knife between two of the boards and attempted to pry one up. When it refused to budge, she cursed and flung the knife into a corner.
She scrambled to her feet, and as she dug through the silverware drawer once more, Colton slipped out of the room. Keeping an eye on the entrance to the cabin, he retrieved a crowbar from the back of the trunk. He would have liked to retrieve his police radio and contact his boss. But he didn’t want to risk her seeing him, or suspect he was anything more than a cooperative hostage.
Yet.
When he reentered the kitchen, she was on her knees again, this time working at the floorboards with some kind of barbecue skewer. It was no more effective than the knife had been.
“Here, let me try.” He crouched beside her.
She had taken her baseball cap off in the truck. Her hair had come partially free of her ponytail and hung in disarray around her flushed face. Her expression of dismay as she took in the crowbar was almost comical. Horror and then relief flitted across her face, and Colton knew she was thinking he could easily have overpowered her.
Before she could protest, he inserted the end of the crowbar between the planks and wrenched upward. Setting the bar aside, he used his hands to wrest the boards up, pulling them free and tossing them aside. He had a glimpse of a shallow storage area beneath the floor.
With a glad cry, Madeleine reached into the space and withdrew what looked to be an ancient holiday cookie tin. It was covered in dust and mottled with rust. As Colton watched, she pried the top off and spilled the contents onto the kitchen floor. There was a thick wad of folded money among the various items, and with a soft gasp she snatched it up and carried it over to the kitchen table to count it.
Crouching on the balls of his feet, Colton traced a finger through the remaining items. There were several photos, some yellowed and cracked with age, and others that were more recent. He picked one up and tilted it toward the lantern. It was a picture of a girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old, sitting on the front steps of the cabin. She had her arm slung around the shoulders of a little boy. They were both skinny, with sun-browned skin and fair hair. He glanced over at Madeleine. It was her, taken maybe fifteen years earlier. Based on the similarity between them, he guessed the little boy was her brother.
There was a photo of an older Madeleine and a frail old man with a grizzled beard. Colton estimated it had been taken no more than a couple years ago. In it she wore a simple sundress, and he raised an eyebrow at the length of leg exposed by the style. He surreptitiously pocketed the photos.
He sorted through the remaining items—a slender length of chain with a small key attached to it, several coins, a handful of poker chips, some old lottery tickets, and what looked to be the deed to the cabin and surrounding land. Colton picked up the key and turned it over in his hand before slipping it into his pocket with the pilfered photos.
He glanced up as Madeleine started laughing. The money was spread out on the table in front of her and Colton could see it was mostly small denomination bills. Her laughter grew, became slightly hysterical. Just when he thought he was going to have to intervene, she buried her face in her hands and the laughter turned to deep, racking sobs.
Colton guessed there wasn’t as much money hidden away beneath the floorboards as she had hoped, and wondered again what the nature of her problem was. He had initially suspected drugs, though he admitted to himself she didn’t seem the type. In fact, she radiated good health. Even with the oversize shirt and no cosmetics, she was more than just attractive. Her hair was a silken mass of dark gold with wheaten streaks, and for one brief instant he wondered what it would feel like under his hands. He had seen the evidence of her slender curves in the photo. There wasn’t anything about her that wasn’t completely feminine. Colton thought she might be breathtaking if she would only smile.
Pushing himself to his feet, he stood uncertainly for a moment. The racking sobs subsided, but she still cried quietly into her hands. The hysterical laughter and deep sobs he could handle. Her soft weeping nearly undid him.
He took one step toward her, then spun away, raking a hand over his hair. He swung back, staring at her bent head and trembling shoulders. The urge to take her in his arms and comfort her was almost overwhelming. He was actually standing over her, one hand poised above her hair, before he realized what he was doing and managed to get a grip on himself. While she might rouse every protective instinct he had, nothing good could come of letting himself feel anything for her. With a muttered curse, he turned on his heel and strode from the cabin.
* * *
SHE WAS A fool to have believed the cabin would hold the key to her brother’s release. When her grandfather had become too frail to continue living alone in the cabin, Maddie had made the difficult decision to move him to a nursing home in Elko, where she could visit him every day. Toward the end, he’d suffered from acute dementia, insisting he needed to return to his cabin. He claimed he had a fortune hidden there.
Maddie knew about the tin box he kept hidden beneath the floorboards. Her grandfather had stashed his spare money there for years, but it had never, to her knowledge, amounted to much. Even though the rational part of her brain insisted the tin contained little, if anything, of value, her grandfather’s words had come back to her. During the ride into the mountains, she had actually begun to fantasize that perhaps he had somehow managed to put away a substantial hoard of cash.
She was such an idiot.
Maddie drew in a shuddering breath and swiped her palms across her wet cheeks. The money lay in a messy heap on the table. Her heart had leaped when she first saw the thick wad of bills inside the tin, but hope had turned to despair when she realized there was barely five hundred dollars there. Even combined with what she had, it didn’t come close to satisfying the debt her brother owed. She glanced over at the gaping hole in the floor and the scattered contents of the tin. But it wasn’t until her gaze fell on the discarded crowbar that she remembered.
Colton.
While she had been crying her heart out over the lack of money in the tin, he had slipped away. With her luck, he had a spare key and had taken the truck, as well. She couldn’t afford to be stranded here. With her heart slamming in her chest, Maddie leaped to her feet and bolted from the room. In the deepening shadows of early evening, she nearly collided with Colton as he reentered the cabin, carrying a large cardboard box.
“Oh! I thought you were gone, that you’d taken the truck.” She felt a little weak with relief.
In the indistinct light, he peered at her. “I’m not going to get too far without my keys, am I?” He indicated the box in his arms. “It’s getting dark, and with the gas tank on empty, we’re not going anywhere tonight. I have two weeks’ worth of food and supplies in the bed of the truck. I thought the least I could do was fix us something to eat.”
Still flustered by her own incompetence, Maddie followed him back into the kitchen and watched as he set the box of provisions on the table, sweeping the money aside with a careless gesture.
“How about some sandwiches? I have ham or roast beef.” He glanced at her over his shoulder as he spoke, pulling bread and condiments out of the box.
Maddie hesitated. There was no way she was going to spend the night here at the cabin. She couldn’t afford to waste any more time. Her overactive imagination conjured up lurid images of what the moneylenders might do to her brother. He was still such a kid. Jamie might act cocky, but Maddie knew that’s all it was—an act. He must be scared to death. She desperately needed to come up with fifty thousand dollars in cash, and she couldn’t do that here in this cabin. Jamie was the only family
