Kiss and Tell (11 page)

Concentrate, you idiot. There's a time and place for everything, and this is neither.

Marnie slowly opened her eyes. She looked dazed, amazed, and unbelievably gorgeous.

Water poured more slowly over the spillway, and somewhere in the distance a bird resumed singing. Snow drifted lazily from the ever-darkening sky.

"Still having fun?" Jake asked dryly.

Marnie glanced down at the rushing water below, then looked straight into his eyes. "Yeah, as a matter of fact, I am. Now what?"

"Now we walk, very carefully, along this nice little ledge back to terra firma."

The going was tricky. The ledge was barely wide enough to traverse single file. In several places the cement had crumbled, and in others it was wet and dangerously slimy. Marnie used the narrow electrical pipe running overhead as a handhold. Knowing Jake was right behind her made her feel marginally safer.

Clothing and hair soaked, Marnie shivered in earnest. She had a real good reason to bitch and complain now. Behind her Jake had a brief, irritating flash of Soledad, snuggling inside the blue fox fur she'd begged for so prettily because she was cold in the New York spring. He snorted. Hell, he must be a magnet for the type.

"Careful!" He made a grab for Marnie's wrist on the overhead pipe as her foot slipped in the green gunk on the walkway.

Her breath plumed white as she muttered, "Thanks," and kept going. Jake kept his hand right behind hers as they inched across to the other side.

It seemed to take hours before they reached the rocky outcrop at the end of the dam.

Senses alert, he checked the woods on either side as he helped her down the rocks and boulders alongside the spillway.

After scrambling the last few steps down to flat land, Marnie turned to glance up at the wall where they'd clung like spiders moments ago.

As they watched, an enormous sheared-off tree shot to the edge, tangled with other debris, and did a free fall over the lip. Jake's gaze followed the descent of the ladder as it was ripped away from the old and crumbling cement. The whole mess crashed and splintered into the raging waters below.

He turned and gave her a pointed look.

She grinned, wiped her brow, then flicked off imaginary sweat. "My hero!"

Her eyes sparkled. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose bloomed bright pink from the cold. Water trickled down her face from her saturated hair.

Jake pushed his hands into the wet pockets of his down jacket. It was a ridiculous time to be charmed.

"Judas! We could be dead right now. In case you haven't noticed, they're trying to kill us."

"Yeah, but they
didn't
. You saved us from the baddies." Marnie flung herself into his arms and kissed him, hard.

With his hands in his pockets, he was trapped for a moment. Jake pulled away, freeing his hands to hold her firmly by her upper arms. He made sure there was not a glimmer of warmth in his eyes. She was either one damn fine actress or she was for real. He didn't have time right now to figure out which.

"Own a fur coat?"

"What?" She gave him a blank look. "No, ugh. I'd never wear fur. But if there was a nice woolly bear around I'd be ecstatic to snuggle up to him to get warm."

"And get eaten for your pains."

"Why'd you ask me, then?" She gave him a puzzled look. "You'd have gotten cranky no matter what my answer was, wouldn't you?"

He kept his tone sleety. "If the idea is to distract me so your pals have another easy shot at me, forget it."

"Huh? You're the one who asked the dumb question." She stared at him for a moment, then shook her head. "You're a real jerk, you know that?" She didn't sound particularly bothered by the fact, which annoyed him for some reason.

"So I've been told."

He took her arm roughly, and she winced.

"Now what?"

As the words left his mouth he remembered the moment when she'd put her own life on the line by holding him until he could regain his balance. "That was a damn foolish thing you did, grabbing me like that. You could have fallen yourself."

"Too bad I wasn't thinking that way. I just figured it would be tough for you to swim with broken bones."

She hadn't taken a breath for that one. Jake stared at her. She couldn't work for the bad guys – unless she was their secret weapon, he thought morosely. "Let's go."

"I'm quite capable of walking by myself, thank you."

Jake felt as though he'd kicked a puppy for bringing him his slippers.
Shit
.

"Fine. Let's see you do it, then. Those guys aren't going to wait forever before they try again."

"They think we drowned. Why would they still come after us?"

"They'll keep coming until they see my body. I don't plan on hanging around for a sighting, do you?" he bit out. "And just in case it slipped your notice, my weapon is floating somewhere downstream on its way to Sacramento."

"Maybe you could just look at them and freeze them to death." She turned around smartly and marched ahead – dignity personified in saturated clothing, remnants of mud still streaking her face.

Obviously danger was a turn-on for her. He understood only too well what she was experiencing. He got a high from the adrenaline rush, too. He also knew without a doubt this situation wasn't going to be a pleasant rush for him. Not this time. Because his wasn't the life he was playing chicken with.

The burning question of the moment was which side these guys were on.

Who had given the order to off him?

The bad guys?

Or, as he was starting to suspect, his own team?

Chapter Six

J
ake pulled himself up a rise using the same small fir tree for leverage as Marnie had. She was several paces ahead, back stiff, eyes straight ahead. Under her breath, very, very softly, she called for her dog.

Jake came alongside her. "No talking. Sound carries."

"You promised you'd keep my dog safe." She narrowed her eyes at him but kept her voice below a whisper. "I want her back. Now."

"Too damn bad. Right now I'm trying to save our
human
asses. Keep walking."

She gave a smart salute, spun on her booted heel, and trudged forward.

Jake sensed no one around them as they scrambled for handholds on the steep, rocky incline. Not the dog, not the bad guys. The bastards were probably congratulating themselves on an easy job.

Behind them the river, now swollen with the unexpected flood, rushed over boulders and swept trees and shrubs in its muddy wake. Soon it would be back to normal, but for now it was impossible to cross. Another barrier between them and civilization.

Snow continued to fall as the sky darkened. The air was crisp and icy with the sharp scent of pine stinging his nostrils. Marnie's breath plumed as she grabbed at bushes to keep her balance. Jake worried about her wet clothes. They had to get to shelter before hypothermia set in. He had to get her safe and out of the line of fire before he could retaliate. Being reactive wasn't his style.

Jake's skin burned with the cold. He hastened his steps, urging Marnie to a faster pace. The shadows lay long and cold on the ground now. It got dark fast in the mountains – faster with this snowstorm brewing. In fifteen minutes it would be blacker than pitch.

The terrain varied extremely. One moment the going was soft and steeply inclined, the soil slippery with mud, moss, and pine needles; the next, stone broke through in outcrops or buried boulders. Both were treacherous.

Jake closed the gap between them, ready to give her a hand if she needed it.

He could see her hunched shoulders under her wet green parka. She had her hands jammed into her sodden pockets. And she was still frantically whispering for the damn dog.

The bad guys might have failed to drown them, but if they didn't get to shelter soon, the mountain would take their lives in the darkness with silent snow. The air seemed to freeze his lungs. He pulled up the collar of his coat just as Marnie did the same, not that that would do much good.

At least ten men, maybe more.

Overkill.

Jake pushed ahead with a frown. Why so many? It wasn't practical or logical. He was only one man. And it had been purely by chance that he'd had advance warning of their arrival at all. Whoever they were, they would have no way of knowing what his resources were up here.

If he'd been safely in his lair, they wouldn't have known where to find him at all. Which led him to another question: How had they found him on this mountain in the first place? Only a handful of people had even known he owned property up here. The few that had were all dead now. And he would have staked his life that none of them would have divulged his whereabouts to anyone.

Which brought him right back to the delectable Miss Marnie Wright and
her
unlikely presence.

*

Marnie had forgotten how dark it got in the mountains. And cold. God, she was cold. The moon played coyly between the clouds, but at least it had stopped snowing.

At the best of times she had an abysmal sense of direction. Up here, where every tree looked pretty much the same as the last, she was hopelessly lost. It didn't help her sense of direction much when she kept anticipating a bullet slamming into her spine.

There'd been no sign of the bad guys. No shots, no voices. They'd walked for what seemed like hours.

When she ran smack bang into a boulder, she stayed where she was, cheek resting against the cold stony face, arms limp at her sides.

"I'd love you forever if you got us somewhere warm and dry, PDQ," she mumbled under her breath.

"You're in luck," Jake said quietly, so close he barely had to raise his voice above a thought. "We're here."

Here
was an enormous outcrop of rocks, similar to the ones in the clearing where they'd been shot at earlier.

Marnie dragged her cheek from the cold stone pillow to glance around. In the sharp moonlight she could see the little hairs on the back of his hand as he indicated the beginning of the formation.

She frowned. "What am I looking
at?
" All she could see were the usual shrubs and a narrow wedge-shaped gap between the boulders. The opening was too narrow to squeeze through. Not that she had any desire to do so.

"There's shelter back there. Come on." He extended his hand. "We have to climb a bit. You stopped shivering a while back – we've got to get dry and warm."

"Didn't I just say that?" Marnie took his hand. His strong fingers closed securely around hers.

Jake set one large foot in the crevice and pulled her up. She clambered after him. He turned, saw she was steady, and dropped her hand. She flattened her palms on the frigid surface, parallel to her shoulders, and imitated Jake as he braced a foot on either side and straddled the gap.

It was slow going, but eventually the vee widened sufficiently for them to drop to the ground and walk normally. To the right and left loomed black, menacing rock faces, towering high above their heads. The scene gave the word claustrophobia new meaning.

Ahead Marnie saw a narrow split in the mountainside. She gave it a dubious look. "What was this? A mine?"

"Yeah, silver, back in the late eighteen hundreds. It was played out before this slide covered the entrance."

"
I'm
not going down a hundred-year-old mine shaft."

"Okay."

"I'm serious, wh—" Marnie stepped on a hard object in the sand and paused to regain her balance. She looked down and felt herself pale. "Ah, Jake?"

He didn't turn around, just kept walking. "What now?"

"I just stepped on a bone," she said in as reasonable a tone as she could muster.

Keeping her gaze fixed to the ground, she saw a trail of bones between Jake's boots and her own. Large bones. Bones that had been picked clean.

Human bones?

"Woman, do you want to freeze to death, or what? Move."

"Jake, there's something in your cave."

"He'll move. Get the lead out, will you? I'm freezing my ass off."

Marnie stepped over a single bone. "Do bears eat humans?" She sidestepped a small pile of bones gleaming white in the moonlight. A chill that had nothing to do with cold raced down her spine.

"Only if provoked." At the mouth of the cave Jake turned to wait for her. She swore his lips twitched.

"What about wolves?" Whatever animal had dined here had a voracious appetite. She flexed icy fingers. "Do you think they like their meat frozen?"

Jake snorted. "The second any animal hears you coming, he'll be long gone." He gave her a look she couldn't fail to interpret. "Want to stand out here all night chatting about the haute cuisine of the animal kingdom, or do you want to get warm?"

With a great deal of trepidation, Marnie followed him into the mine. The darkness swallowed her whole, and she grabbed the back of his jacket with both hands.

"Steady there." Jake sounded amused, darn his hide, but he didn't slow down. Marnie had to keep up with his pace or lose her grip on the back of his jacket.

Between the railroad tracks imbedded in the dirt floor were several more piles of bones. Marnie stepped over them quickly. She could have sworn she spotted two unblinking red eyes glaring at her from the distance.

Her voice came out a wispy croak. "Jake. Jake? There's something in here with u—"

A low, throaty growl rumbled through the cave.

She shrieked, almost pulling Jake over backward as she clutched his jacket like a shield.

The growls became louder. Deeper. Scarier.

All the blood drained from Marnie's head. She'd worry about shrieking like a sissy later. Right now all she could manage was a small moan. The snarls changed pitch. While less amplified, they now sounded considerably more menacing.

And a lot closer.

"Jake...?"

"Relax," he said, sounding amused. "There's nothing in here but us. The sound effects are noise-activated. The second we stepped inside, the show started. Something I was fooling around with in my spare time." The amusement left his voice. "I never intended to have to actually use it."