Hot as Sin (27 page)

Until he got to the dirt road and saw the tire tracks.

Fuck!
The bastard must have stashed a dirt bike on the trail.

Sam could easily follow the tracks. But on foot, he didn’t stand a chance of getting to Dianna nearly fast enough.

He needed help, but heading back to the Farm for reinforcements and to call in the Rocky Mountain hotshot crew and police force was out of the question. Odds were Dianna would be dead by the time he hiked back the way they’d come.

Knowing he’d have to make do alone, Sam ran through the meager tools he had on him. The knife might come in handy later, but what about the flares? He still had four left.

Best-case scenario, the flares would simply send off a smoke signal to any passing aircraft. Worst case, they would ignite a forest fire.

As a hotshot, it went against everything in Sam to light a wildfire on purpose. Arson had always been his biggest enemy, but he couldn’t waste any time feeling conflicted over the choice he was making.

He’d face a hundred arson charges if it meant saving Dianna.

Pulling the cap off of one of the flares, he bent down and lit a clump of dry brush on the edge of the trail.

Watching it burn and move across the mountain with the wind, he hoped like hell that Will and the rest of the Rocky Mountain hotshot crew were canvassing these mountains hourly for wildfires. If the wind picked up, the flames would either ravage the forest in a matter of hours—or turn on him and catch him up in the fire he’d started.

Following the four-inch tire tracks up the dirt road on foot, he continued to light flares every half mile until he was down to his final one. Praying that someone on the local hotshot crew would read his smoke signal, he held one last flare in reserve.

Sam continued to make his way up the trail, his legs and lungs burning, sweat soaking his clothes, praying all the while that Dianna was still alive.

Stay strong, sweetheart
, he silently pleaded.
I’m coming to get you
.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

WIND WHIPPED across Dianna’s eyes, making them water as she held on to the handlebars for dear life.

The man was driving way too fast, the trees a blur beside them as he sped up the bumpy road. She kept sliding, first to one side, then the next, as she overcorrected. She squeezed her eyes shut against the trail dirt flying up from under the wheels, but she couldn’t block out the image of Sam falling off the trail. It would haunt her forever.

Her captor pressed close against her, and even though he’d told her that he was disgusted by the thought of touching her, she could feel his hard-on pressing into her rear every time they hit a rough patch.

What if he changed his mind about raping her?

What if he’d already raped April?

Bile rose to her throat again, and along with the motion sickness she was feeling, she nearly spewed all over the handlebars.

You’re going to see April soon and then you’re going to figure out how to get away from him
.

This mantra was all she had to cling to.

Her heart squeezed and she momentarily lost her breath as she thought about Sam being pushed off the trail. These past three days with Sam had been more than she could have ever hoped for. But they weren’t enough.

She wanted a lifetime.

As the dirt bike wound up the trail, Dianna’s hands quickly went numb and her legs and rear soon followed. She wasn’t sure if it had been thirty minutes or two hours by the time he abruptly hit the brakes.

Her chest flew into the handlebars and she grimaced in pain as the man got off the bike, walking away without undoing the locks that held her captive on the dirt bike.

Dianna clenched and unclenched her hands to bring life back to her numb limbs until tingles started shooting up both of her arms. Blinking fast to clear the wet dirt from her eyes, she looked around at where he’d taken her. They were parked beside a barn on its last legs at the end of a long row of ratty old trailers. Surrounded by the metal boxes, it was almost like being a kid again, except for one big difference.

No matter how bad life in the trailer park with her mother had been, she’d never feared for her life.

“April!” she screamed just in case her sister was close by, but there was no answer.

And then the man reappeared, pushing April forward with his gun.

Although Dianna was overjoyed that her sister was still alive, she gasped at the state she was in. Her face was a mess of blood and bruises, her wrists were bound together with tape, and she looked horribly weak, like she might drop unconscious to the ground at any second.

“You found me,” April said through wobbling lips.

Before Dianna could tell her sister how much she loved her, that she would have moved heaven and earth to find her, the man lifted up the gun and laid the barrel against April’s skull.

“I didn’t get to say good-bye to my brother,” he said, his hands and voice shaking with rage. “You’re not going to get the chance either.”

Dianna frantically pulled at her chains, but there was no way she could get off the bike and save her sister.

Right before he pulled the trigger, April’s gaze was steady, utterly unflinching, and Dianna read all of the love she and her sister had never been able to share with each other in her sister’s beautiful hazel eyes.

———

Sam had been running too many miles, too fast without any water. His legs were starting to go and his chest was burning. With a stiff breeze sending the small fires he’d lit crawling up the mountain’s mounds of dead brush, he was afraid this was about to turn into his worst-case scenario.

With no other option but to keep moving forward, Sam pushed through another tenth of a mile, his muscles and tendons screaming with every footfall. Minutes dragged by as he continued to put one foot in front of the other.

Hotshots were often called superheroes. But Sam had been doing the job long enough to know that they weren’t. They were just average men who sometimes did extraordinary things. And like any other man on the verge of dehydration, he needed water.

Or he’d die.

And then, suddenly, he heard the sharp whirring of helicopter blades breaking through the silence of the forest. Using the last of his strength, Sam clambered up the tall edge of the cliff to try to make himself seen in the nearest clearing.

But the helicopter flew right past him.

All out of options, he lit his last flare and dropped it on the dry grasses a few feet away.

The seconds ticked by, the fire grew hotter, but Sam held his ground. And then, finally, the helicopter headed straight for him, his friend, Will, manning the controls.

With the open space too tight to land the aircraft, Will dropped the ladder and hovered above the spreading flames. Sam jumped up and grabbed hold of a step, commanding his weakening body to get the fuck up into the helicopter without blacking out.

Will was on his radio giving the Rocky Mountain hotshots the coordinates for the fires when Sam finally crawled inside. Usually, when wildfires were caught this early, it was only a matter of a couple of bucket drops to put them out. Sam hoped it would be the case this time, too.

And yet, even if the local authorities threw him in jail for arson, he wouldn’t change what he’d done. Not when using the flares had been his only chance to get back to Dianna.

Will’s eyebrows moved up toward his hairline when he put down his radio and saw the wrecked state of Sam’s face, arms, and clothes that were soaked with sweat, dirt, and blood.

“Drink this,” he said, handing Sam water.

As he drained the bottle, Will said, “I got a call from some guy at the commune. He said you and Dianna were heading off on this trail to look for her sister and asked me if I was planning to fly over this area today. What the fuck is happening?”

“Long story,” Sam said, knowing he needed to conserve his energy. “Dianna’s in trouble. Big trouble. We’ve got to find her. I’ve been following tracks from a dirt bike. How low can you fly?”

“Low enough.”

“Fly as fast and as low as you can.”

The chopper ate up the distance a hundred times faster than Sam had been able to on foot. A handful of minutes later, the tracks abruptly veered off the road into a thick grove of trees.

“I can’t follow the tracks any farther,” Will said.

“Find a place to drop me in,” Sam instructed. “They’ve got to be close.”

Through the thick tree cover, they looked down into a small trailer park.

“Damn it,” Will said, “I thought all of these trailers had been cleared out last year by the Forest Service.”

Just then, Sam saw a flash of color and movement. Yanking the helicopter’s ladder back out, he secured it to the lip of the aircraft. “Get as close as you can. I’m going to jump.”

Will didn’t bother telling him he was crazy; he simply got to work positioning the chopper over a small hole between trees.

But as he prepared to descend, Sam’s blood ran cold.

Dianna was chained to a dirt bike, and the man who’d shoved him down the mountain was holding a gun to her sister’s head, only feet away. In the time it took him to get on the ground, both April and Dianna could be killed.

On the verge of fighting the hardest fight of his life, rage swept through every cell, every nerve.

He was going to save Dianna, even if he had to die to do it.

Time seemed to slow down as the man’s finger twitched on the trigger. And then, suddenly, sand and dirt and pine needles were whipping into her eyes, and Dianna realized whirring helicopter blades were breaking apart the silence of the forest.

Without yet seeing him, Dianna felt Sam’s presence and she was filled with renewed strength.

But before she could act, April took advantage of the man’s distraction, kicking him hard in the balls, successfully knocking him off balance, the loud bang of a shot going wild and slamming into one of the trailers.

When keys fell out of his pocket, despite her obvious exhaustion and injuries, her tough little sister managed to grab them with her bound hands. Dashing over to Dianna, she got to work on undoing the chains around her right wrist.

But all Dianna wanted was for her sister to get away.

“Give me the keys and run!” she pleaded with April.

But April’s stubborn expression said she wasn’t going anywhere. “I’m not leaving you,” she said in a gravelly voice.

But seconds later, seeing that the man was back on his feet, Dianna grabbed the keys with her free hand and tried again.

“Go!”

This time April started running, but she was too weak to outrun the man with the gun. His face furious, he grabbed her by the hair and dragged her into the forest.

Oh God. Dianna needed to get the final locks undone so that she could run after them and save her sister, but she could barely get her numb fingers to work.

And then, miraculously, Sam was beside her.

“He’s taken her into the woods. We’ve got to save her.”

Taking the keys from her and quickly undoing the locks around her left wrist and ankles, he untangled her chains with a steady hand.

“Run toward the clearing behind you and wait in the helicopter for us.”

Without waiting for her agreement, he sprinted into the forest, following the two sets of footprints.

Dianna’s limbs shook as she lifted one leg over the seat and held herself up against the handlebars. She trusted Sam to do everything he could to save April, and she knew he wanted her to be safe in the helicopter—just as she’d wanted April to run to safety—but there was no way she could sit back and wait in the wings while he faced down a truly crazed man.

Not when the lives of the two people who mattered most to her were on the line.

Moving as fast as she could on partially numb legs, she prayed with every step that April was still alive. Running past the last trailer, into the thick grove of trees, her heart raced from a combination of panic and exertion. But what she saw in front of her made her heart nearly stop.

The man had shoved April to the ground, one boot on her skull.

But his gun was pointing straight at Sam.

Looking down the barrel of the gun, Sam knew he had only seconds to act, when he suddenly heard a familiar sizzle.

A flare.

He should have been furious that Dianna hadn’t listened to him when he’d told her to get in the goddamned helicopter, but how could he be anything but amazed by her quick thinking? She’d always been the smartest person he knew.

The lit fuse flew past Sam’s shoulder, nailing the man’s chest dead center. The man’s shirt caught on fire and he stumbled back.

Screaming in pain, the man jumped around the forest, leaving April wide open. Both Sam and Dianna dove for her, but Dianna was faster. Pulling her sister up off the forest floor, Dianna sank to the ground, cradling her sister’s body in her arms.

Sam turned his focus back to the man who had almost taken everything from him, just in time to see the gun pointing at them. On a roar, just as a shot rang out, Sam launched himself at the man.

There was a sharp tug in his thigh, but he’d already been ignoring brutal pain for more than an hour. The new wound barely registered.

Tackling the man, they rolled over each other, the slope growing steeper and more precarious every few feet. Taking a quick glance at the forest, Sam realized they were on the edge of a precipice and picking up speed.

At the last possible second, he let go of his hold on the stranger, reached out with his good arm, gripped a narrow tree trunk, and held on for everything he was worth.

The man’s hands slipped from around Sam’s shoulders, his eyes widening with the sudden knowledge that he was going to die. Down, down, down he went, his screams for help echoing through the forest.

And then, his cries were suddenly broken by the sound of his gun going off.

Everything went silent.

It wasn’t the first time Sam had seen someone die in the mountains. But it was the first time he wasn’t going to head in to drag the body out.

Blood dripping from his arm, from his face, but mostly from his thigh, Sam knew he needed to pull himself up to safety. His vision starting to go, he hoisted himself onto a thick shrub he hoped would hold his weight.