Mountain of Lies

Chapter 9

"Not a word, sweetheart. Not a single word." That same smile she remembered, the one she now knew hid rot under the gloss and charm, flashed at her. He took her arm and steered her toward the pickup. Her legs moved obediently despite the fact she couldn't feel anything below her neck--nothing beyond the minute stabbing of the knife point he held there.

He raised his voice. "I've just got some paperwork for you to sign, ma'am. No charge, of course, seeing you fixed it yourself."

The other men had arrayed themselves behind the second SUV and turned their faces away—the better to obscure their identities from a potential witness. There'd be no help from that quarter. He steered her around the far side of the truck and pulled out a clipboard, holding the knife beneath it and pretending to fill it in as he talked.

"So, imagine my surprise when I opened the paper and saw Ms Raina Meadows on the front page all cuddled up with a cop—and with one of my people, no less, who should have been retrieving something that belonged to me. I thought I'd made my point pretty clear about you staying away from the law."

She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.

He didn't wait for a response, just continued, "Funny thing was, I'd started to suspect I had a mole in my operation." He kept his attention on the clipboard but flicked his pen at where Hudson was standing with the others. "I thought I had it pegged to the French buffoon, but then you showed up, and it suddenly all became clear. What did you do, follow them around until you could come to the rescue? Or did you sabotage the helicopter yourself?"

He used the pen to push up the brim of his hat, and the smile couldn't hide the crazy malice in his eyes. "So, tell me, Raina—or should I call you Mia? What brought on this uncharacteristic surge of bravery? You were such a perfect little mouse. Couldn't do enough for me in the name of saving the habitat of the precious horned whoosit. And so obedient after the fact—except for those few oopsies, but we fixed that, didn't we?"

She stared at him, mute. He was nuts. Certifiably, diagnosably, nuts. There was a twitchiness to his movements she didn't remember and a fervour in his eyes that made her stomach clench. Following his men? Sabotaging helicopters? But if she did manage to convince him she'd been caught up in this by accident, she'd be putting the suspicion squarely back on Hudson.

"Answer me!" he hissed at her, and leaned closer, jabbing the clipboard into her ribs until she wrapped her hands around the edges to stop the knife-edge piercing her skin. "And don't bother to lie. I'll know."

Her mind skipped over the thoughts swirling in her brain, looking for something, anything that would satisfy him and set him off the track. "There were no flowers. They stopped coming." The words fell out of her mouth, sounded flat and flimsy, even to her own ears, but Abe stopped pressing in on her and tapped his pen against his lips.

"Did they indeed? I paid good money to have those deliveries made, and there were still years on the contract. But still, an easy enough fact to check, sweetheart." He took the clipboard back from her and tossed it on the passenger seat before walking around the hood. "It's been good to see you. I would have liked to offer you a ride down the mountain." His lips split in a hard grin. "Damndest thing, that truck of yours starting right up like that. Spoiled our reunion."

If her engine really had died, she'd have had no logical choice but to accept his offer of a ride. And she never would have reached town alive. Her blood turned to ice.

"Don't leave town, honey bun. In fact, seeing the meat-head is so keen to spend some time with you, maybe I'll let him drive you home and keep an eye on you 'til I need you again."