sheer audacity of his growling assurance spurred her fury, and she clamped down on his hand with her teeth.
A stream of curses rewarded her effort, but the man didn’t let her go. He just kept running, an oddly hitching stride that tugged at her memory until she realized where she’d heard that low, cavernous voice before.
The sad-sack maintenance man.
It’s always the quiet ones....
Suddenly, a loud stuttering sound seemed to fill the air around them, and her captor shoved her to the ground and threw himself over her body, pinning her in place. Her purse went flying, pepper spray and all.
The least of her worries, she realized as her rattled mind finally identified the sound. Gunfire. Her pulse started whooshing like thunder in her ears as she held her breath for the sound of more shots.
The engine noise she’d heard before faded, followed by the unmistakable squeal of tire on pavement. They were turning around and coming back for another go, she realized, her breath freezing in her lungs.
The man on top of her pushed himself off her, giving her a brief chance to flee his grasp. But she was too paralyzed with shock to make a move, and then the moment had passed. He grabbed her arm, dragging her to her feet, and started running.
As she stumbled behind him, she realized she had only two stark options—run with him or put up a fight that would give whoever had just tried to gun her down another chance to finish the job.
Her heart hammering wildly in her chest, she ran.
Night had leached all the warmth from the hills, leaving behind a bitter, damp cold that bit all the way to the marrow. The collection of bone fragments, steel plates and screws holding his left leg together joined forces in a cacophony of pain, but Hunter ignored the aches and kept moving.
He wasn’t sure what the men with the guns would do once they realized he’d spirited their target away, but he knew whatever punishment they chose would be brutal and deadly.
Not getting caught was the only option.
A hiss of pain escaped Susannah’s lips, but he couldn’t let her stop running. Not yet. He could hear the sound of pursuers crashing through the woods behind them, a stark reminder of the consequences of being captured.
“Please,” she groaned, tugging at his hand until he slowed the pace, sparing a second to look at her.
In the faint moon glow slanting through the canopy of trees overhead, Susannah’s dark eyes gazed up at him in pain and fear. “My feet,” she whispered.
He looked down and saw she was barefoot. Blood stained her toes, and he thought about the hard, rocky trail they’d just crossed.
Damn it.
Scanning the woods around them, he spotted a rocky outcropping due east. “Get on my back,” he said.
She stared back at him, her mouth trembling open. “What?”
“You either run on those feet or you get on my back. Or you stay here and let those guys back there catch up with you.”
Her jaw squared. “Who are they? Who are you?”
He tried not to lose his patience, even though the sound of the chasers behind them seemed closer than ever. “They’re the people shooting at you. I’m the guy who’s offering to be your damn mule if you’ll just shut up and get on my back.”
Her mouth flattened to a thin line of anger, but she limped toward him as he bent at the knees, grimacing at the strain on his bad leg, and let her climb onto his back. He grabbed her thighs to hold her in place, surprised and annoyed at how the feel of her firm flesh beneath his fingers sent a sharp, undeniable arrow of lust straight to his groin,
Not the time, Bragg. Really not the time.
She wasn’t a featherweight, but running with a heavy load on his back wasn’t exactly a new thing to Hunter after two tours of duty in the Army. He’d been looking for a test of his reconstructed leg, hadn’t he? Here it was.
It was lucky the rock outcropping was only a half mile distant, he reflected once they reached it and he put her down to rest for a few seconds while he searched the granite wall for any sign of a nook or alcove in the rock face. He found it seconds before he decided to give up and started back toward where he’d left Susannah, only to find that she was a few feet behind, her eyes wide and haunted.
“What are we doing?” she asked in a hushed tone.
“Hiding,” he answered succinctly, sweeping her up into his arms.
She made a soft hiss of surprise but didn’t resist as he carried her through the dark opening into a cold, black abyss.
* * *
NO LIGHT. No sound but that of air flowing in and out of their lungs, fast and harsh in the deep, endless void. After a few seconds, even that sound settled into the faintest of whispers, easily eclipsed by the roar of Susannah’s pulse in her ears.
A sliver of deep gray relieved the darkness after a few moments, as her eyes adjusted. The narrow mouth of the cavern, she realized. The only way out. Or in.
If she weren’t so bloody terrified, she might find a spot of bleak humor in the idea of being curled up in the hard-muscled arms of a man she knew only as “the sad-sack maintenance man,” her bare feet bruised and bleeding, while they hid in a cave from unidentified gunmen.
It was like one of those movies her grandmother liked to watch on cable, the ones where the women were all beautiful, noble victims who inexplicably spent years being treated like garbage by the men in their lives before they finally found their backbones and fought back.
To hell with being a victim, she thought. “What’s your name?” she whispered. Because he clearly wasn’t the sad sack she’d thought. And if he was just a maintenance man, she was the Queen of England.
“Hunter,” he answered after a moment.
“Susannah,” she whispered back. “I guess you know that already, though.”
“Yeah.” His grip on her tightened convulsively, as if he was about to drop her. She grabbed his shoulders in reaction, her fingers digging into an impressive set of muscles.
“Sorry,” he whispered.
“You can put me down.”
He eased her down until she stood upright, her sore feet flattening on the cold rock floor of the cave. “What happened to your shoes?”
“I kicked them off to run from you. I thought I’d be crossing nice flat concrete, not rocky soil.”
“Sorry,” he repeated.
He sounded as if he really was sorry, she realized. Of course, maybe that’s what he wanted her to think. Maybe he was trying to lull her into being a docile captive.
But
