A cold and hostile one.
She hadn’t counted on being on the road after dark, and if she hadn’t had a compulsion to find Tom ‘Mac’ McEnroe so strong it was like the compulsion to breathe, she would have turned around hours and hours ago. But there had been no giving up, not even when she tried three dead ends and had had to painfully back out over frozen ruts and dead branches, trying to find a viable road, travelling all day, too driven by her compulsion to stop. She didn’t—couldn’t – stop, not even when light faded from the sky and the few flakes that had fallen turned into a tempest.
Finally, she knew it was the right road when she nearly plowed into a boulder, a huge granite shadow darker than the night, right in the middle of the road.
She’d been told all of this, of course.
He’ll kill your car, your cellphone, your computer, your GPS, your music player.
Not in words so much as in images. She’d seen herself sitting in a vehicle in the dark, no lights on. The images hadn’t made any sense then but they did now.
She’d been told how to find him.
He will hole up somewhere on Mount Blue. Take the most deserted road. The road will be almost impassable. There will be an obstacle—a fallen tree, a boulder. Drive around the obstacle. He will know you are coming. He will find you.
This had been communicated in images, too, fuzzy and incomprehensible yet irresistible. She’d found herself on the first dead-end road without having even thought about it during the course of the 200 mile drive. She’d pressed the button to start the car and it was as if the car had driven itself here.
Only to die.
So, here she was, clutching her useless steering wheel with two sweat-dampened hands, on a deserted mountain road, in a dead car, in the dead of night.
The wind howled.
The last human outpost had been forty miles back and that had been two stores and one of the last gas stations left in California. She’d glanced curiously as it as she drove by. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a gas station. This one had looked ramshackle and deserted, tattered, faded pennants flapping in the rising wind.
Heat was draining out fast. A vicious gust of wind rocked her car. She loved her car. It was sleek and stylish. However, it was made out of a revolutionary lightweight tough resin that would tighten in a crash, but was no match for this gale-force icy mountain wind. What made it so good on the freeways made it a deathtrap in a freezing snowstorm.
Another gust rocked the vehicle, hard. The wheels on the left side lifted a little then dropped the car back with a thump. Catherine’s heart pumped hard as she fought panic. An image flahsed in her mind. The car, buffeted wildly by the howling winds, slowly sliding off the road, tumbling down the mountainside.
It was a perfectly plausible scenario.
What a way to end her life—tumbling over the edge of a mountain cliff until her car smashed against an obstacle. A boulder, a tree. It wouldn’t explode, of course. But if she lived, she’d be trapped in the wreck, bleeding out, with no hope of rescue. No one knew where she was. This was wilderness. It was perfectly possible they’d find her body only in the spring.
Another powerful gust. The car shifted, the wheels slipping an inch or two. She broke out in a sweat which instantly chilled her skin in the cold. A wild white sheet of snow lashed across the windshield, ice spicules chattering against the glass.
The steering wheel was icy under her hands. She relinquished the wheel and tucked her hands under her arms. There were gloves in the baggage compartment but it was electrically operated and would never open now that the car was inoperable. The gloves might as well have been at the bottom of the ocean for all the good they could do her back there.
Catherine shivered again, a full-body shudder. She was a neurologist, but she was also an MD and understood very well what was happening. Her skin and lungs were shedding heat with every passing second and her body was trying to generate it by shivering.
Her core temperature would start dropping soon. The rest was utterly inevitable—confusion, amnesia, major organ failure.
Death.
This is insane, she thought. Yet it was the logical ending to the poisoned chalice at the heart of her life.
Her gift. Her curse.
All her life, she’d worshipped reason. Bound herself to rationality with iron clamps, studying math and biology and medicine and then neuroscience. Trying with all her might to banish her gift from her life.
This crazy quest for a man she’s never met, this Tom McEnroe, was going to cost her her life. Like the appointment with death in Samarra, Catherine could evade her gift no longer.
The wind shook her car again, angrily, as if claiming it for its own. She shivered again. The cold was so intense it was painful. Pain was good. As long as she felt pain she was alive and the hypothermic damage could be undone.
Soon there would be no pain, she would be beyond rescuing. And then there would be no life at all.
Time stood still as she listened to her heartbeat in the darkness. At first she tried to count the beats to give herself a sense of time. After two hours she lost count. After another eternity, she felt the exact moment her heart started to slow. Her core temperature had dropped. She was beginning the slide into hypothermia. It felt as if she were already dead and buried deep underground.
Too exhausted for tears, Catherine leaned her head against the steering wheel, preparing to die. Hoping it would be quick.
A hard, loud rap startled her. She sat up, heart beating painfully, trying to figure out where the noise came from.
The next instant her door was opened and an arm yanked her out into the snow. She stood there blinking. A big hand on her arm was all that was keeping her muscles from collapsing, dropping her to the snow-covered ground.
There was barely enough ambient light to see by. If the man had been even a foot away from her she wouldn’t have been able to see him.
He was incredibly close, though, close enough for her to feel his body heat, the first source of heat in what felt like forever.
He was huge, shoulders filling her field of vision, so tall she had to crane her neck back, though she couldn’t see his features. He was dressed in black, head to toe, with a gun strapped to his thigh and a long knife in a sheath, face covered with a black ski mask with insectoid eyes, a sight so terrifying she’d have screamed if she had the breath.
A modern day Grim Reaper, come to take her away.
“What do you want?” The voice was deep and low, carrying over the howling wind. Catherine was so shocked she couldn’t catch her breath. One big hand shook her slightly, as if to shake her out of a trance and the other moved to his face, lifted those insectoid eyes…up?
She was hallucinating. The cold was slowing her neurological processes down so much she was altering reality.
“What do you want?” The voice was a little more forceful now, a note of hostility in it. He shook her again.
Catherine took in a shuddering breath as reality realigned itself. This was no hallucination. It was a huge man, dressed for the snow, who’d been wearing night vision goggles.
“T-tom,” she stuttered. Her voice was hoarse, the first words she’d spoken in over 12 hours, her mouth dry with terror. There was no way her scrambled mind could put together any kind of reasoning. The naked truth fell out. “Tom McEnroe. Th-they call him Mac.”
She had no idea who Tom McEnroe was. For all she knew, this man had never heard of McEnroe. Or he was Tom McEnroe’s worst enemy. He could either let her go or shoot her with that huge black gun strapped to his thigh. Or, considering the size of him, swat her away and off the mountainside with one blow from that huge fist.
What he did was drop a hood over her head, slap plastic restraints on her wrists, lift her over his shoulder and stride away.
A woman’s worst nightmare.
Catherine could barely breathe from the cold. Resistance was utterly beyond her. She couldn’t see anything because of the hood,
couldn’t feel her hands or her feet, couldn’t think straight.
And, lying over this man’s broad shoulder, she knew there was no resistance possible to the kind of male power she could feel. He walked through the drifts of snow, in the howling wind, carrying an adult woman exactly as if he were walking unencumbered on a summer’s day. There was no sense of strain or exertion on his part.
He was holding her legs down with one powerful arm. She tried an experimental kick but couldn’t move her legs at all under the arm.
His clothes were some kind of high-grade security material, hard and impenetrable. She tried to bite him but got exactly nowhere. The material scraped against her cheeks as he walked.
Wherever he was taking her, it wouldn’t make any difference in a while. Her heart rate was slowing. She couldn’t see herself but she knew she was turning white as the blood in her body rushed in to her core, the last part of her that would die. She barely had the energy to shiver any more. All she could do was endure.
In the cold and darkness there was no way to tell time, but after what felt like forever the man stopped.
Wherever it was he taking her, they had arrived.
Continue Reading Heart of Danger
About Lisa Marie Rice
Lisa Marie Rice is eternally 30 years old and will never age. She is tall and willowy and beautiful. Men drop at her feet like ripe pears. She has won every major book prize in the world. She is a black belt with advanced degrees in archaeology, nuclear physics and Tibetan literature. She is a concert pianist. Did I mention the Nobel?
Of course, Lisa Marie Rice is a virtual woman and exists only at the keyboard when writing erotic romance. She disappears when the monitor winks off.
Lisa Marie Rice has been translated into 8 languages and has twice been a Cosmopolitan 'Red Hot Read'.
Lisa Marie welcomes comments from readers. You can find her website and email addresses on her author bio page.
Also by Lisa Marie Rice:
A Fine Specimen
Christmas Angel
Midnight: Midnight Angel
Midnight: Midnight Man
Midnight: Midnight Run
Port of Paradise
The Italian
Lisa Marie Rice, Woman on the Run (new version)
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