Eye Of A Hunter. Sylvie Kurtz
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Wrong place. She shivered and wished she’d worn a sweater over her sleeveless blouse. He detached himself from the fog, and she sucked in a breath.
Familiar features formed as he drew closer, and the sizzle she’d thought of as teenage infatuation stirred her blood. His sandy hair now sported a salon do instead of the home-butchered bowl cut. His high cheekbones still begged for a camera’s attention. His lips were still tempting. He still wore the mirrored shades he’d taken up in high school. Cool then, scary now because she couldn’t read his intent in his eyes.
Her hands tightened around the camera and she struggled with her desire to inch it up to her eye to capture this ghost from her past. That sleepy smile. That careless pose. That air of endless time on hand. They were all a skin he wore to protect himself and hid a steely determination. She’d admired that survival instinct in him, that fire to succeed that no one could douse no matter how much water they threw at him. That relentless ability to pursue suited his job, but it would also return her to a captivity that doomed her to die. “Stay where you are.”
“I’m here to help you, Abbie.”
“I was safe until you showed up.” She stepped up to the next boulder and away from the frustrating tug of outgrown teenage hormones that had once made her do crazy things like swan dive into the quarry to get his attention.
Balancing himself on the slippery soles of his leather shoes, he followed her. “I don’t work for Vanderveer. I don’t work for the Marshals Service. I work for a private firm. I’m here to help you. You know me, Abbie. Trust me.”
“I can’t. Leave me alone.” She continued putting distance between him and her on the path of rocks she’d traveled time and again over the past few days. She couldn’t trust him. She couldn’t trust anyone. She was learning that lesson blow by painful blow. Look where trusting Bert had gotten her. Where would she go now? “How did you know where to find me?”
“A lucky guess.”
“Brynna.” Tears blurring the path, Abbie reached out to steady herself on a neighboring boulder, then continued her upward climb to the stand of spruce. How could Brynna have sold her out? Even to Gray? Especially to Gray?
“She didn’t say a word.” Gray puffed too close behind her. “Why won’t she open the door for me?”
“You left her.”
“I had no choice.”
“You asked me to go with you.”
He slid and mumbled a curse. “That was different.”
“Not to her.” Not when Bryn knew her only protection from her mother’s hard life was Gray. But he couldn’t know, and it wasn’t Abbie’s place to tell him. “How did you find me?”
“It wasn’t that hard. People tend to go back to what’s familiar. Your parents are dead. Brynna’s too obvious and too close to home. Who else could you trust? Then I remembered your mother’s college friend who used to take you to see all those musicals in Boston when you were a kid. Had a hell of a time tracking her down. Who would’ve thought a theater major would end up in a convent?”
She’d hoped no one. Her mother had died so long ago and Bert hadn’t been an active part of Abbie’s life since then. Abbie had assumed Bert wouldn’t show up on anyone’s radar. Except Gray’s. Because he knew her so well. What if Rafe’s hired goons had followed him? “Please, Gray, if you ever cared for me, go away.”
“You know, between you and Brynna, my ego is taking quite a beating.”
“Then you shouldn’t have come back to the people who can hurt you.”
“You have to testify. I can keep you safe until then.”
Rain started, pecking at the fog. She reached the stand of spruce and looked down at Gray’s dark shape struggling for footing on the rocks below. She’d missed him. But after the way she’d hurt him, she had no right to expect him to put his life on the line for her. She wasn’t the old Abbie, and he wasn’t the old Gray. Too much had happened to both of them. “Go, Gray. Please leave me alone.”
“I can’t, Abbie. Not this time.”
She didn’t wait to see if he made it safely over the last muddy stretch of cliff. She ran through the woods, following not path but memory. Something moved to her right? A deer? She turned her head but saw nothing in the soupy murk. Gray had her imagining Rafe’s minions all around her.
“Abbie!” The alarm in Gray’s voice froze her. A moment later he tackled her to the ground. The hard knock jammed the camera into her chest, stealing her breath. A second later something bit into the tree at her side, drooling chunks of bark onto her arm.
“Stay down,” Gray said, then took off after whoever had shot at them. He disappeared into the fog she’d counted as a blessing only moments ago.
Desperately trying to rasp breath into her lungs, she clawed at the earth at her side. This could not be happening. Not here. This was a safe place. Drops of rain splattered around her. She’d been wrong. Rain didn’t wash away the fear. It was still there. Big and immovable. Raindrops keep fallin’ on my head. She shook her head. Don’t go there. Not now. She had to get away. Tonight. She had to disappear again.
“Can you stand?” Gray’s hand reached down to help her up.
She nodded and sat up, finally getting air into her lungs. “I’m fine. Did you get him?”
“No. He got away.”
She hadn’t realized until then that she’d counted on Gray to catch him and give her a chance for a safe getaway. The bitter hiccup of tears joined her lung-filling breaths. “I have to get back. Bert’ll worry.”
Gray’s hand didn’t let go of her arm. “Abbie.” He opened his left hand. There on his palm rested the proof that her safety was nothing more than illusion.
Chapter Three
“How did he get hold of this?” Abbie’s fingers shook as she picked up the ripped square of fabric from Gray’s palm. Like a chameleon, the square rippled from light to dark, then settled, taking on her skin’s color, and all but disappeared. Steeltex. The experimental fabric her father had developed for the U.S. Army. “How could Rafe’s goon get into the mill? It’s fenced now. Gated. Guarded night and day by military police.”
“I don’t know, but we have to get out of here.” The tautness of Gray’s voice, the protective stance of his body and the predatory way he scanned the area around them ratcheted the tightening squeeze of anxiety in her chest.
“Is he still out there?” She craned her neck and probed the shifting shadows that pooled the woods into shades of black. Her body was strangely numb, as if it didn’t quite belong to her, and it automatically shrank closer to Gray.
Gray poked at the scrap of material peeking out of the top of her fist. “He’s got the advantage. He can see us, but we can’t see him.”
He shook off his jacket and wrapped it around her shoulders. “We need to get moving.”
The jacket had trapped his heat and his clean scent, and both swaddled her like a security blanket. A muscle in his jaw twitched as he adjusted the lapels around her neck, then his face settled into a sharp set of unreadable lines.
“I don’t need this—”
He stopped her efforts to remove his jacket. “The white of your blouse drinks in what little light there is and turns you into a beacon.”
Her gaze dropped to his chest. The pearl-gray of his shirt shimmered in the fading light. “But now you—”
“Shh. Let’s go. We have to get to the convent.”
A look in his eyes yielded only a reflection of her dazed-deer look in the lenses of his glasses. This running, this constant fear, wasn’t going to end. Not until