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He heard water running and the shuffle of footsteps.
After tossing the tiny leather pouch of papers he’d found in her hiding spot, he grabbed his cell phone and flipped open the blinds to survey the weather. “Anne-Marie?” he called.
“You said five minutes! It hasn’t been two.”
So she was inside. Good. He stepped onto the tiny porch, then closed the door and looked back through the window to make certain she didn’t try to escape, walk out of the bathroom and take a hard right for the back door.
Everything inside the darkened interior remained the same, the fire offering up enough light that he could make out the door to the bathroom.
Quickly, he dialed the phone and turned up the collar of his jacket as it rang. Once. Twice. The wind rushed across the porch, scattering the few dry leaves that weren’t already covered in snow.
“Hello?” A man’s voice. Rough. Irritated.
“Yeah, it’s me. Ryder.”
“I see that. Modern technology, you know. Where the hell are you?”
“Still in Montana.”
“What? I thought you’d be on your way by now! What the hell’s taking so long?”
“I’ve got her.”
“Then why the fuck are you still in Montana?”
“Big storm,” Ryder explained.
“Big storm? Big deal. You should have prepared for bad weather. Christ, you knew where you were going, what you were doing.”
“I know. I did.”
“Then, what’s the problem?”
What was the problem? Ryder stared through the window into the darkened interior. He felt the wind battering the tiny, falling-down cabin in the middle of the Bitterroot Mountains, a ramshackle abode no rational person would try to make their home. Unless she was desperate. Unless she didn’t want to be found.
He thought about the passports he’d riffled through, remembering the different photographs, the changed names, the altered looks. He considered Anne-Marie Favier Calderone. She was a gorgeous girl who’d grown up in wealth and seemingly a princess-like existence who was frantic enough to change her good looks and adopt different personas to hide herself, a woman on the run who had eventually wound up in the middle of the mountains, isolated and alone, in a damn cabin with thin walls, no heat, and barely running water.
Why? he wondered again.
Why would she go to all the trouble? Why would she willingly propel herself into all this hardship? How desperate was she to try and disappear off the face of the earth? What had been the reason that she would tumble to such depths as to steal from her grandmother, the one woman she’d sworn she adored?
It didn’t make sense.
Unless she was scared out of her mind.
Unless her bravado was a mask.
Unless her damnably stubborn attitude was propelled by sheer terror.
“Hello?” called the voice on the phone, but he ignored it.
With snow falling all around him, Ryder remembered her vanity. How she’d known how beautiful she was, how sexy and alluring she could be, and she’d reveled in her good looks and charm, in her sensuality. She would never have sliced off her own finger and no accident would have been so clean. As if it had been cleaved by a butcher. Or a surgeon. Or one man who had been both—the monster that she’d married.
“Shit,” he whispered, realizing he was making a huge, irreversible mistake—one it might already be too late to rectify.
“Hello? For Christ’s sake, Ryder? Are you there? Fuck!”
His boots ringing, Ryder stepped to the far end of the porch and took a quick look down the side of the cabin to the bathroom window, just to make certain she hadn’t done anything foolish like squeezing herself through the tiny window and dropping to the ground to escape. As far as he could see, the window wasn’t open and the snow below it was undisturbed.
