Colton Destiny Read online

  She looked around, but rather wildly, as if she were unable to focus on any one thing. But finally her eyes lit on the device that sat atop the woodstove. She seemed to focus on it, and Caleb seized the chance for distraction.

  “It is a thermoelectric fan,” he said. “It uses the Seebeck effect.”

  She blinked. Seeing she had at least stopped the wild glances, he went on, purposely making his voice as low and calm as he could.

  “A German physicist, John Seebeck discovered in 1821 that when two metals that respond to heat at a different rate were placed near each other, it creates a small electric current along with a magnetic field.”

  Her brow was furrowed now as she looked at the fan, as if she were only now noticing that there was no outside power source or even a switch to indicate battery power.

  He droned on, since his distraction appeared to be working. “That small current is enough to turn the blades when the stove gets warm enough. When the stove cools, it stops.”

  “An electric fan not plugged into electricity,” she murmured.

  “Exactly.”

  “Clever man, Mr. Seebeck.”

  “Yes.”

  “Handy, if you don’t have electricity.”

  “Yes.”

  He waited a moment. It seemed the shivering had stopped, so he dared to ask again.

  “What is wrong?”

  “I...”

  She paused, reached under the blanket and into her pocket to pull something out. It was a small plastic bag, sealed at the top, with writing across the seal in what he guessed was her bold yet feminine hand. Inside the bag was a torn piece of paper, perhaps six inches across. She held it out to him.

  He hesitated, seeing now the word evidence printed at the top of the label. But still she held it out, so he reached for it. Their fingers brushed, and he felt a charge as definite as the one that powered the fan he’d explained to her. He barely managed not to jerk his hand away. He took the bag somewhat gingerly and looked at the paper it held.

  He frowned. “This is a mangling of an old Amish children’s verse,” he said.

  “I know. I saw it at the schoolhouse.”

  Her voice was steady enough, and her teeth were no longer chattering. But she did not, he noticed, let go of the blanket.

  “What are the numbers?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  Caleb felt at a loss. Emma was a strong woman, a very strong woman, and that she was so shaken by this surprised him. Her world was sometimes beyond comprehension, it seemed to him. The words and numbers scrawled in crayon made literal sense, but the meaning? He had no idea. But obviously she did; why else would it have put her into such a state?

  “Does this have something to do with Hannah? With the other girls?”

  “I... Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Something else, then?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Emma,” he said gently, “tell me what it is.”

  A renewed shiver rippled visibly through her. But after a moment she began to speak, choppily, in oddly disjointed sentences that gradually came together to form a picture of such horror his very spirit recoiled at it. A serial rapist with a sadistic streak who had taunted officials back in Ohio with notes very like this one, scribbled in crayon, with fractured nursery rhymes. A rapist who had taken and tortured a string of women from age twenty to sixty.

  Caleb again fought the urge to reach for her, to hold her, comfort her. Her face was pale, drawn, her eyes still wide and haunted. He waited and, when she didn’t go on, prompted her quietly. “And?”

  “Then he took a thirteen-year-old girl.”

  Thirteen. One year older than his sweet, innocent Katie would be in just a few months. A fierce anger welled up in him. He tried to fight it but knew it was hopeless. God would just have to forgive him this time.

  “I found him a week later.”

  “Of course you did,” Caleb said, knowing deep inside that she would never, ever have quit until she did.

  “He’d cut her. Badly. Worse than he’d meant to, I think.”

  Caleb suppressed a shiver of his own. Emma swallowed, and he saw her fingers curl, tightening on the edge of the blanket.

  “She was dying. He’d been working on her for a week, the longest yet. He loved knives. She needed medical attention immediately.”

  With her every word the urge in him grew to grab her, hold her, pull her away from the evil she dealt with every day. He was under no illusion; he knew her world desperately needed people like her, to deal with the scum like the man she spoke of. But he fiercely, desperately didn’t want it to be her.

  And he didn’t want to know, but felt compelled to ask anyway.

  “What happened?”

  Emma stared down at the blanket, touching it with her fingers, as if she needed the contact with something real and now to survive the memories of then.

  “She survived. She’s still recovering, as best she can.”

  “You convinced him to let her be helped?”

  “Sort of.”

  He waited a long moment before saying, “Emma?”

  “I made a trade with him.”

  “A trade? What kind of trade?”

  “The girl got help, got to a hospital.”

  “And he got...?”

  “Me.”

  Chapter 20

  Emma felt drained. She had never told it, not like that, not since the days of the investigation, and certainly not to a civilian. Yet it had come pouring out, as if Caleb had somehow found the safety valve and released it. As if, along with his apparent ability to send her body into overdrive, he also had found the way into her mind, as easily as he found the best grain of the wood he shaped.

  “—yourself?”

  She had to force herself to focus, to keep trying to swim upward out of the scalding sea of memories.

  “What?”

  If she had the strength, she’d be embarrassed by the faintness of her voice. She thought she’d had all this buried so deeply it would never surface again, and yet here she was, swamped anew as if it had happened two days ago, not two years.

  “You sacrificed yourself to this...monster?”

  Even through the fog she felt a little jolt as he chose the exact word she used herself. Or perhaps it was at the odd note his voice had taken on, as if his horror wasn’t only at the existence of such creatures or even that a trade had been made, but that it was she who had made it.

  “I... There was no choice.” She didn’t, couldn’t look at him. She just kept touching the blanket. The soft feel of it was soothing, or maybe it was just that it had been Caleb who put it around her. “She was already dying, horribly, and he was about to finish it.”

  “So you offered him a fresh victim?”

  “He’d already been taunting me, toying with me from the moment I found him with the girl. I thought the idea might intrigue him enough.” She gave a self-effacing half shrug. “My job was to save her.”

  “Your job.” He sounded almost harsh. “Are there...many who would do what you did?”

  She looked at him then. “Yes. There are. Not all outsiders accept our world as it is now.”

  “This is why you do what you do?”

  “In part, yes.”

  “How long?”

  She knew he wasn’t asking how long she’d been on the job, but that’s what she answered anyway. “I signed up right out of college. Seven years ago.”

  It didn’t work. Caleb merely looked at her and said quietly, “I believe you know that is not what I meant.”

  She let out a long, compressed breath. He was going to demand it from her. And worse, she was going to give it to him. She couldn’t seem to stop herself.

  “Nine days.”

  He winced, closing his eyes and turning his head just slightly away, as if the answer had been worse than he’d been expecting. Yet he didn’t change the subject, didn’t try to gloss it over, and she knew he was not going to turn away from the ugly
truth.

  He muttered something that she barely heard, something in the dialect they used among themselves. It was close enough to the German that she could tell it was some kind of exclamation to God. And not a happy one. That her story had pushed him to that, oddly, took away some of the chill. She tried to respond in mock shock, to lighten things.

  “Did you just—” she was going to say swear, but had the sudden thought that might be too serious an accusation to joke about, and changed course “—say something uncivil?”

  “Sometimes it is beyond civilized men to remain civil.”

  She found this admission, and the anger that inspired it, somehow reassuring. The Amish pacifism had sometimes made her wonder if they truly felt anything; it had been one of the parents of the girls missing in Ohio that had told her, with more patience that she likely had deserved at the time, that of course they felt anger and all other normal human emotions. It was how they channeled them, what they did about them, that differed. It was not their way to flail wildly, but to seek to understand God’s will.

  “You endured this for nine days.”

  His voice was stiff, as if he were keeping it under strict control. It was somehow more potent than an outburst of anger would have been.

  “I was a bit more of a challenge to him than those young girls.”

  “Yet you were little more than a girl yourself.”

  “I was a trained agent. And I had the profile Quantico had done on him, so I knew a bit about how to get to him.”

  She didn’t explain how a couple of times, that was the only thing that had kept her alive, playing on his need to torment, to break.

  He’d never broken her. That was the one fact that she’d clung to, the one thing that got her through the nightmares and the flashbacks.

  “It was two years ago,” she began.

  “And yesterday,” he said, startling her again.

  “Yes,” she snapped.

  The admission shattered the tentative wall she’d begun to rebuild in the warmth and golden glow of his home. The memories escaped again, and she knew she was far from over this episode.

  “Yes,” she repeated, too far gone now to care that her voice was trembling. The blanket had slipped away, yet the simple task of reaching for it seemed too much. She shouldn’t be cold, not here in front of the stove, but she was, and she wrapped her arms around herself.

  “Emma.”

  Caleb’s voice had turned soft, had taken on an odd note she might have described as yearning in another man. She didn’t dare describe it that way with him.

  And then he moved, quickly. He swept her up out of the chair, grabbed the blanket in the same easy movement, wrapped it around her again. Then he lifted her in his arms—he was just as strong as she’d guessed he would be—and stunningly, with breath-stealing ease, sat down where she’d been, with her held tightly on his lap.

  She shuddered, her mind battling a body that only now betrayed how much it had wanted this. She tried to pull back but instead nestled closer, the heat from him warming her as even the fire in the stove and Caleb’s silly fan had failed to do. She simply couldn’t make herself move, except closer. She wanted his warmth, his strength; it was why she’d come here, instead of running home to the ranch, or to Derek, or Tate, or even Gunnar, who perhaps would understand better than anyone.

  His soothing heat reached where the fire had been unable to, down to her cold, quaking bones. She snuggled deeper, his arms held her, and gradually the shivering stopped.

  She sighed.

  This was an interesting feeling, she thought in some part of her brain the thaw had freed. It was as if the very house had wrapped itself around her, comforting, welcoming. But since Caleb was the heart—and soul—of this home, that shouldn’t be surprising.

  What was surprising was that he had done this. Gone to such lengths to offer comfort. Again, what he’d done clashed with childhood memories of somber men with long, white beards. But she also remembered her father, a man who had held the respect and trust of the people of Paradise Ridge, standing on the Double C porch with a group of about five Amish men one sunny afternoon, all of them laughing uproariously over something.

  She was suddenly seized with the desire to see Caleb laugh like that. He’d chuckled, had even laughed a couple of times on those evenings with the girls, but never had she seen him truly let out a big, male belly-deep laugh.

  She glanced up at him, trying to imagine it. Right now he looked so odd she couldn’t begin to. And as she looked at him, something shifted in his expression, his bright, clear eyes darkening. His head lowered slightly, and she saw his gaze shift to her mouth.

  If it had been anyone but Caleb, she would have thought he was about to kiss her.

  It was Caleb, and he was kissing her.

  It was the briefest of touches, his lips over hers, yet a fire hotter than any the powerful little stove could produce seemed to spark instantly. As if this was the connection that completed a megawatt circuit of the electricity his people shunned, something sharp, snapping and alive leaped between them.

  And just as suddenly it was gone.

  Caleb’s sharp, jerking movement as he pulled back, the loss of warmth as he dropped his arms, the horror in his face as he stared at her, all made her feel as if she’d been dumped back out into the cold.

  “No,” he said, his voice nothing more than a harsh whisper. “Annie.”

  So it was true, she thought, her chest tightening against the admission of what she’d always sensed was true and what she’d been told often enough. He really had buried his heart with his dead wife.

  Awkwardly he stood, holding her only so that she wouldn’t fall when he did. He eased her down into the chair, gentle despite his obvious distress, and then backed away as if she had been the one to burn him.

  “I should not have done that,” he said stiffly. “I am not free to...”

  Not free? “But she’s...gone, Caleb.”

  It wasn’t even for herself that she asked, she realized, even though this man had kindled something fierce and alive in her. It was for him, this man who was so vital, so strong and yet lived as if that part of life was over for him forever.

  “Marriage,” he said in that same strained voice, “is forever.”

  “Or until death,” she said softly.

  “No. Annie and I, we—”

  He broke off, turning to face the woodstove as if he were the one freezing now.

  As cold as the grave.

  The phrase hit her like a sucker punch. They’d both felt it tonight, that kind of bone-deep, soul-sucking cold.

  “You were happy,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “She loved you.”

  “And I her. For seventeen years.”

  “Would she want this? Would she demand your heart be bound to her even into the grave?”

  He spun around. Stared at her.

  “I don’t mean me,” she said, her voice taking on an urgency as she tried to make that clear, even as her heart was saying, Yes, you do. “But someone, sometime... Surely she would want you to feel love again. Would want the girls to—”

  “You have no knowledge and no right to speculate on what Annie would have wanted.”

  It was short, brusque, but to her surprise not angry. She would have expected anger from any other man. She wasn’t sure the simple, calm statement of fact wasn’t worse.

  What she was sure of was that he was right. She should have kept out of it. And if the memory of that brief, searing kiss made the rest of her time here that much more awkward, then it was no more than she deserved. However much it taunted her, she knew one thing.

  It would be even worse for Caleb.

  Emma stood abruptly. She had to regain both her composure and her professionalism. But first, there was something else she had to do.

  “Thank you,” she said, thankful her voice sounded steady, unruffled, ruefully aware of how much effort achieving that tone had taken.

  He flicked a
glance at her. He opened his mouth as if to speak, then closed it again.

  “I needed...comfort. And warmth. You gave it, without hesitation.” And more, she thought, struggling not to let her emotions show any more than they already were. At least he had kissed her; had it been the other way around, she didn’t think she’d be able to set it aside, even temporarily. She finished her statement somewhat formally. “That is what I thank you for.”

  His expression had changed as she spoke, as if he had momentarily forgotten the horror that had driven her here.

  “You are welcome.”

  He said no more, made no reference to her personal nightmare, and for that she was grateful. In return she would let him off the hook for that kiss. She would never mention it and would do her best to forget it.

  And even as she thought it, she knew her best would never, ever be enough to erase that kiss from her memory. Not when it had seared through her every defense, weakened though they’d been at the moment.

  That was it, she told herself. Her defenses were up, but aimed in another direction, at that damned note. That was how he’d gotten under them so easily.

  She crossed the few steps to the table where Caleb had set down the plastic evidence bag. She felt more confident now that she could look at it without falling apart. Caleb had given her that, had been the anchor that had kept her from spinning wildly out into space.

  She picked up the envelope. She didn’t have to read the words, with their wide, crayoned lines; they were already etched into her mind. She focused instead on the writing itself.

  The first thing she noticed was that it was different. The Monster had also used crayon, but had printed his notes in angular letters, with extreme pressure on the page. This was in cursive, in an entirely different hand. She noticed how the lines of the verse were so close together and tilted downward at the end, how the letters themselves got smaller toward the end of each line, making them hard to read in the wide crayon.