Trapped by a Dangerous Man (11 page)

Corbin smiled wearily. “Then you need to update your driver’s license. I’m going to get wood.”

I would have offered to go with him, but I needed a few moments to pull myself together.
 

By the time Corbin built a fire big enough that I wasn’t worried it would go out, I felt like myself again. It helped that after Corbin cleaned up the vase I’d broken, he had lit candles along the walkways to the kitchen and up the stairs. He sat next to me on the sofa and inspected his feet for broken glass. After applying a few adhesive bandages, he leaned forward, his elbows and forearms on his long thighs. His fingers were loosely laced together. “Bad news.”

What could be worse than being snowbound with a possibly kindhearted murderer who I was insanely attracted to? “Bad news has to come with good news or I won’t listen.”

“Ok. The good news is that I only have one piece of bad news.”

“Very funny.”

He frowned. “There’s another storm moving in.”

Relief and worry warred in my stomach. “So we’re stuck here for how much longer?” I could disappear for a day or two, but eventually someone would start to worry, and I wasn’t looking forward to answering questions about what I’d done during the blizzard.

“I’ve got a plane to catch,” Corbin said. “7:00. When I called the truce until 5:00, that was the reason. I should have flown out this morning, but everything was shut down. I absolutely can’t miss tomorrow’s plane.”

“Or what?”

He lowered his head, the furrow in his brow deepening. “Or things in my life get very complicated.”

“Why would you tell me that? If you manage to get away from me—”
 

He laughed bitterly. “Unless I drive you somewhere, you’re stuck in the house until Browning comes by.”

I sat up. “Browning is real? This isn’t your house?”

He shrugged slightly. “It’s complicated. And I see that you know Browning’s name.”

It was easy to ignore an indirect question. “Does he know you’re here?”

“No.”

“Did you steal his truck? Is he…?”

Corbin leveled his gaze at me. “No, he doesn’t know I’m here, but he wouldn’t be shocked if he found out.”
 

“I thought it was an alias. And not a very good one. I mean, come on…”

His laugh surprised me. “Not so easy to buy a house and car under an alias. At least, not for me.”

Since he seemed to be in a talkative mood, I decided to see what I could pull out. “How long have you been…” The words stuck in my throat. “An assassin. How long?”
 

“Long enough.” He rose and went into the kitchen. While he was casual about it, the timing was too convenient. Oh well. I decided to use the bathroom, and I took a candle with me for light.

I looked at myself in the mirror. In the flickering candlelight, my features didn’t look like my own. I seemed less predictable, like a woman with a secret. I smiled, and the expression was strangely lethal.

Who was I? A woman who had fucked a killer. Did he count as a serial killer? Did he get some deviant pleasure out of his job?
 

Did I get one out of my job? It was something that had often worried me. Even though I considered that my family’s business offered a public service—rounding up deadbeats, finding people (though too often for a bail bondsman who my father rarely turned down)—I couldn’t deny the fact that our father enjoyed hunting criminals. He liked thinking like them, outwitting and beating them.
 

At a Fourth of July barbecue when I was 13 or 14, my father had gotten uncharacteristically drunk. Well, it was typical for when one of his dysfunctional relationships was ending, which was the case at that time. And he was argumentative, looking to pick a fight. He got into a debate with one of his contacts at the police department about the possibility that if he had been raised in different circumstances, he would have been a criminal.

It was a philosophy I’d heard many times before, and I sat there, embarrassed, while my brother was off making out with some girl and the other kids my age were likewise as far from the adults as possible.
 

“I can do what they do. It’s in my genes, and I’ve studied it all my life. I do what they do, but while following a strict set of guidelines,” my father had said, his eyes gleaming. “I can catch them with one hand tied behind my back. If I’d been a criminal, I would have been uncatchable.”

The police officer had made a few jokes about my father smoking pot, and the conversation turned to other things. I, however, had pondered my father’s declaration for some time. If it was in his genes, that meant it was in mine, too. He had studied it, and he had forced us to study it.

I suddenly wondered if one of the reasons Dad kept me apart from the truly juicy work was because he didn’t want me to learn. Rob didn’t have that problem; he wasn’t very ambitious. He just wanted to do the minimum, collect his check and spend his free time screwing girls and getting high.

But I was different. I wanted to be better. I was driven to understand. My entire life, I’d fantasized about collecting a bounty larger than anything my father had done. Though he was in his early fifties, because of the grueling nature of the work, my father was nearing retirement age for bounty hunters, and Martha loudly expressed her desire to see the world before they were too old to enjoy it. He didn’t work the hours he used to, and he didn’t focus on the same sorts of targets as before. That didn’t mean he’d turned into a glorified repo man. However, he often reminisced about the good old days. He talked about some of the men he’d worked with—and they were all men—and the fugitives they had helped capture.

It was stupid of me to want so badly for him to talk about me in that same way. But I did. First I wanted to blow his mind by bagging someone huge. Then I wanted him to give me the respect I deserved.

And where did Corbin fit in? He was a wanted killer. But he’d saved me, and had treated me kindly. He hadn’t really threatened my brother’s life. Why did that touch me? Maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe he’d faked the call because he didn’t have anyone to carry out his dirty work. Maybe he would have done it if he could have.

I walked out of the bathroom, carrying the candle. The greatest catch of my career was sitting on the sofa, holding a plate of baked pasta. A second plate sat on the coffee table along with two beers. I stopped, measuring the breadth of his shoulders, the angle of his jaw, the length of his hair over his ear.

He deserved to be brought to justice. And someone would probably find him. He was too sloppy, showing his face in that shopping center, even with the cowboy hat. I had been lucky, but it had been far too easy for me to figure out who he was. If I’d been on top of the lists, if I hadn’t let my father bureaucratize the adventure out of me, I would have recognized Corbin at first glance.

“Are you going to stand there and stare at me, or do you want to sit and eat?” He picked up the beer.
 

My hands had curled into fists, and I straightened my fingers. A small ache in my fingertips tickled through me when I did that, reminding me of my ordeal the night before.

“I can hear the gears turning in your head. Come sit.”

I went and sat next to him.

“Eat. It won’t be easy to heat the food up again until the power comes back on.”

I picked up the beer instead and took a few gulps, then I set it down. “Do you enjoy killing?”

The dancing firelight cast strange shadows in his eyes. “I’m good at it.”
 

“People tend to enjoy things they’re good at.”
 

He set down his bottle, drained. “I’ve got three more questions for you.”

I wasn’t in the mood for these sorts of games anymore. Not now. I was going to tell him to drop it, but a glimmer of curiosity managed to escape through my dismal mood. “Ok.”

“Question eight. Why do you want to turn me in so badly? And don’t say it’s only about the money because I know it isn’t.”

“Prestige. Respect.”

“And then what? You go after bigger and bigger captures until you get yourself killed?”

I shrugged. “Or maybe I retire. Dunno. That’s question nine.”

“Nope. You didn’t answer. You said you don’t know, so it doesn’t count.”

I furrowed my brow.
 

“You don’t even know what you want to be or to do.”

It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t answer, didn’t even think about what it would mean if his words were true.

“I have a proposition for you.” He put the plate of food into my hands. “I see a woman who can’t reconcile her personal feelings for me with what I do for a living.”

“Feelings?” I snorted. “The sex was hot, but—”
 

“You know what I think you like?”

“I like seeing justice done,” I said.
 

“No, Audrey.” He was nodding very slightly, a smile on his face. “You live for the hunt. You like trying to outsmart people, and you figure if you can outsmart one of the big game, that means you’re the best there is.”

“And this is based on knowing me for all of a day?”

“Well, let’s see. You get a glimpse of a man in a store and decide to go after him. Never mind that there are a million different explanations for the conversation you overheard. You want to investigate because you have to know. Because your curiosity controls you. Then, when you find out who he is, you make the harebrained decision to come after him, on your own, when there’s a crippling storm moving into the region.”

“There was a narrow window. And I couldn’t find anyone. Don’t know if you noticed, but there’s a storm—”

“I don’t believe that for a second. If this is a family business, you could have made a single phone call and gotten backup. You could have called the cops. Those FBI lists? Information leading to an arrest. You could have given the address, and they would have sent someone out and you’d collect the money. It’s not about the money, and it’s not about making sure that justice gets served, though I’m sure those things appeal to you. You, my darling fugitive tracker, like the hunt.”

“Interesting theory,” I said lightly, but inside I was shivering. What if he was right? If that was the case, that didn’t make me any better than my father, and not much better than one of the people I hunted.

“But in your business, what it really means is that you paid off the right person. You found your quarry’s enemy and got him to talk. You bribed someone to sell out a friend or family member. That’s how the big bounties are caught. You just need enough money. There’s nothing noble in that.”

“Said the murderer.”

“Touché. But how would you feel about really trying your skills?”

I gave him a long look. Was he really suggesting that I—

“No, not doing what I do. You don’t have the stomach for it.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do. Audrey, I don’t have the stomach for it, and I’ve killed almost 40 people. Most of them were creeps of the first degree, and every single one of them would have killed me first. I’m not going to sit here and try to convince you that I get all teary after I kill someone, but it does weigh on me. I’m not completely an animal.”

I tipped the rest of the beer into my mouth, then took a bite of the pasta. Delicate flavors swirled around my taste buds, but I didn’t let it distract me from my goal. “So what percentage monster are you, anyway? 80%? 95%?”

“Like anything, it depends on the situation.” His expression darkened. “When I see a helpless woman passed out in the road and I bring her home, my monster percentage is low.”

“And when you strip her naked and spank her until she screams?” My body hummed to life, every cell suddenly alert, primed, wanting him even though it was so wrong.

“That depends.” He smiled, his teeth flashing white. “Is she secretly hoping for me to blow her mind? Has she been waiting her whole life for someone to make her question everything she thought she knew about the world?”

“God, I hope you aren’t talking about me.”

Instead of furthering his case, Corbin scraped up the last of his pasta and put the plate down. “Let me know if you want to hear my proposal.”

“Oh, I want to hear it. I’m just preparing myself to die laughing.”

“What if you could save lives?”

“By working with you? How? Keeping you busy in the bedroom?”

He smiled. “Now there’s an angle I hadn’t considered. No, I was thinking more along the lines of creating situations where no one needs to be killed.”

I frowned. I had no idea what he meant.

“I’m part of an organization that does… risk assessment. Sometimes, someone decides that the most expedient way to get from where we are to where we need to be is straight through whoever is standing in the way.”

“That’s a nice way of putting it. Corporate speak for murderers.”
 

Maybe it was my imagination, but a grimace seemed to flash across his face. However, when he resumed speaking, his voice was calm. “Sometimes it turns out there’s a better way. And sometimes, we don’t realize there’s a better way until the problem has been dealt with.”

Now it was my turn to wince.
Dealt with.
Like he was discussing a warehouse shipping delay. “And you want me to, what? Tell you when you can get what you want without killing someone?”

He nodded. “Pretty much.”

“And when I can’t figure something out, people will die.”

“Not very nice people. Think of what a police officer does. They weigh risk. Sometimes that means they have to act in such a way that people die.”

“Not five people by November.”

“Good memory.”

“It’s not the sort of thing one forgets easily. I’ll probably have nightmares about it.”

A dark look crossed his face. “That would upset me. Here’s my ninth question. Will you seriously consider it between now and tomorrow?”

“No. I can’t be involved with something illegal.”

“Like stalking people? Breaking into houses? Illegally eavesdropping?”

“Conversations in public are fair game. And I’ve never broken into a house.”

“You had a listening device. I had thought, at the time, maybe a hearing aid turned up. You didn’t react normally when we spoke louder. The blind old lady behind the counter reacted before you did. And you were stiff. People go very still when they’re concentrating.”