Keeping Watch: Heart of the Night\Accidental Bodyguard (43 page)

“But that’s the name Dr. Rutherford told me to remember. He made me say it twice. It’s the only lead I have.”

“He was probably warning you that Frye was responsible for his death.” The Humvee picked up speed as it came out of the turn. “Frye is an old, uh…nemesis…of The Watchers. He has capabilities and influence you can’t even imagine.”

“Darien Frye killed Dr. Rutherford?” Jonas’s next glance in the mirror raised her paranoia another notch. She turned around and looked out the back, then quickly righted herself. “We’re being followed.”

Jonas eyed the brown county cruiser in his side mirror. “I told Prescott to keep an eye on me.”

“You
want
the deputy to follow us?” There was a devilish satisfaction in Jonas’s expression when Deputy Prescott turned onto White Horse Road after them. He was playing a game of cat and mouse, only Faith wasn’t sure which of them was the prey.

He never answered her question. “Frye wouldn’t dirty his hands with the actual killing. But he’d pay good money to have it done. What else did Rutherford tell you?”

Faith closed her eyes and replayed the gruesome episode in her mind. There’d been so much blood. And he’d fought so hard to share a handful of words when he should have been fighting to live. She opened her eyes and watched the forested slope zip past her window. They were picking up speed. “I asked him who’d attacked him. He said a snake had done it, and that I needed to run away before he found me, too.”

“A snake?” It sounded as if Dr. Rutherford’s delirious answer made as much sense to Jonas as it had to her. She nodded. “A copperhead.”

“Dammit.” Jonas the beast was back again. He pounded the steering wheel with his fist, swiped his hand across his jaw and swore again. “This just gets better and better. Your boss was stabbed, wasn’t he?”

Faith sidled closer to the door, feeling his edgy tension radiating throughout the car. What was going on? What did Jonas know? “The guard was stabbed, too. And Liza.”

He shook his head and swore again.

“You’re like a roaring animal when you curse like that. You scare me and you don’t make any sense. You’re a better man than that, Jonas.
I
deserve better.” But his string of curses wasn’t what made her clutch the door and turn to him. “You know what Copperhead means, don’t you?”

His breath rushed out on an angry sigh, but he made a visible effort to curb the word on the end of his tongue. He pulled into his driveway and followed the curving road up to his cabin. Faith held on with both hands to keep her balance on the bumpy gravel driveway. Jonas didn’t speak until the Humvee jerked to a stop and he’d turned in his seat to face her. She shrank back against her door, reading cold, unforgiving conviction in his eyes. “Copperhead is the code name for a hired assassin. We never could find out his real identity. Last I knew, he worked for Frye.

“If he’s after you, you’re as good as dead.”

Chapter Five

“You’ve got ten minutes to get ready.” Jonas climbed the steps to his porch in two long strides and opened the door. “Help yourself to anything you need and make a pit stop. We’ll be on the road for a while.”

Faith ran up the stairs behind him, barely keeping up with his determined pace. “You have some explaining to do.” She followed him right into his bedroom. “What do you know about assassins? Who’s Darien Frye? Why is he hurting the people I love?”

With methodical precision he cinched a leather sheath onto his belt and slipped in that long hunting knife. He opened his closet and pulled a metal box from the top shelf, unlocked it and pulled out a black leather holster and some type of gun. It, too, was black. Steel. With a thick handle and long barrel. Jonas slid back the top half of the barrel and set it on the bed. He pulled the holster on over his shoulders, stretching it to fit across his back as he returned to the closet.

“I won’t let him get to you, I promise,” he said, brushing past her without an emotional response or answering her questions. He dumped out a shoe box full of three black cartridges and boxes of bullets and proceeded to load each magazine. Then he shoved one into the gun’s handle and tucked the others into his pockets. It was like watching a medieval movie as the knight suited up for battle. Only, these modern weapons were real. The knife and bullets and deadly serious attitude were very real. “It’s what I do.”

“It’s what you
used
to do.” He slid the top of the gun back into place with an ominous ratchet and click that meant business. “You can’t just uproot your life for me.”

“What life?” he challenged. The gun went into the holster beneath his left arm. He pulled a dark brown suede field coat from his closet and put it on, despite the seasonal warmth of the afternoon. But she could see why. It covered him from neck to hip, hiding the arsenal he carried. “The only thing that was ever good about my life was my job. I may have a few years on me now, but no one ever died on my watch.”

“No one?” She followed him from bed to closet and back again as he loaded bullets, a change of clothes and other gear into a duffel bag.

He finally stopped when she planted herself in his path. He looked down from his towering height, giving her a new understanding of the phrase
armed and dangerous.
But something hot glittered in his eyes as that indulgent expression he’d shown her at the library tried to creep across his face again. He cupped her shoulders with his hands. “No one I was assigned to protect.” Then he set her aside and resumed his packing. “We’re down to five minutes. You’d better get moving.”

He zipped the duffel shut and slung it over his right shoulder. “I’ll meet you at the car in five.”

He exited the room, leaving Faith standing alone beside his bed. She hugged her arms close around herself, feeling lost and abandoned in the wake of Jonas the protector. Or maybe it was the fledgling compassion she’d seen glimpses of in his behavior that rattled her to the core.

There was another man hidden inside this beast of the mountain. A kinder, passionate, deeply honorable man behind the looks and the language and the grab’n'go social skills. The man inside was the one who intrigued her, the one she was so inexorably drawn to time and again.
He
was the man who could truly hurt her. Who could make her care. Who could use up whatever reserves of emotional energy she had left.

But he was the same man who could save her life. The closest thing she had to a friend right now. And he’d been her only ally through this whole mess.

She’d thought leaving graduate school and entering the working world in the big city was the biggest risk she’d ever take. But that was before she knew that men like Jonas Beck and Darien Frye and the mysterious Copperhead existed in the world. Before they became a part of
her
world.

No one ever died on my watch.

Faith could endure a lot of things. Her parents had died when she was twelve and she’d grown to love her uncle like a second father. She’d come between a murderer and a tiny, round piece of plastic. She’d made a stranger choose to put his life on the line for her. She owed so many people so much.

But she couldn’t make good on a bit of it if she was dead.

Shaking herself from her intellectual debate, she roused herself to action. The clock was ticking.

Four and a half minutes later, wearing one of Jonas’s thick, soft flannel shirts as a jacket over her own stiff clothes, and carrying her purse plus a bundle of snacks, water bottles and a first aid kit wrapped up in a blanket, Faith walked out the front door into the crisp September sunshine.

Jonas had the Humvee running with the back open. When he hopped out, she nodded over her shoulder toward the door. “Should I lock it?”

“Don’t bother.” He met her halfway and took the bundle from her arms. “If they want in, they’ll get in.” He tossed her parcel in the back and closed the door. “You didn’t leave anything of yours behind, did you?”

She snickered at that. “I didn’t come with much.”

“Let’s move it, then.” He closed her door, then jogged around and climbed in beside her. “Buckle up.”

The lurching ride down to the road was reason enough to take the precaution. When they got down to White Horse Road, a familiar, brown county sedan caught her eye. It was parked on the shoulder near the end of Jonas’s driveway. Faith braced her hands against the window and leaned as close as she dared to see if her flare of panic was justified.

She saw two men inside the car: Mel Prescott, slumped over the steering wheel and his deputy buddy, eyes closed, mouth wide-open, as his hatless head fell back against the vinyl headrest.

Faith reached behind her, blindly groping for the man undoubtedly responsible. “Jonas?”

A rough, warm hand closed around her icy fingers and gave them a squeeze. “Don’t worry. They’re not dead. Just out of commission. I bought us a few minutes of time without anyone tailing us.” He released her before she could turn around and verify his reassuring touch with her own eyes. “I like knowing where they are. And knowing they can’t call in and say we’re on the move.”

He turned onto the smoother pavement of White Horse Road, heading away from the town below. Faith settled back into her seat, feeling a margin of safe breathing space she hadn’t a few moments ago. “Where are we going?”

“Up into the Tetons. We’re gonna get lost.”

“D
AMN
B
ECK
.” Hamilton Prince opened the door to the rustic mountain cabin without even drawing his gun as a safety precaution. Interesting. This good ol’ boy with aspirations of greatness was either an arrogant son of a gun or just plain foolish. “Yep. He’s gone. Cleared out. Looks like he took the girl with him.”

The tall man in the suit followed more cautiously. A missing car and quiet yard didn’t necessarily mean no one was home. Once he’d ascertained that the main room was clear, he entered. “What can you tell me about this Beck?”

Prince peeked into the bedroom and bathroom before coming back to the kitchen area, where he began poking around in drawers and cupboards. He laughed and shook his head. “Not much. He must be living on a pension of some kind. I never knew him to work anywhere around here. Never made friends with anyone. It isn’t right, keeping to yourself so much. I ran a check on him when he first moved here, to see if he was wanted for something. Came up blank. The only info I had on him came from the DMV. I think he changed his name. He’s got the look of pure trouble.”

“How so?”

“Ugly son of a gun.” The sheriff traced a line across his forehead with his thumb. “He’s got a big scar down the middle of his face. He could scare kids on Halloween if he was of a mind to.”

Interesting description. A detail like that should make Beck easier to locate. If he had indeed
cleared out,
as Prince believed.

“Maybe that’s why he keeps to himself.” The man in the suit placed his gun back inside his holster and straightened his charcoal jacket, maintaining a friendly yet professional tone. Though Prince seemed ready to return to town to chew out the two deputies who had fallen asleep on the job and lost track of Faith Monroe,
he
was still assessing the situation. He began his own search through the cabin. “Are you sure she was here with him?”

Prince nodded. “Spent the night. I saw them together in town this morning. Maybe they have a thing going.”

He doubted it. Miss Monroe hadn’t dated anyone seriously since college, according to his quickly scanned information. She’d been all about establishing her career in Saint Louis, not finding a boyfriend. If she had gone somewhere with this Beck, it would put the plan even further behind schedule. His employer wouldn’t be pleased. But he agreed, just to keep the sheriff talking. “Maybe.”

“I impounded her car, just like you said.”

“Good. I’ll have one of my men check it out.” He’d go over the car himself from bumper to bumper, but he suspected it would be a long shot. If she’d skipped town, she would have the disk with her. “Do you have a make and plate number on Beck’s car?”

“Sure thing. Never let it be said that my department won’t cooperate with another.” He pulled a cell phone from his trouser pocket and placed a call. “If you get anything on Beck, you let me know. A man like that must have something to hide.”

Cooperate? The sheriff was still bent on condemning this Jonas Beck. Maybe if he’d paid more attention to his work than his gossip, he’d have kept tabs on Faith Monroe the way he’d been ordered to.

“Must have.” While the sheriff talked to his office, the man in the suit checked the other rooms for himself. The bedroom, in particular, was of interest. Beck owned a gun. And he had it with him. He examined the metal lock box lying open on the bed and sniffed the distinct smell of gunpowder in the empty shoe box beside it.

The bathroom was a stark example of simple living. No clues of any kind beyond a mud-stained denim shirt stuffed into an otherwise empty laundry bag. He caught a whiff of something peculiar and raised the shirt to his nose again. Hmm. Beyond the earthy scents of pine and dirt he detected the faint odor of something citrusy. Something fresh. Perfume. The tall man smiled. “Not exactly Mr. Beck’s scent, I’ll wager.”

But the bathroom in Faith Monroe’s house had been filled with the same smell. Her shower gel. Oh, yeah. He was on her trail again.

And he wouldn’t have to rely on the bumbling
cooperation
of Sheriff Prince and his incompetent band of merry men. He needed to track this Jonas Beck for himself. And a man with a scar down the middle of his face shouldn’t be that hard to find.

He checked his weapon of choice and masked his smile. He clutched the shirt in his fist and joined the sheriff out in the kitchen. “I think I’ve seen enough. I’d better get on the horn to my superior and report in.”

The sheriff nodded. “Did you find something?”

The tall man shrugged. “We might run some DNA samples on this Jonas Beck, see if we can uncover an alias and put together a history for him.”

“Man, I wish I had your resources. Keep me posted on your case, will you? Here’s the plate number you asked for. Beck drives a black Humvee.” Prince handed him a slip of paper and patted his belly above his belt buckle. “What do you suppose a girl like that sees in a man like him?”