Boneyard Ridge (8 page)

So, a tomboy. And a mountain girl, too. Her accent was almost neutral, her vocabulary sophisticated, but he’d caught a hint here and there of her Appalachian roots.

And if he retained any capacity for reading people, the woman was hiding something. Something big. Important.

Life-threatening?

He wished he could get in touch with Quinn, but until he received some sort of all-clear signal, he had to assume that his available lines of communication were compromised. Ever since Quinn had involved himself in the currently dormant investigation of the Blue Ridge Infantry, the former spook had become downright paranoid about infiltration.

A few weeks on the ground with the BRI had convinced Hunter that his boss was probably giving the ragtag band of soldier wannabes and washed-out former grunts a lot more credit for cohesion and strategic planning than they deserved.

But maybe Quinn knew something Hunter didn’t. Hunter had been in the Army long enough to realize that sometimes in a war, the soldiers on the ground could see only part of a larger strategy playing out across a wide and varied battlefield.

Maybe Billy Dawson and his crew weren’t the tip of the BRI spear.

Maybe they were the distraction.

The hiss of the space heater near the bed wasn’t loud enough to mask the sounds of movement coming from the front room. For a second, his gut tightened as he feared he’d miscalculated the strength of her desire to get away from him, and he was halfway out of the room before he recognized what he was hearing.

She was turning on the lamps in the front room. He could hear the soft clicks of the power knobs turning. Even from here, he could see the glow of the lamp bulbs as they flicked on, one after another.

He supposed she’d had about all the darkness this evening she could stand.

He had, too, he thought, reaching for the bedroom light switch and flicking on the light.

He looked the room over with a critical eye. He hadn’t had time to do more than neaten the place up before he’d had to head back to the hotel in hopes of getting her out of harm’s way before Billy’s men struck.

He heard footsteps approaching down the hallway, and he steeled himself for her appearance as he turned toward the doorway.

She stopped in the portal, looking past him briefly to take in the particulars of the room before turning her sharp eyes to him. She’d removed the other brown contact lens, he saw, receiving the full impact of those cool gray-hazel eyes.

He blurted the first thing that came to mind. “Fresh sheets.”

Her lips curved slightly. “Good to know.”

Well, now he felt like an idiot.

“Where’s the bathroom?”

“The door you passed to get here.”

“Thanks.”

“I guess I’ll go, then.”

She gave a little nod and watched him all the way in as he closed the distance between them, edging around her in the tight space between the bed and the door. Her body radiated heat and the lingering green-apple scent that had haunted him all afternoon, ever since he’d shared the elevator with her earlier.

Everything about this whole damn mission had gone belly-up, he thought as he rode a wave of frustration and testosterone into the cabin’s small front room. And he had no idea how to fix it.

But he’d better figure it out, and soon. Because this cabin might be well-hidden and reasonably well-fortified, but if the authorities weren’t already searching these woods for the pretty young event planner who’d just gone missing, they’d be crawling these hills by morning.

And they were the lesser of the two evils who’d be looking for them.

Settling on the sofa, he reached into his battered rucksack and pulled a slim leather wallet from a pocket hidden deep inside the pack. Flipping it open, he gazed at the photo tucked inside the first clear plastic sleeve. It had been taken almost a decade ago, just before his first tour of duty. His sister, Janet, and her husband, Dale, had driven to Georgia to see him off, and Dale had snapped a picture of Hunter and his older sister, all three of them aware it might be the last day they’d ever spend together.

They’d been right. But it hadn’t been Hunter who’d left the others behind. It had been his brother-in-law, who’d passed away from a burst aneurysm a year into Hunter’s two-year tour of duty, leaving Janet alone to pick up the pieces of her shattered life.

Hunter could have left the Army when his enlistment ended, but he hadn’t. By then, Janet had seemed to be recovering from her loss, working a new job in the county prosecutor’s office.

And Hunter had liked the Army, liked the camaraderie and the discipline, things he and his sister had lacked growing up with a good-hearted but soft-willed mother who’d been little more than a child herself. Hunter had never known his father, and even Janet had only fuzzy memories of the man who’d left when she was just four years old. And their mother had died in a car accident shortly after his sixteenth birthday.

For a long time, it had been just the two of them. She’d been part sister, part mother to him for most of his life, but when she’d needed him most, he’d let her down.

He had to figure out some way to make things up to her. He’d hoped his work with The Gates was going to be an answer, but he’d already blown his first assignment. What were the odds Alexander Quinn would ask him back for a second?

Footsteps on the hardwood floor behind him gave him a brief warning. He closed the wallet and turned to look at Susannah Marsh standing in the doorway.

“Is there anything to eat around here?” she asked.

He pushed to his feet. “Of course. Yes.”

He had to pass her to get to the kitchen situated at the very back of the cabin. It was one of the cabin’s roomier areas, large enough to accommodate a table near the back door and an old gas stove and oven. The refrigerator was small but still kept things cold and the freezer unit kept things frozen. He wasn’t sure how much longer all the original appliances would stay useful, but for now, they served the purpose.

“Want something hot?”

“Soup would be fine,” she said with a smile he didn’t quite buy.

He’d stocked the pantry a while back, long before he’d known he’d be working for The Gates. He’d figured on using the cabin as a place to get away sometimes, to hide from a world that had become alien to him in so many ways. The cabin had belonged to Janet, who’d inherited it from their mother when she died. Janet had handed over the keys to Hunter when he returned home after his injury.

He supposed she’d known that he’d need a place to hunker down sometimes. To lick his wounds in private.

He doubted she’d ever thought he’d be using it to practically keep a woman prisoner.

“I wish I could let you contact your family,” he said.

“Let me?” She shot him a look that stung.

“Bad choice of words,” he conceded. “I wish it was safe.”

“It doesn’t matter. Nobody to contact, anyway.”

He frowned. “Nobody will notice you’ve gone missing? I don’t believe that.”

“No family to contact,” she said with a shrug, looking through the freestanding pantry. “People at work will notice, of course. Especially this close to the upcoming conference....” Her voice trailed off, and her gaze rose toward the ceiling. “Do you hear that?”

Hunter listened. At first, he heard only the sound of wind whistling around the cabin’s eaves, and the faint whisper of rain drizzle. But slowly, the deep, rhythmic
whump-whump
sound of spinning rotors filtered through the ambient noise.

“Helicopter,” he said quietly, his gut tightening.

“Looking for me?”

“I don’t know.” He reached over and turned off the kitchen light, then headed through the house and extinguished the rest.

“They’ll find this place eventually.” Susannah’s voice was so close behind him he could feel her breath on his neck. “Won’t they?”

“Probably,” he admitted.

But he couldn’t let it happen tonight.

Chapter Six

The only light in the cabin came from the glowing red wires of the space heater, but it was enough to reveal the tense set of Hunter’s jaw and the dangerous glitter of his eyes as he peered between the drawn curtains over the front window. The helicopter had passed nearly a half hour earlier, but he was still on high alert, his ramrod posture and spare, deliberate movements convincing her all over again that he had spent at least some of his life in uniform.

“They’re gone,” she murmured.

His gaze cut toward her. “They could come back.”

“Meanwhile, we starve to death in the dark?”

For a second, she thought he was going to bark at her like a drill sergeant and tell her to shut up and fall in line. But then he visibly relaxed, a hint of a smile conjuring up one of those rare dimples she was starting to covet. “No. I think we can manage dinner without exposing our position.”

“It’s not going to be an MRE or anything, is it?” she asked. She’d tried one of those military dried-food packets once, the so-called “Meals Ready to Eat.” She hadn’t exactly been impressed.

He slanted a curious look her way. “Why would you ask that?”

“Well, clearly you’re former military.”

That statement earned her a double dose of dimples. “What makes you think that?”

She ticked off the clues. “You’ve approached this whole thing with the planning of a field general. You carry a military-issue rucksack. And use it to carry a field kit of necessary supplies. You know your way around triage first aid. And you have the posture of a bloody soldier.”

“I
was
a bloody soldier,” he admitted. “A lifetime ago.”

“How long a lifetime?”

He sighed as he nudged her toward the back of the house. “A little over a year.”

The elusive half memory that had flitted through her mind earlier made another brief appearance before dancing beyond her reach once more. “That long, huh?”

He stopped in the middle of the kitchen and turned to look at her. “Like I said, a lifetime.”

Sore spot,
she thought, her gaze dropping to the leg he favored. Encased in jeans, there was nothing obviously wrong with the limb, except the limp he couldn’t hide, not even here in the cabin, where the floor was level and there were no obstacles to navigate except for the occasional chair or table.

She’d never been the kind of woman who could resist poking at a sore spot. “War injury?” She nodded toward his bad leg.

The glare he shot her way would have scared a lesser woman. But Susannah had stared down her share of monsters over the span of her twenty-eight years. She didn’t even flinch.

He looked away and crossed to the pantry. “Yeah.”

She crowded him a little, earning another dark glare. “I should know you, shouldn’t I?”

“What makes you think that?” He pulled a can of chicken and dumplings from the pantry and made a show of looking at the expiration date printed on the can in the faint orange glow of the kitchen heater.

“Well, for one thing, I keep thinking I’ve heard your name somewhere. Hunter’s not that common a first name.”

“You don’t know it
is
my first name.” He held the can in front of her. “Dinner?”

She nodded impatiently. “Whatever. Hunter is your first name. And you’re a former soldier. And there’s something—”

“Don’t blow a gasket in there.” He tapped her head lightly with his forefinger. “There are a couple of bowls in the cabinet over the sink, and a saucepan in the next cabinet to the right. Grab them while I get the stove going.”

She fetched the stoneware bowls and a battered but clean two-quart saucepan while he lit one of the gas burners. Blue flames hissed to life, adding soft light to the warm kitchen. “Where’s the can opener?” she asked, scanning the bare counter.

He pulled open a drawer and handed her a manual can opener.

“Oh, we’re going old-school.”

“No, old-school would be an awl and a hammer.” He slanted her an amused look. “You’ve been away from the hills too long, Ms. Marsh.”

“What makes you think I was ever in the hills?”

He turned to look at her, a hint of payback glittering in his light eyes. “Scars on your legs, the kind you get from shinning up trees and climbing rocky hills. Your nails are—were—perfectly manicured, but you can’t hide the scars on your knuckles or that rope-burn scar on your palm. You’ve worked with those hands. Used them for more than typing.” He was ticking off the clues in the same way she’d added up her conclusions about his time in the military, she noted with a mix of irritation and grudging appreciation.

“And no matter how high-priced an accent you’ve adopted, you still slip into a mountain twang now and then.”

She closed her eyes to shut out the sight of him, wishing she could make him disappear as easily. All her hard work to completely erase her former life, and he’d seen through her in hours. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Right.” He took the can opener out of her nerveless fingers and opened the can of chicken and dumplings.

But her appetite had fled. “I think I’m too tired to eat,” she said quietly, already moving out of the kitchen.

His hand closed around her wrist, pulling her to a halt. “A minute ago you were hungry enough to eat this stuff, can and all.”

“Let me go.”

He released her wrist. “Are you in some kind of trouble?”

Damn him, she thought. “I just spent three hours running from men with guns who want me dead. I’m being held captive in a backwoods cabin by a former soldier who won’t tell me his last name. What kind of trouble could I possibly be in?”

His lips thinned to a flat line. “You should eat something. You’ll sleep better.”

He was right. She knew he was right. Even though her appetite was gone, her body still needed fuel, especially after her adrenaline-fed mountain hike. Relenting, she sat in one of the kitchen chairs and rested her chin on her hand, watching as he turned his attention to heating the soup.

When he was done, he poured the chicken and dumplings into the two bowls and carried them to the table where she sat, sliding one in front of her. He took a couple of spoons from a nearby drawer and handed her one. “Careful. It’s hot.”