The Groom's Stand-In

She’d taken her eyes off her feet while she surveyed the area. She tripped over a thick vine, and for once Donovan wasn’t fast enough to catch her. She went down hard, landing on her hands and knees.

He was beside her instantly. “Are you all right?”

Embarrassed, she straightened, brushing mud and wet leaves off her hands. “I’m fine.”

“Let me see.” He took her hands in his, turning her palms up so he could examine them. Fortunately, the ground was still soft from the rain and only her pride had been injured in the fall. The knees of her khaki slacks were damp and filthy now, but the fabric had protected her skin.

Still cradling her hands in his, Donovan frowned down at her. “Can you walk?”

“Of course I can walk.” She rolled her eyes. “I just stumbled, Donovan. I’m fine, really.”

His face had settled into the rock-hard mask he used to conceal his emotions, but she recognized the glint of anger in his eyes. Though he was still a mystery to her in many ways, she was getting to know him better now. Well enough to know that he was blaming himself for letting her fall. Typical of him.

“You shouldn’t have to be goin

g through this,” he muttered. “When we get out of here and I get my hands on the people behind this….”

She squeezed his hands gently with her muddied ones. “We’ll get out,” she said confidently. “And then you can take steps to get justice for what we’ve been through—legally, of course.”

She didn’t quite catch his growl of response, but she had a feeling he wasn’t too concerned about the legality of the revenge he was plotting.

“Let’s keep walking,” she suggested. “I’ll be more careful.”

They moved onward, but this time Donovan was never more than an arm’s length away from her. Chloe was both annoyed and reluctantly amused by his obvious assumption that she could hardly take care of herself. She noted that his steps were slowing, too, and that he was limping almost as badly as she was. She took no pleasure in his discomfort, but she focused on it occasionally to remind herself that if he could keep going, she could, too.

She glanced up at the sky, noting that it looked as though the rain could start again at any minute. As if to confirm her prediction, a single fat drop landed on her cheek, sliding off her chin. “How long do you think it’s been since we left the cave?”

“I don’t know. Maybe four hours. We’ve got a few more hours until dark.”

“We’ve walked so far. It seems like we’d have come across some sign of civilization.”

“Didn’t you read about that little girl who was lost in a forest in north Arkansas a year or so ago? She simply slipped away from her grandparents during an outing, and it took hundreds of searchers three or four days to find her. Even then it took the men who found her nearly six hours to return her to her family—and they were riding mules. The forest is big and dense, and the terrain so uneven that it’s easy to get lost here and hard to be found.”

She swallowed. For once, Donovan had told her more than she wanted to know. She took some comfort in remembering that the child had been unharmed when she was found, even after several nights and days with no food.

She tucked her head and kept moving, looking only at her feet now. She wouldn’t risk falling again—and there was nothing ahead except more trees and bluffs. Occasionally, Donovan helped her up a steep incline or over a log or across a large, mossy boulder that blocked their way, but for the most part they traveled in silence.

They were walking along a ridge of rock so narrow that they had to go single-file when Donovan came to a stop so abruptly that she nearly barreled into him. “What is it?” she asked, craning to see around him.

“A cabin. More of a lean-to, actually.”

She was looking in the same direction he was, toward a heavy tangle of brush on the other side of a deep, erosion-carved crevasse. Water ran through the crevasse—the same stream they’d been more or less following all day. She didn’t see any sign of a building. “Where?”

“There.” He nodded toward the heaviest section of brush. “It’s almost covered with vines, but it’s there.”

She thought she saw it now, a rickety structure made of boards and metal. “Abandoned,” she said with a sigh. No help there.

“Maybe.” His whole body alert, Donovan seemed to be studying the area intently. Warily.

She lifted her eyebrows. “What are you looking for?”

“That shelter probably belongs to someone who grows illegal crops in the nearest clearing. It’s fairly common in areas this isolated.”

“Marijuana?” Chloe whispered, her eyes wide.

He nodded.

“Do you think they’re still here?” Shrinking back into the shadow of a tree behind her, she looked around for crazed drug growers with shotguns.