Other than the one small aisleway through the place, there was no floor space.

  And then, before anyone could move, the woman said, “Oh, wait, what am I thinking? You’ll need the bathroom first. It’s through that door right over there.”

  Dorian needed a restroom. Just the chance to run water on her hands, wipe it on her face, to do her business without squatting in the dust. Glancing at Scott, who nodded, she walked over to him, untied the sling and, pressing against him, transferred the cloth to him to retie around himself. Trusting him to find out how best to get them out of there.

  The baby whimpered as she moved away, and she started to take him back, but Scott shook his head. Motioned her toward the bathroom.

  It might not be usable. Her lifted eyes and shrug were meant to tell him so. Whether he got the message or not, she wasn’t sure, but she took his nod as affirmation.

  “Ohhhh, let me get a look at that little one,” the old woman was saying as Dorian got her first glimpse inside the door that had been indicated to her.

  Shockingly, the room was...not as horrible as the rest of the house. The floor, cracked tile, was stacked only along the walls. The countertop was covered with things, but not stacked up the foot or more of the rest of the house, and the sink and toilet areas were clear.

  And relatively clean.

  There was a washer, too, with the lid open, and a few pieces of clothing inside.

  The shower, a stall, while cluttered around the edges, looked usable.

  Maybe later, if she and Scott were still in the area, she could actually stand under the spray.

  Wait! What was she thinking?

  Before bed that night, she should be home and would be spending half an hour under her own rain-style spray.

  Hurrying with her business, Dorian did take a few moments after sitting. She quickly washed her hands and face, and used a bit of the toothpaste from the tube standing in a glass to finger brush her teeth.

  She’d just opened the door, was stepping back out onto the aisleway in the main room when she heard the woman say, “Oh, you’ll have to wait for my Fred to take you to town. I never learned to drive.”

  And saw her hopes for a hot shower yet that night, fading.

  As reality—the kidnapped newborn in her care, Scott’s injury and being hunted by the worst kind of criminals—came crashing down on her once again.

  Chapter 17

  The woman’s name was Grace Arnold. She had no phone.

  She and Fred had had no children.

  “Oh, there you are!” the woman exclaimed with obvious pleasure as Dorian returned to Scott, and took the baby from him. The little guy was still mostly asleep, but Scott had been holding him in the crook of one arm, rather than in the sling.

  Just felt...better...at the moment.

  “I have bologna or peanut butter and jelly for sandwiches,” Grace was saying as Dorian took the baby from Scott. “I wish I could do better, but the man who delivers my groceries once a week hasn’t come yet. He worked with my Fred at the mine, years ago. Helped him fix the well, too, just right before Fred died.”

  In the few seconds since Dorian’s return, Grace seemed to have regained some of her faculties. Glancing at Dorian for confirmation of the possibility, he took her slight smile as just that.

  “Fred’s ashes were spread here on the property,” Grace was saying. “Which is why I stay here.”

  Scott didn’t find the idea a good one in any way. Even if for none of the obvious reasons, then because staying there alone, with her husband’s ashes around the place, probably helped feed the old woman’s fall back to earlier days when Fred was still alive. She knew he was close. Just seemed to slide in out and of the reality of her husband’s death.

  “Her name is Grace,” he said to Dorian then. And added, “Peanut butter for me, please.”

  He’d gained a good amount of information in a little time.

  But unfortunately none of it brought he, Dorian and the baby any closer to being safe.

  He had to get them to safety, even if he didn’t make it there with them.

  No second choice, no compromise on that one.

  “She’s offered to let us stay here with her until her next grocery delivery,” he added, just to catch Dorian up on the fact that Grace had no immediate help to offer them. In terms of getting them out of the mountains.

  Getting him on the trail of a killer named McKellips, and a high-powered kidnapping ring.

  And away from the influence of a woman he’d hardly known but had never forgotten. One who seemed to speak to him without words.

  He most definitely had to rid himself of that complication.

  In the meantime, Grace had food and water.

  Which, at the moment, was a good bit of help.

  And she had kindness.

  As the woman gathered sandwich fixings, asking about the baby, Scott excused himself to the bathroom, using every ounce of willpower he had not to limp on the way.

  * * *

  Grace landed a quarter of a loaf of bread, a knife and peanut butter and jelly on the table. Dorian, a big salad eater, was surprised to find her mouth watering for that bread.

  Solid food. Wheat based.

  Reaching down to start emptying a chair as best she could, with the baby strapped to her chest, she looked up as Grace said, “Oh look at these. Aren’t they pretty now? The flowers on them!”

  The woman was holding two plates that Dorian wasn’t sure were clean.

  “They’re beautiful,” she said, setting a shoe-sized plastic container on top of a pile of boxes.

  “They’re just lovely,” Grace repeated, and then asked, “Are they yours? Did you bring these for me?”

  And Dorian made another decision. As soon as she was out of the mountains, she was going to send someone up to help Grace. Assess her, at the very least. Depending on the woman’s finances, maybe she could hire someone to stay with her. Or at least drive up from Miami once a day to check on her. Dorian would donate the money to pay for that if that’s what it took.

  The respite Grace was so kindly offering to complete strangers was worth that and more.

  She’d just cleared a chair at the table, was sitting down, when Grace came over without the plates. “Your baby is just precious. Let me hold him while you make your sandwich.” The tone had changed.

  She sounded more like a principal in charge.

  But that didn’t make Dorian any more comfortable giving the baby to her. Most particularly not unless Grace was sitting down and would have her lap to help support the seven-or-so-pound bundle.

  It was just occurring to her that Grace had said him, as though she knew the baby in the mixed-pastel-covered blanket was a boy, when the bathroom door flew open and Scott strode across the room, his gun in hand.

  One look at him, his sharp gaze meeting hers, and Dorian was up and rushing out the back door behind him.

  At first, she was thinking she should remind Scott that in Grace’s day, it was common to refer to anyone whose gender wasn’t certain as “him.”

  Until her mind caught up with the gun, and Scott’s hurried, solid movements in spite of the pain they had to be causing him. The way he remained stooped, constantly surveying the shadows all around them, lit only by the window at the back of the house, commanding her to “stay low” as he jogged her swiftly from hiding place to hiding place, taking cover, even in the darkness, behind junk in Grace’s yard.

  Until she was reckoning with the pounding of her own heart.

  The strike of fear tangling through her stomach.

  Whatever Scott knew that she didn’t, one thing was for sure, they were in immediate danger again.

  And she trusted him enough to do exactly as he ordered.

  * * *

  Adrenaline helped him push through the pain, helped camouflage it, giving Scott almost normal abilities as he headed his small clan back north, toward the compound they’d left behind the night before. Hoping to throw off McKellips, or whoever else had been driving the truck that had turned onto the overgrown long dirt driveway leading up to Grace Arnold’s place from the south.

  He’d half thought himself paranoid when he’d taken a look out the bathroom window, just checking that there wasn’t any sign of anything amiss on the side of the house he hadn’t been able to see or evaluate before entering the building.

  “Something wasn’t sitting right with my gut,” he told Dorian as soon as they were far enough away for him to make a loud whisper without fear of being heard. “She called someone before she brought us into the house.”

  He’d figured that had to be the case as soon as he’d seen the headlights.

  “Maybe she was playing us with the dementia crap.”

  “She’s on the payroll of these guys?” Dorian’s horror was evident even in an almost whisper.

  He shook his head. He had no way of knowing why Grace had made the call. Could have been that she’d been told a couple had stolen a baby from the mission, that they were the bad guys. For all he knew, the old woman could be thinking she was helping to catch criminals.

  Or she could be on the payroll.

  Either way, by falling for her subterfuge, he’d almost gotten Dorian killed. And the baby back on the selling block.

  “I told her our first names,” he said then, blanching again at what had to have been the stupidest mistake of his entire career. Trusting that woman, even for a second.

  Putting them all in immediately life-threatening danger...

  “I’m sure mine’s been on the news anyway,” Dorian told him. “And yours, Scott...that’s common enough to be anyone from anywhere.”

  He didn’t respond, just continued pushing through brush in the darkness. Staying close to trees big enough to be shields from bullets if necessary as they started the climb back up into the mountain peak they’d left earlier, before heading south again. He didn’t slow, even a little bit, for the first hour. Headed south down lower than they’d been earlier, but still a good way up. Got them past the coordinates at which they’d headed down to what they’d thought was the abandoned shack.

  And then, in another inlet, similar to the last one they’d been in that afternoon, he stopped to give Dorian a chance to rest. “We have to assume that they know now that I didn’t kill you. That you’re still a threat. I’m planning to keep going for as long as humanly possible,” he warned, as, moving away from her, toward the ledge of the clearing, he used his phone’s Zoom function to survey the landscape below.

  What he could see of it.

  Grace’s home, slightly to the north now, was lit. He saw no sign of headlights.

  Anywhere.

  Could only hope that she’d called one of the two men who’d been after them earlier in the day. That there weren’t more men, a boatload of them, hunting the mountains for them.

  “Hey, here, look,” Dorian’s voice, soft still, but insistent, called out to him. Turning, his entire being froze for a second, when he didn’t see Dorian. Anywhere.

  Adrenaline pumping anew, he strode toward where he thought the sound of her voice had come from.

  Around the mountain?

  She wouldn’t have gone without him. Not even to pee, unless she’d told him so.

  Reaching for his knife with one hand, and pulling his gun with the other, Scott rounded the steep jutting rock, expecting to see Dorian held at gunpoint.

  Or worse.

  Only to find...nothing.

  “Keep coming,” her voice called to him softly.

  Without fear.

  “You alone?” he asked. Knowing that she’d find a way to let him know if she wasn’t. He couldn’t help her by walking into a bullet.

  “Fourteen years ago, the word I wanted so badly to say, I couldn’t.”

  The response weakened his knees.

  Doubly so.

  That word had been yes. When she’d been walking out of his sight for the last time. With tears in her eyes. After having first kissed him, and then pulled away in the middle of it. He’d never forget her last words to him. “If I wasn’t engaged, and you asked me to go to bed with you, my answer would be...”

  She’d never finished the sentence.

  And he didn’t allow himself more than a brief memory of the past to come forth as he allowed present-day relief to flood him. Yes. She was alone.

  “Can I come forward?”

  She’d called him. But could still be relieving herself. Had just wanted him to know she’d slipped around the corner. Wanted him to keep watch.

  “Yes, please.”

  Another couple of steps, and Scott saw why.

  Dorian had stumbled upon a small cave. A real one that curved back into the mountain enough to allow them to turn on a phone’s flashlight, however briefly, to survey their surroundings. To see each other.

  To set up camp.

  In a place far enough into the mountain that the temperature was at least ten degrees cooler than the heat outside.

  The baby should sleep well.

  They were on the south side of the mountain, rather than east, with no view of the area they’d come from or were traveling toward. But with a bit of finesse with rocks at the corner of that peak, he’d have fair warning before anyone even got close to them.

  And with more brush and natural sources of noise—cracking sticks, rocks hidden under brush as Dorian suggested from a previous case her firm had handled—at the entrance to the cave, he’d be able to get a shot off if anyone breached the cave entrance.

  With both of them working, it took another hour to get them settled inside. With a cradle for the baby and a sleeping pallet similar to the one Dorian had made the night before.

  It was then that she told him what she’d shoved into the sling, at the baby’s feet, when she’d run out of Grace’s home.

  The loaf of bread she’d had in hand as he’d come out of the bathroom.

  Pulling out their filled bottle of cactus juice, she offered up that bread like a three-course meal.

  They were in darkness again, to preserve phone battery, but with eyes adjusted to the dark, he could see her in shadows and wanted so badly to kiss her, to let good feeling take away the raging pain in his leg.

  He cut off the thought as soon as it hit.

  But still admired the hell out of her.

  For the night, she’d found them a little home.

  * * *

  After dinner, while Scott did a perimeter check, Dorian fed the baby. Welling up with feeling as she listened to the rhythm of his breathing and swallows. He was such a little trooper.

  Content just having his needs met.

  And she couldn’t help but fall in love a little bit.

  The child wasn’t hers.

  Somewhere a mother who’d just gone through nine months of nurturing had given birth only to have her son snatched from the one place he should have been safest. She had to be grieving beyond what Dorian could imagine.

  She glanced up when she heard Scott’s two light foot taps after stepping over the rock crunch—which looked like river rock left over from rain and snow flowing off the mountain—at the corner before their cave.

  Before he’d left, he’d handed her his gun and told her that if she heard approach without those two foot taps, she was to aim to shoot.

  He was just a shadow as he rounded the inside turn to the back of their cave.

  And her throat tightened. Tears had been pushing at her most of the night. Stress, she knew. And exhaustion.

  And she wasn’t done working yet.

  But first... “Grace asked his name.” While she’d been escorting them up to her house.

  Scott had been right there. Had heard. She knew because he’d distracted Grace from the question.

  “It’s odd, caring for him, not calling him anything.” Her words sounded pitiful to her. As though that newborn cared if he was called or not. He needed exactly what they were giving him. And nothing more.

  The name calling...that was for her.

  And not admirable. “I know his mother has named him,” she added then, as Scott lowered himself down, sliding his back along the cave wall not far from the pallet she’d built for him.

  Only one again.

  This time because the back portion of the cave only had space wide enough for one. It narrowed considerably farther in where she’d put the baby’s bed.

  She wasn’t allowing herself to think about that pallet. Or how she’d slept the night before. He’d been unconscious then.

  That night, she’d figured they’d take turns sleeping, with someone awake to keep watch. Just as they’d slept the first afternoon they’d been in the mountains.

  “It wouldn’t hurt to call him something, just while he’s with us.” Scott’s voice filled the cave so full her chest tightened up. “It’s not like he’ll remember.”

  He was right.

  And his words brought a bit of a smile to her face. Gave her something positive to think about. “So, what should we call him?”

  “I’ve always liked the name Scott.” His words held a definite drawl. And they still didn’t hold his normal decisive tone. As soon as the baby was in his cradle asleep, she had to get to work on Scott’s leg.

  Had purposely been conserving phone battery because she was going to need the flashlight...

  “Might be a little confusing,” she told him. “Scott here, Scott over there...who am I calling or talking about?” She smiled again. It felt good.

  “So how about Michael?”

  His last name.

  Funny how the man who was never going to marry or have children was wanting a namesake.