Dream Shadow (2 page)

He shrugged into his rain jacket as he stepped away from his jeep. Another wave from the storm front had been waiting to break all night and it looked like it was just about to descend upon them.

Setting his shoulders, Brice began a steady pace that would lead him to the room the woman had been shown to. Sometimes it amazed him the number of people in Benton that regularly pulled their curtains aside. It had taken him just one phone conversation with Jeff Dalton, who ran the lodge, to discover exactly which room out of the eight she had gone into.

Brice kept his pace even. He didn’t doubt for an instant that there would be someone on duty. He continued forward as dawn cast a gray light through the storm clouds and waited for the command to halt.

“He’s clear.”

The voice that issued the command came out of nothing but darkness. The sentry holding him under guard snapped to immediate attention, drawing back to his original position opposite the door that Brice had attempted to knock on.

The man that stepped out of the hallway caused Brice to raise an eyebrow. Recognition was almost instant. A man of Jason Jacobs’s size wasn’t easily forgotten. At six feet four inches, Brice didn’t come up short often. Major Jason Jacobs was one of the true exceptions. The man was immense, from his height of six eleven through his heavily muscled shoulders and impossibly long legs. The man’s hands even looked huge, but in fact they were simply proportioned with the rest of him.

He was also family. The man’s sister had just married Brice’s cousin, Grant. Frustration snaked through Brice briefly. It had taken him a nerve-racking forty-eight hours to contact a man whose phone number he kept stored on his home computer.

“Small world sometimes. But it’s good to know Sarah knows how to keep her mouth shut.”

Jacobs extended his hand out along with his attempt at humor. Brice met it with his own while giving the man a slightly sour look.

“Your sister knows what you do?”

Jason shrugged. “She knows enough. But it looks like she didn’t share that info with her husband or I would have gotten a call directly from you.”

“Only because it’s a kid and I’m not about to give up without exhausting all avenues.” Brice looked past Jacobs at the closed door. “As it would appear that you are not going to have me shot, Major, why don’t you fill me in?”

Jacobs sent him a grin that he recognized from his own service days. In this unit, they didn’t answer questions. They asked them.

“Seems you already know the score,” was the only comment Brice got.

Brice cocked his head to the side. He understood the major just fine. No one had promised him any information, just that their psychic bloodhound would bring back the rabbit. “Just wondering if it was the truth talking or the beer.”

Jacobs raised an eyebrow in response. “You’re a good man, Brice, but I want to know who has a loose tongue.”

“Relax, Major, this isn’t a leak you need to plug. I had clearance at the time.” Brice nodded toward the door. “Can she perform, or are we talking she gets it right some of the time?”

“We deliver.”

The hard certainty of that response gave Brice the first real hope he’d felt in days. Whatever Jacobs was planning, he seemed to have complete confidence in a favorable outcome. Jacobs’s hand cut across the morning air in a sharp salute as his men began filtering out of their rooms and into the hallway. It was done in complete silence as the Ranger unit prepared for deployment.

“So, do I get to meet your operative? Or does she bite?”

Jacobs gave a low laugh. He turned around and laid a solid knock onto Grace’s door. “Grace doesn’t waste time on biting. But she’ll kick your teeth down your throat if you let your guard down for half a second. Don’t touch her and keep your questions muzzled. Our operative is a unique individual.”

The major’s description drew more than one snicker from the group. Brice snapped his head about, but whichever one of the men held so little respect for one of their own seemed also wise enough to wipe his face clean before being discovered.

Jacobs’s eyes turned hard, but his attention remained on the closed motel room door. He cast a long look at the posted sentry before sliding a key into the lock and disappearing inside the room. Brice stepped into the doorway. He considered the untouched bed.

He could feel the wind coming through the open window and followed the tracks, noting the neatly removed pane of glass from the tiny window above the bathtub. Not a single man in the unit would have fit through the slim rectangle, but a slim female wouldn’t have gained a scratch.

“Your operative seems to have an attitude issue with taking her unit along,” Brice observed.

“The problem is my perimeter guard didn’t see her leaving.”

Brice frowned. “Is that part of her uniqueness?”

“It’s part of her almost-perfect performance record.” He shot Brice a hard look before leaving the motel room

“Your perimeter was breached. I suggest you find a way to join your operative instead of listening to my conversations.” Jacobs barked at his men.

Activity was instant. The Ranger unit fell into practiced efficiency. Each man knew his task and the result was a machine oiled to perfection. Jacobs watched the precise actions of his men before he slid his gaze toward Brice.

“Grace was fussing with a link last night. I thought it could wait until morning. That was my mistake.”

“She just knew where to go, just like that?” Brice scoffed.

“Trust me, Brice. She found your kid,” Jacobs insisted in a low voice that was full of confidence. Too much confidence for Brice to dismiss because the major wasn’t a fool.

“Fine. Except now I have two missing persons.”

Which wasn’t promising at all.

Twenty-four hours later, Brice’s jaw ached from the strain of clenching it. The storm was raging with full fury. Battling with freezing rain and mud up to his kneecaps had him critically short of patience. Jacobs’s confidence that his operative had found Paige Heeley wasn’t worth much if Grace didn’t show her face. What kind of Ranger took off without backup and didn’t check in? At the present moment, if Brice found her body lying dead on the forest floor he just might put another bullet into her for good measure.

Damn it.

Thunder rumbled across the sky before echoing over the mountainsides. Brice set his shoulders and climbed another ridge to scan the area below, a favorite among the backpacking community. People hiked through the area during the spring and built small shacks out of any wood that they could find.

The temperature was dropping again, and the addition of a stiff wind caused Brice to once again curse at fate. Forcing himself up another mud-slicked hillside, he stared down at the lake below. A small shack sat ten feet from the shoreline. He reached for the radio microphone attached to his shoulder.

“Allen, I’ve got another possible.”

“Ten-four. Nothing here. I’ll move on to your location, Sheriff.”

“Copy that.”

Making his way down the slope, Brice kept his eyes moving. The forest was thick here and there was a good amount of dead wood on the ground. Something caught his attention in a half-fallen tree. It was standing at a fifteen-degree angle, having come to rest atop some large granite outcroppings. Drooping from the trunk of the redwood, the half-dead branches formed a curtain that ran for almost twenty feet. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled up, the feeling intensified with the knowledge he was completely in the open. He inched his hand toward his gun. His gaze slowly covered the curtain of rotting foliage, searching for the one thing that was wrong. He couldn’t find it, but the feeling that he was being watched wouldn’t fade.

Brice curled his fingers around the butt of his pistol. A slight rustle of leaves drifted on the wind. The figure slowly formed from the wall of rotting tree. It was human, barely. Covered in half-dried mud with pine needles and dead leaves stuck into its head, it stepped from behind the branches, forcing Brice to take another look to convince himself that the tree itself wasn’t moving. The mud and grime even covered its face and all the way down its chest, but the eyes staring out from the filth were a startling emerald green.

“Hold it right there.”

Brice leveled his sidearm at it with a steady hand. He ran an assessing gaze over the figure, looking for gender clues. There was so much forest debris stuck to the person. The emerald eyes lowered to the weapon in his hand before returning to his face. The gun didn’t seem to worry the individual. The unconcerned stance seemed almost eerie. Not many people were that comfortable with a pistol aimed at them.

“You’re not going to shoot me.”

Maybe there was nothing much to identify her gender, but that voice certainly did. It was clear and almost honey-coated. Brice narrowed his eyes as he looked for the woman beneath the grime. Running his gaze down her length again, Brice noted the compact frame that would have allowed her to fit through a motel bathroom window.

“Don’t be so sure about that. At the moment, the thought is appealing. You’ve got a hell of a nerve taking off without backup.”

“I take off when I get a link because I don’t get to choose the timing of those connections.”

“Since I called you in, you should have waited.” He dropped his gun back into its holster.

“Oh…I see. A little disappointed you didn’t get to see the witch at work? Terribly sorry, Sheriff.”

“I didn’t label you a witch.”

But the snicker outside the motel came to mind, making it a lot easier to understand why she didn’t care about leaving her unit behind.

“Can we sideline the hostility? I admit some of your unit has an attitude problem, but what matters at the moment is finding my missing citizen.”

Brice considered his swamp creature. This sort of cover was applied for survival. Not a single millimeter of her skin showed. No hint of hair color. Instead, those intense eyes stared out at him from a mask of thick greenish, black mud. Applied in stripes, the different shades of mud formed an extremely effective camouflage. It was a skill only the elite of the armed forces ever learned. It should have looked ridiculous on a woman. Instead it made her enticing. Brice considered the surge of sexual energy that pulsed through his brain in response to her survival skills. Maybe the modern world might label him a savage for thinking that way, but Brice didn’t care. The truth was, a woman that radiated strength made a man itch to get between her thighs.

“You’ve got a hell of an attitude for a Ranger.”

“I’m not a Ranger.”

“Meaning exactly what?”

She looked more like an Army Ranger than half the men he’d watched Jacobs command that morning. Except for the rather full front of her shirt. Instead of a set of tight pectoral muscles, she clearly filled out her clothing with a pair of breasts. That sense of awareness caught Brice again as he considered the tight little nipples stabbing into the front of her shirt. Hunting brought out a primitive edge in the best of men. It looked like it brought out the same in this woman. Brice felt his nostrils flare slightly in response.

“I’m an operative.”

Males were such irritating creatures. They were control-seeking, career-hungry and always cock-led beings. Grace could see the arousal in his eyes. But she didn’t turn away just yet. There was an odd curl of excitement in her belly. His gaze dropped to her breasts and Grace felt her breath catch. She almost felt his eyes touch her. Grace didn’t think she’d ever been so conscious of a man’s gaze in her life. Her breasts actually lifted under his stare, making her shift as sensation coiled inside her belly.

Grace turned away from him as she ducked back through the tree branches. The need to escape became pressing. There was too much aggression in this man. It bled off his body like a scent that she could smell.

Grace reached for her burden with gentle hands. There was something almost hypnotic about this child’s innocence. She was actually going to miss her. Giving her over to the care of the local law enforcement was almost sad.

An odd, unexpected instinct to love and be loved in return. There was no place for it in her life.

Thunder rumbled in the distance as the wind whipped the tree branches. Angling Paige’s sleeping form against her chest, Grace adjusted the jacket that she’d wrapped around the child to shield her from the rain. Sleeping within the cocoon, Paige was oblivious to the cat-and-mouse chase being carried out.

The sheriff was quickly following her, so she turned and emerged from her hiding place, causing the man to jump back before he collided with her.

“And I’ll keep my attitude any way I like it. This case is finished. Here.”

Grace thrust Paige forward, forcing him to grasp her or let her drop.

The sheriff didn’t disappoint her. He closed his arms over his burden as he rocked back on his heels to avoid touching the grime Grace was covered with. She smiled as his eyes lit onto the fact that his current burden was also covered in mud and leaves.

Brice drew his brows together. “It can’t be that simple…” Hefting the bundle into one arm, Brice moved the top of the fabric back to look inside.

Brice sucked in his breath as he uncovered the small head of dirty blond hair. The child made a slight face as the cold night air rushed in at her. Brice flipped the jacket back over her head while settling her more firmly into his arms.