a handbag or luggage?”
A handbag? She looked down at the cluttered floor, fighting a wave of nausea that swam up her throat. She didn’t know if she had one or not. Who cared?
He pushed aside a few things and swore. “There’s not enough room in here for me to move if you’re standing. Sit back down until I get outside, then walk to the door and I’ll help you. Let’s do it as quickly as we can, okay?”
She nodded again and sat. He climbed from the plane, reached inside and swept a bunch of crushed red flowers out of the way. “Walk over here to me,” he said. “You can do it.”
She stood, steadying herself by grabbing the back of the seat in front of her. Her head spun and she felt nauseous, but the sensations passed. She glanced down and to her left and found a blood-covered man belted into the pilot’s seat. His sightless eyes looked blank. Her hand flew to her mouth.
“Just come to the door,” her rescuer urged.
She did as he told her, mainly because she couldn’t think of another plan. Gazing down at him, she paused for a second. His bloody unbuttoned shirt revealed a well-muscled chest, while the strap crossing his body was attached to a rifle held behind his left shoulder. He’d tucked a handgun into his waistband. He looked like someone you saw on a news report, a mercenary or a bandit, a man not to be taken lightly, sexy and scary at the same time.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She nodded. He clutched her waist and effortlessly lifted her out of the aircraft. She landed right in front of him, once again standing too close.
“Steady now. Dizzy?” he asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“Can you walk?”
“Yes.”
Unable to process the intensity of his expression, she lowered her gaze to the ground, where she found the bruised red flowers. He kneeled in front of her and plucked a small gold foil card from the ribbon that held their stems together and shoved it in his pocket. Taking her hand, he led her a few steps from the crash. She looked back once.
Not a plane, but a helicopter, or what was left of one. The image of the dead pilot’s slack, bloodied face filled her head. Had she known him? Was he her boyfriend or husband or something? Then why was she sitting in the back? Why couldn’t she think?
And wait, had there been someone in the passenger seat, too? She wasn’t sure.
Keep moving, she willed herself as they left the path and took off into the dense forest, ripe with dark mysteries that mirrored those playing out in her brain. The only thing she was sure of was the lifeline of her rescuer’s warm fingers.
Okay, so where were the questions, the accusations? As Adam guided Chelsea onto the cabin’s surrounding deck, he steeled himself for a barrage of all of the above, but none came. Once on the deck, he grabbed the binoculars he kept hanging from a nail under the eaves, then used them to scan the horizon and the small road that emptied into the meadow. So far, so good.
The sky had grown dark and the smell of impending rain filled his nostrils. How long did he have before more of Holton’s men showed up?
He put back the binoculars and discovered Chelsea had disappeared. He found her sitting on the sofa, blood smeared across her face, hands limp in her lap. He crossed to the bathroom, where he moistened a clean washcloth and grabbed the box of bandages. As always, the glimpse of his own altered appearance in the mirror jarred him. So did the dead man’s blood all over his shirt. He grabbed a clean one and changed.
Kneeling in front of her, he gently cleaned and bandaged the laceration. “You must have a million questions,” he began.
She sagged against the sofa and closed her eyes. “No,” she said.
“Don’t you want—?”
“No,” she interrupted, rubbing her temples. “All I want is to sit here.”
“Does your head hurt?”
“Yes.”
He got up to retrieve two aspirin and a glass of water and returned to find her staring around the room. He handed her the tablets and she swallowed them without comment. “I’d like to close my eyes for a moment,” she said as she gave him back the water glass.
There wasn’t time for her to nap, but how did he thrust her into action after what she’d just endured? “Go ahead. I have a few things to do.” Like pack up and get us out of here.
He desperately wanted to know how she’d ended up on his doorstep with a hired killer along for the ride. The most likely scenario was that they’d kidnapped her and forced her into taking them to him, but that didn’t wash because she hadn’t known where he was. No one did. His hands itched with the desire to shake her awake and ask her what was going on, but he couldn’t do that. They also itched with the desire to caress her, to tell her he loved her, that he was sorry he’d left, that finding her here was like a gift from heaven. Would she want to hear any of that? Judging from her aloofness, no, she would not. He shoved his hands in his pockets to kill the urge to shake her awake.
The fingers on his right hand brushed a hard ridge of folded stock paper. He pulled the small foil card he’d found with the flowers from his pocket and opened it, immediately recognizing Chelsea’s concise handwriting.
“‘My beloved Steven,’” he read. Steven. That’s the name he’d chosen when he’d relocated to California. It was the only name he’d ever given Chelsea. He cleared his throat and continued reading. “‘I think I know the location of the cabin you described the night you asked me to marry you. My plan is to drop these roses in the nearby river as a way of letting you go. I don’t want to do this but the reality is you’re dead. I’ll never stop loving you just as I wonder if I’ll ever understand what really happened to you or why that man from the government asked me a million questions, but wouldn’t answer even one of mine. Sometimes it feels as though I’m grieving a shadow. Goodbye, my love. Rest in peace knowing I will move heaven and earth to make a wonderful life for our baby. Yours forever, Chelsea.’”
“Baby?” he whispered, looking from the note to Chelsea. She was pregnant?
A huge smile came and went in a flash as the enormity of this development hit him in the gut. Had the baby survived the crash? What in the world should he do?
Protect her. Protect them! That’s what he should do. And right now that meant getting them out of here.
He threw his meager possessions in a box, then trotted out to the Jeep parked in the tiny shed/garage. The back was already filled with camping gear, a shovel and a chainsaw. To these he added the new box, then he went back inside to take whatever food and drink he could lay his hands on. He wiped things down and carried the perishables out to the Jeep, where he stowed them with everything else before covering the whole thing with a tarp, which he tied in place.
Small rocks separated the cabin from the riverbank. He drove across them and set the parking brake just as rain began to fall. The nonprescription glasses immediately blurred with raindrops and he pocketed them. The abandoned logging road, their only escape route, was a quarter mile downstream. The Jeep had no roof, and its engine was temperamental to say the least. It would be a miracle if it made it to the top of the ridge—if Chelsea hadn’t been there, he would have left it in the shed and hiked out just the way he’d hiked in. But she wasn’t up to that.
Of course, if an attack came from the air, they’d be sitting ducks, but it seemed more likely to him that ground reinforcements would show up instead. The downed helicopter had looked like someone’s paycheck-to-paycheck livelihood and that probably meant there wasn’t a handy fleet that Holton could summon from his jail cell at will.
“It’s