It was too late. The Blazer was moving steadily across the creaking timbers, plowing snow with its bumper, tires spinning and grabbing and spinning again as the four-wheel-drive gear did its work.
Blankets clutched to her chest, snow swirling all around her, Julie stood in a state of helpless paralysis, forced to watch what she could not prevent.
Not until the car, along with its insane driver, reached safety did she breathe again, and then she felt a perverse rush of fury at him for putting her through yet another new terror. Ungracious and ungraceful, she trudged across the bridge, opened the passenger door, and climbed in.
“We made it,” he said.
Julie gave him a killing look. “Made it to what?”
The answer to that came minutes later when they made one last hairpin turn at the top of the mountain. There in the middle of a secluded clearing in the dense pines was a magnificent house made of native stone and cedar and surrounded by wooden decks, with huge expanses of glass. “To this,” he said.
“Who in God’s name built this place up here, a hermit?”
“Someone who obviously likes privacy and solitude.”
“Does it belong to a relative?” she asked, suddenly suspicious.
“No.”
“Does the owner know you’re going to use his place for a hideout while the police are looking for you?”
“You ask too damned many questions,” he said, pulling the car to a stop beside the house and climbing out. “But the answer is no.” He came around to her side of the car and opened the door. “Let’s go.”
“Go?” Julie burst out, pressing into the back of the seat. “You said I could leave when I got you here.”
“I lied.”
“You—you bastard, I believed you!” she cried, but she was lying, too. All day long she’d been trying desperately to ignore what her common sense had warned her: He’d kept her with him this long to prevent her from telling the authorities where he was; if he released her now, there was absolutely nothing to prevent her from doing exactly that.
“Julie,” he said with strained patience, “don’t make this any harder on yourself than it needs to be. You’re stuck here for a few days, and it’s not that bad a place to spend some time.” With that he reached across her, snatched the keys out of the ignition, and stalked off toward the house. For a split second she was too furious and too miserable to move, then she blinked back the tears of futility stinging her eyes and got out of the car. Shivering uncontrollably in the freezing blasts of wind, she trudged in his wake, carefully placing her feet in the knee-high craters his feet made in the snow drifts surrounding the house. Wrapping her arms around herself, she watched him try the doorknob. It was locked. He rattled it hard. It was locked tight. He let go of the door handle and stood there, his hands on his hips, looking about him, momentarily lost in thought. Julie’s teeth began to chatter. “N-n-now wh-what?” she demanded. “H-h-how do you in-intend to g-get in?”
He gave her an ironic glance. “How do you think?” Without waiting for a reply, he turned and headed toward the deck that wrapped around the front and opposite side of the house. Julie trotted doggedly at his heels, freezing and angry. “You’re going to break a window, aren’t you,” she speculated with revulsion, then she looked up at the giant panes of glass that soared to the peak of the roof at least twenty-five feet above and added, “If you break one of those, it’ll fall down and cut you to pieces.”
“Don’t sound so hopeful,” he said, his gaze switching to several large mounds of snow that had obviously accumulated over something beneath them. He began digging in one of the mounds and unearthed a large flowerpot, which he picked up and carried toward the back door.
“Now what are you doing?”
“Guess.”
“How should I know?” Julie snapped. “You’re the criminal, not me.”
‘True, but I was sent up for murder, not breaking and entering.”
In disbelief, she watched him trying to dig in the frozen soil in the clay pot, then he slammed the pot against the side of the house and broke it, dumping the soil onto the snow beside the door. Wordlessly, he crouched down and began hammering his bare fist on the soil while Julie watched in incredulous amazement. “Are you having a temper tantrum?” she demanded.
“No, Miss Mathison,” he said with exaggerated patience, as he plucked up a piece of dirt and brushed at it with his finger. “I am looking for a key.”
“No one who can afford a house like this and pay to put a road up an entire mountain in order to get to it is going to be naive enough to hide a key in a flowerpot! You’re wasting your time.”
“Have you always been such a shrew?” he said with an irritated shake of his dark head.
“A shrew!” Julie said, her voice strangled with frustration. “You steal my car and take me hostage, threaten my life, lie to me, and now you have the—the gall to criticize my manners?” Her tirade was interrupted as he held up a dirt-encrusted silver object that Julie realized was a key, which he then inserted in the door. With an exaggerated flourish he swung open the door and gestured her inside with a sweep of his arm. “We’ve already agreed that I’ve broken all of Emily Post’s rules of etiquette where you’re concerned. Now, I suggest you go inside and look around while I get our things out of the car. Why don’t you try to relax,” he added. “Get some rest. Enjoy the view. Think of this as a vacation.”
Julie glared at him open-mouthed, then snapped her jaws together and said irately, “I’m not on a vacation! I’m a hostage, and don’t expect me to forget it!”
In answer, he gave her a long-suffering look, as if she were being impossibly difficult, so she jerked her gaze from his and marched into the house. Inside, the mountain retreat was both rustic and startlingly luxurious, built around a gigantic center room shaped like a hexagon, with three doors opening off of it into bedroom suites. Soaring wood ceilings were supported by gigantic crossbeams of rough-hewn cedar, and a winding staircase led up to a loft that was lined with handsome bookcases. Four of the six walls were made entirely of glass, offering a view of the mountains that Julie knew would be breathtaking on a clear day. The fifth wall was built of native stone with an enormous fireplace carved into the center above a raised hearth. Facing the fireplace was a long L-shaped sofa upholstered in a butter soft silvery leather. Opposite the sofa and facing the windows were two overstuffed chairs and ottomans upholstered in silver and green stripes that blended with the fat throw pillows on the sofa and raised hearth. A thick carpet with the same design as the throw pillows sculpted into the border covered part of the gleaming wooden floor in front of the fireplace. Two more pairs of chairs were positioned invitingly near two of the windows and a desk was tucked into an angle created by the glass walls. At any other time, Julie would have been awed and intrigued by what was the most unique and beautiful place she’d ever seen, but she was too upset and too hungry to give it more than passing notice
Turning, she wandered into the kitchen area, an efficient, modernistic galley-type affair that stretched across the back wall of the house and was divided from the living room by a high counter with six leather stools in front of it. Her stomach growled as she looked at the oak cabinets and oak-fronted built-in refrigerator, but her appetite was already losing the battle with exhaustion. Feeling like a sneak thief, she opened a cabinet that contained dishes and glassware, then another that contained—luckily—a wide variety of canned goods. Deciding to make a sandwich and then go to bed, she was reaching timidly for a can of albacore tuna fish when Zack opened the back door and saw her. “Dare I hope,” he said, kicking snow off his boots, “that this means you’re domestically inclined?”
“Do you mean, can I cook?”
“Yes.”
“Not for you.” Julie put the can of tuna back and closed the cabinet door just as her stomach let out an audible growl of protest.
“Jesus, you are stubborn!” Chafing his hands against the cold, he walked over to the thermostat
on the wall and turned up the heat, then he headed for the refrigerator and opened the freezer door. Julie peeked around him and spied dozens of thick steaks and pork chops, huge roasts, some packages wrapped in white freezer paper, and boxes and boxes of vegetables, some raw and others prepared. It was a display that would do justice to any gourmet market. Her mouth began to water as he reached for a steak that was an inch and a half thick, but exhaustion was already overwhelming her. Her relief at being in a warm house instead of the car and at having arrived at a destination after an endless, nerve-wracking drive was suddenly making her feel limp, and she realized she wanted a hot shower and long nap a great deal more than food. “I have to get some sleep,” she said, scarcely able to muster the strength to sound cool and authoritative any more. “Please. Where?”
Something in her pale face and heavy eyes made him respond without argument. “The bedroom is this way,” he said, already turning on his heel and heading for a doorway that opened off the living room. When he flipped on the light switch, Julie found herself in an enormous bedroom suite with a fireplace and an adjoining bathroom of black marble with mirrored walls. She spotted the telephone on the nightstand beside the king-size bed at the same moment he did. “It has its own bath,” he told her unnecessarily as he walked over to the nightstand and briskly unplugged the telephone, tucking it under his arm.
“But no telephone, I see,” she added with bitter resignation as she headed back into the living room to get her suitcase.
Behind her, he checked the doors to the bathroom and bedroom, then he caught her arm as she bent over in the living room to pick up her suitcase. “Look,” he said, “we might as well get the rules established. Here’s the situation: There are no other houses on this mountain. I have the car keys, so the only way you can leave here would be on foot, in which case you’ll freeze to death long before you ever get near the highway. The bedroom door and the bathroom door both have those useless little locks in the door handle that anyone can open from the other side with a hairpin, so I don’t recommend that you try to barricade yourself in there, because it would be a waste of time, not to mention unnecessarily confining for you. Are you following me, so far?”
Julie tried unsuccessfully to jerk her arm free. “I’m not a moron.”
“Good. Then you should already have realized you can have the run of the house—”
“The run of the house? Just like a trained beagle, is that it?”
“Not exactly,” Zack said, his mouth quirking in a smile as he let his admiring glance rove over her thick, wavy chestnut hair and slim, restless figure. “More like a skittish Irish Setter,” he corrected.
Julie opened her mouth to give him the biting retort he deserved, but she couldn’t get words out before she yawned again.
23
THE MOUTH-WATERING AROMA OF STEAK sizzling on a grill lured her from a deep sleep. Dimly aware that the huge bed on which she slept was too big to be her own bed, she rolled onto her back, completely disoriented. Blinking in the inky darkness of an unfamiliar room, she turned her face the opposite direction, searching for the pale source of illumination spilling through what turned out to be a narrow parting of the draperies on the wall. Moonlight. For a few blissful moments, she imagined she was in a luxuriously large hotel room somewhere on vacation.
She glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand. Wherever she was, the local time was 8:20 p.m. And it was chilly in the room—the kind of deep chill that made her sleepily rule out California or Florida as her possible whereabouts. It hit her then that hotel rooms were never redolent with the aroma of cooking food. She was in a house somewhere, not a hotel, and there were footsteps in the next room.
Heavy, masculine footsteps . . .
Awareness hit her like a punch in the stomach and she sat bolt upright in bed, already throwing the covers off and standing up, adrenalin pumping. She took a quick step toward the window, her mind’s escape mechanism working before her logic caught up. Goose bumps lifted on her bare legs, and she looked down in shivering disbelief at what she was wearing—a man’s T-shirt she’d removed from a dresser drawer after her shower. Her captor’s warning came back to her “I have the car keys and there are no other houses on this mountain . . . You’ll freeze to death if you try to escape on foot . . . The door locks can be opened easily . . . You have the run of the house.”
“Just relax,” Julie told herself aloud, but she was rested now and fully alert, and her mind was tumbling over itself with possible escape solutions, none of which were even remotely feasible. On top of that she was famished. Food first, she decided, then she’d try to think of a way out of here.
From her suitcase, she pulled out the jeans she’d worn to Amarillo. She’d washed out her underwear after her shower, but it was still soaking wet. Pulling on her jeans, she went into the large closet and looked at the heavy men’s sweaters neatly folded on the shelves, longing for something clean to wear. She took out a bulky cream fisherman’s knit and held it up to herself. It hung down to her knees. Deciding with a shrug that she didn’t care how she looked, and the thick sweater would hide the fact that she wasn’t wearing a bra, she put it on. She’d washed her hair and blown it dry before she went to bed, so there was nothing to do but brush it. Automatically, she bent over, brushing the shoulder-length tresses from underneath as she always did, finding an odd comfort in following this one small, familiar routine. Finished, she straightened, gave her hair a few more brush strokes, then brushed it back off her forehead, letting it fall into natural waves at the sides. She reached for her purse to put on lipstick then she changed her mind. Looking nice for an escaped convict was not only completely unnecessary but probably a major mistake, considering that kiss in the snow she’d participated in at dawn this morning.
That kiss . . .
It seemed like weeks, not merely hours since he’d kissed her, and now that she was rested and alert, Julie felt reasonably sure his only interest in her was merely to ensure his safety. Not sexual.
Definitely not sexual.
Please, God. Not sexual.
She glanced at the mirrors on the bathroom walls and felt reassured. She’d always been too busy and preoccupied to worry much about her appearance. When she had taken time to study it, she always felt she had a rather odd face filled with startling features that were too prominent, like her eyes and cheekbones and that absurd cleft in her chin that had deepened to real visibility when she was thirteen. Now, however, she was thrilled with her looks. In jeans and an oversized sweater, with her hair like this and no makeup on, she wouldn’t appeal sexually to any man, particularly one who’d been to bed with hundreds of gorgeous, glamorous, famous women. His interest in her would definitely not be sexual, Julie decided with absolute confidence.
Drawing in a long, steadying breath, she reached for the door handle and turned it, reluctant but ready to face her captor—and hopefully a delicious meal. The bedroom door wasn’t locked. She distinctly remembered locking that door, on principle, when she went to bed.
Silently, she opened the door and stepped into the main room of the house. For a split second, the inviting beauty of the scene made her feel completely disoriented. A fire was roaring in the fireplace, the lights on the beams high above were dimmed, and candles were lit on the coffee table, flickering on the crystal wine glasses he’d set out beside linen place mats. It might have been the wine glasses and candles that suddenly made Julie feel as if she was walking into a seduction scene, or perhaps it was the dimmed lights or the soft music playing on the stereo. Trying to inject a brisk, businesslike tone into her voice, she headed toward Zachary Benedict, who was standing in the kitchen, his back to her, taking something out of the broiler. “Are we expecting company?”
He turned and looked at her, an inexplicable, lazy smile sweeping over his face as he surveyed her from head to foot. Julie had the staggering, and impossible, impression that he actually liked what he saw, an impression that was reinforced by the way he lifted his wine
glass to her in the gesture of a toast and said, “Somehow, you look adorable in that oversize sweater.”
Belatedly realizing that after five years in prison, any woman would probably appeal to him, Julie took a cautious step backward. “The last thing I want to do is look nice for you. In fact, I’d rather wear my own clothes, even if they’re not fresh,” she said, turning on her heel.
“Julie!” he snapped, all goodwill gone from his voice.
She lurched around, amazed and alarmed by the dangerous swiftness of his mood swings. She took another cautious step backward as he stalked toward her, a wine glass in each hand. “Have something to drink,” he ordered, thrusting a long-stemmed glass toward her. “Drink it, damn it!” He made a visible effort to soften his tone. “It’ll help you relax.”
“Why should I relax?” she countered obstinately.
Despite the stubborn lift of her chin and her rebellious tone, there was a tiny quaver of fear in her voice, and when Zack heard it, his annoyance with her evaporated. She’d shown so much courage, such indefatigable spirit during the last twenty-four hours; she’d fought him so relentlessly that he’d actually believed she wasn’t very frightened most of the time. Now, however, as he looked at her upturned face, he saw that the ordeal he’d put her through had left faint blue smudges beneath her glorious eyes, and her smooth skin was decidedly pale. She was amazing, he thought—courageous, kind, and plucky as hell. Perhaps if he didn’t like her— genuinely like her—it wouldn’t have mattered that she was watching him as if he were a dangerous animal. Wisely suppressing the urge to put his hand against her cheek and try to reassure her, which would undoubtedly panic her, or to offer an apology for kidnapping her, which she’d definitely find hypocritical, he did something he’d promised himself he’d never bother to do again: He tried to convince her of his innocence. “A moment ago, I asked you to relax, and—” he began, but she interrupted him.