Heartbreaker (15 page)

Lynn’s pulse pounded so loudly that she could hear nothing over the drumming of her own blood in her ears.

The stealth of the movements told its own tale: There would be no reason for such care if the pursuers did not suspect the presence of their prey.

Moments passed, seemingly endless.

Without warning Jess rolled away from her again. His absence left her cold and exposed—and afraid.

Lynn glanced around to see what he was up to. He crouched nearby, bits of moss clinging to his back and head like great hairy spiders. His left hand gripped the knife.

He turned his head, met her gaze.

“It’s okay,” he said in a near-normal voice. “They’re gone.”

“How do you know?” Lynn whispered. Not that she didn’t trust him, but …

“Look.” He nodded. When Lynn’s gaze followed the direction of that nod, she saw what he was looking at: a trio of mule deer now some distance away, picking their way through the trees, moving as quietly as shadows. “See?”

Lynn realized that if men with guns had been anywhere near, the deer would not have been moving with such quiet grace. They would have been running for their lives.

“Mom.” Rory turned her head in Lynn’s direction. “Are we safe?”

“Yes, baby.” Lynn gave her daughter a quick hug before rolling into a sitting position. “We’re safe.”

For now, she thought.

The glance Jess sent her brimmed with disagreement, but he said nothing as he folded the knife and tucked it into an outer pocket on his pack.

“I want to go home.” Rory sat up, brushing moss out of her hair with both hands. Her voice trembled.

“You and me both.” Lynn’s answer was heartfelt.

“I guess that makes it unanimous,” Jess said dryly. He was grimacing as he felt inside his jacket. A moment later he withdrew his hand; his fingertips looked black.

Blood.

“How bad is it?” she asked. The stain was now as big as a dinner plate.

“I’ll live.”

“Who
are
those guys?” Rory’s question was indignant and despairing at the same time.

“I don’t know, and right now I don’t think we need to worry about it.” Jess gave Rory a quick, crooked smile. “Let’s just think of them as the bad guys. We’ll work on figuring out who they really are when they’re a long way behind us.”

“They killed those people.” Rory sounded on the verge of hysteria.

“Well, they’re not going to kill us,” Lynn said firmly, brushing moss off her daughter’s back. “They’re gone.”

“Which is what we should be,” Jess said. “Come on, let’s get moving.”

He stood up, dragging his pack with him, draping it over his uninjured shoulder.

“Your wound …” Lynn said, standing, wondering if the hole needed to be bandaged or something. Her knees felt shaky, and for a moment she thought she was going to have to sit down again. With a glance at her companions she willed the weakness away.

It was unsettling to realize that she was the only one who was not injured.

“It’s nothing,” Jess said impatiently. “Rory, do you think you can make it on your own?”

“I—I think so.”

“Then let’s go.”

Lynn was still struggling into her pack when he started walking.

She gave the pack a final hitch, draped an arm around Rory, and followed.

They walked for a long time, taking a route that seemed to be roughly perpendicular to the one that had brought them to the clearing. Lynn realized that following the goat trail would probably have been suicidal, but without a path the forest was all but impassable in places. The undergrowth was waist-high everywhere, and so thick that they had to struggle for each step. Jess broke trail and Lynn followed with Rory, who grew perceptibly weaker as minutes turned into an hour and more.

At night the forest had its own silence. The carpet of moss grew thicker, a foot deep or more in places, and covered everything, even hanging from the lower branches of trees. Footfalls made no sound. Voices, human or animal, did not carry.

The scent of pine sap hung heavy in the air. The no-see-ums attacked mercilessly, like tiny sharks in the grip of a feeding frenzy.

At least, Lynn thought, misery and exhaustion were great antidotes to terror.

“Can’t we please stop?” Rory moaned at last. She had been leaning more and more heavily on Lynn, who realized that the child was about at the end of her rope.

“Jess!” she called, only a smidgen louder than Rory’s muted whisper. But he heard.

“We’re almost there,” he said without looking around. “Just a little farther.”

Jess forged onward without so much as breaking stride. Watching the charcoal gray of his coat become one with the shifting shadows, Lynn and Rory exchanged despairing glances and started walking again, arm in arm.

“My head hurts.” Rory slumped heavily against Lynn’s side.

“I know, baby. Just a little farther, and then we can rest.”

Rory said nothing more. Lynn could feel her daughter’s strength dwindling.

Why, oh, why, Lynn asked herself, hadn’t she followed her first instinct and turned thumbs-down on the trip when it was presented to her? She would be at the station right now, or maybe on that cruise ship in the Caribbean if she had opted for a vacation after all, and Rory would be safe at home with her grandmother, playing video games or watching TV. Or maybe spending the night at Jenny’s.

And if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

At last Jess stopped. The were within a few feet of a steep, rocky slope that rose past the whispering branches to disappear into the mist. A cliff, in fact, much like the one that had brought them to their current pass.

Leaning against the thick trunk of a mighty ponderosa pine, Jess pointed without speaking to the base of the cliff. Lynn drooped with exhaustion, holding Rory up because she was afraid that if either of them sat they would never get up again. She looked where he had pointed and saw a black semicircular opening in the rock wall, just big enough for a human to crawl through.

“In there,” he said. “Then we’ll rest.”

That was all Lynn needed to hear. Too tired to worry much about bears or bats or anything else that might be inside, she helped Rory over to the cliff.

Lynn entered first. Dropping to her knees, she crawled through the hole. Outside, the moss was spongy and damp beneath her palms. Inside, the ground was hard, cold rock, thick with dust and pebbles. Lynn moved with care, trying vainly to see through the inky blackness. The cave smelled of mold, and the space was small. Trying to stand up, she bumped her head; the ceiling was less than five feet high.

Rory crawled in behind her. Crouching, Lynn reached back to guide and reassure her daughter. With Rory beside her she watched as Jess appeared in the opening, pushing his pack inside before following.

For a moment he was silhouetted by silvery moonlight. His shoulders were broad enough so that he had to turn sideways to fit them through the hole. Maneuvering with a surprising degree of clumsiness, he managed to get inside the cave.

He balanced precariously on three limbs. His head went down, his back heaved, and he made a violent retching sound. Then he collapsed and lay still.

“J
ESS
!” It was an urgent whisper. Lynn knelt beside Jess’s prone form, with Rory beside her. “Jess!”

She nudged his uninjured shoulder. Still no reply.

“Is he dead?” Rory asked fearfully.

“I think he fainted,” Lynn replied. Her hand slid along the back of his jacket. The area around his right shoulder blade was wet, warm, and sticky: blood.

“He threw up.” Rory sounded repulsed. “Gross.”

Lynn made a sound that was part snort, part laugh. “I guess if you’d been shot, you might throw up too.”

Lynn located Jess’s ear by touch and laid her fingers below it, against the pulse in his neck. His skin was warm and bristly with five-o’clock shadow. His heart pumped with a strong, steady beat, relieving some of her anxiety. Undoubtedly, that strong pumping was one of the reasons for the amount of blood he still seemed to be losing.

The bleeding needed to be stopped and the wound bandaged. There was a first-aid kit in her pack with gauze and pads and all the necessary materials to do just that—but it was so dark inside the cave that she could not even see Rory, who was right beside her.

How could she bandage a wound she couldn’t see? Their flashlight was long gone; she had dropped it when they fled the mining camp.

First things first.

“Let’s move him away from the mess,” she said.

“Sick,” Rory muttered, but she helped Lynn drag Jess deeper into the cave, away from the puddle of vomit. It wasn’t an easy task, and when they had finished, both were panting.

“He weighs a
ton
.” Rory was sounding less enamored of Jess by the second.

“Wait here with him a minute, will you?”

Lynn scooped dust and gravel over the mess as best she could, then fetched the packs. Unzipping Jess’s, she searched out the lighter by feel. Next she located the first-aid kit. Placing the kit at her knee, she lifted the lighter, bent over Jess—and hesitated.

The light might give them away.

Lynn was not sure whether the tiny flame produced by the lighter was of sufficient strength to illuminate the cave opening. Nor was she sure whether the amount of light would be enough to attract attention, or even if there was anyone near enough to see.

But she sure didn’t want to take the chance.

Shoving the lighter in her jeans pocket, she decided to do what she could by touch. Anything more elaborate would have to wait for the coming of day.

“Help me turn him over,” she said to her daughter.

“Can’t we have some light?” Rory sounded very young suddenly. She had always been afraid of the dark.

“No.” Lynn didn’t spell out why, but Rory didn’t argue. Between them they managed to flip Jess onto his back. Lynn felt for his coat zipper, pulled it down.

Jess groaned, stirring.

“It’s all right. I’m just going to bandage your wound,” Lynn said, in case he could hear.

“In the dark?” His voice was low and ragged, but at least he was conscious.

“You threw up.” Rory sounded accusing.

“Sorry.”

Lynn wasn’t sure if there was a touch of amusement in his answer or if she was imagining it.

“I’m afraid to use any kind of light,” she told him.

“Smart thinking.”

If Jess thought being bandaged in the dark was smart thinking, Lynn was doubly glad she hadn’t flicked on the lighter. He must believe that their pursuers were still on the hunt.

Did she? Lynn wondered. Surely she didn’t imagine that they were simply going to give up and go away.

It was a nice thought. Get real, she said to herself.

As Lynn tugged at the sleeve of his goose-down jacket, Jess managed to shrug his arm out of it. Then he made a movement to sit up.

“Stay still.” Lynn pressed him back down, her hand firmly in the center of his chest. The front of his T-shirt was sticky and wet with blood. He subsided without protest. “I don’t think you ought to move around much until we get this bandaged. You’ve lost a lot of blood.”

“You might throw up again,” Rory said.

“I’ll try not to.” This time there was no mistake: Though his voice was weak, there
was
amusement in it. Clearly he recognized that Rory, with her impossible, girlish notions of what a man should be, was feeling disillusioned.

“Put this under your head.” Lynn wadded up the discarded jacket, bloodied side in, and slid it under Jess’s head.

“Thanks.”

Was it her imagination or was his voice growing weaker? She needed to get his wound bandaged quickly. If he should become incapacitated, from loss of blood or for any other reason, she didn’t know what she would do. There was no way she and Rory could move him very far.

“Rory, get him some water, would you?”

“Sure, Mom.” Rory rummaged in the packs.

“How’d you know I was thirsty?” It wasn’t her imagination. Jess did sound weaker.

“ESP.”

To orient herself, Lynn touched his cheek, which, like his neck, felt warm and prickly with stubble. Her hand moved down to his chin, then his throat, and finally reached the soft cotton at the base of his neck.

“Your shirt needs to come off.” Her hands moved toward his waist as she spoke, and she began to tug the T-shirt free of his jeans.

“I can manage,” he said, his hands there before hers.

“I’ll do it. You need to lie still,” she said, brushing his hands aside, voice crisp because suddenly she felt self-conscious. Rory’s big-eared presence had something to do with that—it was difficult to undress a man, even for such a compelling reason, in the presence of one’s teenage daughter—but not everything. Helping Jess take his shirt off simply seemed like too intimate an act.

It was something a woman did for her child—or her lover.

Now who was being ridiculous? she asked herself. The man was hurt, and he needed help. Period.

The tempo of his breathing increased as her hands slid the hem of his T-shirt over his chest. In different circumstances she might have attributed the changes in his rate of respiration to her powers of arousal, but in this case she was pretty sure his rasping could be chalked up to pain.

Nevertheless, she could not help noticing the body she bared. He had a nice abdomen, she discovered as her hands brushed it, all taut skin and hard muscle with a silky trail of hair disappearing into his waistband. And a nice chest too, wide and warm and firm, with its own wedge of silky hair. Or at least the hair would have been silky if it had not been matted with blood.

“Be careful, would you?” he grunted as she reached the critical area. Lynn discovered that some of the blood had started to dry, gluing the cotton T-shirt to his body.

“Here’s the water.” Rory thrust a cool plastic bottle against Lynn’s cheek.

“Thanks,” Lynn said, taking the bottle.

“Where?” Jess asked at the same time. Lynn twisted off the lid and pressed the bottle into his good hand.

“Do you need help to drink?”

“No.”

She heard him swallowing water. Gently, gently, she tried to disengage the shirt from his person without hurting him more than she had to.