The Prey (34 page)

Without another word, she brushed past him and left the room, slamming the door.

What had he expected? That she’d willingly go with him up the coast? Consider it a vacation? That they could take long walks on the beach and make love in front of the fire? They weren’t going to some damned lover’s nest, it was a safe house. And he wasn’t her lover, just an available partner in bed when they both needed someone.

It was best not to think of his time with Rowan as anything else.

He turned to leave, but the glow of the computer screen caught his eye. He crossed over and read what she’d last written.

My idyllic childhood was anything but. I thought, in my young girl’s mind, that the love of my mother could keep the monsters at bay. Monsters weren’t real, after all.

But we lived with monsters. Not only my brother, whom I had always feared, but a monster masked with the face of a loving father. He never raised his hand to us, his children. But my mother didn’t escape his wrath. And now I can’t help but ask why. Why did she allow herself to be repeatedly hurt? Did it take her death to end her pain?

And why did no one else see my father’s abuse?

It had been a lovely spring day, the white cherry blossoms exploding with life . . .

She was writing an autobiography, John thought, incredulous. He was sure she hadn’t considered this before. Because she didn’t discuss the past. Now, it seemed, she’d been set free.

He started to have doubts about the safe house. Maybe Collins was wrong and she
could
handle a confrontation with her brother. Then again, her reaction five minutes ago told him she was too close, too emotionally involved to think straight.

Torn, he looked at the closed door. No, he couldn’t risk it. He couldn’t risk her life.

If he lost Rowan, he didn’t think he would recover. He just hoped he wasn’t making a huge mistake.

Rowan remained silent on the lengthy drive up the coast, which took longer than it normally would have because John took several precautions to ensure they weren’t followed. The safe house was near Cambria, a small town north of Santa Barbara.

Rowan thought it ironic that only a few weeks ago she’d thought about spending some time on California’s north coast because it combined the ocean, the woods, and the privacy she craved. The central coast was much the same, and Cambria was an idyllic, quiet vacation community where they would be safe.

Yet she disliked everything about it.

She expected this overprotectiveness from Roger. After all, he’d lied to her from the beginning—in order to protect her. While she despised the lies and the betrayal, at least she understood his motivation. She’d been a different person at ten, barely more than a baby, really. What knight in shining armor wouldn’t want to protect a young damsel in distress? And back then, she’d thought of Roger as her rescuer, her white knight.

But she hadn’t expected this from John. Of all people, she thought John would understand. He wanted justice for Michael as much as—or even more than—she did. And for all Bobby’s other victims.

The sacrifice John had made hit her hard. He’d left to protect
her
. He’d given up his chance to avenge his brother’s murder because he wanted to keep
her
safe. She glanced over at him with renewed appreciation. And something deeper. A feeling that had been invading her mind and body since the first night they made love.

John was irrevocably a part of her soul. She couldn’t lose him. She’d finally begun to accept and deal with what had happened so many years ago. Losing John was unthinkable.

When it came right down to it, Rowan hated running. It reminded her of the Franklin murders and the lowest point in her life since Dani had been killed.

She didn’t have the urge to run anymore. Her demon had a face: Bobby. She wanted to fight him herself. She wanted to see the look on his face when he realized she wasn’t the young, weak, frightened little girl he’d confronted twenty-three years ago. Despite her youth she had beaten him then, and surely she could beat him now.

But the opportunity to catch Bobby had been taken away by the erroneous whim of a man who had lied to her and the complicity of a man she had trusted.

It felt wrong, even though she knew it was really their only option. She hadn’t done or said anything to make John or Roger believe she was strong enough to handle a confrontation with Bobby. Was she? If Bobby found her, would she be able to fight him and win? Or would she cower in a closet like her younger self, waiting for him, letting him kill those she loved?

She hoped—no, she
believed
—that if Bobby found her, she would rise to the challenge. She wouldn’t let him get to her. Couldn’t let him defeat her.

But running kept John safe as well. While she had no doubt he was capable of leading an operation while driven by emotion, here in the safe house, he, too, would be protected. The thought gave her a modicum of peace.

“I’m sorry,” she said to John when he stopped in front of a locked gate down a private drive.

He turned in the seat to look at her, the engine idling. “You don’t have anything to be sorry about.”

She shook her head. “Yes, I do. I acted like an immature kid back in Malibu and I sulked all the way here.”

“You do have sulking down to an art. I don’t think I’ve ever been around a woman who could be quiet for three hours.” He was actually joking. It made her heart a little lighter.

She wrinkled her nose. “Well, I appreciate you coming here with me. Roger would have assigned an agent. You didn’t have to do this. You could have stayed back in L.A. Avenged Michael.”

John didn’t say anything for a long moment, then took her hand and squeezed so tight it almost hurt. “You mean a lot to me, Rowan. I’m not going to trust your safety to anyone else. Michael is dead.” He swallowed, raw pain clouding his eyes. “You are alive. I need you to stay that way.”

His voice was full of quiet emotion. He put a hand behind her neck and pulled her face to his, kissing her hard on the lips. Then he stepped from the car to unlock the gate.

She closed her eyes and hoped Bobby was caught fast. Not only because he was a vicious murderer who deserved to be locked up in prison—or worse—for the rest of his life, but because her life was in limbo—professionally and personally—until he was apprehended.

Five minutes later the road dead-ended in front of a cabin. The safe house. It didn’t have a view of the ocean, but through the trees, Rowan could hear the distant roar of water breaking against rocks. It didn’t sound far away at all. This was exactly the location she had dreamed about.

The cabin itself was open and spacious, with two private bedrooms downstairs and a loft upstairs. Everything else—the living room, dining room, and kitchen—was in the open, one large room with tall windows looking west into the woods and toward the unseen ocean.

It was similar to her cabin in Colorado, just bigger. She felt like she’d come home.

John finished his security check, then brought in their bags. She had packed light: one overnight bag and her laptop. John had two bags as well—one for clothes, one for weapons. She had her Glock and knife on her.

John unloaded his firearms. “I’m going to put this little .45 in the kitchen here on the other side of the breadbox,” he said as he crossed into the small kitchen area. “And,” he continued as he crossed over to the larger of the two couches, “the nine-millimeter under this cushion.” The butt barely jutted out, and you couldn’t see it unless you knew it was there.

Rowan nodded. John had his favorite ten-millimeter holstered in the small of his back, and he took the collapsible rifle and another gun into his bedroom, along with extra ammunition.

She watched him walk down the short hall and turn into the bedroom on the right. They were in a fortress, but someone else was taking her place. Someone else was making her kill.

That didn’t make her feel any better.

Adam dreamed the same dream again that night.

He’d been having the dream ever since seeing the picture of the man who told him to buy lilies for Rowan. At the flower stand by the ocean he’d thought something was familiar about the stranger, but he didn’t know what or why.

It always started with the flowers. Adam wanted to buy roses. The man wanted him to buy lilies.

In the dream Adam said no, Rowan didn’t like lilies. She broke lilies and got mad. He didn’t want to buy them for her.

“She likes lilies, she just doesn’t know it,” the man said, his voice sounding odd, through a fog.

Adam shook his head back and forth. Then, as happens in dreams, he was no longer at the flower stand but sitting on Rowan’s deck watching the sunset. Rowan was happy and smiling. She was holding a thick green stalk with a white calla lily on the top.

He frowned at her. “You hate lilies.”

“No, I just didn’t know how pretty they were.”

He listened to the waves break and run up the shore. It was soothing.

And then he would wake up and have to go to the bathroom.

He had the dream every night, and sometimes more than once. But he always woke up and felt like he was forgetting something, something very, very important.

“Stupid,” he said to himself. “You’re just a stupid kid.”

Rowan lamented the fact that she wasn’t good with relationships. She was angry with John about the safe house, but understood its necessity. She’d tried to explain this in the car, but she hadn’t seemed to do a good job.

He’d made no attempt to come to her room last night.

Of course, he was in full protection mode, leaving the cabin every hour to prowl like a cat through the wilderness for ten minutes before coming back.

She’d asked to go with him and he simply said, “No.”

But she was going stir-crazy, and it was obvious John was, too. Rowan typed. John paced. Rowan stared out the window. John checked the perimeter. Rowan cleaned the guns. John paced.

Quinn had checked in that morning and said there was no news. Bobby hadn’t surfaced, but the decoy was in place.

Finally, Rowan had had enough. “Let’s run.”

“We can’t leave.”

“We’ve been cooped up in this damn cabin for the whole day. We have at least a good hour of daylight left, and running will do us both good. Besides, you’re wearing the finish off the poor hardwood floor.”

John frowned, obviously debating her suggestion. “All right,” he snapped. “We’ll go. But I’m in charge.”

“Of course you are,” Rowan mumbled, irritated.

They changed into sweats and running shoes. It was cooler up the coast in the evening. John had checked out the perimeter—again—and brought a map. The beach was a quarter-mile walk through the woods. He led the way, his whole body tense. Rowan resisted an urge to massage his shoulders; certain they would feel too tight and rock hard.

Not being in the action was hurting him as much as it was her. The sacrifice he’d made to protect her both disturbed and warmed her heart. She didn’t want to think he cared. After all, with Michael’s death on their conscience and the reality that when this was all over they wouldn’t be together, she could hardly afford to think that there was something more than physical desire between them.

Last night, before she’d drifted off to sleep—alone—she couldn’t help but think about what might have been. If Michael hadn’t been killed. If Bobby weren’t after her. If she were certain of her sanity.

John Flynn was a man she could love.

But love wasn’t for people like her. John had helped her start putting together the pieces of a life that had been shattered years ago, but now she could do it herself. And in doing it, she acknowledged that she wasn’t whole and it would take a lot more than accepting the past and focusing on the future to make her a complete, viable, lovable woman.

She would never forget what John had done for her.

They walked to the shore and stopped at the edge of a cliff. The beach looked clean and unused. Serene. The ocean here was more volatile than at Malibu, the waves crashing hard against the wet, rocky sand, violently claiming the land. They walked along the rim of the cliff until they found a slope easy to scramble down, then without talking they ran.

She breathed in the cold, wet air. The spray from the breaking waves caressed her skin, and the sensation invigorated her. She was alive. Free. Her heart felt lighter somehow, and she owed it to John. He couldn’t possibly know or understand the transformation she’d gone through over the past few days. Reliving the murders, feeling Dani in her arms again—even if only in her mind. Her willingness to confront Bobby. All of that, together, freed her soul.

She’d written more in the last two days than she had in months. Seventy pages, and she had more in her.

She felt guilty for her elation. Michael was dead. She wanted vengeance, justice, and for the first time truly believed it would happen. Bobby wouldn’t get away with his crimes. He would be punished—both Colorado and California had the death penalty—and he could rot for ten years in a ten-by-ten cell until he finally fried in the electric chair.

For the first time in a long time, she had hope. Not only that justice would be served, but that she would be complete. Healed.

She didn’t know the distance they ran, but suspected it was nearly three miles by the time they got back to the ledge they had descended. She started up first, John right behind her. The setting sun caught her eye and she turned.

“John,” she said quietly, nodding toward the sky.

He turned and looked. “It’s beautiful,” he whispered, then looked back at her. “Just like you.”

Her breath caught in her throat. “John, I—”

He put his finger to her lips, took her arm, and motioned for her to sit. She did. Together, they watched the sunset. Such a normal thing, really. Why did it feel so odd? So different?

Because she didn’t do normal things. She didn’t have a normal life. She didn’t watch sunsets with handsome men she loved—cared about, she corrected herself.