Cold Pursuit - Carla Neggers [2]
Drew stopped, held his breath.
There…voices.
“We have to think through every detail of every assignment.” A man’s voice. Arrogant, deliberate. “We can’t go off half-cocked. We have to plan.”
“You plan.” It was a woman this time, impatient. “I’ll take action.”
“This is business. We’re being paid to do a job. It’s not some adventure to keep you in adrenaline rushes. Just because you don’t need the money—”
“I want the money. That’s enough for me.”
“You’ve never killed anyone,” the man said quietly.
A slight pause. “How do you know?”
The door to Drew’s little house opened, but he didn’t look at who stood on the threshold. Instead he gazed up into the falling snow, letting one flake after another melt on his face. Now he understood his visions. He understood why he was here on Cameron Mountain at this moment.
It was meant to be. He was a father who would get his wish.
His son would live.
Elijah will come home.
One
Seven months later
A red-tailed hawk swooped down from Cameron Mountain and out over the small lake, gray and quiet in the mid-November gloom, as if to warn Jo Harper she wasn’t alone—but she had already figured that out.
She glanced down the private dirt road she shared with Elijah Cameron.
Yep. He was still coming.
Ignoring the tug of pain in her left side, she reached into the trunk of her car for a cardboard box filled with food and supplies she’d grabbed out of her apartment. She thought of the other places she could have exiled herself. New Zealand, for example. The south of France. Costa Rica. It didn’t have to be Vermont. Black Falls. Her picturesque hometown in the heart of the Green Mountains.
It was summer in New Zealand, she thought as she lifted the box on her uninjured hip and noted that it was barely four o’clock and yet almost dark. The long, dark winter nights were upon northern New England. She’d left Washington early in order to arrive in Vermont while it was still daylight.
Using her elbow, she shut the trunk. Three brown-spotted bananas on top of the overflowing box hadn’t fared well on the long trip north, but she hadn’t wanted to leave them to rot in her microscopic Georgetown apartment. She didn’t know when she’d be back at her job with the Secret Service. Technically, she was just taking some time off. But everyone knew she’d been all but ordered to clear out of town for a bit.
Jo knew it, too.
Elijah seemed to be carrying a vase of flowers, but that didn’t make sense.
Flowers? Elijah?
Even from fifty yards away, he looked as sexy, rugged and forbidden as ever. She hadn’t realized he was home from the army. Not that her family in Black Falls would have told her, especially this week—because then she really might have chucked it all and bought a one-way ticket to New Zealand.
Elijah had built a house on the wooded hillside adjoining the thirty acres and its dozen, one-room, falling-down cabins he and his brothers and sister had every reason to expect to inherit one day. Instead, Drew Cameron had left the property to Jo. The shock of his death from hypothermia in an April snowstorm had only been compounded by that one detail in his last will and testament.
None of the Cameron siblings was more taken aback than Jo was herself by their father’s inexplicable act of generosity.
And yet…
She pushed the uncomfortable memory of her last encounter with Drew Cameron out of her mind. She didn’t want to go there. Not now, not especially with Elijah ambling her way.
She watched the hawk glide back toward her and disappear into the woods and hills above the cabins.
Cameron land.
There was no wind, but the air was brisk and chilly—she’d gotten used to Washington’s warmer climate. She’d had to pull on her black fleece jacket when she’d crossed the Vermont border. She hadn’t expected to be back in Black Falls until Thanksgiving, and then only for a short visit with her family.
But here she was, and who knew for how long?
The brightly colored leaves of October had fallen, just the rusts and maroons of dying oak leaves clinging to branches