SNOWBALL’SCHANCE
Cherry Adair

 
Chapter One
JOEZORN STAMPED SNOW OFF HIS FROZEN BOOTED FEETas he impatiently jiggled the door handle. Locked. A damn good thing considering that, despite the nationwide manhunt under way, a serial killer was even now finding his way through the storm to this Nowhere, Montana, ranch.
It wasn’t a case ofif Dwight Treadwell would show. It was a case ofwhen.
Although he was standing beneath the deep porch overhang, the howling wind whipped snow down Joe’s collar and snuck under the hem of his coat as it flapped around his ankles. He shuddered with cold. Which didn’t bother him nearly as much as finding the place lit up like a damned Christmas tree.
Joe glanced around the porch. His new assignment, party planner Kendall Metcalf, must’ve bought out every Christmas and craft store between Bozeman and Billings.
There was Christmas crap everywhere.
Might as well have a frigging flashing red neon arrow pointing to the house.Here I am. Come and get me!
Damn it to hell.
He kept one hand in his left pocket, fingers loosely clasping the grip of his custom-made HK Mark 23. He would rather shoot a hole through his favorite coat than have someone open the door to find a large, armed man standing on the other side.
It worried Joe only marginally that he hadn’t been able to reach the Camerons before he left the ski lodge, or that he didn’t have their cell numbers. High winds and snow storms frequently messed with the phone lines way the hell and gone out here.
Hunching into his coat, he jabbed at the doorbell. “Get the damn lead out, people.” When that didn’t elicit an immediate response, he thumped his fist on the door a couple of times, making the oversized Christmas wreath dance. “Open the damn d—”
He heard the faint beeps from inside as the security alarm was deactivated. The door swung open, spilling golden light and the hot, unmistakable fragrance of cookies baking onto the front porch. Joe’s heart did a hardthump-thump as he got his first look at the Amazon who was his charge.
Kendall Metcalf was luscious. Every curvy, magnificent inch of her. Her hair, the reddest Joe had ever seen, spilled over her shoulders like liquid fire. Her feet were bare, and black leggings accented every incredible inch of her long, long,long legs. A red sweater proclaimed, in cursive white script across a mouthwatering chest,HO HO HO Y’ALL.
Before he could get on her case for opening the door without checking to see who was out there first, she grabbed him by the hand, practically dragging him inside. “Lord, am I happy to seeyou. ”
Joe would have been ecstatic to see Attila the Hun at this point. His freaking nose was numb. He stepped into the warmth, booted the door shut, locked it, and pressed the reactivate button on the alarm before turning around to face her. The smell of Woman overlaid the smell of pine, vanilla candles, and baking. His temperature shot up in response, warming him much faster and more efficiently than a hot shower. But not quite as fast as his anger that she’d opened the door without ascertaining who the hell was knocking. Jesus.
“Lord. You must be a Popsicle,” she said cheerfully, oblivious to his stony look. “Let’s get you defrosted.” She glanced at the control panel, apparently saw the light was on, frowned slightly, then headed across the vast entry hall toward the kitchen. Without turning to see if he was following.
“I just put my millionth pot of coffee on. I’m always addicted when it’s this cold, aren’t you? Here, can I take your co— No, you’re right. Keep it on until you thaw. This way.”
She’d taken her sweet time answering the door, but now that he was inside, she moved at the speed of light and hadn’t yet paused to take a breath. Which suited Joe just fine. He was a man of action and few words. He suspected she wouldn’t like either by the time this was over.
The house was blessedly warm, and smelled mouthwatering. The scent of Christmas was everywhere, but that wasn’t the fragrance making him salivate.She smelled as clean and fresh as . . . he frowned as he followed her into the kitchen. Some kind of . . . fruit? Yeah. Pears or something. Fresh and clean and—Jesus, he was losing it—juicy.She walked over to pour him a huge mug of coffee, bringing it back to the center island where another half-filled mug sat beside a baking sheet of hot-from-the-oven cookies. Joe removed his hat, then unbuttoned his coat. The kitchen was warm, and looking at Miss Metcalf kept his body temperature several degrees above normal.
“Black, I bet.” She handed him the mug. The most bizarre current of electricity passed from her fingers to his, shooting directly to his groin. Her eyes widened in surprise. It sure as hell shocked the hell out ofhim, and he almost dropped the mug.
Joe tightened his fingers around the heat of the Christmas mug, which still had a $3.99 price sticker from Ross stuck on the side. He peeled it off and stuck it on Denise’s sludge green–black granite counter top. Denise didnot shop at discount stores. Never had.
“That’s what I thought,” Kendall said.
He hadn’t opened his mouth. He presumed she was still discussing his coffee choice. “Yeah. Thanks. Where—”
“Are Denise and the kids?” she finished for him. Them, too. But he’d been referring to the cops. “She and Adam took them over to Denise’s mother’s for a couple of days. They’ll be back in the morning. It’s beeninsane here trying to get ready for the party tomorrow night, and all the guests, et cetera. You know how it is.” She laughed, a bright, robust laugh that did ridiculous things to Joe’s stomach before moving lower.
Whoa! Back off, pal.
She sat her quite delectable ass half on, half off a stool, then, without looking away from his face, picked up the spatula to slide cookies from the sheet onto a plate painted with some sort of large brown Christmas animal.
Her hands were pale and slender, her nails long and painted Christmas red. Sexy as hell. What wasn’t sexy were the defensive wounds marring her smooth skin. The obscene scars were thin and silvery, and there were dozens of them. On the back of her hands, on her palms, on her fingers, and on her wrists. Joe sucked back a black rage.
“Help yourself,” she told him, pushing the baking sheet an inch closer to his hand. “I just made them for something to do. The electricity has been iffy with the storm. Good thing they have a generator. I’d go completely apeshi—nutswith nothing to do.”
He’d thought that if the cops couldn’t get to the ranch, he’d at least have Denise’s husband here as backup. He and Adam had been in the Marines together, and Joe trusted his friend at his back. He shouldn’t have trusted his friend with hiswife, but that was old news and water under the bridge.
“Are you alone in the house?” he demanded, straining to hear any noise to indicate someone was either upstairs or in any of the other rooms downstairs. All he heard was her sudden indrawn breath over the soft singing of Christmas carols from the battery-operated emergency radio on the counter. “Some of the guests arrived before the storm,” Kendall said, a little more cautious now. “The guys are upstairs,” she told him without a blink. She might as well have addedCleaning their guns.
Sinceshe’d let him in instead of one of the local cops he’d spoken to en route, Joe now knew damn well she was alone. Fuck it to hell. So they hadn’t been able to make it through before the storm hit. Which meant he and Kendall were alone in the six-thousand-square-foot house with a killer on the loose. Clearly she wasn’t aware that Treadwell had escaped. No wonder she’d opened the damn door.
If the local cops couldn’t get to the ranch, nobody could, not with the snowstorm raging. But dollars to donuts Treadwell was out there. Somewhere. Storm or no storm. Joe figured they had at least twelve hours before the situation turned to shit.
The fact that Kendall was trying to bluff him into believing she wasn’t alone—now, when he was already inside—made Joe’s blood boil. Not only wasn’t she supposed to be alone. She should be far, far away.
Curling an arm about her waist in an unconsciously protective gesture, she took a sip of her coffee, holding her mug to her mouth as she watched him over the rim. Alone, yet she had on all her warpaint. It was subtle, but . . . there. She didn’t need it, Joe thought, almost mesmerized by large sparkling hazel eyes staring at him unblinkingly. Her lips were a pale pink. He wondered if her nipples were the same rosy color. Jesus. He brought his erotic thoughts back in line.
She took another sip of coffee. “I can’ttell you how great it is that you agreed to do this on such short notice, Don. Really. Thank you. My guy backed out at the last— What?”
The timer went off in a strangely karmic way as he corrected mildly, “Joe.”
Her brow wrinkled briefly. “Yeah, I know,” she shouted over the noise. “Snow was one of Preston’s reasons for not coming. But still, you’d think a guy from New York would know how to drive in a little snow, wouldn’t you?” She slid off the stool, slapped a hand on the buzzer, and grabbed a pair of oven gloves. Every vestige of saliva in Joe’s mouth turned to dust as she bent over. Hell’s frigging bells.
“Not that we get much snow in Seattle—but still, Preston’s originally from New York, so you’d think— You don’t care, right?” She grinned. “Anyhoo—his rental car went into a ditch on the way in from the airport. Silly guy ended up with a sprained wrist. And while I feel his pain, I really do, it doesn’t help me with all the stuff I have to do around here. Not to mention I’ll be too busy bossing around the catering people tomorrow night and won’t have time to do that and be Santa, now will I?”
He couldn’t—not even in his wildest imagination, which he didn’t have—envision this woman dressed in a Santa suit. “You’d dress up as S anta?” Now a Santa suit rented fromPlayboy he could imagine without any problem at all.
She scrunched up her face comically. “Well, yes. If you hadn’t saved my bacon. I would have,” she said quite cheerfully, as she pulled out two sheets of steaming cookies. The fragrance of hot cookies, vanilla, and sweet scented steam filled the kitchen. “I really appreciate that you’re willing to come to my rescue like this at a moment’s notice so I don’t have to. Help yourself to those oven gloves near you. These will be a bit too hot—”
Hot. Definitely hot.


Kendall felt the prickle of sweat beading under her bangs. “I didn’t see a car out there.” Now that she came to think about it, she hadn’t seen a blasted thing. It had been snowing, and the world beyond the lights of the house had been dark. She frowned. “Did Donna drop you off?” Donna was his wife—and Kendall was babbling.
The guy made her incredibly self-conscious as he watched her from steady blue eyes as she moved from oven to counter. He was huge. Tall. Broad. Strong. All of which made her nervous as hell. He was intimidating. His massive shoulders, covered by the bulky, honey-colored shearling coat he still wore, looked a mile wide. She doubted he’d fit into the rented Santa suit she’d brought with her, but she appreciated that he’d come over to at least try it on. Especially in this awful weather.
Which probably wouldn’t matter at this point, she acknowledged. She doubted she’dneed a Santa, since according to the latest weather forecast, this storm would be with them for several days. Poor Denise. She’d been so psyched for this party, but Kendall doubted anyone would be able to make it to the ranch in this storm.
A few of the invitees had arrived several days ago and were staying in the outlying guest cottages. The cabins were well equipped, decorated for the holiday, and self-sufficient. She hadn’t seen anyone in two days. So it was nice to have a bit of company. Even if it was only for an hour or so.
Even if the company in question looked like a large caged beast in a too small cage. He was sitting still, yet he gave off waves of leashed energy. And Lord, he washuge. Kendall wasn’t used to a man towering over her. But Donald Sanders did so, by a good four or five inches. His craggy, unseasonably tanned face was too rugged to be called good-looking, too masculine for her peace of mind. The thick dark hair brushing his collar badly needed a cut, and his lean cheeks could do with a shave.
She had the oddest urge to touch both. One to see if it was as soft as it looked, and the other to see if it was as rough. She curled her fingers into her palm to prevent herself from reaching over to stroke him. He looked to be in his early thirties, which was surprising because his wife, Donna, must be close to sixty. Hell, more power to her.Lucky her, her husband had sex appeal in spades. And Kendall certainly wasn’t immune.
Just looking at the man made her breath catch and her heart race pleasantly. She was almost preternaturally aware of him. Of the length of his dark lashes shadowing those cool blue eyes. Of the small pale scar beside his lower lip, almost buried in the crease of his smile. Of the way his large, tanned hand cradled, almost gently, the red coffee mug.
She had a vivid Technicolor image of that large hand cradling her breast, and she felt her nipples harden and her knees go weak.
Whew! The guy waspotent.
Kendall’s physical awareness of another woman’s husband filled the kitchen like a living entity, making her feel a little guilty. But, hey. What was the harm? It wasn’t as though she’dact on the attraction she felt. It was a bit like craving a large slice of Black Forest cake when one was on a strict diet. Just because she wasn’t going to eat it didn’t mean she didn’t want it.
Except she’d never experienced this sensation in her stomach over a piece of chocolate cake. This was more like the dangerous excitement she’d felt as kid, standing on tippie-toe on the highest diving board. Looking down at that water miles below. Too scared to jump.
“I came by chopper.” His deep voice poured through her like hot buttered rum. He put the Christmas mug down and shrugged out of the heavy coat, revealing a thick off-white wool turtleneck and jeans. Taking off the thick coat didn’t make him look any smaller, or any less intimidating. He was still a bear of a man. Masculine in an intriguing way that made Kendall’s heart do a little hop, skip, and jump. He looked as solid as a rock, with no appearance of body fat and an impressive physique. Her mouth went dry, and she busied herself with the cookies.
She hadn’t felt anything other than fear in so long, it felt wonderful to feel this tug of attraction. Better because she knew there was nothing she could do about it. It just was.
“Set down a half-mile from here,” he continued. “Parked back behind the barn.” He tossed the coat onto a bar stool beside him.
The scent of him—clean male skin, cold night air, a hint of leather—aroused all her senses with an urgency that surprised her. Perhaps her reaction to him was due to his size, Kendall thought. The man looked as though he could wrestle a grizzly bear. Being tall herself, it was intriguing to meet a good-looking guy who was big enough to make her feel petite.
And they’d been in the middle of a conversation. “You came by helicopter—from next door?” She knew Montana was huge. But people actuallyflew from ranch to ranch?
The corner of his mouth kicked up in a half smile.Whoa. Down girl. That small smile was so potent, she wondered what it would be like full strength. Judging from her accelerated heartbeat it was probably a good thing that he’d be leaving soon. To go home to hiswife.
“ ‘Next door’ is more than twenty miles away,” he pointed out, biting into a cookie. “But I didn’t—”
The phone rang. Thank goodness. It was working again. It had been out for what seemed like forever, and she’d left her cell phone up at her cottage. As much as she’d like to have made some personal calls, she had no intention of braving this weather to retrieve her own phone.
Kendall held up a hand to stop him as she picked up the receiver. “Cameron residence.” As she listened every vestige of warmth she’d felt seconds before drained right out of her, as did most of the blood in her head. “I know. It’s been out since this morning. I’m sorry to hear that,” she said flatly into the phone as she watched him pick up the mugs she’d bought to brighten up the dark tones of the kitchen. “No, absolutely. I quite under—” The phone went dead. “—stand.”
Her heart was beating fast again. But this time it had nothing to do with the proximity of a sexy-looking man. She turned away as she returned the receiver carefully to the instrument on the wall. At the same time she lifted the front of her sweater and surreptitiously withdrew the small LadySmith handgun tucked against her skin.
Given the man’s appearance she hadn’t mistaken him for a house cat. But she hadn’t pegged him as a predatory tiger either. More fool her.
“You’re the best so far, ya know that?”She could almost hear Dwight Treadwell’s mild voice echoing like a never forgotten nightmare in the here and now. Obscene in this Christmas-scented kitchen a thousand miles away and a dozen months later. Goosebumps rose on her skin.“Defiant little bitch, ain’t ya? You’re scared as shit, but your eyes say go to hell. This is gonna be fun. F. U. N.”
Treadwell chipped at the Formica tabletop with the tip of what he’d told her was his second favorite knife. There was nothing but mild interest in his eyes as he observed her.
There was no more room for terror in her mind. It was filled to capacity. It felt like forever since he’d grabbed her at the grocery store and forced her, struggling, into the trunk of his car. Had no one noticed him kidnapping her? Had no one heard her screams before he’d knocked her out?
She’d woken to find herself naked, cut out of her clothes, and him standing, smiling, over her, a large, curved knife in his hand. It was already covered with her blood. She screamed—
Kendall turned around to face the man inthis kitchen. She knew the six-inch-long gun only weighed about twenty ounces, but it felt as heavy as lead in her hand. “Oh no you don’t,” she snapped as he started to rise. “You stay right where you are. Keep your hands where I can see them.” She motioned at him with the barrel.
“You’re not Donald Sanders. So just who the hellare you?”

 
Chapter Two
KENDALL THANKEDGOD SHE WASN’T PARALYZED BY HERfear. She’d learned, during her months of therapy, that action cured fear, and inaction created terror. Been there, done that, had the scars to prove it.
She curled her naked body protectively over her bare legs. Her skin was already slippery with her own blood where he’d repeatedly played with her. Short cuts. Long cuts. Shallow. Deep. They all gave Dwight Gus Treadwell pleasure. Each slice made her flinch and cry out. And each flinch caused the bicycle chain he’d used to tether her to the wall to rattle. She could tell that he was growing bored with this. He was going to kill her. Soon.
She shook herself mentally. Back tonow. This guy didn’t have to do anything to appear intimidating. He justwas. Her stomach did flip-flops, and her heart pounded as she trained the gun dead center on his chest. Big or not, a bullet would make a large hole in him. Her hand had a fine tremor she didn’t care if he noticed. She didn’t give a damn if he knew he scared her either. He’d know that even a bad shot from this close would kill him.
Watching him, the scar on Kendall’s throat seemed to burn, and she struggled to find a balance between the knowledge that she was the one with the gun, and the memory of what a determined, violent man could do.
“Kendall.” He said her name softly as he crouched in front of her, stabbing the point of his knife into the floor between her pale, curled toes so he could free his hands to reach for a large roll of canvas. Treadwell wasn’t a big man, he didn’t look like a monster. He had a soft fleshy face and light brown hair. He looked like a teacher. Or a priest. But oh God, he knew how to inflict the most exquisitely painful kind of torture. . . .
This man wasbig. And scary-looking, now that she came to think about it. She realized too late that this was a man who could use his body as a weapon. Big. Strong. Fast.
She didn’t have enough air in her lungs to blow out a birthday candle right now.Don’t show fear. Don’t show fear. Don’t show fear. The mental mantra worked fairly well as she tightened her grip on the gun, refusing to blink.
She’d bought the gun after the attack fifteen months ago. She’d wanted a bigger one—a cannon. But found she couldn’t hold the weight and settled for the .22. And even though she’d gone through months of rigorous training, she’d hoped never to have to do what she was doing now. Pointing the gun at a human target. But palpable fear made her ready and more than willing to pull the trigger.
“Well?” She spread her feet a little for better balance and adjusted her left hand to cup her right. “Who are you and what do you want?” She’d been expecting the neighbor’s husband. He hadn’t corrected her—
The Marlboro Man narrowed his eyes. “Prepared to shoot to kill?” His voice was deep and reverberated through her.
“Not just yet,” Kendall said through her teeth. “Buthell yes. I repeat: Who are you, and what are you doing here?” She still didn’t bat an eyelid, and now the gun didn’t waver in her hands, but her accelerated, sickeningly erratic heartbeats danced behind her eyeballs.
Was he her worst fear? The realization of her nightmares?
God. She’d thought the terror was behind her. What a fool she was to open the door like that. Especially when she was here alone. But damn it, Dwight Gus Treadwell was in jail where he belonged. He’d never get out. And in her own defense, the law of averages wouldn’t send her another attacker. Especially not all the way out here in the wilds of Montana, for God’s sake.
So much for the law of averages.
The question was: Run or shoot?
She debated a fraction of a second too long.
One second he was sitting at the counter; the next her wrist stung as he moved across the tiled floor, brought the side of his hand down, and yanked the gun from her nerveless fingers.
He turned the barrel to point at the middle of her forehead. The small gun looked ridiculous in his big hand. Ridiculous, but just as lethal as if he’d been holding a machine gun. He was close enough that any one of the five bullets in the chamber would kill her. Dead was dead.
She felt the blast furnace heat of his body, he was that close. His breath smelled of coffee, his eyes were ice cold, his hand dead steady. A shudder of fear rippled down her spine and settled in her stomach.
She had a fleeting thought. At least this would be quick.
She made a small, guttural sound as Dwight revealed an array of sharp, shiny objects inside the unrolled canvas. She shook hard enough that her teeth chattered. Tears, snot, and blood mingled wetly on her face as, completely mesmerized by terror, she watched him slip the first of seven instruments from their custom-made slots. He held up the thin, pointy ice pick for her to see.
Blubbering like a baby, she shrank back against the dirty paneling of the trailer. “Why are you do-doing this to me?”
Treadwell’s mouth twitched, the closest he came to a smile. “Because, pretty girl, I can.”
If it was a choice between being shot or toyed with for hours at knife point, she’d choose to be shot.
As yet she wasn’t having to make that choice. There was a third option. Run like hell. She locked her eyes with his and waited the three terrifying years it took for the first second to pass. The fear crouched in her chest, making it impossible to breathe. Soon he wouldn’t have to fire the gun, she’d simply die from lack of oxygen.
“You should’ve shot me at the front door, Miss Metcalf. You didn’t ask for ID, or anything else.”
What kind of killer lectures you on safety procedures? she wondered silently. Through the fog of panic, she opted for another strategy. Keep him talking. She figured if he was talking, he wasn’t shooting her. If he wasn’t shooting her, she had a chance of escaping.
“Give me my gun back. I can rectify that mistake in a flash.”
She flinched when he drew her long hair away from her neck with the cold steel barrel of her own gun. If his eyes had been chilly seconds ago, when he saw the still livid scar on her throat they went Arctic. “Son of a bitch.”
The scar was red and ugly. But she was alive. While he looked his fill, Kendall brought her knee up in a lightning-swift move perfected in her self-defense classes.
She was quick, but he was a split second quicker. Her knee struck him in the balls, but he shifted just in time to prevent full impact. His shout of pain and his instinctive half crouch gave her just enough time to make a run for it. His hand shot out to grab her arm in passing, but she was too scared, too determined to let that happen. Again.
She flew.
She knew the enormous house pretty well. He didn’t. She bolted past him as he gasped for air. Past the counter where their bright red mugs and the coffeepot still sat. Through the dining nook. Through the great room with its thirty-five-foot-high limestone fireplace, soaring cedar trusses, and thirty-foot-tall, half-decorated Christmas tree.
Kendall’s bare feet slapped the polished hardwood floors as she ran.Notagainnotagainnotagain. She skirted the trio of heavy leather sofas, skidded around two tall ficus trees in their giant terra-cotta pots, almost careened into the ladder she’d left beside the Christmas tree, and hurdled like an Olympian over the last few half-filled boxes of Denise’s Christmas ornaments waiting to go up. Although she might not have been as well trained as an athlete, she was a hell of a lot more motivated.
The massive, open-riser cedar staircase rose in front of her. There were eight bedrooms up there. All of them with solid-core doors, and locks. Her breath was rapid and erratic as she started running flat-out up the stairs, her heartbeat in time with the pounding of her bare feet on the hardwood.
PleaseGodpleaseGodpleaseGod—
She was halfway up when his forearm suddenly hooked her around the waist. The world spun dizzily as he lifted her off her feet. At the feel of his viselike grip around her middle, Kendall went apeshit. Twisting and bucking, she screamed bloody murder at the top of her lungs as she tried to kick backward.
There was, of course, no one to hear her except her attacker.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he shouted above her shrieks of fear and rage as he carried her, kicking and struggling, toward the cluster of sofas before the massive fireplace.
But she’d heard that before. The words settled inside her like bricks. Stay still and suffer. She struggled and bucked as her mind raced with the endless things he could do to cause her pain. Each possibility ratcheted up her anxiety, causing her to fight harder as he moved toward the sofas with her flailing body hooked easily beneath one arm.


Joe dropped her onto the closest one, then held her arm as she tried to shoot to her feet. “Easy. Easy— Damn it, woman, no biting! Sit your pretty ass down. I swear I’m not going to hurt you. We need to talk.”
There wasn’t a vestige of color in her face. Amber freckles stood out across her ashen cheeks like cinnamon sprinkled on fresh snow. Her pretty hazel eyes were terror-wild as she stared up at him. Joe felt like a heel for scaring her. Feeling like a heel pissed him off. The fact that she could be stone fuckingdead right now pissed him off even more. He’d handled this wrong. Joe hated being wrong.
“You have five bullets in that peashooter of yours,” he said grimly. “You should’veshot me, for Christ sake. Don’t give an attacker a chance to take the gun from you. Didn’t they teach you that at— Oh no you don’t.” He yanked her by the arm as she tried to make a break for it. She sank against the soft, copper-colored leather, her chest heaving beneath the cheerful red sweater.
“You don’t think I’m going to sit here passively while you do God only knows what to me, do you?” she demanded through white lips, breath hitching. Her entire body vibrated with tension as she watched him like a mongoose watched a snake.
Joe withdrew his hand from her arm. She rubbed where he’d been holding her with her other hand. Now that he’d seen the obscene scar running across the base of her throat he felt sick to his stomach. He rubbed his hand across his face. “Don’t run. Please,” he said quietly, dragging his gaze away from the healing gash made by Dwight Treadwell’s Ka-Bar knife. The scar was an obscenity across the smooth skin of Kendall Metcalf’s lovely throat just above the neckline of her cheerful red sweater.
“I’m not going to sit here and chat with you before—” Her throat moved and she managed thickly. “Before—anything.”
He felt like a God-damned bull in a china shop. When the hell had this turned from crap to shit? “We got off on the wrong foot—”
“Gee. Ya think?” she interrupted, a little color returning to her cheeks. Sparks made her hazel eyes appear fiery green. “What’s the plan here, pal? I’m not going softly into that good night without fighting you tooth and nail, and I sure as hell refuse to have a polite conversation beforehand.”
Joe rubbed a hand across his jaw. Shit. What a frigging mess. He gave her a steady look. She shot him a look of pure loathing. Fair enough.
He pulled her little peashooter out of his belt in back. “Here.” She took it, flipped the safety off, pointed it at his groin, and glared at hi m.
“Name’s Joe Zorn.” He took his wallet out of his hip pocket and flipped it open so she could see the bad photograph on his driver’s license.
She frowned. “That expired three weeks ago.”
Ah, hell! So it had. “That’s not the damn point, lady. It’s just ID—” Joe ran his fingers through his hair in frustration. “Look. Your business partner, Rebecca Metzner, hired me to protect you.” So much for his first vacation in two years. His boss, Roz, had hauled his ass off the slopes to do so.
And look at the fine damn job he was doing protecting her so far, he thought with disgust. The woman looked ready to have a freaking heart attack.
“But I gotta tell you, getting my nads shot off isn’t part of the contract, so could you point that thing someplace else?”
She clicked on the safety, lowered the small barrel,slightly, and scooted back into the corner of the sofa. There wasn’t an atom of her body that wasn’t ready for flight. Even her flaming hair seemed to crackle and lift away from her shoulders as she moved, making a fiery nimbus around her head.
Dragging in a ragged breath, she gave him a flat stare, chin tilted. Which exposed the raised red keloid tissue. “Protect me from what?”
Christ, that scar was going to haunt him into his next lifetime. He felt too damn big. He’d been sent to protect her, and instead he’d scared the poor woman senseless. She needed protection from her protector, for God’s sake. “Who,” he corrected.
Her pretty pinking-up lips formed the wordwho, but no sound emerged. She knew who. “Wh—” She had to lick her lips before she could get out that much.
He gently took the wavering gun from her hand and laid it on the coffee table between them, before she accidentally on purpose shot him. “Dwight Gus Treadwell.”
Even before he’d finished speaking, every vestige of returning color drained from her face. “No!” Her hand flew instinctively to her throat. “He’s in Washington State Prison.”
Joe shook his head, and the spark went out of her eyes.
She wet her lower lip, clearly trying to marshal her emotions before she whispered, “He won’t look for me in Montana.” She pulled her bare feet up close to her body, hugging her knees with her arms, and gave him a look that sent shards of ice through Joe’s veins. A look that said she knew she wasn’t safe. Anywhere.
She crossed one pale, slender foot over the other, curling her toes defensively. Joe frowned at how ridiculously . . .vulnerable her feet looked. He dragged his gaze back to her face.
Her large hazel-green eyes glittered. Not with tears, but with fury. “That psycho knows where I am, doesn’t he?”
Without a doubt. Joe could practically hear shark music as the son of a bitch got closer. “The guards tossed his room after he escaped early this morning. They found a copy of theSeattle Post-Intelligencer. One article had been torn out.”
She blanched. “ ‘Local Designer Returns to Work After Harrowing Ordeal with Serial Killer.’ ” She quoted as if reading the headline.
He nodded. “Yeah. Which means he knows about the party tomorrow night. Has the location.” Sheer, unadulterated terror showed in her expressive eyes.Shit. Shit and double shit. “Doesn’t mean he’ll come after you,” Joe added, though even he didn’t believe the backpeddling in his addendum.
“He promised at his sentencing that he’d find a way to kill me.” Kendall hugged her calves even tighter. From her tone and the haunted look in her eyes, Joe figured she’d replayed that ugly moment in her mind a million times.
Just seeing the photographs from Treadwell’s crime scenes were enough to turn Joe’s stomach. She was lucky,damn lucky, to be alive.
He was here to make sure she stayed that way.
“I’m just here as a precaution. Think about it. Treadwell is on the run with no money, no nothing. He’ll be recaptured soon but until then, I’m here to keep you safe.”
She met his gaze, her eyes haunted but steady. “I appreciate the sentiment, but seventeen hours—alifetime in Kendall Marie Metcalf years—being taunted and tortured by that lunatic before he slashed my throat taught me there’s no such thing assafe. ”

 
Chapter Three
KENDALL’S MIND SHIED AWAY FROM THE MEMORY OFthat hellish eternity spent with Treadwell. Without conscious thought she lay her hand protectively against the base of her throat as she scanned the great room with a professional eye. Mentally she started making a list of what had to be done before she could leave. A coping mechanism she’d perfected in the last few months. She’d discovered that if she kept her body and mind busy enough, she could keep the horrific memories at bay.Almost.
She needed to focus on what had to be done now so she didn’t lapse into a full-blown panic attack.
She’d been so tired. So terrifyingly debilitated by her terror for those hours with Dwight Treadwell, that she’d almost begged him to end it—
“Beg me.”
“Go to hell.”
He positioned the paring knife just above her left breast and applied just enough pressure for the tip to pierce her skin.
She gritted her teeth to prevent herself from crying out.
He did it again and again, decorating her torso with a neat pattern of dots. Each dot burned like fire.
“Beg me now, pretty girl,” he whispered, leaning close to her ear.
“F-fuck you.”
Stop. Stop.Stop!
The tree. The tree still had to be finished. Three hours. Tops. The bedrooms were ready for the onslaught of guests, the mantels—oh blast it—except for the one in the small downstairs office, were done. That one would take at least an h—
Good God! What thehell was she thinking? She jumped to her feet. Ready for action when there was no action to be taken. “We have to tell Denise to cancel the party!” Damn. Damn. Damn. The phone wasn’t working, and according to Joe, they couldn’t leave until the high winds and this snowstorm abated at least enough to make their trip marginally safer.
She started to pace. It was a nice big room, and she lengthened her stride as her mind raced. “We have to contact the guests in the cottages. They’ll come with us when we go, of course, but we should warn them about Treadwell n—”
“No.”
“No?” She stopped pacing for a second. Had she taken all the flower arrangements from the mudroom to the bedrooms? She’d better check— She frowned at him. “No, what?”
“No, we are not hauling innocent people with us all over God’s creation. When we leave it’ll be at a moment’s notice. And just the two of us.” He rose, withdrawing a large, nasty-looking black gun from the waistband at the small of his back. It looked mean, and powerful, and as if it meant business. Very much like the man carrying it.
Even with Joe and his big gun here with her, her body was taut with fear. Memories of Treadwell and what he’d done to her were as much a part of her now as her distinctive red hair. She counted her own heartbeats as Joe stood.
“Come with me.” He picked up her girl gun and handed it to her. He waited while she tucked it into the elastic waist of her leggings, then started walking, clearly expecting her to follow. “I want to check all the windows and doors.”
“Sure,” she murmured absently, following him across the enormous room. She wasn’t much of a follower, but where Joe and that cannon went, so goeth Kendall Metcalf. “There are only two couples—”
“I don’t give a damn whether they’re crickets I can stick in my back pocket. Nobody goes with us to slow us down. Conversation closed.”
Conversation closed,she mimicked silently as she followed him into the dimly lit kitchen. The radio was still playing softly, and she went to turn it off to save the batteries as Joe checked the latches on the bay window overlooking the snow-blanketed front yard.
She didn’t give a damn what he said. She had no intention of leaving four unsuspecting people here for that—that monster to find.
Joe pulled the oak shutters closed over the black-and-white scene outside just as the lights flickered. They came on again briefly, then went out, plunging the entire house into pitch darkness.
Treadwell exchanged the small paring knife for a big one, pausing only long enough to wipe the flecks of dried blood from his previous toy on her bare leg. She screamed in earnest when he started taking shallow slashes at her skin as he connected dots in an obscene scarlet geometric pattern.
The lights went out. . . .
Kendall froze beside the center island, a feeling of dread replacing her concern about Denise’s guests. “Oh, God. He’s here.”
“Not possible,” Joe assured her. “Hang tight, the generator—” The lights came back on. “—will kick in. Go and turn—”
“The outside lights off.” She was already striding toward the mudroom where that control panel was located. She turned to look at Joe. He’d stopped dead in the middle of the kitchen. “Coming?”
“Yeah.” His eyes looked a little glazed.
Kendall shot him a worried glance. “You’re not sick are you?”
He swiped a large hand across his jaw. “I’m fine. Hit those lights. I want to get cracking and check upstairs.”
He sounded as if he were coming down with a cold. Which was unfortunate. Because just looking at him madeher feel hot all over.
Odd because she had felt nothing sexually in over a year. Not a flicker. Not even a nanosecond of thought. Yet here was this giant of a man, with his dangerous eyes and his sexy mouth and all she could think of was wanting to climb his body and kiss him.
She shook her head. She was really losing it if she was this tempted to jump the bones of a man she’d just met. She’d had two fairly long-term relationships over the last ten years. She’d dated Jerry for a year, and Andy for more than six months, before sleeping with him.
She just wasn’t that spontaneous. She liked to think things through. Weigh the pros and cons. Deliberate. Kendall bit her lip as she pondered this weird anomaly. Part of it, she admitted to herself, was the latent strength and power of Joe Zorn. Not only did he make her feel sexy; more important, he made her feel safe.
Almost—almost—back to her previously invincible self. That in itself was a big turn-on to a woman who’d begun to believe her fear was part and parcel of who she’d become.
The scars Dwight Gus Treadwell had inflicted on her weren’t all on the outside.
Joe followed her to the door of the mudroom and waited while she dealt with all the plugs and switches for the outside Christmas lights. That done, she crossed to the counter and started cleaning up the mess she’d made earlier when she’d done the floral arrangements.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Her hands cradling wet newspapers filled with flower stems and stripped leaves, she glanced at Joe over her shoulder. “Cleaning up my mess.”
He rolled his eyes. A very male, extremely irritating gesture, that immediately brought back to mind the reason she was racing hither and yon like a florist on speed.
“Leave it,” he told her shortly, motioning for her to go through the door ahead of him.
Kendall was so filled with nervous energy, she didn’t know what to do with herself. She dumped the armload of cuttings into a nearby pail and busied herself washing and drying her hands. “You’re annoyingly bossy, Mr. Zorn.” She turned to look at him.
His gaze drifted to her mouth, and something elemental sparked between them. He hadn’t moved from the doorway, but Kendall felt crowded, breathlessly so. He lifted his eyes back to hers. “And you’re annoyingly . . . busy, Miss Metcalf,” Joe drawled.
“Yeah?” He wasn’t getting out of the way, and she started to move past him. “Well, there are a billion things to d—” He snagged her arm and her gaze clashed with his. She forgot what she’d been about to say, her breath stopping altogether at the blaze of predatory heat she saw in his eyes. The smell of him—damp wool, woodsy cologne,male— was intoxicating, and made her giddy with longing.
She ached to slide her hands under his sweater so she could touch hot, bare skin. She wanted to stand on her toes and press her mouth to his. God. She wanted him to kiss her until she forgot why he was here.
Amusement danced in the smoldering flame of his blue eyes, but he didn’t smile back. “We’ve known each other all of—what? A couple of hours? And I already know a lot about you.”
“Oh yeah?” She dragged in a ragged breath. “Like what?” It was almost impossible to have a coherent thought when all her senses were on overload. The smell of him, the strength of his hand on her arm, the radiant heat of his big body so close to hers—all conspired to make Kendall’s brain fog up.
“You babble when you’re nervous.”
Since right now she was pretty much speechless with lust, she blinked. “Excuse me?I don’tbabble. . . . Okay, yes, guess I do. Sometimes.”
“You make busywork when you’re scared.”
That too. She narrowed her eyes and glared at Mr. Know It All. “So? I also own my own—very successful I might add—business, makethe best homemade chili, and knit sweaters to die for. What’s your point?”
His gaze moved over her face in a disconcertingly thorough sweep as though he were memorizing each feature, every freckle. Kendall’s breath caught in her throat as their bodies seemed to gravitate closer without them actually moving their feet.
“I bet your bras match your panties.”
Nowthat came out of left field. It also jump-started her heart as though she’d been resuscitated. Holy cow. “That’s an incredibly personal observation for a stranger to make,” she told him primly. “And by the way. You’d be wrong. I don’t wear panties.” A thong, but not panties.
“Ah, Jesus.” He choked back a laugh. “No fair.” He was still smiling when his big hands framed her face, then he touched a gentle hand to her hair. “Cool, not hot.” His voice was husky, thick with desire. A desire Kendall, too, was feeling. He stroked his hand down the glossy curtain, then curled his fingers beneath the strands to cup the back of her head, drawing her toward him.
“You have the most beautiful hair.” He brought a handful to his face, rubbing the bright strands against his skin. “So soft. Smells like pears. Delicious.” He sifted the filaments through his fingers, watching intently as the red-gold strands drifted to cling to her shoulders and breasts.
He traced her lower lip with his thumb, then bent his head and kissed her as if he were a starving man at a feast. The pleasure of his open mouth on hers was so intense Kendall went deaf and blind with it. His lips were firm, his taste heady, and the unexpected intimacy of his tongue curling against hers was shockingly sweet. Oh, Lord, Kendall thought, that feelsso good. Wonderful. Amazing.
Fisting his hands in her hair, Joe pushed her back against the doorframe, kissing her with the same urgency she felt. He pressed his knee to the juncture of her thighs. She whimpered with relief. She clutched at his arms for balance as he drew her against the muscled plane of his chest. She needn’t have bothered. Joe wrapped his arms around her and held her tightly against him, until their heartbeats echoed one another.
She went up on tiptoe, wrapping her arms around his neck, eagerly pressing her mouth to his. Eyes closed, her senses flooded with the taste of him as he explored her mouth. There was nothing tentative about the kiss. Apparently he’d been as curious about the taste of her as she had been of him.
She made a soft, inarticulate sound of need, of hunger, her soft breasts pinned against the hard plane of his chest.
A phone rang. An old-fashioned sound.Ring, ring, ring. Her cell phone played Beethoven’s Fifth. She came up out of the kiss like a sleepwalker rudely awakened and blinked back to awareness.
Joe pulled his phone from a back pocket. “What do we have, Roz?” He curled his arm around Kendall’s shoulder, pulling her tightly against him as he listened. Including her in the conversation even though she only heard his half.


“Damn, I wish to hell I could get you out of here now,” he told Kendall as she accompanied him from room to room as he checked the locks on all the windows and doors upstairs. He’d filled her in on most of what Roz had told him, but there were details, like several more killings, that were—hell, were overkill. She was scared enough knowing Treadwell was on his way. She didn’t need the added burden of knowing the man was killing anyone in his path to get to her.
He considered the fact thathe’d made it here with time to spare. Had Treadwell? He didn’tfeel anyone out there. Not yet. Considering the ferocity of the storm, coupled with numerous roadblocks, it was too soon. But Joe could easily imagine the sleaze hiding out in the dark, biding his time, waiting for just the right moment. This place was a security nightmare. But he didn’t intend on hanging around long enough for that to matter. They’d listened to the weather forecast on the emergency radio, confirming what Roz had told him. This part of the state had come to a complete standstill for the duration.
When Roz’s call had come earlier that day, he’d closed his suitcase, thrown his coat back on, and hauled ass to the airfield, where he’d rented a chopper. An hour’s vacation every two years was apparently sufficient for both of them.
He’d known about the incoming storm and flown in anyway, just making it in the zero visibility. The massive snowstorm swept in quicker than predicted. The full fury of the storm hit about fifteen minutes into his flight, and from the sound of it, was still getting worse. “I’m willing to take the risk of leaving now,” Kendall told him, rubbing her arms as if she were cold. The house was a comfortable seventy degrees. “Of course I wouldn’t want you to do anything dangerous—”
Joe smiled, touching a finger to her pale cheek. “Sweetheart, Ilive for danger. If I thought we had a snowball’s chance in hell of making it out of here, we’d be long gone. But it would be suicide trying to fly in this; the snow’s too heavy, the wind too high.”
He’d been damn fortunate he’d been able to land in the high winds and blinding snow swirls earlier. The storm was considerably worse now. He’d known before he arrived that there would be no way to get her out until the storm let up some. Known it, but sure as hell hadn’t liked it.
“There’s a snowmobile in the garage.”
“If I thought we had a shot, believe me, I’d take it.” They weren’t going anywhere tonight, but somehow, he’d get her out before tomorrow morning. And before Treadwell found his way to the Camerons’ ranch.
“As long as we’re gone before he shows up,” Kendall muttered, reading his mind. Again. “If we can’t leave, he can’t get here. Right?”
“One would hope.” He twisted both locks on an upstairs bathroom window. The room was small, especially with both of them in it. He was becoming addicted to the fresh, crisp fragrance of pears. The kiss downstairs seemed to have happened years ago instead of less than half an hour. He wanted more than to taste her mouth.
Joe wanted to feel her bare skin against his. He wanted to taste her all over. He wanted to feel the weight of her breasts and taste her nipples against his tongue.
It was good to want things, he thought wryly.
“At least your Roz was able to reach Denise and Adam and warn them not to come home even if—when—the storm clears.”
Kendall straightened up a basket of luxurious toiletries on the counter as she spoke. “I just wish somebody could get ahold of the guests in the cottages.” She refolded two perfectly folded towels, smoothed them flat, then hung them back over the rod.
“Roz and Denise will both keep trying.” She was so filled with nervous energy he wondered if he should suggest they go down to the gym in the basement. She could run a few hundred miles on the treadmill. That might tire her out—although Joe had some better ideas on how he could channel some of that frenetic energy.
Biting back a smile as she folded a point in the edge of the toilet paper, he motioned her out of the bathroom. She scanned the small room before exiting, turning left down the wide hallway. A single strand of her long hair clung to his sweater as she passed, and stuck there, tying them together, as he followed her down the hallway.
“Realistically,” she said, making Joe speed up to keep pace with her long legs, “how long do you estimate it’ll take him to get here?”
Family pictures filled the walls on either side of them. Next to the blissfully happy photograph of Denise and Adam’s no-expense-spared wedding was one of himself and Denise attheir hurry-the-justice-of-the-peace-is-waiting wedding. The fact that they were all good friends hadn’t changed with either marriage. For a moment Joe had the foolish urge to share that information with Kendall. Then he remembered that she was an assignment. Strange that she felt like—more.
“We started with nine hundred and three miles between him and us,” he told her. “Bellingham to Bozeman. In good weather, thirteen, thirteen and a half hours,” he told her, stepping into an unoccupied bedroom. The king-sized bed, draped in red velvet and accented with Christmas-themed pillows, looked decadently inviting.
“He escaped at five this morning.” He crossed to the bank of windows on the far wall. Really. He shouldn’t be anywhere near a bed with this woman around. Bed? Hell. Who needed a bed? Any fairly flat surface would work.
She glanced at her watch. “Twelve hours.”
Joe locked first one window, then the other. “He’s encountering the same storm we are. So he won’t be moving fast. Plus he has to find transportation.” He decided not to tell Kendall that Treadwell had slashed the throats of two prison guards, killing both, before he’d carjacked a guy on his way to work. Took his clothes as well. That guy too was dead.
Three people dead before Treadwell crossed into Mullan, Idaho, at nine this morning. Another when he’d switched vehicles in Foracre, Montana, at noon. All with Treadwell’s signature. They’d been brutalized, played with. Sliced and diced, before he’d cut their throats.
At Roz’s last update, the authorities knew Treadwell was on Route 90 and headed this way.
The snow must be putting a serious crimp in his travel plans, but Treadwell was determined enough, crazy enough, to persevere.
The son of a bitch was like a heat-seeking missile.
Joe had given serious consideration to taking one of the snowmobiles. Denise and Adam had half a dozen guest cabins on their property. Too close to the house, he’d already decided. But he knew of several holiday cabins on neighboring ranches fairly nearby. Of coursefairly in these parts was twenty-plus frigging miles. And while no one would find her there, traveling those distances in this weather would be asking for trouble.
He might be able to stand the elements, although honestly Joe knew even he wouldn’t make it far or fast. One thing was for sure. Kendall would never make it down the freaking driveway in this weather. It was brutal out there. Even experienced ranchers and locals didn’t brave the outdoors when it was this bad.
But the second the snow let up enough to take off, they’d be gone. If he could get the chopper up, he’d take her to the Andersons’ place thirty miles south of here. If the winds were still too high, he’d risk one of the snowmobiles. But get her away he would.
Treadwell knew to come here, but he’d never find Kendall once Joe whisked her away from the Camerons’ ranch. Damn it, he wished to hell they could leave now.
“I’m willing to risk it, if you are,” Kendall offered as if she were reading his mind. It was a disconcerting habit she had.
“Too dangerous.” Joe brushed aside a strand of hair caught in her lashes, then let his fingers linger on the warmth of her cheek for just a second.
It was a mistake. Because he didn’t want to lightly touch this woman with victory scars on her body and fear in her eyes. He wanted to take her to bed and love her all night long. He wanted to wake up beside her in the morning and see her with sunlight on her face.
To paraphrase old Will Shakespeare, Joe thought facetiously, he was melting in his own fire. Too bad. He’d have to burn alone. Because the last thing this woman needed right now was his horny self. “I’m going to take a shower.”
Cold.

 
Chapter Four
JOE TOLD HER TO PICK A ROOM, ANY ROOM.KENDALLchose the last bedroom at the end of the hall. It was beautifully decorated in cream and terra-cotta, and even had its own fragrant Christmas tree in the corner near the fireplace. Not that she cared about the decor at this point. The room was big and had a luxurious en suite bathroom. It also had an interleading door into an adjoining room.
Three exits should they need one. Forgetthey. She needed multiple ways out. The ordeal with Treadwell had taught her that—just as he’d taught her the true meaning of terror.
Joe locked the bedroom door, then went around checking windows. “All secure. Stay here while I shower. I won’t be long.”
Kendall was tempted—more than a little—to ask if she could shower with him or just sit on the floor so she wouldn’t be alone. But that would be turning her power over to Treadwell on a silver platter and she refused to do that. She’d worked too hard, come too far to do that again. Instead she asked, “Would you mind if I used your phone?”
He handed it to her, warning her that the charge was getting low and not to talk too long, then went into the bathroom, leaving the door slightly ajar.
She gave a bemused shake of her head as the shower turned on. She imagined him dragging that thick cream-colored sweater over his head, she imagined him dropping his jeans. God help her, she imagined Joe Zorn buck-naked under the spray. All of which gave her a hot flash.
Her emotions were all over the place. She needed to focus and get her brain in gear. She quickly dialed Becky’s home number.
“Call him your early Christmas present,” Becky told her as soon as Kendall let her know Joe was with her. His cell phone was crackly, and Becky’s voice faded in and out every time Kendall moved her head. “I’ve been . . . ing to call you since . . . cops called this . . . rning at the crack of,” Becky continued. “I even booked a flight out there to come and . . . ind you myself. Damn it. You scared the crap out of me w . . . dn’t reach . . . ou.”
Kendall wasn’t feeling too sanguine herself. Both her body and brain were on sensory overload. She walked over to the window to see if the reception was any better. Worse. She crossed the room to sit on the slipper chair at the dressing table.
“Detect . . . Abrahams r . . . mended the Agency wh . . . lled . . . ell Tre . . . escaped,” Rebecca told her. The cell phone was trying to die. Kendall turned her head slightly for better reception. “The manhunt—” Becky’s voice was clearer. “—Roadblocks yadda, yadda, yadda are all over the news here. Despite the weather up your way, he’s getting past all these damn people hunting for him.
“Every time that monster ditches a car and highjacks another one, hekills someone. The press has been Johnny-on-the-spot with the lurid details. I hate to scare you even more, sweetie, but you do know at last count he’s killed seven people today?”
Kendall let out a little murmur of panic. She hadn’t known. But she’d bet Joe had. She swallowed down the lump of terror in her throat.Sound calm. Be calm. “The house is locked up like Fort Knox, and Joe has the biggest gun I’ve ever seen.” She suspected there were a lot of other very big things about Joe Zorn, and smiled. Really. Fantasizing about him beat to hell being scared out of her mind.
“Don’t let him out of your sight,” Beck warned unnecessarily. “On the plus side, if the local cops can’t get to you, neither can Sick Bastard. But be careful until they have him in custody.”
Kendall had no trouble getting Becky to agree to cancel her plane reservation. With the danger of Treadwell looming, and the weather, there obviously wasn’t going to be any party tomorrow night.
“I don’t give a damn about the commission,” her friend said fiercely. “I just want you safe. I’m glad the Agency guy’s there with you so you aren’t alone. But donot, ” she warned, “do any of that stupid dumb girlie crap you see in movies, like wandering around outside in the dark by yourself. Let this Joe guy stick to you like glue until Treadwell is back in chains. Is back in a cage. Is somewhere far, far away fromyou. Promise me.”
“Believe me,” Kendall said dryly, “that’s an easy promise to make.” Joe had proved just how easily someone could take her gun away from her. So much for her false sense of confidence in her ability to protect herself.
She kept an eye on the slightly ajar bathroom door. He was gloriously naked in there. Was he tanned all over? Good God. Stop that, she admonished herself. Butwhy? her devil side demanded. It wasn’t as though the man was a mind reader for heaven’s sake. It was much easier to fixate on Joe’s body than it was knowing a killer was rapidly approaching. Both thoughts made her blood pressure throb behind her eyeballs. “I’m not saying I’m not terrified at the prospect of Treadwell showing up, but having Joe here does wonders for my . . . comfort level.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line as her voice trailed off. “And? But? If? And then?” Becky tried to finish the thought. “If you don’t trust him to keep your ass safe, tell me. I’ll call Roz and have her—do something.”
“He’ll keep me safe from Treadwell,” Kendall assured her friend. “But who’s going to keep me safe from Joe Zorn?”


While Kendall went in to take a shower, Joe turned off the emergency radio they’d brought upstairs with them. He’d had enough freaking Christmas carols to last a whil e. He crouched and lit kindling in the fireplace. Probably not such a swift idea. Coupled with the muted glow of the oil lamp, the ambiance was a little too romantic and seductive for his peace of mind. Especially now that he’d kissed her.
If Roz hadn’t called when she had, Joe wasn’t certain he wouldn’t have taken Kendall right there on the floor of the mudroom. He raked a hand through his wet hair.
There was no getting away from the fact that he was attracted to her. God only knew, what man wouldn’t be? She was gorgeous, smart, funny, and sexy as hell.
He’d felt this tug of attraction before. Several times, he thought ruefully, as he turned up the wick in the lantern as far as it would go. The room became marginally brighter, and he crossed to sit in one of the extra-wide easy chairs flanking the fireplace.
He liked women. He particularly enjoyed attractive, intelligent women. Which Kendall Metcalf was. In spades. So his heightened physical attraction to her didn’t come as a surprise. The woman’s sex appeal was off the charts.
Stretching out his long legs toward the fire, Joe absently rested his Heckler & Koch double-action pistol on the chair arm beside him, keeping his hand on the custom tooled grip as he contemplated the flames dancing in the old-fashioned stone fireplace.
He wasn’t a guy who spent a hell of a lot of time contemplating his own navel, but his visceral reaction to Kendall Metcalf was as intriguing as it was puzzling. He tried to pinpoint exactlywhat he felt when he was with her. The high lust factor was a given. But it was the strange, unfamiliar feeling in his chest that had him mystified.
A . . . flutter? An extra heartbeat?Something that was wholly alien. He hadn’t felt this way about Denise. Which was probably why, five months after saying their vows, their marriage had ended with a fizzle in divorce. That had been almost ten years ago. Clearly Denise felt that aliensomething for Adam Cameron.
They had three kids, another on the way, and appeared to be as in love now as they had been when Adam had rushed the ex–Mrs. Zorn to the altar three months after her divorce was final.
Joe was happy for them. He really was. He liked them both. He hadn’t even been heartbroken at the end of his marriage. He thought he should have been, but he wasn’t. Every now and then he wondered, on a purely academic level, exactly what that elusivesomething factor was that the couple had and he’d never found. Denise called itspark, magic, and lots of other girl words that until a few hours ago, he’d pretty much dismissed as the rantings of a romantic.
Sparkwas a pretty damned good description for the sensations currently annoying him. Why Kendall Metcalf? Why now? When his total focus should be on protecting her from Treadwell. He should be thinking about guns, ammo, close combat, points of entry, etc. Instead his mind conjured all sorts of enticing images of his protectee.
Sparks, he decided, were distracting as hell.
Without making a conscious decision, Joe had created this nomadic lifestyle. Well, not created it so much as fallen into it without much objection.
Every now and then he thought about assessing his choices but then backed off immediately. In his experience, nothing good ever came of that. He shook his head at musings brought on by flickering firelight and thoughts of a wet, naked Kendall in the other room. “Get a grip,” he told himself firmly.
From his vantage point he could keep an eye on all the doors in the room. He didn’t like sitting here waiting like this. He was a man of action. But Mother Nature wasn’t cooperating. If he had backup he’d go outside and check the perimeter. But he wouldn’t take Kendall out there, and he sure as hell wasn’t leaving her in the house alone.
It would suit him perfectly if that son of a bitch Dwight Treadwell did one right thing in his miserable sick life: walk in right now.
One shot between the bastard’s eyes and it would be over.
Roz had faxed Joe the court transcripts while he’d been waiting for the ground crew to ready the chopper. He’d scanned them while standing in the small airport terminal. And he’d been sickened by what Kendall had endured at the hands of that psychopath. He’d also felt the ticking of the time bomb, knowing that while he was en route to her, Treadwell was, too.
At the time Treadwell had kidnapped and tortured Kendall, it was known that he’d brutalized and then killed five other women. At his arraignment that number had jumped horrifically to twenty-three.
Kendall was Treadwell’s only living victim, the one person left to identify the serial killer in court. Which, according to the transcripts Joe had read, she’d done. Clearly and succinctly. Her attention to detail and minutia in her party-planning business had served her well.
She’d recalled in stark, no-nonsense language details that only one of his victims could possibly know. She’d given a specific and succinct physical description of the man. And she’d gone into clinical, precise detail about what she’d endured for seventeen hours at Treadwell’s hands, the reading of which had turned Joe’s stomach.
What she’d suffered, and the retelling of it, had taken unimaginable guts. Joe had a clear picture of the physical characteristics of the serial killer. He’d also understood the subtext in Kendall’s testimony. The sick bastard had played with her like a cat with a half-dead mouse. He’d slashed her deep and he’d slashed her shallow, letting her suffer as he taunted her with death but kept her alive. Barely.
He’d kept her holed up in a trailer deep in the woods south of Seattle for almost two days.
Considering the timeline, the slash across her throat must’ve still been raw and livid as she sat in court facing her attacker. The jury had deliberated for all of forty-seven minutes before coming back with a guilty verdict on all counts.
Washington was one of thirty-eight states with the death penalty. But Treadwell’s attorneys had managed to get a sentencing recommendation of life without parole after the verdict in exchange for the killer’s cooperation in finding the bodies of the other eighteen victims he’d confessed to killing.
Dwight Gus Treadwell had received twenty-three consecutive life sentences, plus one concurrent sentence for the attempted first degree on Kendall and another seventy-five years for her torture. He’d also promised, before the court, that he would one day find Kendall Metcalf and finish the job he’d started. And that the next time she wouldn’t get away.
Yet despite all that, he’d somehow managed to escape while being transported between the intake center and a more secure facility. Joe cursed the fact that all inmates, and Treadwell in particular, were given a thorough evaluation to determine the right prison for their particular personality and propensity toward violence.
Hell, if it were up to him, Treadwell would be drawn and quartered, dropped down a hole, and left to rot slowly and painfully. An eye for an eye.
The shower turned off and he glanced up just in time to see, through the partially open door, a flash of pale hip and leg as Kendall reached for a towel.
It was going to be a long night. He’d wait for the first lull in the storm and haul ass outta there.
Fully dressed once again, Kendall walked out of the bathroom blotting her hair dry with a towel. She looked deliciously touchable with her still-damp pink cheeks, shining hazel eyes, and dewy velvety skin.
“Let’s talk about our sleeping arrangements,” she said without preamble. Joe admired her straightforwardness. He admired a hell of a lot of other things, like the fact that he could see she was no longer wearing a bra under that red sweater. He’d like to peel—Hey! Up here, pal!
Already disconcerted by his strong physical attraction to her, Joe wasn’t about to debate Kendall on the sleeping arrangements. “You’re going to offer to sleep in one of these chairs, right?” he said roughly, trying to ignore the gentle sway of her unfettered breasts and the way the firelight painted her in shades of amber.
“No, actually, I wasn’t.” Her lips twitched.
Joe watched her pace. She smelled delectably of fresh pears. He’d used the same soap and shampoo, but he smelled like—a guy. “Good. Because then you’d be between the door and me,” he pointed out, wishing to hell she’d land somewhere. She was making him dizzy pacing like that. Or was it the clean soapy fragrance of her as she passed him? Or her braless state? Or her bare feet—damn it to hell, he was becoming quite attached to her bare, endearingly too large, feet. Joe felt a sharp stab in his belly that was neither pain nor pleasure as she did another circuit of the room.
She went to the armoire and opened the mini refrigerator that no doubt still held its temperature and removed a bottle of wine. She held it up. He shook his head. No drinking on the job. She found a corkscrew, opened the bottle, poured one glass, then resumed pacing, sipping as she walked.
She stopped to run a hand through her wet hair. It was the deep, rich orange-red of an excellent XO cognac. Joe loved a mellow brandy on a cold winter’s night. . . .
“. . . eep with me.”
“Saywhat ?”
“I said—” She took another sip of golden wine, her eyes sparkling over the rim. “—you’ll have to sleep with me.”
Joe nearly choked on his own saliva. “That isn’t protocol, Kendall.”Boy howdy it wasn’t protocol. “Besides, I have no intention of sleeping—anywhere. I’m here to protect you, remember? The second this snow lets up, I’ll wake you, and we’ll be outta here.”
She met his gaze with a level look. “Under the circumstances I doubt if I’ll sleep either. But to be honest, without a solid five hours’ sleep, I tend not to function on all cylinders. So I’d like to at least try to get a few hours in before we leave. I’d feel a hell of a lot safer if you were besi de me. I don’t mind if you want to leave the lantern on all night. I’d just like— I’d just like . . .”
Protection. “Company?”
Her nod was jerky as, for a few seconds, she concentrated on the wine she was swirling in her glass. Joe wondered if the woman ever relaxed. Hell. If shecould relax. Filled with nervous energy, she eventually came to perch on the edge of a chair near the fire. Wired and ready to blow she twisted the stem of her glass between her fingers, then looked up to meet his eyes.
“I’ve worked really hard overcoming this knee-jerk reaction every time I hear something behind me. A creak when the house settles, or when I see the glint of what I pray isn’t a knife.”
Her gaze was steady as she looked at him. “I don’t want Dwight Treadwell to win, Joe. I don’t want to live in fear for the rest of my life because of what he did to me. I thought I’d done pretty well up until now. But knowing he’s somewhere out there—knowing that I’m no longer a random victim to him, but someone hespecifically wants to kill—”
“He won’t come within shouting distance of you, honey.” Joe kept his voice low and soothing, his gaze away from the frightened, erratic pulse of her heartbeat in her slender white throat. And that scar. Hell. “I won’t let you out of my sight for the duration. I promise.”
Kendall rose and held out her hand. “Then come to bed with me, Joe. Keep me safe.”

 
Chapter Five
HER HEART POUNDED HARD AT HER BOLDNESS.BUT HERheart might as well be flatlining. When he didn’t take her outstretched hand she dropped it to her side, arranging her face into a mask of indifference. Her skin went sweaty and hot. Somehow she wasn’t surprised by his answer. The tightness in her chest made it hard to draw a normal breath. “Hey, don’t worry about it,” she told him brightly. “You’ll be sitting right there keeping guard while I sleep, right?”
“Kendall—”
She lifted her chin. His gaze flickered to her throat—the scar—then came back up to meet hers. All she read there was pity. An emotion she’d seen more times than she cared to remember. Thanks to Treadwell, she’d forever be the Surviving Victim. Little else seemed to matter to people. She almost remembered a time when people looked upon her with acknowledgment—praise even—for the way she’d picked herself up after her divorce. She’d made a life for herself—defined that life. And now that was gone. For good if that unwelcomed, familiar glint was any indication. “I know it’s early,” she inserted before he could come up with some lame excuse for not wanting to have sex with her. After all, what man would want to put his mouth anywhere near the red welt of a scar? It was a painful truth, one she wasn’t sure she could ever get used to. She added that to her mental list of reasons for wanting Treadwell to burn in hell.
“But I might as well get in a few hours before we leave.” She fake-yawned. “Wake me when it’s time to go, okay?”
The tremor she’d been battling since Joe had told her about Treadwell’s escape, intensified as she walked across the room to the high king-sized bed. Why was she mad at him? They didn’tknow each other. He’d kissed her. So what? Probably just a mercy kiss—until he remembered the scar. She tossed the decorator pillows onto the floor with a little more gusto than was warranted, then pulled back the terra-cotta-colored velvet spread with jittery hands.
She was nothing more than an assignment to him. A ship that passed in the night. A duty. Fully dressed, she climbed under the covers, lay on her side, and curled into a ball. Her fingers went to her neck. The scar always throbbed when she thought about that night.
She usually slept naked, and while the leggings were thin, the sweater wasn’t. She was uncomfortable. She also felt antsy, annoyed, and sorry for herself, all of which pissed her off. She didn’t know who she was madder at: Treadwell for creeping back into her life like the rodent he was, or Joe for tempting her, but not being tempted enoughby her, or herself for—she didn’t know for what. Which annoyed her even more.
It was too early to sleep. She wasn’t even close to sleepy anyway. She lay still. Not moving, not twitching, not showing Joe that she was awake. That lasted, oh, sixty seconds. She had to straighten the uncomfortably riding up sweater. Then her legging twisted. . . .
The room was warm, but she burrowed under the blankets anyway. Blocking out the flickering light. And Joe. She wanted to bury her head like an ostrich. The problem was, when she came up for air, the situation would be exactly the same.
She tried to concentrate on just how damnfreaking uncomfortable she was, trying to sleep in her clothes. There were only two other subjects to mull over, ponder, dissect, and agonize about. Joe. Or Treadwell.
One aggravated her but made her feel protected. The other downright terrified her and made her painfully aware of how vulnerable she was.
Would she ever believe herself completely safe? God, she hoped so. She’d done every single thing her therapist had told her would help. She’d taken self-defense classes, bought a gun, made sure she knew how to use it and when to use it. She’d faithfully gone to counseling for months afterward.
A violent criminal victimization is a real-life classical conditioning experience in which being attacked is an unconditioned stimulus that produces unconditioned responses of fear, anxiety, terror, helplessness, pain, and other negative emotions. Any stimuli that are present during the attack are paired with the attack and become conditioned stimuli capable of producing conditioned responses of fear, anxiety, terror, helplessness, and other negative emotions.
Intellectually she knew she’d be in a much better position to defend herself.This time. But her body was reacting as though she were once again in danger and under siege. Her teeth began chattering. How could she be sweating and cold at the same time? A sob broke through the tight constriction of her throat and tears scalded her cheeks as she curled into a fetal position and hugged herself. Oh, God. She was sotired of being afraid.
“Hey now, what’s this?” Joe sat down beside her, peeling back the covers from over her head. “Ah, hell, honey. Come here.”
She smacked his hand away, when what she really wanted to do was curl his fingers against her face and draw him to her. “Leave m-me alone.”
“I wasn’t rejecting you, honey. It was just that—”
Kendall punched him in the arm. Hard. “You egotistical—jerk. If I wanted some guy to sleep with me, I wouldn’t have to p-pay him.”
In a quick move he hauled her out from under the cavern of blankets and into his lap, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her close. “Pay someone to sleep with you?” He sounded genuinely taken aback by her tear-choked comment. Stroking her hair gently, he whispered against her ear in warm waves of hot, moist breath. “From my vantage point, I’d say you’ve got the opposite problem. I’m considering demanding a bonus for my self-restraint.”
Kendall pressed her face to his shoulder, curling her arms around his neck. Which made her one sad, pathetic puppy. She’d give him another hour or two to comfort her, then she’d tell him to go straight to hell. She neither wanted nor needed pity.
His arms tightened around her. “Shit, sweetheart, you’re shaking hard enough to break apart. I promised you I’d keep you safe, didn’t I?”
“Your contract probably stipulates that you get paid, no matter what,” she said against his throat. The thought didn’t exactly fill her with confidence. But the strength of his arms around her did. Joe Zorn was big and solid and his large body seemed to surround her, making her feel very safe indeed.
“Well, yeah. But that would look bad.” The smile in his husky voice shimmered through her body like an electrical current, closing the circuit they’d started in the kitchen. Her toes curled.
“On the other hand,” he said, pushing damp hair off her face, then raising her chin so they were eye to eye. His expression was dead serious, his steely blue eyes steady as he said, “Did I ever mention what an overachiever I am? Hell, hate to lose atanything. Particularly hate to lose when a pretty girl’s involved in the equation. And sweetheart, you arethe prettiest girl I’ve seen in a lifetime.”
His head lowered, and with a small sigh Kendall closed her eyes, parting her lips to welcome him.
She wanted him with a strength and desperation that should have frightened her. Instead she relished the hungry exploration of his mouth on hers. He nibbled and teased, catching lightly at her lower lip with his teeth, then played over the little sting with a hot sweep of his tongue. Her breath hitched, but his lips drifted away to stroke a burning path across her cheek, pause over her closed lids, then return to her eagerly waiting mouth.
She welcomed his tongue, silky-smooth and wet, against hers as he tasted her, the subtle strokes and forays made more thrilling by his control. He didn’t plunder. He didn’t grab. Instead he savored, which made Kendall feel cherished. It also made her temperature spike and her pulse race with anticipation. Nor was he immune himself; she felt the fine tremor riding through his body as Joe kissed her.
He buried both hands in her long, wet hair, cupping the back of her head in one palm as he gently teased her mouth.
She reciprocated by combing her fingers through the cool, silky strands of his dark hair. She scored her nails gently against his scalp, causing him to draw in an out-of-rhythm breath, but he didn’t stop what he was doing.
Suddenly dizzy, she realized Joe had shifted them to a prone position, her head supported by his hand, his body sprawled half over hers. Even through two layers of clothing, his body burned with a furnace heat. His arms were like steel bands surrounding her. Not a cage, but a haven.
“I want you mor e than my next breath.”
And that breath, Kendall noticed, was gratifyingly ragged. A shudder ran through her body as his mouth crushed down on hers. She yanked and pulled at his sweater for what felt like an eternity until she was able to bunch it up, slip her hands underneath and strip it off of him.
His chest was tanned, broad, and lightly furred by crisp dark hair. She rubbed her face against him like a cat. If she’d been capable of purring she would have. She struggled to reach his belt buckle, determined to get his pants off, but kept getting sidetracked by where next he was going to put his mouth on her.
“Hold it. Hold it.” He levered his upper body off hers and she reached for him blindly. But he only wanted to pull her sweater over her head. “Did you make this?”
“I’ll knit you one just like it if you hurry and get the blasted thing off me.” She tried to help, then realized rather muzzily that she was hindering him in her haste to be naked. She relaxed, letting him tug the garment over her head unimpeded. Hurry. Hurry!
His eyes glittered as he stared down. Who knew when she’d dressed this morning that by evening she’d have a strange man staring at her bare breasts.
He drew in a sharp breath.
She’d forgotten the scars. She tried to pull her hair over her chest, but she couldn’t lift up her body enough to get it out from under her. Shit! She was lying on it.
Before she could murmur a protest, he trailed a finger down the pale, velvety valley between her breasts and murmured thickly, “Beautiful.” And he didn’t care about the scars. A wild surge of emotion flooded her, and tears stung behind her eyelids.
Kendall cradled his head in her hands. She brought his mouth down to hers, meeting his tongue thrust for thrust as his warm fingers closed around the cool globe of her breast. His thumb teased her nipple until it was rosy and hard. Gliding his palm down to span her rib cage, Joe lowered his head.
The warm silk of his hair brushed her breasts as he opened his mouth, drawing a peak deep into the hot, wet cavern of his mouth. She let out a cry as he nipped his teeth delicately over the tight bud, then stroked it with his tongue. He paused to look up at her. “Don’t hide from me.” His voice was soft, thick with desire. “Every part of you turns me on. Every creamy inch of your body makes me hot. There’s not a part of you that I don’t want to touch. Taste.” His hands were everywhere.
“Lift up— God,” he said reverently as he pulled her leggings off to expose a small triangle of sheer black lace. He placed his warm mouth on her mound, then lifted his head slightly so he could draw away the final barrier.
“One of us is over . . . dressed,” she murmured as he brushed his slightly stubbled jaw across her lower belly. There were scars there, too. Thin white lines that she knew he could see in the dancing light of the lantern.
His skin gleamed and she couldn’t resist sinking her fingers into the crisp dark hair that V’d from his chest down to a narrow ribbon to disappear into his jeans.
She reached for his belt buckle again, but he saved her fumblings by standing to practically rip his pants off his body. The firelight behind him limned the dark silhouette of his body in bronze as he kicked off his boots before stripping. It was a spectacular show. He grabbed his pants up off the floor and dug in a pocket for his wallet. Kendall hadn’t given a single thought to birth control. He pulled out a small foil square.
“You carry condoms around with you?” Not that she wasn’t eternally grateful, but the fact that he was such a Boy Scout gave her pause. Was he always ready for a quick lay? Worse yet—when had she become a quick lay?
“Let me put it this way,” he told her stretching out beside her and pulling her back into his arms, the small package in his hand. “Condom.There’s no plural about it.” He trailed the foil up and over her breast making her nipple ache for a firmer, more personal, touch. “And this damn thing is so old I’m not going to guarantee its reliability. Still game?”
Since he asked the question with his lips against her throat, and his hand sliding purposefully up her inner thigh, Kendall managed only to push out the word, “Now!” He brushed his lips around the curve of her ear, causing every nerve in her skin to come alive, and nudged her knees apart. “Is that an all systems go?”
She wanted to say something clever and witty, but she barely had enough breath to demand, “I want you inside me.Now. ” And just in case her urgency wasn’t coming through loud and clear, she slid her hand down his hip, then wrapped her fingers around his penis. He was hot, silky, and hard. She stroked her thumb over the head until he groaned. “I want to explore every glorious inch of you, Miss Metcalf, but that pleasure will have to—” He groaned as her fingers tightened around him, “—wait.”
Like the rest of him, Joe was a big guy. He had big—hands. He slid two fingers inside her, moving them in intense circles, massaging and testing her readiness. Kendall shuddered, moving her hips against his hand in jerky, involuntary motion. She was wet, swollen, and desperate, and several stages beyond ready. “Talk aboutchatty —”
With a huff of laughter, Joe withdrew his hand to settle his narrow hips between her spread knees. She had a moment’s pause to feel the sheer size of him—there—before he pushed inside.
He hissed out a shuddering breath as he buried himself to the hilt in one powerful thrust, then lay still. And Kendall was grateful. The sensation of Joe inside her was so piercingly sweet, so monumental, that she couldn’t move either.
“Okay?” he asked, voice rough against her ear.
She smiled against his throat. “Better than.”
“Wrap your legs around me.”
“I was getting there,” she groused, her voice thick as he pushed himself impossibly deeper. She walked her heels up his back, feeling gloriously invaded, and kissed his jaw as he started to move.
Pinned down by his not inconsiderable weight, her legs tightened as he moved his big, powerful body inside hers. She felt alive, supernaturally so as she ached and burned and shuddered in his arms.
Their lovemaking transcended anything Kendall could ever have imagined even in her wildest dreams. Their bodies were perfectly matched. Yin and yang. The waves of pleasure crashed and churned until she went blind and deaf, her entire being focused on where they were joined. She was being helplessly urged higher and higher, impossibly higher, on a tidal wave of sensation.
The wave broke, huge and powerful, flinging her into sweet oblivion.

 
Chapter Six
JOE ROSE AND PULLED ON HIS JEANS.HE DIDN’T HAVE TOexplain why, and even though she was disappointed, Kendall didn’t have to ask. He handed her his sweater. “As much as I’d rather have you warm and naked, put this on. Hang on a sec—” He leaned over to brush a kiss to each breast before she covered them. It was sweet and silly and her heart swelled with emotion as she finished pulling his sweater down over her warm body.
She closed her eyes briefly. The soft merino wool smelled of him. Joe sat beside her on the bed, using both hands to slowly draw her damp hair out from under the neckline.
“Can you come back to bed?” Kendall asked hopefully. He was playing with her hair, lifting and dropping the long strands as if fascinated by the color and texture. Apparently there was a direct route from the hair follicles on her scalp to all her girl parts. She wanted him again with a need that surprised her.
His hesitation was almost negligible before he stretched out beside her on top of the covers, tucking her against his side. Kendall rested her head on his chest and draped her arm over his waist. She snuggled her cheek against the crisp hair underlain by his hot skin. He smelled so incredibly good she wanted to bottle him.
“Will you sleep?” she asked, letting her fingers explore the deep grove of his spine and the bands of taut muscles and satin-smooth skin of his back. Touching him was sheer pleasure.
“Tomorrow. But you go ahead. You said you needed at least five hours to fire on all cylinders. You have time. Get some rest.” He reached over and repositioned his gun on the bedside table beside him, then pulled the covers up, tucking them around her back.
Kendall found the perfect spot to rest her cheek in the curve of his shoulder. Joe glided his hand under the sweater to rub her back in slow, lazy circles and her muscles relaxed as she hovered close to sleep.
It seemed as though she’d just closed her eyes, but she woke with a scream and bolted upright in bed. Disorientated and shaking, she looked around the dimly lit bedroom as if she’d never seen it before.
Beside her Joe said softly, “Bad dream?”
Eyes dark and haunted, she nodded, making her hair slide over her shoulders. “He’s out there.”
“No, he’s not,” he said with conviction. “Come here, sweetheart.” He pulled her back down into his arms. “Roz called to give us an update not an hour ago, remember? He was last seen in Nimrod. That means he’s at least five hours away, on a good day. And that’s only if he manages to commandeer another vehicle. If the storm lets up. If he isn’t stopped by one of the roadblocks between here and there. Everyone is looking for the son of a bitch, honey. He won’t get anywhere near you. I promise.”
“He doesn’t have to be anywhere near me to scare me spitless,” Kendall said tightly. She was shivering hard now. Joe tightened his arms around her and rubbed her back in long, soothing strokes. He wished like hell he were touching her bare skin, but this had to be enough. For now.
“How did you get away that night?” he asked, tightening his arms around her. He knew, of course. It had been in the transcripts. But he wanted her to remember taking action. To remember that she hadn’t been helpless.
“I’d lost track of time. There was tinfoil over the windows, and I had no idea if it was day or night. Or how long he’d h-had me. He kept me chained to the handle of the oven. There was—b-blood all over me—”
Shit. Bad idea. “But you managed to outsmart the sick fu—bastard and get away, didn’t you?” His own stomach lurched at the thought of the cuts on her body and how terrified she must’ve been.
“He said, ‘I’ve enjoyed our time together, Kendall,’ and took a key out of his pocket. I thought— Oh, God. I thought— He’s going to kill me with a key. I was so freaked, I believed he could’ve done it, too.” She was breathing fast, and Joe rocked her against his chest, listening to her erratic breathing. Fury blazed in his belly as she talked.
“But he opened the padlock on the chain. He showed me the special knife in one hand and hoisted me up off the floor. He needed me standing. He wanted to add my blood to his wall of s-splatter.”
Christ.
“He considered himself an artist,” she said bitterly. “I was his medium. He told me . . . told me that I had to be positioned just right so that when he sliced my artery, the spray of blood would add to the mural he’d been creating on the—the wall of the trailer.”
The mural that had the blood of more than a dozen other women dried on it. A challenge for the forensic teams to unravel the DNA. “Jesus, sweetheart. I’m sorry. So sorry. But you beat him at his own game. You got away.”
Bleeding from dozens of cuts, she’d still had the fortitude to pick up the open padlock from the floor where Treadwell had dropped it. While Treadwell angled her for best effect, then started to cut her throat, Kendall, despite considerable blood loss, had managed to smash him in the face with it. Then she’d run.
When a passing motorist had almost driven over her, he’d called 911 about the dead body sprawled in the middle of the road. The Good Samaritan had, thank God, made the call, but Kendall had almost bled out because the man had stayed in his vehicle until the cops arrived.
“Yes.” She burrowed tightly against Joe, shaking hard enough to shatter. “I got away.”
At what cost? Joe thought, wrapping her in his arms and holding her tightly. Damn. He hated that he was in a hurry-up-and-wait position. He didn’t like not having options. He had a fantasy of getting Kendall to safety, then returning to the house to wait for Treadwell himself. One on one.
Before the cops arrived and made a nice, polite arrest, Joe wanted just half an hour with the son of a bitch. Just long enough to give Dwight Gus Treadwell the punishment he so richly deserved.
He listened to the storm die down beyond the sealed windows and checked the safety on the H&K.
He could tell she was too agitated to remain in bed. She was antsy. Hungry. No, thirsty. They went down to the kitchen, Joe wearing only jeans, Kendall wearing nothing but his white sweater. Her long, pale legs and unfettered breasts did amazing things for his favorite sweater. He found everything about Kendall Metcalf sexy. From her incredible red hair all the way to her slender feet and bright red toenails. And pretty much everything in between.
Carrying the extra oil lamp, they took the radio downstairs with them so they could keep apprised of the weather situation. Dim nightlights, powered by the generator, glowed throughout the house.
They stood at the center island in the semi-darkness eating cookies washed down with eggnog. Then Kendall decided she needed protein, and ripped off chunks of turkey breast, feeding them to Joe as he leaned a hip against the counter, supporting her body against him.
“Hear that?” She lifted her head. “The wind’s dying down. Let’s go now.”
He felt the same urgency. But going out in that would be suicide. He shook his head, looping a long strand of fiery hair behind her ear. “But it’s still blowing hard enough to knock us off our feet if we ventured outside. Sorry, honey. We have a few more hours to wait.” He rubbed his hands up and down her arms. “Let’s get you back in bed. You’re shivering.”
She gave him a flirty look under her lashes. “You could warm me.”
Where the hell had this woman been all his life? “I could, yes.” Joe slid his hands to her hips and started bunching up the sweater. It skimmed up her bare body like some kind of fantasy, making him hard and hot.
With a laugh, she spun out of his hands and dashed across the kitchen. “I don’t want to make love on this cold tile floor.” She hesitated in the doorway, a silhouette in the darkness. “Race you upstairs.”
Joe bit back a smile. “I’ll give you a seven-minute head start.”
“Show-off.” Her voice faded, and he heard the soft thuds of her running footsteps as she sprinted across the great room.
She was easy to catch. She wasn’t running very fast.
He caught her by the waist when she was on the fifth step. She giggled, wrapping her arms around his neck as he took her down. He fought to drag his sweater over her head, while she wrestled him for his jeans. Her long hair clung to the white wool as he tossed the sweater aside, leaving her bare and beautiful.
Her mouth curved, and her pretty eyes glittered up at him as she lay naked on the stairs. She started to laugh. “You know this is physically impossible, don’t you?”
His mouth silenced her. Nothing was impossible.
He braced his hands on the riser on either side of her head as her knees came up to hug his hips. Her hips lifted to greet his first thrust.
It was over in minutes, leaving them with ragged breath and sweat-dampened skin.
He sucked in deep, gulping breaths, somehow managing to position himself so that while he was still inside her, he wasn’t squishing her against the hard wood of the steps.
“Okay?” he asked, opening his eyes a crack.
Pushing hair off his forehead, she grinned. “Better than. But I think I have bruises on my butt—” She screamed playfully as he turned her over to lavish kisses on her delectable ass.
His jeans rang. He fumbled to reach them, then flipped them to reach his back pocket and the chiming cell, bringing the phone to his ear. “Yeah?”
Cradling her cheek on her folded hands Kendall let herself drift. She was limp as a noodle with a mixture of pleasure and exhaustion. While he talked, she stared through the open risers beneath her at the unfinished Christmas tree below in the great room. Not that it mattered at this point, but still—
And while she was lying here—not that she’d noticed while they were in the throes—but now that she wasn’t otherwise occupied, she felt each individual plank of wood across her upper chest, midriff, hips, thighs, and shinbones, just as she’d felt them all the way down her back earlier.
She found just enough energy to turn over, then to clamber over his long, rangy body. Let him take the brunt of the hardwood for a while. He shifted beneath her, getting comfortable, as he talked to Roz. Kendall whiled away the time by kissing his throat, his jaw, his mouth, and wherever else she could reach without expending any more energy than necessary. He moved the open cell phone accordingly. “Yeah. ’Preciate it, thanks, Roz.”
He snapped his cell phone closed. “They’ve managed to clear part of the road up here. The local cops are on their way.” Before she could move, Joe scooped her up and carried her upstairs.
“Very manly,” she murmured admiringly, looping her arms about his neck and laying her head on his chest. Fortunately, all ofher clothes were upstairs.

 
Chapter Seven
THEY DRESSED AND, TAKING THE RADIO WITH THEM TOlisten to the weather, went downstairs to wait for the police to arrive. The house was icy, and Joe considered lighting the fire in the great room. But they wouldn’t be there long enough to get the benefit.
Kendall had left a pair of bright blue, fur-lined, knee-high boots in the hall closet, and she plopped herself down on the area rug to pull them on.
Joe held out his hand to pull her up when she was done. “Man. I’d give a year’s pay to see you in those—and nothing else.”
“Yeah?” Her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes as she came up beside him in a smooth move he had to admire. “That can be arranged.”
“I’ll consider that a promise and take a rain check. Here.” He took her coat from her. “Let me help you with that.” The yellow down coat made her look like a fluffy chick. He took the opportunity to gather her luxurious hair in one hand as she shrugged the garment over her shoulders.
He put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a squeeze. He knew she was scared, and he wasn’t going to diminish that emotion by pretending he wasn’t aware of her feelings. As much as he sympathized, her fear would keep her on her toes. He should be feeling a mild form of relief at this point. The storm had relented enough for them to leave. He had ample backup and the means to leave quickly, and there had been no reported sightings of Treadwell for almost five hours.
Instead Joe felt a tightening at the back of his neck. There was the sense—the anticipation—of impending danger. Something was off.
Treadwell was close.
Following her into the kitchen, Joe tugged on his own heavy coat, then picked up his hat and gloves from where he’d left them the day before. Hell. Was it only yesterday?
“Want one of these oh-so-stale cookies? Neither do I.” She tossed the one she held back onto the animal plate as she passed. She opened the refrigerator. “No coffee,” she told him brightly. “But for that all-important caffeine jolt, how about a warm Coke instead?”
She was babblingand pacing. “Pass,” he told her, buttoning his coat. “The cavalry should be here soon.”
He snagged her arm as she passed, drawing her against him to cup her cheek. Her skin was cold, despite the thick coat she wore. “In an hour or less,” he promised her, “I’ll have you back in a warm bed. With a very hot me.” He brushed his mouth over hers. And then because, honest to God , he couldn’t keep his body parts off her body parts, he pulled her tightly into his arms and crushed his mouth down on hers.
The kiss was short but filled with promise. Joe lifted his head, then went back in to rub his nose on hers in an Eskimo kiss. “This’ll be a hell of a story to tell our grandkids over the campfire, won’t it?”
She narrowed her pretty eyes. “I hate camping.”
“You’re young. Plenty of time to learn to love it. Kids like that sort of thing.”
The doorbell rang.
“Easy, sweetheart,” he told her calmly as she jumped at the sound of the chimes echoing through the house. “The cavalry, remember?” It was just after seven, and still dark outside. “Almost over. Got your gun?”
When she patted a pocket, he smiled. “I’ll let them in. We’ll have our own personal army to accompany us to the chopper. And when he gets here, the local cops and the Feds can grab him.”
Kendall wrapped a blue-and-yellow-striped knit scarf around her throat several times. The thing was a mile long. “From your lips to God’s ear.” She fished a pair of child-sized blue gloves from a pocket and pushed her hands into them. Strangely they fit.
The doorbell rang again, urgently. Impatiently.
“Step back into the kitchen while I let them in,” Joe told her briskly. She’d dug a blue hat out of a pocket and was pulling it on over her head with both hands. It covered her ears and forehead. She looked adorable.
He couldn’t resist, and dropped another quick, hard kiss to her mouth. “Scoot.” He waited until she was well into the kitchen and out of sight.
He wouldn’t risk taking a single chance. With the H&K in plain view, he opened the front door. Joe knew several of the officers. He kept the six men on the icy doorstep as he checked the others’ IDs. Treadwell was no lightweight; he was doing this by the book. Now, when he got his hands on Treadwell—the book was out the fucking window.
Satisfied, Joe let the guys in, glimpsing the snowplow parked near the steps out front. The door slammed shut with the force of the wind behind the last man. The storm might have died down, but it was far from over. While it wasn’t impossible to fly the chopper out, the high winds were going to make it dangerous as hell. And clearly the men hadn’t been able to drive a regular vehicle through the snow banks. Damn it to hell.
They spent a few minutes brushing snow off their shoulders. Joe was grateful that he knew some of the officers and also grateful to have them at his back protecting Kendall.
At his all-clear, she came out of the kitchen and introduced herself, glancing around curiously. It was obvious she realized he knew the men, but she didn’t ask any questions.
“Your boss lady says y’all are gonna fly a copter outta here?” the chief of police, beefy, red-faced William “Buckeye” Wilder, said to Joe after touching his Stetson briefly to Kendall. Buckeye’s son had played football with Joe at the U of Montana way back when. Go, Grizzlies.
“Wouldn’t suggest it, son,” he said grimly. “Know you’ve been flyin’ since you was yay-tall, but that wind out there’ll bring you down before you lift off.”
Joe suspected he was right, but he’d done more than fly over the Montana landscape in the last ten years. He had infinite confidence in his own abilities as a pilot, but until he went out there and saw for himself exactly how bad it was, he wasn’t going to negate their best, most expedient form of transportation.
“Could be” was all he said. He glanced from man to man. “Is there any other way? All I saw out there was a snowplow. Not exactly my idea of a speedy getaway.”
“Better to wait four or five hours, and take a couple of the Camerons’ snowmobiles when the wind lets up.” Sonny Goodwin, a younger brother of another of Joe’s college buddies, suggested, stomping the snow off his boots onto the hall rug. “Don’t suppose there’s any hot coffee around?” he asked hopefully.
“Sorry, no.” Kendall looked at Joe with a frown. “I don’t want to wait. But I also don’t want to do something stupid and dangerous. What are our options?”
Not many, Joe thought with frustration. A plodding snowmobile a child on a tricycle could follow, or the chopper. Hanging around for another four or five hours wasn’t an option. “Stay here. I’ll go out, see just how strong the wind is, and come back for you.”
She didn’t want him to go without her, Joe could tell by the set of her jaw. He touched her cheek with his fingertips. “You’re safer here,” he answered her unspoken plea. “Light the fire in the great room. Make coffee on the camp stove. It’s on the top shelf of the pantry. I’ll be back in less than an hour.” If the chopper could be flown he’d bring it back and land it on the front lawn.
He headed for the door, pulling on his gloves. He turned around with his hand on the door handle. “Do not,” he said to the six men, “I repeat. Donot let her out of your sight for even a second. Treadwell is out there. I can feel the son of a bitch breathing down our necks.”
With a last glance at Kendall, Joe opened the front door letting in a blast of frigid air.
“Be careful,” she told him.
Joe nodded, his eyes holding hers. Then he let the door slam shut behind him.


“Well,” Kendall said brightly. “Coffee and a fire it is. Would one of you go in there and light the fire, please? Everything’s ready. The matches are—the matches are on the mantel.” She felt like a watch that had been wound too tightly. She didn’t want to be here without Joe. It didn’t matter that she had six men in his place. Six average law enforcement officers didn’t equal one Joe Zorn.
Kendall pulled off her hat, then tugged off the gloves, shoving both deep into a pocket. Even with the down coat on she was freezing. She wondered if she’d ever feel warm again. She felt what Joe felt—imminent danger. What if Treadwell was out there waiting, and he hurt Joe— What if— What if. Beneath the scarf wound about her throat, the scar seemed to pulse. Oh, God . . .
While one of the guys went into the other room to tackle the fire, the rest of them trailed her like ants on their way to a picnic into the dimly lit kitchen. The baking sheets of cookies and the two red mugs she and Joe had used yesterday still sat on the center island, along with the glasses they’d used earlier. Kendall carried the dirty dishes to the sink.
“Help yourselves to those cookies. I’ll look for that camp stove.” She picked up the oil lamp they’d brought down with them.
She paused going into the pantry. “Did you check on the two couples in the cottages?” She hoped that someone had eventually managed to contact them.
“No, ma’am. We came here straightaway.”
Heart pounding with dread, Kendall came back into the kitchen on leaden feet, horrified that they hadn’t checked that the others were all right. “We have to makesure they’re okay. My God. He could look for me there first! You have to go and warn them. Please.”
The men looked from one to the other. “Joe told us to stick to you like glue, ma’am,” the beefy older guy stated firmly. “Those folks won’t do nothin’ foolish. Not in this weather. ’Sides, Adam Cameron will keep tryin’ to contact them, don’t you worry.”
“Nobody who hasn’t felt his knife at their throat really knows about Dwight Gus Treadwell,” Kendall told them bitterly. “My God, if you guys made it to the ranch, so can he!”
“I guess a couple of us could go take a look-see. . . .”
They decided which of them should go, and two of the men left—reluctantly, Kendall could tell. It was cold and dark out there, and they didn’t think Treadwell was anywhere around yet. But they went, and for that she was grateful.
Coats were removed and guns exposed while Kendall fixed a pot of coffee on the camp stove. “How did Joe know where this was?” she asked out loud as she took down mugs. In fact, now that she came to think about it, Joe had appeared to be quite familiar with the house. He’d known which rooms were where. He’d been familiar with the door and window locks. He also appeared to know these men.
“Oh, this here was Joe and Miss Denise’s house before they went and got that divorce.”
A mug slipped out of her hand and crashed noisily onto the tiled floor as Kendall spun around. “What?”
The man flushed uncomfortably. “You didn’t know Joe was married to Denise before she married Adam Cameron?” He glanced nervously to the other two men. “Oh, shit. Was it a secret?”
Kendall bent to pick up the shards scattered around her feet. “I’m sure it wasn’t a secret.” She tossed the broken crockery into the trash can under the sink. “It’s not as though we know each other. He’s not obligated to tell me about his past.” Especially not when he didn’t expect to ever see her again, she thought. There was realistic and there was realistic. Her chest felt as though she’d just taken a body blow. That was pretty frigging realistic.
The radio came on in the other room. “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” belted out, filling the quiet, dimly lit kitchen.
“Power’s back on,” one of the younger officers said.
The older man smacked the back of his head. “Does it look like the power’s back on, McKenna?”
“It’s the emergency radio,” Kendall told them absently. Music. Great. Just what she needed, she thought, pouring coffee into four bright red mugs and leaving the fifth empty until the other cop came back from his fire-lighting expedition.
The men had already polished off most of the stale cookies. She wasso not in the Christmas spirit. The house smelled of Christmas. It looked like Christmas. But, oh God, it didn’tfeel like a joyous time of year at all. She wasscared.
Scared for herself because she knew a killer was close.
Scared out of her mind for Joe who was out there alone.
Scared for the four innocent people whose only thoughts had been to attend a fun, pre-Christmas weekend house party. Was Joe okay? Of course he was, Ke ndall told herself firmly, drinking the too-strong coffee just to feel the heat of it going down. He knew what he was doing. Apparently he also knew the area very well. Another point he might’ve brought up at some time in the past twenty-four hours. She gulped down half her coffee before she realized she’d added neither creamer nor Sweet ’n Low.
The annoying song “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” blasted from the other room, jangling her nerves even more. She set her mug down with a little more force than necessary.
“Getting on your last nerve, is it, ma’am?” the younger, blond officer asked, his eyes twinkling with amusement, or sympathy, or blast it—probably no feelings one way or the other at all. “Want for me to go tell Sonny to turn it off?”
Kendall gave him a smile. “Justdown would help, thanks.” She glanced at her watch. Joe had been gone for less than seven minutes. It felt like an eternity. No, it didn’t. She knew what an eternity felt like.
She’d experienced an eternity in that single-wide trailer in the woods fifteen months ago.That was eternity.
The officer took a cookie to go and ambled off in the direction of the great room. There was really nothing to say to the two men in the kitchen with her, and the silence stretched, helped only marginally by a rousing rendition of “Jingle Bell Rock.”
She had just refilled her mug when a sound reverberated through the house. The retort was as loud as a gunshot. With a scream, she jumped, spilling scalding coffee down her front.
Both men drew their guns in the blink of an eye.
The older man relaxed. “Stand down. Door slammin’.”
As the men reholstered their weapons Kendall felt light-headed and sick to her stomach. God, she wanted this to be over.
“You okay, ma’am?”
She nodded jerkily. Her midriff stung from contact with the hot coffee, which had soaked into her sweater. “I’ll just go and wash this off me.”
“I’ll go with you,” the blond officer told her. He looked spooked, which didn’t fill her with confidence.
She needed just a few minutes to compose herself, give herself a pep talk. Hell. Talk herself off the ceiling. Her heart was still racing. “The bathroom door is right there.” She pointed down a short hallway to show the door was visible from where they stood. “There’s no window; I’ll be safe in there for a few minutes.”
She took the oil lamp, went in, and shut the door behind her. The room was decadently large. It had looked charming a couple of days ago when she’d placed red votive candles amid clusters of holly berries and glossy green leaves between the rocks of a small fountain on the counter. Right now it just looked—dark.
She shrugged off her coat, which fortunately hadn’t been too splashed, and pulled her sweater over her head. The sting of the faint red mark across her middle was fading. She let herself look at the scars Treadwell had made on her body. Those too were fading. Much faster than those he’d made to her psyche.
She glanced in the mirror over the vanity and gave a choked, semi-hysterical laugh. The way her hair was drying every which way made her look like a wild woman. And even in the flickering light her skin appeared pale. Fear did that to a girl.
She took a deep, shuddering breath, held it, and exhaled slowly. And again.
Better.
She rinsed the coffee out of her sweater, then blotted it with a towel before turning on the wall hairdryer and holding it over the wet spot. After a while she hung the dryer over the towel rack and placed the sweater beneath it.
She closed the lid on the toilet and sat down to wait, rubbing the goosebumps on her arms. The lamp flickered before settling into a steady flame. She felt her sweater, still damp. She glanced at her watch. Joe had been gone for fourteen minutes.
Time stretched. She got up and pulled on her coat. The lining felt icy against her already chilled skin. Tugging the long zipper up to her throat, she paced. From the toilet to the vanity and back. Eleven steps. And back again. He said he’d be back in an hour. She could wait an hour.
How could she possibly feel this deep connection with a man she’d just met? She didn’t know the how or the why. She knew only that when this was all over she wanted to explore what they’d started here.
Joe and Denise had been married.
Joe had lived in this house. Loved Denise in the house.
Why hadn’t he told her?
How long had they been married for goodness’ sake? Lord. Were any of the childrenhis ?
The wick flickered and jumped in the air current every time she passed. Very creepy and atmospheric, she thought, watching the shadows form on the cream-and-gold wallpaper beside her as she paced back and forth.
And now that she came to think of it—why would a door slam? There were no doors or windows open— Oh, God, she really was creeping herself out.
Inhale.
Exhale.
The flame in the lamp leaped, then without warning, died, plunging the bathroom into stygian darkness. “Well, hell!” Kendall stood in the middle of the bathroom for a couple of seconds, waiting for her heart to leave her throat and race back into her chest.
She opened the door. “Hey guys, anyone got a ma—”
Dwight Gus Treadwell was leaning against the wall opposite the bathroom. He smiled. “Hi, honey. I’m home.”

 
Chapter Eight
IT COULD BE ANY ONE OF THE MEN IN THE HOUSE STANDINGthere in the dark. He was little more than a shadowy figure, but recognition was instantaneous. Kendall knew who he was almost before she heard the voice. His voice.
Heart pounding, throat dry, she jumped back and tried to slam the bathroom door closed with both hands. It was snatched out of her grasp.OhGodohGodohGod.
They were close to the same height; in fact, now that she saw him again Kendall was stunned at how weedy he looked. In her nightmares he was always huge and brutish. But the reality was Dwight Gus Treadwell was medium. Medium height. Medium coloring. Medium features.
But his strength was almost superhuman as he grabbed her by the front of her thick coat and yanked her out into the hallway. She fought him wildly, kicking and scratching, screaming at the top of her lungs.
He struck her across the face, a punishing blow that had her sagging in his hold. “Tsk. Tsk. Now is that any way to welcome an old friend?” He jerked her upright, pulling her into the kitchen by her hair. His fine, light brown hair was wet, as were the shoulders of a too-large tan ski jacket. “Know how manyshit cars I had to drive to get to you?” he demanded, shoving her in front of him. “Know how manydumbasses contributed to the cause and gave their lives so I could be here with you? Do you, huh? Do you have any idea howfucking cold it was hiding out in the trees waiting for just the right moment for us to be reacquainted?”
He shoved her hard, and she staggered because he was still holding her hair. “Selfish.” Shove. “Selfish.” Shove. “Bitch.”
“Go to hell where you belong.” Kendall stumbled before getting her feet under her. Her face throbbed. Her heart skittered, missed several beats, then raced, making her light-headed. Her brain was completely blank with terror. “You won’t get away with this. The place is crawling with cops,” she whispered through dry lips. Wherewere they?
“Not really.” Treadwell smiled, using the blade of the knife in his other hand to indicate something across the room.
She did not want to look. Bile rose in the back of her throat. It took several eternities for Kendall to force her eyes to shift from the faint glimmer of steel to the dark shapes almost lost in the darkness on the floor. “You killed them.”
“Ooops. My bad.” He shoved her away from him. “Go on. Go. Run. Don’t make this easy for me, baby.” He slammed his fist into her shoulder. She staggered back a step. His closed fist wasn’t meaty or large. She’d been mesmerized, in a horrific way, by his hands before. They were narrow and pale, with fingers like a piano player’s—or a knife-wielding lunatic’s.
“Go on. Run like the wind, pretty girl. Let old Dwight have a little fun to make up for all the aggravation you caused him.”
She was already walking carefully backward, and his next shoulder slam made her totter. Her hip hit the center island with a dull thud. She fumbled to insert her hand into her coat pocket as she righted herself. It crossed her numb mind for all of a nanosecond that she should keep him talking until she could get her gun from her pocket.Think! Think! Talk! Treadwell likes to talk, to taunt. If he’s talking, he isn’t killing me.
Now “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” was playing. The situation was surreal. God. If he’d killed the cops, what about Joe? The image of Joe’s body out there in the snow made her physically ill. Her fingers closed around the handle of the LadySmith. She whipped out the .22. The air smelled sweet, unpleasantly so. Nausea rose in her throat at the sickening reek of death.
“There’ll be more cops,” she told him, keeping her voice steady as she clicked off the safety. “They won’t stop until they catch you and put you back in your cage.”
He smiled, not acknowledging the small gun in her hand. “Maybe. But I’ll kill you first, pretty girl. I’ll just kill you dead fir—”
Kendall pulled the trigger.
Pop.
The shot made no impact. He didn’t fall back or even flinch, making her doubt she’d hit him. Then slowly dark red bloomed on his upper arm through his coat.
Everything moved in slow motion as though she were underwater, yet images bombarded her. The two dead men at her feet. The flickering lantern on the center island, casting dancing demonic shadows on Treadwell’s face as he kept coming, his expression feral, not slowed in the least by the shot. The knife, huge, slick, and already stained with blood—
Pop.
He staggered back with a howl of pain, clutching his ear with his free hand. Blood trickled between his fingers, and his eyes went black with rage. But he kept coming.
“I’m gonna peel your skin off your body real slow, bitch. Run if you can.”
Damn it. She hadn’t hit him where it would stop him. God, it barely slowed him down, and he kept coming like a psychotic Frankenstein. She didn’t waste another shot; she was in motion. Backing away, she felt a total sense of unreality as she fired again. This time she got him in the leg. Not bad. Except that she’d been aiming for his groin. He yelped in outrage, but other than putting a pause in his step, the wound didn’t stop him.
Kendall twisted around, running flat-out toward the front door. She noticed a man’s body only seconds before she stumbled over him in the entry hall. She jumped at the last fraction of a second, then almost tripped over an askew area rug. Blood made the floor slick, but she skated until she got her balance.
She screamed as Treadwell’s fingers tangled in her hair, yanking her toward him. She kicked backward, sending him into the slippery pool of blood. Losing his footing, he almost took her with him, but Kendall risked a few bald spots by jerking her hair out of his grip. He went careening into the opposite wall with an inhuman scream of rage.
She darted out of the front door without looking back. The frigid air stole her breath. The sky had lightened to pewter. The landscape before her looked like a Currier and Ives rendered in black and white. The enormous snowplow loomed in the front yard. Were the keys in it? Did she have time to look? How fast did the damn thing go? Fast enough to outrun Treadwell? She couldn’t chance taking the time to find out.
Sticking her gun into her pocket for now, she looked around frantically. Where to hide? Where the hell to hide? The son of a bitch was like the Energizer bunny. He wouldn’t stop. Not while he still had a breath in his body.
Chest heaving, she gulped icy, painful air, hard and fast. The guest cottages were to the left. There were empty cottages and trees behind which she could hide. She hauled ass across the wide porch, knowing he was right behind her.
A flash of silver arced down to her left. She tried to dodge. But his knife ripped through her left sleeve. No pain. Just an ice cold jolt as the blade sliced through fabric and down to skin. But it would hurt later. God, would it hurt later when adrenaline and fear weren’t anesthetizing her.
Run. Run. Run.
He tackled her from behind, taking her down. Her head slammed on the wood floor of the porch, hitting hard, but she tucked and rolled as she’d been taught, managing to stagger back to her feet before he could grab hold of her again. She turned to race down the five steps leading away from the house—
He grabbed her arm, swinging her into a support column with teeth-jarring impact. Several of the little fir trees she’d decorated yesterday toppled over. Lights, garland, and faux candied fruit bounced down the steps. He pulled her up by her collar, then clamped her throat in a one-handed vise. “Stupid. Stupid bitch.” His voice, as always, was chillingly calm. Which made it more frightening and ominous than if he’d been yelling at the top of his lungs. “You ruined it. You ruined itall. ” He smashed the hilt of the knife into her cheekbone. She screamed with the blinding, white-hot pain. Brilliant dots danced in her vision as she struggled to stay conscious. It was a losing battle. There was a fuzzy buzz in her ears, then she slipped into silence.
Minutes, hours,days later, Kendall came to in a rush of cold and bone deep terror.Oh, God. Oh, God. Treadwell had her slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
Déjà vu.
They weren’t in the front yard. Her hair hung over her face, and she surreptitiously parted the strands. She couldn’t see the house. Or the snowplow. Or Joe.
Joe.
Her arm was on fire. The pain intense. Nausea choked her. She heard nothing over the blood pounding in her ears, although the trees must be rustling in the wind, and his boots surely must be making a rhythmic sound as he trudged through the virgin snow.
The wind whipped her hair silently about her head as she hung there like a bat, upside down, almost blinded by the dancing, swirling red strands and the blood rushing to her brain. She forced herself to remain limp. But it wasn’t easy. Every fight and flight instinct screamed at her to do something. She wanted to ask him about Joe but didn’t dare. She focused on that for a second, reasoning that if Treadwell had killed Joe, he’d have told her as much. She’d learned that about him during her captivity. Treadwell liked to regale her with the gory details of past trophies.
She knew she just had to hang on long enough for Joe to realize that Treadwell had her. Just long enough for him to find her.Please God make it soon. Oh, God. Please . . . Her arm wasn’t totally useless. She might not be able to move it, but hot red blood dripped freely from her fingertips onto the pure white snow. She was leaving a trail of blood in Treadwell’s footprints. She could only pray that he didn’t look back.
She swallowed convulsively, a blend of bile and terror. She didn’t want him to realize she was conscious. She could . . . would . . . as soon as . . . Unfortunately she ruined the element of surprise by puking down his back.
“Jesus! You fucking bitch!” Treadwell growled, flinging her off his shoulder so she landed face first in the snow.
He hauled her to her feet, but somehow she managed to break away.Run. Run. Run. She felt as if she was looking through the bottom of a thick glass. Tree branches slapped at her, though she’d stopped feeling pain long ago. Clutching her arm, she ran. Her life depended on it.
He grabbed her around the neck from behind. She bucked and jerked, leaning her weight to counter his, hoping to slow him down. Keeping her completely off balance, Treadwell dragged her through frozen quicksand toward the tree line. Every time she tried to pull away he found another place to cut her. Her bright yellow coat was trailing ribbons of fabric, many of them now tinged red. She kicked and bit, screaming hoarsely as he took her deeper and deeper into the isolated landscape farther and farther from the house.
She saw the snowmobile up ahead between the dark skeletons of the trees, black against the brilliance of the snow.
No! Nonononono!
“This has been fun, Kendall.” He spun around, grabbing her by the throat, squeezing hard enough for brilliant stars to explode before her eyes. “But you’re boring me now. Time to say b’bye.” Her weight was balanced against his chest and he used his knee as a wedge between her legs, freeing his hand to grab her hair at the scalp as he brought the knife to her throat.
Paralyzed, Kendall stared at the knife inches from her face. “Not again. Damn you, not again.” Despite the pain in her scalp where he’d fisted her long hair, she wrenched her arm up, the small gun clutched in her bloody hand. She had no idea how many bullets were left. Or God, ifany bullets were left.
She pointed the barrel over her left shoulder and pulled the trigger.

 
Chapter Nine
JOE PUSHED THROUGH THE SNOW, FOLLOWING THEblood trail deeper across the south paddock.KendallKendallKendall. An insistent mantra in his brain. Fear was a new experience for him. But it was real and physical. He’d heard her cries on the way back from the disabled chopper. Heard them, and known immediately that Treadwell had her. And if Treadwell had her, the men he’d assigned to protect her were dead. Ah, Jesus.
Every breath was an effort in the icy air. His heart pounded with helpless frustration at his slow progress in the fresh, calf-deep snow.
Uncharacteristically bloodthirsty images kept flipping through his mind as he ran, weapon drawn in his gloveless hand. He’d learned some interesting techniques with a knife himself over the years. So far those lessons had been purely academic. He relished the idea of demonstrating his skill on Treadwell. Let the son of a bitch feel the terror of findinghimself on the other end of a knife wielded by a madman. A madman who’d been trained in the art of knife fighting and wasn’t afraid to use those skills to fight dirty.
The wind whipped Joe’s hair about his face and batwinged his coat about his body as he ran. Kendall’s cries, echoing in the isolation of the remote area, pierced him to the heart. She was alive. At least he had that to hold on to. He doubled his effort to reach her as fast as humanly possible as powder skipped and danced across the surface of the drifting snow, trying to obliterate Treadwell’s footsteps.
He felt the beat of chopper blades overhead before he heard them. Three coming in fast, spotlights strafing the snow-covered landscape. The cavalry after all. Snow whipped up, blinding him. Damn it to hell!—he pointed in the direction of the tree line. Not that they would be able to land here. The terrain was hilly, and there were just too many damn trees. The three beams of light rose; the choppers moved off, taking their lights with them.
Kendall cried out again.
“I’m coming, sweetheart, hold on. I’m coming.” Correcting slightly to the west, he battled across the snow drifts, chest heaving.
He was close. Two hundred yards and closing.
Go. Go.Go.
They were twined as closely as lovers, two indistinguishable silhouettes against the stark whiteness of the snow.
Faster. Faster.
A gunshot cracked through the predawn quiet. Joe’s heart jerked in response.Kendall . . .
A hundred and fifty . . . forty . . . thirty . . . twenty . . . He saw the fiery blaze of her hair, the brilliant yellow of her coat, as she and Treadwell fell to the ground in a tangle of arms and legs and started rolling about. Joe saw the glint of a knife.
Run, faster, damn it,run. Ninety feet . . . eighty . . . He took aim. Treadwell and Kendall rolled just as he was about to squeeze off the shot. Shit. She was blocking. They rolled again; this time Treadwell was on top. Joe fired. The other man jerked with the impact. He tilted.
Sixty feet . . . forty . . .
Kendall took the window of opportunity and shoved and pushed Treadwell off her. God Almighty! Instead ofrunning, she surprised the hell out of Joe by jumping on top of Treadwell with a banshee scream of rage. Straddling the man’s waist, she started beating the hell out of his head and shoulders with her fists.
Twenty feet . . . ten . . .Kendall — Joe grabbed her arm, flinging her aside just as Treadwell’s knife arced toward her chest. He grabbed the killer’s wrist, placed his weight on the knee he applied to the man’s chest, then dug the muzzle of the H&Khard to the underside of the guy’s chin. “Play withme, dick,” Joe said, his voice low and feral as he applied pressure to a tendon in Treadwell’s knife hand. The grip should have caused the person’s fingers to release whatever he was holding. But Treadwell’s fingers, slick with blood, remained fisted around the hilt of the cheap ten-inch kitchen knife. Joe dug his knee into the man’s chest and exerted more pressure on his wrist.
“Talk to me, Kendall,” he yelled, keeping his eyes fixed on the killer. “Talk to me, sweetheart!”
“I-I’m okay,” she replied, out of his line of sight.
“I won’t go back there,” Dwight Treadwell told Joe vehemently, eyes wild. His brown coat was splotched with blood. It sure as hell better not contain one drop belonging to Kendall. “You can’t make me.” He attempted to jerk his hand free. Not going to happen. “I won’t go back.”
Joe kept up the pressure of his thumb on the man’s wrist, but the knife remained firmly in Treadwell’s bloody but bloodless hand. In one lithe move Joe surged to his feet, dragging Treadwell up with him. The fingers he had around the knife hand remained there like a vise, his weapon stayed put under the weak jaw.
“Oh, you don’t have to go back if you don’t want to,” Joe assured him with silky menace. “In fact I insist that you d—”
“Oh, God! Joe, watch out!”
He felt the sharp jab of pain in his side a second before Kendall’s warning. Damn it to hell! Treadwell surprised the hell out of him by producing a second knife—smaller and considerably more effective—and stabbing him right through the hide of his coat. Ah, crap. The other man was also left-handed.
Twisting to deflect the depth of the strike, Joe lifted the H&K.Pop. Pop.
Pop.
Treadwell’s eyes widened in surprise as he crumpled to his knees, then slowly toppled to his side. His sightless eyes stared at the dawn-flooded sky as bright arterial blood drenched the snow at Joe’s feet a satisfying crimson.
Joe plucked both knives from Treadwell’s limp fingers. He’d only fired two shots.
Kneeling, he felt for a pulse beneath the other man’s jaw. Dead. Perfect. He turned his head to see Kendall, eyes narrowed, still standing in the classic firing stance.
She looked like an avenging angel with her red hair blowing in the breeze, the golden glow of a new day backlighting her. “Is he dead?”
“As the proverbial doornail.” Joe assured her as he rose. He kept his gaze on her face as he tossed aside both knives and walked toward her.
“I’m not sure exactly what thatis, ” Kendall said with only a small tremor in her voice. “But if it’s very dead I’m all for it.”
“Very,” Joe assured her, touching the blood on her face. Her coat was slashed. He wanted to strip her and check every inch of her skin. “Did he cut you?”
“No.”
“Liar. How bad?”
“Bet I won’t need one stitch,” she assured him, clutching the front of his coat in both hands as she stood in the circle of his arms. Her casual tone was hard won, the terror was still clear in her expressive eyes.
An unfamiliar aching tenderness gathered inside him. He had to clear the thickness from his throat before he could speak. “You won’t mind if I play doctor later, and check that out for myself.”
“Noplaying. If you want to be my doctor you have to take the job seriously.” Kendall’s lips curved. “I insist on a complete and thorough physical.”
“I concur. Top to bottom and everything in between. Let’s get the hell out of Dodge before then. Come on.” He wrapped his arm around her, and they started walking across the paddock. In the distance he saw the posse arriving. Dozens of local cops, Feebs, and federal marshals racing across the tinged snow toward them. There’d be questions and more questions—
He veered off and headed in the opposite direction. “How do you like the great outdoors so far?” he asked conversationally.
She pulled a comical face. “Not very.”
“Yeah, I can see how the situation would require some rehabilitation.” Joe sighed. “The kids would like it out here, though.”
She shot him an amused glance as they walked. “Whose?”
“Ours.” He rubbed her arm. He was going to have to buy her a new coat. That would take time. “Four, do you think?” he asked.
Her steps, in those sexy blue knee-high boots, faltered, but she laughed. “Don’t you think we should go on a couple of dates before we start naming our children?”
They came to the snowmobile Treadwell had left under the trees. “Hop aboard,” Joe said, helping her maneuver onto the machine. “Aren’t we a couple of stages beyond dating?” he asked politely, starting the engine. The Christophs had a nice, secluded little summer place just over the ridge—
“No,” Kendall told him, wrapping her arms about his waist and resting her chin on his back. “We are not several stages past dating. I want movies, and dinners, and flowers. You can start by calling me.”
The snowmobile picked up speed. Anticipation made Joe’s heart pick up speed, too. Four miles to a bed. “I don’t have your phone number,” he shouted as the wind carried them forward.
“I programmed it into your cell phone last night.” Kendall laughed, her breath warm against his cheek.
They burst through the trees. Ahead was a pristine expanse of white, pure and fresh and untouched. It held only a few small shadows and was tinged with the promise of sunshine.
Kendall tightened her arms about his waist as he shut off the engine. He turned to take her in his arms. “This looks good, doesn’t it?” she said softly.
“Yeah,” Joe cupped her face between his hands. “This looks incredibly good.”
And it was.