“That’s the best I can do,” she finally said, restoring the first-aid kit to the way he’d had it and gathering the soiled wipes and torn paper she’d thrown on the ground. She hesitated, not knowing what to do with the trash now that she’d gathered it, and finally dropped it back on the ground. She would worry about neatness later.
“Why don’t we go inside?” Milly asked, her voice trembling with cold.
“Cate’s house may be a little too close to the action,”
“The coat closet is just inside the front door, on the right,” she said to him. “I have several coats hanging in there, and the linen closet with extra blankets is just this side of the laundry. I’ll run in, gather everything I can, and be back out here within one minute.”
“I’ll do it,” he said instead, turning toward the porch.
Cate stopped him with her hand on his arm. “You can’t do everything. Go find Creed and Neenah, and the others. I’ll get the blankets and coats. Where should we go, so you’ll know exactly where we are?”
For a moment she thought he would argue, but he said, “Pull back to the Richardsons’ place,” naming the house that was farthest from the bridge. “The shooting was coming from at least three separate locations, so they have different angles of fire. Stay low, try to keep some sort of structure between you and the mountain, from the bridge to the Notch. Got it?” He’d raised his voice so he was speaking to all of them, not just to Cate.
“Yes.” Her breath was frosty as it hung in the air between them.
“If you do have to cross an open space, do it in a hurry. Don’t stay in a line or the last ones are just asking to be picked off. Vary your routes, your timing, everything you can. Keep the flashlights off, if possible; you’re just pinpointing your position if you have one on when you’re in the open.”
Heads nodded in the dark.
“How long will you be?” Cate asked, trying to keep her anxiety out of her tone. She didn’t want him going out into the night by himself, though she understood they needed to know what was going on. And he was armed; he wasn’t helpless.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I’ll find.” He turned his head and looked at her in the darkness, a long, quiet gaze as potent as a touch. “But I
will
be back. Depend on it.” Then he was gone, melting into the darkness with just a few steps.
NEENAH SHRIEKED, TERROR CLAMPING HER ARMS CONVULSIVELY around Creed as his heavy body crushed her to the rug. The percussion from the explosion shook the entire house, raining dust down on them in a choking cloud. Creed covered her head with his arms, trying to tuck her completely beneath him to shelter her from any falling debris.
Then it was quiet, a strange, ear-ringing silence.
“E-earthquake?” she gasped.
“No. Explosion.” Creed lifted his head, and saw nothing but darkness. The lights were out—big surprise there. The explosion must have taken out the power lines that crossed the stream at the bridge.
Then there was a sharp, deep
crack!
that made his blood go cold, and simultaneously the front window imploded with a shower of glass slivers. He felt several stings but disregarded them as more booming shots rang out. He was already moving, twenty-three years of training kicking in at the sound of rifle fire even though he’d been out of the Corps for almost eight years, dragging Neenah along beneath him as he scrambled, half-crawling and half-slithering, out of the exposed living room and toward the short, more protected hallway he’d noticed when he came in. He couldn’t see shit in the sudden darkness, but he had an excellent sense of direction.
Neenah was utterly silent except for the harshness of her breathing. She clung to him like a monkey and tried to help by pushing with her feet. She’d recognized the sound of rifle fire, too; after all, she’d grown up around people who still hunted for some of their food.
He wasn’t certain where the shots were coming from, didn’t know if he was the target or if Neenah was, or if neither of them was the specific target and this was more a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Right now the “why” didn’t matter, only the “where”—the location the shots were coming from. He couldn’t just blindly run out; he had to keep Neenah safe.
“Where’s the kitchen?” he rasped, listening to round after round being fired. It sounded like a fucking war out there. The kitchen would offer the most protection, with its array of metal appliances. A high-caliber bullet from a powerful rifle would punch through multiple walls unless it was stopped by something like a refrigerator. He still intended to stay on the floor, even if Neenah happened to have a whole row of refrigerators lining her walls.
“I—I don’t know,” she stuttered, gasping for breath. “I—where are we?”
She was disoriented, which wasn’t surprising. Creed tightened his left arm around her. “We’re in the hall; your feet are pointing toward the front door.”
She was silent for a moment, breathing hard, as she struggled to order the position of her rooms. “Ah—okay. To your right. Ahead, and to the right. But I need to go to the bedroom.”
He disregarded that; a bedroom wouldn’t offer as much protection. “The kitchen is safer.”
“Clothes. I need clothes.”
Creed paused. There had been some sort of powerful explosion, someone was shooting at them, and she wanted to change clothes? The same sort of acid comment that had taken strips off some very tough Marines boiled to his tongue, but he held it back. This wasn’t one of his men; this was Neenah…and she’d been a nun. Maybe former nuns were extremely modest. God, he hoped not, but—
“What you have on will do,” he ventured, cautiously feeling his way lest he run afoul of some nun rule.
“I can’t run in this nightgown and robe, much less in bedroom slippers!”
Unfortunately, that made sense, not to mention that the nights were getting cold. He would have preferred to retreat to a safe position where he could assess the situation, but he was acutely aware he couldn’t command her as he had his men. Faced with that reality, Creed shifted his priority to helping her do what she wanted as safely as possible.
“Okay, one change of clothes coming up.” Another round punched through the living room wall, followed by the deep crack of the rifle shot. Creed flattened her in case the next shot was lower, letting his weight crush her against the floor. She was so soft beneath him, the way he’d spent years imagining, and the thought of one of those powerful rounds tearing into her was horrifying. He’d fought wars, lost men to every kind of violence possible, whether it was a bullet, a bomb, a knife, or a training accident, and every loss had been a scar on his soul; he himself had killed, and that was a different sort of scar—but all of that he’d borne with an inner stoicism that had allowed him to function. If anything happened to Neenah, though, he simply couldn’t bear it. Because of that he said, “You stay in the kitchen—lie flat on the floor where it’s safest. I’ll get your clothes and bring them to you.”
“You don’t know where they are; you’ll be exposed longer—” Before she finished speaking, she was trying to wriggle away from him.
Stunned, he realized
she
was trying to protect
him.
Shock made him a little rough with her as he blocked her effort to wriggle free, keeping her firmly beneath him.
She pushed on his shoulders, her breasts straining into his chest. “Mr. Creed…Joshua—I need to breathe!”
He eased his weight off her, but not enough that she could slide out from under him. He could piss her off, he thought, or he could keep her alive. To his way of thinking, the choice was crystal clear. He bent his head to her ear. “Here’s the way it is: Someone is shooting at us with a high-powered rifle, which makes this my game, not yours. My job is to get us out of here alive. Your job is to do what I say the second the words are out of my mouth. After we’re safe, you can slap my face or kick my shins, but until then I’m boss. Got it?”
“Of course I’ve got it,” she said with remarkable cool, under the circumstances, one of which was not being able to draw a deep breath. “I don’t believe I’m an idiot. But it’s only logical that I would be able to get my clothes faster than you would, thereby making it safer for both of us, because if you get shot while you’re hunting for my shoes, then my own chances for getting out of here alive go down. Am I right?”
She was arguing with him. The experience was both novel and infuriating. Even more frustrating was the fact that she made sense—again. He hung there over her, torn between logic and his overpowering instinct to protect her at any cost.
With a sudden fierce movement he rolled off her and snapped, “Be fast. If you have a flashlight, get it, but don’t turn it on. Don’t stand up. Belly crawl if you can, get to your knees if you have to, but under no circumstances are you to stand up. Clear?”
“Clear,” she said. Her voice shook a little, but she was in control of herself. Creed forced himself to let her move away from him, tracking her by the sounds she made as she pulled herself along on her elbows, and dug into the carpet with her toes to push. Once he heard what sounded like a muttered curse, but he was pretty sure nuns, even ex-nuns, didn’t swear, so he was probably wrong about that.
He broke out in a fine sheen of sweat, waiting for her, knowing that at any second another round could rip through the walls as if they were made of paper. So far the shots had been placed about head high, designed to catch people who were standing. The people of Trail Stop were civilians; they hadn’t been trained to automatically hit the ground. Instead they would try to run, and not necessarily in the best direction. They might even try to look out the windows, which was about the dumbest thing to do in this situation. Or they might grab their flashlights and turn them on, pinpointing their positions for the shooters. He needed to get out there, get them organized, stop them from doing stupid shit.
At least
Neenah was taking too long. “What are you doing?” he asked sharply, barely containing his urge to follow and drag her into the kitchen.
“Changing clothes” came her equally sharp reply. His eyebrows lifted a little. The nun had a temper. For some reason, that seemed a tad kinky; he liked it. Creed knew himself well enough to realize he’d never be able to tolerate a doormat.
“Just get the clothes and bring them into the kitchen to change. Don’t leave yourself vulnerable any longer than necessary.”
“I can’t change in front of you!”
“Neenah.” He took a deep breath, managed to inject patience into his tone. “It’s dark. I can’t see anything. And even if I could…so what?”
“So what?”
“Yeah, so what. I plan to get you naked pretty soon, anyway.”
Okay, so he had the finesse of a gorilla. If she exploded in his face, he’d know right now that he was wasting his time.
She didn’t explode. Instead she went very, very quiet, as if she were even holding her breath. The pause went on so long despair began to rise in his throat. Then came the unmistakable sounds of her crawling toward him.
His heart almost seized, literally almost stopped beating.
He’d lied about not being able to see. At first, before his vision adjusted, he hadn’t been able to see shit, but now he could dimly make out the shapes of doorways and windows, the darker bulk of furniture. If he could see, then she could see—so she knew exactly how much he was seeing. No detail, of course, but definitely the pale length of bare leg. She already had her shirt on, but she was dragging her jeans and shoes and coat with her. Maybe she had on underwear, maybe she didn’t. He fought the urge to slide his hand over her ass to find out. He fought the even stronger urge to roll her onto her back and make a place for himself between those bare legs. If ever there’d been a bad time, this was it, but for once his libido didn’t want to listen to his training.
She crawled past him into the kitchen, and in the darkness he made out the whiteness of panties in front of him, which solved the question of underwear or no underwear. He was following before he realized it, as if drawn by a magnet. Any red-blooded man would follow a woman’s panty-clad ass crawling in front of him, he thought, and once again he fought the urge to pounce. Get her to safety first, pounce later.
In the kitchen, she sat on the floor and pulled on socks, then her jeans and shoes. Her shirt was light-colored, but there was no help for that now because he sure as hell wasn’t sending her back to change; she’d be wearing her coat anyway.
“Flashlight?” he asked, wondering if she’d forgotten.