Jace woke up sweating. He woke up fast. In a single movement, he began to roll, pulled open a drawer, reached for the Glock, and landed in a crouch between the bed and the wall even as he racked the slide.
A hard listen for the sound of breathing, a sniff of the air, then a whine from Tobias confirmed it. He was naked. Alone in the dark.
No threat here. Nothing but the nightmare.
The remnants of the dream lay draped across his vision even now like a black shroud he couldn’t claw away. Andy O’Connor on the ground, sucking air, his normally ruddy face bleached of color, his legs sprawling at an unnatural angle, the bright arterial blood soaking into the khaki-colored silt faster than Jace could work.
In the dream, as in life, Jace had fastened the tourniquet high on Andy’s upper thigh and heard the pop-pop-pop of small arms fire on the other side of mud walls that were nothing like shelter and didn’t have a hope in hell of stopping those rounds. Around him, the superheated air was filled with shouts, unseen boots pounding dirt, and the distinctive shake and explosion that was a grenade. Hurled by an Afghan or an Aussie, he couldn’t tell. He worked on, his hands and arms soaked nearly to the elbow in Andy’s blood, and didn’t think about what was headed toward them. Do what’s in front of you. Focus on now.
Fifteen more seconds. Get the tourniquet in place, the wounds packed, and get back in there. Ambushed was a long way from dead. Support was on the way.
“Bad,” Andy gasped. “It’s bad. Tell Cass… tell her…” His hand was on Jace’s arm, gripping hard, his green eyes shining like glass.
“You tell her, mate,” Jace said. The tourniquet was on, but Andy’s other leg was bleeding as well, and a choked scream from the next squatty, dirt-colored house told him he had to get over there. “Hang on and tell her yourself.”
“Tell her,” Andy said, his voice a thread. “Tell her I’m sorry. The baby—”
The flash. The pressure wave, and Jace was falling back. Tumbling again and again, the dust choking him, his hands, sticky with blood, reaching for his weapon and grabbing air.
Tobias brought him out of it. The soft sound of his breathing as he rounded the bed, a press of his warm shoulder against Jace’s thigh, and another whine, more urgent this time.
“No worries, mate,” Jace said. “She’ll be right.” Breathe in. Breathe out.
Darkness around him. Bedroom. Cabin. Montana. He stood up, ejected the magazine from the Glock, cleared the chamber, inserted the magazine again, and placed the weapon in the drawer of the bedside table again, ready for use. Every motion, even done in the dark, deliberate and familiar, practiced tens of thousands of times. Habit. Control.
Afterwards, he swung his arms in giant circles, rolled his head on his neck, and bounced on his heels. Breaking the cycle, unsticking his stuck mind, getting off the hamster wheel. All the tricks.
Someday, he might crack again, but it wasn’t going to be today. Today, he could get out.
He wanted a drink. He didn’t go get one. Instead, he turned on the bedside light, grabbed a pair of track pants and a flannel shirt from the closet, and headed down from the loft and into the log cabin’s single room with Tobias padding silently behind him, a brown ghost. Or a ghost fighter. Jace opened the door of the bottle-green iron stove, concentrating on the resistance of the heavy iron, the smell of clean wood smoke, the frigid bite of the night air, on everything that said he was here and not there. He thrust a couple more logs into the embers, stabbed them with a poker and watched the yellow flame flicker and grow, then shut the stove door and stayed there, crouched on the stone hearth, its surface icy under his bare feet, his hand stroking Tobias’s silky ear.
Touch. Smell. Hearing. Sight. Checking in on his senses, one by one. Rhythmic movement, and a reminder. The dreams were his old reality. They weren’t his life.
“And, yeah,” he told Tobias. “We both know why. That bloody letter.”
That was his trigger every time: the unseen enemy, just out of sight, waiting for the ambush. No matter how prepared you were, reaction was slower than action. And when they caught you at a disadvantage? Good luck catching up.
He’d been doing so well until today. The first letter hadn’t spooked him much. He’d called the mysterious number and had heard nothing but ringing, and when he’d received nothing else from his new—reader? fan? creep?, he’d put it out of his head. He’d cleaned the cabin, cooked a huge pot of stew, and had gone to the gym every day, because whatever he’d told Rafe, he knew he needed to keep pushing, to keep moving forward. He’d thought about getting his hair cut and hadn’t done it. He’d called his mum and dad, and when they’d asked when he was coming for a visit, he’d said, “Soon.” It would be turning winter in Brisbane, and he’d just shaken the snow of winter off his boots. He was ready for summer. Besides, his mum would see too much and say something, and his dad would say nothing, but he’d see, too.
On Friday afternoon, he’d been splitting wood—which sounded unnecessary in May until you lived in the Montana Rockies—and thinking about shaving, which made him think about how much damage it was possible to do to somebody with a multiblade razor. Probably not that much, other than scraping the hell out of them. Just another way technology made life tougher on thriller writers. Cell phones and razors.
It would have to be an old-fashioned single-blade, which was more of a luxury item these days, a throwback. Which Sawyer wouldn’t use. Sawyer was the anti-James Bond.
How about if the villain were the metrosexual type and used a single-blade? Made of platinum? That could work.
He hauled a crudely cut section of wood onto the block, steadied it, raised the axe overhead, and brought it down with measured force.
Crack. The pieces fell from the block, and he hauled up another section.
The fight would have to be in the bathroom, which would take some ingenuity. Why was Sawyer in metro-baddie’s bathroom?
The next section of wood split. Crack. Sawyer’s love interest, of course. This time, Jace would have to make her likable. A heroine, fighting the good fight along with Sawyer. Otherwise, readers would complain he was misogynistic. He wasn’t misogynistic. He just didn’t necessarily trust women.
He didn’t necessarily trust men, either. But nobody complained about a treacherous man in a book. That, they expected.
Erica. He rolled the name over in his mind. Yeah, it sounded sexy. Dark hair, blue eyes. Tall, willowy, cultured, and mysteriously feminine. Perfect.
Sounded good to him, too. Maybe he should clean up his act. That kind of woman probably didn’t want a mountain man. Of course, she probably wasn’t hanging about in the produce aisle in the Sinful, Montana, Safeway, either.
Right, so Erica’s taking out a bodyguard, and Mr. X thinks he has Sawyer backed up into the bathroom, and…
Tobias barked, and Jace looked down the drive. Mail truck. He finished stacking the wood and took off for the mailbox with Tobias trotting behind.
He pulled out the white envelope, and Tobias whined.
“Yeah,” Jace told the dog, ignoring the fact that his heart was pounding in that way your heart did when you got the danger signals, a way Sawyer’s wouldn’t have. Readers didn’t want to know how it really felt, about the coppery taste of your own fear.
This time, he looked at the postmark. Missoula. A couple hours away. He thought about fingerprints and took the envelope up to the house, where he put on gloves, feeling a bit silly, opened the envelope with his tactical knife, and drew out the two sheets of stapled paper.
Blackstone didn’t let anyone catch him off guard. So how had it happened? He would have given the question more attention, except that he was otherwise engaged. By the caressing touch of the sting-inducer on the sensitive insides of his upper thighs, then over his groin, around and down. And by the purr of that voice. The one that, he was nearly sure, belonged to the woman in red.
“I’m going to make you want it whether you want to or not,” she told him. “I’m going to make you do it. Then you’ll know how helpless you can truly be. And after that… have you ever heard of choking at orgasm, I wonder? Of course you have. I’m sure you’ve done it. But you’ve never felt it yourself, have you? Always in control. Always in command. But surrender can feel so good. Trust me. You’ll think you’ve died and gone to heaven. You could be wrong about one part.”
It had gone on, but Jace hadn’t read it. “That’s the worst of it, mate,” he’d told Tobias. “That I’m getting my knickers in a twist over somebody who actually wrote, ‘the woman in red.’” Tobias had cocked his head, his ears at full alert, his brown eyes locked on Jace’s, and Jace had said, ‘Too right. Bloody soft. You’d think I’d be too old and too hard for mind games.’”
It hadn’t been so much about what she’d written—at least, he was fairly sure now that it was a “she.” It was more what had come next, at the bottom of Page Two.
Three spaces, then, You tried to call me. That makes me happy. I knew you’d be curious, and I was right, wasn’t I? It’ll be better than you’ve ever had before, because you’ll wonder how much of it I mean. You’ll wonder if it’s even me, because I won’t tell you. I can give you something nobody ever has. I can make you give it all up, and make you want to go there. Watch for me. And wonder.
I love your muscle definition. I love your strength. I want to take it from you. How will I hold you still while I do that? Don’t you wish you knew?
Love,
Natalia
(That’s not my name. But you can call me that. I’ll call soon. Love you.)
Which was all creepy, but stupid, except that it had been effective enough to spark the old nightmare. She knew, somehow, what he feared most. Being afraid. Being powerless.
But he wasn’t powerless. Twelve hours later, still crouching before the wood stove, watching the yellow light dance behind the glass window, he rewrote “Natalia’s” scene in his mind. In his version, he didn’t lie there with his mind paralyzed by fear. Whoever had written that didn’t know him very well.
If you responded to danger with paralysis, bad things tended to happen to you.
You tended to die.
In Jace’s rewritten version, he listened to that purring voice, focused all his attention on it, let his body respond, and then said, “All I hear is promises. I don’t see you climbing on top of me and giving me a go. I reckon you’re all talk.” And then, when she’d taken the challenge, because she’d need to—when she’d thought she’d won, when she was well and truly after it, when his body had got itself with the program and given her something to work with—he said, “Kiss me. Please.” Like he wanted it. Like he was hers.
And when she did? He bit her lips off. He grabbed the hand clutching at his wrist, broke a finger, and held on. He made her let him go. People who delighted in giving pain never wanted to feel it for themselves. No guts. No ticker.
You only lost if you gave up, and he didn’t give up.
He stood up, pulled the shirt over his head without bothering with the buttons, and told Tobias, “Back to bed. Nightmare’s over.”
He couldn’t save Andy O’Connor. He could dream it, could rewrite it as many times as he wanted, and O’Connor would still bleed out in the dust of the Mirabad Valley. And then his body would be blown apart.
That story was written. It was done.
He woke at six the next morning with a PTSD hangover, but he knew about that, too. He called it what it was, he stared it down, and he put it away. He drove into Sinful, told Tobias to stay in the ute, headed for the gym—The Sinful Body, which he supposed he’d name a gym himself if he were trying to bring the customers in—and said hello to Charlotte, the redheaded girl at the front desk, who always smiled and blushed when he arrived. Of course, she probably blushed for everybody, so he wasn’t too excited. He smiled back, because shy redheads reminded him of his cousin Willow, accepted his towel, and put himself through the first phase of the workout he and Rafe had done together last time he’d visited his brother.
Rafe had been getting himself to six percent body fat at the time. It was a good workout.
Kelli, a personal trainer with an I-know-you-boy smile and a dark ponytail, came over during his upper-body work and said, “Looks like you’re really getting after it. Want a spotter?”
“Cheers,” Jace said, lay on his back, and accepted her help getting the bar set. Time to get after it himself, maybe, he thought as she stood over him and eyed his chest in a not entirely professional way, and not for the first time. She wasn’t too far off his Erica of the razor-blade finish, in fact, it had been clear for a while now that she appreciated his physique, and he liked slim, tidy brunettes. The kind who looked like they could look after themselves. Another way his mystery fan had got it wrong with her curvaceous blonde.
He said, as she helped him lift the bar after his final chest press and slip it back onto the rack, “I’m guessing here. Muay Thai.”
She smiled like she knew what he was thinking and didn’t mind. “Krav Maga. You?”
“A bit of everything, one time or another.”
“Show me sometime,” she said. “We could check out each others’ moves, learn something new. Could be interesting.”
So, yeah. He was here, he was alive, and he was functional once more. Nobody was going to take that away from him. For now, he left it there. He might not be all that functional, but he was getting closer. And when he got home, he went for a run. Editing could wait, and so could breakfast. It wasn’t even eight yet, and the air was still morning-crisp, barely touched around the edges by the faint beginnings of summer. The area beneath the trees was dark and scented like a Northern Hemisphere Christmas, the dirt of the Heavenly Ridge ski run was packed and solid under his feet, and his lungs were working hard.
That was enough.