The Groom's Stand-In

She still seemed to find it impossible to believe that this man wasn’t going to offer them assistance. “But couldn’t we at least—”

His eyes on that steady shotgun, Donovan spoke sharply this time. “Now, Chloe.”

Subsiding into a bewildered silence, she moved beside him and offered him her shoulder for support.

Donovan made sure to exaggerate his limp as they made their way slowly out the door—not that he had to play it up much, since his leg really did hurt like the devil. He wanted to appear as non-threatening as possible to the other man.

The scruffy man watched them suspiciously, staying on guard against any sudden moves. When they were outside, he stepped into his doorway as if to prevent them from going back inside. “Don’t come back here,” he warned. “You won’t be leaving again if you do.”

“You won’t see us again,” Donovan replied.

The door slammed shut. Then immediately opened again. “Get moving!” he shouted. “And stay off my road. I’ll be watching it. You know what will happen if I find you again.”

“We’re leaving.” Donovan nudged Chloe toward the woods. “And don’t worry, we never saw you.”

They made their way as swiftly as possible into the shelter of the trees. Donovan’s back itched with the awareness that there was a shotgun aimed right at the center of it.

He heaved a slight sigh of relief when they reached the tree line and slipped into it, letting themselves be swallowed by the shadows. Only then did they hear the crash of the cabin door closing again.

Releasing his grip on Chloe’s shoulder, Donovan reached out to prop himself with one hand against the trunk of a large tree, needing a moment to get his equilibrium. He might have seemed calm, but his heart was pounding like a jackhammer against his ribs. He’d been scared that he would do or say something wrong and put Chloe in further jeopardy.

Realizing that Chloe was frowning at him in heavy silence, he lifted his eyebrows at her. “What?”

“You could have at least tried to reason with him.”

“I could have,” he agreed equably. “But I really wasn’t in the mood to get shot today.”

“You really think he would have shot us? Even if we had taken the time to make him understand that we—?”

“Chloe,” he interrupted her gently. “Do you know what that guy is probably doing right this minute?”

She blinked a minute, then shook her head. “No.”

“He’s probably searching every inch of that cabin for the listening devices he’s certain we’ve placed there. He’s convinced himself by now that I was lying to him, that we’re really government agents who were spying on his activities. He doesn’t believe I have a broken leg, or that we have no idea where we are. The only reason he didn’t shoot us is because he was afraid the sound of shots would make our army of jackbooted partners rush in to rescue us. If we’d waited much longer, he would have taken the chance and shot us, anyway.”

“But—”

“He’s not sane, Chloe. He’s scared and confused and paranoid. There was no chance of negotiating with him without putting both our lives at risk. And besides, there’s not that much he could have done to help us, anyway.”

Biting her lip, she looked back toward the cabin. “I was just surprised that you cooperated so easily with him.”

“What would you have had me do? Tell him he had no right to throw us out of his own cabin? If I had tried to fight him, and by some miracle I had overpowered him without getting shot, would you have had me beat him up for protecting his few belongings?”

She sighed. “Not when you put it that way.”

“If you’d ever stumbled into a bear’s den, you’d know how dangerous it is to surprise a wild creature in its lair. That’s pretty much what we just did.”

“I take it you’ve stumbled into a bear’s den before?”

“Yeah.” He glanced back toward the cabin, and pushed away from the tree. “And we’d better get moving before this particular bear decides to come out and make sure we’re gone.”

She hurried to support him. “I didn’t see a car anywhere around the cabin when we left. How do you suppose he got there?”

“He could have been on foot, maybe camping out all night. He obviously hadn’t been to the cabin in a while, so maybe he has other hidey holes and switches around between them—to make himself harder to find, of course. If he has a vehicle of some sort, it’s probably an old junker to haul a few supplies in.”

“Maybe we could find it. You could hot-wire it, and we could, well, borrow it to get to safety and then make sure he gets it back when we’re rescued. Or return an even nicer one, maybe, to compensate him for the inconvenience.”

Donovan cocked an eyebrow at her without pausing in his walking. “What makes you think I know how to hot-wire a car?”