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of shoes from his little first-aid kit, but he did wrap her feet in a liberal amount of gauze. As footwear, the gauze didn’t have a chance of lasting through another wild hike through the woods, but for the moment, the gauze was bringing her numb feet back to tingling, aching life.
She was beginning to wish they were still numb.
With her feet safely bandaged, Hunter turned off the flashlight, plunging them back into icy blackness. The shocking change from light to dark sent another hard shiver through Susannah’s chilled body.
Then warmth washed over her as Hunter settled on the rocky seat next to her, his hip pressed firmly against hers. She felt his arm wrap around her shoulder, and even though she wanted to pull away from his touch, the sheer relief his vibrant heat offered her shivering body was too much of a comfort to rebuff.
With a silent promise to grow a backbone as soon as she could feel her fingers and toes again, she nestled closer to his heat.
* * *
HE’D LOST HIS cell phone. In the greater scheme of his present troubles, it wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened to him out there in the woods, but it was bad. How was he supposed to call in the cavalry—assuming Quinn could assemble one—if he didn’t have his phone?
Beside him, Susannah Marsh had finally stopped shivering, her soft curves molding themselves to the hard planes of his own body. He’d felt her tighten up when he’d first slipped his arm around her, but she was a sensible woman. Even if she thought he was a crazy kidnapper—and really, she’d be an idiot not to—she surely saw the wisdom of letting him keep her from sinking into hypothermia.
“I’m not a crazy kidnapper,” he whispered, feeling foolish but unable to stop the words from slipping between his lips.
She stiffened beside him. “What proof can you offer in your defense?”
“I wasn’t the one with the guns?” Well, technically he did have a gun, a subcompact Glock 26 tucked in an ankle holster. But if he told her that—
“No, you’re the one who accosted me in the parking lot, dragged me barefoot through the woods and told me I had to run or die.”
“Those were the only choices at the moment.”
She sat up, away from his grasp, and cold air slithered into the space between them. Only a whisper of ambient light seeped into the small cavern from outside, so all he could make out of her expression was the faint glimmer of her eyes as she turned to look at him.
He knew she couldn’t see him in the dark, but he wondered what she’d seen earlier, at the hotel, when she’d looked at him. He’d let his hair grow in the year since he left the Army. Or maybe the better term was, he’d let it go. Like he’d let a lot of things go—his self-respect, his control over his temper, his once-upon-a-time ambitions. Even before taking on the role of the life-battered maintenance man, shuffling his way around the Highland Hotel and Resort, he’d been slacking off the simple disciplines of life, like shaving daily and trying to find a job that paid more than minimum wage.
Mostly, he’d wallowed. In self-pity. In anger. In a crushing amount of guilt for everything that had gone wrong for him since Afghanistan.
It had served his purposes to come across as a loser at the hotel. But if she could see him now, with the play-acting role sloughed off, would she see anything different?
He’d hoped this job with The Gates would give him back a sense of purpose. So far, all it had given him was a queasy sense of impending doom, a coming juggernaut of danger and disaster that left him feeling helpless and overwhelmed.
“Can I go?” Susannah asked quietly.
His gut tensed at the very thought. If she left this cave, she wasn’t likely to reach civilization again without running into people who wanted her dead. She was a city girl, a pampered, polished princess who might know her way around a mall but had no chance getting out of these woods alive.
Nevertheless, he couldn’t hold her captive. Not even for her own good. He’d been a prisoner once, and it had damn near destroyed him.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “But I wouldn’t, if I were you.”
Her voice tightened. “Because there are people trying to kill me?”
“Yes.”
“And how did you know they’d be there in the parking lot?”
He could hardly tell her that he was working with the people trying to kill her, but anything else was a lie or a secret he wasn’t prepared to tell.
When he didn’t answer immediately, her voice sharpened to a diamond edge. “Are you one of them?”
“You’re still alive, aren’t you?”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s all you’re gettin’.” For now, at least, until they could reach someplace safe and contact Alexander Quinn.
She settled back into silence again, but she’d shifted far enough away from him that he knew any attempt to pull her back into the shelter of his arm would be seen as an assault, not an offer of comfort.
“It’s raining,” he said as the drumbeat of raindrops hitting the rocky ground outside filtered into the cave. “We’re not going anywhere for the next little while, so why don’t you try to grab a nap?”
Her voice rose. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Shh!” He slanted a quick look toward the cave entrance. Outside, the steady beat of rain masked almost all other noises. It would certainly cover any movement outside, which meant they were not only cornered with nowhere to run but also vulnerable to a sneak attack.
He’d tried to plan on the fly, once he’d learned the hit on Susannah Marsh had been moved up by twenty-four hours, but even faking illness to leave work early that afternoon had afforded him only a couple of hours to get his supplies together. He’d barely reached the parking lot in time to pull her pretty little bacon out of the fire.
“How do I even know there’s anyone out there?” she asked, not bothering to lower her voice. “How do I know that wasn’t just a car backfiring?”
She knew better. He could tell by the tension in her voice, the little tremble as her tone rose at the end of the question. She knew she was in danger, though he doubted she had any idea why. But she was also determined not to trust him one whit.
And he couldn’t really blame her for that, could he, when he didn’t even trust himself?
“You know it wasn’t.”
“I didn’t get hit. They must have been lousy shots.”
Fortunately, he was pretty sure they were. For one thing, they’d deliberately chosen to make the hit with pistols fired from a moving car, a piss-poor choice if you were serious about actually hitting your target. A critical thinker with any skills would have set up on the hill overlooking the parking lot with a Remington 700 or an AR-15 with a suppressor to keep down the noise.
Lucky for Susannah Marsh—and for him—they weren’t dealing with critical thinkers.
But that didn’t mean the men who were undoubtedly out there in the woods trying to track down their prey weren’t dangerous as hell.
“There are a lot of them and only one of you,” he said. “At close quarters, it won’t matter if they’re lousy shots.”
“Who says they’ll get close?” The volume of her voice dropped to a hiss of a whisper.
He almost laughed, trying to picture her out there in the woods, barefoot, dressed in a straight skirt that might make her legs look outstanding but wasn’t ideal for hiking. The woman normally looked like a catalog model, all sparkling clean and perfectly groomed. He wouldn’t be surprised if he turned on the flashlight right now to find that she’d somehow managed to finger-comb