A Game of Chance Read online

  If they lived through this, she thought fervently, she wouldn’t keep the secret to herself a minute longer.

  “It can’t be Hauer’s men,” she blurted. “It’s impossible. They couldn’t be here ahead of us, because we didn’t know we were coming here. It has to be a crazy farmer, or a—a jerk who thought it would be funny to shoot at someone.”

  “Sweetheart.” He touched her arm again, and she realized she was babbling. “It isn’t a crazy farmer, or a trigger-happy jerk.”

  “How do you know? It could be!”

  “The sniper’s too professional.”

  Just four words, but they made her heart sink. Chance would know; he had training in this sort of thing.

  She pressed her forehead against the grassy bank, fighting for the courage to do what she had to do. Her mother had died protecting her and Margreta; surely she could be as brave? She couldn’t tell Hauer anything about Margreta, so her sister was safe, and if she could save Chance, then dying would be worth it….

  Her child would die with her.

  Don’t make me choose, she silently prayed. The child or the father.

  If it were just her, she wouldn’t hesitate. In the short time she had known Chance—was it really just two weeks?—he had given her a lifetime of happiness and the richness of love. She would gladly give her life in exchange for his.

  The life inside her wasn’t really a child yet; it was still just a rapidly dividing cluster of cells. No organs or bones had formed, nothing recognizable as a human. It was maybe the size of a pin head. But the potential…oh, the potential. She loved that tiny ball of cells with a fierceness that burned through every fiber of her being, had loved it from the first startled awareness that her period was late. It was as if she had blinked and said, “Oh. Hello,” because one second she had been totally unaware of its existence, and the next she had somehow known.

  The child or the father. The father or the child.

  The words writhed in her brain, echoing, bouncing. She loved them both. How could she choose? She couldn’t choose; no woman should have to make such a decision. She hated her father even more for forcing her into this situation. She hated the chromosomes, the DNA, that he had contributed to her existence. He wasn’t a father, he had never been a father. He was a monster.

  “Give me your pistol.” She heard the words, but the voice didn’t sound at all like hers.

  His head snapped around. “What?” He stared at her as if she had lost her mind.

  “Give me the pistol,” she repeated. “He—they—don’t know we have it. You haven’t fired back. I’ll tuck it in the back of my jeans and walk out there—”

  “The hell you will!” He glared at her. “If you think I—”

  “No, listen!” she said urgently. “They won’t shoot me. He wants me alive. When they get close enough for me to use the pistol I—”

  “No!” He grabbed her by the shirt and hauled her close so they were almost nose to nose. His eyes were almost shooting sparks. “If you make one move to stand up, I swear I’ll knock you out. Do you understand me? I will not let you walk out there.”

  He released her, and Sunny sank back against the creek bank. She couldn’t overpower him, she thought bleakly. He was too strong, and too alert to be taken by surprise.

  “We have to do something,” she whispered.

  He didn’t look at her again. “We wait,” he said flatly. “That’s what we do. Sooner or later, the bastard will show himself.”

  Wait. That was the first idea she’d had, to wait until dark and slip away. But if Hauer had more than one man here, the sniper could keep them pinned down while the other worked his way around behind them—

  “Can we move?” she asked. “Up the creek, down the creek—it doesn’t matter.”

  He shook his head. “It’s too risky. The creek’s shallow. The only place we have enough cover is flat against the bank on this side. If we try to move, we expose ourselves to fire.”

  “What if there’s more than one?”

  “There is.” He sounded positive. A feral grin moved his lips in a frightening expression. “At least four, maybe five. I hope it’s five.”

  She shook her head, trying to understand. Five to two were deadly odds. “That makes you happy?”

  “Very happy. The more the merrier.”

  Nausea hit the back of her throat, and she closed her eyes, fighting the urge to vomit. Did he think sheer guts and fighting spirit would keep them alive?

  His lean, powerful hand touched her face in a gentle caress. “Chin up, sweetheart. Time’s on our side.”

  Now wasn’t the time for explanations, Chance thought. The questions would be too angry, the answers too long and complicated. Their situation was delicately balanced between success and catastrophe; he couldn’t relax his guard. If he was correct and there were five men out there hunting them—and that was the only explanation, that one of his own men was a traitor and had given Hauer the location of their supposedly impromptu picnic—then they could, at any time, decide to catch him in a pincer movement. With only one pistol, and Sunny to one side of him, he couldn’t handle an attack from more than two directions. The third one would get him—and probably Sunny, too. In a fire fight, bullets flew like angry hornets, and most of them didn’t hit their target. If a bullet didn’t hit its target, that meant it hit something—or someone—else.

  His own men would have been stood down, or sent to a bogus location. That was why there hadn’t been any return fire when he and Sunny were fired on—no one was there. For that to have happened, the traitor had to be someone in a position of authority, a team leader or higher. He would find out. Oh, yeah, he’d find out. There had been several betrayals over the years, but they hadn’t been traceable. One such breach had almost cost Barrie, Zane’s wife, her life. Chance had been trying to identify the bastard for four years now, but he’d been too smart. But this time it was traceable. This time, his men would know who had changed their orders.

  The traitor must have thought it was worth blowing his cover, to have this opportunity to kill Chance Mackenzie himself. And he should be here in person, to see the job done. Hauer’s two men would bring the count to three. Hauer made it four. The only way Hauer could have gotten into the country and moved about as freely and undetected as he had was with inside help—the FBI mole. If Chance were really lucky, the mole was here, too, bringing the count to five.

  But they’d made a big mistake. They didn’t know about his ace in the hole: Zane. They didn’t know he was out there; that was an arrangement Chance had made totally off the record. If Zane wasn’t needed, no one would ever know he was there. Chance’s men were damn good, world class, but they weren’t in Zane’s class. No one was.

  Zane was a superb strategist; he always had a plan, and a plan to back up his plan. He would have seen in an instant what was going down and been on the phone calling the men back into position from wherever they’d been sent. How long it took them to get here depended on how far away they were, assuming they could get here at all. And after the call Zane would have started moving, ghosting around, searching out Hauer and his men. Every minute that passed increased the odds in Chance’s favor.

  He couldn’t explain any of that to Sunny, not now, not even to ease the white, pinched expression that made him ache to hold her close and reassure her. Her eyes were haunted, their sparkle gone. She had worked her entire life to make certain she was never caught off guard, and yet she had been; he himself had seen to it.

  The knowledge was bitter in his mouth. She was terrified of the monster who had relentlessly hunted her all her life, yet she had been willing to walk out there and offer herself as a sacrifice. How many times in the short two weeks he’d known her had she put herself on the line for him? The first time had been when she barely knew him, when she swooped down to grab the snake coiled so close to his feet. She was terrified of snakes, but she’d done it. She was shaking with fear now, but he knew that if he let her, she would do