Charmed and Dangerous (11 page)

They were moving away from the marina. She loathed having to put so much faith in some random pissed-off guy she’d hijacked just an hour ago. But the whir of the helicopters overhead (growing more distant as she and Trevor moved away from the bridge) told her she didn’t have a
helluva lot of choice at this point. If this Trevor
did
have his name on a registration in that truck (and of course he would, as much as he luuuvved the damned thing), then he might have a point. She knew Cam would take one quick appraisal of this guy and know, without a doubt, her “hostage” could have removed her from his truck any time he’d wanted, so he must be helping her of his own free volition. Which made him an accessory.

Was he telling the truth? Or was he using the accessory bit as cover to try to find out what she was after? He
had
asked about the “valuable” thing the geeky boys took. He clearly knew how to handle a gun. And improvise solutions, something most really good criminals knew how to do. He had that soldier’s air about him—part confidence, part street smarts, part “I’ve killed people, don’t annoy me, you could be next.” She was going deeper into the woods with a guy who could help her find the tiara, but who could just as easily improvise his way into taking it away from her.

Damn. This was insane. And she had no other choice.

Trevor set a fast pace. Bobbie Faye stayed close behind him, careful to follow as directly in his footsteps as possible, which wasn’t easy when she was hyper aware of the gigantic spiderwebs strung between trees and the enormous wood spiders, wider than the palm of her hand, dangling in the center of their webs. All around her were beetles and bugs and animals bigger than a breadbox. She thought it wise to keep as close as she could to this strange, angry man. If nothing else, if they encountered anything hungry, maybe it would eat him first.

Cam didn’t recognize the guy with Bobbie Faye, but he could sense from Zeke’s satisfied smile that
he
did. Cam had ordered the WFKD news helicopter to stay above the bridge area in case they came out from that direction. He eavesdropped as Zeke pulled out his cell and ordered his own FBI helicopter to pick him up.

“Yes,” Zeke said as he walked away from Cam. “Definitely
Cormier. Just get here; we can’t afford for him to have too much of a head start.”

Zeke flipped his phone closed and glanced at Cam, who waited, arms crossed, to see if the Fed was going to pull “need to know” bullshit territorial crap. Instead, Zeke reached for a folded piece of paper his inside breast pocket.

“He used to be an agent.”

“Used to be?” Cam asked, opening the paper Zeke handed to him. On it were two photos of a man named “Trevor Cormier”—one from when he was a clean-cut agent, and a more recent surveillance photo where he looked exponentially shabbier, seedier. More dangerous. He was taking what appeared to be a thick envelope of money from men who looked, if possible, even more criminal. Cormier had a steely gaze that would have unnerved most people. The man who’d yanked Bobbie Faye back into the woods had cleaned up some since this photo, but Cam was certain it was the same man. Below the photos, there was a grocery list of crimes, and Cam didn’t think this Trevor had left off any of the biggies: there was murder, fraud, grand theft, kidnapping, smuggling . . . Cam looked at Zeke to get the rest of the story.

“It took us a couple of years to realize he was on the take,” Zeke explained. “He’d tip off people we were tracking and they’d escape, just one step ahead of us arresting them. Always a lot richer from whatever scam or money laundering scheme or theft they’d planned. Once he knew we were onto him, he went underground. Now he mercs out for a pretty hefty fee. A few weeks ago, we heard rumblings with your Ms. Sumrall’s name—”

“She is definitely not
my
Ms. Sumrall,” Cam interjected, mostly under his breath.

“—and some sort of moneymaking scam.”

“Bobbie Faye? Make money?” Cam shook his head, refraining from the laugh he’d felt at the thought.

“Well, either she’s an innocent bystander who somehow got caught up in Cormier’s trap, or she’s helping him. And
he’s sharp. He reads people extremely well and knows how to play them.”

“You don’t know Bobbie Faye. Manipulating her is a little like manipulating a live grenade. In the dark. You don’t play Bobbie Faye.”

“You don’t know Cormier like I know him. He’s not only a chameleon, I’ve seen him con the un-connable. If she’s with him, then it’s because he wants her there, alive. And before he’s done with her, she’ll have handed over whatever he wanted, willingly.”

Cam stared at Trevor’s photo and when he glanced up, Zeke fixed him with an unblinking gaze.

“I will catch Cormier. I have an order to pick him up. If he resists—and I assure you, he will resist—then I am to stop him. Period. If she’s anywhere near him . . .” Zeke let the end of his sentence hang in the air between them.

“Knowing Bobbie Faye, she’s just a bystander,” Cam said, not quite able to add “innocent” to that.

“Well, then, your bystander is about to have a very short life because Cormier will take her out when she ceases to be useful to him.”

Bobbie Faye would be a force of nature, if she weren’t so unnatural.

—Lucy Swimmer, Red Cross disaster director, Southern Region

As she tromped through the woods, she took mental inventory: she was soaking wet, annoyed, grimy, itchy, pissed off, gritty, irritated and oh, throw in aggravated for good measure. And now she could add feeling inundated and disoriented by the saturation of lush greens in the canopy of the trees above them. The leaves danced and sunlight dappled and mottled them, every undulation teasing and hypnotizing. The shifting vibrant colors plunging into her consciousness so soon after the dark of the lake made her woozy. She kept her eyes down or on Trevor’s back to stay focused on every step, trying to avoid stumbling into thorny brambles grown shoulder high. Maybe adrenaline had made her hyper aware of the light in the trees, the periwinkle blue beyond the awning of crisscrossing limbs, the loamy smell of old earth and new growth, the Spanish moss dripping from the tress like gray wax from melted candles. Maybe it was the adrenaline which inspired all her thoughts to swirl and hopscotch subject to subject, so random that nothing made sense.

Had she
just
been in a truck inside a pipe
in
a lake?

So she stared at Trevor’s back, trying to focus, trying to pull herself back into reality. Instead, all she managed to do was to notice the way his muscles were very nicely toned, the way the triceps were defined when he lifted his arms to move a branch out of the way, the way his confidence in every move he made just oozed sexiness and for crying out freaking loud, she needed to be interested in a man right about now about as much as she needed to grow a third boob, although, think of the money she could make in the freak show.

Geez. Focus.

He was a jerk, she reminded herself, with very questionable motives. Although he was also a jerk whom she’d hijacked and whose truck she’d shot (um, several times) and then destroyed . . . and, okay, maybe he had a teeny tiny bit of a right to be in a bad mood. Didn’t matter. She had instituted a no-new-boyfriend rule. Well, a no-dating rule, because she’d hardly call the idiots she’d dated after Cam real honest-to-goodness boyfriends, although that had been the plan.

She was noticing a theme here on the whole “planning” aspect of her life.

No, Cam was a major effing fiasco. The ones that followed were just more or less a parade of losers, and seriously, she’d had her quota of jerks. More than her quota. So no more dating until she had her life a little more together.

At the rate she was going, maybe she’d be capable of dating someone normal once she was in a nursing home.

She decided to avoid staring at Trevor’s back and opted to concentrate on his feet while following him, which meant she didn’t quite realize when he was about to pause, and when he did, she ran smack into him.

He scowled at her after the third time.

“Did you flunk ‘walking in line’ in kindergarten or what?”

“Hey, at least I passed ‘plays well with others.’ ”

“Only because you hadn’t figured out how to blow them up, yet.”

“I haven’t blown anything up,” she protested. “Lately,” she amended.

He muttered something under his breath that she couldn’t hear, which was probably a good thing.

She followed Trevor as he hurried through the woods, crossing small muddy creaks and boggy marshes. Bobbie Faye had to hug her bare arms tightly to her body in order to avoid the sharp edges of the thick-fingered palmetto fronds sprouting in clusters which had grown to shoulder height. Trevor used a large stick to knock down the spiderwebs and check the stability of what appeared to be hard soil, but which might turn out to be deep soupy muck with a dried crust. Of course, neither of them thought about doing that
before
Bobbie Faye’s boot broke through just one such crusty spot and she had sunk down to her calf in mud.

As she stomped to dislodge the mud, she had let out such a string of expletives, Trevor laughed, shaking his head.

“What?” she asked.

“I saw
three
mother squirrels cover their babies’ ears, they were so shocked at your mouth.”

“Fuck the squirrels. They get to climb,” she said, continuing with the stomping, slinging mud onto his jeans.

“Are you finished being Lord of the Dance?”

“I don’t know what scares me more . . . that you made a joke, or that you know about the Lord of the Dance.”

He chuckled then, and she felt the energy of his grin surge through her. Wow. It was the first quiet moment she’d had to really look at him, beyond just registering the general hottie factor, and she liked the crinkles around his eyes, the not-perfect face with the lopsided grin, the calm he radiated. That man really should smile a lot more often. She had to mentally shake herself to keep from touching the scar just below his eye.

They stood like that a moment, grinning, and then turned together to head deeper into the woods, keeping up a brisk pace, dodging around thickets of briars, avoiding overgrown blackberry bushes full of thorns, and walking carefully around deadfall to avoid snakes lying in the crevices. She
saw deer tracks and then a few minutes later, an area of flattened grass where several doe had bedded down together the night before. Above her, resurrection ferns had leafed out after the recent rain, covering the broad curved limbs of the live oak trees, ruffling in the small breeze like a thick, decorative fringe. The colors and smells soothed her and the calm gave her hope.

Trevor paused near a pine tree, cocking his head to listen to the whir of a helicopter . . . check that, helicopter
s
. There were at least two. So much for
hope
. She watched his face and had the eerie feeling that he not only knew exactly how many there were, but could have told her the model, the payload, and how many people were on board just from the sound. It puzzled her all over again, why he’d let himself get roped into her disaster, because she knew now more than ever that he wasn’t a man to
get
roped. It worried her.

Just as she started to ask him, Bobbie Faye saw something move in her peripheral vision. She grabbed his arm.

“Stop,” she said, sudden and sharp, and he froze.

She looked around carefully without moving; she wasn’t entirely sure what she’d seen at first, but something inexplicable had seized that animal instinct part of her brain, that survival part. To her surprise, Trevor watched her and waited.

And then she saw it.

“Cottonmouth,” she whispered to Trevor and he stayed immobile. It was coiled at the base of the nearest pine tree, its jaws wide as it weaved, undulated, preparing to strike. Chills slalomed across her goose bumps, and she tensed, staying perfectly still. The woods around lakes and swamps were full of all types of snakes. This was a deadly water moccasin which they hadn’t seen in their speed through the underbrush.

“Striking distance?” he asked, and she nodded. The really bad news about a cottonmouth was that, unlike other snakes which would, if given the option, flee an intruder, the cottonmouth would go after an invader, following it and still
striking, even when the invader was trying to leave its territory; simply moving away wasn’t so terribly easy. She wasn’t sure what to do since the snake was mostly behind Trevor, and at roughly four feet long with an ability to jump nearly its length, the cottonmouth could easily strike Trevor even if he tried to move out of its way. Or strike her, if he moved fast enough.

That’s when she saw what she needed out of the corner of her eye—the knife sheathed at Trevor’s hip. A Ka-Bar. Ce Ce sold them. The one many military and ex-military favored. The blade alone was seven inches and with the leather-wrapped handle, it was nearly twelve inches long. She eased her right hand to his side and unsnapped the sheath.

“What the hell are you doing?” he muttered.

“Just be still,” she whispered, never taking her eyes from the cottonmouth. She slowly lifted the knife, thankful that side of Trevor was hidden from the snake, and she balanced its weight in her palm. Trevor started to protest, but something stopped him and she could feel his intake of breath and she knew he was surprised at how she handled the knife. Well screw ’em all, they were always surprised.

She measured the timing of the snake’s rhythm against some internal metronome, and she went calm, moving liquid fast, throwing the knife with perfect accuracy, seeing the knife impale the snake’s head on the pine tree with a sharp
ssschhhtkkk
sound—

“Oooh, gllrch,” she said, slapping her hand over her mouth, shuddering hard, her body wanting to crumple as she turned away from the impaled snake and tried not to throw up.

“You’re kidding me,” Trevor said, his gaze moving from her to the dead snake. “You throw like . . . a guy, but you—”

“Will totally puke if you don’t get that knife and move that thing,” she said, shivering again.