Inside, there was only blackness, save for the sliver of light seeping in from the narrow cave opening. “Not a word,” he whispered in her ear, still not letting her go.
Her breathing was fast and harsh to his ears, but he doubted anyone outside the cave would hear them. Still, he stayed completely still and quiet, his ears cocked for any sign that Amanda’s pursuers had seen where they’d disappeared to.
He wasn’t sure how long they remained motionless. Amanda’s breathing softened to a mere whisper, and the rat-a-tat of her heartbeat against his chest slowed to almost normal. He dared a quick glance at his watch and found that they’d been in the cave for at least twenty minutes.
He pulled the small flashlight from his survival kit and flashed it around quickly, getting a quick look at the interior of the cave. It was about twelve feet by twelve feet, with a ceiling rising about ten feet in a dome shape. If necessary, it would be a decent shelter for them for the night.
He just hoped it wouldn’t be necessary.
“I’m going to check outside for a minute,” he whispered, his lips brushing the curve of her cheek as he bent to speak into her ear.
He felt a little tremble run through her before she responded by clutching him closer, her grip strong. “You called someone, didn’t you?” she asked in a voice full of barely contained anger.
“What?” For a moment he thought he’d misunderstood her.
“You called someone while you were out. That’s why you really left the room—I told you not to call anyone, so you went out to find a phone.” Her hands pushed at his chest, trying to force him away from her.
But he held on to her arms, keeping her close. The last thing he needed was for her to run out of the cave and back into that phalanx of men in black carrying big weapons. “I didn’t call anyone.” He peered into the gloom, trying to see her face. “Maybe if you’d stayed put like I asked you to—”
“I stayed put for three years, and fat lot of good that did me.” She gave another push and broke free of his grasp.
He shot after her as she dashed toward the cave entrance, catching her as she neared the light. “Stop it, Amanda.” He didn’t dare raise his voice above a whisper, but he infused the soft exhalation with as much force as he could. He could practically smell the panic rising off her skin in waves. He couldn’t blame her for losing her grip on her emotions—nothing quite like becoming a killer’s target to get the adrenaline pumping in overdrive.
He could see her better, now that they were closer to the fading light seeping through the cave entrance. She looked pale and exhausted, as if the same adrenaline that had kept her on her feet this far had finally sucked her dry of energy.
He couldn’t stop himself from cradling her face between his palms. “Stop running. Stay with me.”
Her gaze lifted to meet his, her pale eyes wary. “I can’t trust you.” She looked away. “I can’t trust anyone.”
His chest ached with sympathy. “Believe me, I know the feeling, baby. But we need each other if we’re going to get out of this mess alive.”
“They’re probably already at the motel, waiting,” she growled, pulling away from his touch again. This time, however, she moved away from the cave entrance instead of toward it. “We don’t have a chance in hell of getting anywhere near your car.”
“I moved the car,” he said, smiling slightly as her gaze snapped up to meet his again.
“You thought I’d double back and take it while you were hunting the woods for me?”
She wasn’t so tired that her whip-smart mind couldn’t cut to the chase, he thought. “The idea crossed my mind.”
Her lips flattened with annoyance, but she didn’t protest. She could hardly argue with his reasoning, given what had actually transpired. “They could be waiting out there for us right now. Just biding their time.”
“I’d like to know how they found us,” he said.
“And why there are so many of them,” she added, edging toward the cave entrance again.
He caught up with her, keeping his hands to himself for the moment. But if she made a run for it, he’d be ready.
She didn’t try to run. She just crept to the edge of the opening and took a quick look outside. She backed up until she bumped into Rick’s chest. “I don’t see them out there anymore.”
“They didn’t have a clear line of sight once I pulled you behind the bush,” he murmured, enjoying the feel of her small, round backside pressed against his thighs. For a second, he found himself immersed in the memory of that moment they’d shared back in the motel room, when years had seemed to melt into nothing, taking them back to a time where finding pleasure in each other’s bodies had seemed as natural as breathing.
He eased away from her before his body betrayed him. “Do you want to take a shot at locating the car? If it’s still where I hid it, and they haven’t located it, we could get out of here before they found us.”
“I’ll go. You head for the highway—go to the hamburger place where you got dinner. I’ll find the car and come get you.” She held out her hand. “Keys?”
He couldn’t hold back a soft chuckle. “Not on your life.”
One eyebrow arched. “You don’t trust me?”
“You haven’t exactly given me any reason to.”
“I could say the same of you,” she pointed out. “You call me and within hours, I’m getting shot at and chased away from my own home—”
“Funny—I’m the only one who actually took a bullet.”
She made a small sound of frustration. “So we go together, then. Probably smarter that way.”
“Together,” he agreed. He looked at the cave entrance. “I’m going to scout out there first, make sure the coast is clear. The last thing we want to do is walk into an ambush.”
She looked as if she wanted to protest, but she finally gave a nod. “Okay. Hurry.”
Outside, night had already begun to fall, casting the evening sky in deep shades of crimson and purple. It was almost 6:00 p.m., he saw with a quick glance at his watch. He edged toward the mountain-laurel bush where he’d hidden before, stopping at the sound of a faint snapping noise ahead.
Crouching behind the bush, he waited.
There. Movement about fifty yards ahead through the trees and underbrush. In the twilight, the man in black almost blended in with the woods.
Almost.
Moving at a snail’s pace, Rick edged backward toward the cave entrance, keeping his eye out for more men in black. He finally reached the narrow slit in the rock and hurried back inside. “There’s at least one of them still out there,” he whispered to Amanda.
He heard her soft exhalation. “Damn it.”
“We could be in worse shape,” he pointed out. “You’ve got water in your pack. Probably more food. We have extra clothes if the temps drop overnight. A roof over our heads.”
“So we’re staying in this cave tonight?” She sounded so defeated, he thought. Pushed to her limit.
“Can’t be much worse than the motel room,” he pointed out, deliberately keeping his voice light.
Her gaze slanted his way, and in the faint light from outside, he saw her lips curve. “I’ll give you that,” she answered, sounding stronger.
“Let’s figure out what supplies we have,” he suggested. “Ration it out so we have some food and water left over for tomorrow if we have to stay here beyond the night.”
With a nod, she picked up the duffel bag and backed deeper into the cave. Finding a place to sit, she unzipped the bag and started digging inside.
“Four twelve-ounce bottles of water,” she whispered as he sat down across from her. “Six protein bars.”
“Okay—that’s one bottle apiece for tonight and one bottle tomorrow. We had protein bars earlier, so we’ll save those for tomorrow. Two a day—that’ll get us through tomorrow and into the next day.”
“I have one of your boxes of ammo.”
“I know. I have another box, and if we can get to the car without incident, I have more packed in the trunk.”
“What if they find your car?”
It was a possibility, he had to concede. The Charger was hidden from sight on the road, and he’d covered it with some loose limbs he’d foraged from the woods around where he’d parked. But if someone was out there scouring the woods for Amanda, it wouldn’t be hard to find the Charger in its hiding place. “We’ll deal with that if it arises.”
“Are you sure there isn’t a tracker of some sort on your car?” she asked a few minutes later.
“Short of tearing it down and putting it back together, I can’t be sure,” he admitted. “But I looked at all the obvious places, and a few not so obvious ones. I didn’t see a thing. And the GPS signal detector I used didn’t spot anything.”
“If we get out of here, we should check again.” She barely got the sentence out past an enormous yawn.
“Why don’t you try to get some sleep?” Rick suggested. “You’ve got to be beat.”
Though the light was nearly gone from the cave, he could see her just well enough to notice her back straightening as she spoke. “I’m fine.”
She wasn’t fine, but if she needed to maintain that facade in front of him, he wasn’t going to take that away from her. “Okay. Not going to be much else we can do in here, though. No candles, no books.”
“You can sleep if you want to,” she said, her tone indifferent.
He wasn’t sure he bought the nonchalance, however. There was a faint thread of tension in her voice that made him wonder if she was hiding something from him.
Of course, the more obvious question at this point was, what
wasn’t
she hiding from him?
THE NIGHT SEEMED ENDLESS, and despite her determination not to, Amanda fell asleep sometime deep in the morning hours. Following her into her slumber, bleak memories chased her through her dreams, a jumble of horrors and regrets that had been her constant, unwelcome companions almost every night for the past three years.
The dreams always began with no sign of threat in sight. In this dream, she was ten years old again, sitting on the front stoop of the house in McComb, sketching pictures of dragons and unicorns in colored pencils in the sketch pad her Aunt Debbie gave her for her birthday a few days earlier.
She wasn’t unaccustomed to the sounds of voices raised in anger. Her mother drank too much, and she tended to pick men who were cruel-mouthed bullies. How much those unpleasant attributes fed on each other was something Amanda had never really been able to decide.
By the age of ten, she’d grown to ignore the fights for the most part, so when the shouts rose over the sounds of birds chirping in the trees and the lawn mower buzzing busily in the neighbor’s yard down the street, Amanda blocked out the noise and concentrated on achieving the perfect shimmery green required for a dragon’s wing.
The gunshot, however, had ripped through her self-protective cocoon, setting her nerves rattling.
She’d learned not to be afraid of the fights, because none of her mother’s boyfriends ever struck blows or made threats. The words that passed between them could be violently ugly, but there were lines they never crossed.
But not that morning.
Slowly, her ten-year-old self turned toward the open screen door and peered through the mesh, telling herself that her mother’s boyfriend, Jerry, had turned on the television. That’s all it was. He’d turned on the TV to watch one of his favorite cop shows. She listened hard for the sound of voices coming from the set in the kitchen. But all she heard was a low, keening noise that sounded as if hell itself had opened a window to let a song of suffering escape.