LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter Three

      Okay, so where were the questions, the accusations? As Adam guided Chelsea onto the cabin’s surrounding deck, he steeled himself for a barrage of all of the above, but none came. Once on the deck, he grabbed the binoculars he kept hanging from a nail under the eaves, then used them to scan the horizon and the small road that emptied into the meadow. So far, so good.

      The sky had grown dark and the smell of impending rain filled his nostrils. How long did he have before more of Holton’s men showed up?

      He put back the binoculars and discovered Chelsea had disappeared. He found her sitting on the sofa, blood smeared across her face, hands limp in her lap. He crossed to the bathroom, where he moistened a clean washcloth and grabbed the box of bandages. As always, the glimpse of his own altered appearance in the mirror jarred him. So did the dead man’s blood all over his shirt. He grabbed a clean one and changed.

      Kneeling in front of her, he gently cleaned and bandaged the laceration. “You must have a million questions,” he began.

      She sagged against the sofa and closed her eyes. “No,” she said.

      “Don’t you want—?”

      “No,” she interrupted, rubbing her temples. “All I want is to sit here.”

      “Does your head hurt?”

      “Yes.”

      He got up to retrieve two aspirin and a glass of water and returned to find her staring around the room. He handed her the tablets and she swallowed them without comment. “I’d like to close my eyes for a moment,” she said as she gave him back the water glass.

      There wasn’t time for her to nap, but how did he thrust her into action after what she’d just endured? “Go ahead. I have a few things to do.” Like pack up and get us out of here.

      He desperately wanted to know how she’d ended up on his doorstep with a hired killer along for the ride. The most likely scenario was that they’d kidnapped her and forced her into taking them to him, but that didn’t wash because she hadn’t known where he was. No one did. His hands itched with the desire to shake her awake and ask her what was going on, but he couldn’t do that. They also itched with the desire to caress her, to tell her he loved her, that he was sorry he’d left, that finding her here was like a gift from heaven. Would she want to hear any of that? Judging from her aloofness, no, she would not. He shoved his hands in his pockets to kill the urge to shake her awake.

      The fingers on his right hand brushed a hard ridge of folded stock paper. He pulled the small foil card he’d found with the flowers from his pocket and opened it, immediately recognizing Chelsea’s concise handwriting.

      “‘My beloved Steven,’” he read. Steven. That’s the name he’d chosen when he’d relocated to California. It was the only name he’d ever given Chelsea. He cleared his throat and continued reading. “‘I think I know the location of the cabin you described the night you asked me to marry you. My plan is to drop these roses in the nearby river as a way of letting you go. I don’t want to do this but the reality is you’re dead. I’ll never stop loving you just as I wonder if I’ll ever understand what really happened to you or why that man from the government asked me a million questions, but wouldn’t answer even one of mine. Sometimes it feels as though I’m grieving a shadow. Goodbye, my love. Rest in peace knowing I will move heaven and earth to make a wonderful life for our baby. Yours forever, Chelsea.’”

      “Baby?” he whispered, looking from the note to Chelsea. She was pregnant?

      A huge smile came and went in a flash as the enormity of this development hit him in the gut. Had the baby survived the crash? What in the world should he do?

      Protect her. Protect them! That’s what he should do. And right now that meant getting them out of here.

      He threw his meager possessions in a box, then trotted out to the Jeep parked in the tiny shed/garage. The back was already filled with camping gear, a shovel and a chainsaw. To these he added the new box, then he went back inside to take whatever food and drink he could lay his hands on. He wiped things down and carried the perishables out to the Jeep, where he stowed them with everything else before covering the whole thing with a tarp, which he tied in place.

      Small rocks separated the cabin from the riverbank. He drove across them and set the parking brake just as rain began to fall. The nonprescription glasses immediately blurred with raindrops and he pocketed them. The abandoned logging road, their only escape route, was a quarter mile downstream. The Jeep had no roof, and its engine was temperamental to say the least. It would be a miracle if it made it to the top of the ridge—if Chelsea hadn’t been there, he would have left it in the shed and hiked out just the way he’d hiked in. But she wasn’t up to that.

      Of course, if an attack came from the air, they’d be sitting ducks, but it seemed more likely to him that ground reinforcements would show up instead. The downed helicopter had looked like someone’s paycheck-to-paycheck livelihood and that probably meant there wasn’t a handy fleet that Holton could summon from his jail cell at will.

      “It’s

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