause to knock at both the front and back doors and call out Liane’s name.

No answer, but there were no signs of forced entry, either, and he could see the red lights of the house’s alarm system—which evidently had a battery backup—blinking, showing that it had been armed. All signs, Harry suspected, that the terrified young mother had done exactly as she’d threatened and ridden off to find her family.

On a night like this one, with her thieving, murderous ex-husband on the loose. The same man, if one could call him that, who had stalked and shot her two years back.

As Harry passed the former hotshot’s pickup on the way to the old bunkhouse, he laid a hand on the older Ford’s blue hood. Cool, as he’d expected, since Whittaker rarely left the place after last summer’s fateful fire. Punishing himself, people were saying, though the investigation that followed had cleared him of all fault in the deaths of the men working under him.

Like most people he knew, Harry thought highly of Jake, but he understood the younger man’s decision to move away from town. Harry had felt guilty enough after being forced to lay off four deputies. How much more painful must it be for Jake, knowing that they’d died following his orders—and that a handful of the dead men’s family members had openly, aggressively, questioned the decisions he had made that terrible night?

Taking in the darkened windows, Harry stepped onto the cabin’s front porch. “Jake?” he called.

No answer. But when he tapped at the door, it swung inward with a loud creak. “What the hell?” he murmured as his flashlight’s beam raked the interior.

The place had been ransacked, the mattress and two upholstered chairs shredded, and the contents of every drawer strewn across the floor. But this had been no robbery, because a laptop computer lay among the mess with its screen smashed, along with a television and what looked to have been an expensive stereo system.

Alarm punching at his chest, he went inside, dreading the thought that he might come across Whittaker’s body buried in the wreckage. Grateful to find no sign of either Jake or any blood as he checked the small bathroom and the bedroom space behind a low partition, Harry struggled to come up with a theory to make sense of the destruction. Could McCleary have come back here and grown jealous of the handsome former boyfriend living too close to his ex for comfort? Or maybe this vandalism had another source. Perhaps someone was still holding a grudge against Jake for what had happened last summer. Or, who knew, maybe it had been some local kids on a drunken spree, or even a hungry bear that had found the door ajar and wandered inside. As for why Jake wasn’t there... Knowing the man’s keen sense of responsibility would trump whatever hurt feelings he might harbor over some old high school romance gone wrong, Harry could easily imagine him riding out with Liane to keep her from searching for her family alone.

As Harry hurried back toward his SUV, he suspected he was deluding himself to even consider that this break-in was coincidental. Still, he prayed it was possible that Jake and all the Masons would somehow get back home safely. Foolish as it might be, he couldn’t help hoping his earlier wishful thinking would prove true, and his old friend’s delay in returning with his grandchildren would prove to be no more criminal than a broken radio and a horse with colic or a thrown shoe.

And above all, he prayed it would have nothing to do with his own failure to warn Deke and Liane that this might happen.

Passing the corral on his way back to his vehicle, Harry went still at the sound of whinnying, then slowly turned his flashlight on the horses.

A dozen or so had crowded near the far end of the enclosure, their attention on another animal shambling into view. As Harry approached, he saw the white foam of exertion on the sweat-soaked chestnut hide, along with a grayish coating of dust.

No, not dust, he realized, his breath hitching as he registered the acrid odor. Ash—and the horse’s tail was singed, the long, brown hairs all crisped or missing. Which had to mean that there was fire between here and Elk Creek Canyon.

“Where the hell are you, Deke?” he murmured, more worried than ever.

Then his gaze found the saddle, and his stomach lurched as he took in the stirrups, which had been shortened for a child’s legs. Even worse, he saw dark splotches marring the brown leather.

Bloodstains, he was certain, and so large they indicated a serious, if not mortal, wound.

“God forgive me,” he murmured, raising his light at the sound of approaching hoof beats. A cloud of dust preceded Deke’s big black mule, Waco, as it came hobbling from the brush. Like the horse, the mule was saddled, but Waco’s tack included a special holster Deke had had made to fit over the pommel.

Deke’s revolver remained in place, the sight of it adding to the nausea swirling in the sheriff’s stomach.

After letting both exhausted animals into the corral, he used a handkerchief to pull the weapon from its holster. A sniff of the muzzle and a check of the chambers confirmed that whatever had happened, his old friend had never even gotten off a shot.

But he wouldn’t give up hope. He couldn’t, so Harry broke into a run, heading back toward his Yukon and his radio, a radio he would use to call in backup from the state, the hotshot fire crews, the search and rescue teams—whoever the hell he could think of—to save whichever of the Masons might still survive.

* * *

Sizing up the crashing sounds from above in a split second, Jake grabbed Liane, holding her firmly in spite of her struggle to run from the avalanche.

“We’re okay here,” he shouted as the slide rocketed past, smashing down more trees with an earsplitting racket that far outstripped the thunder.

She held on to him for dear life, her nails digging into his back. Within seconds it was over, leaving her breathing hard.

“There, you see?” He was breathing just as hard as he gave her a squeeze before releasing her. “But we’d better get out of here before the next one comes.”

“I can’t—can’t believe we’re still alive,” she said.

His senses heightened by their near miss, he grew hyperaware of the warmth of her breath against his face, the way her stiffness slowly dissolved into trembling. The sweet familiarity of her body pressed against his surged through his veins, along with the pell-mell thumping of her heart against his chest.

On more than one occasion he’d dreamed of holding her this close again, a fantasy crafted from stolen glimpses of a woman who treated him as if he were some stranger. A woman whom Deke Mason had warned him needed space.

Jake stepped back from her, heat rushing to his face. A man, especially a man who’d been without female companionship for as many months as he had, couldn’t be blamed for what ran through his head on dark nights in his chilly cabin, especially not with the first woman he’d ever been with living so close by. But Liane was terrified, and with good reason. His own heart was still pounding with the adrenaline surging through his bloodstream. “It’s over now. You’re all right.”

“We’re safe?”

“For the moment, anyway, but we’d better get to shelter before it happens again.”

She nodded, then disentangled herself and started moving back up the mountain. Minutes later she crouched under the lip of a low overhang and waved him inside.

“Whoa, there,” he warned, stepping past her with the flashlight. “Better let me check first, just to make sure nothing else has holed up in here. We definitely don’t want to end up getting between a trapped animal and freedom.”

He ducked his head inside and used his light to skim the recesses of a cave only marginally larger than a box stall. Relieved not to spot any glowing eyes, he said, “Looks clear, but watch where you step. Snakes can be hard to see.”

“I’ll take my chances with the snakes,” she said. “I just want out of this wind.”

She sounded so exhausted that he instinctively—foolishly, he warned himself—reached for her. To his relief, she didn’t fight, only laid her head on his shoulder and gradually relaxed into his embrace. Despite the circumstances, he liked the way she fit—and felt—against him all too well.

The moment served as another painful reminder of how good they’d been together once, and how isolated he’d been since leaving the rehabilitation center. When was the last time he had touched anyone for more than a brief handshake? But with the grandmother who had raised him long gone and his former fellow firefighters too sharp a reminder of things he could never change, he’d told himself that he was better off focusing on adapting to his new life than pining for the old one.

Maybe he’d told himself wrong, at least the part about living like some kind of recluse. Maybe he should adopt a big, slobbery dog that he could run and roughhouse with, and spoil rotten when no one else was looking. Having something he could claim might keep him from latching on to a woman who didn’t want him and a family that wasn’t his.

Or better yet, maybe he just needed to remember the sleepless nights and crushing pain she’d cost him at eighteen, then get out there and find himself a woman with a heart. A woman who would give him a family of his own.

“Tell me, Jake,” she said, the hollowness in her voice making him feel guilty for judging her so harshly. “Tell me this is just some awful nightmare. Tell me we’re both sleeping, and Dad and the kids are safe at home.”

“I wish I could do that,” he said honestly, “or snap my fingers and make everything right for you. But until this storm dies down, there’s nothing I can do.”

“We could call for help, at least.”

“I’ll try,” he promised. “But let’s get you out of this wind first. You’re dead on your feet.”

Unwinding his arms from around her, he edged a little farther inside. Outside, the wind shifted, setting off an unearthly howl as it gusted across the cave mouth like a child blowing over the top of a bottle.

He focused his flashlight on a corner where leaf litter had accumulated and kicked at it with his prosthetic foot, but nothing stirred or slithered.

“Why don’t you sit here and rest?” he suggested, his voice echoing in the enclosed space. “I’ll try the radio again.”

He’d turned and made it several steps away when she said, “Thanks, Jake. And...I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what?” he asked, wondering if it was possible that she, too, might be thinking of their past. That she might be regretting the way things had ended.

“For dragging you into this. And for the way...” as she knelt down in the dry leaves, the noise drowned out her next few words “...probably think I’m the biggest bitch in the county, the way I’ve acted toward you since I came back.”

“What way’s that?” he asked, playing the Clueless Male card. Pretending that it hadn’t cut him to the bone.

“Never mind,” she said, fending off Misty’s attempt to lick her cheek. “I just want you to know how much I appreciate what you’re doing for me. Especially since—”

“Not just for you,” he interrupted, doing his best to compete with the gale. “Your dad’s been—he’s a great guy. A great man. When I first brought up the idea of fixing up the old bunkhouse in exchange for cheaper rent, I was only looking to save some money toward a new truck. I never banked on him insisting on lending me a hand—or turning into one of the best friends I’ve ever had.”