Authors: Susan Andersen
“The ferry terminal. Does anyone have a schedule?”
“If you leave in the next five minutes, you should be in time to check the dock before the eight-oh-five loads,” Christopher said. “The boat after that, which is the last to leave the island tonight, is at ten-fifty.”
“Let Christopher and me check it out for you, though,” David said. “Between us, we know most of the ticket takers, and we probably have a better chance than you of talking them into keeping Escavez’s car off the boat if he’s there.”
“Thanks.” Zach gave them a brief description of Miguel, then pulled his keys out of his pocket. “I’ll head back to Rosario and see if I can pick up a trail to follow from there. Glynnie, can I take your cell phone?”
“You bet.” She went into the parlor to collect it.
When she returned an instant later she handed it to him with a scrap of paper containing two telephone numbers. “The top one is David’s cell and the bottom number is for the phone here. Keep in touch. I’ll contact the sheriff, then let both of you know what he says.”
Within moments the three men were climbing into their vehicles, and Zach followed David’s car as it raced along the winding country roads. Reaching a crossroad, the other two men continued straight for the ferry dock, while Zach turned left onto Crow Valley Road to head to the east side of the island. Once alone, the hollow space in his gut began to spread, melting outward like a piece of old film caught in a projector. If anything happened to Lily—
Every word they’d exchanged tonight as a result of her evening-altering declaration played back in his head. He’d told himself that while he clearly could have handled it better, his succinct, dispassionate summation had been necessary to let her know in no uncertain terms that he could never love her. But who the hell was he fooling? That excuse was so full of shit it was a wonder there wasn’t a cloud of flies surrounding it.
Lily had accused him of being afraid, and he’d blown the suggestion off. He wasn’t a man who thought of himself as being afraid of anything that didn’t result in death or dismemberment. But the truth was, he was terrified. He was scared right down to the ground that if he admitted to the feelings that had been growing ever since he’d realized how special she was—and then lost her when she discovered that he didn’t have what it took to hold on to love—it would destroy him.
How the hell had he managed to keep the truth from
himself, though? He should have known the instant he’d awakened from his dream the other morning and found himself oddly comforted by her presence, realized when holding her had kept at bay the old familiar sense of abandonment the dreams usually left in their wake. He should have known when, beneath his towering relief upon discovering she couldn’t possibly be pregnant, there had been the tiniest spark of disappointment that an excellent excuse for hanging on to her had been removed.
Shit.
On some level he had known. He just hadn’t want to confront it. Exposing emotions was too much like ripping off your armor in the heat of battle. It left you wide open for the knife’s plunge or a bullet’s destructive, ripping force.
But the raw fact remained, he acknowledged as he pulled into Rosario’s parking lot for the second time that evening, that if anything happened to Lily tonight it would kill him every bit as much as it would have if he’d taken the chance and they’d lived together for months or years before she left him. The difference was, he would have had time to bask in her integrity, her honest sexuality, her sweetness.
Right now he had nothing but too few memories.
He didn’t know what he expected to find by coming back here. He’d gone over the area pretty damn carefully earlier. But he’d been looking for her then; he hadn’t been searching for a clue that might allow him to follow her trail. He headed along the path that led to the point.
A few minutes later, he paused beneath the dense stand of trees to let his night vision establish itself away from the lights. This was pointless. He was following a concrete path, for crissake—it wasn’t as if
he’d find holes from her spike heels to lead him to her. Bending his head, he dug his fingers into the tight muscles knotting his neck.
A second later he realized the darker shadow he stared at on the ground wasn’t part of the tree trunk as he’d first assumed. He squatted and felt a hot zing in his gut when his fingers slid over the smooth leather of Lily’s little purse.
Slowly he straightened, the small handbag clutched in his hand. And an icy calm settled over his nerves.
He couldn’t afford to race around blind; he needed a plan. But before he could form one of those, he needed to know if Lily was still on the island. He pulled Glynnis’s cell phone from his pocket and punched in David’s number.
“What have you found out?” he demanded the instant his future brother-in-law answered.
“Chris is up checking every car that loads on the boat, but so far neither of us have seen one that fits the description of Escavez’s. And no one remembers seeing either him or Lily.”
The rush of relief had Zach’s spine bowing for a second. Then he pulled himself back upright. “That’s good. The longer we can confine Escavez to the island, the better chance we have of finding Lily. And where I was ninety-nine percent certain he had her before, now I’m a hundred percent positive. I just found her purse under the trees near that little park on the point.”
The other man swore, and Zach said grimly, “As long as I’m over here, I’m going to drive through the park. It seems a logical place for Escavez to go.”
“Try Mount Constitution,” David suggested eagerly.
“There’s a lookout tower up at the top—he might have headed up there for the night.”
“Thanks. I will. Have you heard from Glynnie?”
“Not yet, but I’ll call her to pass on your information, and one of us will get back to you.”
They disconnected, and Zach headed for his Jeep. He was torn. Most of him wanted Escavez to be somewhere in the park, since it was a specific place to search and his best bet for getting Lily back as soon as possible. But there was a fraction of him that remembered how much the place had frightened her the last time they’d been there. Then he stuffed everything except the need to concentrate into the back of his mind and drove up to the highway, where he turned toward the park.
His sister called to let him know the sheriff’s office would be on the look out for Escavez’s car. With renewed purpose, he continued on, driving slowly and stopping to peer into anything large enough to shelter a car.
When he rounded a slight bend and his headlights suddenly picked out Lily, carrying her shoes and limping along the shoulder of the road, he stood on the brakes and stared, unable for an instant to believe his eyes.
Then sweet relief flooded his system. “Thank you, Jesus;
thank
you,” he breathed.
She stumbled to a halt and threw up her hands to block the light from her eyes, and rage exploded in his gut when he saw the cord binding her wrists together. But before he could react or even open the door to go to her, a look of pure panic flashed across her face. And, pivoting on her nylon-stocking-clad foot, she plunged off the road into the woods.
L
ILY HAD SEEN TOO MANY SLASHER MOVIES.
When the car lights found her by the side of the road she was so unnerved that the first thing to pop into her mind was the standard plotline of those films—woman gets hacked / slashed / chainsawed by resilient, utterly invincible killer. Fresh adrenaline roared through her and, since she’d already done the fight thing tonight, flight seemed the better choice.
And the worst of it was, it was her own darn fault. It hadn’t taken five minutes alone in the dark, after her escape from Miguel, for her to realize just how badly she’d screwed up. Rather than taking the car keys to prevent the young thug from gunning for her the moment he regained consciousness, she should have just shoved him out of the car and taken the vehicle for herself. This pockmarked, rock-strewn, pitch-black wilderness was
no
place for a city-bred woman—particularly not one whose hands were bound and whose feet had been shod in her highest pair of heels until she’d fallen
flat on her face trying to run in them down the goat-path that passed for a road.
Of course by the time she’d figured out her mistake, it had been too late to go back and rectify the matter. For all she knew Miguel might have already come to, and she hadn’t wanted to be anywhere in the vicinity if that were the case. But after her second tumble to the rough ground, she’d started to rethink even
that
—until the vehicle with the blinding lights had slammed to a halt in front of her.
That’s when her fantasy of taking over Miguel’s car with its sturdy, lockable doors vanished, and the young man—who in her mind had been growing increasingly more easily conquered—suddenly morphed into a monster with foot-long steel blade fingernails. Dear God, he’d found her! Gripped by terror, she didn’t stop to wonder how he’d managed to get the car started or why he was approaching from the wrong direction. She simply turned tail and ran.
Hearing her name called as she crashed through the underbrush unnerved her even more, but it was the sound of pursuit that really shot her panic up into the stratosphere. Ignoring the branches snagging her clothing and catching at her hair, she battled her way through the foliage, and when some small gleaming-eyed creature suddenly scurried in front of her before just as abruptly skittering out of her way, a sob pushed its way past the lump of terror clogging her throat.
A rebounding branch she’d turned loose too quickly whipped back and thwacked her left elbow, and a battalion of pins-and-needles charged down a pathway of nerves to her fingertips. One of her shoes tumbled to the
ground, but she didn’t dare stop for it. Instead, she desperately tightened her grip on the remaining one. She didn’t have a clue how effective it would prove as a weapon now that the element of surprise had been removed. But it was all she had to defend herself, and she wasn’t about to lose it, too.
The trees and undergrowth suddenly thinned, and her heart lifted at the prospect of picking up her speed—only to drop crashing to her stomach when she pushed into a small clearing and found the way in front of her blocked by an almost vertical rocky cliff. Whirling to the right, she discovered that avenue obstructed also by an impenetrable thicket of brambles and young trees.
Breath sawing in and out of her lungs, she swung around to examine her options, and found there weren’t any. So she turned back to face her pursuer, whom she could hear rapidly closing the distance between them. When a nocturnal bird suddenly screeched on the bluff above her, she screamed.
Trembling as she teetered on the slippery slope of hysteria, she tried to regulate the speed of her breathing. To keep herself from tumbling into an abyss from which she feared she’d begin to scream and scream and never stop, she sucked air deep into her lungs and held each inhalation as long as she could before exhaling it. Then, her breath still coming too fast but feeling marginally more in control, she raised her shoe with its spiked heel out, ready to swing the makeshift weapon the moment anyone got too near.
That’s how Zach found her, hair wild, eyes ablaze with equal amounts of terror and determination, her ny
lons in shreds, her clothing snagged and streaked with dirt. Blood was a black trickle down her right leg from an abrasion on her knee, and her hands and face sported a number of welts and scratches. She looked one scant nudge away from a total meltdown, but still she stood like a rookie up to bat, her stiletto-heeled shoe gripped between her bound hands, ready and willing to inflict damage on anything that came within reach.
Aw, man. And he’d actually thought he had a prayer of
not
loving this woman?
“Stay back!”
“Lily.” He inched nearer, wishing he’d thought to grab the flashlight so she could see his face. “It’s me, sweetheart. It’s Zach.”
“Stay away from me, I said!” Her voice wobbled and she adjusted her stance, lifting the shoe a fraction higher. “I cold-cocked you once, buster—don’t think I won’t do it again.”
“It’s not Miguel, honey; it’s me. Shh, shh, shh, now,” he crooned. “It’s all right. You’re safe and nobody’s gonna hurt you. I just want to get you out of these woods.”
It was the latter, he suspected, that finally got through to her. He watched as she blinked and then leaned forward, eyes narrowed, to peer suspiciously at him through the meager illumination provided by the fingernail moon drifting in and out of the clouds.
“Zach?” She took a tentative step forward, but didn’t lower the shoe.
“That’s right, baby, it’s me.” He eased toward her. “You’re safe now, Lily. Let me take you back to the car.”
The stiletto heel tumbled from her grasp. Her arms dropped, and she seemed to sag where she stood.
It only took him three strides to cover the ground between them, but even as he reached for her, she rallied. Her posture snapped erect, and she swung her clasped hands at his chest, connecting with a solid thump. “You wretch! You scared me to death—I thought you were
him
.” Then she threw herself into his arms.
He held her tightly, aware of the rapid drumming of her heartbeat against his abdomen.
She rocked her forehead back and forth against his chest. “Of course, I also thought
he
was Freddy Kruger. I guess both assumptions were pretty stupid.” A wild laugh exploded out of her throat. “Stupid seems to be the order of the night. I can’t believe I lost it over my
shoes
, of all things.”
He didn’t have a clue what she was babbling about and didn’t particularly care—he was just grateful to have her back safe and sound. He tucked in his chin to peer down at her. “Are you all right? Escavez didn’t hurt you, did he?”
“No. I’m shook up, is all.” She pressed closer. “Just hold me.”
“Oh, yeah; I intend to.” He’d forgotten how tiny she was without her four-inch shoes, and being reminded caused him to hunch over her protectively, tightening his hold. But her bound hands between their bodies kept him from enfolding her as closely as he’d like, and with an exasperated murmur, he swept her up off her poor abused feet and turned to stride back to the road.
Teeth chattering, she burrowed against him on the
short journey to the car, and stayed close when he set her on her feet.
He grabbed a knife out of the toolbox and cut the cord that tethered her wrists together, then watched helplessly as she rubbed the skin where the ligature had chafed. Guilt and love welled up in him and, reaching out, he gently smoothed back her hair, plucking bits of flora from it. “God, Lily, I am so damn sorry I got you involved in this mess. The instant I knew Glynnie was safe I should have checked up on Escavez’s whereabouts. If I’d called the base sooner, you could have been spared all this.”
She shook her head. “It’s not your fault. And I was surprised that he’s just a kid. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t half as scared of him as I am of these horrid woods.”
“Still, I screwed up. It was unprofessional of me, even if I don’t understand why he fixated on you. But it’s gotta be due to his grudge against me.”
“He said you were responsible for the loss of his woman, so in return he was taking your woman from you.” Her eyes cooled then, and she took a step back. “You needn’t worry, though. I set him straight on that score.”
Zach winced. He had really hoped to put off his groveling until he could put some thought into what he wanted to say, but it looked as if he was out of luck on that score. “Listen, about that. I owe you an apology for my behavior after dinner tonight. I was wrong, and I acted like a jerk. You, on the other hand, were one hundred percent right.”
She blinked. “I was?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, as much as hearing that is music to my ears, I’m not quite sure I understand just what it is you think I was right about.”
He shifted uncomfortably, because this was uncharted territory and he was a man who liked to prepare. Still, he had to give it a shot. He owed her that, at the very least. “You know…love.” He opened the passenger door of the Jeep and lifted her onto the seat, but sat her sideways, facing him. “The relationship thing.”
“What about it?”
“I’ve decided I’m for it. I think we should have one.” He eyed her expectantly.
To his dismay, Lily looked more confused than ecstatic. “Isn’t that quite a turnaround?”
“Yeah, well, what can I say. I’m”—he cleared his throat, drew a deep breath—“crazy about you.” He exhaled in relief. Whataya know? That hadn’t been so damn difficult after all.
“Or perhaps just plain crazy,” she said flatly. “And you sure as sugar picked the wrong night for it, because I am so,
so
not in the mood for your charity.” Her chin came up even as her voiced cracked.
His head snapped back as if she’d slapped him. “Say what?”
“You sat across a table from me not more than two hours ago, and informed me in no uncertain terms that you don’t—how did you put it?—‘
do
’ love, but now I’m supposed to believe you’re suddenly wild about me? Don’t insult my intelligence, Taylor. You think I don’t recognize your overactive Mr. Accountability streak at work when I see it?” She crossed her arms over her
breasts. “You’ve decided it’s your fault I had a big, bad uncomfortable hour at Miguel Escavez’s hands, so you’re offering yourself up as consolation prize.”
“That’s a crock of sh—”
“The heck it is! But I’ve got news for you, Zachariah. Like I said, I’m not some charity case, and I deserve more than a pity proposal, or proposition, or whatever this is supposed to be. So I tell you what. You can just
keep
your big sacrifice. I don’t want it.”
I don’t want you
, roared in his head, and all his shields slammed into place. For one of the few times in his life he’d opened himself up and taken an emotional risk. Hell, he’d just offered her more than he’d ever offered another woman in his entire adult existence, and she’d tossed it back in his face. “Fine.” Losing all expression, he essayed an indifferent shrug. “Whatever. I thought it might be fun. But if you’re not interested, you’re not interested. Damned if I’m going to beg.”
“No,” she agreed thinly. “Zach Taylor would certainly never do that, would he?”
Surprisingly, temptation was riding him with spurs of steel to do exactly that, but she obviously wasn’t ready to listen and he wasn’t about to toss his heart at her feet again—not when she seemed more inclined to stomp all over it with those needle-heeled shoes of hers than clutch it to her breast. He turned away and pulled Glynnie’s cell phone from his pocket. “I’d better let everyone know you’re okay.”
His sister answered the phone and screeched so loudly when he broke the news that he had to hold the phone away from his ear. Once she’d settled down
enough to carry on a coherent conversation, he said, “Is David back yet?”
“No, but he’s on his way,” Glynnis said.
“Okay, I’ll see if I can intercept him. I need him to come pick up Lily.”
“What, you got a hot date or something, that you can’t bring her home yourself?”
“That’s cute, Glynnie—a real knee slapper. And no. I don’t. But I do have to go get Escavez and take him to the sheriff’s office before he can slither off and find himself a hidey-hole to hatch a
new
plan to screw up my life.”
“Oh. Yeah. Good idea.”
“Can’t tell you how relieved I am that you agree.”
There was an instant of silence. Then she said, “Whoa,” at the same time he muttered, “Sorry.”
“Forget sorry,” she snapped. “What’s got your shorts in a wedgie?”
“Not a damn thing. I gotta go.” He disconnected, and glanced at Lily. But she’d swung around to face front and didn’t look at him. Pacing away, he punched in David’s number. A moment later he disconnected again after giving the younger man a succinct update and directions on how to find them. Then he turned back to the Jeep.
He was all business as he grilled Lily regarding what direction she’d traveled since escaping from Escavez’s car, but he didn’t appreciate by half her own businesslike responses. As soon as David and Christopher arrived, he put her in the backseat of their car, but then stood holding the door open for a moment as he stared down at her.
This was freaking nuts. He loved her, she loved him, and he was ready and willing to make a go of it—why was she being so damned stubborn? Okay, now clearly wasn’t the time to hash it out, but he couldn’t just let her go like this. So he dropped to his haunches, reached into the car, and snagged a hand around the back of her neck. Pulling her toward him, he leaned in to meet her halfway, and planted a hard, hot one on her startled mouth.
Just as abruptly, he turned her loose. “I
will
do right by you,” he warned her baldly as he rose to his feet. “You can take that to the bank.” Then, closing the door, he slapped the car’s roof to signal David to take off.
It didn’t take him long to find Escavez’s car. And miracle of miracles, something actually seemed to be going his way when he saw that the young man was still inside, head tipped back against the seat as he stared dully up at the roof liner. Zach opened the passenger door and slipped inside. “Hey, there, Miguel. I hear you and I have a little unfinished business.”