The Dangerous Boxed Set Read online

  That was when Charity realized how badly sex messed with her head. She was worried sick about Aunt Vera and terrified she was going to die in a car crash. And yet those thoughts faded for a second as she watched Nick’s grim face in the space-age glow of the lights on the dashboard.

  The dim glow highlighted his beautiful cheekbones, his strong jawline, the cords in his neck standing out from the tension of driving fast in impossible weather. He was so handsome her heart squeezed as she looked at him.

  Even after rolling out of bed and into his clothes, he looked liked he could walk into a boardroom right now. Charity was sure she looked like she’d spent the night sleeping on the floor and that she had those fine worry lines only Uncle Franklin and Aunt Vera could call up.

  “Two elderly people living alone in the middle of nowhere and they don’t even have an alarm system?” Nick took his eyes off the road for a second to shoot her a glance. “That’s not good, Charity.”

  No, it wasn’t good. She’d asked Uncle Franklin a hundred times to put in burglar alarms, more for Aunt Vera than in anticipation of a nonexistent crime wave. Ferrington didn’t run to burglars, but an alarm would act as a tripwire if Aunt Vera wandered.

  Charity sighed. “Uncle Franklin keeps promising he’ll put one in. But he doesn’t get out much and he doesn’t know much about alarm systems.”

  “I do.” The muscles in Nick’s jaw jumped again. “I—uh—invested in a security company and when I invest I do my homework, so I know a lot about them. Tomorrow a security system is going in. I’ll order it and oversee the work myself.”

  Wow. “That—that’s very kind of you.” Charity blinked. This was entirely new territory not covered by any sex etiquette she knew of.

  Casual lovers didn’t take on this kind of responsibility. Certainly not for elderly relatives of a bedmate of three days’ standing. It was incredibly generous of him. Not so much from the monetary point of view—he could clearly afford it—but from the perspective of time spent.

  She had no idea how much wealthy businessmen earned by the hour but surely buying a security system, then overseeing its installation, would eat up thousands of dollars’ worth of his time. If Uncle Franklin would accept, which he might not. “I’m not too sure, though, that Uncle Franklin would acce—turn left!” she said sharply.

  Oh my God, she’d been so busy mooning over Nick and going over his offer she’d almost missed the turnoff. They would have lost precious time turning around.

  Now that they were close to her aunt and uncle’s house, Charity’s heart started thumping. For the first time, she willed the car to go faster, even though it was impossible. Nick was making time as fast as any ambulance could. Faster.

  She peered anxiously out the window. If anything, the snow had stepped up during the trip. Great white sheets fell out of the sky in increasingly fast waves. A sharp wind had risen, driving icy particles of sleet against the windshield.

  Aunt Vera might well be somewhere in the huge house or outlying buildings. Or she might be out in this weather—alone and dazed.

  Maybe dead.

  Charity’s throat swelled shut with unshed tears. She opened her mouth to say—turn right—but no words emerged. Her hand waved to the right and Nick understood. They took the corner into the driveway of Hedgewood, her aunt and uncle’s home, Nick driving almost blind.

  “Stop,” she whispered. Though she could barely see the house as a dark shape in the swirling night, the sudden dip of the tires where the runoff from the gutters had etched a depression in the ground told her they’d reached the entrance. She swallowed heavily. “We’re here.”

  Nick killed the engine instantly. “Stay put,” he growled and before she could object, he’d opened his door and shot out. The door was only open a couple of seconds, but in that time, the warmth in the car dissipated in the icy wind. A second later, her door was opened and Nick was lifting her out bodily.

  He had to because she froze the instant she was out of the car. It was instinctive—her body’s unwillingness to face the extreme temperature. Ice particles bit into her cheeks and eyes. She lifted her arm to cover her face. Confused, she tried to figure out where the path to the front door was. It was impossible to make out any directions. The only possible bearings were up and down.

  Something strong against her back propelled her forward, a force so impelling she couldn’t resist. She was forced to scramble, her feet slipping on a patch of ice. Before she even had time to scream, she was picked up one-armed and rushed forward.

  Nick practically carried her up the big marble steps to the entrance, her feet barely touching the steps.

  Uncle Franklin must have been looking out for them because the big front door opened immediately.

  “Charity! Oh my dear, you made it!” Uncle Franklin threw his arms around her, and she hugged him back, alarmed at how thin and fragile he felt. The fact that he wasn’t impeccably and elegantly dressed scared her even more. Growing up, she’d never seen him en dishabille. He was such a natty dresser, always immaculately turned out, freshly shaved and barbered, smelling of a special eau de cologne he had made for him in England.

  Now he was in his bathrobe, and white stubble marked his thin face. He smelled of fear and sour milk. As she hugged him, Charity could feel his thin limbs shaking.

  She stepped back. “Uncle Franklin, this is a—a friend, Nick Ames. Nick, my uncle, Judge Franklin Prewitt.” She needn’t have bothered wondering how to explain showing up with a man after midnight. Uncle Franklin didn’t even notice.

  “Judge Franklin.” Nick took his hand in a swift shake. “When did you last see your wife?”

  Uncle Franklin blinked. For the first time in her life, Charity could see her uncle at a loss. He shook his head sharply, loose skin around his jowls flapping. Charity stepped in. “They usually go to bed around nine, nine thirty, don’t you, Uncle Franklin?”

  He nodded his head gratefully. “Yes.” His voice was papery thin, shaky. “We went to bed a little after nine thirty. I woke up at eleven thirty. I was thirsty. I felt for Vera and she was—she was gone.” He looked up at Nick, the strong young male in the room, as if at a savior. “Gone,” he repeated.

  “What was she wearing?”

  The old man blinked at Nick’s urgent tone. “Ah, a pink nightgown. Pink slippers.”

  “Okay.” Nick nodded. “Did you check all the doors?”

  Uncle Franklin looked blank. “No. No, I didn’t think—”

  Nick turned to her. “Charity,” he ordered. “Show me all the doors leading to the outside. Fast. If she’s gone out, she’s in trouble. If she hasn’t gone out, if she’s still in the house, she’ll be okay for a little while longer. So we have to eliminate the possibility that she’s left the house.”

  Charity led him around the enormous house. He checked each door carefully, then they moved on. The French windows in Uncle Franklin’s study were slightly open, the wind making the thick burgundy curtains sway gently.

  Nick turned to her, face grim. “This is where she’s gone out. Stay with your uncle. Make him drink some whiskey; he’s in a state of mild shock.”

  Charity gasped with outrage. “I’m going with you! We have to search for her together. I know these grounds intimately and you don’t. And anyway two people are better than one.”

  “No.” Nick shook his head sharply. “In this case, two people are worse than one. You’ll just slow me down. Trust me; I know what I’m doing. Your job is to look after your uncle. When I find your aunt, she’ll be suffering from hypothermia. Whether mild or severe depends on how long she’s been exposed. So I need you to make sure you have plenty of warm blankets on hand. Put a big pot of water on to boil. Make sure a cup of hot tea with sugar is ready.”

  She opened her mouth to argue and he clasped her shoulders hard in his big hands and shook her. “Blankets. Big pot of boiling water. Tea with sugar. And don’t even think about coming with me. I don’t want to have to end up chasing your pretty tail out ther
e.”

  Before she could reply, he’d slipped out the door and was lost in the swirling storm.

  Nick had learned to track from the best of the best. Colonel Lucius Merle had grown up in the Ozarks with a shotgun in his arms and five generations of Merle hunters behind him. Tracking was in his DNA. Oddly enough, the colonel had done most of his professional tracking in filthy urban streets and that was the lore he’d passed on to Nick, in Baghdad and in Basra, in Kabul and Kandahar, in Caracas and Cartagena.

  Still, sign was sign.

  Nick scanned the ground right outside the big French windows. They gave out onto a covered terrace, so the snow hadn’t accumulated much. There were clear prints in snow half an inch lower than the surrounding grounds. Nick followed them as they angled sharply off to the left.

  He wished he knew the terrain better. Damn! It hadn’t occurred to him to scout out Charity’s elderly relatives’ home while he’d been studying her. He wished he had now. He wanted to find the old lady fast. Out of the house less than a minute, he was already cold and he was young, healthy, and conditioned. He didn’t want to think of what was happening to a frail, elderly woman.

  His heart had clenched watching Charity’s uncle, shaking and defenseless, almost naked in his fear.

  Got to him every time. Old people and kids. Adults can fend for themselves, life sucks, you embrace the suck and go on, but he had a real soft spot for geezers and ankle biters.

  The wind bit at his heavy coat, icy fingers reaching inside. Jesus. It was fucking freezing.

  For just an instant, Nick flashed back to the heat of being inside Charity. The soft, warm, wet feel of her. That warm back heating his entire front. And Jesus, his cock in her. Clamped tight, so hot it was like sticking his dick in a little oven. Just the memory sent a flash of heat over him and then it was gone.

  Get your head out of your dick, Ireland, he told himself. Now.

  The snow was easing up, thank God. Where before it had been almost a complete whiteout, now he could discern big dark shapes all around, punctuated by the feeble glow of lamps. At least the old geezer kept outdoor lights on. Local scumbags would simply assume that rich old folks would have an airtight security system to go with the security lights. Otherwise they would long since have broken in.

  Nick didn’t buy for a minute Charity’s nonsense that this was a crime-free zone. There was no such thing as a crime-free zone. Where there were humans, there was robbery and murder and rape. That ancient couple living alone with no security was a burglary just waiting to happen. If not worse.

  Nick had only spent a few minutes inside the house, talking to Charity and her uncle, but he could multitask and he was a good observer.

  The Prewitts were loaded. Old money. With lots of expensive stuff, just begging to be carted away by dickwads who’d rather steal than work. Thick antique Persian carpets, real artwork on the walls, loads of antique silver. They were lucky to still be alive.

  Nick followed the footsteps down from the terrace to the gardens below and for a second lost the trail. Fuck! She’d been out in this cold for at least an hour, probably more. With each passing minute her chances of surviving went way down.

  Nick crouched, taking out the powerful Maglite he always kept in the car. It had a narrow intense beam, which he focused on the surface of the snow.

  There! A slit in the snow, like a little valley. His jaws clenched. He knew what that long depression meant. It meant that a few steps outside the house, she was already shuffling. Probably already losing sensation in her feet.

  This was not good.

  Still crouching, holding the light at an oblique angle, he followed the depressions, the ground dipping beneath his feet. A big oak was ten feet to his right, a building that looked like a garage to his left. Another building was visible just beyond it.

  For a horrifying moment, Nick lost her track, then noticed a pink puff of material hanging from a laurel shrub and next to it, another long depression. The tracks paralleled the thick shrubs that ended abruptly next to another large building. This one was made of glass, dimly lit from within. Nick could make out rows and rows of plants in terra-cotta vases.

  A greenhouse. The orangery, Judge Prewitt’s generation would have called it.

  He followed the shallow depressions around the building, hoping they were going to lead to the greenhouse. Greenhouses were often heated. It was the one place an old lady could have a hope of surviving a snowstorm.

  Nick opened the side door of the greenhouse, trying to make out shapes in the gloom. The temperature inside was at least thirty degrees warmer than the icy hell outside but it was still cold. He had to check this place out fast. If she wasn’t here, her time would be running out.

  Nick walked fast down the aisles, exactly as if clearing a room during combat, checking in a grid. Five minutes later, he was back at the door, teeth clenched. The old lady wasn’t here. It was entirely possible she was already dead. Charity would be devastated.

  He stood with his hand on the door, still and silent. He had to move fast but something stopped him. A hunch. He trusted his hunches. They’d saved his life more than once.

  Something…

  He stopped breathing for almost a full minute. The sound of air in his lungs was distracting him.

  There was something…again! A—a snuffling sound. At two o’clock.

  Nick headed for the sound at a run, heavy boots pounding, the echoes loud in the large space. And there she was, curled up behind some gunnysacks. He saw one long, bony white foot attached to a pink slipper.

  The animal in her had found the one place she could survive outside her home. In the northeastern corner was a pile of fertilizer sacks and empty gunnysacks. She’d nestled in them, and they had saved her life.

  Nick lifted a sack. There she was, huddled in on herself, rail thin and bony. Once beautiful, now ravaged, shaking with cold, lost and forlorn. But for all that, alive.

  She turned her head, pale blue eyes blank and rheumy.

  “Frank-lin?” She blinked rapidly, mouth trembling. “Franklin, I want to go home. Take me home. I’m cold.”

  Nick crouched next to her. She reached out a hand and touched his face. Her hand was thin, long-fingered, the skin crepey and mottled. She was shaking as she laid the flat of her hand against his cheek.

  “Franklin,” she sighed, a tear falling down her wrinkled cheek. “Home.”

  Nick’s chest felt tight. “Yes, Franklin,” he said softly, sliding his arms out of his coat and wrapping it around her. “I’ve got you now.” He lifted her as easily as if she were a child and strode to the door. “I’ve come to take you home.”

  Ten

  Charity would never forget the sight till the end of her days. She’d pulled back the living room curtains and turned on the porch light before setting herself to reassuring Uncle Franklin.

  He was aging so fast. His skin hung from his jaws with the weight he’d lost in the week since she’d last seen him and he was paper white. The bone structure beneath was easily visible. Any more weight loss and his head would resemble a skull. He ran a bony hand over his face and she could hear the rasp of his white beard stubble. “What’s taking him so long?”

  Charity took his hand and winced at the tremor. “It’s only been about ten minutes since he’s gone out, Uncle Franklin, even though it feels like more,” she said gently. “Don’t worry. Nick will find her.”

  At one level, the words were empty reassurance, but Charity was astounded to find that she meant it. How was that? How on earth could she be sure Nick knew what he was doing? She couldn’t. And yet every instinct she had told her that she could trust him to find her aunt.

  He was a businessman who led a soft life, making money in the city. There was nothing about him that suggested he’d grown up on a farm or hunted in some way. Most hunters, in her experience, tended toward the tedious about their guns. Nick had never once mentioned hunting or safaris or anything of the sort. What could an investment broker possi
bly know about tracking someone in the snow?

  And yet, when he’d told her to stay put, she’d instinctively obeyed, instantly, though it went against common sense. She knew her aunt and the area around the big house, and he didn’t. If she didn’t have a bone-deep sense that if anyone could find Aunt Vera, it was him, she would never have stayed behind.

  It had been an instant, a flash of something like steel. She’d met his serious, beautiful eyes, sensed the power he was keeping leashed while trying to convince her to stay put. And the moment she’d let him go out alone it was as if something had lit up inside him, as if she’d freed him somehow. Like a wild animal let out of a cage to do what it did best—hunt.

  It was crazy, but it was true. There had been a blast of—something. Something almost frightening. Something potent. Primordial and utterly male. As if Nick had been infused with an otherworldly power and was only now letting it show.

  She shook her head. Wow. Massive amounts of sex and lack of sleep were driving her crazy.

  Still, she did what he said. A big pot of water was on the stove, almost at boiling point. Two mugs of tea with three teaspoons of sugar apiece were in the microwave, waiting to be nuked. A pile of blankets, a clean nightgown, and several towels were on a kitchen chair.

  “Sit down, Uncle Franklin,” Charity said gently. She guided her uncle to a chair, putting her hands lightly on his shoulders. He sat abruptly, as if she’d pushed. Or as if his legs wouldn’t carry him any more.

  Head bowed, he covered his eyes with his hand, weary and despairing. His voice was a whisper. “Look out the window, honey, and tell me if you see anything.”

  More to humor him than anything else, Charity walked to the kitchen window. All the outside lights were on, including the spotlight under the huge oak in the back garden. The snowstorm had left almost a foot of snow on the lawn. It had spent itself in the last hour and was now slowly abating. A few minutes ago she could barely see the oak she’d spent her childhood climbing. Now the stark, bare, black branches stood out in the field of white.