Love Inspired Suspense October 2015 #1 (23 page)

With a nod, he accepted the plate and started eating. She took a deep breath, then another, staring into the fire.

Maybe it was the flames dancing in the fireplace, or the sound of his spoon scraping against the plate. Whatever the case, she found herself relaxing, fighting to keep her eyes open.

Stay awake!

“Relax and I'll keep watch,” he said, as if sensing her thoughts.

Will might think they were safe in the cabin, but Sara knew better. Danger was almost always on the other side of a closed door.

The warmth of the fire filled the cabin and she blinked, fighting to stay alert. Exhaustion took hold and she felt herself drift. She snapped her eyes open again, and spotted Will lying on the floor on top of his sleeping bag. He wore a headlamp and was reading a book.

He was definitely a trusting man, but was he really so naive to think they weren't in danger? He was a civilian determined to protect her. Yet she'd brought the danger to his doorstep.

For half a second, she wanted to believe there were quality men like Will Rankin who rescued failed FBI agents, and protected them from bears and assassins.

Comforted her with a gentle hand on her shoulder. She drifted again...

Don't make a sound...

She gasped and opened her eyes. Will was no longer on the floor beside the fire. She scanned the room. She was alone.

The door opened and she aimed the gun. Will paused in the threshold. “Needed more wood.” He crossed the small cabin and stacked the wood beside the fireplace.

“What time is it?” she said.

“Nineish,” he said.

“I've been out for...”

“A couple of hours. Your body needed it.”

Her mind ran wild, panicked about what could have happened in the past two hours. How close the assassin was to finding her.

“Give me your phone.”

He handed it to her. She stood and headed for the door.

“I don't think it will work yet,” he said.

“I've got to try.”

“Want me to come with?”

“No.” She spun around and instinctively pointed the gun at him. The look on his face was a mixture of disbelief and hurt.

“Sorry.” She lowered the gun. “Just...stay here.”

“Try a few hundred feet that way.” He pointed, and then turned back to the fire, his shoulders hunched.

The minute she stepped out of the cabin a chill rushed down her arms. She should have brought the blanket with her, but wasn't thinking clearly. Why else would she have pointed the gun at Will?

His hurt expression shouldn't bother her. She hardly knew the man. Yet shame settled low in her gut.

Focus!
It was late, but she had to call her boss if she could get a signal.

The full moon illuminated the area around the cabin. She pressed the power button and practically jogged toward a cluster of trees up ahead.

“Come on, come on.” She held the button for a few seconds. The screen flashed onto the picture of the two redheaded girls.

“Yes,” she said.

But still, no signal.

She waved the phone above her head, eyeing the screen, looking for bars.

The click of a gun made her freeze.

“There you are.”

FOUR

A
firm hand gripped a fistful of Sara's hair. “Did you think you could outrun us?” a man's deep voice said.

Us? They'd sent more than one of them after her?

“Nice to meet you, Sara. I'm Bill.” He snatched the gun from the waistband of her jeans and pushed her toward the cabin.

“What do you want?”

“Why'd you run off from the group?”

“I had a family emergency.”

“Sure,” he said, sarcastic. “Who sent you in the first place?”

“No one. I work for Whitman Mountain Adventures.”

“Convenient how you showed up out of nowhere and worked your way onto LaRouche and Harrington's camping trip.”

“I needed the job.”

“Yeah, yeah. We're meeting up with them tomorrow so you can explain yourself. We'll sleep here tonight.”

Sleep here? In the cabin? Where Will was innocently stoking a fire?

“No,” she ground out.

“Yes.” He shoved her forward.

She opened the door to the cabin, but Will was gone.

“Where's your friend?” the man asked.

“What friend?”

He pushed her down in a chair. “The guy I met earlier today. Before our pleasant chat, I noticed your torn jacket on the bed. I guessed you were close. Where'd he go?”

“I have no idea.”

A thumping sound echoed from the front porch.

“You sit there and be quiet while I go hunting.” Her attacker bound her wrists in front.

When she winced at the pressure against her sprained wrist he smiled as if taking pleasure in hurting her. He leaned close. So close she was tempted to head-butt him. Instead, she stared straight ahead, acting like the innocent victim she claimed to be. He tied another rope around her midsection, securing her to the chair.

“Behave,” he threatened.

He turned and went outside in search of Will. Why had Will gotten himself involved in this? Why had he had to help her when he'd found her unconscious body next to the lake?

Silence rang in her ears as fear took hold. The assassin would kill Will, leaving two little girls without a father. No, she couldn't let that happen. Couldn't let those girls suffer through the kind of mind-numbing grief Sara had experienced, especially since Will's girls had already lost their mom.

“Never give up,” she ground out. And she wouldn't, ever, unlike the cops who'd given up on finding Dad's killer.

She dragged the chair into the kitchen, awkwardly opening drawers in search of a weapon.

She found a multipurpose fork in a drawer. It would have to do.

The door swung open with a crash.

She spun around, aiming her weapon...

At Will.

“You're here,” she gasped.

He rushed across the small cabin. “Are you okay? Did he hurt you?” Will untied her and searched her face, as if fearing she'd been beaten up.

Sara shook her head. “I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.”

“It's not your fault.” He led her back to the fireplace, removed his backpack and dug inside. “Let me find—”

The assailant charged into the cabin, wrapping his arm around Will's throat.

“Let him go!” she cried.

Will tried to elbow the guy in the ribs but the assassin was too strong. Digging his fingers into the guy's arm, Will gasped for air. Sara darted behind the guy and wrapped her arm around his neck. The guy slammed her back against the cabin wall, sending a shudder of pain through her body. She collapsed on the floor.

He dragged Will outside and Sara stumbled after them. “Stop! Let him go!”

He threw Will to the ground and stomped on his chest, over and over again. “You like that?”

“Leave him alone!” Sara charged the assassin. He flung her aside, but not before she ripped the gun from the waistband of his jeans.

He continued beating on Will, unaware she had his weapon.

Sara scrambled to her feet. Aimed the weapon. “Stop or I'll shoot!”

The assassin was drowning in his own adrenaline rush, the rush of beating a man to death. She squeezed the trigger twice and the guy went down. She rushed to Will, who'd rolled onto his side clutching his stomach.

“Will? Will, open your eyes.”

He coughed and cracked them open. “That was...the guy who was after you?”

“He was hired to find me, yes.”

“So someone else will come—” he coughed a few times “—looking for you?”

“Not tonight. He was supposed to take me to meet up with them tomorrow.”

“Is he dead?”

“I don't know.”

Will groaned as he sat up, gripping his ribs. “We need to check. If he's not dead, we need to administer first aid.”

She leaned back and stared at him, stunned by his comment. “He tried to kill you.”

He pressed his fingers to the assassin's throat. A moment later he nodded at Sara. “He's gone.”

Will coughed a few times as he scanned the area. “We can't leave him out here. Animals.”

She didn't have a response for that, either, speechless that Will could show compassion for a man who most certainly would have beaten him to death if she hadn't shot him first.

She eyed the body.

The dead body.

She'd just killed a man.

Her fingers tightened around the grip of the gun and her hand trembled uncontrollably, sending a wave of shivers across her body.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Will said, rushing to her. “Let's get you inside.”

She thought she nodded, but couldn't be sure.

“Relax your fingers,” he said, trying to take the gun away.

Staring at her hand, she struggled to follow his order but couldn't seem to let go.

“Sara, look at me.”

She took a quick breath, then another. With a gentle hand, he tipped her chin to focus on his green eyes. Green like the forest after a heavy rain.

“That's it,” he said. “Everything's okay. You can let go now.”

But she didn't feel okay. Her hands grew ice cold and thoughts raced across her mind in a random flurry: her boss's disappointed frown, her cousin Pepper's acceptance into med school, the look on her father's face when he savored a piece of coconut cream pie.

A long time ago. Before...before...

Her legs felt as if they were melting into the soft earth.

She gasped for air...

And was floating, her eyes fixed on the moon above before she drifted into the cabin.

It was warm inside. It smelled like burning wood, not death. She was placed on the bed in front of the fire, but she didn't lie down because she didn't want to sleep, to dream, to be held captive by the nightmares.

“Keep the blanket around your shoulders,” Will said.

It was then that she realized he'd carried her inside. He pulled the blanket snugly around her, and poked at the fire. It flared back to life.

He kneeled in front of her. “You're probably going into shock, but you'll be fine.”

Those green eyes, brimming with promise and sincerity, made her believe that things would actually be okay.

It only lasted for a second.

Because in Sara's life, things were never okay.

“I'll be right back.” Will squeezed her shoulder and left.

That was when the terror of her life came crashing down on her.

If she were a religious person, she'd go as far as to say she'd sinned in the worst possible way.

She'd killed a man.

She'd become like the monsters she'd sworn to destroy.

Like the monster that killed her father.

* * *

Will clicked into overdrive. He tossed logs out of the wood container, rolled the body onto a tarp and dragged him across the property.

A part of him was shocked, both by the murder of a stranger, and by his own reaction. He found himself more worried about Sara than the ramifications of this man's death.

It should be justified in the eyes of the law, since she'd shot him to save Will's life. The guy would have surely beaten Will to death, leaving his children parentless. Will wasn't sure Sara had had another option. The man was about brutality and death, and that was how his life had ended.

But taking another man's life was a sin, so after Will placed the body and weapon into the wood container, he kneeled beside it and prayed. “Father, please forgive us. In our efforts to live, we took another man's life.”

Guilt clenched his heart. He still couldn't believe what had happened. But he couldn't dwell on it, not while Sara was going into shock. He needed to tend to her.

As he went back to the cabin, he noticed the man's blood on his gloves. He took them off and dropped them outside the door. The sight of blood might upset her further. He stepped inside the cabin.

Sara was not on the bed where he'd left her. He snapped his head around. “Sara?” His heart slammed against his chest. Had she left again? Was she wandering aimlessly in the mountains in a state of shock?

“Sara!”

The echo of his own voice rang in his ears. He turned, about to race out into the dark night.

Then he heard a squeak. Hesitating, he waited to see if he'd imagined it. Another squeak drifted across the room. He slowly turned back. The sound was coming from under the bed.

Will went to the bed and checked beneath it. Sara's terrified blue eyes stared back at him.

“He won't see me in here,” she said in a childlike whisper.

“No, he won't. That's a good hiding place.” He stretched out on his back and extended his hand. She looked at it. “Your hands must be very cold,” he said.

She nodded. “Like ice-cycles.”

“My hand is warm. May I warm the chill from your fingers?”

Her eyes darted nervously beyond him. “What if he comes back?”

“He won't. He's...” Will hesitated. Reminding her she'd killed a man would not help her snap out of shock. “He's gone.”

“Are you sure?”

“One hundred and ten percent.” The number he used with his girls.

She eyed Will's hand. He motioned with his fingers to encourage her to come out.

“I'm only safe if I stay hidden,” she whispered. “He won't see me in here.”

That was the second time she used the phrase
in here.
Where did she think she was? Will suspected she might be drifting in and out of reality, the present reality mixed with a past trauma, perhaps? At any rate, he needed to keep an eye on her condition by making sure she was warm and comfortable. If she felt most comfortable under the bed, then that was where she'd stay.

“Are you warm enough?” he asked.

She shrugged.

“How about another blanket?” He snatched one off a chair and placed it on the floor.

Her trembling fingers reached out and pulled the blanket beneath the bed. “Thanks.”

“Is there anything else I can do for you?” he said.

“No, thank you.”

He positioned himself in front of the fire. A few minutes of silence passed as he stared into the flames. The adrenaline rush had certainly worn off, because he was feeling the aches and pains from the beating he'd survived.

Survived because of Sara. She'd saved him from an ugly, painful death.

As energy drained from his body, he struggled to stay alert. Will needed to protect Sara, take care of her.

He glanced left. Her hand was sticking out from beneath the bed. Was she trying to make a connection with him? He positioned himself on the floor and peered under the bed. She'd changed positions and was lying on her side, bundled up in the blankets.

Bending his elbow, he brushed his hand against her petite fingers. She curled her chilled fingers around his.

“Wow, you are warm,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said, barely able to speak. This connection, the fact that touching Will comforted her, filled his chest with pride.

“Do you have a fever?” she said.

“Nah. The warm body temperature is a family thing. My girls run hot, too.”

“Your girls.” She closed her eyes and started to pull away.

Will clung to her hand. “No, don't. I...I need the connection.”

She opened her eyes. “You do?”

“Yes.”

“But I've been horrible to you. Accusing you of being an assassin, tying you up.” Her eyes widened. “Oh, my God, that's why your wrists were bleeding. You had to cut yourself free.”

She snatched her hand from his and rolled away.

Well, good news was she'd returned to reality and was no longer caught up in some trauma from her past. The bad news was she blamed herself for whatever pain Will had suffered.

He went to the other side of the bed. The fire didn't light this part of the room so he couldn't see her face, but he still tried to connect with her, there, in the dark.

“It's not your fault,” he said. “You were terrified and confused, and most likely suffering from dehydration.”

“I gave you a bloody nose.”

“I startled you.”

“You were trying to help me.” She sighed. “I'm so ashamed.”

“Why, because you were protecting yourself from men who wanted to harm you? You should be proud. You escaped. You survived.”

“No, they were right. I don't belong out here.”

“Where, in the mountains?”

She didn't answer him.

“Sara?”

She rolled over again and he went to the other side of the bed. He bit back a groan against the pain of bruised ribs as he stretched out on the floor next to her.

“Could you do me a favor and stay in one position so I don't have to get up and down again?” he teased.

“I'm sorry.”

“It's not that bad. But the ribs are a little sore.”

“I meant, I'm sorry for everything that's happened.”

“Sara, it's not your fault.”

“Yes, it really is.”

Silence stretched between them, punctuated by the sound of the crackling fire. Will sensed there was more behind her words, but he wasn't going to challenge her. He tried another strategy.