set things into motion to offer his services as a profiler.”
“He played his own people, in other words,” Joe said.
“That would be my guess,” Riley agreed.
“Why did you hang up on me when I called from Boise?” Joe asked, his expression still a little wary as he looked at his old friend. Tension radiated from him, contagious. It made Jane’s stomach hurt.
“Holbrook sent an agent from the Jackson Hole resident agency to babysit me until he could get here. The guy was walking in just as you called.” Riley gave Joe a pointed look. “I was hoping you’d call me at home.”
“I couldn’t risk it.” Joe glanced at Jane. She met his gaze, remembering their whirlwind tour of Boise as they tried to shake Clint and the Idaho authorities off their trail and make it to Reno unscathed.
“Why’d you come back, then?”
Joe turned his gaze back to Riley. “Because I needed help from people I trust. That’s you, isn’t it?”
Riley looked hurt. “God, Joe, how can you even ask that after all these years?”
“We’ve been shot at, framed and chased all over Reno,” Joe responded, his voice tight. “Trust is a bit of a problem for me at the moment.”
“You can trust me. I swear that on Emily’s memory.”
Joe’s eyes grew bright with emotion. He reached out and clasped his friend’s arm. “I know. I just needed to hear you say it.”
“Whatever help you want, you’ve got it,” Riley promised. “What do you have in mind?”
“Right now, I need a new base of operations. Somewhere nobody would think to find me.” He glanced at Jane. “I think I might know the place.”
Riley’s eyes shifted from Joe’s face to Jane’s and back. A hint of a smile touched his mouth. “Old Curt’s place up in the hills?”
Joe nodded. “Nobody would connect me to your great-grandfather’s old hunting cabin. And you can’t get there except by foot or horseback.”
“Horseback?” Jane asked.
Both men looked at her.
“Do I know how to ride?” she asked.
BY NINE o’clock, Joe and Jane were heading into an icy rain as they wound their way up Sawyer’s Rise. Riley had supplied them with oilskin ponchos for the ride, but the brisk wind drove rain into every available opening, leaving them both soaked before they were halfway up the mountain.
The borrowed Glock 9mm lay heavily in the holster tucked into the back of Joe’s jeans. It was a strangely comforting feeling, having it there, even though Joe hadn’t used his own service weapon more than once or twice in his career as a cop.
Livestock thieves he could usually handle without resorting to gunplay. Clint Holbrook was a different animal altogether.
Over the soft moan of the wind, Joe heard a rattling sound. He turned his flashlight toward Jane and saw her teeth chattering in the cold. She clung to the reins with white-knuckled fists, her thighs clamped tightly to Bella’s sides as the chestnut mare picked her way up the rocky incline. Realizing the light was on her instead of the path ahead, she turned her head and squinted at him.
“Almost there,” Joe called.
“Damned good thing,” she said flatly.
He grinned and turned the flashlight back to the path, urging his own horse, Jazz, up the narrow trail with a murmured command and a squeeze of his knees against the gelding’s sides.
Within a half hour, they reached the top of the rise, where Riley’s great-grandfather Curtis Patterson had cut a small clearing to build his hunting cabin. It was a good bit more primitive than the cabin he and Jane had shared in Idaho, but it was shelter, with an electric generator, a water pump, a large fireplace and a wood-burning stove. A small horse shed behind the cabin would shelter the horses for the night in relative warmth.
“I’ll settle the horses,” he told Jane as they dismounted in front of the cabin’s wooden porch. “The place is unlocked-nobody comes up here but Riley and me.” He took the reins from her icy hands and nodded toward the cabin door. “Go on in and see if you can get a fire started. I’ll be inside in a second.”
He led the horses to the shelter and tied them in two of the shed’s four stalls. Riley had been up there recently, he noticed with relief. There was fresh hay in the stalls and a large plastic barrel full of fresh horse feed. He gave each of the animals a rub down and made sure their beds were warm and dry before he gave them a little feed and some water, forcing himself not to skimp on attention to the horses just because he wanted to get back to the cabin where Jane was waiting.
Would she remember this place? Pieces of her lost memory were coming back to her, more and more every day. And the cabin was special to them.
Would Jane remember why?
JANE STRIPPED to her underwear and hung her clothes on the back of a chair in front of the cold fireplace. For the second time tonight she was soaking wet, but the quick shower at Riley’s house had been a tropical vacation compared to the drenching she’d received on the ride up the mountain.
She was relieved to see someone had already left the makings of the next fire, with two fat logs and several kindling twigs already piled up, ready to use. Now she just had to find the matches.
Shivering, she wrapped a blanket around herself then searched the cabin until she spotted a small alcove that appeared to serve as a kitchenette. Scrabbling through the drawers, she found a box of matches and carried them back to the fireplace.
A strange sensation prickled the skin on the back of her neck as she opened the box of matches and withdrew one. This place seemed…familiar. In some ways, it was not so very different from the nicer cabin belonging to Angela Carlyle’s family in Idaho. Rough plank floors, sturdy pine window frames, a stone fireplace instead of brick.
But the Carlyle place was just that. A place.
This cabin was a memory. Elusive, just out of reach.
She tried not to force it. That never worked. Instead, she struck the match she’d removed from the box and turned toward the fireplace.
The outside door opened, letting in a blast of cold, damp air along with Joe. He stopped in the doorway, staring at her for a moment. Then he shut the door behind him and walked toward her, his pace unhurried. His gaze moved over her body, as tangible as a touch.
Her heart rate tripled in the time it took for him to reach her. He took the match from her hand just as its heat began to reach her fingertips and tossed it into the fireplace. The kindling caught fire, shooting off sparks and light.
He moved away from her, stripping off his wet jacket. Jane forced her gaze away from him, reaching for the hurricane lamp sitting on the mantel over the growing fire.
She found a wick trimmer sitting beside it on the mantel and set about lighting the lamp, wondering how and when she learned such a skill. Had it been here, in this cabin? Had Joe taught her?
She thought maybe he had.
She turned to look at him. Her breath caught. He stood closer than she thought, close enough to touch. Stripped to his damp jeans, his rain-slick body glistening in the warm glow of the fire, he seemed like a creature formed from the fabric of her deepest fantasies. Elemental, masculine and hers for the taking.
“I’ll get the sheets for the beds,” Joe said, his voice ragged.
“No, let me,” she said, forcing her reluctant body toward the tall pine armoire standing at the foot of the closest bed. She had already opened it and taken out a set of sheets before she realized that she’d known exactly where to find the linens.
She turned back to the bed, afraid to let herself look at Joe, not yet ready for the trickle of memories to become an inundating flood that would wash her away. Clinging to her control like a shield, she returned to the bed slowly, stripping back the thin dustcover protecting the mattress, and started to make the bed.
She heard Joe’s approach, slow steady footfalls across the plank floor. The heat of his body warmed the chilly air, the sensation bringing with it a steady stream of images racing through her mind. A crackling fire spreading light and warmth. Soft sheets beneath her back. Joe’s body, hard and beautiful and relentless over her, driving her to the edge of madness and beyond. Her soft growls of release, echoed by his as they fought for every last ounce of
