“Tell me what’s going on,” he said quietly. “What’s this about your father?”
She leaned her head on his shoulder, grateful for his strength. “Hard to believe, isn’t it? But he’s the leader of a terrorist group that has done some awful things. His name is Crispin Hauer.”
“I’ve never heard of him,” Chance lied.
“He operates mostly in Europe, but his network extends to the States. He even has someone planted in the FBI.” She was unable to keep the raw bitterness out of her voice. “Why do you think I don’t have a license for that pistol? I don’t know who the plant is, how high he ranks, but I do know he’s in a position to learn if the FBI gets any information Hauer wants. I didn’t want to be in any database, in case he found out who adopted me and what name I’m using.”
“So he doesn’t know who you are?”
She shook her head. She had spent a lifetime keeping all her fear and worry bottled up inside her, and now she couldn’t seem to stop it from spewing out. “My mother took Margreta and left him before I was born. I’ve never met him. She was five months pregnant with me when she ran.”
“What did she do?”
“She managed to lose herself. America’s a big place. She stayed on the move, changing her name, paying with cash she had taken from his safe. When I was born, she intended to have me by herself, in the motel room she’d taken for the night. But I wouldn’t come, the labor just kept on and on, and she knew something was wrong. Margreta was hungry and scared, crying. So she called 911.”
He wound a strand of golden hair around his finger. “And was there something wrong?”
“I was breech. She had a C-section. While she was groggy from the drugs, they asked her the father’s name and she didn’t think to make up a name, just blurted out his. So that’s how I got into the system, and how he knows about me.”
“How do you know he knows?”
“I was almost caught, once.” She shivered against him, and he held her closer. “He sent three men. We were in…Indianapolis, I think. I was five. Mom had bought an old car and we were going somewhere. We were always on the move. We got boxed in, in traffic. She saw them get out of their cars. She had taught us what to do if she ever told us to run. She dragged us out of the car and screamed ‘Run!’ I did, but Margreta started crying and grabbed Mom. So Mom took off running with Margreta. Two men went after them, and one came after me.” She began shuddering. “I hid in an alley, under some garbage. I could hear him calling me, his voice soft like he was singing. ‘Sonia, Sonia.’ Over and over. They knew my name. I waited forever, and finally he went away.”
“How did your mother find you again? Or was she caught?”
“No, she and Margreta got away, too. Mom taught herself street smarts, and she never went anywhere that she wasn’t always checking out ways to escape.”
He knew what that was like, Chance thought.
“I stayed in my hiding place. Mom had told us that sometimes, after we thought they were gone, the bad men would still be there watching, waiting to see if we came out. So I thought the bad men might be watching, and I stayed as still as I could. I don’t think it was winter, because I wasn’t wearing a coat, but when night fell I got cold. I was scared and hungry and didn’t know if I’d ever see Mom again. I didn’t leave, though, and finally I heard her calling me. She must have noticed where I ran and worked her way back when she thought it was safe. All I knew was that she’d found me. After that was when she decided it wasn’t safe to keep us with her anymore, so she began looking for someone to adopt us.”
Chance frowned. He hadn’t found a record of any adoption but hers. “The same family took both of you?”
“Yes, but I was the only one adopted. Margreta wouldn’t.” Her voice was soft. “Margreta…remembers things. She had lost everything except Mom, so I guess she clung more than I did. She had a hard time adapting.” She shrugged. “Having grown up the way I did, I can adjust to pretty much anything.”
Meaning she had taught herself not to cling. Instead, with her sunny personality, she had found joy and beauty wherever she could. He held her closer, letting her cling to him. “But…you said he was trying to kill you. It sounds as if he was trying very hard to get you back.”
She shook her head. “He was trying to get Margreta back. He didn’t know me. I was just a means he could have used to force Mom to give Margreta back to him. That’s all he would want with me now, to find Margreta. If I was caught, when he found out I don’t know where she is, I’d be worthless to him.”
“You don’t know?” he asked, startled.
“It’s safer that way. I haven’t seen her in years.” Unconscious longing for her sister was in her voice. “She has my cell phone number, and she calls me once a week. So long as I answer the call, she knows everything is all right.”
“But you don’t know how to get in touch with her?”
“No. I can’t tell them what I don’t know. I move around a lot, so a cell phone was the best way for us. I keep an apartment in Chicago, the tiniest, cheapest place I could find, but I don’t live there. It’s more of a decoy than anything else. I suppose if I live anywhere it’s in Atlanta, but I take all the assignments I can get. I seldom spend more than one night at a time in one place.”
“How would he find you now, since your name has been changed? Unless he knows who adopted you, but how could he find that out?” Chance himself had found her only because of the incident in Chicago, when her courier package was stolen and he checked her out. As soon as he said it, though, he knew that the mole in the FBI—and he would damn sure find out who that was—had probably done the same checking. Had he gone as deep in the layers of bureaucracy as Chance had, to the point of hacking into those sealed adoption records? Sunny’s cover might have been blown. He wondered if she realized it yet.
“I don’t know. I just know I can’t afford to assume I’m safe until I hear he’s dead.”
“What about your mom? And Margreta?”
“Mom’s dead.” Sunny paused, and he felt her inhale as if bracing herself. “They caught her. She committed suicide rather than give up any information on us. She had told us she would—and she did.”
She stopped, and Chance gave her time to deal with the bleakness he heard in her voice. Finally she said, “Margreta is using another name, I just don’t know what it is. She has a heart condition, so it’s better if she stays in one location.”
Margreta was living a fairly normal life, he thought, while Sunny was on the move, always looking over her shoulder. That was what she had known since birth, the way she had been taught to handle the situation. But what about the years they had spent with the Millers? Had her life been normal then?
She answered those questions herself. “I miss having a home,” she said wistfully. “But if you stay in one place you get to know people, form relationships. I couldn’t risk someone else’s life that way. God for bid I should get married, have children. If Hauer ever found me—” She broke off, shuddering at the thought of what Hauer was capable of doing to someone she loved in order to get the answers he wanted.
One thing didn’t make sense, Chance thought. Hauer was vicious and crazy and cunning, and would go to any lengths to recover his daughter. But why Margreta, and not Sunny, too. “Why is he so fixated on your sister?”
“Can’t you guess?” she asked rawly, and began shuddering again. “That’s why Mom took Margreta and ran. She found him with her, doing…things. Margreta was only four. He had evidently been abusing her for quite awhile, maybe even most of her life. By then Mom had already found out some of what he was, but she hadn’t worked up the nerve to leave. After she found him with Margreta, she didn’t have a choice.” Her voice dropped to an agonized whisper. “Margreta remembers.”
Chance felt sick to his stomach. So in addition to being a vicious, murdering bastard, Hauer was also a pervert, a child molester. Killing was too good for him; he deserved to be dismembered—slowly.
Wo
rn out by both physical labor and her emotional storm, Sunny drifted to sleep. Chance held her, content to let her rest. The fire needed more fuel, but so what? Holding her was more important. Thinking his way through this was more important.
First and foremost, he believed every word she’d said. Her emotions had been too raw and honest for any of it to have been faked. For the first time, all the pieces of the puzzle fit together, and his relief was staggering. Sunny was innocent. She had nothing to do with her father, had never seen him, had spent her entire life running from him. That was why she lugged around a tent, with basic survival provisions; she was ready to disappear at any given moment, to literally go to ground and live out in the forest somewhere until she thought it was safe to surface and rebuild her life yet again.
She had no way of contacting Hauer. The only way to get to him, then, was to use her as bait. And considering how she felt about her father, she would never, under any circumstances, agree to any plan that brought her to his attention.
He would have to do it without her agreement, Chance thought grimly. He didn’t like using her, but the stakes were too high to abandon. Hauer couldn’t be left free to continue wreaking his destruction on the world. How many innocent people would die this year alone if he wasn’t caught?
There was no point in staying here any longer; he’d found out what he needed to know. Zane wouldn’t check in again, though, until tomorrow morning, so they were stuck until then. He adjusted Sunny in his arms and rested his face against the top of her head. He would use the time to formulate his game plan—and to use as many of those condoms as possible.
“Get away from me,” Sunny grumbled the next morning, turning her head away from his kiss. She pried his hand off her breast. “Don’t touch me, you—you mink.”
Chance snorted with laughter.
She pulled his chest hair.
“Ouch!” He drew back as far as he could in the small confines of the tent. “That hurt.”
“Good! I don’t think I can walk.” Quick as a snake, her hand darted out and pulled his chest hair again. “This way, you can have as much fun as I’m having.”
“Sunny,” he said in a cajoling tone.
“Don’t ‘Sunny’ me,” she warned, fighting her way into her clothes. Since they barely had room to move, he began dodging elbows and knees, and his hands slipped over some very interesting places. “Stop it! I mean it, Chance! I’m too sore for any more monkey business.”
More to tease her than anything else, he zeroed in on an interesting place that had her squealing. She shot out of the tent, and he collapsed on his back, laughing—until she raised the tent flap and dashed some cold water on him.
“There,” she said, hugely satisfied by his yelp. “One cold shower, just what you needed.” Then she ran.
If she thought the fact that he was naked would hamper his pursuit, she found out differently. He snatched up a bottle of water as he passed by their cache of supplies and caught her before she had gone fifty yards. She was laughing like a maniac, otherwise she might have gotten away. He held her with one arm and poured the water over her head. It was ice-cold from having been left out all night, and she shrieked and sputtered and giggled, clinging to him when her legs went weak from so much laughter.
“Too sore to walk, huh?” he demanded.
“I w-wasn’t walking,” she said, giggling as she pushed her wet hair out of her face. Cold droplets splattered on him, and he shivered.
“Damn, it’s cold,” he said. The sun was barely up, so the temperature was probably in the forties.
She slapped his butt. “Then get some clothes on. What do you think this is, a nudist colony?”
He draped his arm around her shoulders, and they walked back to the camp. Her playfulness delighted him; hell, everything about her delighted him, from her wit to her willingness to laugh. And the sex—God, the sex was unbelievable. He didn’t doubt she was sore, because he was. Last night had been a night to remember.
When she awakened yesterday afternoon she had been naturally melancholy, the normal aftermath of intense emotions. He hadn’t talked much, letting her relax. She went with him to check the traps, which were still empty, and they had bathed together. After a quiet supper of rabbit and cactus they went to bed, and he had devoted the rest of the night to raising her spirits. His efforts had worked.
“How are your hands?” he asked. If she could pull his chest hairs and slap his butt, the antibiotic cream must have worked wonders.
She held them out, palms up, so he could see. The redness from the burns was gone, and her raw fingertips looked slick and shiny. “I’ll wrap Band-Aids around them before I get started,” she said.
“Get started doing what?”
She gave him a startled look. “Cutting handholds in the rock, of course.”
He was stunned. He stared at her, unable to believe what he was hearing. “You’re not climbing back on that damn wall!” he snapped.
Her eyebrows rose in what he now recognized as her “the-hell-you-say” look. “Yes, I am.”
He ground his teeth. He couldn’t tell her they would be “rescued” today, but no way was he letting her wear herself out hacking holes in rock or put herself at that kind of risk.
“I’ll do it,” he growled.
“I’m smaller,” she immediately objected. “It’s safer for me.”
She was trying to protect him again. He felt like beating his head against a rock in frustration.
“No, it isn’t,” he barked. “Look, there’s no way you can cut enough handholds for us to climb out of here in the next two days. You got, what, twelve feet yesterday? If you managed twelve feet a day—and you wouldn’t get that much done today, with your hands the way they are—it would take you over a week to reach the top. That’s if—if— you didn’t fall and kill yourself.”
“So what am I supposed to do?” she shot back. “Just give up?”
“Today you aren’t going to do a damn thing. You’re going to let your hands heal if I have to tie you to a rock, is that clear?”
She looked as if she wanted to argue, but he was a lot bigger than she was, and maybe she could tell by his expression that he meant exactly what he said. “All right,” she muttered. “Just for today.”
He hoped she would keep her word, because he would have to leave her alone while he went to the spot where he signaled Zane. He would just have to risk it, but there would be hell to pay if he came back to find her on that rock.
He quickly dressed, shivering, and they ate another cold breakfast of water and nutrition bar, since there wasn’t anything left of the rabbit from the night before. Tomorrow morning, he promised himself, breakfast would be bacon and eggs, with a mountain of hash browns and a pot of hot coffee.
“I’m going to check the traps,” he said, though he knew there wouldn’t be anything in them. When he’d checked them the afternoon before, knowing they would be leaving here today, he had quietly released them so they couldn’t be sprung. “Just tend to the fire and keep it smoking. You take it easy today, and I’ll wash our clothes this afternoon.” That was a safe promise to make.
“It’s a deal,” she said, but he could tell she was thinking about Margreta.
He left her sitting by the fire. It was a good ten-minute walk to the designated spot, but he hurried, unwilling to leave her to her own devices for so long. Taking the laser light from his pocket, he aimed it toward the rock on the rim and began flashing the pickup signal. Immediately Zane flashed back asking for confirmation, to make certain there wasn’t an error. After all, they hadn’t expected this to happen so fast. Chance flashed the signal again and this time received an okay.
He dropped the light back in his pocket. He didn’t know how long it would take for Zane to arrange the pickup, but probably not long. Knowing Zane, everything was already in place.
He was walking back to the camp when the small twin-engine plane flew over. A grin spread across his face. That was Zane for you!
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nbsp; He began running, knowing Sunny would be beside herself. He heard her shrieking before he could see her; then she came into view, jumping in her glee as she came to meet him. “He saw me!” she screamed, laughing and crying at the same time. “He waggled the wings! He’ll come back for us, won’t he?”
He caught her as she hurled herself into his arms and couldn’t stop himself from planting a long, hard kiss on that laughing mouth. “He’ll come back,” he said. “Unless he thought you were just waving hello at him.” The opportunity to tease her was too great to resist, considering she had pulled his chest hair and poured cold water on him. He’d retaliated for the cold water; this was for the hair-pulling.
She looked stricken, the laughter wiped from her face as if it had never been. “Oh, no,” she whispered.
He didn’t have the heart to keep up the pretense. “Of course he’ll come back,” he chided. “Waggling the wings was the signal that he saw you and would send help.”
“Are you sure?” she asked, blinking back tears.
“I promise.”
“I’ll get you for this.”
He had to kiss her again, and he didn’t stop until she had melted against him, her arms locked around his neck. He hadn’t thought he would be interested in sex for quite a while, not after last night, but she proved him wrong.
He huffed out a breath and released her. “Stop manhandling me, you hussy. We have to get packed.”
The smile she gave him was brilliant, like the sun rising, and it warmed him all the way through.
They gathered their belongings. Chance returned her pistol to her, and watched her break it down and store the pieces in their hiding places. Then they walked back to the plane and waited.
Rescue came in the form of a helicopter, the blades beating a thumping rhythm in the desert air, the canyon echoing with the sound. It hovered briefly over them, then lowered itself like a giant mosquito. Sand whipped into their air, stinging them, and Sunny hid her face against his shirt.
A sixtyish man with a friendly face and graying beard hopped out of the bird. “You folks need some help?” he called.