much time we have. You’re in danger. Is Jim there? The other hands?” She heard him swear, the impatience in his epithet familiar. “Damn. I suppose they’ve all gone home for the day.”
She frowned. “Hawk, what’s wrong?” A shiver raced down her spine, and the room seemed suddenly chilled.
“You need to get off the ranch. Now. Go to town and stay with…I don’t know, any of your friends. Sheila maybe, if Rafe will be there. Just go somewhere safe and don’t return until I get to town. It’s going to take me a day or so. I haven’t been able to get a flight yet. If I don’t find something soon, I’ll start driving.”
It was unusual to hear her taciturn brother string two sentences together at once. So this litany of terse orders didn’t get her back up. It filled her with foreboding.
“You’re going to have to be a bit more specific, Hawk. What’s going on? What kind of danger are you talking about?” She glanced up as Shane moved to her side. At his quizzical look, she shrugged. She couldn’t tell him what was going on when she didn’t understand herself.
Rather than snapping at her, as was his custom when she refused to fall in with his plans, he spoke faster. “Someone is coming for you. I don’t know who will appear, but stay away from anyone you don’t know, just to be safe. I can’t give you details now. Just get out of there, Cassie, as quickly as possible.”
“There was a couple here about an hour ago,” she said acerbically. “They wanted to look at the horses we have listed on the sale bill. Irritating, certainly, but hardly cause for alarm.” Annoyance had replaced trepidation. It wasn’t like him to be so dramatic, but he’d been overprotective ever since he’d learned of her pregnancy, and the weird spells that had accompanied it.
“Who were they?” His voice was sharp. “What’d they look like?”
After Cassie described the strangers, she heard her brother’s voice, sounding muffled, as though he were talking to someone next to him. “Sheridan’s found her. She’s already been there.”
“Sheridan?” The shiver was back, an electric current down her back. “They introduced themselves as Billings.” Even as she completed the sentence she knew the couple had lied. There had been something about them from the first that had made her wary. She’d explained away the feeling as a side effect of the mental flash she’d had that had preceded their arrival. Cassie swallowed around a throat that had gone suddenly dry. Aware of the man standing beside her, listening intently, she said, “Hawk, I knew they were coming. Just like I knew about Baby.”
Her brother was silent as he digested the information. She’d called him on his cell a couple days ago, after she’d had one of those strange mental flashes. In this one she’d seen her brother’s beloved dog, Baby, lying on the ground, blood pouring from its flank. Her brother hadn’t been available to answer her call. But when they’d spoken later she’d learned her brother had been involved in a fight for his life, and his pet had been injured by a bullet meant for him.
“This is related to what you found out about our mother, isn’t it? What haven’t you told me about that? Why would people have tried to stop you from discovering the truth about her death?” She felt, rather than saw, Shane’s reaction to her words.
“I’ll tell you everything later,” Hawk promised, a hint of desperation sounding in his voice. “But I think the woman who showed up at your door is Dr. Janet Sheridan. She’s a chemist, and the man she works for will stop at nothing to get you, Cassie. She’ll try to inject you with a drug they’ve designed. You can’t let her near you.”
The ground seemed to shift beneath her. There were, she thought numbly, more pieces than ever missing from the story her brother had yet to tell her about his adventures in the last few weeks. “Who is he?” she demanded. “How would he know about me?”
“That doesn’t matter now. If the woman at your door was Sheridan, and from your description, it sure sounds like it, she’s picked up some hired muscle to help her. I don’t know why she left before kidnapping you, but you can’t wait for her to come back.”
“I know why.” Cassie took a deep breath, forced herself to think rapidly. “Shane was coming up the drive. When they saw the car, they left, saying they’d be back tomorrow.” After their initial insistence on seeing the horses, she’d thought it odd that they’d left in such a hurry. But when she’d discovered who was in the vehicle that had sent them on their way, all thoughts of the couple had abruptly faded.
“Farhold’s there?” Hawk’s voice was sharp. “Let me talk to him.”
She hesitated, torn. Her brother had made no bones about his feelings about Shane when he and Cassie had broken up. But the decision was taken out of her hands, along with the phone.
Ignoring her glare, Shane took a few steps away, holding the cordless to his ear. “Hawk. What the hell’s going on?”
“Get her out of there, Farhold. You’ve got to keep her safe. You owe her that much, at least.”
The censure in the man’s voice didn’t come as a surprise. For all intents and purposes, he’d left Cassie alone and pregnant. Even if he had known about the baby, it wouldn’t have changed what happened between the two of them. Couldn’t change it even now.
“I heard most of what you told her on the phone,” he said evenly. “And there was a car leaving as I came up the lane. You think the couple in it was after her? But why?”
“I’m as certain as I can be. So is the FBI. They’re involved in this case, too. I don’t have time to go into it. Just get her to town and watch her every second. I’ll get there as soon as I can, and the Bureau is sending agents, as well. The danger is real, Shane. Make her believe it. And keep her safe. This guy who’s after her, he’s—” The line went abruptly dead.
“Hawk?” When there was no answer, he clicked off the phone and looked at Cassie. “His phone must have gone dead. Was he calling from his cell?”
“Check the caller ID.” He pressed the button on the receiver that should have displayed the numbers of incoming calls. The screen remained blank.
“Looks like it was your phone that went dead.”
She went to the den and retrieved her cell phone from its cradle. As she reentered the living room, she flicked on the light switch, then stopped midstride when the light failed to go on. She swallowed hard, caught his gaze on her. “The electricity is off.”
A grim mask slid over his expression. “Any chance it happened earlier today and you just didn’t notice?”
She thought for a moment. “I used the microwave and the stove about three hours before you got here. It could have gone off anytime since then, I suppose.”
He went to the window, peered out into the rapidly descending dusk. “There’s no sign of anyone out front. Any other way to get to the ranch without using the lane?”
“Not unless someone got to the main road and cut the fence, came up a quarter mile or so from here and circled around back.” The likelihood of that scenario was remote. But then, the whole scene Hawk had warned her of had a vaguely surreal aspect to it.
“Grab a bag and throw a few things together,” Shane said. “You’re staying with me until we get this figured out.” As he spoke he moved to the door, locked it. She stared at him, swaying a bit on her feet as his figure moved into and out of focus. His words seemed to come from a distance and there was an all too familiar sense of velocity, as though she was being catapulted through space. Her pulse galloped as her vision dimmed, rainbows arrayed beneath her eyelids. The cell phone slipped from her hand, clattered unnoticed to the floor. And then it was as if a giant curtain was slung aside, bits of mental images whirling and colliding before forming yet another scene.
Shane was striding across the room in front of the window. There was the sound of a shot, and the glass shattered, spraying across the room.
“Cass!”