Mountain Investigation (4 page)

It was Special Agent Michael Grayson, the FBI agent who’d made her life a living hell and nearly killed her father in his efforts to get at a truth that had existed only in his mind.

And now she was at his mercy.

“I prefer to be called Gray. Not that it matters much to you, I’m guessing,” he said, seeing displeasure flood her face, no doubt due to the way he’d treated her and her family during the investigation. Which was too bad, because as far as he was concerned he’d done what needed to be done.

Besides, it wasn’t as if he was thrilled to see her, either. He hadn’t been about to let Mawadi grab her and drag her back inside, but rescuing her had complicated the hell out of the situation. He’d planned to wait for the five o’clock meet and move in then, when the motion detectors were down, but now there were going to be more men, and they would be searching the damn forest, which shot that plan to shreds.

No, the best thing for him to do now would be to get the woman down to the city and hand her over to Johnson and his crew. The SAC would be furious that Gray had disobeyed orders, but he’d be forced to send a team up to the cabin. Gray knew damn well that by the time they got up to the ridgeline, Mawadi and the
others would be long gone. But, unfortunately, as tough as Gray might be, he was just was one man with a 9 mm, and that was no match for a terrorist cell on high alert.

Muttering a curse, he rolled off the woman, banishing the sensory memory of how she’d felt beneath him—all soft, curvy and female. He so wasn’t going there.

Once this was all over and al-Jihad and the others had been brought to justice, he’d allow himself to live again. But at the moment he had no intention of letting himself be distracted by a woman. Besides, even if he had the inclination, there was no way in hell he’d be going for this woman. There was a physical connection, yes—it had been there from the first moment he saw her. But she was a witness at best, a conspirator at worst, and she’d been married to one of the bombers.

She was a means to an end, nothing more. The fact that her glare suggested that she hated his guts made it that much easier to ignore the fine buzz of tension running through his body as they faced each other in their small hiding space.

Her eyes were dark and bruised in her pale face, her full lips trembling, though whether from fear or cold or a combination of the two, he didn’t know. It didn’t much matter, either, because he needed to focus on getting them the hell away from the cabin and down to cell phone range ASAP.

Shucking out of his camo jacket, he shoved it at the woman. “There are mittens in the pocket. Put them on your feet and follow me. And for crap’s sake, don’t make any noise.”

She started to snap in response, but shut her mouth when he pulled his gun from where he’d tucked it at the small of his back, and racked the action to the ready position, just in case.

He waited for a second, watching to see what she was going to do. When she pulled on the jacket without comment, then felt in the pocket and covered her bloody feet as best she could with the mittens, he nodded grimly. “Good call.”

Then he turned his back on her and led the way out of the small copse, moving as silently as he could, but traveling fast because the light was fading. Already, the sky had gone gray-blue, and the world around them had turned colorless with the approaching spring dusk. So he jog-trotted downhill, hoping to hell they’d get lucky and make it down the ridgeline undetected.

The first half mile was tough going through a hilly section of deadfall-choked forest, made more difficult by the fading light. At first Mariah moved quietly, but as they kept going, Gray heard her breathing start to labor, heard her miss her footing more and more often.

He turned back, ready to snap at her to be quiet if she wanted to live. But one look at her waxy, pale face, which had gone nearly white in the fading light, had him biting back the oath and cursing himself instead.

He crossed the small gap between them and caught her as she crumpled, sweeping her up against his chest.

She was feather-light in his arms, though his memory said she’d been solid, bordering on sturdy before. The change nagged at him, making him wonder
exactly how long she’d been bound in that cabin, and what Mawadi and the other man had done to her.

Guilt pinched, but Gray quickly shoved it aside, into the mental refuse bin where he consigned his other useless emotions, few and far between though they might be.

After only a few seconds of unconsciousness, she roused against him, pushing feebly at his chest. Her eyes fluttered open. The dusk robbed them of their color, but he knew they were amber, just as he knew he couldn’t trust the stealthy twist of heat that curled through his midsection when their gazes locked. She moistened her lips and swallowed, and he was far too aware of those simple actions, just as he was far too susceptible to the tremor in her voice when she whispered, “Put me down. I can walk.”

“Don’t be stupid,” he said, the words coming out more roughly than he’d intended. He yanked his gaze from hers and pressed her closer, not in comfort, but so he wouldn’t be looking at her face, wouldn’t be thinking of how her body felt against his, flaring unwanted heat at the points of contact.

Gritting his teeth, he shifted his grip so he could shove the 9 mm back in the small of his spine, then took hold of her once again and headed downhill, moving as fast as he could while still keeping quiet. His four-by-four was maybe another mile farther down, and as he hiked, he forced himself to focus on the case, not the woman. The case was important. The woman wasn’t.

By now, Mawadi and the second man would have gotten in touch with the other members of their cell. If Gray could talk SAC Johnson into sending choppers
and search teams up to the cabin, they might get lucky. They wouldn’t get al-Jihad, of course; he was too smart to come up the mountain now. But they might get Mawadi, might get some idea of why the terrorists had returned to the area.

As Gray put one boot in front of the other and his back and arms began to ache, though, it wasn’t the terrorists, his boss or even revenge that occupied his mind—it was the woman in his arms. And that could become a problem if he let it.

M
ARIAH WOULD HAVE
held herself away from Gray, but she lacked the strength to do anything but cling, with one arm looped over his neck and her face pressed into the warm hollow at his throat. She despised surrendering control to him, hated that her safety was in the hands of the FBI special agent who had been a large part of making her life a living hell more than two years earlier, and whose relentless questions had put her father in the hospital, nearly in his grave.

But at the same time, the man who held her easily, walking with long, powerful strides, was so unlike the picture in her mind, it was causing her brain to jam. This man was warm to the touch rather than cold, and when their eyes had met, his had blazed with an emotion that she couldn’t define, but had been far from the detached, sardonic chill he’d projected during the investigation.

His warmth and steady masculine scent surrounded her now, coming from the jacket he’d given her and from the solid wall of his body against hers. She’d hated the man who had interrogated her, hated what he
stood for and how he treated people. But she didn’t know how to feel about the man he’d turned out to be—the soldier who’d come up to her cabin alone and had been there when she’d needed him in a way that nobody else had for a long, long time.

Confused, weak with drugs and exhaustion, she was unable to do anything but give in to circumstances beyond her immediate control. Closing her eyes, she leaned into her rescuer, anchoring herself to his warmth and strength.

She must’ve dozed—or maybe passed out—after that. She was vaguely aware of Gray loading her into a large vehicle and strapping her in tightly. Through the fuzzed-out fog her brain had become, she knew that he was white-knuckle tense as he pulled the vehicle out of its hiding spot and headed it down the road. It was full dark; he wore a pair of night-vision goggles he’d retrieved from the glove compartment and drove with the truck’s headlights off, muttering a string of curses under his breath as he kept the gas pedal down and steered the vehicle along the fire-access road leading down from her cabin. Then they flew through the gate, which hung open, and turned onto the paved road headed toward Bear Claw.

He decelerated, shucked off the goggles and flipped on the headlights before glancing over at her. “We got lucky. No sign of your husband’s reinforcements.”

“Ex-husband,” she corrected him, the faint echoes of warmth and gratitude dispelled by irritation because he’d made the same mistake a handful of times during the initial investigation into the prison break. It annoyed her that he kept insisting on the undoubtedly deliber
ate gaffe, and that she couldn’t stop herself from correcting him each time.

He nodded, his eyes not quite the cold steel of Special Agent Grayson, not quite the fiery resolve of the soldier he’d been up on the ridgeline. When his gaze met hers, she felt a click of unwanted connection and a shimmer of fear.
What next?
she wanted to ask him, but didn’t, because she wasn’t sure she wanted to know what his answer would be.

So, instead, she turned away from him, settling into her seat as the truck accelerated, heading for the city. While he drove, he made a call on his cell, tersely reporting the situation, and what he’d seen and done. Mariah didn’t add anything to the conversation. There was nothing she could do to change her situation; she was too weak, too confused. And, bottom line: whether it was logical or not, she was heart-sore.

Being around Lee again hadn’t only been terrifying, it had also brought to the surface of her mind things that she’d thought she’d managed to bury years ago. Seeing him had reminded her of the good times—or at least the times she’d thought were good ones, when Lee had courted her. He’d brought her flowers and silly gifts; he’d made her feel as though she were the center of his universe, that she was special. And when he’d proposed, dropping to one knee and promising that they would be together forever, she’d believed him.

But those memories were overlaid now with the pain of remembering the months after their marriage, when he’d gradually changed, growing cold and distant. After a while, his petty cruelties and outright manipulations
had made her grateful for the nights he didn’t come home, and had made her start to think she was losing her mind. It was only later that she realized that he’d purposely broken her down, little by little, undermining the defenses she’d built up over a lifetime of being an outsider. Then, once he’d made her completely vulnerable by promising her forever, he’d started beating her down further, stripping her of her worth until she’d been nothing but his wife, his plaything. Simply because he could, because it amused him.

She knew the authorities thought of Lee as a follower, a patsy. She knew different; he might follow al-Jihad’s orders, but when it had come to their marriage, he’d been the one in control.

Despite the months of subtle torment, though, she’d retained a tiny core of strength. It had been too little, too late back then. Would it be enough to see her through whatever came next?

The bang of a car door startled her, jolting her awake, though she hadn’t realized that she’d been dozing.

She squinted against the sudden glare of lights. When she finally focused on the scene, she recognized the walled-in parking lot of the main police station in Bear Claw City. A tingle of unease and ill will shimmered through her at the memories of being interrogated in the station, then rushing her father to the nearby hospital, where he’d nearly died, not just because of Gray’s heavy-handed questioning, but because of the decisions Mariah herself had made, the horror she’d brought into her parents’ lives.

That was her shame. One of many.

There was a crowd gathering outside the truck; it seemed to be made up of equal parts cops and suited-up Feds, with the latter group gathering around Gray as he climbed from the vehicle. In his flannel shirt and camouflage pants, with his short brown hair bristled on end and his face and clothing streaked with dirt and sweat, mute testimony of their harrowing escape, he should’ve looked at a disadvantage compared to the other agents, neat and clean in their dark suits. To Mariah’s eye, though, he looked like a man of action, one who could break the others in half, and might do just that, given the provocation.

She saw him visibly brace himself as he squared off opposite a salt-and-pepper-haired agent who wore an air of command and a deep scowl. It took Mariah a moment to place the other man, but when she did, nerves bunched in her midsection.

SAC Johnson, the FBI special agent in charge of the federal arm of the jailbreak investigation, had struck her as a pompous ass far more concerned with his own on-camera image than the actual investigation. There was no way she wanted him calling the shots when it came to her cabin…and potentially her life. Because that was one of the things that seemed painfully clear: she didn’t need to protect herself simply from Lee’s personal revenge. The terrorists apparently wanted something from her, which meant she was going to need help staying safe, whether she liked it or not.

Not liking it one bit, she pushed open the truck door, unclipped her seat belt and dropped down from
the vehicle, hissing in pain when she landed on her injured feet.

A young, uniformed Bear Claw City cop appeared at her side almost instantly, and took her arm. “This way, ma’am. Agent Grayson said you’re wounded. We have an EMT-trained officer who’ll take a look at you while we wait for the paramedics.”

“Not yet.” She pulled away, focused on the group of FBI special agents, where Gray and SAC Johnson were arguing in low voices, their faces set in stone.