Authors: Penny McCall
When they got to the farm they gave the house and the other buildings a wide berth, approaching the barn from the rear.
“Hayloft,” Cole said, indicating a door sitting about twenty-five feet off the ground, at the top of a conveyor.
He took her hand and pulled her up the ramp, wincing when he opened the door and the shriek of unoiled hinges cut through the still night air. A dog barked from the farmyard, but Cole relaxed when he heard the faint rattle of chain that told him the animal wasn’t roaming around free.
Cole wouldn’t have risked it, but Harmony went past him, continuing across the loft to look out the window on the other side.
“The house is still dark,” she said softly, “and the dog has stopped barking.”
“What about tomorrow morning?”
“We’ll be gone before anyone knows we were here,” she said, and then for the second time that night she decided to torture him, digging through her duffel. “Yes!” she said, pulling out another pair of jeans. “They’re still dry. Mostly.”
She toed off her shoes and peeled out of her wet jeans one agonizing inch at a time. Cole turned his back. He could still hear the rustle of cloth, imagine too well what she was taking off and regret what she was putting on, but at least he had the self-control not to watch this time.
“It feels good to be dry again,” she finally said, dropping down onto the hay.
“I wouldn’t know,” Cole said. “I don’t have anything to change into. But we can share body heat.”
“You want to share body heat?” she asked, her voice dropping from chipper to sultry. “I think that’s a wonderful idea.”
“Really?” His voice shot up about three octaves and broke at the end.
“Sure. There’s a cow right down there.”
Cole stomped to the other side—okay, it was more like wading, since it was impossible to stomp in knee-deep hay. “It’s your fault I’m cold,” he griped. “You didn’t bring me a coat.”
“Sue me,” Harmony said groggily, the hay rustling as she settled down, her duffel under her head.
Cole waded back and lay down behind her, but she scrambled away before he could get too cozy.
“Time to get some things straight.”
Cole blew out a breath and rolled onto his back, crossing his arms behind his head. “You do like your rules, don’t you?”
“Not rules,” she said, “these are more like guidelines.”
“Guidelines.”
“Suggestions,” she amended. “Obviously you’ve decided to help me, and I think it would be a good idea to agree—”
“Agree?” Cole sat up, exasperated. “Sweetheart, if you want to be in control, just take charge. Don’t ask or suggest or supply guidelines. Tell.”
“Fine, I’m the FBI agent—”
“Having a job title doesn’t make you the boss, either.”
“Back off, Mr. Chips.”
“That’s better,” Cole said. “Nice snap to the voice, good touch with the sarcasm.”
Harmony didn’t say anything.
“Earth to Blondie.”
“I’m reminiscing about our first meeting, when you refused to talk to me.”
Cole smiled before he could stop himself. It was surprising. And troubling—even more because he was feeling . . . friendly. Lust he could understand; anything else was sheer stupidity. Sure, she was attractive, and yeah, he enjoyed the fact that she could keep up with him. Hell, she gave as good as she got, mentally and physically. But she was FBI, and if she hadn’t lied to him outright, she definitely hadn’t told him everything. She’d managed to answer all his questions, and she’d looked sincere while she did it, but the FBI operated on a need-to-know basis, and he wasn’t in the loop.
“You have something to say, say it,” he said, feeling as grim as he sounded.
Harmony must have heard it too because she got right down to setting boundaries, no edge, no banter. “Like I said, I’m the FBI agent, so I’ll deal with any threats and I’ll handle strategy.”
“Nope. I’m laying my life on the line, too. I get a say in what we do.”
“I have contacts at the Bureau,” Harmony countered. “I’ll have the intelligence—”
“And you’ll share it with me.”
“Your job is to hack into the accounts and move the money,” she reminded him, “but only where and when I tell you.”
“Because?”
She huffed out a breath, but she didn’t answer his question.
“You’re right,” Cole said. “I agreed to help you. That makes us partners in my book, and partners watch each other’s backs. I can’t do that if you’re not straight with me.”
“We’re partners?” she said in a voice that sounded like an
awww
should go along with it. But she dropped that tone and became all business again. “You were right. I’m going after Richard. I need you to move enough money to fool the kidnappers into thinking we’re cooperating. I’m scheduled to call them tomorrow night. We only have to show them enough progress so they believe we’re doing what they ask. So they won’t hurt Richard.” Or kill him. “And we need to get as many miles behind us as we can.”
“To give you time to find out where he is and come up with a way to rescue him.”
“Yes, but you won’t be in danger.”
He snorted. “You come with your own warning label. And then there are the people trying to capture me and take me back to jail.”
“That problem will be going away,” Harmony said. “Once we get out of Pennsylvania, we won’t have the state police to worry about anymore, and as soon as they’re out of the picture, the FBI won’t have any way of knowing where we are.”
“Famous last words,” Cole said. “Those are your last words, right? We’re going to be partners in this. Full partners. No secrets.” Except the ones he was keeping.
“Yes,” she said, no hesitation, which didn’t mean she was telling the truth, just that she’d decided her course, same as him.
“Except . . .” she added just when he’d begun to relax, “you can’t have a gun.”
“I don’t want a gun.”
“Why not?”
“People have a tendency to shoot back at you for one thing. And when I get caught with a gun, it’ll only go harder for me.”
“
If
you’re caught,” she said. “You really should try to have a little faith in me.”
“No problem,” Cole said. “I have just as much faith in you as you have in me.”
Harmony shifted, the dog backed off far enough to snarl at her, upper lip curled back over really big teeth. She froze. “You’re on your own.”
“If he doesn’t like you, he’s not going to like me,” Cole said.
The dog sat down and let out a low whine, which told Harmony two things. “It’s a she,” Harmony said. And apparently Cole was a babe magnet regardless of species. “I think she has a crush on you.”
The dog snarled at Harmony again.
“He’s all yours, Fido.”
The mutt’s ears perked up.
“Awwww—” Harmony began.
Cole’s arm tightened around her ribs. At the same time Harmony heard the barn door roll open, followed by the sound of footsteps and the clank of something metal. She raised her head—careful not to piss off Cole’s canine fan club in case the bite was worse than the bark—and peeked over the edge of the loft. A farmer, complete with overalls and a straw hat, hung a lantern from a hook on the other side of the barn and pulled out a small stool. He hunkered on the stool and proceeded to get intimate with a cow. The cow looked less than invested in the process, chewing her cud and staring placidly at the wall. The cats were a different story. About a dozen barnyard tabbies sat to the farmer’s left side, which made perfect sense when he aimed a teat in their general direction and squirted one of them in the face.
“There’s a farmer down there,” Harmony whispered to Cole.
“What happened to ‘We’ll be gone before anyone knows we’re here?’ ” Cole asked, managing to put an amazing amount of snottiness into a whisper.
“Who knew farmers milked cows in the middle of the night?”
“Everyone who didn’t grow up in Hollywood, where apparently milk appears magically on store shelves.”
“Why didn’t you wake up before milking time? Apparently you’re the expert on dairy production.”
“It’s your show, remember?”
“Maybe you could can the sarcasm and help me come up with a plan,” she hissed, shifting to aim her narrowed eyes at him.
The dog growled. Harmony’s glare hadn’t worked on Cole, so she decided to try it on the dog, who went into full-blown Cujo mode, lip snarled back, growling low in her throat, half-crouched and ready to spring.
“Dot,” the farmer thundered, his voice echoing off the rafters about a mile overhead, “
kommen sie hier
.”
“I think this guy is Amish,” Cole said, putting the lack of overhead lighting and the German-studded commentary together.
“And how does that help us?”
“They don’t believe in guns. That’s got to be a plus.”
“Unfortunately, they believe in dogs.”
Dot took offense to Harmony’s observation, loudly.
“Dot,” the farmer bellowed, sounding at the end of his patience, “come down from there and leaf the mice for the cats.”
“Mice!” Harmony squeaked, Cole pulling her back down on the hay before she could bolt to her feet and give them away. Just for good measure he laid his long body over hers, clamping his hand over her mouth.
Dot sank her teeth into Cole’s pant leg and tried to pull him off Harmony, growling and snarling.
“Dot!” the farmer yelled again. “You haf a skunk treed up there?”
Harmony’s eyes cut from the dog to Cole, and they all froze, listening to the creak of the ladder leading up to the loft. The crown of a straw hat appeared, followed by the farmer’s head. He lifted the lantern, his eyes taking in the scene, Cole on top of Harmony, his hand over her mouth, her eyes wide with fear.
“
Schwein!
” he yelled, charging the rest of the way up the ladder. Amish people might not believe in guns, but they had no moral objection to pitchforks. The farmer grabbed one from the corner and brandished it, one-handed, at Cole.
Cole scrambled off Harmony, both hands up to ward off the tines that were pointing his way. “It’s not what it looks like,” he said, backing away slowly.
The farmer took a couple steps forward, stopping when he was beside Harmony. “You all right, Miss?”
“I’m better than all right,” she said grinning at Cole.
“A little help here?” he said through clenched teeth.
“He won’t hurt you. The Amish don’t believe in violence.”
“The pitchfork says otherwise.”
Not to mention the guy was built like the Hulk with ZZ Top facial hair. And he was pissed.
Harmony got to her feet, grabbed her duffel and laptop, and went to stand beside Cole. “Really, everything is fine,” she said to the farmer. “We’re together. No problem here. Everything was consensual.”
It wasn’t quite the tension defuser she’d hoped it would be. In fact, it had the opposite effect, the farmer looking at the flat spot in the hay, then at them, his face getting redder as he leapt to conclusions.
“Noooo,” Harmony said, “we weren’t . . . you know. We just needed a place to spend the night.”
“You English,” the farmer said, followed by something unintelligible in German. But when he stepped forward he got his point across loud and clear. It was a whole different dynamic, Harmony decided, when that pitchfork was aimed at her.
She put her hands up in the universal I-mean-no-harm gesture, making her jacket gap open—which made the farmer’s eyes bug out and his face go even redder.
“You bring a weapon here?” he thundered.
“Time to go,” she said, slipping her hand into Cole’s and backpedaling to the door they’d come through the night before. They hightailed it down the conveyor, Cole taking a precious moment to look it over in the predawn light.
“It’s horse-powered,” he said. “Pretty ingenious.”
Harmony rolled her eyes. “Nerd.”
“The Amish are really good at engineering,” Cole said defensively, following her into the cornfield, the dry stalks rattling around them like bamboo wind chimes.
“I’m just happy they don’t believe in guns. Or phones.”
“They believe in the police, and that one believes we snuck into his barn to have sex.”
“You speak German?” Harmony asked, surprised enough to look over her shoulder at him.
He waggled his brows back at her. “Didn’t need to understand German to get that.”
Neither did she, but she’d decided the subject of sex was off limits so she let it go. “Do you really think he’ll go to the police?”
“He was pretty mad. We probably aren’t the first couple to sneak onto his property for a booty call.”
“We’re not a couple, and that wasn’t a booty call. And why would anyone do that?”
“Don’t know,” Cole said with a shrug in his voice. “It’s probably like the Mile High Club.”
Harmony had never really understood that one, either. Why have sex in a tiny airplane bathroom or a scratchy hayloft when you could—
“You’re thinking about sex, aren’t you?”
“Yep,” she said, mostly because he wouldn’t expect it, “in a bed, with satin sheets and champagne, and all night so you don’t have to race through it, because if you’re with someone who counts, you don’t need some kind of stupid thrill to get in the mood.”
There was silence behind her. She glanced back. Cole had stopped walking—and breathing. He was about twenty yards behind her, his eyes on her backside. She turned the rest of the way around and his gaze rose about eighteen inches, so she crossed her arms over her breasts and waited until he made eye contact.
“You’re playing with fire,” he said.
“You’re the one who keeps bringing up sex.”
“And you’re supposed to keep shooting me down.”
“I’ll try to remember that,” she said, which wasn’t just a smart-aleck comeback. Testosterone might be making him forgetful, but there were moments . . . Take the way he was looking at her right now. Hot, burning her up, making her remember the heat and solidness of him against her last night and the way he’d kissed her, strong and hard. If she hadn’t been shocked enough to shove him away, she wouldn’t have cared if there’d been a bed. Hell, she wouldn’t have cared if there’d been a horizontal surface. The tree would have done just fine as long as she got him inside her, just as fast and hard—
“Stop looking at me like that,” he said, his voice even deeper than usual, impossibly deep, stroking over her nerve endings and throbbing in places she shouldn’t be thinking about in Cole Hackett’s vicinity.
“I will if you will.”
He let his chin drop to his chest, and she could see him taking slow, even breaths.
“Chanting mantras?”
“Reminding myself you’re a pain in the ass,” he said, “with an FBI badge.”
“Whatever works for you.” Harmony started off into the corn again, but in a couple of steps Cole overtook her.
“I think you should walk behind me for a while.”
Harmony couldn’t help but smile over that, even if it was sadly unprofessional of her. Sure, she was a federal agent, but she was also a woman, and what woman wouldn’t be flattered to know she was so distracting to a man? Even one who’d been in jail for nearly a decade, working out every day and getting a butt she wanted to sink her teeth into—
“Do you think the farmer is going to report us to the police?” she asked, seizing on the first thing that didn’t have anything to do with Cole’s butt, flexing with each step in a nice steady rhythm . . . “I know they don’t have telephones, but he could drive his buggy into town.”
“The Amish take a lot of crap from tourists. Not to mention your gun might make him think twice about overlooking our visit.”
“He’ll finish his chores first, though. I mean, you can’t not milk a cow, right? That’ll give us time to get to a town and find some transportation.”
“You mean steal a car.”
She shrugged. “It’s better than walking.”
“It’ll get us arrested,” Cole said. “By now every cop in the state is on the lookout for us. We steal a car in a city smaller than Pittsburgh, and we won’t make it to the city limits. Why can’t you just . . .” He swirled his hand in circles, a forthcoming gesture that didn’t mean a thing to her.
“What?”
“You know, get a car the same way you got me out of jail? Use your FBI wiles.”
“Wiles?”
“Do what you do. Get us some transportation the cops won’t be looking for.”
“But the Bureau will. They’ll be watching the buses, airlines, trains, and car rental agencies in the area. I could use my FBI
wiles
, maybe arrange for a car using another agent’s name. But there’ll be no way of knowing we didn’t get away with it until we see the agents or cops in our rearview mirror, and I’d rather not be surprised that way.”
“So we steal a car.”
“Eventually.”
“Not liking the sound of that,” Cole said.
“Even if we could find a car, stealing one in farm country, where the crime rate is probably zero, would get everyone’s attention. And the state police have you on their radar. Much as I’d like to stop right here and put you to work on those bank accounts, the smartest thing we can do is get out of Pennsylvania before we do anything the cops might connect with your escape.”
“Then I guess we walk,” Cole said.
She knew it was the right decision, but that didn’t make the prospect of an all-day hike any more palatable. Not to mention the time they were wasting. Harmony took a deep breath and let it out, stiffening her spine before she set off after Cole. The kidnappers were expecting a call from her in less than twelve hours. When they found out she hadn’t gotten the money yet, they weren’t going to be happy, and Richard would be the only one they could take it out on. Walking a few miles was nothing to complain about.
By mid-afternoon wide-open spaces had lost of lot of their appeal for Cole. The morning had started off breath-steaming cold. They’d begun their trek at cow-milking time, also known as four a.m. By the time the sun came up they were in heavy woodland that kept them shaded. And cold.
As they wound their way farther west, headed for Ohio, the terrain had gradually changed from hills and valleys to flatter country. There wasn’t a tree in sight or a cloud in the sky, just the sun, big and bright and hot, beating down on Cole, turning every inch of exposed skin into cracklings. His feet hurt, he had a couple pounds of dirt in his eyes, and car exhaust caught at the back of his throat. Every step took him farther from Lewisburg, USP. Otherwise the day would have been a total waste.
“We have to get off this road,” Cole said.
Harmony nodded, too busy concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other to form actual words.
Aside from a brief stop at a roadside fruit stand, they’d been walking for most of the day. The cornfields and dirt lanes had given way to paved roads a while ago, and the paved roads were getting wider, more lanes, more traffic. More cops.
“At least two police cruisers have gone by in the last hour,” he said. “It’s just a matter of time before one of them wonders why we’re walking down the side of the highway and takes a closer look.”
Almost before the words were out a white Lincoln Town Car pulled off the road a little way ahead of them, tires crunching on the gravel. The car was a late-seventies model, big as a parade float, and tricked out with tinted windows, lots of striping, and enough shiny chrome to be visible from outer space. Moby Dick with wheels. One of the windows slid down and an insanely beautiful woman stuck her head out, jet-black hair, porcelain skin, cheekbones like razorblades.