High-Stakes Playboy (19 page)

Who in the hell would sneak up to the cabin and peer inside the windows like that? He supposed it was technically possible that the stalker was after him. But frankly, he didn’t think he had been back in the United States long enough for any enemies he might have to have caught up with him so quickly. Which left Marley as the target of this craziness.

He frowned. What if the accidents around the movie set had something to do with her? Steve had been clear that Marley had been close to all of the places where things had gone wrong either just before or at the time of the incidents. Had
she
been the target of all the near-catastrophes? He needed to get back to town. To talk it over with Steve. Look at the security footage of the incidents and see if Marley could possibly have been the target instead of the movie set itself. For that matter, he needed to check the footage and see if he could spot someone who might be stalking her.

They had to get away from this cabin as soon as possible. They were completely isolated out here in the woods and severely limited in options for self-defense.

He took a hike down the driveway, and it was a disaster zone. Drifts of snow nearly as tall as he piled across the drive, lined up one after another. He might be able to shovel through it all, but with the wind blowing like it was, any path he made would fill right back in, probably in a matter of minutes. They were stuck here until the wind died down.

He turned around and headed back to the cabin and Marley. He was not leaving her side again until they were safely back on the movie set and surrounded by Steve’s stunt crew, most of whom Steve had recruited from the ranks of recently retired Special Forces soldiers.

He slipped inside the cabin, stripped off his coat and stomped the snow off his boots. He had suggested to Marley that she take a nap while he checked out the snow. Hopefully, she’d listened to him and was safely tucked under the down comforter. He stuck his head in the bedroom door and spied a riot of blond curls peeking above the covers. Relief coursed through him. She was safe. And, by God, he planned to keep her that way.

He piled more wood on the fire and laid out his snowy clothes to dry on the hearth, then headed for the bedroom and climbed into bed. Marley promptly rolled over in her sleep and draped herself over him. She came half-awake as her limbs wrapped around his. Hugging an ice cube probably would wake him up, too.

He murmured, “Go back to sleep, baby. I’ll warm up in a second. And then I promise I’ll hold you all night long.”

She breathed on a sigh of total contentment and mumbled, “Best. Fling. Ever.”

His hands stilled on her skin. A
fling
? He was really starting to hate that word.

Still, he was the last one who should be throwing stones. It had been his own MO for so long, he didn’t know what the hell to do now that his perspective was changing. And he sure as hell didn’t like that she was turning the tables on him.

He was spinning out of control, and there didn’t seem to be a damned thing he could do about it. He was having all sorts of strange feelings piled one on top of another, and he couldn’t stop any of them. This must be what it felt like to go crazy. It was by turns giddy and truly terrifying.

It was almost as if he’d become obsessed with Marley. Either that, or she’d invaded his mind somehow.

He was actually considering asking her if she would be willing to give a long-term relationship with him a try. He knew better than most just how hard those were for military members and their significant others to sustain. He’d watched dozen of men and women in his unit over the years try to hold together long-distance romance with their spouses, girlfriends and boyfriends. Some had succeeded...and some hadn’t.

Poor Marley. He had no business inflicting all his crap on her. She had just wanted to gain some sexual experience. Not that he minded being the provider of that. But she’d never bargained on him turning out to be the one who wanted to turn their fling into something more. Something long-term. Hell, maybe even permanent.

As much as he might want more from her, a fling was probably the best thing for them. No deep emotional attachments, no obligation for her to wrestle through his deep-seated relationship demons with him. Yup. A fling was the thing.

On cue, the whole stew of weirdness in his gut flared up again. He couldn’t even begin to name all the ingredients. Need. Longing. Anger. Abandonment. Grief. It was as if all the emotional crap in his life had picked this moment to come surging out of wherever he usually stowed it, and all of it was messing with his head. Nobody had ever warned him that falling for someone opened the floodgates to all the relationship issues amassed over one’s entire life.

What the hell was
wrong
with him? He hadn’t felt remotely this emotionally unbalanced even right after that last mission from hell.

Maybe it was the incredible, emotional sex with Marley throwing him off his game. God knew, it had blown his mind. The weird thing was he’d had hot sex with lots of women in his life, and none of it had ever had this kind of an effect on him. But Marley was different.

Warming to the mental topic, he postulated that maybe it was something about her inexperience making him unable to shake her from his thoughts. She’d made him feel unusually protective.
Yeah.
That was probably it.

Although it wasn’t as if he was going to get to stick around to find out. He would go back overseas, and she would move on with her life. She would find a guy who was permanently stateside, who could offer her a stable life and the promise of a long-term relationship.

A hot knife of jealousy stabbed him at the thought of a lout like Gordon Trapowski getting to be with her, getting his mind blown on a nightly basis by Marley. God, what he wouldn’t give to be that guy. It was almost enough to make him think about resigning his commission and staying stateside for good.

The random thought shocked his mind into stillness. He had never been the type who would give up his career for love. He’d always scorned those men and women, in fact.

But damned if Marley wasn’t rapidly turning him into one of those love-struck idiots. This was nuts. He’d clearly lost his marbles. The hell of it was that it felt so damned good. He didn’t want to wake up from this mad dream. At all.

Marley moved restlessly against him, and he gathered her closer, wrapping his arms and his heart around her protectively. She settled, cuddled even closer to him and drifted back into a deep sleep.

His last conscious thought was to register in vague shock that he felt a smile on his face. What kind of fool fell asleep grinning?

A fool just like him apparently.

* * *

Marley woke slowly, warm and lazy and in no hurry to go anywhere. A warm, muscular, entirely male chest rose and fell gently under her ear. Yup. This was just about perfect.

A chill in the air announced that she and Archer had slept through the night and that the fire in the main room had burned down while they slumbered. She ought to get up and feed it more wood, but she was too comfortable and cozy right here to summon the energy to crawl out of bed, put on cold clothes and go out into the icy main room to stoke the fire. In a few minutes...

The next time she woke up, Archer was gone and she heard a firing crackling and popping loudly in the living room. The bedroom was still cold, so he must have gotten up recently. She sat up reluctantly, keeping the comforter tucked up around her chin.

“Hey, sleepyhead,” Archer said cheerfully from the doorway.

“Hey. What time is it?”

“Sadly, it’s time to go. The wind has died down, which means I can shovel the snowdrifts and they won’t build up again. I’m heading out soon to try to open up the driveway.”

“That thing’s a quarter mile long. No way can you shovel the entire thing!”

He threw her a mock scowl. “Hey. I’m a specimen of supreme physical ability, thank you very much.”

She laughed gaily. “Well, then. Please forgive me for impugning your superpowers. You’re not seriously going to shovel the whole driveway, are you?”

“Nah. I’m gonna use my truck to blast through the drifts. I’ll only dig whenever it gets stuck. Hopefully, it’ll knock out all but the worst of the drifts blocking our escape.”

“Our escape?” That was a strange word choice. “You don’t feel trapped by me, do you? I mean, I don’t expect you to make any promises or to hold you to any long-term commitments because we, well, you know.”

“Had smoking-hot sex?”

“Yeah. That.” Crud. Her cheeks were getting hot. Worse, though, Archer was frowning for real now. What was that all about? What had she said to put that deep crease between his eyebrows?

He whirled and headed out into the main room. His voice, a bit on the clipped side, drifted into the bedroom. “Hungry?”

“Yes. I’ll cook if you’d like.”

“Nah. I got it. You get dressed and pack your stuff. I want to leave as soon as possible.”

A hot, nasty little dagger of pain slipped between her ribs and fished around inside her guts. Little bastard found a number of soft, ready to bleed organs, too. Why was he suddenly in such an all-fired hurry to get out of here? Was he bored with her? Already? God, and to think she’d been fantasizing about a long-term relationship with him. Who was she kidding?

Glum, she climbed out of bed and shivered as the nippy air chilled her through in a matter of seconds. She raced to the bathroom, jumped into her warmest clothes, and packed as he’d suggested. It was sad to feel this magical interlude coming to a close. In a wistful frame of mind, she zipped her rucksack and carried it to the bedroom doorway.

Archer was sitting on the hearth, staring pensively into the dancing flames, as she approached him. What had him looking so serious? She had worked with enough guys to know better than to ask him outright. In her experience, men didn’t like to talk about their feelings unless they initiated the conversation in the first place.

She sat down in the big armchair in front of the hearth and he silently passed her a pan that turned out to have hot oatmeal in it. Not her fave food, but it was warm and sweetened with plenty of melted brown sugar. She dug into the cereal silently.

He moved to the door and fished in his coat pocket, coming up with a jangly key chain. “My truck has an automatic prewarming and defrost feature. I’ll get that going now, and by the time you’re done eating, it’ll be thawed enough for us to head out.” He pressed a button on the key fob.

Kaboom!

A brilliant flash of light blinded her from outside the cabin and a concussion wave shook the entire cabin. The windows rattled, ash rained down from inside the chimney and the china rattled on the kitchen shelves.

The sound was deafening. It actually hurt her ears, as though someone had slammed their hands against each side of her head. Hard.

Something big and fast moving shot toward her. It grabbed her out of the chair and threw her to the floor, then smashed her flat beneath its weight.

Archer. He’d tackled her like an NFL linebacker. He was staring down at her like the end of the world was upon them and he was bracing himself for a fatal blow.

“What was—” She stopped. Huh. She couldn’t hear herself talking. She tried again, louder. “What was that?” Her ears rang ferociously, and she could barely make out her own voice.

“Explosion,” Archer answered loudly.

“Of what?” she demanded in disbelief.

“My truck. It just blew up.”

Chapter 12

“S
tay down, Marley.”

She stared up at him in dismay.
H
e pressed up and away from her abruptly. She sucked in a deep breath as his weight lifted away from her rib cage. How on earth had his truck blown up? That was crazy.

Archer sidled up to the wall beside one of the windows as if he expected someone to shoot him if he showed himself. He must be having another one of those combat flashbacks of his. Curiosity to know how and why his truck had just exploded overcame her shock and she climbed to her feet to have a look out front.

Something was definitely burning out there. A bright glow flickered beyond the front porch. That and debris was starting to rain down on the cabin. It sounded like a storm of hailstones plinking off the metal roofing.

She headed toward the window and Archer, and he bit out,
“Get back!”

But she’d gone far enough. She could see the source of both explosion and fire. His truck was, indeed, entirely engulfed in flames. The doors and roof of the cab were gone, the hood over the engine was nowhere to be seen and the remaining parts of the frame were mangled and twisted almost beyond recognition. Wow. That was some blast to have completely torn the sturdy vehicle apart like that.

“Oh, my God!” she cried. Horror flowed over her. Her breath and pulse accelerated, sending blood careering wildly through her veins. Her legs felt shaky and her knees were physically wobbling.

“Keep your voice down,” Archer growled.

What
was his problem? Shouldn’t he be racing outside to put out the fire and see if he could salvage his truck? Instead, he was acting like a squad of terrorist commandos was about to break down the door and kill them both.

In an attempt to lighten the moment, she said drily, “Um, Archer, while that preheating and defrosting system is
incredibly
effective, I might not use it again until your truck’s manufacturer works the bugs out of it a little more.”

Archer snorted for a single instant of humor, but then he was right back to his terse, tightly wired self. “Get back from the window, for God’s sake,” he hissed.

Startled, she lurched and took a few steps away from the window and slid more behind him and the front door. “What in the world is going on?”

“Someone just blew up my goddamned truck. Tried to kill us. Bastard’s probably out there right now, watching his handiwork.”

Tried to kill them? What? No. She glanced out the sliver of window she could see from here. Archer’s truck was a blazing fireball. No question about it. Had the two of them been inside it when that explosion happened, they would both have died. Surely it was an accident. His high-tech prestarting system had malfunctioned.

“C’mon,” Archer muttered. “We’ve got to get out of here before the bastard moves in to confirm the kill.”

She took one step to follow him and he glared back at her. “Get
down
. He can see in the windows. And if he can see you, he can shoot you.”

All at once, the gravity of their situation penetrated the haze of shock that had come over her when his truck exploded.
Bomb. Killer. Shooting. Dead.

Adrenaline slammed through her, making her entire body feel hot and cold by turns. They could
die
. What in the hell was going on? She dropped to her hands and knees, mimicking Archer.

He crawled to the bedroom door and grabbed her rucksack, then back over to the fireplace to grab his. That gave her enough time to mostly catch up to him and follow closely on his heels to the back door.

“What are we doing now?” she whispered, fully in panic mode now.

“We’re heading into the woods. Whoever blew up my truck will be back, assuming they’re not outside right now, getting their sick jollies watching my truck burn, presumably with us in it.”

“They wouldn’t know for sure that I would be in it with you. Why would someone try to kill you?” she asked, confused. Her mind just wouldn’t seem to operate at full speed, and his logic escaped her. Or maybe it was just denial making it impossible for her to accept that someone was trying to
kill
her.

Archer ignored her question. Instead, he said tersely, “Once I open the door, don’t make a sound. We’re sneaking out of here as silently and covertly as we can. Stay right on my heels and hang on to my coat. I’m going to be moving fast at first. If you can’t keep up with me, let go of my coat and I’ll slow down until you catch up and grab it again. Got it?”

“Yes, but...”

“Hush, baby. We’ve got to go. Now.”

He eased the back door open just far enough to slip outside onto the little porch. It was awkward staying low and sidling through the cracked door behind him. As soon as she cleared it, he eased the door shut behind her again. He checked to make sure it was locked and then he nodded grimly at her.

She nodded back, although she felt none of the readiness to head out into the woods that her nod conveyed. One second she’d been eating a pot of oatmeal, and the next second, someone had apparently just tried to assassinate her and Archer. The whole idea was so surreal as to border on absurd.

Crouching low, Archer darted into the woods behind the cabin. She followed, disbelief raging through her terror. She struggled to concentrate on even moving her feet, let alone keeping her balance, staying right on Archer’s heels like he’d told her to and remembering to hang on to his coat.

He wasn’t kidding. He did move fast through the heavy woods. Branches laden with snow whipped her in the face, dumping powdery snow all over her. It got in her hair and down the neck of her coat, into the crease between her mittens and coat sleeves. And it melted. And got cold. And miserable.

While Archer had been running around at high altitude in the mountains of the various war zones he flew in overseas, she was a sea-level baby. In a matter of minutes, she was huffing and puffing behind him.

It was a dilemma whether to breathe hard and have enough oxygen not to pass out, or to try to control the noise of her breathing so the hypothetical bad guy chasing them wouldn’t hear them and shoot them dead. She alternated between holding her breath and panting like a dog on a hot day.

Her lungs burned and then her legs burned. She felt light-headed and spots danced in front of her eyes before she finally had to let go of his coat out of sheer inability to hold her fist closed any longer.

Archer stopped immediately. He pulled her down into a crouch under the spreading branches of a big fir tree. The snow was not deep under its thick canopy of branches. It took her an embarrassingly long time to catch her breath.

While she huffed and puffed, Archer tried his cell phone, but there was no signal up here in these isolated mountains.

Finally, as her respiration approached normal once more, Archer mouthed, “Ready?”

She nodded resolutely.

He headed out at a slightly more reasonable pace. But again, the altitude got to her eventually, and she had to let go again. They fell into a pattern of moving for about fifteen minutes and stopping for her to catch her breath for about five.

She thought of herself as a relatively fit and strong person. After all, shoulder-held cameras weighed upward of forty pounds and she had to be able to walk around with one on her shoulder, holding it steady with one hand and dragging around a power cord with her other hand. And she might be required to do it for hours on end with only short breaks for rest. But running around in these mountains while scared out of her mind was kicking her butt.

They must have run and walked through the woods for two hours before Archer finally halted under yet another huge pine tree. This pocket of shadow was almost entirely devoid of snow. Archer used his gloved hands to gather a big pile of pine needles together. He sat down on it and gestured her down beside him. She sank gratefully to the impromptu cushion and leaned into the crook of his arm that he held out for her.

He spoke in a low mutter that wouldn’t carry five paces. “How are you?”

“Terrified. Who blew up your truck?”

“No idea.”

“Are they following us?”

“I haven’t heard the sound of any pursuit whenever we’ve stopped. I’m betting we bugged out of there much faster than the bastard thought we would. I think it’s safe to assume we slipped away unseen.”

She probably ought to feel relieved at his assessment, but she couldn’t work up much of a sense of safety while hiding in the woods in the middle of winter in the mountains, far from civilization. She felt exposed and tremendously vulnerable out here. “Now what?” she asked in a small voice.

“Now we find civilization. Another cabin or a passable road where we can flag down a car and get a ride to somewhere with a working phone. Cell tower coverage is nonexistent out here.”

She glanced around at nothing but trees and more trees around them. “How do we find a way out of here?”

His arm tightened around her shoulders. “I happen to have a decent sense of direction. We’ve been paralleling the main road the cabin was on. All we have to do is cut to our right and go a quarter mile or so, and we should hit the road. Then we follow it to another driveway or until a car comes along.”

“How will we know the driver isn’t the same person who tried to kill us?”

“We’ve been walking uphill, away from the nearest town. Odds are that the would-be killer headed back to town after supposedly frying us extra crispy. I don’t see him driving higher into the mountains and higher into the snowfall line.”

His logic made sense. Still, deep paranoia about any other human being overwhelmed her at this point. Although it wasn’t like they could just stay out here forever. They rested for perhaps fifteen minutes this time, and it felt like heaven to relax her entire body like this.

But eventually, Archer murmured, “Ready to head out?”

“As I’ll ever be.” She sighed.

He helped her to her feet and they headed out again, blessedly at a much more sane pace this time. However, now they were cutting across the direction of the prevailing winds of the past few days, and they had to slog through drift after drift of snow. It was slow, cold and wet going, and all she had to do was follow in the path Archer made for her. She didn’t envy him having to forge his way first through the chest-high mounds of snow. She did offer to take her turn going first, but he was having no part of that.

She didn’t know how long they trudged through the snow. She just knew she was exhausted and hungry, and wet and cold, when Archer stopped so abruptly in front of her that she ran into his back.

Startled, she peered nervously over his shoulder. There. Through the trees. A strip of relatively flat, white snow. With tire tracks in it.
A road.

Archer eased forward slowly, and she followed behind, being as stealthy as she could manage on her limp-as-noodles legs. He stopped just under the cover of the last trees by the edge of the road.

“Now what?” she breathed.

“Now we wait for someone to drive by.”

She got the distinct impression that he thought this could take a while. Great. If they stopped moving, she suspected the cold would catch up with them quickly and make their misery complete. But miserable was better than dead.

She was, in fact, shivering so hard her teeth physically chattered by the time Archer went tense and alert beside her. She clamped her jaw shut to hear past her tap-dancing teeth and listened hard. There it was. A rumbling noise in the distance.

It sounded like it was coming from above them on the mountain. Archer moved closer to the road after muttering to her to stay under the trees until he waved her over.

Tense, she waited where he told her to, watching the road a hundred yards or so to their left where it disappeared around a curve into the trees.

Her breath caught as a huge dump truck rumbled into sight, a snowplow blade mounted on its front bumper. Archer leaped out of the trees and into the road, waving wildly for the driver to stop.

The vehicle ground to a stop and the passenger window came open. “You folks in some trouble?” the driver shouted.

Archer waved her over and she stumbled through the snow frantically. It wasn’t as if the guy was going to drive off and strand them out here, but she was so grateful to see another human being who obviously wasn’t going to kill them and could take them away from this nightmare that she could cry.

In fact, as Archer hoisted her up the steps into the high cab of the truck, she did feel tears tracking down her cheeks, leaving icy cold trails behind. Archer piled in behind Marley and slammed the door shut gratefully behind himself.

The warmth in the heated cab struck her like a physical blow. It had been days since she’d felt room temperature air surround her. Ahh, the comforts of modern civilization. God bless them, one and all.

“You folks have car trouble?” the snowplow driver asked.

“You might say that,” Archer answered wryly. “Any chance we could get a ride to town, or at least someplace with a working phone so we can call for help?”

“Yeah, sure. But I can plow your car out and give you a tow back onto the road if you want.”

Archer shook his head. “Car’s dead. Gonna need more than plowing and a tow, I’m afraid.”

“Okay. Well, sit tight. It’s gonna take me a little while to plow my way down this road.”

She leaned forward to ask, “Has this road already been plowed? I see tire tracks.”

“One of the guys went through here last night. Did the initial clearing and got one lane open. I’m opening up a second lane.”

“What about the tire tracks?” Archer asked, obviously seeing where she was going with her line of questioning.

The driver downshifted as the road went downhill more steeply. “Some of the locals have been out on four-wheelers playing in the snow. Had to tow one out already today.”

So. It was possible that their would-be killer had driven in on a four-wheel-drive vehicle, sabotaged Archer’s truck and then driven out. She sincerely hoped the guy was long gone.

“Lean back,” Archer muttered to her under his breath. “And turn your head toward me.”