Run Wild (15 page)

“Natasha,” Trent whispered, turning so the breeze, which was sporadic through the trees, wouldn’t help his voice carry in the direction of the man down in the valley. “There he is.”

“I see him.”

“Is that your father?”

Trent didn’t know if the man was George King, or not. For the first time, she saw a different side to the sheriff. Natasha looked at him, stared into his green eyes. Gone was the cockiness and arrogance. Trent met her gaze, but continued shooting his attention in the direction of the man hurrying back around the base of the hill beneath them. He wasn’t as worried about whether she would lie to him as he was keeping an eye on whoever the man was. He trusted her. She trusted him, too, to do his job.

“I don’t know,” she whispered.

Trent reached up underneath her hair and rubbed the side of her neck just above the coat’s collar.

“You don’t know?” He sounded surprised. “It would really help if we knew if it were him, or not.”

Trent didn’t believe her. Something constricted in her chest. She didn’t feel caught in a lie since it had been four years since she’d seen her father. Natasha didn’t remember her father’s hair being as gray, This guy was pretty far away. She could be wrong. Maybe it wasn’t him. So she wasn’t lying when she said she didn’t know. Searching Trent’s face, she willed the hardened expression now there to go away. She preferred the glow in his eyes when he believed the two of them were working together.

“It’s been four years since I’ve seen him,” she reminded him.

“But it could be,” Trent pushed.

“It could be,” she admitted.

That spark returned to his eyes and a slow grin formed at the corner of Trent’s mouth. His fingers dragged along the collar of the coat before he dropped his hand to his side. “Find out,” he whispered. “Yell to him.”

Natasha’s heart started thudding in her chest. If the man below were her dad, he probably would know the sheriff, especially since Trent was looking for him on murder charges. If she yelled at him, her dad would think she was helping to turn him in. She told herself she didn’t care if Trent believed her trustworthy. But the truth was, she did care. Just as she cared for her father.

Damn it. Nothing good could come out of this.

Natasha spun around, turning her back to Trent.

“Dad!” she yelled. Her voice echoed back at her.

The man beneath them froze in his tracks and Natasha’s heart stopped beating. “No,” she whispered, the one word barely audible to herself. She was pretty sure Trent didn’t hear her, although he was so close behind her she swore she felt his body heat combatting the frigid cold around them.

“Dad,” she continued, wishing her father, wherever he was, could hear her. “I know you didn’t do it.”

The man didn’t call back to her. Instead he turned slightly, shifting his weight; then he pulled his hand out of his pocket.

“Down!” Trent yelled in her ear at the same time he tackled Natasha and flung her to the ground.

The man below pulled a large gun out of his vest pocket, raised it, aimed directly at her and fired. The loud explosion echoed repeatedly off each of the hills. It sounded as if he fired again and again.

Natasha went numb. In that final second before Trent bulldozed into her and sent the two of them sprawling over rocky, uneven ground, she had stared straight into the eyes of the man who tried to shoot her. They’d glowed with so much raw, unadulterated hatred, it had chilled her blood. Although she’d never seen him look that way, she swore he was her father. George King had just tried to kill her.

Chapter Seven

Trent adjusted himself on top of Natasha’s body. He was all too aware of her soft curves underneath him but at that moment he was more satisfied that with his weight on her she couldn’t get up and get hurt. He pulled his gun out and aimed at the man fleeing into the trees.

Goddamn, if he didn’t look like George King. Trent had seen King a few times in town at the diner and out at Trinity Ranch. It had never crossed his mind that he’d have to put the man’s face, or body type, to memory, though.

Trent aimed and fired. His gun exploded just as loudly as the man’s below had.

“God, crap! Trent,” Natasha hissed, suddenly squirming underneath him.

If asked at any point in time later, Trent would swear the hardest shot he ever got off in his life was the one at a murder suspect with Natasha underneath him, twisting and rubbing her hot, round ass against his dick.

“Stop.” He ground out the order as he tried for a better angle, keeping his eye on the man who was still running as fast as he could away from them.

Trent fired one more shot just as the man disappeared into trees on the other side of the valley below. “Damn it.”

“What the hell are you doing?” Natasha freed her arm out from underneath him and grabbed his firing arm.

Trent lowered his weapon. “What do you think I was doing?” he demanded, then tried to catch another glimpse of the man, who, of course, now was gone.

“Quit shooting. Why are you trying to shoot him?”

Trent laid his gun on the ground, securing the safety. “Because he just tried to kill you,” he hissed, barely able to contain the growing rage in him. If that wasn’t his murderer who just escaped him, there was another equally unstable, enraged motherfucker running around in his jurisdiction. Neither thought sat well with him.

Pushing himself to his feet, Trent grabbed his gun and Natasha. He kept a firm grip just above her wrist as he marched down the side of the hill they’d just climbed. Maybe he dragged her alongside him a bit more fiercely than needed. Her black hair flew loose around her face and in his peripheral vision. Natasha complained, he thought. He wasn’t sure. What he did know was if he said a word, he would start screaming and yelling. He was so damned pissed.

“I swear, if you manhandle me one more time,” she snapped, digging her heels in and tearing her arm free from his grasp once they were at the bottom of the hill.

He turned on her. “You’ll what?”

Natasha took a step closer and lowered her voice. “Don’t do it and we won’t have to find out.”

“Did you follow your father out here?” he demanded, asking the one question that was rubbing him raw at the moment. “Is that why you turned off the highway?”

“I already told you why I turned off the highway.” Natasha walked away from him, rubbing her hands and stared at the cabin. “Maybe we can figure out who he was by looking around some more in there,” she said, and nodded at the cabin. “Got any flashlights?”

Trent stared at her a moment when she looked over her shoulder at him with the question. Maybe she was telling him the truth. Maybe she had driven south, cut back, and headed back up north to throw him off her trail. He guessed she wanted to find her father and talk to him first. And maybe she had turned herself around so that not even her GPS knew how to straighten her out.

“Why did you not want me to shoot him?” he asked, feeling some of his temper wane.

He watched all the air deflate out of her as she exhaled. She reached for her hair at the back of her neck and twisted it so it wouldn’t blow around her face.

“I don’t know,” she said, sounding defeated. She looked at the ground between them instead of at him. “He looked like Dad but I wasn’t sure. And well, if he was, I sure as hell didn’t want you shooting him.” Her eyes were a flat shade of tan when she finally met his gaze.

“Let’s search that cabin.” He would let it go at that for now.

It was completely dark and their beams of light bounced off the dilapidated walls once they were inside the old cabin. After hiking up and down that hill, having his adrenaline and his temper spike and recede, and with it getting colder, Trent was feeling rather stiff.

“I think I found something.”

“What?” Trent turned from where he’d been inspecting the weak floorboards, checking to see if any of them might be intentionally loose.

She was on her knees with her back to him. His coat still hung on her small frame, drowning her but probably keeping her warm. She sure as hell had been hot when all those curves had been snuggled underneath him. As crucial of a moment as it had been, and he’d performed within the letter of the law, he’d swear to it, Trent was also aware of how well their two bodies had fit together.

After going over every inch of the cabin, inside and out, for any clues that might let them know who had evaded them and shot at Natasha, Trent planned on confirming how well their bodies fit together. She might not have thought it through yet, but when they were done, he was taking her home with him. Her truck would be in the shop getting new tires and she’d checked out of Pearl’s. Whatever motel room she had reserved for the night, they would stop and get her things, then head back to Weaverville. He also planned on getting her to talk. She would open up to him, if it took seduction to do it.

“What did you find?” he asked when she grew silent again. Trent crossed the small, dimly lit cabin and stood over her.

Natasha had twisted and neatly knot her hair into a bundle at the back of her head. Trent was fascinated by how easily she was able to pull it away from her face. He wondered if it would be just as easy to untie it and watch it tumble back down her back and over her shoulders and down her front.

“The wall here is hollow.” She looked up at him, made a face, then tapped the wall with her fingernails. “I mean, there isn’t much to the walls anywhere in this cabin, but right here the sound is different.”

“Learn this from watching detective shows?” He grinned at her as he knelt alongside her.

When she glared at him there wasn’t any hostility in her eyes. “I don’t watch a lot of TV,” she offered. “But my uncle and cousins have found clues in hidden compartments in walls before. It seems to be the most common place people hide things.” She shook her head and the knot on the back of her head slipped a little. “You’d think if someone was going to make a conscious decision to break the law they would at least do the research and learn to do things unlike the way every convicted criminal has done before them.”

Trent tried not to laugh. Natasha’s face was wrinkled into an almost comical expression as she shook her head. He believed she had some insight into the mind of a criminal. Natasha was the product of a law-enforcement family, raised by a cop and his loyal wife, then graduated into the family business of bounty hunting. She knew no other life. Which explained a lot. Natasha couldn’t comprehend her father being anything than low-abiding the way the rest of her family was.

“Right here.” She ran her fingernails through a seam in the log wall, then dug in and gripped one of the logs. “I’ve got it.”

“Let me help.” Trent reached for the log just as Natasha pulled it free from the wall. For a moment he thought she’d broken the wall and that a rush of frigid air would bombard them and make the cabin even colder. “Damn,” he muttered when he instead stared at a compartment built into what appeared to be a fake log.

Natasha reached inside, but Trent grabbed her hand. “Wait,” he instructed, jumping up and hurrying out of the cabin. He was back in a second and Natasha was still kneeling facing the wall. She’d turned to watch him leave and moved to the side, giving him room, when he returned.

“There’s a key,” she said, pointing at a small key lying loose among the other objects Trent began to lift out of the hidden compartment and place in evidence bags.

“I got it.” He held it up between his gloved fingers and she aimed the beam of her flashlight at it.

“I’d say it’s a safe-deposit key.”

“Interesting,” Trent muttered, and dropped it into a bag by itself.

He’d brought in a marker as well, and Natasha put herself to use, writing on each bag as he filled them. Other than the key there were several individually wrapped stacks of money, which appeared to all be in small denominations.

“That’s all the money,” he said, and lifted a sealed envelope that looked to have been a bit too weatherized. It almost crumbled in his hand. “Be careful with this,” he instructed, handing it gingerly to Natasha.

She let it slide into a bag, then sealed it. “This money looks just as old,” she said, picking up one of the bags she’d already sealed. “Those are some old dollar bills.”

Trent lifted the last item out of the compartment. “What in the hell is this?”

Natasha took it, keeping her hands inside the sleeves as she held it out in front of her. Trent lifted the last evidence bag and opened it, but whatever it was didn’t fit in the bag.

“I think it’s a stuffed animal.” Natasha frowned. “It is. Look. There are two button eyes. It’s a teddy bear. A very old, worn-out teddy bear. I wonder if all of these things were here before whoever was using this cabin as temporary lodging ever came here.”

Trent noticed she’d referred to the man she’d called Dad just a short bit ago now as “whoever had been staying here.” He believed she loved her father. And unlike when he had first called her in L.A., Trent now accepted that she hadn’t seen him in several years. He didn’t know what type of relationship she had with him prior to that, or if George King was a good man. It was clear he was a pretty crappy father. Trent decided not to push the matter for the time being.