Alace Sweets, page 11
“Hey, did you say you’re headed to Cuba? Can I get a ride?” If Rick thought him a tourist, he might not be willing to involve him in what was going on here. When his partner was unknown, she’d been convinced Waterdrum had to be the hunter of the two, but now she remembered how Rick had continually surprised her today. First by linking her together with Waterdrum’s death, and then by Rick’s efficient abduction of her, a person trained in the kind of countermeasures that should have kept her safe. She stepped to the end of the porch and off, dropping the three feet to the ground, landing balanced, with soft knees that still complained about the impact. “I was going to hitch with Rick, but he’s tied up with something for a while. I need to get to Cuba. Any chance of you helping me out?”
“Sure.” Eric’s calm voice didn’t match his expression, which bordered on freaked out. “Climb on in.”
“Thanks, Rick.” She called over her shoulder, twisting to see the ranger had swung to watch her walk away. “Love what you’ve done to the place.” A reminder that his interior decorations held secrets he would probably prefer to keep hidden. “See you around.” You won’t see me coming. She held her breath as she dropped into the seat, hearing Eric’s door slam shut, closing them inside the vehicle. Shifting the bag to her lap, she wrapped her arms around it. Will he really let me drive away, knowing what I know?
From his position on the steps, Rick watched, unmoving. Alace locked gazes with him and he didn’t blink, didn’t flinch. He was letting her go. Time to get the fuck out of Dodge.
Alace turned her head towards Eric who was staring at her, equal parts terror and exhilaration in his expression. “Drive. Turn around and drive.” Surprised out of his shock, he reached and started the car then reversed into the field next to the cabin, pulling out onto the rocky track. “Not too fast, you’ll tear up the car.” Tearing her gaze from Eric’s face, still not believing it was real, Alace angled her eyes to the mirror, seeing Rick growing smaller with every second. “How’d you find the place? How did you find me?”
Eric didn’t respond, and she glanced at him. Fingers tight around the wheel, his knuckles were stark white from the force of his grip. He was alternating looking at the road and flicking his eyes towards her. Back and forth, as if he were afraid she would disappear in an instant. The vehicle was rapidly picking up speed, and he looked about half a second away from that promised freak-out she’d seen on his face earlier. Keeping her voice soft, she repeated the question, “Eric, how did you find me?”
Motion in the mirror pulled her attention, and she saw the cop car slowly pulling away from the cabin. It turned the other direction, towards the loop that ran through the back of the property, and Alace wondered if she’d missed something up that way. “Slow down. You can slow down, he’s leaving. We’re good.” The SUV immediately decelerated to a crawl, the punishing bounces from the rocks in the road lessening.
Alace was pulled, finding herself unaccustomedly uncertain what to do. Should she bail out and head back to follow Rick or stay with Eric and make sure he got out of harm’s way? Shit. Her inclination was to keep Eric safe, no question. I can always come back and track Rick. I’ll need to gather the kids’ IDs anyway. She would send those to someone Regg kept on retainer to report things like this, since attempting to give every family closure was part of her standard gig.
With Rick headed away from them, it felt safe to turn her full attention to Eric, so she twisted to see he was no longer pretending to watch the road, staring across the car to where she sat. “Hey.” His eyes widened at the greeting she’d worked to keep casual. “You saved me.”
“You’re really here?” Eric’s hands slipped and tightened on the wheel as a pothole threatened to rip it from his grip. Then he gifted her with something she longed for every day, playing each utterance of her name in his voice in her dreams. “Alace, baby. You’re here?”
“I am.” One side of his mouth pulled down, and he quickly turned to look out the windshield. She drank in the sight of him. Hair slightly longer than before, curling softly at the nape of his neck. He bore lines of tension she suspected would smooth out once things had calmed down, but they didn’t look bad on him at all, giving him a veneer of even more rugged handsomeness.
She studied him, impressing every detail on her brain, storing up the tiniest of things for later. The way the muscles in his forearms shifted as he wrestled the SUV down through the creek and up the other side. The DNR vehicle downstream fifty yards or more, wedged against the bank in a crush of tree branches and logs. Alace shivered, remembering the chill of the water as it seeped into the vehicle. She dragged her gaze away and stared at Eric again. He’s really here.
“Eric, you saved me.” Not that she’d needed saving, really. When he drove up, she’d been two seconds from exiting out the back door and into the woods, where Rick would have been hard-pressed to find her. Eric pulling up when he did certainly made her escaping easier.
“This was the place? Where you called from last night?” His voice dipped a register, adopting a husky drawl that teased along her spine.
How odd that it was just last night. A handful of hours ago, she’d been drunk off her ass and crying on the phone with a man. This man. Someone who had made it a mission to hunt her down, but not for reasons most men searched for a person like her. Not to take her to the nearest authorities and turn her over for a reward. Fear drilled into her head, stiffening her spine. What if he is? It had been more than two years since their short-lived romance. People changed all the time. Hell, I’ve changed. She thought of the small cache of mementos she carried with her now. On the phone, he’d told her he knew people, folks who could make things go away. That implied confronting her actions, something she wasn’t willing to do anywhere near anyone who wore handcuffs as a uniform accessory. “Where are we going?”
“What?”
“Where are we going? Where are you taking us?” If she couched it like that, he might be less inclined to immediately hit up the nearest authorities. “Yes, that’s the cabin I was at.”
“How…why would you come back? Did you ever leave?”
“Yeah.” She shrugged off the backpack and settled it on the floor between her boots. “Rick found me and brought me back.” She plucked at her shirt, pulling it away from her body, wincing as the material stuck to the oozing burn on her chest.
“He brought you back? Why?” She ignored his questions for a moment and hooked a finger in the neck, dragging the fabric out to expose the spot and angling her chin down to look at where the Taser barb had impacted. There was a quarter-inch hole with red, raised edges flaring from the site. “What is that? Did he hurt you?” The vehicle slowed. Glancing up, she saw his eyes fixed on the burn, then flicked to her wrists, raw and torn from the repeated sessions with zip ties. He scowled, expression hardening, and Alace realized Eric was about a half a second from deciding to go back and do something stupid.
“He used a Taser. Got the drop on me because he didn’t ping like he was dangerous. The man—” She hesitated a moment, then continued. “—I told you about the man last night.” Eric nodded. The SUV had drifted to a complete stop, the quiet engine leaving the silence of the wilderness nearly unbroken. “Rick, Ranger Rick…I don’t know his name because he didn’t fucking factor.” She let go of her collar and slammed a fist against her thigh. “He didn’t fucking factor, but he was the partner. The one I couldn’t figure out, and I’d talked to him nearly every day for weeks.”
“Baby, I don’t understand.” A sweet pain swept over her with his use of the word, and Alace let her eyes close for a moment. Sound in the distance alerted her, and she looked in the mirror, staring at Waterdrum’s car as it returned to the front of the cabin. We gotta go.
“Drive, Eric. Get us out of here. I’ll explain everything, just…” She couldn’t wait any longer, needed to reassure herself that this was real, not a drug-induced hallucination. Alace reached out and covered his hand with hers, flesh and bone fingers spreading to let hers fall through, tightening around and trapping her as their fingers threaded together. “Get us safe first.”
He released a deep breath, heat gusting over her hand where it was joined with his, and he brought their clasped hands to his thigh, adjusting his other hand on the wheel as he started the SUV rolling again. “Okay. I can do that.”
By the time they’d reached the highway, she’d thrown caution to the winds, no longer caring if he might have a recording device in the vehicle. She had explained what brought her to the location, a scattering of reports on the darknet about how kids who hit the local state cops radar fell off when they headed west through the reservation. Those disappearances had eventually led her to Waterdrum. He’d been the last contact for many of the cops dropping the runaways at the edge of the reservation, as far as the treaties would allow them to go without a clear invitation. She talked through her process, and how she’d been hiking and camping for months, working a grid pattern to try and find his base of location. The process of identifying which of the many remote cabins held not only the tools, but as of last night, graphic evidence of his murder and mutilation of so many kids. She’d skimmed over her involvement in his death, not certain what pitfalls her failed memories held for things she must have told Eric last night.
Through it all, he’d listened quietly, not asking questions, just taking in the story. His fingers had tightened on hers at places when she’d gotten too detailed, those reactions letting her map out when to back off. When she got to today and her disgust at not picking up anything from Rick, irritation at herself for allowing him the opening to scoop her up, Eric made a tortured sound, and she looked at his face, seeing lines of pain drawing his mouth down and to the side. Too much. Skipping to waking up at the cabin and what Rick had been doing hadn’t alleviated Eric’s distress, so she quickly drew her narrative to a close, ending with her relief at seeing Eric in the vehicle.
When he turned towards town on the highway, they were only minutes away from whatever came next, and she pulled in a hard breath. Reality time. “What are you going to do? Where are you taking me?” His fingers clutched hers, knuckles grinding painfully against her bones. “Eric, what—?”
“I’d checked into a motel room, but he knows I was coming back to Cuba. That was it.” He gestured over his shoulder at the brown building they’d just passed. “I’d rather…” Trailing off, he loosened his grip slightly, adjusting to pin her hand between his palm and thigh. “Come home with me, Alace.” She opened her mouth, but he cut her off. “You’re injured, exhausted, and you have everything you need from here to sort out what’s next. You have everything you need, baby. What’s a day or two? Hmmm? Come home.”
Not a mention of cops or his friends who could magically fix everything. Eric didn’t give any reaction to the things she’d said, any guilt she’d claimed. Come home. Like anything could be that easy. “Your home?” Five and a half hours away waited the place that still was a balm to her soul. “Just leave this unfinished?” That went against the grain, and she knew he heard it when he pressed her hand farther into the giving flesh of his leg.
“Just for a couple of days. We’ll come back and sort it out.”
Her head was shaking back and forth before he’d even finished spitting out the lie. “No. That’s not what you mean. Not at all.” The tone of his voice had given it away. Up to that point she’d believed, but not now. He would take her home, right. “You’ll pick up the phone first chance you get. First time I doze off, you’ll be up and making a call.”
He shook his head, the quick motion exposing his fear. Fear of what? “No, Alace—”
They’d pulled up behind a car turning left, stopped in the middle of town in light traffic. She evaluated her options, reaching down to grab the strap of her bag as she tried to yank her hand out of his grip. Tried and failed, and they were moving again, faster, turning a corner with the vehicle’s frame rocking violently before he screeched to a stop, tires barking as they slid on the pavement. “Alace, don’t.” He slammed the gearshift with his hand, reaching over to grip her arm.
She twisted in his grip, willing to leave skin behind if that was what it took. He was ripping apart every dream she’d had about him. His words down in Alabama making her believe he could look past what she’d turned herself into and see the person she wanted to be. “Alace.” He sounded frustrated as she opened her door, sliding half out of the seat, one foot and one hand still inside the SUV. Yanking hard, she nearly broke free. Then he stripped her of movement with a word.
“Baby.” Fucking, fucking Eric. He pulled, and she slipped halfway across the seat towards him, foot leaving the ground to dangle uselessly in the air. “Don’t. I’m not going to do that. Not a chance, baby. I get it. I do.” Fucking liar. No one could get it, especially not someone like him who had lived such a good life. Her words to Regg echoed through her head. He’s a good man. “Baby, I get what you do. I want to help.” That stiffened every muscle as if she’d been Tasered again, and she stared up into his eyes. Honesty and something else shone out at her, the something else undefinable, outside her wealth of experience. Honesty she could deal with, and she stopped struggling, choosing to believe him. “Baby, I want to help. Get back in and let me bring you home. We’ll sleep and eat and plan. I’m good at planning. I can do that with you.”
“Help me?” He nodded, pulling her closer, her head nearly in his lap, neck craned so she could look up at him. “Not turn me in?” She needed the reassurance. In her experience, people could say things on their own, volunteer lies through smiling lips, but if asked a direct question they didn’t like, you could see it on their face as they answered.
“Help you, baby. I want to help. I get it.” He’d said that several times now, over more than one conversation, but it still confused her. How much has he looked into me? He’d had two years and then some to put everything together and come to peace with how her chosen life’s direction went. He was staring straight at her, gaze locked on her face, and nothing in his expression told her he was lying. He meant every word and was so willing to back it up he’d driven down to what she’d described as a slaughterhouse to find her. On the strength of her words, he’d dropped everything to come to her. She hadn’t allowed herself to do more than cursory searches on him since she’d left his bed in the middle of the night. Her searches had dug a little deeper after Alabama, just enough to find out he’d taken paid vacation time to drive down. She didn’t know what methods he’d used, what markers he’d called in, but she did know that nothing he’d done to find her had raised an alarm with any of the countermeasures she had in place against that kind of thing.
You’d think I’d have worried more after Alabama. She hadn’t, though. Getting away and sorting out her next plan of action, she’d laid aside any misgiving about his actions. It’s like I’ve known all along I could trust him. She stared at him. Can I trust him? Multiple adrenaline crashes were clouding her brain, making every thought more difficult than it had to be. She might have slept until nearly midday, but that didn’t count for much when she’d been up more than twenty-four hours previously, and only laid down her head after six o’clock. Add in all that had happened today: Tasered, drugged, hit with bear spray, choked out, then rescuing herself again—exhaustion made her muscles weak, biceps and quads quivering from the strain of holding her position.
He stayed still, not shifting his grip on her arm and hand, not moving. Eric watched her, his gaze seeming to drink her in, eyes flicking side to side as he tracked down her features. No doubt she was a sight. Face covered in dirt and blood, flushed red with fear and anger, probably paling now as she came to a decision. Am I deciding right now? Once again, their penchant for having single words alter their trajectory together came into play, and she gave him what he wanted. Gave herself what she wanted, too. More than anything. My dream. “Okay.”
Without another word, he tugged, and she slid all the way into the seat, swung her legs around and dropped her bag as she reached out to close the door. Only once it was shut did he release her arm. Eric glanced down and his eyes closed, an anguished expression on his face as he turned away. She looked at her arm and saw the white imprint of his fingers there. That’s gonna bruise. Snorting, she regained his attention. His eyes flew open and he stared at her. “Smallest of prices.” She was already leaning his direction when he hooked a hand around the back of her neck, abandoning her hand for a more secure grip.
For the first time in more than two years, she kissed a man. Not any man, but Eric—fucking, fucking Eric—and just like that, she was gone for him again.
His lips softly questing across hers led to a firmer pressure as their mouths worked together. Her palm hit his chest, fingers twisting into his shirt to pull him near, pull herself closer, anything she could do to reduce the gulf of distance between them. The tip of his tongue slipped between her lips and tenderly touched hers, sliding and withdrawing, testing the waters. A breath later, she knew he found the waters to his liking as the kiss did what every one of their caresses had done and exploded into a corona of heat.
He made love to her mouth, breaths mingling as they separated to draw in air, panting and groaning. “Beloved.” His murmur covered her like a blanket, separating her from the knowledge of what he was, letting her fall farther under his spell, no longer caring if she ever crawled out. She shifted, angling her body towards his, slipping between the wheel and his chest, and he adjusted on the fly, lifting and supporting her. Cradled in his arms, she explored as much as she could reach. Nips and licks drew more groans from him, making her smile when he arched his neck, giving her access to the sensitive underside of his jaw. She worked along the edges of muscles and bone, mapping his skin and charting every inch with her touch.
The whoop of a siren yanked her back into her head, heart pounding as she looked through the SUV and out the back window, seeing a cop car parked behind them. Eric had done a half-assed job of pulling over to the curb when he stopped, leaving them blocking part of the lane. God. Sloppy and stupid. She eased back across the seat to her side as Eric recaptured her hand, rolled down the window and propped his arm on the wheel. When he squeezed her fingers, she realized this was intentional, a way to partially block the cop’s view of her.
