Willing Hostage (16 page)

At the word “murderer” Leah squirmed beneath him but he settled more heavily, driving the hard earth into her back. When he turned sideways to glance at the plateau, she could see the pulse in his neck, feel his hardness against her leg. Leah was altogether too warm now.

He turned back with a slow, not particularly warm smile. “Leah, I had great and wonderful plans for Big Marvine, but I'm afraid it's time to go.”

She couldn't believe how quickly the cold moved in when he moved off. “Why?”

“Look.”

The plateau was gone … white with cloud … but no helicopter … no tent …

“This may be our last chance.” He pulled her out into the wind and drew her so tightly against him she thought she'd crack. Then he released her.

“Run, Leah,” he said gently. “Like you've never run before.”

Chapter Twenty

Milk-clouds leaked over the top of Big Marvine when they reached the head of the trail. Misty fingerlets lapped at their boots while sun still glared in their faces. Leah had never imagined clouds rising up the side of a mountain, had long taken it for granted that clouds lowered from the sky. But as they started down the trail they were soon muffled in chill, damp gray.

Glade Wyndham loomed darkly ahead in the suffocating murk.

“We can't possibly make it down in this. I can't see.”

“It's the only way. The fog will provide cover. Feel for the trail with each step. It's a godsend for us, after all, Leah.”

The godsend laced her eyelashes with tiny drops, made her sinuses drain. It swirled white in some places and formed dark writhing shadow-shapes of things that weren't there in others. Leah saw a horse and rider, distinctly, coming up the path, the horse's head bobbing as it walked, but horse and rider evaporated as they neared.

The reality of her aloneness had never been more apparent. She felt cut off and floating. The jarring of injured toes against boots as she jolted downward, the ache in her knees, and the fear of walking off into oblivion kept her panic just under control.

Her mother's dependence on her father had been disastrous. Her sisters acted like willing and pale appendages to their mates. And Leah had set out for Colorado to prove her own independence. But her vow to rely on no one but herself evaporated in the mist shrouding Big Marvine, like the phantom horse and rider. Her spy bobbed ahead like a shadowed safety buoy and when he stopped suddenly, turned and kissed her, she wanted to cry.

The fog encrusting his beard was wet on her face. “I think we're going to make it.” His whisper was jubilant “We're almost down. Be quiet now, sound carries on fog.”

With this warning, Leah realized how much she could hear … a tree creaking below, sheep bleating far away. The sounds of their boots and breathing seemed loud enough to give away their position to anyone within miles.

The air smelled of moss and rotting wood and damp earth.

At the bottom of Big Marvine, the fog had thinned enough to let them find their things. Goodyear lay under the flap of Glade's pack and was allowed to ride that way as they skirted the base of the mountain. The fog lifted higher, and they caught a glimpse of the helicopter and the shepherd's camp, and then all was hidden in a slow soaking drizzle that promised to last the day.

Leah followed Glade for hours through the rain and hoped they weren't getting lost. Her companion looked grotesquely humpbacked with the poncho covering the great lump of his backpack.

A grove of live pine sheltered their tent that night and Leah awoke once to find the rain had stopped and Glade talking in his sleep. A few incomprehensible phrases in what sounded like Spanish with a guttural German accent.

Sun warmed their breakfast rock the next morning. Leah gulped hot coffee gratefully. “I don't want to know anything about it, but do you know you speak Spanish in your sleep?”

He glanced up from the little stove with one of those brutal heart-stopping looks. “I have recurring nightmares.”

“In Spanish?”

“Chile.” He pronounced it Chee-lay.

“Chile! When they—”

“I worked for a copper company before Allende threw it out. But I stayed on for my other employer, melted in. People of Chile have little or no Indian blood, an American can infiltrate almost—”

“Allende! Glade, you shouldn't be telling me this. I mean, it was in the papers about … I don't want to know.”

He sighed and brought out the bottle of whiskey from his pack. She hadn't seen it since that day in the pickup. “Have you ever stopped to thing Leah Harper”—he gulped from the neck of the bottle and shuddered—“what can happen when nobody wants to know?”

He no longer looked like the savior she'd followed through fog and rain the day before. The gilt was tarnished, worn. They were both dirty and rumpled. She had no mirror to look at herself, but she could see the hopelessness on his unshaven face … and drinking whiskey for breakfast was somehow like a last act. He'd seemed so triumphant coming down Big Marvine.

If he gave up now, she would have to depend on herself as she had once brashly set out to prove she could.

Birds sang to the morning. A squirrel, pumping its oversized tail, cluttering its indignation at their presence from the safety of a tree limb. Wild columbine turned enormous blossoms to the sun, raindrops still glistening on delicately shaded lavender.

Leah had another cup of coffee. “Do you know where we are … exactly?”

“Yeah.” Glade took another drink of whiskey. “We're lost.”

The sun warmed Leah and dried the columbine. Still they sat. Still he drank.

She threw her cup to the ground. He didn't look up from the spot of earth he seemed to be trying to dig into with his eyes.

Leah slid off her rock and grabbed the bottle from his hand. That got his attention, but he still had a faraway expression. “What's the matter?”

“Here we are lost and the whole world is after us and you sit drinking your breakfast.” She capped the bottle. “That's what's the matter.”

“According to the map, if we walk west long enough, we'll come to a marked trail.”

“Oh.” Leah took the bottle back to the rock with her. If she had felt threatened at being alone in the wilds with an admittedly violent man, she felt more so with a drinking one. If his moods were unpredictable when he was sober.… “Well, liquor won't help us find that trail or get out of here, will it?”

“No, ma'am.” He pushed himself to his feet and walked toward Leah and the bottle, the faraway look gone, his focus steady on hers. “But it might help me get through another day in a very long ordeal.”

Leah felt an awful but tantalizing prickle and couldn't lower her eyes as he pried her fingers from the whiskey. “Drinking won't help you get the papers to the press, to—”

“What do you know about that?” He raised the bottle to his lips and his eyes turned cruel. “You're in the middle of something important and all you can think of is your own little problems, whine about men because they beat you out of a job, feel sorry for yourself when you could get involved in something”—he waved the whiskey in front of her—“something more important than Leah Harper.”

“You're going to walk out on me, aren't you?” Jason had asked, rage etching the lines of his face. “Because you're afraid to really get involved, right?” Jason had towered over her. “Selfish is what you are, Leah. So go … sit around and feel sorry for yourself and be secretly glad that you didn't give anything away. Go back to nursing your ulcer, flitting from one job or man to another so you can claim failure. Anything important happen to you”—Jason had been drinking, too—“you wouldn't be around it long enough to know. You're like a bee starving in a field full of flowers because it can't decide which flower to molest first.” Mutt, the soft-eyed dog, always whimpered, cried when they fought.

Glade Wyndham emptied the whiskey bottle. “They're going to rip up a whole section of beauty that outshines even you, but you're still back with your sucker of a sister's abortion.” His laughter was hollow now as it had been when she first heard it.

“Glade.…” She tried to sound soothing, reasonable.

“Why aren't you afraid of me anymore, Leah?” The bottle dashed to splinter against the rock beside her. “I think I liked you better when you were afraid of me.”

Leah slid backward off the rock, putting it between them, looked away from the hard stare. “Because I don't … really believe you can be all those things you say you are.” She held her voice steady but her mouth was dry.

“Then you're a fool.” He moved around the rock.

“You can be so kind and gentle at times.…” She backed to a tree and then slid around it, leaving pine branches to whip back at him. Given the nature of this beast, how had she put it off this long? Could she stop it now?

“She doesn't want to get involved, our Leah,” he whispered and advanced with her to the next tree. “Because it's disturbing. She might have to give up something. You're a fake, Leah.”

The treacherous, breathless urge to submit … the tickly sensation. Leah watched him draw closer … it was the size of him, the darkness, the mystery that froze her like fear froze a rabbit … it was.…

“Oh, God. Glade!” Leah swiveled around the tree to run but was caught by the belt and swung back against him. “Glade, it's just the whiskey. Please …”

“I should never have brought a woman along.…” The detached, impersonal voice, the rough beard painful on her sun- and wind-scarred skin.

“I'm not just a woman.…” She sank to the ground under his weight.

He blocked out the sun.

Leah found that she was still afraid of this man. And that struggle was useless. And that he was not necessarily kind and not necessarily gentle.

Chapter Twenty-one

Leah hunched over the cat on her lap. Goodyear poked a chilly wet nose into her cheek as if in sympathy. But there was only cold-blue dislike in the slanted eyes. Still … Leah found such comfort in the crackling plush coat. She could almost leave her hand print in it.

“Did I hurt you?”… the flat voice behind her.

“Yes … no …” Leah closed her eyes and kneaded Siamese fur with the fingers of both hands. The spurty purring promised love and loyalty. Claws pricked her bare skin as they constricted, let go as they relaxed in a repeated feline rhythm.

“Then what's the matter?”

Goodyear sprang from her lap, yawned, and stretched, as if to say, “That was nice, but I can take it or leave it.”

“I don't understand you,” Leah answered them both.

“Neither do I.” He sat beside her. “You're ashamed then?”

“No … yes … I don't know.”

“You needn't be,” he said with that finality of tone. “There wasn't a thing you could have done about it.”

“I don't like being helpless.”

“You sure could have fooled me.” He plucked a grass stalk and put it between his lips like a cigarette. The bitter-spicy stench of whiskey clung to them both. But she realized he wasn't drunk now, if he had ever been.

“And I'm not a fake.”

“Oh, hell, Leah, you'd been asking for that for three days. And it's not exactly like it was hermetically sealed or—”

“Why, you overblown … egocentric male.…” She turned to the hard face and saw dark eyes laughing at her. “I hate you … I.…”

“No, you don't.” He ran the grass stalk to tickle along her leg. “You just want to.”

“You're a bully, and a …” Her voice broke. She really didn't hate him. Why, for God's sake? “I don't understand you.” She tried to push his hand away but it, came back to knead her hair and scalp as she had the cat's. She cried until he pulled her in against him.

“You're not helpless. It's just that you need me now,” he said soothingly. “There's no shame in needing.” He ran dry scratchy fingers over her ribs where her blouse hung open. “You're a city girl thrown into a situation that frightens you.” His hands, his movements were smooth, catlike, caressing.

“I'm not just
a
woman. I'm me,” she demanded uselessly. “And … and I'm thirty years old.”

The rich, full laughter of the other Glade warmed her through. “And barely ripe … poor Leah.” He slid her forward until her back touched the grass and her shoulders were cradled in his arm. “Poor Leah,” he said gently and hid the glare of the sun once again.

Leah couldn't have said which Glade she feared or enjoyed more. But the gentle Glade was somehow more dangerous.…

They walked, demon-driven, the rest of that day and the next. They walked in the rain, seldom speaking and never touching … except once when they leaned against each other laughing at a miserable dripping Goodyear, who'd just returned from a necessary trip into the trees.

“Why does he stay with us?” Leah took him in under her poncho.

“Where else can he go? He's domesticated. This place is as bizzare to him as it is to you.”

Leah awoke feeling filthy in her sleeping bag and hearing more than the normal sounds of morning in the forest. She heard a helicopter, and farther off, the harsh barking of excited dogs.

Her spy slept peacefully. How had he ever escaped dangerous situations when he slept so well? “Glade!” She pummeled his chest. “I think they've found us.”

He came awake slowly and then tried to sit up suddenly when he realized what he was hearing. They peered through the tent opening at a calm sun-filled forest. But the sounds were not far away.

They packed quickly, stuffed a reluctant Goodyear into Glade's pack. Quietly, Glade and Leah climbed to the top of the low mountain on which they'd camped to discover a meadow stretching below on the other side. A jeep trail. crossed it. The helicopter stood with blades stilled. A pickup and several jeeps parked by a large tent. Five men stood around a pack of leashed dogs.