WILDER DAYS Read online

  Wilder Days

  Linda Winstead Jones

  Copyright © 2003 by Linda Winstead Jones

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  * * *

  Cover design by Elizabeth Wallace

  http://designwithin.carbonmade.com/

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also by Linda Winstead Jones

  Chapter 1

  2003

  * * *

  Vic squirmed a little, trying without success to loosen the duct tape that bound her hands behind her back, her ankles to the rear legs of the metal chair, and her bare legs to Del’s blue-jeans-encased thighs. She straddled him, and they were both snugly trussed to the chair and to one another, face-to-face. She glanced down as the man who had dragged her from her home that morning very carefully slid beneath the chair. He cradled something small and deadly looking in his large hands. Vic hadn’t thought it possible to be more frightened than she had been since the kidnapping, but the sight of that device made her heart beat a little harder, a little faster.

  The second kidnapper, a petite blond woman, handed her partner more duct tape, and he tore off a long strip.

  “You said you would let her go when I got here,’’ Del said between clenched teeth.

  The blonde looked up at Del and smiled. “I lied.”

  Del tried, as Vic did, to discreetly loosen the duct tape that bound him securely to the chair in this second-floor room of a deserted warehouse. Had the sight of that device scared him, too? He didn’t seem to be particularly frightened. Mainly, he looked annoyed.

  “Whatever happened to professional courtesy?” Del asked, sounding as annoyed as he looked. He kept his eyes on the woman, who continued to kneel by the chair.

  Vic shuddered. Professional courtesy?

  The woman moved aside as her partner slithered from beneath the chair. The fair-haired man rubbed his palms together as he stood. “All done. Let’s get out of here.”

  “You’re sure you didn’t forget anything?” the woman asked in a low, soothing voice.

  “I didn’t forget anything.” The man sounded slightly offended.

  “Good.” The blonde’s smile returned. “Let’s go.”

  With one last quick wave, they did just that. They left the room, closing the door behind them even though this warehouse somewhere near the interstate had long been abandoned. From what little Vic could see through the uncovered window, they were far from anyone or anything that might be of help. The occasional hum of a large truck passing in the distance was all she could hear. The tops of trees, lush with summer growth, were all she could see through the dirty panes of glass in the single window in this room.

  Since they were now alone Vic laid her eyes on Del. He was staring at her. Eyes dark blue and intense, mouth an unhappy slash, he stared at her as if this was her fault.

  “That was a bomb,” she said softly, wondering if something so simple as a raised voice might set it off.

  “Yep.”

  “We’re sitting on it.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  She hadn’t seen Del Wilder for sixteen years, until he’d appeared in the doorway of this very room not a half hour ago. Some things about him hadn’t changed. He still had long black hair, long legs wrapped in faded denim, a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket and a wicked mouth. But he was taller, wider in the shoulders, and occasionally she caught a glimpse of a single glittering diamond earring peeking out from those dark strands of hair. The man was thirty-three years old… no, thirty-four… and he still hadn’t managed to completely grow up. Something else to hold against him.

  What on earth was he involved in that would lead him, and her, here? Criminal activity, surely. No matter how much she’d hated Del Wilder in years past, she’d never thought he might end up some kind of outlaw. Even in her worst moments, she’d thought better of him.

  “Well?” she prodded.

  “What?”

  “Do something!”

  He did. He smiled. Had she really once thought that smile irresistibly charming?

  “Still painting, I see,” he said, nodding his chin.

  Vic couldn’t do anything about the smudge of paint she knew marred her cheek. Yellow, carried there from a spot of paint on her hands just moments before the doorbell rang. “Yes,” she said simply.

  Del’s eyes traveled from the paint on her cheek to her mouth, to her throat and slowly down the much-too-open V in the worn and paint-stained men’s dress shirt she wore. At the tip of the V his roving eyes stopped and lingered.

  “Do you mind?” she asked in her frostiest voice. His gaze drifted up once again to meet hers.

  “How did they get you?” he asked in a low voice. “Please tell me you didn’t just open the door and invite them in.”

  Vic didn’t want to remember, and she certainly didn’t want to talk about it. Almost unconsciously, she twitched her nose. She shifted her gaze to the window for a safer view. “I did have the sense to look through the peephole. They were dressed like delivery men,” she said.

  “Two delivery men?” Del asked sharply. “That didn’t strike you as unusual?”

  Vic shrugged and pursed her mouth. The last thing she needed was to be chastised by Del Wilder! “The box they were pushing on a dolly was quite large. I thought maybe it was very heavy and was too much for one person.” She looked Del in the eye again. “The box was for me. They put me in it.”

  He nodded, as if he’d already figured that out.

  “Who are they?” she asked.

  Del took a deep breath and shook his head. “Tripp and Holly Mayron. Drug dealers. Small-time, mostly. Can’t figure out what set them off.”

  Competitors, she imagined, since he’d been so incensed at their lack of professional courtesy. Apparently there was no honor among thieves. Or drug dealers.

  Vic’s anger faded, just a little. No matter how hard she tried to hate Del Wilder, she couldn’t quite get rid of that one little tender spot she still carried for him. “You shouldn’t have come here,” she said softly.

  “I didn’t have any choice.”

  Of course he’d had a choice. Not long after their arrival at this warehouse, the female half of the pair of kidnappers—Holly, she now knew—had dialed a number on the cell phone she’d taken from Vic’s entryway table. Until Del had shown up at the door, Vic had thought it was her father they were calling. They’d made Vic say her full name, nothing more, and then Tripp had twisted her arm until she’d cried out. Just once. Holly had told the person on the other end of the phone that he had an hour to get here. If he wasn’t here in sixty-one minutes, Victoria Lynn Archard Lowell would be painfully and decisively dead. Directions to this place had followed and less than an hour later Del had arrived.

  “You had a choice,” she whispered.

  After sixteen years, why would Del put his life on the line for her? They’d been together for a day or two less than a month, what seemed like a hundred years ago, thrilling and suffering through an intense teenage romance. It hadn’t worke
d out for them; of course it hadn’t. They came from different worlds, and the only thing that had drawn them together had been chemistry. That’s all. Some freak biological attraction. She’d told herself that a million times in the past sixteen years.

  And here he was.

  “Lowell, they said your name was,” Del said as he again tried to loosen the duct tape at his back. “Married?”

  Her heart hitched. This was not a conversation she wanted to have with Del Wilder, whether they were about to die or not. “Yeah.” Not a lie, exactly, since she had been married.

  “Kids?”

  Oh, no. She couldn’t handle this. Not now, not ever. “A daughter.”

  “Just the one?” His eyes no longer bored into hers, but instead were fixed over her shoulder as he concentrated on loosening the tape at his wrists.

  Vic nodded. “What about you?” she asked quickly, hoping to change the subject. “Married? Kids?”

  Del shook his head. “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  Again his eyes came to hers. He didn’t answer. He was getting frustrated, and his frustration showed more and more on his face.

  God, he had a fabulous face. Del had once been almost pretty, but the years had transformed his pretty face into something strikingly masculine and fascinating. She knew that face too well. She knew the distinct lines, the shape of the mouth, the blue of the eyes.

  He turned his head toward the window and muttered something. She couldn’t decipher it all. There were a few obscenities, and something about shock. Did he think she was going to panic and go into shock? Did he think he would? No, he looked much too calm for that concern.

  “I couldn’t see the timer on the… the bomb,” Vic said in a low voice. “Did you?”

  Del nodded, once.

  “How much time do we have?”

  He hesitated. “We’ll be okay.”

  She didn’t think so. She didn’t think they were going to be at all okay.

  She’d once loved Del Wilder so deeply and intensely that he had been her entire world. The love hadn’t lasted nearly as long as the anger, the disappointment, the heartbreak. Vic didn’t let herself expect anything from the people in her life, not anymore. She always ended up disappointed, but these days no one broke her heart. Del had been an important part of her life, long ago, but she didn’t owe him anything.

  Or did she? If they were going to die here, did he deserve to know that he had a daughter?

  Vic had always looked like an angel: flowing wavy hair caught somewhere between brown and gold, cat’s eyes of green and gold, lush lips just made for smiling and kissing. She wasn’t a girl anymore, she was a woman, nicely filled out and without the little bit of baby fat that had made her cheeks round and pink, years ago. She was leaner in the face today, shapelier everywhere else.

  But of course Vic was not an angel and never had been. She was a mere mortal, with flaws all her own. Del took some comfort from the fact that she was currently sweating like a pig.

  Where was Shock? He should’ve been here by now. Something had happened, something had delayed the planned rescue. They were going to have to get out of here themselves.

  “Know what I remember about you?” he asked, smiling crookedly at Vic.

  “What?” she asked, as if she really didn’t want to know. Smart girl.

  “Your flexibility.”

  She looked offended. “That’s what you remember?”

  “You could twist your legs, turn your body, bend...”

  “All right,” she snapped. “I get the picture. Know what I remember about you? I remember that you were nothing but trouble. I remember that you were the most stubborn, arrogant, possessive, egotistical...”

  “Vic, this isn’t helping matters any.”

  “And your observations have some deeper meaning?”

  Again, he smiled. “There’s a knife in my right boot.”

  Her anger faded. “There is?”

  “I can’t reach it, but maybe you can.”

  She nodded, shook her hair back and began to tilt to the side, her face taut with determination.

  “Vic, honey,” Del said calmly. “My other right boot.”

  She straightened quickly, gave him a sharp glance that told him it was somehow his fault she had moved to her right and not his, and began again.

  Vic was the woman he’d spent the past sixteen years trying to forget. Some days he actually succeeded. But when he’d heard her name being whispered over the phone, his heart had just about stopped. Maybe because she was his first. First love, first lover, first real experience with pain. It was perfectly natural that he sometimes remembered her fondly.

  And surely it was also perfectly natural that as she moved to the side and her shirt shifted, he was distracted by the new expanse of breast that was exposed. A pale, soft-looking swell of flesh that momentarily took his mind off of everything else.

  Del did his best to shake off the distraction. Couldn’t the woman wear a bra? If he didn’t know better, he’d think Vic was doing this to him on purpose.

  Vic’s shorts were short, the legs that were wrapped around him were smooth and strong. He hated that his hands were tied. More than anything, he wanted to run his palm up her leg, slow and easy.

  Her fingers skimmed down his calf as she reached blindly for the sheath and the knife inside his boot.

  What was wrong with him? He hadn’t seen her for sixteen years, and their last parting had been ugly, to say the least. She was married, a mother, the woman who had once been the girl who’d broken his heart. In the years since he’d left her behind, he’d cursed her, longed for her and almost forgotten her.

  And right now he wanted her. Nothing else mattered enough to get in the way of that.

  “Almost there,” she whispered, licking her lips as she stretched and moved just a little bit more. She smiled when she finally found and grabbed the handle of the knife. “Got it.” A grin that didn’t last long flitted across her face. It was the first time he’d seen her smile since he’d walked into this room. Of course, she hadn’t had much to smile about today.

  Vic straightened cautiously, the knife behind her back. “If you can just knick the edge of the tape at your wrists,” Del said calmly, “you should be able to rip it apart. Once your hands are loose, we’re home free.” She nodded and began, her face once again rigid with concentration. Those cat’s eyes were fixed on the center of his forehead as she worked.

  “I wish it wasn’t so hot in here,” she said softly. “My palms are slick with sweat.”

  “It’s okay, baby. You’re doing great.”

  Her eyes met his, briefly, and then she stared at his forehead again as she continued her efforts. “So close,” she whispered beneath her breath. “I just can’t quite...” She cursed, flinched, and the knife clattered to the floor. Her eyes met his again, and he saw something new. Panic.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I tried to catch it, I did, but it just slipped right through my fingers.”

  “Did you cut yourself?”

  She nodded.

  “How bad?”

  “Not too bad, I think. It just stings a little.”

  He kept his knife sharp. If the blade had brushed past her fingers, the cuts might be deep.

  Cuts on Vic’s fingers were the least of their problems, and still that knowledge bothered him more than it should. If she wasn’t here, he’d knock the chair to its side and try to free himself from that position, but he couldn’t take the chance. What he’d seen on the side of the explosive device that had been taped to the bottom of the chair looked to be a tilt detonator. If the chair tipped over, the bomb would go off. He didn’t mind taking chances with his own life. He wouldn’t—couldn’t—take that risk with hers.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again, softer this time.

  “It’s okay,” he said, trying to ease her distress with a smile.

  “You keep saying that,” she said, growing visibly frustrated. Her cheeks flush
ed, her chest rose and fell with deeper, faster breaths. “Nothing is okay!”

  While he thought about what came next, he had to calm her down. He had to get her talking about something else, anything else. “A daughter, huh?”

  Her eyes widened, her spine straightened. “Yes.”

  “What’s she like?” Mothers liked talking about their kids, right? He might have asked about the husband, but in truth he didn’t want to know about Vic’s marriage. He didn’t want to hear her talk about the man who shared her bed.

  Vic took a deep breath. “Noelle,” she said. “Her name is Noelle.”

  Del nodded. “Nice name. How old is she?”

  Vic hesitated. This wasn’t working. Talking about her daughter was not calming Vic in any way. “Fourteen,” she finally whispered.

  “Tough age,” Del said, trying to carry the conversation along. “Is she as pretty as you were at fourteen?” he teased.

  “Prettier.”

  “Not possible.”

  Vic’s eyes latched on to his. She took a deep breath, and something in her changed, slowly and subtly. “Noelle is much more beautiful than I ever was. She’s smart, too, and has a real talent for drawing.” Her lips parted and softened. “She hates that, that she inherited a talent from me.”

  “She’d rather be like her father?”

  Vic shook her head. “No. I sometimes think Noelle wishes she’d sprung from a pod, fully grown and beholden to no one.”

  “Sounds like fourteen to me,” Del said, his voice low. His smile faded. “Was she home this morning?”

  Vic shook her head. “No, thank God. She’s in Gulf Shores with a friend’s family. Michelle refused to go on vacation without her best friend.” Finally, she smiled again. “You should see her,” she whispered. “She’s so… so much like...” She stopped, her throat worked gently, and she shook her head. “Del...”