Mountain Investigation. Jessica Andersen
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the woman. The case was important. The woman wasn’t.
By now, Mawadi and the second man would have gotten in touch with the other members of their cell. If Gray could talk SAC Johnson into sending choppers and search teams up to the cabin, they might get lucky. They wouldn’t get al-Jihad, of course; he was too smart to come up the mountain now. But they might get Mawadi, might get some idea of why the terrorists had returned to the area.
As Gray put one boot in front of the other and his back and arms began to ache, though, it wasn’t the terrorists, his boss or even revenge that occupied his mind—it was the woman in his arms. And that could become a problem if he let it.
MARIAH WOULD HAVE held herself away from Gray, but she lacked the strength to do anything but cling, with one arm looped over his neck and her face pressed into the warm hollow at his throat. She despised surrendering control to him, hated that her safety was in the hands of the FBI special agent who had been a large part of making her life a living hell more than two years earlier, and whose relentless questions had put her father in the hospital, nearly in his grave.
But at the same time, the man who held her easily, walking with long, powerful strides, was so unlike the picture in her mind, it was causing her brain to jam. This man was warm to the touch rather than cold, and when their eyes had met, his had blazed with an emotion that she couldn’t define, but had been far from the detached, sardonic chill he’d projected during the investigation.
His warmth and steady masculine scent surrounded her now, coming from the jacket he’d given her and from the solid wall of his body against hers. She’d hated the man who had interrogated her, hated what he stood for and how he treated people. But she didn’t know how to feel about the man he’d turned out to be—the soldier who’d come up to her cabin alone and had been there when she’d needed him in a way that nobody else had for a long, long time.
Confused, weak with drugs and exhaustion, she was unable to do anything but give in to circumstances beyond her immediate control. Closing her eyes, she leaned into her rescuer, anchoring herself to his warmth and strength.
She must’ve dozed—or maybe passed out—after that. She was vaguely aware of Gray loading her into a large vehicle and strapping her in tightly. Through the fuzzedout fog her brain had become, she knew that he was white-knuckle tense as he pulled the vehicle out of its hiding spot and headed it down the road. It was full dark; he wore a pair of night-vision goggles he’d retrieved from the glove compartment and drove with the truck’s headlights off, muttering a string of curses under his breath as he kept the gas pedal down and steered the vehicle along the fire-access road leading down from her cabin. Then they flew through the gate, which hung open, and turned onto the paved road headed toward Bear Claw.
He decelerated, shucked off the goggles and flipped on the headlights before glancing over at her. “We got lucky. No sign of your husband’s reinforcements.”
“Ex-husband,” she corrected him, the faint echoes of warmth and gratitude dispelled by irritation because he’d made the same mistake a handful of times during the initial investigation into the prison break. It annoyed her that he kept insisting on the undoubtedly deliberate gaffe, and that she couldn’t stop herself from correcting him each time.
He nodded, his eyes not quite the cold steel of Special Agent Grayson, not quite the fiery resolve of the soldier he’d been up on the ridgeline. When his gaze met hers, she felt a click of unwanted connection and a shimmer of fear. What next? she wanted to ask him, but didn’t, because she wasn’t sure she wanted to know what his answer would be.
So, instead, she turned away from him, settling into her seat as the truck accelerated, heading for the city. While he drove, he made a call on his cell, tersely reporting the situation, and what he’d seen and done. Mariah didn’t add anything to the conversation. There was nothing she could do to change her situation; she was too weak, too confused. And, bottom line: whether it was logical or not, she was heart-sore.
Being around Lee again hadn’t only been terrifying, it had also brought to the surface of her mind things that she’d thought she’d managed to bury years ago. Seeing him had reminded her of the good times—or at least the times she’d thought were good ones, when Lee had courted her. He’d brought her flowers and silly gifts; he’d made her feel as though she were the center of his universe, that she was special. And when he’d proposed, dropping to one knee and promising that they would be together forever, she’d believed him.
But those memories were overlaid now with the pain of remembering the months after their marriage, when he’d gradually changed, growing cold and distant. After a while, his petty cruelties and outright manipulations had made her grateful for the nights he didn’t come home, and had made her start to think she was losing her mind. It was only later that she realized that he’d purposely broken her down, little by little, undermining the defenses she’d built up over a lifetime of being an outsider. Then, once he’d made her completely vulnerable by promising her forever, he’d started beating her down further, stripping her of her worth until she’d been nothing but his wife, his plaything. Simply because he could, because it amused him.
She knew the authorities thought of Lee as a follower, a patsy. She knew different; he might follow al-Jihad’s orders, but when it had come to their marriage, he’d been the one in control.
Despite the months of subtle torment, though, she’d retained a tiny core of strength. It had been too little, too late back then. Would it be enough to see her through whatever came next?
The bang of a car door startled her, jolting her awake, though she hadn’t realized that she’d been dozing.
She squinted against the sudden glare of lights. When she finally focused on the scene, she recognized the walled-in parking lot of the main police station in Bear Claw City. A tingle of unease and ill will shimmered through her at the memories of being interrogated in the station, then rushing her father to the nearby hospital, where he’d nearly died, not just because of Gray’s heavy-handed questioning, but because of the decisions Mariah herself had made, the horror she’d brought into her parents’ lives.
That was her shame. One of many.
There was a crowd gathering outside the truck; it seemed to be made up of equal parts cops and suitedup Feds, with the latter group gathering around Gray as he climbed from the vehicle. In his flannel shirt and camouflage pants, with his short brown hair bristled on end and his face and clothing streaked with dirt and sweat, mute testimony of their harrowing escape, he should’ve looked at a disadvantage compared to the other agents, neat and clean in their dark suits. To Mariah’s eye, though, he looked like a man of action, one who could break the others in half, and might do just that, given the provocation.
She saw him visibly brace himself as he squared off opposite a salt-and-pepper-haired agent who wore an air of command and a deep scowl. It took Mariah a moment to place the other man, but when she did, nerves bunched in her midsection.
SAC Johnson, the FBI special agent in charge of the federal arm of the jailbreak investigation, had struck her as a pompous ass far more concerned with his own on-camera image than the actual investigation. There was no way she wanted him calling the shots when it came to her cabin…and potentially her life. Because that was one of the things that seemed painfully clear: she didn’t need to protect herself simply from Lee’s personal revenge. The terrorists apparently wanted something from her, which meant she was going to need help staying safe, whether she liked it or not.
Not liking it one bit, she pushed open the truck door, unclipped her seat belt and dropped down from the vehicle, hissing in pain when she landed on her injured feet.
A young, uniformed Bear Claw City cop appeared at her side almost instantly, and took her arm. “This way, ma’am. Agent Grayson said you’re wounded. We have an EMT-trained officer who’ll take a look at you while we wait for the paramedics.”
“Not yet.” She pulled away, focused on the group of FBI special agents, where Gray and SAC Johnson were arguing in low voices, their faces set in stone.
She took a couple