“So what’s with the hiking gear?” I feel self-conscious when she lowers her eyes to my skintight yoga pants and three sizes too big shirt. Regan is the very epitome of a barbie doll—big green eyes, flawless skin, blonde hair, and breasts Alex has to use his massive hands to measure. “If you want Jell-O legs, wake up Big Foot for round three.”
She brushes off my sneer with a tongue poke before flopping onto the couch.
I join her in the living room, albeit hesitantly. I’m not overly good at lying, but when you’re desperate, you’ll give anything a shot. “I’m not going for a hike. I need to pop into a drug store. They don’t deliver out this far.”
“I know,” she mutters with a gag. “Alex was harping on about that all night last night.” She straightens her back, then angles her head to the side. “What do you need to purchase? If it can wait, I’m reasonably sure Alex is going to town this morning once Hawke and the rest of the security detail get here.”
“We’regoing to the drug store,” Alex corrects as he enters the room shirtless and shoeless. I’m unsure which direction to look when Regan appears on the verge of having a coronary while drinking in his pajama-pants-only stalk of the elaborate space. “And not a damn hour too soon.” After greeting Regan with a good morning kiss, he shifts on his feet to face me. “Why? What do you need?”
“Umm…”Come on, brain. “Something to remove taser barbs from asensitivearea.” I removed the prongs embedded into JR’s cock last night, but since that delicate operation was kept between JR and me, I use it to my advantage. “They tasered him—”
“Right in the cock,” Alex butts in with a laugh.
Regan socks him in the stomach, halving his chuckles before locking her wide-with- concern eyes with me. “They tasered him in the…” She points to her crotch like she’s never said the word penis before. When I jerk up my chin, her face whitens, “But instead of removing them last night, you took care of business instead.”
Even a virgin would know what her took-care-of-business comment refers to. She thinks we had sex with the barbs still embedded into JR’s cock. Although that was what we did minutesafterI carefully removed them, I’m not a complete barbarian. But since that isn’t something I can disclose to Regan right now, I nod for the second time.
It whitens her face even more.
“Wow…” She stops, throws a hand up to her mouth, then races for the bathroom dividing the two rooms of the cabin.
When the noise of a woman being sick filters into the living room, I shoot my eyes to Alex. He looks more excited than nervous.
“You better go help her,” I suggest, aware this is the perfect opportunity to make my escape. “If this is what you’re hoping, but it’s unplanned, she’ll need a lot of support to ease her into the idea.”
With his mind on his personal life more than his job, he nods, then races into the bathroom. I snatch up the keys to his SUV and hightail it outside before my head can talk my heart out of my decision.
With JR not willing to plead not guilty, I either need to find evidence that proves it was self-defense or risk losing him for a lot longer than another ten years.
I lower down Alex’s FBI cap to cover my eyes before waving a greeting to a young officer monitoring traffic coming and going from the cabin. With the plates on Alex’s SUV federal and my daggy clothes concealed by the steering wheel, the rookie agent waves back before he unlocks the gate so I can exit.
I’m tempted to do a little jig when I am on the open road. The only reason I don’t is because my heart is in my throat. One wrong movement might see me bringing up last night’s dinner into a toilet bowl like Regan. Cedric was remanded until trial, but when Alex searched Cecil’s cabin, he found it empty.
The man with the scarred face was nowhere to be seen.
After checking the address placed on JR’s arrest documentation against the one I punched into the GPS, I stray my eyes across a gate covered with vines.
“I guess this is it,” I mutter to myself while pulling on a parka thick enough to combat the freezing temperatures. The blizzard has blown over, but it is still cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. I smile about my dad’s favorite saying while climbing over the gate. There are too many vines strangling it for me to push it open.
Partway down the overgrown driveway, I breathe a little easier. Even with the ground sloshy and the snow melted, there’s no mistaking this cabin. It was the first one I woke up in, and the one we fled when a madman took over its ownership.
The inside of the cabin, although still ransacked, is empty, so I turn to face the landscape JR described so well, I know the exact direction to walk to hunt for clues.
Tears prick my eyes when I reach a tree with a rope noose hanging off a thick branch. I don’t know if they left it up as a cruel reminder for JR or if they were too busy rushing Roderick to the hospital to take it down. Whatever the reason, it’s a horrible reminder of how cruel some people can be.
After sending a prayer to Cecil to thank him for taking care of JR, I shift on my feet to face the cabin, then crank my neck in the direction JR said Roderick came from. There’s nothing out that way but more woods, so Roderick must have been hiding in wake for JR to show up, or he knows this land as well as JR.
Once I’ve breathed out the nerves bubbling in my stomach, I crouch down onto my knees in the area Roderick lied lifeless, then push away the sludgy snow and leaves coating the ground.
I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I’m praying like hell something is here. I’m just really hoping it isn’t a body. I’ve seen plenty of corpses in my time, but I steer clear of decayed ones.
I’m on the verge of giving up when my hand scrapes across something hard in the soil. With my teeth, I remove the gloves stopping my hands from getting frostbite, then drag them over the object protruding from the ground.
“What is that?” I ask no one since I’m the only one stupid enough to be this deep into the woods so soon after a blizzard.
I snap my eyes to the left when a faint voice answers my rhetorical question. “A gun.” A woman who I’d guess to be approximately late thirties, early forties glances past my shoulder before she slowly walks out from behind a large tree trunk. Just like JR when he approached me, my first thought is that she looks disheveled and unhinged. But the more I watch her, the more I realize she too is using the woods as armor.
“Is it your gun?” I ask, thrusting the muddy side pistol her way.
