In sight of the enemy, p.20
In Sight of the Enemy, page 20
Cassie stuck to his side, cradling one of his hands in both of hers. She wanted to get that blood wiped off his face. Only then would they be sure of the extent of the damage. There seemed to be a nasty gash above one eye that was still flowing pretty freely. She wondered if any of the party Hawk had brought with him had medical training. As sheriff, surely Lloyd would have some basic knowledge of—
“Cass.”
Instantly diverted from her thoughts by that soft voice, her gaze jerked to Shane, found his eyes open but unfocused. “Shane!” She squeezed his hand, relief doing a quick tumble in her stomach. “Oh, I’m so glad to hear your voice.”
His eyes had fluttered shut again. “What happened?”
“We were hoping you could tell us that,” her brother said.
There was a slight line between Shane’s brows, but he didn’t open his eyes. “Hawk’s here,” she explained tenderly, restraining the urge to push his hair away from his forehead. She was afraid to touch him until she knew just where and how badly he was hurt.
“Yeah, I have to say I’ve seen you look better, Doc.”
Shane’s mouth twitched. “It’s the beard.”
Two of the newcomers that Hawk had introduced as FBI agents passed them, with a couple deputies, heading in the direction they’d just come from. One was carrying blankets and a bag, and Cassie realized they’d be examining the scene and then using the blankets in lieu of a body bag. She couldn’t summon an ounce of regret at the thought. Not when it could just as easily have ended very differently.
A makeshift bed was made up for Shane outside the cabin, and once the worst of the blood was washed away, Cassie was relieved to see there were no obvious wounds other than the cut over his eye and the lump on his head. “It’ll be your turn to go in for tests this time,” she said. “I won’t be satisfied until they do one of those scans to check for a fracture or a brain bleed or something.”
“Just slap on a couple of those butterfly bandages from the kit and I’ll be fine.”
Cassie leaned over him, taking an inordinate amount of time to hold the wound closed and to place a strip over it. She was working on the third when Hawk and Liam approached.
“Feeling up for conversation?” the agent asked.
“I’m okay,” Shane said quietly. “Nearling?”
“Dead.”
He started to nod, winced. “Yeah. I spotted him making his way to the cabin. Headed him off. Dropped my damn rifle so I had to jump him. We fought. He picked up a rock.” He stopped, frowned. “Tried to brain me with it, damn near did. I got it away from him and used it.”
“That’s pretty much how we figured it.”
Shane reached for Cassie’s hand, entwined their fingers. “Now it’s your turn. What the heck went on in North Carolina? Sheridan told us about this Payne guy. She claims he’s Cassie’s and your father?”
Hawk glanced up quickly at his sister. “God, no, not our father. I’m sorry, Cass, if you thought that.”
“Then what is he?” The question exploded from her. “Who is he to us?”
“It’s true that he was married to our birth mother when we were conceived. But the files I found indicate that a sperm donor was used. He’s nothing to us, sis.”
His words brought her a dizzying sensation of relief. The thought of having that man’s blood flowing through her veins was overwhelmingly repulsive.
“We’ve been on Payne’s trail for years,” Liam put in quietly. “He’s had a long and checkered criminal career, but he made his fortune in the design and sale of experimental drugs.”
“Instant addiction,” Cassie breathed.
Liam nodded. “He broadened his repertoire with this latest venture. He started out using it for blackmail, forcing his victims to pay him for more drugs. But he had some setbacks. Some of the victims died. A senator, a wealthy French industrialist. And we were getting close. We shut down some of his labs. We’re not sure now where he’s basing his work.”
“Mobile labs,” Shane said succinctly. At Liam’s startled look, he repeated the conversation they’d had with Sheridan.
“So she’s cooperative?”
“She is with one of those syringes against her neck.”
The agent’s mouth quirked. “I’ll keep that in mind when I interrogate her.”
Cassie’s attention drifted back to Shane. To her critical eye, the gash on his head could use another bandage. But she couldn’t bring herself to relinquish her grip on his hand. There was comfort offered in that simple touch. And an intense heat in the gaze he turned on her that infused her with warmth. She reached up with her free hand, fussed with the sterile strips she’d applied.
“We just couldn’t figure out how Payne knew about me. Has he kept tabs on us throughout the years?” she asked her brother. The thought of that malevolent presence in the shadows the whole time they were growing up was more than a little creepy.
Hawk looked miserable. “I’m afraid that was my fault. He was determined to keep me from finding the files in North Carolina. He must have overheard me talking to Sheryl about your ability and decided to go after you.”
“Mind control,” Liam said grimly. “The man’s a psychopath, but he’s a brilliant psychopath.”
Cassie was still puzzling over her brother’s words. “Why would he have tried to stop you from finding information on our birth mother?” She saw the glance he exchanged with Liam.
“Because…” He laid a hand on her shoulder. “He killed her.” He swallowed convulsively. “He murdered Deanna Payne because she was trying to get away from him. Cassie.” His voice went lower, his gaze was intense on hers. “Your dream. The one of you in the yellow dress.”
She nodded jerkily.
“I don’t think that’s you in the dream, Cass. I think…I’m sure it was our mother.”
There was a roaring in her ears. “Our…mother?”
Silently, Hawk took a picture from his shirt pocket, handed it to her. Cassie stared down at it dumbly, her thumb tracing the woman’s face. Black hair, long enough to hang below her shoulders. Green eyes, fringed with dark lashes. The shape of the face, the tilt of the chin… It was like looking in the mirror.
Shane’s voice filled the long silence, anchoring her to the present. “She’s beautiful, honey. Just like her daughter.”
“I don’t understand.” Her fingers clutched the picture tightly. “It’s always been precog. I’ve never dreamed of the past.” A tentative bloom of hope was unfurling inside her. She was afraid to believe it. Afraid to be doomed to disappointment. “How is that possible?”
“Remember the boy you talked about being in the closet?”
She nodded, her throat tight. Because she’d always felt such a bond with the child, she’d assumed he was hers, or very close to her.
“Because of your dream, I’m wondering if the older children were hiding in the closet.”
“The older children?”
“There’s another set of triplets,” Hawk said. “They would have been three at the time.”
It was difficult to absorb. She and Hawk had grown up close, thinking they were alone. Then he found out they were actually part of a set of triplets. And now…there were six of them.
“You said the boy had a soft terry toy in his hands.” Hawk was talking again. “I wonder if it belonged to you, and if that’s why the connection was so strong.”
“That’s possible, I guess.” It was like having her world tilt off its axis. It was disorienting to have something she’d believed her whole life reinterpreted. To be given hope for the future, when she’d never had any.
But it was also a gift. One she’d never imagined receiving.
“Will we meet them?” She wanted, more than anything, to meet the boy—her brother?—who had figured so large in her life, without ever knowing him at all.
“I’d say that’s pretty likely,” Liam said. “You all figure in this thing one way or another. And I don’t want you to worry. We’ve gotten some new leads to track down Benedict, and any one of them might crack this case wide open. There was a cell in the truck abandoned by Sheridan and Nearling. I ordered a dump on its records so we might get lucky there.” He got to his feet. “Now I’m going to go in and see if I’m as successful as you were getting Sheridan to talk. With more details on those mobile labs, we might be able to nail him sooner than we expected.”
Cassie watched him walk away, then looked down at the picture in her hand one more time. Shane reached up to stroke her arm, and the simple gesture soothed her.
“Are you okay, Cassie?” her brother asked.
“I will be.” She smiled tremulously. “I really think I will be.”
“I’m not a damn invalid.” Cassie heard Shane muttering when Sheriff Lloyd suggested he might want to lie down again. Pushing away from the door, where she’d gone to check on Agent Brooks’s progress with Sheridan, she approached Shane with a critical eye. His color was better, she was relieved to note. And if surliness was a sign of good health, he was improving rapidly.
“No, you’re not,” she told him when she reached his side. “When I told Agent Brooks about our adventures, he suggested you might be half cat.”
When she sank down next to his blanket, Lloyd didn’t seem unhappy to leave Shane to her.
“I don’t like cats.”
She smiled. “You have something in common with them, though. The way I figure it, you’ve used up about six lives recently.”
He started to laugh, then winced.
“How’s the head?”
“Throbbing.”
She stroked his jaw tenderly. “I wish you could take something for it.”
“Yeah, well, I know enough not to risk pain relievers with a possible concussion. I’ll be all right.”
“I know something that might cheer you up. I think the group is planning a celebratory feast. They brought real food.” She waited a beat. “Summer sausage and apples.”
He gave a lopsided smile. “At this point I’m not in the mood to quibble over the menu. I’m just grateful I’m going to get to take part in it.”
So was she. She reached out for his hand, needing the contact. Though thankful he’d been returned to her, she knew the hard part was still ahead of them. “I talked to Liam,” she blurted out. “About Payne, I mean. He agrees with Sheridan. He won’t stop until he finds me. And I can’t put the baby in jeopardy.”
Shane didn’t answer. He just looked at her with a line between his brow that didn’t tell her if he was angry, in pain or just puzzled. “He has a place he thinks I can use. Somewhere Payne won’t find me. Hopefully it’ll just be for a while, until the FBI catches up with him. But…I’ll have to leave as soon as we get back to the ranch.”
He was quiet for so long that her stomach sank like a stone. “That’s too bad. I was counting on being there with you during the next checkup.”
For the baby, she realized, and tried to smile. This was what she wanted, was more than she’d hoped for when she’d first written him that note. “When I get back, you can be involved as much as you want, I promise.”
“What if I want more?”
The question hung between them, delicate as crystal. Cassie was afraid to answer, afraid to shatter the silence with the wrong word. Surely he couldn’t mean what she hoped.
Shane reached out, tenderly tucked a strand of hair over her shoulder. “The way you figured it, I have about three lives left. But I’m only interested in the one I can spend with you. With the three of us. I’m not about to let you go to Liam’s safe house, or anywhere else, without me.”
Her heart wept. It was the most cruel torture to have what she most wanted in the world held out to her, and know she couldn’t reach for it. “Nothing has changed, Shane. After this, more than ever I realize that. I can’t live with a man who rejects part of what makes me who I am. I can handle you not understanding it—”
“Good, because I do not pretend to understand it.”
She went on as if he hadn’t spoken, “But this would always be between us. Because of your childhood, your grandmother…”
“You are nothing like my grandmother.” His tone was almost angry. Her gaze flew to his, searching. “I might have believed that at first, but it didn’t take me long to realize that this ability is real to you.”
She looked at the ground. “That’s something, at least.”
“That was the start. Do you remember this morning when you told me that Sheridan and Nearling were at the stream?” At her nod, he said urgently, “How long was it before I headed out the door, Cass?”
She frowned, not seeing the relevance. “You left right away, I guess. As soon as you could get dressed and get your gun…” She stopped then, comprehension beginning to dawn. And with it a fragile bud of hope. “You left right away.”
“Yes. I wanted you to be wrong, but I never even thought about not going to check it out.” He smiled crookedly, his heart doing a rapid tattoo in his chest. “You saved my ass too many times in the last couple days to ignore your warning. And when they appeared, right where you said they would, well…it would take someone a lot more pigheaded than me to ignore that kind of evidence.”
“You are big on evidence.”
“Right. Because that’s part of who I am. Annoying, but there it is.” He reached out, traced her jaw with the tip of his index finger, praying that it wasn’t too late. “I can’t even do the noble thing and promise to change. I’ll probably always be trying to figure out the hows and whys of it all. But I can promise that I’ll never reject you again.” His jaw clenched with emotion, his chest expanded with it. “Not you or the baby. Everything that makes you what you are is precious to me. I love you, Cass. And I want to spend the rest of my life, our lives, proving that to you.”
She linked her arms around his neck and gave him a blinding smile. And he noticed that finally, the lingering sadness had been banished from her eyes. “I’m not like you scientist types. I don’t need proof. I have faith.”
Faith. As their lips met, Shane was willing to admit that even a scientist could use a healthy dose of that, too.
Special thanks and acknowledgment are given to Kylie Brant for her contribution to the FAMILY SECRETS: THE NEXT GENERATION series.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-6304-2
IN SIGHT OF THE ENEMY
Copyright © 2004 by Harlequin Books S.A.
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the editorial office, Silhouette Books, 233 Broadway, New York, NY 10279 U.S.A.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
® and TM are trademarks of Harlequin Books S.A., used under license. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.
Visit Silhouette Books at www.eHarlequin.com
*The Sullivan Brothers
*The Sullivan Brothers
*The Sullivan Brothers
†Charmed and Dangerous
†Charmed and Dangerous
†Charmed and Dangerous
**The Tremaine Tradition
**The Tremaine Tradition
**The Tremaine Tradition
**The Tremaine Tradition
Kylie Brant, In Sight of the Enemy
