Читать книгу Rock-A-Bye Rescue - Karen Whiddon - Страница 15
ОглавлениеLila gaped at Dean. Not leaving? Didn’t she have enough to deal with between the cranky foster baby and a murderer on the loose and looking for her cabin? A chill slithered through her at the reminder. The last thing she needed was her teenage crush hanging around. A man who was a confusing mix of scruffy and sexy, bad boy and military hero, tough and gentle. He made her head spin and her heart race at a time when she needed more than ever to keep her wits about her.
A murderer wanted to come after Eve!
“Dean...” she began, trying to sound reasonable, which was not easy with his brawn towering over her and his intense dark eyes boring into her. “You can’t—”
“I don’t know can’t.”
His reply confused her further. “Wha—?”
“Can’t isn’t in my vocabulary.” He squared his shoulders. “I don’t do can’t. Can’t is for quitters.”
She sighed and dodged Eve’s head as the baby wiggled and almost smacked into her chin. “Look, as much as I appreciate the whole Zig Ziglar act, my world has kinda imploded in the last few hours, and I need—”
“A bodyguard,” he said, at the same time she said, “—you to leave.”
His pronouncement rattled her, and she blinked at him.
“You need a bodyguard,” he repeated and stepped toward her. “If there is a nut-job cult guy headed up here, you need more than a shotgun you’re unwilling to fire to protect you.”
She wanted to protest, to convince him she could shoot a man if needed, but...could she?
“Until you have the assurance of the FBI that all danger from this Pitts character has passed,” he said, “I’m not leaving this cabin. Not without you, anyway. The truth is, we should all clear out until this cult guy is captured.”
His offer to protect her silenced her. For several seconds, she fumbled mentally to process his offer—no, his dictate. He hadn’t asked if she wanted his help; he’d declared he was staying, her wishes be damned.
Finally she cleared her throat and managed to stutter, “Special Agent D-Dunn said...um, a police officer is coming.”
“Good.” He jerked a nod. “That’s the least they can do.”
“With this ice storm and bad road conditions, Special Agent Dunn said that moving anywhere is dangerous. Besides, since they’ve sent someone to watch my place, there’s no need to move me anywhere. Anyway, you don’t have to—”
“But the cop’s not here yet. And while having a cop, probably a rookie, sitting in his patrol car in your driveway is helpful, it’s not enough. I’m staying.”
She should be affronted by his high-handedness, but she was...relieved. Because in truth, the idea of the Pitts brothers hunting down the babies, the prospect of protecting little Eve should one of these dangerous men show up at her cabin, scared her spitless. She didn’t want to be alone—even if his company made her nervous and uneasy on a different level.
The fact that Dean was strong and skilled with a weapon didn’t hurt. She might have questions about his integrity, based on his youthful crimes of vandalism, petty theft and trespassing, but she’d never heard anything about him being violent or vicious.
When she made no reply, Dean strode to the front door, unlocked it and yanked it open. “So—” He took the shotgun from the porch, where he’d set it and came inside. “Is this thing loaded?”
It wasn’t. “Well...”
He groaned and rolled his eyes. “Geez, Lila! You threatened a trespasser, a potential thief with an unloaded weapon? Are you insane?”
She frowned. “We are still talking about you, right? I’d have thought you’d be glad to know I couldn’t have really hurt you.”
“What if it hadn’t been me?” He stalked into her kitchen, lit only by the watery daylight from one small window thanks to the power outage, and started opening drawers. “Do you understand how vulnerable you are up here by yourself?”
“What are you doing?” She carried Eve into the kitchen, closing drawers in his wake.
“Cell reception is spotty at best. The nearest neighbor is on the other side of the ridge,” he continued as he searched her kitchen, “and emergency help is at least thirty minutes away. Probably more, given the ice storm.”
“What’s your point?” She slammed shut a cabinet he’d opened.
He lifted the shotgun by the barrel. “Where’s your ammunition for this thing? Since we’re stuck here, we need to be ready if one of the Pittses gets here before the cops do.”
She shuddered and nodded toward the back of the house. He was right, of course. And it rattled her to think he’d been quicker to think through the ramifications and needed preparations. She had a duty to protect Eve, and she’d let Dean distract her, even if briefly. “I, um...in the laundry room.”
He headed down the dark hall, still lecturing her, his tone just short of angry. “The locks on your front door wouldn’t keep a hungry bear out, much less a seasoned burglar. You still haven’t answered me about whether you have a generator. And I’m guessing your windows can be jimmied open from outside with a screwdriver if they’re like the ones at my parents’ cabin.”
“If you’re trying to frighten me—” She swallowed hard. She’d never considered all the weaknesses in the cabin’s security. “It’s working.”
Lila pushed past him to reach into a cabinet over her washing machine. Taking the box of shotgun cartridges down, she shoved the ammunition into his hand.
He sighed, and in the semidark room, the sound seemed amplified. “I’m not trying to scare you. But if you’re going live up here alone, you have to think about these things. Take better precautions.”
“We’ve never had a problem in all the years my parents vacationed here or rented the place in the off-season. Even when you went on your crime spree as a teenager.” She hated her cattiness as soon as she spoke it, but his preaching to her about staying safe from thieves was sublime irony, and her own edginess was sharpening her tone. She took a breath to calm down. He was, in his own way, trying to help.
A grunt rumbled from Dean’s chest. “If I didn’t break in here, it was because I didn’t want to, not because I couldn’t,” he growled. “And a track record is simply history, not a predictor of the future.”
Eve was getting especially squirmy, and her whimpers were tuning back up to full cries of distress. Lila could imagine the tension in their voices was a factor in the baby’s fussiness. She lowered the volume and hostility in her voice when she replied, “I agree this cabin is far from Fort Knox, but it is quiet and inspiring and restful. That’s all I was concerned with when I moved here a few months ago. I didn’t realize I’d need to keep a murderer at bay or—” she waved a hand toward him “—neighbors from stealing from my ax.”
“Give it a rest. I would have brought the ax back.” He brushed by her and disappeared down the hall, leaving behind a hint of his scent—wood smoke and crisp soap. She stared into the blackness of the laundry room, quaking at her core. But whether her tremors were from the fear that still hovered like an apparition, from their heated discussion, or from the casual contact of his body as he scooted past, she couldn’t say. Probably all of the above.
Eve rubbed a damp fist in her eye, a clear indication of how tired the baby was. “Okay. To bed with you, little one.”
She stopped at the nursery and found Chloe sleeping in the crib. “Hey, you. That’s not your bed. Scat, cat.” She nudged the sleepy feline, but Chloe didn’t budge. “Vamoose, fuzzy girl. That’s the baby’s bed.”
Chloe tucked her head down and got comfortable again.
“Come on, Chloe. Please, move.” Lila gave the cat’s butt a push.
Still Chloe ignored her until Eve let out a loud wail of discomfort.
Putting her ears back, the cat gaped wide-eyed at the baby then jumped out of the crib and scurried out the nursery door. Probably to hide under Lila’s bed, if she knew her cat.
“Sorry, Chloe!” Lila changed Eve’s diaper before putting her in the crib. The little girl fought sleep for a minute or two while Lila patted Eve’s back and stroked her head before Eve’s eyelids drooped closed for good. With a flip of a switch, Lila turned on the nursery monitor and picked up the receiver. When she tiptoed out of the bedroom, she found Dean on the couch, the shotgun across his lap as he loaded it.
She watched his deft movements in silence for a moment, and without looking up from his task he said, “You have a cat.”
“Yes. Why?”
“I almost shot it.”
Lila tensed. “What!”
“It came tearing out of the nursery and startled me.”
Her jaw dropped. “So you shoot first and ask questions later?”
“Did you hear me shoot anything?”
She tucked her hair behind her ear. “No.”
He glanced at her and lifted one eyebrow in a manner that said, So there. “Any other animals around here that might burst out of the shadows?”
“Are you always this jumpy?”
“Only since my last tour. I guess it was the proverbial straw that broke me.”
Lila pulled her shoulders back and regarded him with a frown furrowing her brow. And how was she supposed to take that announcement? Sympathy and a new edginess toward him tangled in her chest. If a cat could startle him, how did he expect to protect her and Eve?
While she studied him, he said, “I apologize for yelling earlier. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“You didn’t.”
He cut a brief, dubious glance in her direction. “So pale and shaking are your norm?”
“I—” Lila puffed out a breath through pursed lips. “Okay, so you rattled me. But I was already upset because of the call, and the baby crying and...” She raked her hair back from her face with her fingers and cast a glance toward her front door, double-checking that Dean had relocked it when he came back inside with the shotgun. “Besides, you’re one to talk if Chloe running into the hall frightened you.”
“I said startled, not frightened. I’m good.”
She hummed her skepticism, then continued to watch him silently.
Another few quiet seconds passed, marked by the loud ticking of her mantel clock. “I do have a generator. Out back. It’s old, but I think it still works.”
He nodded. “I’ll take a look when I finish here.”
Lila rubbed her arms. The cabin was drafty on a good day, but without the electric heater and with the wind beginning to pick up outside, the temperature in the cabin was rapidly dropping. “I should build a fire,” she said, mostly thinking aloud.
Dean looked up from the shotgun. “I can do that.”
“No. I can handle it.” She hurried over to the hearth and kneeled. As she started stacking kindling and split wood on the grate, she added, “Thanks.”
“Hmm?”
“I said thank you. For your help. I know I’ve acted anything but grateful so far, but...” She sat back on her heels and dusted her hands. “I am glad you’re here. I appreciate your precautions. This whole horrifying situation—ice storms and escaped murderers wanting to kill innocent children—I don’t know why I’m lucky enough to be caught in the middle of this insanity, but...it would be even more terrifying if I was facing it alone. We may have gotten off on the wrong foot this morning, but thank you for overlooking my judgmental assumptions about you and volunteering to stick around until—”
Dean grunted loudly and shook his head. “You’re right.”
She blinked. “What?”
“You do prattle when you’re nervous.”
She huffed a sigh. “Oh. Sorry.”
He stood from the couch and propped the shotgun against the side table. “Whatever. Just an observation. I’ll take a look at the generator now.”
With a nod, she turned back to the fire she was building, struck a match and held it to the shreds of paper she’d stuffed under the wood. Once the fire caught the logs, she followed Dean outside, taking the shotgun with her.
He crouched by the generator and tinkered with the motor. Before she even reached him and without turning, he said, “It didn’t crank on my first try, but I think it just needs a little maintenance.”
“How did you—”
“You have a light step, but I still heard you coming.”
“I could have been the killer. The cop, an animal.”
He sent a you’re-not-funny look over his shoulder.
“I smelled your perfume, too.”
“I don’t wear perfume.”
“Shampoo, then. Or body lotion. Whatever.” He rose to his feet and faced her. Arching one eyebrow, he let his gaze dart to the shotgun and back to her face. “You smell like flowers, and I’ve been trained to be fully aware of my surroundings at all times.”
“I see.” Knowing he was so keenly alert to her scent and the sound of her approach sent an odd tickle to her belly. Such an intimate awareness was usually reserved for close family...or lovers. She pushed the sensation away and said, “And yet Chloe almost got shot.”
“Give it a rest. I wouldn’t have really shot at your cat.” He sighed and added, “I was surprised by the cat, yes, but I’m okay. Really. Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m a time bomb. I’m fine. Just...don’t sneak up on me again. Okay?”
She raised a hand. “Fine.”
“This should only take a minute. You can wait inside if you want to get out of the cold.”
She glanced toward the front door and considered going in. It was cold out. A damp, bone-chilling cold. But somehow, as strange as it seemed, she felt safer outside. With Dean. She gave a wry chuckle with that realization, and her exhaled breath made a white cloud.
As Dean continued tinkering, she alternated between studying him—his chiseled profile, which had only improved as he aged—and glancing nervously to the frosted woods, where the icy branches shimmered as they swayed in the chilly breeze. She tried to appreciate the sparkle of the ice with an artist’s eye, but the notion of a killer lurking in her woods tainted even the fairylike beauty of the wintry scene. The ping of ice pellets created an added tension, like the ticking of a clock.
While her attention was focused on the wind picking up and the clatter of frozen branches swaying in the increasing gusts, Dean cranked the generator. The engine roared to life.
For the second time that day, she yelped her surprise. Clapping a hand over her thundering heart, she spun back toward him. “Geez, Dean. A little warning next time?”
He arched an eyebrow. “Now who’s jumpy?”
She rolled her shoulders to loosen the tense muscles. “Can you blame me? With a murderer headed up to my cabin?”
He dusted off his hands and twisted his mouth in a noncommittal moue. “You need to distract yourself somehow. Stop thinking about it.”
“Really?” She sent him a skeptical eye roll. “How do you propose I do that?”
He shrugged as he rose from his crouch. “Paint.”
She shook her head. “No. Too many distractions.”
“Then you could make us lunch.”
“How can you even think of food? My stomach is in knots.”
“So I get nothing in exchange for fixing your generator and providing you with power?” For the first time, she heard a teasing note in his tone that did as much to calm her as any distraction she could think of.
She tried for a similar lightness, even though her voice remained strained. “I guess you’ve earned some soup. Maybe a sandwich, too, if it means you’ll stop growling at me like a hungry bear.”
“Grrr!” he replied with a droll smirk, but the low rumble from his throat was far more sexy than it was intimidating. “I’ll stop growling at you if you promise to stop aiming shotguns at me and bringing up my less-than-noble past.”
She twitched a grin. “Deal.”
He placed a hand at her back to steer her inside, and while the gesture was minor in the big picture, a warm sense of reassurance flowed through her. Dean was here. He was competent, confident and in control of the situation.
Wow, I’ve sure done a one-eighty with regard to him in the last hour, she acknowledged as she headed inside with him.
She led him into her kitchen, where she took out a container of homemade vegetable soup, some cold cuts and condiments. “The bread is over there.” She pointed toward her counter.
“In the bread box?” he asked, opening the wooden storage. “Imagine that.”
She chuckled at herself. “Hmm. Yeah.” Then with a playful grin, she tipped her head. “I’m ingenious that way. Guess where I keep my cookies?”
He faced her with an expression of exaggerated intrigue. Raising one dark eyebrow, he opened the drawer in front of him. “Cookies? You have cookies?” He moved to the oven and the dishwasher, opening each in turn, then moving closer to her. “Am I getting warmer?”
She chuckled at his playfulness. She remembered his sense of humor from their earlier acquaintance. His ability to make her laugh had been one of the things that first drew her to him. Along with his dark good looks. And his bad-boy image.
“Colder.”
Despite her direction, he moved closer to her, checking more drawers. When he reached her, he grabbed the hem of her sweater and flipped it up to bare her midriff. “Are they in here?”
With a startled gasp, she swatted his hand away, smoothing the sweater back into place. “Dean!”
“I don’t know about you, but I think I’m getting warmer.” He edged closer, crowding her personal space. He tucked her hair behind her ear, allowing his crooked finger to brush her cheek. “What do you think, Lila? Am I warmer? Are you?”
“Dean, I—” The rest of her sentence snagged in her throat when he leaned in to steal a soft kiss. Her head spun dizzily, and a flash of heat raced through her blood. Desire coiled in her belly, and her most intimate places throbbed with longing. Warmer? Oh, yes. In an instant, he’d managed to set her on fire.
He placed another breath-stealing kiss on her lips, then stepped back, snapping his fingers as if inspired. “The cookie jar!”
With a puckish smile, he crossed the floor to the opposite counter where her whimsical Kermit the Frog cookie jar sat. When he lifted the lid and spied the peanut butter cookies she’d made yesterday, he crowed, “Score!” He gobbled a cookie down in two bites, wearing a smug look. “The cookie jar. You can’t fool me, you minx.”
Lila pressed a hand to her belly, where a host of butterflies flapped furiously. “Gee, I thought that one would stump you.”
Outside, another loud snap echoed through the woods, and a stiff wind whistled through her eaves. The haunting noises were enough to spoil the brief moment of levity. Reminded of her situation and the looming threat to Eve, Lila’s muscles tightened again. Moving stiffly, she took a pot from her lower cabinet and set it on the stove. “So...soup? It’s vegetable beef.”
The soft shuffle of his feet across her hardwood floor was her only warning before he stepped close behind her and set his hands on her shoulders. Her flinch spoke for itself. She was all wound up and ready to shatter.
“Soup is fine, but I can heat it myself.” His low murmur and warm breath near her ear didn’t help calm her. If anything, it stirred her pulse to a fevered pitch.
She bit her bottom lip, still damp from his kiss, and tried to center herself. “What happened to me needing a distraction?”
His fingers dug into her shoulder muscles, kneading...tantalizing. “Yeah, a distraction would be good. You’re as tight as a drum.”
Her hands shook as she pulled the lid off the soup and dumped it in the pan to heat. She closed her eyes as he continued massaging her shoulders. The deep strokes felt divine, and she had to brace her knees to keep from melting into a puddle of goo. The hypnotizing massage was muddling her thoughts. Fueling the lust in her core. I should stop him...
Instead, she prayed he’d never quit. If she died now, she’d die happy. A small moan of bliss slipped from her throat as she let her head loll forward, giving him better access to the stiffness in her neck and upper back. Hussy! her conscience hissed.
He chuckled softly, and his hands moved up her nape into her hair. “If you keep making sexy noises like that, I’m gonna have to kiss you again. This time, for real.”
Finding the air in her lungs to speak was difficult, but she managed to rasp, “Dean, I can’t... I don’t want...”
His hands stilled, dropped from her arms, and she almost wept for the lost contact. She turned to face him, ready to defend her choice, while at the same time regretting her hesitance. Damn Carl and the pain he’d caused her! This reluctance was his fault, his legacy.
“What don’t you want? Me?” Dean ran a finger along her cheek, and she shivered. “’Cause I don’t believe that. That’s not what your body is saying.”
He stood close enough for her chest to brush his, for her to have to tip back her head to meet his gaze, for her to note that his bister eyes grew even darker when he was aroused. What was darker brown than bister? Zinnwaldite? She gave her head a shake. Who cared? Wasn’t it enough that they were intently focused on her, that she could read his desire for her in those dark, brooding depths?
“Okay, I’d be lying if I denied feeling something for you, but...” She wiggled loose of his grasp with a defeated sigh and stalked to the living room, stewing. “I followed my heart in the past and got burned. This time, I have to listen to my head.”
She heard the clomp of Dean’s boots as he crossed the floor, sensed him moving up behind her.
“Are you telling me,” he asked, “that there is a this time?”
