been slacking off the simple disciplines of life, like shaving daily and trying to find a job that paid more than minimum wage.
Mostly, he’d wallowed. In self-pity. In anger. In a crushing amount of guilt for everything that had gone wrong for him since Afghanistan.
It had served his purposes to come across as a loser at the hotel. But if she could see him now, with the play-acting role sloughed off, would she see anything different?
He’d hoped this job with The Gates would give him back a sense of purpose. So far, all it had given him was a queasy sense of impending doom, a coming juggernaut of danger and disaster that left him feeling helpless and overwhelmed.
“Can I go?” Susannah asked quietly.
His gut tensed at the very thought. If she left this cave, she wasn’t likely to reach civilization again without running into people who wanted her dead. She was a city girl, a pampered, polished princess who might know her way around a mall but had no chance getting out of these woods alive.
Nevertheless, he couldn’t hold her captive. Not even for her own good. He’d been a prisoner once, and it had damn near destroyed him.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “But I wouldn’t, if I were you.”
Her voice tightened. “Because there are people trying to kill me?”
“Yes.”
“And how did you know they’d be there in the parking lot?”
He could hardly tell her that he was working with the people trying to kill her, but anything else was a lie or a secret he wasn’t prepared to tell.
When he didn’t answer immediately, her voice sharpened to a diamond edge. “Are you one of them?”
“You’re still alive, aren’t you?”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s all you’re gettin’.” For now, at least, until they could reach someplace safe and contact Alexander Quinn.
She settled back into silence again, but she’d shifted far enough away from him that he knew any attempt to pull her back into the shelter of his arm would be seen as an assault, not an offer of comfort.
“It’s raining,” he said as the drumbeat of raindrops hitting the rocky ground outside filtered into the cave. “We’re not going anywhere for the next little while, so why don’t you try to grab a nap?”
Her voice rose. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Shh!” He slanted a quick look toward the cave entrance. Outside, the steady beat of rain masked almost all other noises. It would certainly cover any movement outside, which meant they were not only cornered with nowhere to run but also vulnerable to a sneak attack.
He’d tried to plan on the fly, once he’d learned the hit on Susannah Marsh had been moved up by twenty-four hours, but even faking illness to leave work early that afternoon had afforded him only a couple of hours to get his supplies together. He’d barely reached the parking lot in time to pull her pretty little bacon out of the fire.
“How do I even know there’s anyone out there?” she asked, not bothering to lower her voice. “How do I know that wasn’t just a car backfiring?”
She knew better. He could tell by the tension in her voice, the little tremble as her tone rose at the end of the question. She knew she was in danger, though he doubted she had any idea why. But she was also determined not to trust him one whit.
And he couldn’t really blame her for that, could he, when he didn’t even trust himself?
“You know it wasn’t.”
“I didn’t get hit. They must have been lousy shots.”
Fortunately, he was pretty sure they were. For one thing, they’d deliberately chosen to make the hit with pistols fired from a moving car, a piss-poor choice if you were serious about actually hitting your target. A critical thinker with any skills would have set up on the hill overlooking the parking lot with a Remington 700 or an AR-15 with a suppressor to keep down the noise.
Lucky for Susannah Marsh—and for him—they weren’t dealing with critical thinkers.
But that didn’t mean the men who were undoubtedly out there in the woods trying to track down their prey weren’t dangerous as hell.
“There are a lot of them and only one of you,” he said. “At close quarters, it won’t matter if they’re lousy shots.”
“Who says they’ll get close?” The volume of her voice dropped to a hiss of a whisper.
He almost laughed, trying to picture her out there in the woods, barefoot, dressed in a straight skirt that might make her legs look outstanding but wasn’t ideal for hiking. The woman normally looked like a catalog model, all sparkling clean and perfectly groomed. He wouldn’t be surprised if he turned on the flashlight right now to find that she’d somehow managed to finger-comb her hair back to its normal glossy state.
“So, you’re not just a brilliant event planner but you’re also an expert outdoorswoman?”
“You know nothing about me.” She somehow made a whisper sound haughty.
He schooled the grin playing at the corners of his mouth. “I’ll give you that.”
A sharp noise outside sent animal awareness crackling along his nerves. He felt Susannah’s instant tension snap across the space between them, as electric as lightning.
He reached out to touch her, to silently urge her to be quiet, and felt her skin ripple wildly beneath his touch. But she held her tongue as they waited in breathless agony for another noise.
The sound of footsteps barely registered above the hammering downpour of rain. Giving Susannah’s arm a quick, reassuring squeeze, Hunter rose from the stone bench and moved toward the cave entrance, ignoring the protest of pain that clawed its way through his bum leg.
Keeping to the shadows just inside the cave, he looked out on the rain-drenched scene, letting his gaze relax. Movement would be easier to pinpoint if he wasn’t actively looking for it.
There. He spotted a man dressed in dark camouflage moving slowly through the woods about twenty yards away. He held a pistol in one hand, a satellite phone in the other. It was hard to make out anything more about him through the heavy curtain of rain and mist, but from his general shape and size, Hunter guessed that the man outside the cave was probably Myron Abernathy, one of the handful of men Billy Dawson had directed to take down Susannah Marsh.
Myron had been one of the ones most enamored of her candid photo, Hunter remembered with a grimace. If he were to get her alone—
“Do you know him?” Susannah’s taut whisper sent a shock wave rippling down his spine.
Taking a swift breath through his nose, he hissed, “Do you ever stay put when asked?”
“You didn’t ask,” she whispered back.
The urge to give her a shake was
