time, she was the one to wave him off. “Your brother hired me to keep house—starting here. He didn’t tell me that I was going to need a backhoe and a dump truck.”
Either she had accidently forgotten to supply him with her name, or there was a reason she was keeping it from him.
It hardly seemed fair she should know anything about him when this was the first he was hearing about her.
“You from around here?” he asked, motioning vaguely in the direction of Mystery in hopes she would loosen up with a little bit of small talk.
“Actually, I’m kinda new. Was looking for a slower pace of life.”
“Well, it doesn’t get a whole lot slower than here,” he said, a darkness flecking his words. He hoped she didn’t read anything into his tone. He didn’t need to get into some deep discussion with a stranger about the merits or pitfalls of a place where he doubted he was going to stay.
“If you think it’s slow in town then you haven’t spent enough time in the mountains. These mountain men are about as fast as cold molasses and a little less intelligent. If you ask me, their family tree is more of a twig.”
He laughed. “So where are you from…and hey, what’s your name again?” he asked, trying to play it off like she had told him and he had simply failed to remember it.
She gave him an impish smile, and he could have almost sworn that she fluttered her eyelashes at him. “Sabrina. And I’m from all over. Kind of an army brat, but my last stop was Schofield.”
Instinctively, he glanced down at her arms. She was pale and far from the buttery color of someone who had spent their days in the Hawaiian sun. She had to be lying.
On the other hand, maybe he was reading far too much into her and her answer. Maybe she just valued her privacy like he valued his. Besides, if he was going to transfer into the civilian world, he would need to stop thinking everyone was out to conceal the truth from him—not everyone was his enemy, especially a housekeeper in the little town of Mystery, Montana.
But he’d been wrong before, and that failure to see danger had gotten his sister killed. He couldn’t let his guard down. Not now. Not ever.
“Your father in the marines?” he asked.
“Schofield is an army base. I wouldn’t make that mistake around a vet, if I were you.” She sent him a dazzling smile.
She had passed the first test, yet something about her just didn’t feel right—just like everything in his life since his sister Trish had died.
“How long have you been waiting on the Cussler boys?”
She shrugged. “I only got here a few minutes before you. To be honest, I was trying to figure out where to start the cleaning.”
“So, they’re gone?” His job of kicking the family out of their shanty was proving to be a whole lot easier than he had expected.
“They’re not here, but I thought you had already come to kick them out. At least, that’s what your brother led me to believe.”
He was supposed to be here an hour ago, but he hadn’t known his brother was sending a crew behind him or he would have been on it. “And you haven’t seen any sign of activity?”
She shook her head. “But like I said, I only got here right before you.”
He walked up to the door and knocked. There was the rattle of dishes as the mice, or whatever vermin it was that lived in the place, scurried over them. He went to knock again, though he was almost certain they were alone, but as he moved the door creaked open.
“Hello? Someone home?” he asked, walking in.
The place was dark and as he entered, a putrid smell wafted out—the brothers mustn’t have been there in some time, or they were even worse at keeping house than they were at building one. He stepped in and the cobwebs in the corners of the front door clung to his face. He tried not to be squeamish as he wiped them away. No matter where he went in the world or what he was doing, he’d always hated that feeling. No amount of training or conditioning could get rid of the instinctual revulsion—and that was to say nothing of the inhabitants of the webs.
“Trevor,” Sabrina said breathlessly from behind him. “Look.”
He dropped his hands from his face and gazed into the dark shadows where she pointed. There, sitting against the corner, was a man. His face was bloated and his lips were the deep purple color of the long dead.
Trevor clicked on the flashlight on his cell phone and pointed it toward the man as he moved closer. Above his right ear, at the temple and just below the dead man’s ruddy hair, was a small bullet hole. There was no exit wound on the other side. The man’s eyes were open, but they had started to dry and shrink in the socket, in sharp contrast to the rest of the man’s features.
“Do you see a gun anywhere?” Trevor asked, flashing the light around as he looked for the weapon that could have killed the man.
“No,” she said, but she stood in the doorway staring at the man. She covered her mouth with the back of her hand as though she were going to be sick.
Trevor rushed over to her and wrapped his arm around her. “Come with me. Let’s go back outside. It’s going to be okay. You’re all right. Everything is going to be fine.”
She turned her body into him, letting him pull her into his arms as he moved her out the door and to the fresh air of the forest. He had been right—she would be just fine; from the way she felt in his arms, he was the one who was truly in danger.
Sabrina had no idea why she had reacted that way. The man was hardly the first dead body that she had come across, and yet it felt like the first time. Maybe it was the way he seemed to be looking at her through those cloudy eyes or the smell of the body that had been left sitting in the heat of the fall, but she just couldn’t control her body’s reaction.
Damn it. Every time she started to think that she was strong, she did something like this.
Although maybe it wasn’t a bad thing that she had reacted as she had. She had gotten to play up the lady-in-distress angle. If she had to be undercover for any amount of time, it was going to be immensely easier if she had one of the brothers under her spell.
She just had to remember to keep him at arm’s length; the last thing she needed to do was let her emotions come into play. Emotions only had a way of getting her into trouble, and she was in enough as it was. They were the reason she was stuck in this place…and out of the direct line of sight of her superiors. Though she was certainly under their thumb.
Trevor was just another case, another investigation she had yet to complete. In a month, if everything went according to plan, she would be out of here and set down in a new little nowhere town in the middle of America investigating another possible threat to homeland security.
Trevor rubbed her back and as he held her, his chest rose and fell so rhythmically that she found herself mimicking his movements. He was like a man version of a white noise machine,
