Hunted

He’d gotten a quick look at her when she’d stood outside the car. Slender. Not overly tall. Dark hair piled on top of her head. Now that she was in his arms, he could tell that she was at least eight inches shorter than his six-two and her shoulders and ribs were delicately female. His chin rested on her head. Her hair was silky and he caught the scent of cherries with a hint of vanilla.

As crazy as it seemed, she felt right in his arms.

Hell, maybe he’d hit his own head.

He shifted, carefully turning her in his arms. It was very dark and they were in the bowels of the tree. No moonlight filtered through.

He wanted to touch her face, to see if her features were as delicate as her body.

He kept his arms where they should be. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“I think so. Thank you,” she added.

Her voice was low. Sexy. “You’re welcome...” He let his voice trail off, hoping she’d fill in the blank.

“Chandler,” she said.

It was an unusual name and he got a very odd feeling. “Chandler what?” he asked.

“McCann. Chandler McCann.”

Ethan almost dropped her again. But he held on. Mack’s little sister. She’d been a skinny little girl, with wild hair and emerald-green eyes.

Cat-Eyes.

That’s what Mack had called his little sister. Ethan and Brody hadn’t called her anything, never really talked to her at all. She was just their best friend’s little sister. He remembered her as a quiet kid who liked her computer games.

It had been a long time since he’d seen her—not since the time they’d celebrated Mack’s graduation from the Naval Academy, and Brody’s graduation from college and acceptance into medical school. By that time, Ethan had already had four years in Uncle Sam’s army. He’d completed flight school and had spent some time in the skies above Iraq.

He’d been about twenty-two at the time, which would have made her fourteen. She’d still been a skinny kid with braces and wild hair, but he remembered thinking that Mack’s sister was going to be a pretty girl when she grew up. Brody must have thought the same thing because Ethan remembered hearing him tease Mack about having to beat the boyfriends off with a stick. Mack, who even at twenty-two was more James Bond than any of the actors who’d played the iconic hero on-screen, had calmly responded that he’d vaporize them.

While Ethan hadn’t seen Chandler since then, he had heard about her. Knew that she’d been the valedictorian of her high school class, knew that she had gone to college in Chicago on a full scholarship and knew that she’d gotten her heart broken by some jerk a couple years ago. She lived in Denver. Worked for some company that was a military contractor.

“I’m Ethan Moore.” He heard her swift intake of breath and wished there was enough light that he could see her eyes. His mother had cleaned the McCann house, the Donovan house and at least twenty others. That’s how he’d met Mack. That’s how he’d come to spend his summers in Crow Hollow.

“Good old Walnut Street,” she said. “I guess that’s where we both learned to climb trees.”

It was nice of her not to mention that his mom had been hired help. “I think we need to get out of this tree.”

* * *

SHE FELT HIM SHIFT, just enough to look past her. She didn’t know how he could see much, unless his night vision was considerably better than hers.

She wished she could have seen more of his face. Ethan Moore. He’d been one of her brother’s best friends. And Mack still talked about him, spoke as though they kept in contact even though Mack’s work took him everywhere.

She knew he’d be having a birthday soon. He’d turn thirty-eight next week, just two days after she turned thirty. She could still remember the year that her dad had invited Ethan over and they’d gathered around the kitchen table to share a cake. She’d been nine, he’d been seventeen.

And she’d been secretly in love with him.

And he’d pretty much ignored her every time she was in the room with him.

God, that was so long ago. Now she was here in a tree scared for her life, and her teenage crush had come to save her.

Not exactly the way she’d fantasized she’d end up in his arms.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” he said. “I’m going to go first. I’ll guide you on where to place your feet. Branch by branch, we’ll work our way down. Okay?”

She nodded. It sounded easy enough. Until she had to grab the first branch. Damn, her shoulder felt as if a ball of fire had landed there. While Ethan’s body had shielded her from the brunt of the fall, her shoulder had connected with something. She gritted her teeth, determined not to complain.

He wrapped his strong hand around her right calf and she could feel his heat through her jeans. He gently tugged, guiding her to the next branch. It was slow going and by the time they reached the ground, she was clammy and terribly afraid that she might vomit after all.

There was a midsize dog with dark fur at the bottom, and it circled her.

“Don’t worry about Molly,” Ethan said. “She found you.”

“Thank you,” she said to the mutt, reaching out her good arm. The dog’s fur was thick and warm and it made her realize how cold she was in her shirt, jeans and lightweight denim jacket.

Molly evidently got excited with the attention and jumped up. Both paws hit Chandler squarely on her bad shoulder with enough force to send pain skyrocketing through her arm. “No,” she cried weakly.

“Molly.” Ethan’s voice cut through the quiet night.

Chandler managed to turn the other direction before she bent at the waist and vomited.

When she was done, she realized that Ethan was standing right next to her, his hand on her back. She straightened and wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I hurt my shoulder and Molly caught it just right.”

He didn’t say anything for a minute. When he did, his voice was calm. “Okay. We need to get you inside as quickly as we can.”

She could hear the sound of a zipper. Then felt something warm around her shoulders.

“I can’t take your coat,” she said. “I have one.”

“You have a jacket,” he said. “It doesn’t even look as if it’s lined. Now put your good arm through,” he instructed. “Keep your other arm tucked at your side.”

She did as he told her and in the dark, with just a little moonlight to guide their actions, he gently bundled her up. She felt warm and safe, and the coat had a comforting smell of musk and man.

“I feel bad about taking your coat,” she said. It was cold and all Ethan had on was a long-sleeved shirt.

“It’s fine,” he said, dismissing her concerns. “Does Mack know you’re here?”

“No. I didn’t want to bother him. I got a text from him a couple weeks ago that he was going out of the country for the next few months. Working.” Saving the world. That’s what Mack did.

“So your dad knows that you’re here?”

She hesitated before deciding to tell the truth. “No, not exactly.”

“You’re not in any trouble, are you?” he asked, perhaps reading into the hesitation.

Chandler knew she was definitely in trouble. Someone had run her off the road. But it was possible that she’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. She certainly couldn’t go around making crazy accusations against her stepmother. Not until she had more proof.

“You mean other than my car being in a tree?” she asked, forcing a light note into her voice.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Not that I know of.”

“Okay, good. I guess what I really want to know,” he said, “is how the hell your car ended up in the tree.”

She wanted to spew out the whole terrible story. But there was no way. If she told him that she’d been purposefully run off the road and that someone had circled back to verify that she was dead, any reasonable person would expect that she’d be clamoring to get the police involved. She wasn’t ready to do that. Certainly wasn’t ready to say “someone tried to kill me.”

She wasn’t ready to face that herself. Much less tell Ethan.

“I must have been going too fast. It’s been a long time since I’ve driven these roads. I lost control, hit the side of the mountain and the next thing I knew, I was headed over the side.”

“Scary,” he said, his voice soft.

He had no idea. She remembered the headlights in her rearview mirror and the impact of the car against her back bumper, and shivered. “Yes. I think I flipped over in the air because my backpack and purse got thrown somewhere else in the car. I landed right side up, fortunately. The air bag inflated. I was just taking stock of my situation when you came along.”

“We’re lucky Molly can be a pain in the butt, otherwise I wouldn’t have found you. If you can’t walk back to the cabin, I can always carry you.”

The idea of being in Ethan Moore’s arms made her warm up suddenly. “It’s my shoulder, not my legs. I can walk.”

“I know that. But injuries have a way of sneaking up on a person.”

“I’ll be fine once I can get to the cabin,” she said.

“Here’s the deal. There’s electricity but no heat or hot water at your cabin,” he said. “I was actually going to stay there until I discovered that. That’s when I moved to the Donovan cabin. Fortunately, Mack, Brody and I always had keys to both. I think it was your brother’s idea. Always have a plan and a backup plan.”

That sounded like Mack. And the situation at the cabin sounded rather grim. But she’d come this far, she wasn’t stopping now. “I’d still like to go there. I...I need to see it.” For days her world had been in turmoil. The cabin had always been there, solid, safe, comfortable. Everything she needed right now.

“As the crow flies, we’re about a mile from there. If you need to stop at any point, just tell me. Don’t hide anything,” he said. “Knowing about someone’s abilities or inabilities is sometimes the difference between life and death. All right?”

“Got it.”

“Okay. Give me a minute to find the flashlight.”

She stood perfectly still, afraid to move. She could barely see her hand in front of her face but somehow he was confidently moving around in the dark.

It took him less than a couple minutes to locate the flashlight. “Here we go,” he said. “It was practically buried in these pine needles.”

Suddenly a swath of light split the dark night and she immediately felt better.

He turned and led the way on the narrow path that required them to go single file. The terrain was rough and without her one arm for balance, she felt awkward and slow. But he never said anything. And he never got more than a couple steps in front of her before slowing down so that she could catch up.

When they reached the cabin, he stopped and turned. “Why don’t you stay here for a minute and let me take a look first. All kinds of things can happen in an unattended space.”

Yikes. She hadn’t considered that. Just her luck, a bear had taken up residence. “If you think it’s necessary,” she said.

He let out a loud sigh. “Mack would kick my butt if I did anything different.”

As she recalled, from all the wrestling matches that had occurred in their basement, Mack and Ethan had been very evenly matched. She reached into her jeans pocket and pulled out a small key ring with two keys. “It’s this one.”

“Shouldn’t take me more than thirty seconds,” he said.

“Okay. Be careful,” she added.

He walked away. “Don’t worry.”

Worrying was all she’d done since she’d realized what had happened and was still happening.

She hadn’t said goodbye to her stepmother, hadn’t been able to face the woman who sat behind the big desk in her five-hundred-dollar suits.

While she couldn’t be 100 percent sure, she was pretty confident the trail led right to that shiny desk with its silver pens placed just so.

If only Claudia Linder was just the CEO of Linder Automation. But six months ago, under a full moon, in the presence of twenty slightly drunk guests, Chandler and Mack being two of them, Claudia Linder had married Baker McCann, becoming Claudia Linder McCann, Chandler and Mack’s stepmother.

Her dad had been over the moon about finding a second love. He’d been alone since his wife had died more than twenty years earlier.

It would destroy him if what Chandler suspected was true.

But how many would pay if Chandler turned her back and said nothing?

It had been thirty seconds since Ethan had entered the cabin and he still hadn’t called for her. In fact, she couldn’t hear anything from inside. Her heart was pumping in her chest. She wished the dog had stayed with her.

Something was wrong.

Chapter Three

The front door of the cabin swung open. A light had been turned on. Ethan stood in the doorway, his arm raised, motioning her in. She ran toward him, not caring that it jarred her shoulder.

“It’s okay,” he said, stepping aside quickly.

She nodded and for the first time in many days, when she stepped over the threshold into the familiar space, thought that he might be right.

She took a deep breath and the sense of family filled her lungs. The main living area of the cabin was one big room, with a kitchen on one side and family room on the other. Off to the left, down a short hallway, were two small bedrooms and a bath. The floors were all narrow slats of pine, and the round-log walls were the best that Colorado had to offer.

It had been in her family for generations. She knew the Donovan cabin was the mirror image. Her great-grandfather had built them both in the 1930s. In the 1960s, Grandpa McCann had inherited the cabins and paid for electricity lines to be strung from the main highway and had dug a well. By the 1990s, they’d been passed down to her dad, who saw no need for two cabins. Baker McCann had sold one to his best friend, Brody Donovan’s dad.

And her family had kept the other one, spending summers here since she was a child. Both Baker and Mr. Donovan had worked from home. Baker as a computer analyst, Mr. Donovan as a novelist. That flexibility allowed them to come in June and stay until Labor Day. The McCanns had stayed home the summer Sally McCann had died. Baker had barely left the basement and had stopped tinkering with the old helicopter that he was rebuilding. He certainly wasn’t up to vacationing with his two children. Mack had been angry that they’d missed a summer in the mountains. Chandler had been too young to care as much. But by the next year, her dad had pulled himself together and things had gotten back to normal. Except the new normal had included Ethan Moore.

He and Mack had shared a bedroom, she’d had the other and her dad had slept on the pullout sofa. Every morning, the boys had met Brody Donovan at the end of the lane and they didn’t come home until dark. They’d fished, hiked and swam in the lake. And at night, when Mack and Ethan had returned to the cabin, they’d played cards. It was how she’d learned to play poker, first watching, then finally, when she got the hang of it, they’d let her sit in on a few games.

“How are you feeling?” Ethan asked, interrupting her memories.

Every muscle ached and the pain in her shoulder hadn’t gotten any better. “I’m okay,” she lied.

He reached toward her, his palm open, and with the pad of his thumb, gently brushed the bridge of her nose, then her cheeks. “You’ve got some marks here from the air bag,” he said. “Do they hurt?”

“Not really.” Her cheeks were too cold to feel much else.

“We should assess for other injuries,” Ethan said.

Speaking of assessing... Wow. Ethan had grown up and into his body. At twenty-two, he’d been tall and lanky. At thirty-eight, he was still lean but his frame was thicker with muscle. His hair was still buzzed short, military-style. His face had the same strong chin, high cheekbones and dark eyes.

He had a long, fresh scratch that started at his ear and ran down the side of his neck. She wondered if there were more scratches and cuts on his back from rescuing her from the tree. “I don’t think I’m the only one hurting,” she said.

He shook his head. “I’m fine. Nothing a little hydrogen peroxide and ibuprofen can’t handle. I’m going to walk over to the other cabin and get my truck. There’s an emergency room about forty miles away where we can get your shoulder looked at.”

She shook her head. “It will be fine,” she said. “I think I just sprained it. I don’t need a doctor.”

“Can I at least take a look at it? I don’t have any formal training but I’ve spent the past twenty years with medics attached to my unit. I’ve picked up a thing or two along the way.”

“Okay.”

He unzipped the coat that practically hung to her knees. Very gently, he helped her pull one arm out and then he lifted the material away.

He gently probed her shoulder area and her collarbone. When he tried to gently rotate her shoulder, it moved but it hurt a lot. “What do you think?” she asked.

“I think you should go to the doctor. But beyond that, I’m pretty confident that you didn’t dislocate the shoulder. It appears more likely that it’s a soft-tissue injury, more of a sprain. We should get some ice on it.” He walked over to the refrigerator and opened the freezer door. It was empty. “I have ice in my cabin,” he said.

She nodded.

“We need to call the police,” he said. “The accident should be reported.”

“I’ll do it in the morning. I want to get some sleep first.”

“I suppose it’s not going to make a difference.” He studied her. “Are you going to call Mack?”

She might have to. But not yet. If she was wrong and the attack had been totally random, she didn’t want to plant seeds of doubt. He hadn’t been crazy about her father and stepmother’s marriage, either. Had said more than once that there was something about Claudia Linder that he didn’t like. “I don’t think there’s much he can do about a car in the trees.”

“He’d want to help. But if he’s working out of the country, it might take him a few days to get back, regardless of how much he wanted to.”

“I guess.” Tomorrow, in the daylight, somebody was bound to see her car. If she didn’t report it, somebody else would. The car was registered in her name. It would probably only be hours before the police notified her dad and stepmother that she’d been in an accident and was missing.

Her dad would be terrified. Her stepmother was the wild card. Would she be grieving alongside her new husband or would she start to hunt in earnest?

By morning Chandler was going to need a plan. Right now, it simply seemed beyond her. She was tired from the drive, sore from tumbling over the mountain and almost falling out of a tree, and rather discombobulated by suddenly seeing Ethan again after all these years.

Ethan reached down to pat Molly’s head. The dog was crowding up against his leg, probably eagerly anticipating the next adventure.

“Like I said before, I’m not sure this is the best place for you.” Ethan looked around the room.

She followed his gaze. The furniture was covered with dusty sheets. There were cobwebs in the corners and hanging over the stone fireplace. Nobody had been at the cabin for more than six months and it showed. She knew the beds would be stripped of their linens and the refrigerator would be bare.

It was cold. She desperately wanted a hot shower, but that wasn’t going to happen. Still, she could probably make do. They always kept clean sheets and blankets in a tote in the closet and she wouldn’t starve to death overnight. The lights were a plus. “It’s not great,” she agreed, “but I don’t have a lot of choices right now.”

“You can stay with me. There are two bedrooms, just like here,” he added quickly.

“I know,” she said. “I didn’t think it was an invitation to...” She stopped, embarrassed. Of course it wasn’t that. For all she knew, Ethan was married with two kids. She sneaked a quick look at his fingers.

No ring.

He noticed. “To hook up?” he said, finishing her sentence. “You’re Mack’s little sister. I value all my appendages.”

She smiled, appreciating the fact that he was trying to make light of the situation. Ethan Moore asked me to stay over. If she was fourteen, she’d have written it in bold in her diary, with little hearts around it.

But she didn’t want to drag Ethan into her mess. “I’ll be fine here,” she said, hoping she was right.

“You don’t have any food.”

“I did. I had a box of crackers and a jar of peanut butter in my backpack.”

“I’ll fix you a bacon, egg and cheese on toast.”

She tilted her head. “That’s my favorite sandwich.”

He winked at her. “It’s the only thing I remember you eating in the mornings. You had one every day for the entire summer, with a glass of chocolate milk.”

She’d always assumed she was invisible to her brother’s friends. “Do you have milk?” she asked.

He nodded. “White milk and chocolate syrup.”

She smiled. “That’s how I always make it.”

“And I’ve got ice for your shoulder,” he reminded her.

Even though she knew staying with Ethan may be a bad idea, she really didn’t want to be alone. “You’ve got a deal. Thank you,” she added. “I’ll try not to be any trouble.”

* * *

ETHAN LED THE way to the Donovan cabin, with Chandler following close. They didn’t talk. He figured she was hurting and he was trying to process the past half hour.

Chandler McCann had certainly grown into a beautiful woman. When she’d entered the cabin and he’d seen her in full light, he’d been practically speechless. Her skin was lovely and it had made him crazy that she’d been marred by the chemical burns of the air bag. Those marks would heal but it was hard to see perfection harmed. Her dark hair had been piled up on her head but the strands that had escaped fell past her shoulders and were silky and shiny.

And then there were her eyes. A vivid emerald-green, with a slight tilt up at the corners. Thick, dark lashes.

She was stunning. And absolutely off-limits. They both might be adults and in any other circumstance he’d consider it, but she was Chandler McCann. Neither Baker nor Mack had ever delivered one of those “stay away from Chandler, you big lug” kind of conversations. Probably hadn’t figured they needed to.

Both of those men―men he admired greatly―doted on this woman. Nobody would be good enough for her. Certainly not Ethan Moore.

The McCanns were old money in Denver. The kind that had a beautiful house in the wealthy district and cabins in the mountains. The kind where wealth was passed down generation to generation. No money had passed down when his mother had died. In fact, there hadn’t been enough in his mother’s bank account to bury her. Ethan had made sure the funeral was nice, though, using some of his savings. He hadn’t expected anything different. He’d been sending money to her every month, knowing that her health limited the number of houses she could clean, knowing that her idiot of a husband did a poor job of providing for them. About the only thing he did well was run his mouth and swing his fist.

Ethan had survived the verbal and physical abuse his stepfather had dished out because he knew that Mack McCann and Brody Donovan were going to grow into men that others would be proud of.

And Ethan wasn’t going to get left behind.

A week after graduation, he’d enlisted in the army.

He’d always known he was going to have to find a different path than his best friends because there weren’t any prestigious military academies or fancy colleges in his future. But he had been determined to be a man others would respect.

Which led him to the second reason why there was no way, no how, that there would be any “hooking up” between him and Chandler. Nobody would respect a man who got involved with somebody when his personal and professional lives had fallen apart. Under investigation.

Ugly words that had come on the heels of ugly accusations. And even though the wildebeest was finally off his back, there were still many who didn’t believe in his innocence.