going anywhere again. Damn, neither was the car. The two locked vehicles made a dandy roadblock.
How did Anastasia Ryder get untied? Stupid question, he knew how. He hadn’t tied her tight enough, he hadn’t wanted to break her soft skin. He hadn’t wanted to yank her arms behind her, he hadn’t wanted to hurt her.
And in payment of this gentle treatment, she crashed his getaway truck.
He pulled open the truck door, dreading what he would find. Anastasia had been thrown or had thrown herself flat onto the bench seat and she sat up slowly, her lovely face splattered with her own blood, hair tumbling across her forehead and down her shoulders. Tiny cubes of safety glass sparkled in her hair like ice crystals.
Her hands were still tied together, a cut rope dangled from the knot around one ankle. She’d apparently used his biggest kitchen knife to cut her feet free and brought it along as a possible weapon. It now stuck straight out from the dashboard, the tip imbedded in vinyl, the plastic handle still vibrating from the impact.
She bit her lip when her gaze followed his and she saw the knife.
“You’re lucky it didn’t imbed itself in something softer. Like your throat,” he said.
She nodded in a dazed kind of fashion.
“Can you move?”
She nodded again and sat perfectly still, blinking.
“I’ll help you,” he said.
More nodding. He brushed some of the glass away then reached inside and pulled on her jacket sleeve and her jeans. She slid closer to the edge of the seat until she slipped into his arms as though she belonged there. She looped her arms over his head and around his neck and for a second, he wondered if she knew how to choke a man with a rope. But instead of trying to strangle him, she looked into his eyes. The cold, miserable day receded, the pain ebbed, the clock stopped ticking.
“Thanks,” she said, lowering her gaze.
“If you’d stayed tied up this wouldn’t have happened,” he grumbled as he carried her away from the hissing, steaming mass of mangled metal. He set her on her feet, anxious to see just how injured she was. She swayed a little but caught herself.
“Can you walk?” he barked.
“Of course,” she said, shaking glass off her clothes, out of her hair. “I’m just a little…rattled,” she added, and proved it by trembling from the feet up.
“Stand here for a second,” he said as he handed her her handbag. “Don’t run away.”
He limped back to the truck and grabbed the rifle before pulling his duffel bag from behind the seat. He didn’t know how he was going to get out of here now that both vehicles were wrecked, but he knew he had to. Soon.
She still stood where he’d left her. What was he going to do with her? He couldn’t leave her here alone, could he? He pulled out his pocket watch and checked the time. The minutes kept ticking by.
As he approached, he saw the return of fear in her eyes. Why she should be afraid of him when it was she who had started this mess?
She believes you blew up Elaine Greason.
He moved a few steps toward the house and looked back at her. “Let’s go inside while I come up with plan B.”
She looked anxiously over his shoulder toward the cabin and back again, her gaze straying past the wreck. It appeared she longed to run down the hill screaming at the top of her lungs.
“The snow is beginning to stick,” he said.
“But—”
“Listen. I know you’re Anastasia Ryder, I know you have a husband named Jack, I know you came to find me and that you called someone named Shelby Parker once you followed me back to Ben’s place. I know all this. I know you’ve been stalking me and I know why. So let’s can the scared female act. Thanks to your little escape attempt, I have to figure out how I’m going to get out of here before the cops come. Or worse.”
As she walked toward him, she shrugged off her coat and shook off more glass. “Call me Annie,” she said.
THE FIRST THING Garrett Skye did was tape a square of thick cardboard over the broken pane in the door and sweep up the glass. He did this work efficiently and without fanfare as Annie stood by, still shaken up and disorientated. The stream of cold the hole had allowed to enter the cabin immediately stopped and along with it, some of Annie’s shivers.
Next, he produced a lethal-looking pocketknife and as Annie shrank away from the blade, cut the rope from around her wrists. As she rubbed the reddened skin, he disappeared into the kitchen, reappearing a few moments later with a small clean towel and a bowl of steaming water. He pointed at a chair and she sat down.
“I don’t have a lot of time but I can’t leave you here like this. I’m going to wipe the blood off your face. While I do that, you’re going to talk. Your last call, made minutes before you hiked up my driveway, was to Shelby Parker. Who exactly is she?”
“You looked at my cell phone.”
“Yes.”
What was the use of lying? She said, “Shelby Parker is Elaine Greason’s daughter.”
“Elaine’s daughter? The one who lives in Arizona?”
“That’s the one. She got tired of waiting for the police to find you.”
“So she hired you?”
Annie tried to look like a force to be reckoned with. “I’m sure she’s called the police by now. They’ll be here any minute.”
“You hope,” he said, dousing the cloth with water and moving it across her forehead. “Sure seems to be taking them a long time, though, doesn’t it?” he added as he wrung out the cloth. The water in the bowl turned pink. Annie’s stomach turned over. She wasn’t good with blood, especially her own.
She cried out as he dabbed at her chin. “There’s a piece of glass in there. Stay put.”
He found tweezers in a cabinet and brought them back to the table, where he deftly removed the glass. “I wonder why the sheriff hasn’t shown up?” he mused again as he tossed the glass chip into the waste basket.
She glanced out the big window in front. Snow. Nothing but snow. No cops running to the rescue.
He leaned back and looked at her. “I’ll tell you why. The sheriff’s office doesn’t know my true identity because you didn’t tell them. The whole town of Poplar Gulch thinks my name is Pete Jordan. They believe I’m a professor friend of Ben Miller’s, using his place to recover from knee surgery. I don’t talk a lot, but I’m friendly, ride Ben’s horse on occasion, and pay my bills with cash.”
“But—”
“Your cuts are minor.” He took the bowl and cloth back to the kitchen and returned with a box of bandages and a tube of ointment which he applied with a cotton-tipped stick. The bandages went on next. One near her temple and another on her left cheek. Two over the gash on her chin.
