Passion to Protect (15 page)

At the stark reminder of his duty to give Deke’s daughter the full truth, Harry said curtly, “Close the door on your way out, Camille.”

Then he reached for the phone one more time, intent on reaching Liane before Agent Davies beat him to the punch.

Chapter 15

P
eering from behind the corner of the old bunkhouse, Mac watched Liane walk out with the man he now knew for certain was her lover. Though he hadn’t been able to see anything when he’d finally worked up the courage to creep close enough, he’d damned well heard her cries of passion. It disgusted him to know that his wife, still as beautiful as ever, was whoring with some two-bit cowboy, that she would screw the bear-spray-wielding bastard within sight of the house where she lived with the children whose minds she’d poisoned against him.

I’d be well within my rights to kill them both now, to leave their blood-soaked bodies lying in the dirt.
Then he could go and take the children. Sooner or later they would come around and realize that everything he’d done had been for them. Eventually, he thought, he could even make them love him.
After all, I’ll be the only one they have left.

But when he noticed the tools that Liane and her lover were carrying, he pushed aside his fury and focused on what she was saying.

“There’s no way we’ll find that money, not after the sheriff and his deputies have already searched the place three times.”

“If it’s anywhere, it has to be in your dad’s study,” the cowboy insisted. “Maybe hidden in the walls?”

Mac’s rage grew white-hot. Not only was the cowboy screwing Liane, he was clearly out to claim the money he’d sacrificed everything for.

She nodded. “I still think you’re dead wrong, but Dad did have drywall put in front of the old log walls so he could hang his photos.”

He nodded, shifting the tools uncomfortably.

“Let me get that. You’re still healing,” she said, reaching for the pickax.

“I’ve got it,” he was quick to tell her.

Even from his vantage point, Mac could detect the strain between them.

“Don’t be so stubborn,” Liane said, taking the pickax from him.

“When they put up the drywall,” the cowboy said, “they would’ve had to build the wall out. Which means there’d be a space behind it.”

“If there’s a drywall patch, we’ll see it,” she said. “But don’t you think the sheriff and his men would’ve, too?”

The two of them walked toward the house, still debating, and Mac weighed his options. As badly as he wanted them dead, he had to have that money. Could he take a chance on killing them both and then searching the house by himself? Or would it be better to risk a confrontation now, before they got inside, and force them to do his searching for him?

Armed as he was, he was certain he could control Liane, but the memory of the tall man jumping him, then nailing him full in the face with the bear spray, had him worried about the potential for another violent surprise.

So take the risk out of the equation,
he thought as, heart in throat, he slipped out into the open.
Kill the cowboy right now, while surprise is on your side.

* * *

“Move over, Misty,” Liane said as she set down the tools to unlock the back door, “and please stay out from under my feet.”

Whining urgently, the dog seemed as tense as she felt, but it was all she could do to handle her own swirling emotions. As furious as she’d been with Jake for believing her father could have found and kept the stolen money, she knew she was not only terrified he was right but angry with herself.

She’d been a fool to sleep with him. No matter how powerful the attraction, how right and inevitable—how incredible—it had felt to make love with him, she knew she could only hurt him by pretending she was capable of getting past what had happened to her and moving forward.

She also knew now that she’d been crazy to think she and Jake could ever maintain a simple friendship. There was no ignoring the way he made her feel and no deluding herself into thinking she could ever push him away without hurting him or that it wouldn’t destroy her to see him with another woman.

“You all right?” he asked, clueing her in to the fact that she was standing frozen in place.

“Whatever we find or don’t find,” he said gently, “I swear to you, I’ll be there to help you through it.”

Tears came to her eyes as she thought of how much she would miss this caring man and how devastated her kids, who had taken to begging her to “be real nice to Mr. Jake so he can stay with us forever,” would be when they were forced to leave him. Her heart shuddered as she thought of giving up the home that had been in her family for more than a century, but she had no hope of affording it on her own, much less growing the business back to the point where it was a going concern. Instead, she would be forced to evict Jake and then leave—perhaps returning to her old job—since she couldn’t imagine sticking around this area, living on the fringes of her old life.

The sense of loss and failure, of letting down her father and grandfather, the whole long line of Masons, stole the breath from her lungs. Maybe if she’d taken more of an interest from the start, stayed here to help her dad instead of rushing off straight after college to work for a big corporate hotel—or tried harder to help him out after her return, in spite of his resistance to what he’d called her “fancy new ideas”—he never would’ve grown desperate enough to...

Grief sideswiped her again, so raw and painful that she found herself saying, “I need a moment. You go in. It’s just—it’s harder than I thought to come back.”

“The first step’s always toughest,” he said, looking at her with such compassion that she wanted to fall into his arms.

But she didn’t allow herself to compound her earlier error. Instead she opened the door, moving aside as Misty nosed her way through. “I’ll be right in, I promise. Do you remember the alarm code?”

“I’ve got it,” he told her as he stepped inside to turn off the newly repaired system. “You call if you need me and I’ll be back out in a flash.”

* * *

The smile Liane sent Jake’s way didn’t touch the sadness in her eyes. As upset as he’d been when she’d compared him to her ex, his anger evaporated at the reminder of the hell she’d been through—and was still going through.

Don’t crowd her,
he warned himself,
or you could lose her forever.

A few minutes later, when he looked out to check on her, he found her pacing as she spoke on the phone.

“Whatever you need to say, Sheriff,” she was saying, “just go ahead and spit it out.”

Assuming that Harry was telling her about the FBI’s involvement, he left the door ajar, then went to find a flashlight. Back inside the study, he directed the beam over every inch of drywall, including the areas hidden behind the desk and file cabinet and behind the framed photos. But he found no sign of a recent patch job, nor did he spot anything behind several file boxes in the supply closet.

“Foundation...” he murmured, then looked down, realizing he should have thought of the floor earlier. Though he saw no evidence of loose boards, he realized there was no way he would know for certain whether anything was under there until he took up the big area rug and then pried up every bit of flooring.

It would leave a hell of a mess, he knew, as well as a lot to explain when the FBI came calling. Realizing that his previous plan to move the money if he found it had been a foolish fantasy, he decided he had better discuss things with Liane before he went any further.

As he returned to the back door, he didn’t hear her talking, so he stepped outside to look. “Liane?” he called, wondering where she could have gone.

Then he spotted the taillights of her silver Jeep as they disappeared from view.

Chapter 16

A
s she ended her conversation with Harry, Liane was stopped her in her tracks by the sound of a voice she’d hoped never to hear again. Mac’s voice.

“One move, one sound, and you’re one dead slut, I swear it.”

Shock cascading through her system, she felt something hard pressing into her back. A gun, she thought, a scream on her lips before he grabbed her arm and starting walking her quickly toward her Jeep.

“Try anything and I swear I
will
shoot you,” he said. “Now move. We’re going for a little ride.”

Somehow she managed to stay on her feet, but there was nothing she could do to stop her body’s trembling or the nausea threatening to double her over.
It’s real this time—no nightmare. Today’s the day I die.

“You want to stay alive?” he asked. “At least a little longer?”

Paralyzed with fear, she couldn’t answer.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” he told her as he opened the driver’s door and shoved her behind the wheel.

Shaking her head, she fought to clamp down on her panic. “Just let me go inside and tell him I have to go pick up the kids. That way he won’t be suspicious.”

Mac’s cruel laughter sent her racing heartbeat into overdrive. “You’re kidding, right? You take one step toward that house and it’s over.” His gun still pointed at her, he slipped into the seat behind her. “Take out that phone and call him, tell him you’ll be right back. Tell him Cody’s sick and you’ve gone to get him. Tell him whatever you want. Just make it good.”

“He’ll insist on coming with me,” she warned, desperation forcing her voice higher. “No matter what I say.”

Mac’s slow grin in the rearview was the face of evil. “If you can’t manage one simple lie, no problem. I have a score to settle with the bastard anyway. And don’t worry, I’ll be happy to take his place between your legs.”

Liane’s vision grayed, her stomach lurching.

“Start driving,” he ordered. “Then make your call. And be sure to make your story convincing.”

She pulled her keys from her pocket and stabbed them into the ignition. “He’ll hear it in my voice that I’m lying.”

“He’d better not. Otherwise we
will
go get those kids now, and I swear you’ll never see them again.”

Alarm streaked through her at the thought that he might mean to harm them. “Please, Mac. Whatever you believe I’ve done, you’ve already punished me by—you took my father from me.”

“It was his own damned fault. He went for his gun—didn’t even give me a chance to ask him about that money he stole.
My
money.”

“Whatever he did or didn’t do,” she said, forcing herself to keep her focus on saying whatever she had to to save her children, “there’s no reason to do this.”

“I can think of about two-and-a-half million reasons,” he said. “And that’s not even counting the most important one—revenge.”

* * *

As Camille stepped inside Harry’s office, she raised her delicate brows. “I’ve never seen you turn up your nose at Toni’s pot roast. Something wrong with it today?”

He looked down at the congealing brown mass, normally his favorite, and shut the take-out container with a snap. “Guess I’m just not hungry.”

“You’re not getting sick, are you?”

He shook his head, though the burning in his stomach had grown worse than ever. Funny, when he’d convinced himself that talking with Liane would make things better. Maybe if he’d kept on talking, rather than convincing himself he’d already upset her enough for one day...

She gave him a skeptical look. “Your color’s kind of off. Maybe you should make an appointment with the doctor.”

“If your grandmother’s put you up to doing her nagging for her, you can tell her I’m just fine.” With no children of his own to “look after him,” as his sister put it, she’d come right out and told him it was up to her to see he didn’t go to seed. He might have appreciated the thought if Violet’s “help” hadn’t included sending Hurricane Camille his way.

His grandniece looked worried. “Maybe Grandma’s right. You’ve had a really tough week, and it’s only been a few months since Aunt Myrtle—”

“Six months,” he said hollowly, feeling every day of the half year since he’d last seen her in the flesh. In dreams he saw her all the time, and even in the daylight he often imagined he glimpsed her thin face with its reassuring smile.

“Why don’t you go home and lie down for a little while?” she suggested. “I can give you a call when Special Agent Davies gets here.”

“I imagine you’d like that,” he groused. “Give you another chance to chat with your new friend about me.”

She smiled. “Come on, Uncle Harry. I was only teasing about that. I swear I didn’t tell her anything except how you’re a real sweetheart, underneath that grouchy exterior.”

“The hell I am. Now, did you come in here for any reason in particular? Aside from irritating me, that is?”

Still smiling, she nodded and passed him a message. “Sure. I thought you might get a kick out of this one. Lady called in with an
urgent
problem.”

“What kind of problem?”

Camille rolled her eyes. “She says that when she and her husband came home a little bit ago her coffee pot was empty. And, even worse, apparently she’d had her heart set on a honey-glazed donut, but somebody’d swiped the last one from the box.”

She laughed, as she usually did at the more absurd calls. But if she’d hoped he would join in, she was disappointed.

“You’re seriously bothering me about that? Now? Don’t you have some filing out there or something?”

She sighed and left him, hurrying her steps when the phone on her desk started ringing.

Before Harry could get up the gumption to toss his lunch in the trash, Camille called, “Line two for you. Bob Carpenter, and he sounds really mad.”

Wondering what was bothering the normally easygoing retiree—who had occasionally joined him and Deke for breakfast—Harry picked up. “Wallace here. What can I do for you, Bob?”

“You can get a man out here, and I don’t mean tomorrow.”

Taken aback at his friend’s tone, Harry glanced down at the name on the message Camille had handed to him. “This isn’t about Becky’s missing donut, is it?”

“Hell, no, it isn’t about my wife’s stupid donuts. But she wouldn’t quit squawking, so I checked things out and found a busted window latch in the back. So I checked, and a pistol’s missing from my gun case.”

That was when it hit Harry, like a hard pop to the sternum. This was definitely no laughing matter. Because the Carpenters lived out on Black Oak Road, all too close to the Masons.

Heart pounding, he murmured a promise that he would send a man out ASAP and quickly hung up, thirty-eight years of law enforcement instincts screaming that the theft was no coincidence. McCleary was alive and had come back with a vengeance, either out of desperation to find his missing money or to finally finish what he’d started when he’d first tried to kill Liane.

* * *

Jake was just pulling his phone from his pocket when it started ringing and Liane’s name popped up on the screen.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, ignoring Misty’s attempt to push her head beneath his free hand. “I saw you drive off. What the hell—where are you going?”

“He was my father. I can’t do this.” Her words clinked together, like ice cubes against glass. “And I don’t want you in there, digging through my house.”

The phone beeped to signal that he had another call. Ignoring it, he stepped outside, the blood rushing in his ears and the big dog right beside him. “Come back, Liane, please. You’re upset. Let’s talk this through, and then if you still don’t want to—”

“It’s not that—it’s Cody. The school nurse called to say he’s sick. I have to go and get him. I have to go right now.”

“Come on back and let me take you. You shouldn’t be driving when you’re upset.”

“No!” she said, far too sharply.

“Liane, think of your kids. If you’re in a wreck, who will they have to—”

“You,”
she said emphatically. “They’ll have
you,
Jake. That’s what I want. Remember.”

A white-hot current of alarm burned through him. “What are you saying, Liane?”

With a beep in his ear, the call disconnected. Ignoring the ringing of the landline inside, he tried frantically to call her back. When his calls kept rolling to her voice mail, he reached for his keys and raced for his pickup. His heart was hammering a warning that if he didn’t get to her quickly, he would regret it forever.

“Out of the truck, Misty,” he shouted when the dog jumped into the pickup bed, her tail wagging with excitement. As she reluctantly obeyed, the phone in his hand started ringing. “Liane,” he said, slipping behind the wheel. “Thank God. What’s—”

“Jake—it’s Harry here.” The sheriff shouted to make himself heard over a siren’s wail. “I’ve been trying to reach you to let you know—”

“I have to catch Liane.” The pickup’s engine roared to life. “She just took off in her Jeep. Then she called and told me—”

“You don’t understand. It’s—”

Jake talked over him.
“
No,
you
don’t understand. Something’s
wrong
. I have to catch her before she—”

“Shut up and listen to me, Whittaker!” Harry boomed. “It’s McCleary. I think he’s alive and on his way there.”

“McCleary?” Panic speared him. Could Liane’s ex have grabbed her? “I thought he was long gone. Or dead.”

“That’s why I’m calling. I’m on my way out to the ranch now. We’ve had a report of a break-in next door, and Bob Carpenter says he has a gun missing. School’s been contacted to keep the children inside and in sight, and not to release them until a deputy gets there, but I couldn’t get hold of Liane.”

“He has her. That has to be it.” Nothing else accounted for her abrupt change in behavior. His blood running cold, Jake threw the truck back into Park and bailed out. He was going to need a weapon of his own. “She said she was going to the school to pick up Cody. That might’ve been a lie, but either way I’m going after them before they get too far.”

“You stay put,” Harry ordered. “I’m en route, and I’ve got deputies dispatched, too.”

“I’ll be damned if I’ll let him hurt her,” Jake swore.

“You’re in way over your head on this, Jake. You’ll get her killed. Maybe yourself, too.”

“If I don’t move right now, she’s as good as dead already.” His life would be over, too, if he couldn’t save her.

“You have to let me do this. This is my responsibility, all of it.”

Before Jake could ask what he meant, Harry added, “I’m only ten, maybe fifteen, minutes out at most. It’s possible that I can intercept them. If not, I’ll pick you up and we can go from there.”

“That’s ten or fifteen minutes for Mac to take her God knows where.” Jake couldn’t stand to think about what he would do to Liane then or how terrified she must be. How could he have taken his eyes off her even for a moment?

“I’m—I’m ordering—” Gasping for breath, the sheriff struggled to get the words out. “Ordering—you—Jake. Stay—”

A pained grunt was followed by a thump as if he’d dropped the phone.

“What’s wrong, Harry? Harry?” Jake shouted, but no matter how he strained his ears, he heard only the keening of the siren.
Not this. Not now,
he thought, recalling how exhausted the man had looked of late, how worn by the burden of his best friend’s murder.

“Pull over!” he yelled. “Pull off the road now, Harry. I’m calling 9-1-1.” When there was no response, he added, “Can you hear me?”

As the siren continued to wail, Jake thought he made out another low moan. A moment later there was a banging sound and the line went dead. Had Harry fumbled the phone and disconnected—or crashed into the trees that lined the lightly traveled road?

Though finding Liane was his priority, Jake called 9-1-1 and reported what he’d heard, along with his best estimate of the sheriff’s location. By the time he was finished making certain the dispatcher understood Liane’s situation, too, he’d collected the borrowed handgun from the cabin and was speeding down Black Oak Road in the direction she had turned.

As he drove he lowered the windows, thinking he might hear something his eyes missed, and racked his brain trying to imagine where McCleary might have taken her. Did he really mean to snatch the children, as Liane’s call had suggested? Thankful that Harry had moved quickly to see to their safety, Jake considered the possibility that McCleary believed Liane knew the location of the money. Or maybe it had never been about the money. Maybe she’d been right to think it was the desire for vengeance that drove him.

Jake tasted bile at the thought that McCleary might simply shoot her and dump the body somewhere, just as he had left Deke. Even more nightmarish was the possibility that he would take her someplace where he could pay her back for her imagined sins with hours of brutal torture, while Jake searched frantically, as helpless to save her as he’d been to rescue his men.

He slowed as he approached a crossroads, looking for any clue that a vehicle might have recently turned off, heading either toward the river or the Smuggler’s Gulch Trailhead. Spotting no traffic or even a hint of telltale dust above the smaller dirt roads, he made the difficult decision to remain on Black Oak, heading toward town—and the school.

Spotting a blue-gray blur in his rearview mirror, he saw that Misty must have jumped back into the pickup bed when he’d gone inside to grab the gun. Nothing he could do about that now. He just kept driving, panic clawing its way along his backbone. What if he’d been wrong to go straight? What if Mac had forced Liane to pull off into one of the narrow driveways leading toward someone’s vacation cabin or a hidden hiking trail? And there were other turn-offs ahead, other choices that could as easily prove wrong.

Images of Liane suffering at that bastard’s hands hammering at his temples, Jake pictured himself blowing McCleary’s brains out or, better yet, pounding his face to pulp. But as violent as his rage was, he quickly realized that right now, raw emotion was the enemy. He had to push aside his feelings and think clearly or he really would lose her forever....