Read the book: «Telling Secrets»
Telling Secrets
Tracy Montoya
MILLS & BOON
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This one’s for Kim and Sharron, for regularly talking
me down from the writer’s ledge. It’d be lonely on
my freaked-out planet without you two.
And to Gail, Eileen, Lisa, Lena and Sandy for great
critiques and even better margaritas.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Epilogue
Chapter One
Alex Gray didn’t know the woman who was staring so intently at him from the far side of the Bagel & Bean coffee shop. All he knew was that she made him nervous, in a not-so-good kind of way.
“Sabrina,” he murmured to his longtime tracking partner and fellow member of Port Renegade’s Search and Rescue team. “You know her?” He indicated the woman with a slight tilt of his head—subtle, if he did say so himself.
Sabrina Adelante took her customary latte from the barista and turned toward the redhead seated several feet away from them. The woman swiftly jerked her head to look out the window, but not before Sabrina had seen her watching them.
“I don’t.” Sabrina took a careful sip of her latte and considered the woman over the lip of her cup. “But she seems to know you.”
Swallowing his reflexive denial, Alex pretended to be absorbed in reading the specials on the chalkboard over the woman’s head while he checked her out once again. She was pretty, in a non-knockout kind of way, her most standout feature being the brownish-red and undoubtedly natural curls that she’d piled atop her head. A few had escaped to frame her oval face, emphasizing a delicately pointed chin and a pair of large dark eyes. She may have had the looks to blend in with the crowd, but he had to admit, there was also something about her, something that made him sure he would have remembered her if they’d met before. Especially those eyes—when she’d been staring at him, it was as if she knew…everything, all of his secrets, his darkest thoughts, down to the bone.
Her head swung around, and he was caught again by her dark gaze. This time, she didn’t look away.
“Ah, crap.” Alex spun around and headed for the door. Anything to get away from that too-intense woman, because he wasn’t sure he wanted to find out why she was so fascinated with him. That definitely wasn’t a casual “hey, you’re kinda hot” stare, and anything else probably meant trouble.
Sabrina pushed out the door a few seconds later, her hands wrapped protectively around her latte, likely trying to leach warmth out of the cup as the cold air hit her. Port Renegade, Washington, never got all that much sun, but the November day was even grayer than usual, with the sharp biting feel of an impending storm in the air. “So what was that all about? Should I be on the lookout for some guy with a shotgun who wants you to make an honest woman out of his daughter?”
He raised one gloved hand, the stiff outer fabric of his waterproof parka making swishing sounds as he moved. “Swear to God, I’ve never seen her before in my life.”
Sabrina took a careful sip of her coffee while glancing back toward the shop. “Well, better start running, Casanova, because she’s coming outside.” She leaned forward, straining to see through the gray-sky glare on the shop’s front windows. “And she looks seriously unhappy.”
A smattering of snowflakes started to fall, the light, airy kind that looped and danced in the air like miniature pixies before they finally hit the ground. Alex watched them as he curled his toes into the cushioned soles of his hiking boots and quashed the urge to bolt. Whatever she wanted, he’d let her have her say, and then they could both move on. Even with his obscured view of her through the glass double doors, he could see she wasn’t much over five feet tall. He could take her.
Another Bagel & Bean customer strode past him, a little too closely, and Alex shifted his weight to avoid getting pushed over. The man yanked the door open, and there she stood, still aiming that scary-intense look right at Alex. She didn’t even seem to notice when the man jostled past her, obviously feeling an urgent need to get some caffeine into his system.
She wasn’t rail thin—probably about a size twelve or fourteen—but she had the most amazingly small waist, emphasized by a fitted green sweater, from which her generous hips flared in a way that practically invited a man to put his hands on them and hold on. As the door closed behind her, Alex could see she’d left her coat hanging on the chair she’d just vacated. But that didn’t stop her from heading his way, an expression of firm resolve on her face, acting as if the cold didn’t bother her in the least.
Once she got within a couple feet of him, however, she planted her boots on the wet cement walkway and sucked in her cheeks, her expression morphing into something less confident. In fact, it was almost a wince, as if she expected him to get angry at her mere presence. But why the hell would he be angry? He’d told Sabrina he’d never met this woman before, and up close and personal, he was still positive that was true. But the way she reacted to him threw him, all the same.
They stared at each other for what seemed like a very long time, playing a strange mental game of chicken. Naturally competitive, Alex dug his heels in and refused to be the first one to speak. Behind him, Sabrina muttered something under her breath, and he heard her hiking boots clunk across the pavement as she moved a polite distance away. When the silence had stretched out for too long, his natural concern drove him to finally break it. “Are you okay?”
Her hand floated up to toy with the neckline of her sweater. She had the most perfectly shaped rosebud of a mouth, dotted with the occasional freckle like the rest of her pale skin, and it turned upward in a small self-deprecating smile. “Sorry. I just—” Covering her mouth, she cleared her throat. “Are you a tracker?”
Lacing his gloved fingers together, he cracked his knuckles, buying some time before he answered. Sabrina and he were on Renegade Ridge State Park’s lead search and rescue team, a group that had gotten lots of media attention locally and nationally both for their rare dedication to old-fashioned footprint tracking and the resulting successful searches for lost hikers. He loved his job, and it wasn’t beneath him to play up the details of what he did to try to impress a woman here and there. But he never knew how to react when people seemed overly starstruck by the idea—something that tended to happen when the local cable access channel reran the series of interviews they’d done with the trackers a little over a year earlier. “I—”
“Do you find missing people?” The intense look was back, telling him she definitely wasn’t an admirer.
“Yes,” he replied. “You didn’t lose someone in the park recently, did you?”
“No.”
The tension that had suddenly built up in his body drained away at her denial, leaving him feeling half relieved that there wasn’t a lost hiker in need of rescue and half disappointed that he wasn’t going to get called in on a search this morning.
But though he waited, she didn’t volunteer any further information, instead becoming strangely preoccupied with tracing the square toe of her impractical, clunky black boot along a crack in the sidewalk. Living in the mountains and doing what he did for a living, he’d made it a habit never to go out without a pair of shoes he could run and climb in. With that gigantic heel on hers, he wondered how she could even walk.
“Okay, do I know you?” he tried again.
“No. Not even slightly,” she said to her shoe.
“Thennnnnnn, can you tell me what this is about?” This was like trying to get his ex-girlfriend Trina to tell him what he’d done to make her angry—on way too many occasions. Hence the whole ex-girlfriend thing. This woman didn’t look like a drama queen like Trina, but you just never knew….
“There’s a trail you’ll be on today,” she blurted out suddenly. “It’s beautiful—runs by a two-tiered waterfall with a small fence at the bottom where the water pools and a really tall pine tree on the far side.” She finally made eye contact with him, making circular motions with her hands. “The path there makes a loop.”
Her eyes were pretty, a deep, dark blue, not brown as he’d originally thought, which reminded him of the ocea—Focus, dude. “Sounds like Dungeness Falls.” He cleared his throat and focused.
“Okay.” Her eyes flicked to the ground and back up at him. “Don’t take the kids to the far side of the water.”
“What?”
“Don’t take the kids to the far side of the water.” She ducked her head again and mumbled, “Don’t ask me how I know that.” After imparting that strange bit of wisdom, she pivoted back toward the coffee shop, obviously wanting to make a quick escape. He stopped her by grabbing her elbow—gently, so as not to scare her, but firmly enough to keep her from bolting.
“What does that mean?” he asked. “What kids?”
“Generally speaking, all of this will make sense later.” The strange half smile was back. “Unless I’m wrong, and then it’ll just be embarrassing. But right now, that’s all I can tell you.”
“I don’t have kids.” Frustration and confusion warred for dominance inside him, and he tightened his grip on her arm. She probably was a drama queen after all, what with the cryptic messages and the big, pretty, I’m-so-lonely-come-save-me eyes. And all he knew was that he needed to stay far, far away from that type. History showed that he didn’t do well with drama queens. “And could you please make sense for maybe five minutes? How do you know who I am? What kind of message is that?”
Now the smile was gone, replaced with the look of someone who’d had her puppy kicked too many times, which made him feel like a huge jerk. But then again, that was what drama queens did. They manipulated you into feeling sorry for them, and then—BAM! They hit you while you were vulnerable, just so they could fight and make up.
But instead of hitting him, literally or figuratively, she reached down and calmly peeled his hand off her elbow. “Trust me, you don’t want to know.” With that, she headed back inside the coffee shop, leaving him to wonder at her bizarro-world way of holding a conversation. Pulling his Mariners ball cap out of one of his jacket’s oversize pockets, he jammed it backward over his head and turned toward his truck, hoping that getting her out of his sight would exorcise her from his brain.
But, of course, he had no such luck. As he slogged across the parking lot to where Sabrina was waiting for him, he found that any attempt to turn his thoughts away from the woman, her strange words and her cartoon-character eyes proved futile. She’d gotten stuck in his craw, and he wanted her out of his craw and as far, far away from it as possible.
Sabrina reached over and opened the driver’s-side door for him, making a big show of shivering and chattering her teeth once he’d gotten inside.
“Sorry. I know you’re cold.” He got in and started the truck, cranking the defrost to clear the windows, which were nearly covered by a thin layer of moisture.
“I thought you might be a while, so I got your coffee.” As soon as she’d handed him the small paper cup she’d been holding, she rubbed her bare hands vigorously together, then replaced her gloves. “By the way, you are so going to hate me.”
“Okay, enough with the mysterious commentary. Just tell me straight what’s going on.” It took a major effort not to snap at her after she’d been nice enough to get the drink he’d forgotten, but his words still came out sharper than he’d intended.
Sabrina reared back in surprise. “Whoa, Mr. Grumpy Pants, who tied your boxers in a knot this morning?”
He sighed, leaning back in his seat and taking a sip of his coffee, which was already lukewarm from waiting in the frozen truck. Of course, Sabrina had also probably sucked all the heat out of it with her perpetually icy hands while he’d entertained the crazy woman in the parking lot. “Nothing.” He made an effort to bring his voice back to a normal conversational tone. “So why am I going to hate you?”
She tried to smile at him, but it quickly turned to a toothy grimace, as if she expected him to start shouting at her once he figured out what the hell she was talking about. “Because I forgot to tell you that we have a bunch of fifth graders coming out to the park today to learn about tracking, and you get to take them on a hike.”
“Excuse me, your what hurts?” he asked calmly.
Sabrina completely ignored the sarcastic non sequitur. “I’m sorry, Al, but Jessie is mapping out the road closures for the winter with Skylar, and I promised Aaron I’d take Rosie in to the doctor today. She has a virus she can’t shake.” Aaron was Sabrina’s new husband of six months, and Rosie was his teenaged daughter—who, come to think of it, hadn’t been coming around to watch her stepmother work as often as usual lately. The girl was fascinated with tracking.
“She okay?”
“Yeah, just a fever and a nasty cough. We think it might be bronchitis, but I don’t want to put off taking her in.”
The truck finally warmed up, and he took that as a cue to turn on the windshield wipers to finish clearing the windshield. “No, don’t do that. I can take the kids around, no problem.”
That earned him a real smile from Sabrina as she clicked her seat belt into place. “You are fabulous, and I adore you.”
“I know, but we must never speak of this again. Aaron would be mad at me, and I might have to kick his ass to defend myself,” he said, referring to her husband, a police detective and good friend.
“Right.” Sabrina laughed, holding her gloved hands in front of the heater vent. “Poor kids, they probably didn’t expect snow today. Well, as you know, they’ll want a demonstration from the big, bad search-and-rescue tracker, so I left some footprints last night down by Dungeness Falls for you to read for them.”
He froze, his coffee cup floating a couple of millimeters from his mouth. “Say that again.”
“I left some tracks down by Dungeness Falls.” Narrowing her eyes, Sabrina pivoted in her seat to face him, reaching back to pull her long black ponytail over her shoulder so she could finger the ends. “Alex, you’ve been acting really stran—”
He didn’t wait to hear the rest of her sentence, instead bolting out of the truck and heading for the shop. His breath coming out in heavy puffs from the cold, he shoved through the doors, barely noticing as he clipped a heavyset man balancing a cardboard tray filled with steaming cups in both hands. The man grunted a “Hey!” at him, but Alex just muttered an apology and kept moving, darting around the closely set tables to the one in the back where she’d been sitting.
She was gone. Jacket, coffee cup, all gone.
Don’t take the kids to the far side of the water.
She’d known. She’d known he was headed to Dungeness Falls today, and she’d known about the kids on the field trip before he had. He pushed back through the shop and headed toward the parking lot once more, nearly upsetting the same Weeble-shaped man he’d almost toppled a few minutes earlier—dude sure didn’t move fast. Once outside, he searched like a madman among the cars sitting in the small parking lot, looking for signs of telltale curls or a too-intense stare as he ignored Sabrina’s shouted questions. But the woman wasn’t there anymore. And he didn’t even know her name.
Smacking his palm against the nearest car hood, Alex blew out a frustrated breath, still scanning the parking lot, even though he now knew it was a hopeless cause. He’d just spotted the footprints her ridiculous clunky boots had made in the thin layer of snow that now coated the ground, and they led to a parking spot that was now empty.
Don’t take the kids to the far side of the water.
What the hell was he supposed to do now?
Chapter Two
“So even though it’s snowing, you can still see a slight depression in the snow where our mystery woman left tracks,” Alex called out over an excited group of fifth graders. About ten of them hung on his every word, bumping heads every time they bent down to see something he had to show them on the ground. The rest were pretty much touch and go—sometimes he captured their interest, and other times they got distracted by something shiny. But all in all, they were a pretty decent group of kids. He liked fifth grade—they were old enough to have an interesting conversation with, but still young enough to be dazzled by his tracking brilliance. Not that he’d tell Sabrina that—she still thought he was doing her a giant favor.
He started walking backward, beckoning to the group to follow him. “Here you’ll notice our subject started veering off the path.” He gestured toward a smattering of tall grasses, some of which were bent and broken. “Plants don’t crush themselves, so you can see something’s been here. Since the footprints we’re following seem to have disappeared off the path, looking for broken vegetation is the next best thing.”
“Oooh, that’s so cool!” said one gum-chomping girl as she pushed her trendy red glasses up higher on her nose, smiling brightly.
He laughed softly. “Be careful. That’s how I got into this business—I thought tracking was cool. But it’s also exhausting and sometimes cold, wet and nasty.”
“But you get to save lives. That’s awesome,” she responded.
True. And that was the best part, finding lost hikers and bringing them home.
“Are you Native American?” a boy bundled in a puffy purple jacket and a Minnesota Vikings stocking hat interjected. His voice was partially muffled by the yellow-and-purple scarf someone had wrapped around the lower half of his face, dark brown eyes peering over it. It wasn’t that cold, but some parents couldn’t be too careful when it came to their children.
“Yes.” Don’t say it. Don’t say it. Don’t say it. Alex’s teeth clicked together in an involuntary jaw clench as he waited for the inevitable question.
The boy pulled the scarf off his face, clumsily, as his hands were encased in some hard-core ski mittens. Alex felt the tension leave his shoulders when he noticed that the boy’s skin was slightly tanner than that of the Caucasian children in his class. “I’m Ojibwa, from Minnesota. We’re not trackers. Is your tribe?”
“Thank you. I have a lot of people assume that I’m a tracker because of some mysterious Native American power.” He smiled at the boy, who grinned back in understanding. “I’m Oglala Lakota Sioux, but I grew up off the reservation. And no, the Sioux aren’t trackers, to my knowledge.” He’d been six when his mother had moved off the reservation with her only child, so he didn’t actually know a whole lot about the Lakota except for the few things Anna Gray had told him through the years.
The girl with the glasses raised her hand, so high and straight above her head, her tummy stuck out with the effort.
“Yes?” Alex waved at her so she’d feel free to ask her question.
“Where did you learn to track, then?” Her hand remained in the air, even though he’d already called on her.
“I took a class as a college student from the park rangers here to fulfill a phys ed requirement when I couldn’t get into weight training, and I liked it so much, I designed my own semester abroad to Botswana to study tracking and desert survival with the Kalahari San.” At their puzzled looks, he added, “You might know them as the Bushmen. They’re tribal people in Africa, and their tracking skills are legendary. As luck would have it, the group who took me in were also brilliant teachers. I came back here to do a mountain-tracking apprenticeship, and they hired me.”
After fielding a few questions about his Africa experience and telling them how he learned to always keep his tent zipped in the Kalahari—to keep the hyenas out—Alex headed down the trail once more, showing them how to spot the sign indicating where his coworker’s trail continued.
It wasn’t until he heard water rushing through rocks that he felt the first pangs of uneasiness.
Don’t take the kids to the far side of the water.
But that was where the trail led. Across the water. And a successful field trip meant following the tracks around the entire Dungeness Falls loop, at the end of which one of the park rangers would be waiting with a picnic lunch to tell them about Renegade Ridge’s history and point out some interesting sights.
What had she been warning him about? Should he just ignore her? Was she an overprotective parent who’d decided to be spooky and weird about her fear of having her child near water? Was she insane?
Maybe she was insane. An insane bomber who had rigged the bridge over the falls to explode once they set foot on it.
Ah, hell. Now he was being insane. But he also couldn’t just ignore her. If any of the kids under his watch got hurt because he ignored Ms. Batcrapcrazy’s warning, he’d regret it for the rest of his life. He should have just called the police and had them sort this out, but now it was too late. He was in charge of a group of thirty-odd fifth graders, and he alone had to decide whether they were going to cross the water in about fifteen minutes.
Pulling the radio off his belt, he brought it up to his mouth. “Hey, kids, here’s how we communicate with the ranger station during a search,” he said brightly. Probably too brightly, judging from the confused look one of the chaperones had just shot him. Toning down his Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood smile, he depressed the talk button with his thumb. “Base, this is tracker one-B, over.”
A burst of static, and then came, “Roger that, tracker one-B, how can we help you, over?”
“I need you to patch me over to Sabrina’s cell phone, over.” He hoped that Sabrina, who had set the tracks he and the schoolkids were following, had taken her phone with her on the way to her stepdaughter’s appointment.
“Hey, Al, what’s up?” Sabrina asked, never having been one for radio protocol via cell phone. “Uh, over.”
“Bree, I’m just about to cross Dungeness Falls. Did you see anything strange up here when you were laying these tracks last night, over?” Naturally, none of the kids were distracted at the moment, and all were hanging on his every word. Thirty pairs of eyes widened when he asked about “anything strange,” and then the kids started whispering excitedly among themselves. Great. Now he’d scared them all. Their parents would be overjoyed.
“No, Al. Everything was pretty normal. What in particular are you looking for, over?” she responded.
“Nothing. Never mind.” Without so much as an over, he clicked off the radio and returned it to his belt. “Okay,” he said to the kids, “let’s head around this bend to the falls, and you can all stop and take pictures if you want.” He didn’t know how many of them, if any, would have cameras, but he figured that sounded plausible. While they were resting, he’d head up the trail next to the falls and check out the far side of the bridge. And if he saw anything remotely threatening, this was going to be the world’s shortest field trip.
After leading the students to the lookout point near the falls, he told them to fan out so they could all see the spectacular rush of white water as it plunged down a steep, rocky incline to spray into a pool at the bottom. The falls weren’t particularly tall—maybe twenty feet or so—but they were beautiful.
Reaching across the fence to run his palm through the cloud of fine, cool mist at the foot of the falls, he scanned the crowd to make sure they were all busy oohing and aahing. Then, after a word to one of their teachers, he headed up the trail. With long, quick strides, he made short work of the switchbacks leading to the top of the falls, then jogged along the path beside the upper part of the Dungeness River until he reached a small wooden bridge.
Don’t take the kids to the far side of the water.
Resting a hand on the smoothly sanded pine of the guardrail, he looked across. The path curved just a few feet after the bridge into a dense stand of Sitkas, dripping moss and low-hanging branches obscuring his view. Whatever it was that the mystery woman had wanted him to keep the kids away from, he couldn’t see it from this side. So, did her message mean that it was all right for him to go across the water alone?
Curiosity. One of these days, it was going to get him killed. But today, he didn’t figure that a cryptic message from a strange curly-haired woman was going to accomplish that feat. He made his way to the other side of the gurgling stream of water and thumped his boot emphatically on the dirt path once he reached the other side, mentally daring said curly-haired woman to come and get him.
She didn’t. So he kept going.
A few minutes later, something large and white—a bright, pristine white that didn’t occur naturally in the forest—caught his eye a few yards off the path.
“She probably left you a body, champ,” he muttered under his breath. “You think she’s cute. Therefore, she must be a wack-job.” For some reason, he’d always been like a magnet for that type, and it was starting to get old.
Small twigs and leaves crackled under his feet as he left the path and made his way through the undergrowth. Batting a low-hanging branch out of his way, he squinted at the white object, hoping its brilliance would suddenly make sense, that its presence would be something perfectly innocuous.
He pushed through the last of the tall weeds and bristly shrubs in his way, and the thing was finally visible. And what he saw there chilled him to the bone.
“Holy—”
Backing away slowly, Alex pulled his radio off his belt once more. “Base, this is tracker one-B, over.”
“Tracker one-B, this is Base. What’s your twenty, over?”
“About one hundred yards above the falls on Dungeness.” He was nearly overcome by an overwhelming urge to get out of there as quickly as possible. That or throw up. But he had a job to do, and no one else was up here to do it. “I need you to call the police, and get every park ranger you’ve got to block off this trail.” He scrubbed a hand over his face, still unable to believe what his eyes were telling him.
“Alex, are you okay?” Skylar, the search-and-rescue coordinator slipped out of her usual radio-speak. He’d blocked off trails before, for less grisly reasons, but she’d obviously become alarmed at something she heard in his voice.
“Yeah, just—” He took a deep breath. “Skylar, I’ve never seen anything like this. Just call the police. I’ve got to get those kids away from here.”
The free excerpt has ended.
