Next of Kin (22 page)

Julie hefted the baby on her hip and rolled her eyes. “That’s okay. I don’t need any more surprises, honey. This little guy was surprise enough for me.”

They grinned at each other, and then moments later James was gone.

It was the ping of the tracking system that woke Moe up. He rolled over, then grabbed his reading glasses and eyed the laptop. The program was active. James Walker was on the move.

Moe jumped out of bed and raced around getting shaved and dressed, all the while keeping an eye on the truck’s progress. When he realized the truck was actually heading toward Mount Sterling, he grinned. His target was coming to him. How considerate.

He’d only taken the room for one night, so he packed and reloaded his belongings into the rental car, and headed for a McDonald’s drive-through to get breakfast. After that, wherever that truck went, Moe would follow. Even the things that Walker might be buying or the places he visited could be clues. Moe left nothing to chance.

Nearly thirty minutes later, the truck was in the city. Moe pulled up a city map, transposed the program onto the screen and then followed the truck turn by turn until he finally caught sight of both it and the driver.

“So that’s what you look like,” Moe muttered, as he caught a glimpse of James’s profile.

After he followed Walker into the parking lot of a supermarket and the other man got out, Moe took a couple of photos of him, then set the camera under the seat and followed Walker inside.

He grabbed a shopping cart and began following James around the store, taking note of what he was buying. For cover, he began tossing items in his cart without paying much attention to what they were. He was at one end of the cereal aisle and James was at the other end when James’s cell phone suddenly rang. Moe moved closer until he could hear clearly, while making sure to keep his gaze on the shelves.

James was debating about getting one box of cereal or two when his cell phone began to ring. He answered absently as he reached for the shelf.

“Hello?”

“James, it’s me.”

He smiled when he heard his wife’s voice. “What did you forget?”

She sighed. “Toilet paper. That should just be a given every time we go to the store.”

“Toilet paper coming up,” he said. “Anything else?”

“I found the list you made for Ryal on the floor.”

“Dang, are you sure?” he asked, and began checking his pockets. Sure enough, the list was missing. “You’re right. I don’t have it. Good catch, my love. Hang on. Let me get a pen and I’ll write it on the back of our list.” He pulled a pen out of his pocket and then grabbed a cereal box off the shelf to use for a table. “Okay…go ahead.”

Julie began naming the items slowly, giving James time to write.

About halfway through, James stopped her.

“Wait. What was that last one?”

“Band-Aids. I wonder who’s hurt?” she added.

James scribbled as he talked. “Beth is, but I thought I told you. Her hands…remember?”

“Oh…yes. Quinn stopped by Aunt Tildy’s and got some of her ointment. Now I remember. I guess she’s getting better if the sores can be covered with Band-Aids now. Good news.”

“Right. Thanks again, honey. I’m almost through with our list. As soon as I pick up the stuff for Ryal, I’ll be heading home. What’s the weather look like there?”

“Still clouding up. Hurry home. I don’t want you that high up on the mountain when the storm hits.”

“I will. I don’t want up that high, either. Not with lightning all over the place. I’m hurrying. Love you—bye.”

“Love you, too,” Julie said, and disconnected.

James tossed the cereal box he’d been writing on into the basket, then finished filling their grocery list before parking the cart up front and bringing back an empty for Ryal’s list.

By that time Moe was already out the door. He wanted to verify some more information before he assumed he’d hit the jackpot, so he began to boot up the laptop while keeping an eye on the supermarket exit.

He typed in the name Ryal Venable. When he didn’t get a hit on that, he tried Ryal Walker. Within moments he had an entire list of links, including one for Walker’s Handcrafted Furniture.

So a man named Ryal Walker had sent for some groceries via a man named James Walker, and on that list were Band-Aids for a woman named Beth. No way in hell were these names a coincidence.

While he waited for James Walker to return to his truck, Moe ran a search on property owned by people with the last name Walker. To his surprise, he got dozens of options.

Then he searched the local newspapers’ online archives for Beth Venable’s name, and to his surprise there were several old articles in which her name popped up. Most of the articles had to do with school functions, though one was about an annual family reunion and listed all the attendees. But the article that caught his attention included a photo of several attendees at a local turkey shoot right before Thanksgiving eleven years ago. The picture showed the winners of the contest, including a young man named Ryal Walker. The young girl standing by his side and smiling up at him was identified as Beth Venable.

Moe smiled back.

She’d run home to an old flame.

Now all he had to do was figure out where Ryal Walker was hiding his childhood sweetheart, and then he would be on a plane and back in good old L.A. before sunset tomorrow.

Beth was sick of being housebound and had talked Ryal into another walk through the forest, this time to a waterfall he’d promised to show her. It occurred to her that he had a thing for waterfalls—maybe because she’d seen him naked under one—but she kept it to herself.

She’d been trying to make sandwiches to take with them when Ryal had come into the kitchen and taken over.

“I love you to distraction, Bethie, and I mean no offense, but I can’t stomach Aunt Tildy’s ointment on my bread.”

Beth had relinquished the knife she was using to spread mustard with a smile.

“None taken,” she said. “Do we have a sack small enough to pack the food in?”

“Look in that bottom drawer,” he said, pointing to the set of cabinet drawers nearest the back door.

“I found one,” Beth said, and brought it back to the counter.

Ryal had the sandwiches made and wrapped in wax paper. He dropped them in the sack, along with a small bag of cookies, and then rolled down the top to seal it.

“We’re good to go. Wanna use the bathroom before we head out?”

She nodded and hurried back through the house. A few minutes later she joined Ryal on the back porch.

“Should we lock the house?” she asked.

“No. Quinn might need to come in. Besides, there aren’t any other people living up this high anymore.”

He slid his arm around Beth’s shoulders. When she looked up, he kissed her hard and long.

“You sure you wouldn’t rather spend the morning in bed?” he asked.

She shook her head. “As good as you are in bed, I need to get out of the house. The walls are closing in on me.”

He grinned. “I’ll take that compliment and raise you one. You’re the queen of my heart, and I have a waterfall to show you, located in the great outdoors. Might even get in a little skinny-dipping while we’re at it.”

Beth arched an eyebrow. “I knew that was where this was going. Leave it to you to get me naked, no matter where we’re going.”

He grinned. “Hey, I have ten long years of missed quickies to make up for.”

Beth laughed as she wrapped her arms around his neck. This time, she was the one who kissed him hard and fast.

“There’s your quickie,” she said. “Now show me that waterfall.”

They headed off into the woods, talking and laughing as if her absence of the past ten years had never happened and they were safe as houses there on the mountain.

When James got home, he unloaded the family groceries and then, at Julie’s urging, sat down to the noon meal she had waiting. By the time they finished eating, it was a little after 1:00 p.m. Julie put the baby down for a nap and had settled in the big rocking chair with their daughter to read a book as James headed for the front door.

“I’d better get those groceries up to Ryal. I won’t stay, honey, so don’t worry. I should be back in a couple of hours, okay?”

“Okay,” she said. “Let Big Red in the house when you leave, will you?”

James frowned. Normally, Julie was the one who didn’t want him inside.

“Why?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m just a little unsettled, maybe because of all this hiding out and hush-hush drama. Just my motherly instincts on alert, I guess.”

James went back and dropped down on his knees beside her chair.

“I’m sorry, sugar. If this is making you upset, I can get one of the cousins to—”

Julie grabbed his wrist. “No. I don’t want you to abandon Ryal and Quinn. It’s important that we help Beth. I’m just being a worrywart, okay?”

James kissed her, then kissed her again. “I won’t be long.”

“Love you,” she said, as he opened the door.

“Love you, too,” James echoed as he let in the dog, and then he was gone.

Moe stayed a good five miles behind James Walker’s pickup truck. He didn’t need to see him to know where he was going. When he realized James had stopped at his home, he pulled his car off the road into the same tree cover that he’d used last night and settled in to wait.

A little over an hour later, the truck was once again on the move. Moe assumed James was delivering the other set of groceries he’d purchased, and while he would have liked to follow to see for himself, the area was so deserted that he feared there was no way he could do that and not be seen by someone.

It was too big a risk to take.

He would just keep on using the area map to track Walker, then take coordinates when he stopped again and get the hell off the mountain while the getting was good.

Sixteen

T
he woods were dense, the underbrush thick and often hard to walk through, but they followed the sound of the waterfall all the way to the banks of the stream that it fed. They walked out of the trees, startling a doe that had been drinking at the bank. She bounded across the water and into the trees on the opposite side in one leap.

“Oh, no, we scared her,” Beth said.

“She’ll come back when we’re gone,” Ryal said, as he set the sack with their picnic on a nearby rock and pointed to the falls coming over a ledge about ten feet above their heads. It was just large enough to send a spray of water back up into the air, forming its own rainbow.

“There it is. When we were kids we named it Foster Falls, because it was close to Grandma and Grandpa Foster’s house, but I don’t think it ever had an official name.”

“Oh, look!” Beth said. “Look at that rainbow! Isn’t it beautiful?”

“Yes, very beautiful,” Ryal said, but he wasn’t looking at the waterfall—he was looking at Beth. He put his arms around her and kissed her gently at first, and then harder, hungrier.

Beth leaned into his embrace as he parted her lips with his tongue. A shock wave ricocheted through her as she felt his erection through the fabric of his jeans. That was what she wanted—all that power—inside her. She pulled back and reached for his belt with shaking fingers.

“Ryal…”

He heard the question in her voice, but he was already on the same page. His answer was to shed his clothes as fast as he could get out of them, then strip her bare. Before she had time to worry about the temperature of the water, he scooped her up in his arms and stepped off the bank into the swiftly moving stream.

It wasn’t deep, no more than knee-high, as he kept walking toward the falls. The closer they got, the louder the water became. One moment the spray from the falls was on their faces, and then, the next thing Beth knew, he’d carried her through the cascade of water to the rock wall behind it and set her on her feet. Their hair was wet and plastered against their heads, and the mist continued to blanket their skin, while the thunder of the water matched the blood rush inside their bodies.

Their gazes locked.

He cupped her breasts.

She encircled his erection with her hands.

His nostrils flared, and for a moment she saw his eyes close in quiet ecstasy.

She moved her hands, and his body followed. The silken feel of his foreskin was in direct contrast to how hard he had become. She thought he groaned, but the sound was swallowed up by the water’s roar.

Ryal put her arms around his neck, then picked her up and lowered her slowly onto his shaft. She locked her legs around his waist, breathing deeply in quiet satisfaction as he filled her.

He braced himself against the rock wall with one hand while holding on to her with the other, then began to thrust.

Beth tightened her hands around his neck and held on, her face buried in his shoulder, her breasts flattened against his chest, and rode him hard. There behind the falls, the water thundered against the rocks until they were deaf to everything else—even the beating of their own hearts.

It was the most sensual experience of Beth’s life. She couldn’t hear a thing over the sound of the falls. There was nothing but the sensations of their bodies locked together in one pounding thrust after another, the feeling of the blood rushing through her veins and building in the valley between her legs in a ever-tightening spiral of lust and need, until she thought she would die from the pleasure.

Ryal was lost in what they were creating. He had no control. No thought of Beth. No thought of tenderness or care. Just a mind-bending need to keep pounding himself against the wet heat of the woman in his arms.

When the climax hit Beth, she felt as if she were flying into a million little pieces.

When she peaked, the muscles inside her core clamped around Ryal like a warm, wet fist, pushing him over the edge. He came with such force that it nearly sent him to his knees. Still deep inside his woman, he spilled his seed.

When it was over, they both sank into the water, their foreheads touching, their hands still locked in a death grip around each other.

Beth opened her eyes to find Ryal watching her. When he spoke, she read the words on his lips, rather than heard them.

“And I love you, too,” she said.

They sealed what they’d done with a kiss, and then slowly made their way out from under the falls and back across the stream to where they’d left their clothes.

Ryal wrung out the length of Beth’s hair as best he could, then dried her off with his shirt before he helped her dress. When he finally put on his own clothes, he hung his shirt on the bushes to dry.

“My feet are too wet to get in my boots,” he said.

“We can go barefoot awhile,” Beth said, as she crawled up on a flat rock nearby. She eyed the droplets on his thick black hair, and then reached forward and caught a droplet off the ends of his eyelashes before it fell into his eyes. “You are one sexy man, Ryal Walker, but I guess you know that, don’t you?”

“You make it happen, Bethie. This part of me has never been for anyone but you. I love you. I never want to spend another day without you.”

Beth’s heart twisted anxiously. “I hope we can make that happen,” she said.

“Don’t say that,” Ryal cautioned. “I keep telling you this is all going to work out. They’ll put that SOB in prison and the world will go on, this time with us in it together, not on opposite sides of the country.”

“Promise?” she asked.

“Promise,” he said, and took a sandwich out of the sack and handed it to her, then took one for himself, unwrapped it and took a bite.

Beth did the same, eyeing the beauty of the area as she chewed and swallowed. She caught Ryal watching her and almost blushed, still self-conscious about how abandoned their lovemaking had been.

“You’re turning me into someone I don’t know,” she said.

“No, darlin’. I’m not changing anything about you. It’s just that when you’re with me, the real you comes out.”

She knew he was right, but it was still disconcerting to know that this lustful, wanton woman had been inside her all along.

When she didn’t answer, he got a little anxious. “Are you okay?”

She glanced back, then smiled shyly. “I’ll let you know when my head stops reeling.”

He grinned and took another big bite of his sandwich. As long as she was good, he could handle anything.

“I wish I had a sketch pad,” Beth said, as she continued to admire their surroundings while they ate. “This place is amazing.”

“We’ll have to come back here sometime when all this is over. You can take as long as you like to draw it,” Ryal said.

Beth smiled. “Really? That would be great!”

“Really,” he said, then finished off his sandwich.

She ate most of hers, tossing the remnants into the water to feed the little fish she could see darting in and out along the bottom of the streambed.

“There’s a storm coming in,” Ryal said, as he pointed up to the building clouds. “We’d better head back to the house.”

Beth remembered the last thunderstorm, the constant crash of thunder and the white-hot flares of lightning. That had been the night they’d first made love. It had been great inside the house, but she didn’t want to be caught out in anything like it.

She got off the rock, and began to look around for her shoes and socks while Ryal did the same. He folded up the sack and put it in his hip pocket, then held out his hand.

It never crossed Beth’s mind to hesitate. Her hands were nearly healed, and after the way they’d just made love, the bond she felt to him was so strong that she wouldn’t have rejected his clasp if she’d been openly bleeding.

“If we’re lucky, we’ll get back to the house before the rain begins,” he said, and started walking.

“Don’t slow down on my account,” she said, and increased her stride to keep up.

Their trip home was less leisurely than the walk up, but it was physically easier, since they were moving downhill. By the time they reached the clearing at the back of the house, the wind was changing.

“Just in time,” Ryal said, as they crossed the last twenty yards and hurried onto the back porch. Before they got inside, they heard the sound of an approaching vehicle. “That’s probably James with the groceries.”

Beth stopped on the porch with Ryal as James’s dark truck appeared around the corner of the house and drove all the way up to the steps before he stopped.

“Oh, man, I thought that damn storm would beat me here,” he said, as the wind began to whip the tree limbs. “Grab some sacks and let’s get all this inside before the rain hits.”

They got the groceries inside just ahead of the first drops, and had just begun putting everything up and catching up on news of the family and the mountain, when the front door suddenly flew open with a bang.

Ryal spun toward the sound just as Quinn came striding into the kitchen.

“Sorry about the door. The wind caught it as I was coming in. It also took the tent while I was making sure no one had followed James up here. I found the damn thing but didn’t have time to put it back up before the rain started. Decided I was too delicate to stand out in another storm.”

Beth put a hand on Quinn’s arm. “You’re soaked. Ryal has a dry shirt. Go change before you make yourself sick.”

Ryal watched surprise come and go on Quinn’s face.

“Yes, ma’am, I believe I will,” he said quietly, eyeing Ryal to see if there was an objection, then left the room.

“I’ll start some coffee. Hopefully it’ll get made before the power goes off,” Ryal said.

“None for me,” James said. “I’d love to stay and visit, but Julie’s uneasy when it storms, and I want to get off this slope before the road gets too slick.”

“Drive safe,” Ryal said. “And thanks for the delivery.”

James grinned, then winked at Beth. “Totally my pleasure. Ya’ll be careful. Call if you need anything.”

“Thanks again,” Beth said.

James waved and then ran out the back door, jumped into his truck and took off down the mountain as fast as he dared to go.

Ryal slid the coffee carafe into place and turned on the coffeemaker as Beth walked up behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist.

“I love the Walker brothers.”

Ryal laid his hands on hers. “Thank you, baby,” he said softly.

Quinn soon joined them, sheltering with them until the worst of the storm had passed. When there was nothing left but a little wind and the rain dripping from the leaves, he got up.

“I need to get back and get set up before dark.”