And he’d perform just fine. Get the job done.

  He might pay later. Might have an abscess or some other physical price to pay for not babying his injury. And that was his choice to make.

  He brushed her hand aside and got his pants up by himself.

  And was thankful that her support under his leg made the process a little less uncomfortable.

  “And now we rest,” he told her, taking command of the operation because the case was his.

  She started to pull away. “I’ll take first watch.”

  He caught her arm. “We both need sleep. There’s less chance of someone discovering us here tonight than one or the other of us failing tomorrow due to lack of sleep. We have no idea what’s ahead of us, but we can count on it being arduous. We’ve got alarms set outside—I’m a light sleeper and have my gun ready in the event anyone invades.”

  She didn’t pull away. Just glanced at him, not quite meeting his eyes, and said, “I need to feed the baby. He’s starting to wake up.”

  Scott let go of her. But said, “I’m staying awake until you get back here. I need to know you’re going to sleep, too.”

  He heard her rustling behind him. “I can sleep back here.”

  “Not comfortably.” He leaned up on one elbow, saw her head turn in his direction. “You sorry?” he asked.

  When she didn’t reply, he had his answer.

  He lay back down, trying to convince himself that her withdrawal was for the best.

  * * *

  The baby responded to stimuli as Dorian changed him. He ate well, burped, fell asleep right on target. And Dorian was too exhausted to fight with herself.

  The back of the cave...too narrow. Since her kidnapping the year before, claustrophobia had been an issue. Therapy had helped. And her therapist had diagnosed that she might have the condition for life, too.

  Wondering, in a half-aware kind of way, what type of long-term mental residue she’d develop due to her current situation, Dorian walked the few steps into wider ground. Thought about heading around the small curve and outdoors. Just for some air.

  And a glimpse of a clear night sky with shining stars.

  She glanced down at the pallet as she passed. Noted Scott’s even breathing and, she was pretty sure, closed eyes. And just stopped walking.

  He was right. They both needed rest.

  And his chest was the only pillow that seemed to do the trick for her, out there in a world where they were being hunted by devils.

  He’d offered it the first day. She’d helped herself to it the night before.

  But couldn’t seem to do it again. Afraid of what she’d be losing, what she’d be giving up, if she did so.

  Instead, she stretched out on the cave floor, laying her head on the side of the pallet, almost touching Scott’s shoulder, and promised herself that she wasn’t getting weak.

  She dozed, didn’t think she’d sleep much, but came fully awake as strong arms pulled her up on the pallet.

  He didn’t speak. She didn’t even open her eyes.

  But fell asleep almost immediately.

  * * *

  Scott awoke, wide awake, each time Dorian got up to feed the baby. And stayed awake until she was back on the pallet with him.

  He didn’t welcome her back. Didn’t hold her. He served his pillow duties and went back to sleep.

  Three times.

  Before sitting up straight as a gun blast sounded.

  Echoing through the canyon beneath them. And then another. And the third, he was fairly certain he heard hit rock.

  Which meant it had to have been aimed close enough to them for him to have done so.

  Dorian, up beside him, jumped to her feet. Grabbed the baby, gently enough that if he awoke, he didn’t cry, then tying her sling as she kicked aside brush and stepped into her shoes at the base of the cradle.

  By the time she’d rejoined him, Scott had the satchel on his back and, gun in hand, had rounded the slight turn in the cave and was approaching the outdoors.

  The baby was whimpering. They couldn’t afford that, let alone a full-out cry. After reaching into the satchel, he handed Dorian a bottle. They had enough for one more day’s feedings. He knew she’d have already counted.

  Time was closing in on them. If they didn’t make it out of the mountains that day, they might not make it out.

  Not a usual thought for him. Yet, there it was, as he slid on his belly toward the ledge outside the cave, peering over, while Dorian stood around the cave side of the peak, feeding the newborn.

  First glance from north to south showed him nothing but quiet mountain. Surreal beauty. The occasional roof he knew was there.

  South to north, the same.

  And then...a flash. Color. Phone out, he zoomed in. One man, slightly north of him, halfway down to the valley. Running south. In his direction.

  Further along that coordinate above sea level was another man. Holding up something with both hands. Scott couldn’t make out the body, his zoom was too blurred, but he figured it for some kind of animal.

  They’d been awoken by hunters?

  Legal hunters. Or at least ones hunting for prey that was most likely legal.

  Or, as he told Dorian minutes later as they started their third day of hiking, “They could easily have been squatters, hunting illegally, but animal prey. Not human.”

  “You didn’t recognize them, then?”

  He shook his head. But had to add, “They were too far away. Too blurry.” And also confessed, “My phone’s back down to fifty percent battery.”

  “Mine’s at thirty.”

  They were definitely running out of time.

  * * *

  The claustrophobia was getting worse. Dorian fought it with fact. With logic. Telling her brain what was happening to it, in a scientific sense, so that she could combat it.

  Mind over matter.

  And the matter was, she was trapped in the mountains, with guns at her back, and a babe in arms.

  She was confined with a man she couldn’t reason out of her.

  Maybe because she didn’t know him well enough? If she knew what he needed—as she’d known how badly Brent had needed to be the only man who’d ever strummed her strings—she’d know specifically how she’d be at risk of hurting him. And use that knowledge to stop the desire from flowing through again.

  If the knowledge could also interrupt whatever strange nonverbal communication that had seemed to thrum through them from the first day they’d met, that would be a wonderful bonus.

  With a solid goal, and a specific way to meet it, she had more energy in her step as she followed Scott along a mountain ridge, into another slight valley between two peaks. He’d said, with the hunters down below, they had stay up high for a while, which made for more strenuous hiking, but when they headed down again, they’d be much closer to the road than they’d been the day before. The paved road.

  The good thing about the little valleys, besides easier trekking, was the natural cover the peaks surrounding them provided. They couldn’t be seen from down below.

  Stopping to change and feed the baby, to eat and replenish their juice supply—Scott feeding while Dorian insisted that he rest his leg, while she hunted and cut cactus—she welcomed the respite.

  Along with the hope that resurged at the thought that the blacktop road had become the current goal, rather than a future one.

  The journey was taking much longer than she’d thought it would, but they were alive. Relatively okay. And making progress.

  She was feeling so much better she’d almost convinced herself that she’d overcome the earlier panic, until she returned to see Scott with little Michael in his arms and yearned to walk up and give them both a thankful hug.

  They weren’t hers to be thankful for.

  And if they were, she wouldn’t trust herself around them. How did one see they were blinded by emotion if they were blinded and couldn’t see?

  Somehow, from their very first meeting she’d romanticized Scott Michaels. Because she didn’t know him well enough.

  The thought came stronger than ever. So much so that as they started out again, with the easier walk ahead of them for a bit, she pressed forward verbally, too.

  “When did you know that you didn’t ever want to marry?” She just put it right out there. A person’s life choices were generally based on life lessons. The combination made them who they were.

  “The first time, I was six, in first grade. The second, a year after I got engaged when she still didn’t want to set the date.”

  Whoa. She stepped and restepped. Moving only about half a step. “You were engaged?”

  “For a year.”

  Yes, they’d established that. But... “When?”

  For two days she’d been looking at the back of the man’s head for most of their time moving forward. That moment was the first time she was frustrated by that fact.

  She was desperately in need of the information that he was only partially imparting. Without access to his eyes, how could she fill in the blanks?

  And that, right there, was the reason she had to get him out of her. To find the key to expelling him. No way she could really read a man’s mind through his eyes.

  She of all people—a scientist, an expert in her field—knew that.

  His answer was a long time coming. She was working on a repeat question when he said, “A year before you and I met.”

  “What happened?” Could it be that easy? She’d find her answers in one of his?

  And...what woman in her right mind wouldn’t set the first date possible to join herself to him? If she was the marrying kind.

  “I pushed. She cried.”

  She waited for more. Tense to the point of irritability in her need to know. The valley’s verdant brush was pulling at her ankles, she was sweaty, starting to stink, and the baby’s sling was putting a permanent crick in her neck. “And?”

  Tell me you got impatient with her. Gave her an ultimatum. Maybe she’d wanted to finish college first. Maybe she’d needed to get through medical school before being a wife.

  “She told me that she couldn’t marry me.”

  Now that, she hadn’t expected. Brent had been in a hurry to marry, too. But when Dorian had told him it would have to wait until after she’d completed her residency, he’d been as supportive as always.

  “Why not?”

  Her need to know was all-encompassing now. Without justification to egg it along.

  “Because she didn’t want to risk having children with bad blood.”

  She stopped walking. Stared at his retreating back when he didn’t even slow down. “Scott,” she said as she caught up to him. He didn’t turn.

  “Why would she say a thing like that?”

  It wasn’t about her need to protect him from herself anymore. She’d never met a man with “better blood” in her life. Unless, “Does leukemia or something run in your family?” But even then...

  “Nope, we’re healthy as can be.”

  She scrambled to keep up with him then, as he seemed to find new sources of energy, propelling him faster forward. But she was just as fast.

  And without a bum leg, she could keep up the pace longer. Caught up to him. “Why did she say that?” she asked, side by side with him. Glancing over.

  His gaze remained steadily straight ahead.

  “Because it’s true.”

  No. No. No. No. No. Not good enough. She’d...they’d...he was attached to her somehow, by a string she couldn’t identify. For his own good, she had to cut the thread.

  “What makes it true?”

  He still didn’t stop. But Scott slowed to a more reasonable pace for both of them, considering the distance they had yet to travel, the climbing ahead of them, as he said, “My paternal grandfather died in prison. My maternal grandfather, best we can tell, dealt drugs to hippies back in the late sixties. My father is currently serving a life sentence for murder. My paternal grandmother had a substance abuse problem that eventually killed her. My maternal grandmother liked men and spent most of her life running off with one or another of them. And my mother is also in prison. She has quite the rap sheet for small crimes but is serving life as an accomplice to my father.”

  Her justification for questioning him disappeared as Dorian listened, her heart flooding with pain for his pain, and with an admiration she couldn’t quell if she’d given her life to do so.

  Pulling on his arm, she yanked him to a stop. Looked him in the eye, and, with all the command of an expert scientist in her voice, said, “You couldn’t possibly have bad blood, Scott. You were born to people who obviously made very poor choices but look at you. With that start, with that baggage, with that example, you still managed to make the right ones.”

  Chapter 20

  The woman was just being kind.

  He’d saved her life. Of course, she’d spin him in the best light.

  No need to convince her otherwise. It wasn’t like they were going to see each other again once they got to safety. She’d be whisked off; he’d have to endure a quick medical check, and then he was going to be right back on the case.

  Saving one baby was great. But there were too many more out there. Needing to be found. And needing to be protected from future kidnappings, too.

  And, maybe Dorian had needed to paint him in colors she could look at more easily since she’d had sex with him, wham bam though it had been.

  They’d reached the far end of the valley, which precluded further conversation at that point, anyway. Back to the hide and seek form of travel, sticking close together, speaking in whispers and moving from natural barrier to natural barrier, spending as much time out of sight as they could.

  Always scoping out potential hiding places, just in case.

  They’d been hiking since just after dawn—before six—and by noon he knew they had to start heading down. Much farther and they’d be circling around too far and would begin heading southwest. Farther away from the couple of small towns toward which they’d been heading.

  Finding one last cave, to cool off and feed and change the baby, they rested for a couple of hours. Sitting upright, eyes closed, heads against opposite walls. She might have dozed. He doubted it. He planned.

  The hours ahead. Anticipating ways a hunter could prevent them from reaching town. Planning solutions for each obstacle.

  And moving on toward finding the general, too. The man was going down. Whether Scott was dead, or alive to participate. No way Sierra’s Web or the FBI were going to let this one go. If nothing else, Scott had exposed the operation. Many of his colleagues, and, he assumed, all of the Sierra’s Web experts, were more than qualified to finish the job.

  He jerked upright.

  What in the hell was he doing? Writing himself off?

  No way in hell.

  Standing, his leg stiff, but not throbbing nearly as badly as it had the day before, Scott grabbed the satchel, moved out of the last mountain domicile he’d share with Dorian and the baby and scoped out the safest route to head down the mountain.

  Safe from physical harm, a landslide or slick rock that could send them catapulting. And safe from discovery, or capture, too.

  By the time Dorian joined him, the baby once again changed and fed, he pointed out a jagged trail winding sideways at times, but that would get them down the mountain. He wanted her to know the route, just in case.

  Told her so.

  And at her nod, set off.

  * * *

  She missed Scott. Longed for the camaraderie of their first two days on the run. Recognized the futility of longing for anything, pursuant to her current reality.

  Warned herself against any form of Stockholm syndrome—not relating to her captor, but to the captivity itself. And made it down the mountain without embarrassing herself further with phobia-induced chatter.

  She did let Scott know that she’d filled a couple of formula bottles with cactus juice and was switching them out, two formulas to one juice. Just in case something happened to her and he was left to care for the baby.

  Michael.

  She’d denied herself the right to call him that. It wasn’t professional.

  Didn’t seem to stop her thinking of him as such, though. Hard as she tried not to do so.

  Scott was so worried about passing on his genes when, in fact, he was doing the world a disservice by not having a little Michael of his own. With Scott as a father, that human being would be pretty much guaranteed to make the world a better place.

  When the man she wasn’t supposed to be thinking about on a personal level came to a sudden stop, Dorian was so lost in her thoughts of Scott that she almost bowled right into him.

  And then saw why.

  “All points down seemed to lead me here,” Scott said. “Now I know why.”

  They’d run into a rudimentary dam. Built who knew how many decades before. A cement wall taller than both of them put together. It ran from a wall of mountain to a huge swamp area.

  “A retaining wall,” she said. “To keep the snow and rain rushing down the mountain from flooding something on the other side.”

  He nodded. Turned, and pointed to the north of the huge swamp. A huge drainage ditch ran along the mountain wall. “We’ll have to head back this way,” he told her, pointing in the opposite direction. “The brush is thick enough to give us some cover, but I have to tell you, I don’t like it so stay close. At the first sign of trouble, head down into the ditch and into the tunnel.”

  He’d given her a hiding place, she knew. And, for the baby’s sake, she also knew she’d use it if she had to.

  And didn’t ask if he’d be using it with her.

  Keeping right behind him, she covered the top of the baby’s head with the sling, using both arms to ward off branches as they walked through them. Avoiding prickers in some, and just more scratches along her arms in others. Scott did the same, holding branches for her as he could. Cutting through the thickest points.