Adam (7 Brides for 7 Soldiers Book 2)

  Clinging to that shaky plan, she squinted through the windshield, barely able to see because of the rain. Traffic was light and the truck was heavy, but she resisted the urge to floor it. The last thing she needed was to be pulled over for speeding.

  Finally, she spied the brown and white battered sign for the Hideaway Hotel. She weaved through the lot to the side of the building where her room was, letting out a soft grunt of relief at the sight of her little blue rental car.

  Pulling the truck in next to it, she took a slow, steadying breath. She could do this. She wasn’t guilty of anything except trusting Adam. She could find her way to the nearest FBI office and explain everything.

  Climbing out with the room key, she slammed the door, remembering how they’d torn out of there the last time…

  The last time she fled from law enforcement.

  No wonder he hadn’t believed her.

  At the door, she tried to get the key in the slot, cursing her shaking fingers…and gasping when the door opened from the inside.

  “It’s about time you showed up.”

  She blinked away rain, almost falling backward in shock.

  “Give me your phone, Jane.”

  “I don’t have it.”

  Only then did Jane see the gun, as it was lifted and pointed directly at her.

  “Give it to me, or you just breathed your last breath.”

  * * *

  Where the hell was his truck?

  It was the first thing Adam noticed when they finally brought the boats in. The second thing he noticed was the boathouse door was wide open and rain was sluicing inside. There hadn’t been a water rescue, since Holly had had the situation pretty well in hand once they got there. But the injured man needed medical attention, and the ambulance was waiting when they tied up.

  “I’ll be back,” Adam said, hustling toward the boathouse with a new wave of worry rising up. She wouldn’t attempt to go up the mountain and get her phone, would she?

  Inside, he cursed a small puddle on the hardwood by the door, but his gaze went to his backpack, left gaping open and his phone on the floor next to it, the waterproof case open. What the hell, Jane? Why would she do that?

  He picked up the phone, hoping for a message or clue, but the notifications were blank. Wiping it off, he tapped the screen, relieved that it worked. But he still didn’t know where she’d gone.

  She either went for that phone, which he doubted, or…

  Good God in heaven, that drug trafficker found her and took her and—

  “Adam.” Zane walked in, frowning. “There are two FBI agents out here looking for someone named Jane Anne McAllen.”

  Adam tried to breathe. Failed. “I’ll talk to them.”

  Zane blocked him. “What the hell is going on?”

  “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “Jane’s in trouble.”

  “Jane? Jadyn? Who is she?”

  He wasn’t sure anymore. “Let me talk to the agent. Is one named Lydia Swann, by any chance?”

  “Lydia what?” Zane stepped in closer. “It’s two men. And they are not messing around. They want her.”

  “Yeah? That makes three of us.”

  Zane blew out a dark curse and narrowed his eyes. “Maybe you’re thinking with the wrong organ where she’s concerned.”

  “Shut up.” Adam stepped by him, but Zane grabbed his arm and stopped him.

  “What do you really know about her, Bro? Nothing.”

  He almost reeled at the thought. The woman he held all night? The one he made love to and swore promises to and already started a campaign to beg her to stay? “You’re wrong, Zane. I know her and I trust her.”

  His brother just looked at him like he was a raving idiot. “You go tell that to the two nice men who want to arrest her.”

  Son of a bitch.

  Without another word, he stepped into the light rain where two men dressed in casual clothes stood talking to each other. One was in his mid-fifties, with salt-and-pepper hair and deadly blue eyes. The other was younger, looking around like he’d find his suspect and pounce instantly.

  “Are you Adam Tucker?” the older man said, holding out a badge for Adam to examine. “I’m Special Agent Tim Bratcher with the Portland FBI. This is Assistant Special Agent Gary Holcolm. Thanks so much for the tip you sent in to Supervisory Special Agent Murphy in DC. You did the right thing.”

  The names and barrage of special agents all ran together with only one word that really mattered. The tip? “What are you talking about?”

  “Jane McAllen.”

  He stared at the man, speechless.

  “We’ve been trying to track down Jane McAllen since she left Miami. Where is she?”

  He fought the urge to look at the empty spot where his truck had been. “I’m not sure.”

  The agent nodded and looked as if he was considering just how much to share with Adam. “Kenny Murphy and I go way back, and he said you’re on the right side,” the man said. “Jane McAllen has enough information on a chip to stop half the drug trafficking on the East Coast. We need your help locating her and that chip. Do you have any idea how we could do that?”

  None. Zero. “I left her here a few hours ago, but she…” He finally glanced in the direction of his missing truck. “Might have left to run an errand.”

  “Any chance she found out you’d turned her in?” Bratcher asked.

  Turned her in?

  He could feel Zane looming, silent, a few feet away. “Any chance there’s been a mistake?” Zane asked, stepping closer.

  A rush of gratitude washed over Adam, but Bratcher ignored the question. “We can get a search warrant.”

  “That’s not necessary,” Adam said, digging for a legitimate reason not to trust a woman he was falling in love with. Yes, she’d given him a fake name. Yes, she’d zipped out of the motel when the police were there. Yes, his truck had obviously been taken.

  But he still trusted her.

  Or wanted to.

  “Let’s go look in my apartment where she’s been staying,” Adam suggested, gesturing them toward the building and leading the way. He marched into the offices and up the back stairs, opening the door without a key.

  “You don’t lock your apartment?” the young upstart agent asked.

  “I work downstairs,” he said gruffly, looking around to see everything exactly as they’d left it. A sweater of hers on the sofa. A T-shirt with some paint stains drying on the sink. And her handbag hooked onto a kitchen chair.

  She went without her purse?

  “That hers?” Bratcher asked, zeroing in on the same thing. When Adam nodded, the agent reached for it. “May I?”

  Adam shrugged. “Sure.”

  As he unzipped and reached in, the younger agent gestured to a pair of Jane’s underwear on the bed. “So how well do you know her?”

  Adam just glared at him.

  “No phone in here, but here’s her wallet,” Bratcher said, setting the bag on the chair to unlatch a navy leather woman’s billfold. “Lydia Swann,” he read.

  “What?”

  He held the wallet out and showed him. “This her?”

  At first glance, yes. Same hair, same eyes, but… “No.”

  “She ever mention a Lydia Swann to you?”

  “She told me the FBI agent who sent her here was named Lydia.”

  “So she told you everything,” the younger agent said.

  “Not everything.”

  Bratcher eyed him, then held up the bag. “We’re taking this. And we’re going to search every inch of this apartment for that chip, but I’ll get the proper paperwork processed. Can you think of anywhere else she’d hide that?”

  Her phone. The one she panicked over when it was out of sight.

  Oh man. Was he that dumb? Had he been totally played? He refused to believe it, but…things were not looking good.

  “Her phone,” he said.

  “Well, she probably has that on her,” the other agent said.

&n
bsp; He opened his mouth to tell them where it was, but Bratcher reached into his pocket, getting out a card holder. “Mr. Tucker, if you change your mind.”

  “Change my mind?”

  “About protecting her.”

  Ire rocked him. “I’m not.”

  “I’ll have a team come up here and look around in case she hid anything in your belongings,” the agent said.

  “Feel free. I have nothing to hide,” he said pointedly.

  But did she? He didn’t know what or who to believe anymore. His gut said she was innocent of anything they were accusing her of, but the evidence sure as hell was mounting. Where was his truck?

  “I’ll be outside,” Adam said, needing a lungful of clean air and answers.

  He stomped down the stairs, leaving them behind, trying to make sense of something that made no sense at all. He stormed past the A To Z offices, opened the back door, and walked right into the wall that was Zane.

  “Your truck’s in the front.”

  “Really?” He practically knocked his brother over at that news. “Maybe she left a note.”

  “She didn’t.” Zane put his hand on Adam’s shoulder. “And one of the two-man kayaks is missing.”

  Adam froze, his gaze automatically looking toward the ridge. She did go up there. She did. And she wasn’t alone.

  And suddenly, he knew exactly who she was with…and why.

  He turned to Zane, met his gaze. “I’m going up the back way. You can come with me, or you can go hang out with the FBI who are after the wrong woman. Your choice.”

  Zane gave him a push. “Let’s go. I’m a better climber than you are.”

  Under any other circumstances, that would have been funny.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Jane hated to admit it, but Lydia Swann—or whatever her name was—could hold her own in the outdoors. Which totally annihilated Jane’s feeble hopes that she could somehow get away from the woman while on their trek to find the phone.

  Escape had seemed possible—and necessary—when a menacing black pistol was aimed at her chest and the no-nonsense FBI agent showed a deadly intent to use it. In seconds, Jane had realized there was no way she was an FBI agent…and no way to run from the woman or the question she wouldn’t stop asking: Where was the phone?

  Saying she’d lost it just got that gun raised a little higher toward Jane’s head. Admitting she knew where it was got Jane pushed back into the truck with an order to drive. Learning that getting it meant rapids, waterfalls, danger, and a muddy hike didn’t deter Lydia one single bit.

  Jane had sped back to A To Z, managing to drive despite the heavy silence and heavier revolver still aimed at her. But, sadly, no Eagle’s Ridge police officer pulled her over. She prayed Adam or someone would be at the office, but Adam and Zane were still out on their mission and the office looked deserted. She hoped against hope that the rapids would take Lydia, that the Middle Finger rock formation would spill their kayak, or that a bad ride down the Nakanushee Falls would end this nightmare.

  None of that happened, since Lydia was clearly versed in the art of giving orders, handling an oar, and never putting that damn gun down.

  Now they were sloshing their way up a mud-covered path, and the skies were as threatening as her hiking partner. A flash of lightning in the distance announced that this band of rain included thunderstorms.

  Trust me, you do not want to be up here in a thunderstorm.

  The problem was, she had trusted him. And he’d shared her secret with someone, and…now Lydia Swann was ready to kill her for a phone?

  “What if the phone’s gone?” Jane asked as she tried to cling to a branch to keep her boot from sliding and taking her down the side of the mountain.

  “Then you will be, too.”

  Jane slipped and lost hold of the branch, falling into Lydia, who kept her balance. “If it’s so important to you, why did you let me cart it across the country?”

  “I had to get it out of Miami by someone who wasn’t me. You fit into the plan perfectly.”

  The plan? “You planned this?”

  “The day I saw you, I knew you were my ticket.”

  Jane’s steps slowed as she tried to catch her breath and make sense of what the woman said. “To what?”

  Lydia gave her a hard nudge forward. “Just move. Fast.”

  Jane tripped again, using her hands to break the fall, covering her palms in cold, sticky, unforgiving mud. “Why are you doing this?” she cried as she attempted and failed to get her footing. “What are you trying to accomplish?”

  “How much farther?” Lydia demanded, looking past Jane and up the mountain.

  Jane followed her gaze, seeing the boulder she knew marked the end of the “safe” trail and the beginning of the last treacherous section of the path before reaching the ridge. “After we climb that,” she said, gasping for a breath. “Around…then…we’ll be there.”

  “Good. Good. We’re almost done.”

  “Done with what?” Jane demanded.

  Lydia threw her a vile look, then reached down and grabbed the collar of the down vest Jane had put on hours ago, not far from here, at the campsite.

  “Get moving or die.”

  “I’m not much good to you dead,” she muttered, pushing herself up in the world’s most graceless rise. “But I sure was good to you alive. Why me, for God’s sake? I’m an interior designer. Why?”

  “Look at you,” she said. “Same hair and eye color. Even the same height. The ID switch was easy.”

  Jane tried to process that as they neared the boulder, remembering how generous the offer had seemed at the time. Take my ID, Lydia had said that hectic night at the airport. We look enough alike. You can’t have yours on you anyway.

  And Jane, like a trusting idiot, handed over everything she had that said Jane Anne McAllen on it.

  “So you targeted me to switch ID’s and sent me off with a phone that you’d kill for?” Her voice rose in wild frustration. “Why would you do that?”

  She jabbed Jane with the gun. “Don’t even try to yell for help.”

  As if anyone would hear. As if Adam would come after her. The knowledge that he wouldn’t, that by now he surely believed the worst about her, believed that…what had that man said on the phone? She’s double-crossing the whole Sergio Valverde operation for one of her own, and the feds want her. Bad.

  “So you’re screwing Sergio,” Jane said.

  “Not technically,” she replied dryly. “I draw the line at sex with the scumbag bastard who killed my father.”

  “But…professionally?” she guessed, earning a look of begrudging respect from her nemesis.

  “I’m doing what I have to do to put Sergio Valverde out of business and take everything owed to me.”

  “And the phone?”

  “It has what I need to do that.”

  They reached the boulder and stopped cold, and even Lydia was a little winded. Or maybe emotional.

  Sergio killed her father? Jane filed that away as a possible weapon.

  “Climb it.” She shoved the pistol into Jane’s kidney.

  Of course, emotional currency was hardly as effective as that gun. “It’s hard,” she said. “Especially in muddy boots.”

  Lydia’s dark eyes narrowed to cold, black slits. “It’ll be really hard when you’re dead.”

  Jane turned and found the crevice she’d used the first time she’d climbed this particular obstacle. Back when she was falling for Adam. Trusting him. Counting on him. Actually letting herself fall in love with him.

  And he sure as hell wasn’t going to come and save her, so she damn well better do it herself.

  At the fury of that thought, she swung herself up, making it easily in one move, turning quickly to see Lydia, who had stuck the gun in her pants and, for one second, was looking down to find her footing.

  Now. Now was her chance. There was only one place Lydia could put her hand. One stone to use as a grip. Taking a deep breath, she stole a gl
ance to her left, where Adam had blocked any chance of her falling. Not a particularly steep fall, but it was mud, and Lydia would go tumbling at least fifty feet. Enough time for Jane to run.

  Bracing for support, she stared at Lydia’s hand rising, moving as if in slow motion, higher, higher, over her head and away from that pistol, and landing on the stone.

  Jane lifted her muddy boot and slammed it down so hard she could have sworn she heard bones crack but for Lydia’s howl in pain. Instantly, Lydia lost her balance and Jane jumped right back down and pushed with all her might, knocking the other woman to the side, but not over the edge.

  Damn it!

  Lydia swung around, using her leg, but Jane got a hold of that and thrust her whole body into a push. Lydia screamed, reached for her pistol, but fell backward. Jane took one last swipe, and down Lydia went, ass first, hands and feet in the air, screaming and sliding down the muddy side of the mountain.

  Jane froze for one second in shock, then turned and ran, falling and slipping and swearing as she made her way back down. She heard Lydia’s screams echo off the mountain and the cliff, and then a single, heart-stopping gunshot told her the woman hadn’t lost her weapon.

  Fastest way. Fastest way. By boat, of course, without a life jacket and only one person in the boat.

  Jane ran, fell, rolled, scraped her face, but pushed right back up and fought her way to the bottom of the path.

  She heard the rushing water and knew she was one step closer to safety. She could hide, of course, but Lydia would find her. She had to strand Lydia with no boat. Only a local would know the footpath out of there.

  A huge bolt of lightning made her stumble again, followed by thunder and…another gunshot. Did Lydia already have her in her sights?

  Jane reached the two-man kayak they’d stolen and dived toward it, scrambling inside and grabbing one of the oars, nearly dropping it as she tried to push off from the rocky shore.

  The rain pelted and the skies lit up with another bolt of lightning, but Jane ignored nature’s fury and pushed with all the strength she had, finally getting the boat off the shore.

  The white, rushing, wild water suddenly seemed a thousand times more dangerous than on the way here, when her focus had been on that gun aimed at her back.