Читать книгу Boneyard Ridge - Пола Грейвс - Страница 10
ОглавлениеNight had leached all the warmth from the hills, leaving behind a bitter, damp cold that bit all the way to the marrow. The collection of bone fragments, steel plates and screws holding his left leg together joined forces in a cacophony of pain, but Hunter ignored the aches and kept moving.
He wasn’t sure what the men with the guns would do once they realized he’d spirited their target away, but he knew whatever punishment they chose would be brutal and deadly.
Not getting caught was the only option.
A hiss of pain escaped Susannah’s lips, but he couldn’t let her stop running. Not yet. He could hear the sound of pursuers crashing through the woods behind them, a stark reminder of the consequences of being captured.
“Please,” she groaned, tugging at his hand until he slowed the pace, sparing a second to look at her.
In the faint moon glow slanting through the canopy of trees overhead, Susannah’s dark eyes gazed up at him in pain and fear. “My feet,” she whispered.
He looked down and saw she was barefoot. Blood stained her toes, and he thought about the hard, rocky trail they’d just crossed.
Damn it.
Scanning the woods around them, he spotted a rocky outcropping due east. “Get on my back,” he said.
She stared back at him, her mouth trembling open. “What?”
“You either run on those feet or you get on my back. Or you stay here and let those guys back there catch up with you.”
Her jaw squared. “Who are they? Who are you?”
He tried not to lose his patience, even though the sound of the chasers behind them seemed closer than ever. “They’re the people shooting at you. I’m the guy who’s offering to be your damn mule if you’ll just shut up and get on my back.”
Her mouth flattened to a thin line of anger, but she limped toward him as he bent at the knees, grimacing at the strain on his bad leg, and let her climb onto his back. He grabbed her thighs to hold her in place, surprised and annoyed at how the feel of her firm flesh beneath his fingers sent a sharp, undeniable arrow of lust straight to his groin,
Not the time, Bragg. Really not the time.
She wasn’t a featherweight, but running with a heavy load on his back wasn’t exactly a new thing to Hunter after two tours of duty in the Army. He’d been looking for a test of his reconstructed leg, hadn’t he? Here it was.
It was lucky the rock outcropping was only a half mile distant, he reflected once they reached it and he put her down to rest for a few seconds while he searched the granite wall for any sign of a nook or alcove in the rock face. He found it seconds before he decided to give up and started back toward where he’d left Susannah, only to find that she was a few feet behind, her eyes wide and haunted.
“What are we doing?” she asked in a hushed tone.
“Hiding,” he answered succinctly, sweeping her up into his arms.
She made a soft hiss of surprise but didn’t resist as he carried her through the dark opening into a cold, black abyss.
* * *
NO LIGHT. No sound but that of air flowing in and out of their lungs, fast and harsh in the deep, endless void. After a few seconds, even that sound settled into the faintest of whispers, easily eclipsed by the roar of Susannah’s pulse in her ears.
A sliver of deep gray relieved the darkness after a few moments, as her eyes adjusted. The narrow mouth of the cavern, she realized. The only way out. Or in.
If she weren’t so bloody terrified, she might find a spot of bleak humor in the idea of being curled up in the hard-muscled arms of a man she knew only as “the sad-sack maintenance man,” her bare feet bruised and bleeding, while they hid in a cave from unidentified gunmen.
It was like one of those movies her grandmother liked to watch on cable, the ones where the women were all beautiful, noble victims who inexplicably spent years being treated like garbage by the men in their lives before they finally found their backbones and fought back.
To hell with being a victim, she thought. “What’s your name?” she whispered. Because he clearly wasn’t the sad sack she’d thought. And if he was just a maintenance man, she was the Queen of England.
“Hunter,” he answered after a moment.
“Susannah,” she whispered back. “I guess you know that already, though.”
“Yeah.” His grip on her tightened convulsively, as if he was about to drop her. She grabbed his shoulders in reaction, her fingers digging into an impressive set of muscles.
“Sorry,” he whispered.
“You can put me down.”
He eased her down until she stood upright, her sore feet flattening on the cold rock floor of the cave. “What happened to your shoes?”
“I kicked them off to run from you. I thought I’d be crossing nice flat concrete, not rocky soil.”
“Sorry,” he repeated.
He sounded as if he really was sorry, she realized. Of course, maybe that’s what he wanted her to think. Maybe he was trying to lull her into being a docile captive.
But two could play that game. If he thought she had decided to go along agreeably, he might drop his guard sooner, giving her a chance to make a break for it.
“You really don’t know who those people out there are?” she asked, not believing it for a second.
He didn’t answer. Now that she was on her feet, he’d moved slightly away, although she could still feel the furnacelike heat of his body close by, helping cut the biting cold of the cave.
A few seconds later, when it became clear he had no intention of answering her previous question, she asked, “How long before they give up?”
“They don’t,” he replied.
She’d been afraid of that. “Then how do we get out of here?”
He didn’t answer right away, and she felt more than saw him move toward the cave entrance.
She followed, noting with some dismay that while the pain in her feet had lessened, it was mainly because the cold had begun to render them numb. He edged over, giving her an opening to look outside with him, and she slid into the narrow space, her arm brushing his. He really was very muscular, she thought as she peered into the misty gloom.
Scudding clouds gathered overhead, blotting out most of the moonlight filtering through the trees. The darkness outside loomed like a physical entity, threatening and impenetrable.
“Rain’s comin’,” Hunter whispered, his drawl pronounced. Definitely a mountain native, she thought.
“Is that good or bad?” she asked.
He gave a little shrug, his shoulder sliding against hers. Heat slithered down her arm into her fingertips, catching her off guard.
Good God, woman, she scolded herself silently, inching her arm away from his. He’s your captor. And not in a good way.
“I don’t see anyone out there,” he whispered after a few minutes. “I think if we go a little deeper into this cave, we might risk a light.”
“A light?”
“Flashlight,” he said softly, tugging her with him away from the cave entrance. She stepped gingerly after him, less from pain than from the fear that her numb feet wouldn’t know it even if she were walking across a field of broken glass.
A few seconds later, a beam of light slanted across the damp cave walls, illuminating the tight space they occupied. The cave was narrow but surprisingly long, twisting out of sight into the rock wall. Hunter swept the light across the visible space, as if reassuring himself they were alone.
“No bears?” she whispered, quelling a shudder.
“Not at the moment.” He flashed an unexpected smile, baring straight white teeth and a surprising pair of dimples high on each cheek. A flutter of raw female awareness vibrated low in her belly, and she jerked her gaze away, appalled by her reaction.
His hand brushed lightly down one arm, scattering goose bumps where he touched her. He closed his fingers around her wrist, his grip solid but gentle. “Let’s take a quick look at your feet.” He tugged her with him toward a shelflike slab of rock jutting out from the cave wall. “Sit.”
She complied, wincing as the coldness of the rock blasted right through her skirt and underwear to chill her backside.
“Sorry. Didn’t bring a seat warmer.”
But he had brought supplies, she saw with growing alarm, as he reached into the pocket of his jacket and withdrew a soft-sided zippered bag that contained a compact stash of first-aid supplies.
Had he known beforehand that he was going to need to treat a wound?
He ripped open a packet and the sharp tang of rubbing alcohol cut through the musty odor of the cave. “This is gonna sting,” he warned a split second before he wiped the alcohol swab across one of the jagged scrapes on the bottom of her foot.
“Son of a—” She clamped her teeth shut and gripped the edge of the outcropping doubling as her seat.
“Sorry.” Once again, he sounded sincere, making her feel off balance.
He worked quickly, efficiently, as if he was used to offering aid. Hell, maybe he was. Maybe he was some sort of psychotic cross between Dr. McDreamy and Hannibal Lecter. Emphasis on the McDreamy, she added silently as she watched the muscles of his back flex visibly beneath the thick leather jacket he wore.
He couldn’t conjure up a new pair of shoes from his little first-aid kit, but he did wrap her feet in a liberal amount of gauze. As footwear, the gauze didn’t have a chance of lasting through another wild hike through the woods, but for the moment, the gauze was bringing her numb feet back to tingling, aching life.
She was beginning to wish they were still numb.
With her feet safely bandaged, Hunter turned off the flashlight, plunging them back into icy blackness. The shocking change from light to dark sent another hard shiver through Susannah’s chilled body.
Then warmth washed over her as Hunter settled on the rocky seat next to her, his hip pressed firmly against hers. She felt his arm wrap around her shoulder, and even though she wanted to pull away from his touch, the sheer relief his vibrant heat offered her shivering body was too much of a comfort to rebuff.
With a silent promise to grow a backbone as soon as she could feel her fingers and toes again, she nestled closer to his heat.
* * *
HE’D LOST HIS cell phone. In the greater scheme of his present troubles, it wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened to him out there in the woods, but it was bad. How was he supposed to call in the cavalry—assuming Quinn could assemble one—if he didn’t have his phone?
Beside him, Susannah Marsh had finally stopped shivering, her soft curves molding themselves to the hard planes of his own body. He’d felt her tighten up when he’d first slipped his arm around her, but she was a sensible woman. Even if she thought he was a crazy kidnapper—and really, she’d be an idiot not to—she surely saw the wisdom of letting him keep her from sinking into hypothermia.
“I’m not a crazy kidnapper,” he whispered, feeling foolish but unable to stop the words from slipping between his lips.
She stiffened beside him. “What proof can you offer in your defense?”
“I wasn’t the one with the guns?” Well, technically he did have a gun, a subcompact Glock 26 tucked in an ankle holster. But if he told her that—
“No, you’re the one who accosted me in the parking lot, dragged me barefoot through the woods and told me I had to run or die.”
“Those were the only choices at the moment.”
She sat up, away from his grasp, and cold air slithered into the space between them. Only a whisper of ambient light seeped into the small cavern from outside, so all he could make out of her expression was the faint glimmer of her eyes as she turned to look at him.
He knew she couldn’t see him in the dark, but he wondered what she’d seen earlier, at the hotel, when she’d looked at him. He’d let his hair grow in the year since he left the Army. Or maybe the better term was, he’d let it go. Like he’d let a lot of things go—his self-respect, his control over his temper, his once-upon-a-time ambitions. Even before taking on the role of the life-battered maintenance man, shuffling his way around the Highland Hotel and Resort, he’d been slacking off the simple disciplines of life, like shaving daily and trying to find a job that paid more than minimum wage.
Mostly, he’d wallowed. In self-pity. In anger. In a crushing amount of guilt for everything that had gone wrong for him since Afghanistan.
It had served his purposes to come across as a loser at the hotel. But if she could see him now, with the play-acting role sloughed off, would she see anything different?
He’d hoped this job with The Gates would give him back a sense of purpose. So far, all it had given him was a queasy sense of impending doom, a coming juggernaut of danger and disaster that left him feeling helpless and overwhelmed.
“Can I go?” Susannah asked quietly.
His gut tensed at the very thought. If she left this cave, she wasn’t likely to reach civilization again without running into people who wanted her dead. She was a city girl, a pampered, polished princess who might know her way around a mall but had no chance getting out of these woods alive.
Nevertheless, he couldn’t hold her captive. Not even for her own good. He’d been a prisoner once, and it had damn near destroyed him.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “But I wouldn’t, if I were you.”
Her voice tightened. “Because there are people trying to kill me?”
“Yes.”
“And how did you know they’d be there in the parking lot?”
He could hardly tell her that he was working with the people trying to kill her, but anything else was a lie or a secret he wasn’t prepared to tell.
When he didn’t answer immediately, her voice sharpened to a diamond edge. “Are you one of them?”
“You’re still alive, aren’t you?”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s all you’re gettin’.” For now, at least, until they could reach someplace safe and contact Alexander Quinn.
She settled back into silence again, but she’d shifted far enough away from him that he knew any attempt to pull her back into the shelter of his arm would be seen as an assault, not an offer of comfort.
“It’s raining,” he said as the drumbeat of raindrops hitting the rocky ground outside filtered into the cave. “We’re not going anywhere for the next little while, so why don’t you try to grab a nap?”
Her voice rose. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Shh!” He slanted a quick look toward the cave entrance. Outside, the steady beat of rain masked almost all other noises. It would certainly cover any movement outside, which meant they were not only cornered with nowhere to run but also vulnerable to a sneak attack.
He’d tried to plan on the fly, once he’d learned the hit on Susannah Marsh had been moved up by twenty-four hours, but even faking illness to leave work early that afternoon had afforded him only a couple of hours to get his supplies together. He’d barely reached the parking lot in time to pull her pretty little bacon out of the fire.
“How do I even know there’s anyone out there?” she asked, not bothering to lower her voice. “How do I know that wasn’t just a car backfiring?”
She knew better. He could tell by the tension in her voice, the little tremble as her tone rose at the end of the question. She knew she was in danger, though he doubted she had any idea why. But she was also determined not to trust him one whit.
And he couldn’t really blame her for that, could he, when he didn’t even trust himself?
“You know it wasn’t.”
“I didn’t get hit. They must have been lousy shots.”
Fortunately, he was pretty sure they were. For one thing, they’d deliberately chosen to make the hit with pistols fired from a moving car, a piss-poor choice if you were serious about actually hitting your target. A critical thinker with any skills would have set up on the hill overlooking the parking lot with a Remington 700 or an AR-15 with a suppressor to keep down the noise.
Lucky for Susannah Marsh—and for him—they weren’t dealing with critical thinkers.
But that didn’t mean the men who were undoubtedly out there in the woods trying to track down their prey weren’t dangerous as hell.
“There are a lot of them and only one of you,” he said. “At close quarters, it won’t matter if they’re lousy shots.”
“Who says they’ll get close?” The volume of her voice dropped to a hiss of a whisper.
He almost laughed, trying to picture her out there in the woods, barefoot, dressed in a straight skirt that might make her legs look outstanding but wasn’t ideal for hiking. The woman normally looked like a catalog model, all sparkling clean and perfectly groomed. He wouldn’t be surprised if he turned on the flashlight right now to find that she’d somehow managed to finger-comb her hair back to its normal glossy state.
“So, you’re not just a brilliant event planner but you’re also an expert outdoorswoman?”
“You know nothing about me.” She somehow made a whisper sound haughty.
He schooled the grin playing at the corners of his mouth. “I’ll give you that.”
A sharp noise outside sent animal awareness crackling along his nerves. He felt Susannah’s instant tension snap across the space between them, as electric as lightning.
He reached out to touch her, to silently urge her to be quiet, and felt her skin ripple wildly beneath his touch. But she held her tongue as they waited in breathless agony for another noise.
The sound of footsteps barely registered above the hammering downpour of rain. Giving Susannah’s arm a quick, reassuring squeeze, Hunter rose from the stone bench and moved toward the cave entrance, ignoring the protest of pain that clawed its way through his bum leg.
Keeping to the shadows just inside the cave, he looked out on the rain-drenched scene, letting his gaze relax. Movement would be easier to pinpoint if he wasn’t actively looking for it.
There. He spotted a man dressed in dark camouflage moving slowly through the woods about twenty yards away. He held a pistol in one hand, a satellite phone in the other. It was hard to make out anything more about him through the heavy curtain of rain and mist, but from his general shape and size, Hunter guessed that the man outside the cave was probably Myron Abernathy, one of the handful of men Billy Dawson had directed to take down Susannah Marsh.
Myron had been one of the ones most enamored of her candid photo, Hunter remembered with a grimace. If he were to get her alone—
“Do you know him?” Susannah’s taut whisper sent a shock wave rippling down his spine.
Taking a swift breath through his nose, he hissed, “Do you ever stay put when asked?”
“You didn’t ask,” she whispered back.
The urge to give her a shake was damn near overpowering. He allowed himself a quick glance in her direction, wishing there were more moonlight outside so he could get a better look at her expression.
But he didn’t need moonlight to see that her eyes had widened and her perfectly shaped lips had trembled open with shock.
Following her gaze, he sucked in another sharp breath.
It was Myron Abernathy all right. No doubt about it.
Because he was ten yards closer and moving straight toward them.
