Perilous Christmas Reunion Read online

  Wordlessly, they continued as they had before, both wrapped in the afghan, stepping with care to avoid collecting too much snow in their slippers. Around them, the woods popped and cracked, branches breaking under the weight of ice and snow. The falling flakes thickened, silent now, too cold for ice. Walking warmed Lauren. If she kept her head down, her hair, loosened from its braid, sheltered her face. The numbness left her cheeks. Chris had to be suffering with his short hair and exposed ears. She glanced up. In the glow of moonlight she saw he had pulled the collar of the flannel shirt over his ears and tucked his chin into the neckline buttoned all the way up.

  “It can’t be much farther.” She spoke out of hope. “The lake isn’t more than a mile off the highway. As long as we are going in the right direction.”

  They were not going in the right direction. They edged around a curve in the trail and the world opened before them, the lake to their right, her house to the left.

  Until that moment, she had been able to keep going. Right then, she wanted to lie down and cry.

  “We were just going round in a circle.”

  “Half circle.” His tone and the gentle squeeze of his arm on her shoulders said he was trying to make a joke to lighten the mood.

  “I suppose we can’t go back inside.” She knew the answer.

  “They may have left someone there.”

  Light shone through the slats of the shutters. A lack of smoky smell suggested the fire had gone out, but the men had either allowed at least one of their gang to remain in the shelter of solid walls or closed up with care.

  “So much for my full propane tanks.” She attempted a joke too. “Merry Christmas to the thugs inside enjoying my heater.”

  “My SUV has a great heater. We can get there now.”

  “How without them seeing us?”

  “We stay inside the tree line.”

  They skirted the clearing just inside the line of trees so no one could see them from the house. When they reached the driveway, they paused. The monstrous truck that had blocked their passage earlier was gone. Beside Lauren, Chris tensed.

  “What’s wrong?” Even her murmur sounded like a shout in the quiet.

  “I just thought...” He trailed off.

  Lauren waited.

  Chris nudged her forward. She went, but prompted, “Yes?”

  “If they found my Jeep, we may have nothing to go to once we reach the road.”

  Lauren stopped. “Then should we go back to the house and take our chances there?”

  “I think we should stick to the original plan.”

  Lauren nodded and trudged on. Half a mile. No more. Twenty-six hundred feet or so, less in steps. She had surely walked farther along that trail.

  The trail had been easy. Edging along trees and breaking through shrubbery was harder. If she survived, she would clear out this area, make the trees easier to pass through. Wasn’t that better in the event of a forest fire anyway?

  Ah, a fire. How she would love to sit beside a fire. Cold was tolerable if a body knew warmth was imminent.

  Chris’s SUV would have a heater. She would not consider that the men after them, after Ryan, had damaged it. She would imagine the two of them steaming like dumplings and fogging up the windows as the car’s heater warmed the air.

  “Where did you park?” Lauren thought to ask.

  “In someone’s driveway. I hiked in. I didn’t want the engine to announce my approach.”

  So Ryan wouldn’t be warned if he was there.

  Her heart felt as heavy as her moccasins. Chris was helping her get to safety now, but he was first and foremost after her brother. It was his duty. The moment she was safe and sound somewhere, he would rejoin the manhunt for Ryan.

  He would leave her.

  Lauren’s throat closed. She couldn’t even sigh with relief when she saw the highway through the trees, a dark ribbon against the white wrapping of the snow.

  The cleared area indicated the plows and salt trucks had passed that way recently, so recently the plow’s flashing red light shone to the south. And to the left the truck that had blocked her driveway earlier crouched at the edge of the highway, its headlights reaching out like laser beams that would catch them in the glare if they stepped onto the road.

  FIVE

  If he had had his weapon, he could’ve shot out those headlights and given Lauren and himself the cover of the night and the storm to run across the road and up the deserted driveway where he had parked his Jeep. But his weapon was...somewhere. If Lauren had it, he didn’t know where she’d stowed it. And yet he didn’t know how it could have disappeared so swiftly from the end of the deck if she hadn’t taken it.

  No sense speculating on that now. They had to get out of sight, cross the road, find transportation before they died of exposure. Chris knew he was dangerously close to being too cold except along his side, where Lauren still stood close. Leaned against him, in truth. She must be exhausted. He was. Sleep sounded far too nice at the moment.

  A true sign of hypothermia—sleepiness.

  “We need to move.” Chris drew Lauren into the trees. “If we can get behind them, we have a chance of crossing the road without anyone seeing us.”

  “We can’t go that way inside the tree line. There’s a culvert under the road. The water is probably frozen solid, but we can’t risk it.”

  “I’m glad I’m with you.”

  To learn that, he meant. He hoped she understood that was all he meant. He would much rather have been alone.

  That’s not true. His mother’s and sister’s voices rang in his head. You’re twenty-nine years old. You shouldn’t be alone anymore.

  He wished they were wrong. He wished their admonitions to settle down and marry hadn’t popped into his head at that moment.

  “We’ll have to run for it,” Chris said.

  “Maybe no one is in the truck?” Lauren’s tone sounded hopeful. “They didn’t try to shoot at us or run us down when we stepped out of the trees.”

  “It’s entirely possible they just left the truck there after bringing it out of your driveway.”

  “But unlikely.

  “Or a moment of not paying attention.” Lauren’s sigh was audible above the wind.

  “We just don’t know how many men are here. At least two,” Chris added.

  “We’ll run across the road, then.” Lauren stepped away from Chris, leaving the afghan behind on his shoulders. “I’m ready.”

  The road was only a two-lane highway. It looked like a major interstate of at least ten lanes with those headlights glaring and expanding against the curtain of white spilling from the sky.

  Chris draped the afghan around his neck like an oversize scarf and grasped Lauren’s hand. “When I get to three, run as fast as you can. Okay?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Ready. One.” Chris stepped from the trees. “Two. Three.”

  They began to sprint. Gracelessly. Clumsily. A flat-footed slap of wet suede moccasins on blacktop rather than the light pad of high-tech rubber in a proper dash. Chris shortened his stride for Lauren’s lesser inches. Despite the recent passage of plows and salt trucks, the road’s surface bore another coating of snow turning to slush as slick as oil. Speed was merely a want, a hope. If another vehicle approached, Chris and Lauren would be two more statistics on someone’s accident report.

  Chris glanced to the right, seeking headlights. Snow and darkness met his gaze. To their left, the truck’s headlights glared, flared to high beams.

  Someone was in the truck. Someone started the engine. Its rumble split the night. Gears shifted.

  The trees looked a hundred miles away. Chris yearned to leap faster. His feet slipped in the snow and ice trying to cling to the blacktop. Beside him, Lauren dropped to one knee with a gasp, but was up and hurtling ahead before Chris had time to reac
t.

  The roar of the engine sounded louder. Chris didn’t risk glancing back. A moment’s inattention to the pavement increased the likelihood of slipping on black ice. Falling. Not getting up before those oversize tires bore down upon them...

  The edge of the road passed beneath their soles, driving them against a snowbank from the plow’s passage.

  “Climb.”

  A stupid thing to say. They could do nothing else.

  They climbed up, up and over the hard-packed snow and ice tossed to the side of the road. Beyond it more trees rose, their branches laden with white and crystals in the sun-bright glare of the headlights. Chris lifted Lauren and propelled her over the last of the snowbank and behind a tree. Seconds after he joined her, the truck slammed to an abrupt halt, tires buried in the side of the road.

  “They’ll get out,” Lauren was gasping.

  “Let them.”

  “What?” In the radiant light from headlights and snow pouring through the tree branches, her eyes shone huge and dark, her cheeks pink from cold or exertion or both.

  She was so pretty.

  Chris drew them beneath a pine tree with branches hanging nearly to the ground. “We’ll wait and see what they do. If it’s just one man, I might be able to stop him.”

  “We’ll freeze.”

  “We won’t wait that long.”

  Chris wrapped them both in the afghan, and they waited, clenching their teeth to stop them from chattering, though no one could have heard it above the grumble of the truck engine. For too long, nothing happened. Just when Chris thought they needed to start creeping toward his SUV, a shadow passed before the headlights. Chris peered out from their hiding place in time to see the truck door was open and a man was headed into the trees. He held a cell phone in one hand and a gun in the other.

  “You can’t stop him,” Lauren murmured in Chris’s ear, her breath warm against his cold skin. “He’s armed.”

  “I should be.” Chris set his lips in a hard, thin line and watched the man.

  He wore cold-weather gear, not an afghan.

  Chris gave the afghan to Lauren and started to rise.

  She wrapped both hands around his arm and held him back. “Wait. Do you think we could take his truck?”

  Chris didn’t like the thought that sprang into his head. Leave it to a lady with Delaney blood to think of breaking the law. It wasn’t fair. To his knowledge, assisting her brother was the first law Lauren had broken, and he wasn’t yet sure how much she had helped Ryan escape. Besides, these were extenuating circumstances.

  “I don’t mean for long.” Lauren’s words seemed as though she’d read his thoughts. “I mean just to take us to your SUV. And it would slow this guy from coming after us.”

  “And his friend or friends.” Chris conceded she had a good idea. “I suspect whoever else is with him is on their way.”

  “And we know they’re armed, so this may be our only chance.” Her hands shook on his arm. “I have to get out of the cold, and so do you, or I will be of no use—” She broke off.

  She would be of no use to Ryan, he finished for her.

  Ryan. Always Ryan. Her beloved brother got her love and loyalty.

  But she was right in saying they couldn’t remain in the cold any longer. If neither of them caught pneumonia or ended up with frostbite, it would be newsworthy.

  “All right. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  Suggesting they borrow the truck—take it, she had actually said—was not the brightest move she had made that night. It wasn’t the worst. Getting turned around in the woods and landing them on the lake was the worst. Still, she felt Chris tense when she suggested stealing the truck.

  Yes, stealing. That was how he saw it in his black-and-white, always by-the-book view of the world. One was either doing right or doing wrong. Taking the truck was doing wrong.

  Yet there they were on another mad dash across the snow in moccasins. Chris lifted her through the open driver’s-side door as though she weighed nothing and hadn’t been indulging in too many Christmas cookies brought to her by her employees. Sugar cookies. Peanut butter blossoms. Mexican wedding cookies...

  She was hallucinating from cold and fatigue and fear. Scrambling past the gearshift in their desperate attempt to get away from whoever wanted her brother, whoever was willing to shoot them to get to Ryan, all she could think about was the box of cookies left on her kitchen counter.

  Right behind her, Chris swung into the driver’s seat, slamming the door behind him with one hand and reaching for the brake with the other.

  Something thumped into the back door. Bullets. “Duck,” Chris shouted.

  But Lauren was already down.

  “Hang on. This is going to be bumpy.”

  “I didn’t think. Do you know how to drive a standard shift?”

  He threw the truck into Reverse.

  Lauren bounced off the seat and grabbed the armrest to stop herself from smashing into the door and then the dashboard or windshield. Bumpy was right. They jounced off the snowbank and lurched onto the blacktop. The truck fishtailed on the slushy surface. Before them, the headlights arced off snow, trees and an oncoming snowplow.

  Lauren closed her eyes. She didn’t want to witness the impact.

  The truck jerked. Gears ground, then they surged forward.

  “We’re all right.” Chris’s voice was calm. Soothing. “For the moment.”

  “It feels like the inside of a toaster compared to outside.” Lauren held her hands in front of the heater vent. She started to slip her feet from the soaked moccasins.

  “Not yet. My Jeep isn’t far.”

  “Won’t it be snowed in by the plow?”

  “It can handle little drifts like these.”

  Now she was relatively safe, Lauren noticed the piles on the side of the road weren’t as high as she’d thought earlier. When the truck was chasing them, the snowbank had felt like a mountain.

  “I’m more concerned about ice on the windshield,” Chris was saying. “That could take us some time to clear.”

  “But we have their truck.”

  “They still have a snowmobile.”

  How could she forget? They also, apparently, had cell phones—useless off the highway but highway reception was excellent.

  Lauren huddled inside the afghan, willing it to absorb heat for the next plunge into the cold.

  Which came all too soon. What seemed like seconds later, Chris pulled the truck as far to the side of the road as the plowed banks allowed and cut the engine and lights. He tucked the keys beneath the seat and pushed open the door. A blast of wind and snow smacked Lauren like a fist. She gasped, but clambered over the gearshift to slide out the open door.

  “Where is your Jeep?”

  “Up this driveway. Do you know the owners?”

  “We met once last summer. They’re from Illinois and don’t get up here much.”

  “No lake on this side.” Chris tucked his hand beneath her elbow to help her over the mound of snow at the foot of the driveway.

  “They have a river.”

  “I prefer lakes.”

  “I remember.”

  They had been standing on the shore of Lake Michigan, the expanse of crystal-blue water stretching to the horizon beneath an equally blue sky, white sand eddying beneath their feet with each wave, when he proposed to her. Two weeks later, his father had been killed in the line of duty, and Chris made a decision that changed their lives, their love, a friendship of nearly two years.

  Lauren could scarcely breathe. Suddenly, each inhalation felt like someone had replaced oxygen with icicles.

  “It’s only another hundred feet or so.” Chris’s voice was too energetic. “We can make it.”

  “Trying to convince me or yourself?” Lauren asked in a tone as brittle as the ice
replacing her air.

  “Both of us.”

  “Still truthful to the core.” She half smiled despite cracked lips.

  His honesty was one of the things she loved about him. Had loved about him. Now she had only one person in her life left to love—Ryan, the fugitive somewhere in the woods still, maybe. Wounded, maybe. Dead, maybe.

  “I have a scraper and a brush and emergency supplies.” Chris pressed the remote ignition.

  With only a hint of a stutter, the engine fired up, promising warmth and escape—eventually.

  “Do those supplies include a propane heater?” Lauren tried to joke.

  “My snow boots and clothes.”

  “What a blessing for you.” She couldn’t find a fleck of humor this time.

  “I can give you dry socks and a thermal blanket. And water.”

  “Even that much sounds good.” Lauren leaned against the hood, savoring the first hint of warmth from the engine. “I’ll start brushing the snow off.”

  Chris brought her a small broom for brushing snow off the windows, along with a shiny space blanket. He wrapped the latter around her instead of the soaked afghan. “I’ll scrape.”

  They worked as a team, Lauren brushing snow off the windows and hood, Chris scraping the underlying ice. All the while, Lauren kept looking over her shoulder for headlights, for the shadow of a man passing across their lights. She strained to hear the sound of another vehicle, truck or snowmobile above the purr of the Jeep’s engine. Or the crack of a gunshot.

  She finished brushing off the SUV, including standing on the running board so she could reach the roof.

  “Go ahead and get inside,” Chris said when Lauren sent the last mini avalanche of snow cascading to the ground.

  “Then you take this.” She gave him the space blanket.

  He hesitated, then accepted her gift. “I won’t be much longer. They’ll find us far too fast.”

  Lauren climbed into the passenger side of the Jeep. Already the powerful engine had begun to warm the air streaming from the heater vents. She wanted to curl up in the footwell beneath the dash and savor every iota of warmth blowing upon her. If she took off her sodden moccasins, her feet could warm. But if they had to run again, she might be without anything on her feet.