Chapter Fourteen

Chance had always knocked first, but Pagan just opened the bedroom door and whistled for Gallo like invading a woman’s privacy was no big deal. The big dog bounded off the bed without so much as a goodbye glance, and Pagan slammed the door without saying a word.

Suede fidgeted, wondering if Chance was already gone. Tired and sleepy, she couldn’t settle down knowing he might be on his way into a vicious storm to confront an even more vicious man.

No one knew Lionel York like Suede did. The man was heartless. He claimed he’d been faithful since they’d hooked up, but she had her doubts. He knew too many models and celebrities, and he spent too many unexplained nights away from his penthouse suite. Who’d Chance think he was to take on York all by himself, Superman?

He just might be.

She leaned back into the pillow where only an hour ago Chance had lovingly kissed the hell out of her. Touching her tender fingertips to her lip, she sent a prayer to the God she hadn’t spoken to in years. I know I don’t have any right to ask favors, but could you please keep him safe? For him. For me too.

That should’ve settled her nerves, but it didn’t. Tired of lying in bed, she eased both feet to the floor, determined to be up and moving by the time Chance returned, if she was still here.

Suede lifted to her feet, bound and determined to be mobile. She took a minute to stretch her arms over her head, her back muscles protesting all the way down to her butt. Her bones popped and cracked, or maybe those were her muscles. Wow. That fall could’ve ended her. Surprised it hadn’t broken anything, she arched backward, clenching her shoulder blades to determine how she felt. Except for the burning sensation in her thigh, not too bad.

With no clothes to change into, she shuffled over to Chance’s closet like an elderly woman, her soles flat to the floor and using the mattress, then the footboard for support. As much as she was beginning to care about Chance, he didn’t need someone like her. The quicker she got out of his life, the better off he’d be.

Now that she’d used it, her thigh hurt like she’d been burned with a red-hot poker, but she persevered. Her lungs were still tight with congestion, but she wasn’t about to waste time lying around healing.

Opening his closet revealed your every day basic wardrobe for a guy who liked flannel, denim, and, umm, gear bags? He’d taken two with him, but three more packed and zippered canvas bags lined the far back corner of his closet behind a row of polished boots lined up as if for inspection, their laces stuffed down their throats. The funny guy had a touch of OCD. Jackets, sweatshirts, and hoodies hung neatly on the clothes bar at her right; jeans were straight ahead on pants hangers, and shirts were to the left. Funnier still, everything looked clean and ironed.

A drift of his manly scent—wind and sunshine—tickled her nose. For a moment, Suede closed her eyes and inhaled, thrilled to have some small part of him in the room with her, one she wished she could take with her. If only. She’d learned long ago that life was one disappointment after another, and this man? Tempting, but Chance Sinclair was clearly heartbreak in the making. He wasn’t York, but she was still Suede Tennyson, and love stories were fucking fairytales. Umm, damn. Darn. Not swearing was going to be harder than she’d realized. But hey, Chance wasn’t there. He hadn’t heard her. This time.

The time to leave was now before he returned. She didn’t need a hero. She needed a new life. Yeah, I’ve got it bad, only this time I like the guy. Which meant she needed to go. Yes, she’d liked Chance enough to kiss him, but that was all the more reason to get out of his life before she ruined it. Wasn’t that what Mom always said? Before you came along everything was perfect?

An overflowing wicker clothesbasket in the corner of his closet completed the intimate picture of the man who’d rescued her. Suede lifted an olive drab flannel shirt to her nose. Since none of his pants would fit, this single shirt would have to do until she located her clothes and laundered them. But the scent of Chance clung to the weave in her hands. Suede couldn’t help but bury her nose in the shirt and take a deep, make that two deep breaths of his masculine scent. God, it was addicting. Her heart thudded at the memory of his body wrapped around hers. His pepperminty breath in her face. His big warm hands. And this smell...

Suede took one last sniff of his shirt. Turning slowly so she didn’t fall down, she headed into the bathroom. Leaving him was going to be just as difficult as not swearing.

*****

The thing about owning the mountain in your back yard, which Chance did, was that he’d climbed it plenty while working alongside the crew that built his cabin, dug his basement, and excavated his escape tunnel. None of the hardhats he’d hired knew they’d worked alongside the picky owner of this land and the cabin they’d built back then. He’d liked it that way. For the most part they’d been blue-collar, honest hard workers, his kind of people.

Still recovering from the injuries of his last mission and his abrupt departure from the TEAMs, he’d found that sweat labor was best eased at the end of a long, blue-collar day by a good stiff climb to the highest peak on Old Man Mountain. A man could breathe there. The air smelled cleaner. Purer. It cleared his head.

It was during one of those climbs when he’d taken the face without safety gear, hand-over-hand and toe-to-toe with the mountain, setting anchors and pitons as he climbed. On the reverse climb, he’d laced a network of black nylon ropes, hammering more pitons where needed. On another evening, he’d networked another fifty or so anchors and ropes at intermittent angles until he’d created a nearly invisible interlocking escape grid to fall back on if needed. A man couldn’t have enough alternate getaways the day his enemies caught up with him, but now? He could move experts and novices up these cliffs in record time.

Chance snowshoed to the base of the frozen falls in the middle of the storm that wouldn’t quit. He stowed the showshoes on his back, pulled his balaclava over his head, donned his goggles, and up he went.

The sturdy ropes held fast. The roughened grip of his climbing gloves made certain of that. In less than an hour he was topside, sweating like a beast but warm. The wind at the peak crested around forty knots per hour, fresh gale force on the Beaufort Wind Force Scale. If he’d been out on the sea with this stiff wind, waves would’ve been choppy and running between eighteen and twenty-five feet high. The foam off those waves would’ve smacked his face and watered his eyes.

As fierce as it was now, the snow came sideways in hard-driven pellets, not flakes. He leaned into it, fighting Mother Nature’s northwesterly attempt to shove him off the mountain. It was, after all, hers.

The old hunting cabin stood due north of his position, its windowless backside against the storm. Chance took that direction to keep his bearings. At fifty yards, he paused. The cabin was within reach. No lights glowed from within, not that he’d expected York to use the place.

Drifts banked up to the low roof on the windward side, making it resemble a Hobbit’s hovel from Middle Earth instead of a fifty-year-old foursquare hunting cabin. What was left of the chimney on the roof was buried as well, and ice caked the windows. Leeward wasn’t much better, but the doorway was passable.

Cocking his head to listen for any animal life inside, Chance gave the door a good shake, certain that any noise he made would be lost to the wind and would go undetected by York. The handle broke free in his hand, but that was just as well. He’d fix it later.

Ducking inside, he surveyed his only shelter. Cold. Barren. Good enough. The table he’d hauled up in pieces during the summer still stood under the window to his left. He’d chopped and stacked the cord of split pine logs to his right, but there’d be no cozy fire tonight. The snow on the chimney made certain of that.

His snowshoes went on the inside hook beside the door for easy access. He wouldn’t leave them outside to give himself away. The broken door handle would do that if York’s men came looking, which Chance doubted. His gear bag went to the floor by the nearest table leg.

Chance spent all of five minutes de-icing the windowpane before he got serious. His tripod and rifle took up residence in the center of the table, aimed out the now clear-as-a-bell port in the window. Visibility was still zero in the storm, but the only clearing on top this mountain lay twenty-one yards straight ahead. That was where York would be holed up in a heated modular unit, waiting out the storm. Chance planned to be ready if Mother Nature cooperated and the storm died down. He only needed one shot.

To make certain his gear stayed put and undisturbed, Chance stepped out in the blizzard and paced off ten feet from each corner of the cabin. He doubted York’s men, probably all city boys, would be inclined to check the perimeter of their camp on an afternoon like this. North, south, east, and west, Chance placed one of those pesky beacons. The shriek it emitted wouldn’t have bothered Pagan had he broken the beacon’s beam because he knew the shutoff code to disable them.

Animals would run the other way, frightened for their lives, but these smartass city guys? Chance doubted they were that bright. Their ears would be bleeding in seconds. By then he’d be on them, and York would be short a couple bodyguards.

Chance rubbed his gloved hands together, warming his frozen fingers. It was OK Corral time. He armed himself with the two pistols out of his bag, a six-inch knife in his boot sheath, and a back-up pistol up his sleeve. Brass knuckles went under his insulated gloves. Hand warmers and the thermal pad went into his jacket pockets.

He stuffed three bottles of water inside his flannel shirt and against his skin to prevent them from freezing. Dehydration was the biggest killer on arctic ops. Eating snow made it worse. Not only did it chill a guy’s body from inside, it denied precious moisture. People died when they made greenhorn mistakes.

As an added precaution, he tied one end of one of the ropes he’d brought up with him over his jacket and around his waist, the other to the table leg for a lifeline. He wasn’t normally directionally challenged, but the whiteout could mess with a man’s internal compass and he didn’t take unnecessary risks. With his back to the wind, Chance headed due east to the only place York could be.

Modular shelters were the ideal set up for rough terrain. Chance wasn’t sure which he’d find, the heavier trailer-sized kind or a tent, a fiberglass igloo or, knowing York, a micro-camper unit with plumbing and heating, caviar and bubbly in the fridge.

It was interesting York had lied to Suede to get her all the way up here, though. The missing pieces of that puzzle irked Chance. What the hell did Sullivan have to do with this creep? What was so urgent that Sullivan broke his own rules to end the guy? Why here?

Chance paced off nineteen yards toward the clearing, then twenty before a black shadow evolved out of the driven snow and turned into a cylindrical overnight unit on tripod legs, not unlike a semi-trailer minus the semi. The unit had one point of egress and a silent generator, both portside. Interesting layout, but adequate for the weather, if that generator had been up and running. Heavy-duty hooks stood like giant eyes at the top of the rig, testifying that a chopper had transported it, but the generator was oddly silent. Didn’t make sense.

Getting inside would be a definite no-go, but Chance hadn’t planned to. Instead, he unwrapped the acoustic amplifier listening device he’d concealed inside his inner jacket pocket. Wiping a circle of frost from the wall of the aluminum-shielded rig, he attached a listening device with a built-in amplifier, the ceramic head of the microphone at its core, to the smooth surface. Trading one of the two earpieces that linked him to Pagan for half the stereo headset, he hunkered against the rig and out of the wind to eavesdrop.

Hell, it was cold as a witch’s tit up here, and getting colder. He planned to be back inside that ugly little cabin by sunset. Chance tugged his bandana over the mouth of his balaclava for extra protection and adjusted the volume of his ‘ears’, his senses focused within the trailer.

Between the whistling wind and the moaning trees, it was a difficult listen at best. Finally, a deep male voice growled in Spanish, not a language Chance understood but for a few colorful swear words. Another voice, this one more alto than baritone, responded, but both were muffled. Chance set the device to record for later translation when another voice lifted above the others. “In English. You know I don’t understand that crap.”

Must be York. The German super star had hired muscle from South America. Interesting.

“I said I hate snow,” Baritone complained with a rich Hispanic accent. “It’s cold in here. Why can’t we turn up the thermostat?”

“This storm can’t last forever.” York again. “We have to conserve what fuel we have in case things get worse.”

A light bulb flashed over Chance’s head. Freezing to death would certainly take care of Sullivan and Suede’s problem, but Sullivan had been clear. Make it hurt.

“Jesus Christ, how long before the chopper comes to get us?” That from Alto, the other whiner and another Hispanic. “I’m wearing two jackets and I’m still cold.”

You should’ve hired help from the motherland, not the southland, mused Chance.

“You have her ring.” York sounded pissed. “What more do you want? A Jacuzzi to bask in while we wait out the storm?”

Chance snapped to attention. Alto had Suede’s ring? What’d York do, divvy up her things with his posse? Good to know.

“And you.” York must’ve turned on Baritone. “If you’re so damned cold, put her jacket on. You’re small enough. It should fit.”

Alto snickered, but neither man argued. Didn’t matter. Chance canted his head, cracking the vertebrae in his neck at the mention of Suede’s winter jacket. Suede. Forced to undress. Up here in the bitter cold? He needed to hit something as the image of the nearly lifeless body he’d so recently pulled from the pond came to mind. Baritone and Alto might live the day, but York? No way.