Ice Read online

  Gabriel looked toward the house, took Lolly’s hand again, and together they eased away from their protected position behind the tree to move deeper into the woods. His step was quick but sure, and she had to struggle a little to keep pace. Her legs weren’t as long as his, and hiking through the woods wasn’t exactly her thing. She didn’t have many “things,” she realized. She was excruciatingly normal, lived a normal life, worked at a normal job. She liked books and movies, forced herself to exercise, but despite growing up in Maine, she didn’t care for roughing it or any winter sports at all, so she was definitely out of her element right now.

  The trees had sheltered the ground beneath them, so there was less ice here, though their feet still made crunching sounds. That meant ice was building on the limbs and branches overhead, and she knew how dangerous that could be; working for an insurance company had given her insight into all sorts of situations, because she’d seen the claims.

  Gabriel led her at an angle that generally followed the long driveway toward the narrow secondary road, stepping over fallen dead branches, maneuvering around clumps of wild growth. A couple of times he looked back at her. She felt like a tethered balloon, being tugged along in his wake. Her breath huffed out in rapid gasps. He must have realized that she was struggling to keep up with him because he shortened his stride, but not by much. “It’ll be a bit easier when we can leave the woods,” he said once, as he helped her around an overgrown, brambly bush. “I have soup and coffee in my truck.”

  “Dangling a carrot, eh?”

  That might’ve been a smile, but it was so dark she couldn’t be sure. “Whatever works.”

  “Um … exactly where is your truck?” The shock had worn off enough now that she could think a little. Obviously Gabriel hadn’t flown there, so he had to have wheels somewhere.

  “About half a mile farther. The ice was so bad I had to stop.”

  Questions tumbled in her mind, questions like: why was he here? It wasn’t as if she and Gabriel McQueen were close friends—or even friends, come to that. Of all the people in the world, what was he doing at her house? None of this felt real, and somehow his presence was the most unreal part of it all. Being knocked around, terrorized, almost raped, and held captive were all shocking enough in their own right, but the fact that he, of all people, had appeared out of the night to help her escape was simply dumbfounding—either that, she thought wryly, or this was her brain’s way of helping her cope by shoving all that other stuff to the side until she could cope.

  If concentrating on Gabriel McQueen was a coping mechanism, then she’d go along with the game plan; that was much better than thinking of the violence, of everything that could go wrong, of how dangerous walking for miles in weather like this could be. The odds were so heavy against them surviving the night that only sheer desperation made her willing to try.

  The darkness in the woods was almost complete; they both stumbled over obstacles, feeling their way along. Her eyes had adjusted somewhat, and still she could barely see. If Gabriel had a flashlight he didn’t produce it, and she didn’t ask; much as she wanted to see where she was going, she seriously didn’t want the equivalent of a spotlight pinpointing their position for Niki and Darwin.

  In spite of the poncho Gabriel had given her, before long the cold cut through all the layers of clothing she wore. Her jeans and sweatpants were wet from falling on the ice, and the wind went right through to her skin. She would have liked nothing better than to stop and hunker down so the poncho draped around her and blocked the wind, but if she stopped moving she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to start up again. Knowing what waited behind her, in the warmth of her own home, spurred her to keep up. She’d walk all the way to Portland if that was what it took to get away from those two.

  She’d even put her life in the hands of Gabriel McQueen, who had been the bane of her teenage years. He’d been everything she wasn’t: popular, outgoing, self-assured. And she’d had the most horribly painful crush on him all through junior high and high school. The flip side of that was she’d hated him, too, for all the times he’d made fun of her, all the times he’d taunted her and laughed at her, and she’d never passed up an opportunity to slip a verbal knife between his ribs. When he’d graduated two years ahead of her, she’d been relieved, yet she’d still caught herself watching the hallways for that proudly held dark head.

  She should probably count herself lucky he’d bothered rescuing her. The teenage Gabriel wouldn’t have bothered—though, to be fair, if she’d still been a teenager she’d probably have slammed the window on his hands anyway.

  Thinking about the past could occupy her mind only so long before her physical misery began to push its way to the forefront. The rain was coming down harder now, coating the trees, the underbrush, even them. She couldn’t see it, but she could feel the weight of it crusting her wet pants and shoes. At least her feet didn’t seem to be quite as wet as her legs, thanks to the Vaseline … either that, or they were so cold she couldn’t feel the moisture. The wind soughed through the tree limbs, making them rattle like bones in their ice-coffins. The sound was eerie, ghostly, and she was glad for the big, hard hand that gripped hers.

  Then Gabriel pushed through some particularly heavy undergrowth and halted so abruptly she plowed into his back. “Finally,” he said, reaching back to steady her. “Here’s the road. There’s about a three-foot drop down to it, so be careful.”

  He bent down, gripped a sapling, and used it to steady himself as he jumped down the low embankment. His feet skidded on the ice, but with the aid of the sapling he stayed upright. Gingerly he turned, reached up, and grasped Lolly around the waist, then lowered her to the road with easy strength. “Watch your step,” he warned. “There’s a shallow ditch here. Walk on the weedy strip between the ditch and the pavement; it’s better footing.”

  Head down, Lolly concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. Surely they had gone more than a half mile; shouldn’t they have reached his truck by now? She had grown up on this mountain, knew it like the back of her hand, most of the time, but the darkness, the cold, the unrelenting series of shocks, had all left her disoriented and she had no real idea where they were. Her hands and feet hurt so much from the cold she felt as if she could barely shuffle forward. She couldn’t do anything about her feet, and Gabriel gripped one of her hands so she couldn’t do anything about it, either, but her other hand she wormed under the poncho and several other layers of clothing to reach the bare skin of her warm belly. She could barely feel the warmth on her fingers, but her belly could definitely feel the cold of her hand. There, that was a little better.

  Now and then she darted a glance at the man who was leading her, though in the darkness she couldn’t make out much more than his height and the width of his shoulders—that, and the determination with which he faced the storm head-on. She remembered the way he’d looked when he’d popped up in her window, though. He was older, obviously; so was she. A lot of years had passed since he’d graduated—fifteen of them!—and they’d both changed.

  He was no longer a cocky teenager with the world at his feet; he was a grown man, a widower with a son, as she’d heard during one of her trips to Wilson Creek. Becoming a father and losing his wife were life-changing events; no way could he be the same person he was when they were in school. She wasn’t, and she hadn’t been through anything as traumatic as losing a spouse. There was nothing traumatic in her life at all. Instead she’d quietly made her way, made a settled life for herself, shed a lot of her insecurities and shyness.

  She had butted heads with him for as long as she could remember, and right now … she wasn’t sure why. Was it because she’d always had such a ferocious crush on him, and never expected him to like her in any way, so she’d protected herself by developing a shield of hostility? Teenagers were such tangled pits of angst and emotion, anything was possible. Looking back, she felt slightly bemused by their teenage selves.

  If there would ever be any tim