Tempted by a Dangerous Man (3 page)

I held my arms out. “Happy?”
 

“Extremely. Don’t I look it?” he asked, scowling as he handed me a pair of pink knee-high socks.

It hadn’t been intended as a joke, I didn’t think, but he looked so irritated that I laughed despite myself. His scowl deepened. He grabbed two oversized shoeboxes that I hadn’t noticed sitting behind the coffee table.

I clumsily balanced against the back of the sofa and pulled on the socks. They were strangely padded, but soft. Comfortable.

“Wasn’t sure which size would be better,” he said, handing me the boxes. Inside were serious hiking boots, pink with black accents.
 

“What makes you think I’m into pink?”

“Let’s go,” he said, snapping his fingers.

“You didn’t say where.”

And he still didn’t.

Sighing, I sank to a crouch and tried on the boots. He’d nailed the size. At the door, he handed me a pink ski jacket and a black hat and gloves. “There’s a balaclava in your coat’s hood,” he said. “Though I don’t think we’ll need it.”

The jacket was nice. Expensive, I was sure. But pink, and I had no intention of keeping it, so I didn’t argue.
 

“Fit ok?”

“Guess so,” I said.

He nodded, then disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a medium-sized hiking pack, which he leaned up against the door while he laced up his large boots. Unlike the boots I’d seen him in before, these looked built for performance, not fashion, with ankle padding and deep lugs. The creases across the toes were worn to a patina, and I wondered if his job ever required him to spend days or weeks in the wilderness.
 

We went outside. It was still dark, the moon a glowing crescent in the sky. I glanced at Corbin, curiosity getting the better of me. “Seriously, though, where are we going?”

“Get in the truck. I’ll be out in a minute.” He opened the garage.

If things hadn’t unfolded the way they did… It was easy to imagine sitting and waiting, excited instead of dreading whatever he had planned. I wished I had accepted when Rob offered to steal the photos from the office. If only I had gone home.

But instead I’d insisted on taking care of everything.

I remembered pushing the man away, and I reflexively tightened my arms across my chest. As if being still now could somehow fix what had happened.
 

Corbin threw some things in the back of the SUV, closed the garage and got into the driver’s seat.

“Kidnapping is a federal offense,” I said.

“Add it to my list.”

He drove out to the main road. Instead of turning right, toward the highway that would lead us to the city, he went left.
 

I stared out the window, watching dark farmhouses become scarcer and trees grow closer together until there was nothing around us but forest. The roads turned into smaller roads. Bumpy. Then it was one lane, and then it wasn’t even paved at all, and the vehicle tilted and swayed. Corbin kept driving, and I hoped we would stop before all the bouncing permanently rearranged my organs.
 

He swerved off to the side, bringing us to an abrupt stop.

“Uh…” I peered through the dirty windshield. The sun was coming up, spilling enough light over the landscape to illuminate that we really were in the middle of nowhere.

“Come on.” He opened the door and got out, closed the door behind him. The noise was loud and final in the otherwise silent atmosphere.

~~~

Corbin was heading to my door when I pushed it open. I slid onto the ground and stood there, caught between the vehicle’s comforting warmth and the sharp chill of the winter morning.

And then Corbin stepped closer, now wearing a black ski jacket, and I felt the heat from him, so much warmer than everything else. He reached over me and closed the door, then looked down at me.
 

His hands wrapped around my shoulders, dropped until my hands were in his. “There’s a good chance you’ll hate the next few hours, but please trust me.” He led me to the back of the truck, where he shrugged into the backpack, four snowshoes now partially wedged under the bungee laces.

Apparently there was nothing for me to carry. If I’d been feeling myself, I might have protested, but at the moment, fairness and pulling my own weight were low on my list of concerns.

Corbin picked up two pairs of hiking poles that had sat in a pile on the bumper. He unscrewed the bottom of one and telescoped out the pole, handed it to me, then repeated with the second one. His poles, however, he left collapsed.
 

“Where are we going?”

Electric blue-green eyes patiently turned my way. “For a walk.” Like it was obvious.

“To where?”

Instead of answering, he strode off, following a snowy path that was nearly invisible to me.
 

“You’re right. I do hate this,” I muttered. It didn’t take fifteen steps before I was fucking
over
the whole thing. I hadn’t eaten enough in the last few days, and I felt as depleted as if I’d just gotten over the flu. And Corbin moved like he intended to shatter a world record.

“Corbin!” His name flew out of my mouth in a cloudy puff. A crow cawed nearby.

He kept walking.

I jammed my hiking poles into a snowdrift and crossed my arms. “Hey!” But Corbin kept going.
 

“Heading back,” I said. When he didn’t even slow down, I abandoned the poles and doubled back to the SUV. It was locked, of course. Because heaven forbid I sit out this pointless excursion.

I waited a few minutes for Corbin to return for me. When he didn’t, I cursed him loudly and thoroughly. Minutes ticked by, and my light shivering turned to chattering teeth. So those were my choices: freeze or trudge through wilderness.
 

I stomped back onto the trail, snatching up my poles as I passed them.
 

All the fury I’d felt at my situation, at the weight that I now bore, was funneled into Corbin. If I had never met him, none of this would have happened.

None of the good, either. I would still be working all the time, picking up random guys for a fast, often unsatisfying, screw.
 

My ending up with Corbin was really my dad’s fault for pushing me so hard, not giving me time to develop friends, a life.
 

My father and his distrustful meddling. If he hadn’t hired Smile to spy on me… I felt my anger tick up a notch.
“We put the fun in dysfunctional,”
Rob liked to say when things were particularly bad.
 

But there was no fun.

My mind turned back to Corbin as I chased his mocking tracks through the snow. Far as I could see, he hadn’t paused anywhere, giving me a chance to catch up. And he damned sure hadn’t turned around at any point
.
The bastard was long gone.
 

The trail split, and I stopped to catch my breath. I considered following the other path. Two roads diverging in a not-so-yellow wood and all that. The pristine path seemed level whereas Corbin had, of course, chosen the steeper trail. Going off on my own would teach Corbin a valuable lesson, too; he should have waited there for me, should have asked which way I wanted to go.

Screw it.
I would find him, get the keys—even if I had to skewer him on a pole to do it. Maybe I’d leave him out there. See how he liked it.

I redoubled my effort, the poles stabbing the snow with every step. I finally settled into a predictable if ungraceful rhythm.
Left pole, right leg. Right leg, left pole.
Blood was pumping through my veins now, and the angry buzz quieted, then melted away. The wind’s kiss on my cheeks turned from biting to soothing.
 

After forty minutes of hard walking, I saw Corbin up ahead, the backpack hanging from a broken branch. He stood with his hands on his hips, looking calm and at ease. When I drew near, he pulled a yogurt bar out of one of his coat pockets and handed it to me, then held out a large, sloshing pouch with backpack straps.

“That’s yours,” he said.

“Not going to make me eat snow if I get thirsty?” I gave him a dirty look as I ripped ravenously into the bar, then washed it down with several swallows of pouch water. “What if I need to pee or something?”

Corbin gestured to indicate that there were plenty of places to take care of that. “You’re hardly shy.” He handed me a small bag of mixed nuts. I jammed them into my pocket.

He pulled the snowshoes out of the backpack’s bungee lacing and dropped the smaller ones in front of me. “Lean on me,” he said as he knelt.

“I want the keys.”

“Doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “Come on.”

There was something a little weird about looking down at a 6’3” man who was pure muscle. And an unexpected thought floated into my mind: I wanted him on his knees, but not like this. On one knee.

The thought was so disconcerting that rather than follow through on my demand, I placed my hand on his shoulder. Even through his coat, I felt the solid strength of his thick muscles.
 

“Little help here,” he grunted. “Don’t want to knock you over.”
 

I picked up my foot, and he slid a snowshoe underneath and tightened the bindings. When they were both on, he made me walk back and forth a few times until he was satisfied that everything was properly adjusted.

“How long is this trek gonna be, anyway? Because—”

“Long as it takes.” He stepped into his snowshoes and tightened them.

“Takes to do what?”

Instead of answering, Corbin hefted the pack onto his shoulders. “Give me your hand.” He held open the loop on my hiking pole and put my fingers through it. “Like this,” he said, pressing the pole’s handle into my palm.
 

“Apparently I don’t even know how to hold the poles, so why would you run off and leave me?”

I expected him to gaze into my eyes, say something about how he would never leave me. Instead, he squinted at the canopy of evergreens overhead. “Four hours and we’ll stop for a nice lunch.”

“Four hours!”

But he was already walking off, swinging his arms gracefully, looking like a goddamn ballet on snowshoes.

“Crap,” I mumbled under my breath. I slipped my arms through the backpack, then trudged after him. But deep down, I wasn’t as upset as before.

~~~

Roughly four sweaty hours later, I spotted the abominable snowman again. He had cleared off a flat rock, over which he’d spread a small picnic.
 

“How are you?” he asked as I panted up to him. I noticed that he hadn’t started eating without me, a gesture that melted the last of my anger at him.

“Fine,” I gasped, not sure how to explain how I could feel better and worse at the same time. Being out in the fresh air helped. So did moving. Made it moderately harder to obsess over my troubles.
 

Though I was hardly enjoying myself. It was exhausting. I had thought I was in shape, but apparently not.

“These pants are waterproof, right?” I asked as I sat. It didn’t matter because I couldn’t stand a moment longer.

“Of course.” Corbin handed me one of his overstuffed gourmet sandwiches. The scent of fresh bread and Corbin’s mustard vinaigrette sauce drifted toward me. I stared at the sandwich in my hand, salivating like crazy but too breathless to do anything more than ogle.

“I love this hike,” Corbin said mildly, passing a bottle of lemonade. I managed to swallow a few gulps, then attacked the sandwich as best I could, which wasn’t easy given how tall it was.

We ate in silence for a few minutes. Then Corbin said, “I want to tell you about a man named Zachary Thompson.”

I stopped chewing. Swallowed. Looked away. “I know who he is. Was. I picked him up a few years ago.” Until then, I hadn’t remembered his name.

“That’s the one,” Corbin said. “Do you know what he had been doing since then?”

“No. But I know what he’s doing right now.” I remembered the sound of his head slamming into the sharp, pointed desk corner, and my stomach lurched.

“Eat,” Corbin said. He waited for me to take another bite. “Zachary got out of prison for testifying against his cellmate. Once released, he turned back to dealing, hanging around the high school and middle school. He didn’t always make the girls pay in money.”

My hand trembled so violently that I had to put down the sandwich. “It doesn’t matter what he’s done. I know he was a scumbag. It was obvious. But no one is all bad, and people can change.”

“Change?”

“He might have changed. And now he won’t because he’s—”

“Much more likely, he would have only gotten worse. That’s been my experience with criminal sociopath types.”

“Oh, God.” I leaned forward, dropped my head between my knees and took deep breaths.
 

Corbin squatted in front of me. “Hey.” He caught my face between his hands and forced me to look at him. I saw nothing but patience in his eyes. “Do you think you killed him? Is that why you’re upset?”

I nodded, but Corbin forced me to shake my head. “You didn’t kill anyone, baby. It was an accident. And not a particularly tragic one except for the fact that it’s messing with your head.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Close your eyes.”

Shutting out the world was an easy order to follow right about then.

“Tell me everything that happened two nights ago. I know you don’t want to relive it, but I need to know. I can’t fix what I don’t know about. So start at the beginning. And keep your eyes closed.”

I licked my dry, chapped lips, some part of me relieved that he was forcing me to tell him. Then I explained about the photos of us together, how I’d broken into Smile’s house and then had gone to the office to get the physical copies.

When I reached the point where Zachary arrived at the office, my voice faltered. “I was terrified when I realized it wasn’t my dad,” I said.

“Ok,” Corbin said. “Tell me what happened. Details. What do you see?”

Details? I didn’t want to. But I did. I told him about the phone call to Henry. I told him how I’d tried to hide the photos from Zachary.