WILDER DAYS Read online

  Having Noelle with them to this point had been like having a chaperon. And still they’d managed to kiss. Twice. Last night she’d been swept away by the way he touched her, and if Tripp and Holly hadn’t arrived, she and Del would have made love on that creaking, uncomfortable sofa bed. She knew nothing could come of this. Of them. And still she felt like she’d been robbed of one of life’s special moments.

  So what would happen tonight?

  She was allowing her emotions—no, her passions—to color her judgment. Del wasn’t going to stay. He couldn’t. They had less in common now than they had sixteen years ago, and he brought danger with him. Danger for herself she could handle, but when it came to Noelle…

  No amount of happiness for herself was worth putting Noelle in even the tiniest amount of danger. She’d dedicated her life to her daughter, and Del wasn’t going to change that.

  And yet, she found herself looking forward to tonight. Wondering what would happen, now that their chaperon was gone.

  Less than half an hour after they left his mother’s house, Del pulled the car sharply off the road. The car jerked and bounced as he left the pavement. The shoulder of the road was wide, and they hadn’t seen another car for miles. They were all alone.

  With the car in Park and the motor still running, he turned to look at her. The muscles in his face and neck were strained, and so was the hand on the steering wheel. He laid cold eyes on her face, and she shivered.

  “Were you going to tell me?” he asked.

  Her heart climbed into her throat. “Tell you... what?”

  “How many secrets are you keeping, Vic?”

  “Del...”

  “Just the one, I’m thinking.” His voice was tight with anger. “The big one. Did you think I wouldn’t find out? That somewhere down the line I wouldn’t discover that Noelle is not fourteen, she’s fifteen?” He cocked his head slightly. “Christmas Eve. She was a couple of weeks early, wasn’t she?”

  “Yes.” The word was so soft, she wondered if he heard it.

  “Did you know you were pregnant when...” He pulled his eyes from her face and looked out the window. “When you sent me packing, did you know?”

  She shook her head and muttered, “No. I swear, Del, I had no idea.”

  “When you did find out?”

  “You were already gone,” she said softly, remembering that day too well.

  “Dammit, Vic.” He shook his head and glanced toward her again. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You were gone...”

  “Now!” he exploded. “Not then, not sixteen years ago. At this particular moment I don’t give a damn about anything that happened sixteen years ago! Why didn’t you tell me now? You could have told me when we thought we were going to die, or on the way to Gulf Shores to pick Noelle up, or even after I’d met her.” His lips thinned; a muscle in his jaw twitched. “You could have told me last night. It’s not like you haven’t had a chance to come clean.”

  The words caught in her throat.

  He gave her a crooked, bitter grin. “Don’t tell me. You were waiting for the right moment. You wanted to do something romantic and sentimental and sweet. I know,” he said, his voice low and dark, “you were waiting for Father’s Day.”

  “No,” she whispered.

  “Then what the hell were you waiting for?”

  She’d told enough lies, she imagined. Another one wouldn’t help matters any. “I didn’t plan to tell you at all.”

  For a moment, Del looked like she’d slapped him. Finally he shook off the surprise and the hurt and put the car into gear. Vic reached out to lay a comforting hand on his arm. If he’d just let her explain—

  He didn’t move or shrug off her hand, but he glared at her. “Don’t touch me,” he ordered.

  Vic let her hand fall away as Del pulled the car, too fast, onto the road.

  Chapter 7

  His shock faded and turned into pure, white-hot anger. Why was he surprised? He’d never been good enough for Vic, he was certainly not good enough to be her child’s father. At least she’d been honest about one thing. She hadn’t planned to tell him, ever. It was apparently better to let Noelle think that a man who dismissed her when she called begging to live with him, who made her cry by brushing her off, was her father.

  For all intents and purposes, in every way that mattered, Preston was Noelle’s father. He’d been there when she was born, watched her grow, played Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus. If he’d ever been a decent father to her, he’d dried her tears and helped her learn to read and helped her with her homework. Those were the important things about being a parent.

  He’d missed it all, and dammit, it hurt. More than he’d expected it could, more than it should.

  Two rooms in the seedy motel he’d chosen for the night would be best. A little distance, a wall or two between them, was definitely called for. But he didn’t want Vic out of his sight. Not yet. At least there were two beds in this motel room. He’d even let her have the one that didn’t cant to one side on a busted leg.

  It was getting late in the afternoon. They might have driven farther on down the road, gone in a direction where Holly and her wounded husband wouldn’t ever think to look, but this is where he wanted to be. He was close enough to Birmingham to keep in touch with the investigators and close enough to Huntsville to get there in an hour or so if he needed to. He and Vic weren’t going to hide indefinitely. They needed to get this over with so he could get her out of his life. For good, this time.

  Vic was in the bathroom, and had been for almost twenty minutes. She wasn’t sick, she wasn’t primping. She was hiding. Smart girl.

  When his cell phone rang he grabbed it from the bedside table. This is what he’d been waiting for.

  “Wilder.”

  “Tripp’s dead,” Shock said with no further introduction.

  Del nodded and sat on the side of the canted bed. “I knew I hit him hard.”

  “Sorry, man, it wasn’t your bullet that killed him.”

  A tickle of warning crawled up Del’s spine; he wouldn’t like what was coming.

  “Tripp’s body was found less than a from mile the cabin. In addition to the wound in the chest, he had a bullet put through the back of his head,” Shock explained. He finished with a low sound effect that whistled through the phone. Kapow.

  No, Del didn’t like this at all. “Holly never would’ve done that I don’t care how bad he was hurt how dangerous it would have been to take him to a doctor.”

  “I know.”

  “There’s someone else involved.”

  “Yep. Lab guys place three bad guys at the scene last night, and two blood types. Tripp’s inside the front doorway and across the porch, where he apparently crawled to the step and then managed to get on his feet, and a few drops of another type on the back porch. You didn’t get hit did you?”

  “No. I must’ve winged Holly.” Maybe that’s why she’d taken off, instead of coming inside and finishing the job. “I really don’t like this.”

  “I’ve just gotten started,” Shock said, his voice low. “Man, none of this is good news.” He paused, took a deep breath that echoed through the phone lines. “We know how they found you. There was a very sophisticated tracking device on the back of the license plate on Vic’s van.”

  Tripp and Holly didn’t use tracking devices. Their methods were crude. Simple. This thing stunk to high heaven. “Great,” Del mumbled.

  “I made a quick trip to Huntsville this afternoon and checked out Vic’s garage. There’s an identical device on your Jag, and Del...” Shock paused for effect. “It wasn’t there when I checked out your car after the warehouse exploded. It must have been added that night.” That night, while he and Vic slept, someone had crept into her garage and planted those tracking devices. After he’d assured Vic that her house was safe, after he’d promised her that the couple who’d kidnapped her was well down the road, someone who knew they were still alive had been right under their noses,
planning for the next step. Making sure they wouldn’t go anywhere without being tracked.

  He’d been so damned certain that Tripp and Holly were a long way down the road and blissfully unaware that their plan had failed, that night. He knew them, knew how they thought. How they worked.

  In his gut he knew he hadn’t been wrong. Someone besides Tripp and Holly had planted those tracking devices. Someone who apparently didn’t want to get his or her hands dirty by breaking into the house and finishing the job then and there. If Tripp and Holly had been at Vic’s house that night, that’s exactly what they would have done.

  “This complicates matters,” he said, keeping his voice low. He didn’t want to have to explain these complications to Vic, not now. In truth, he still didn’t want to speak to her at all.

  “Yeah, if there’s one more bad guy there might be two. Or three. Or—”

  “I got it,” Del interrupted.

  “So now what? I mean, we figured if we got Tripp and Holly, this was done. But if they’re just hired help, we have a much bigger problem.”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “Do you want me to call Sinclair? Maybe Malone?”

  “Not yet.”

  His own personal much bigger problem walked out of the bathroom, laid her eyes on him for a fraction of a second and then dropped them and sat delicately in the single chair in the room.

  “Do you have a report from the guys in Mississippi?”

  Vic’s head snapped up when he said Mississippi, and her eyes lit on him again. They stayed this time.

  “Yeah. All’s well. As of an hour ago, your mom was giving Noelle riding lessons. Everything’s cool there.”

  “Good. Call me if anything else comes up.”

  They ended the call, and Vic took a deep breath he somehow felt, all the way over here on the other side of the room.

  “You’re having them watched,” she said.

  “Yeah. A patrol car drives by the house a couple times a day.”

  “You didn’t tell me you had men checking on Noelle and your mother.”

  He shrugged. “I was afraid you’d worry, think I had a reason for putting them under surveillance.”

  “Do you?”

  “It’s just a precaution.”

  No one could find Noelle at the Mississippi house. The daily reports were for his own peace of mind.

  “Del,” Vic said softly.

  His nerves were on end, the way they were toward the end of an assignment, when everything was about to come down. He couldn’t take this. If Vic sat there with her hands in her lap, all placid and reasonable, and tried to explain away the lies, he would explode. Fortunately, she didn’t try to reason with him. “I need to go shopping.”

  He shook his head in disbelief. “Shopping?”

  “I need to pick up a few things.”

  “My mother loaned you a couple changes of clothes.”

  Anger made her eyes spark. “I’d like some deodorant, my own underwear, a scrunchy to pull my hair back and some aspirin.”

  “Headache?”

  “Yes,” she snapped. “We left that cabin with nothing but the clothes on our backs, and I don’t see that a quick trip to Walmart is going to draw out those two.”

  He didn’t tell her that he now knew there were more than two bad guys looking for them, or that one of the criminals who had kidnapped her was dead. She had enough to worry about. The car Shock had provided last night was clean; no one had been tracking them today. A quick trip to the store probably wouldn’t hurt.

  And just about anything was better than being stuck in a motel room with Vic.

  Vic tossed her plastic bags onto the bed as Del closed the door behind him. “I can’t believe you wouldn’t let me use my credit card,” she said, still angry. “It took almost all the cash I had in my purse to pay for this.”

  “Using your credit card at this point would have been a little foolish.”

  She spun on him. “Foolish?”

  He stared her down. “Yeah. More than a little, to be completely honest.”

  She couldn’t win an argument with him, so she took her purchases out of the plastic bags and began to put them away. “Sorry if I don’t know all the rules about hiding from the world, like you do,” she said beneath her breath. “Can criminals even get my credit card information? And if they could, wouldn’t it take some time?”

  “Better safe than sorry.”

  “My lifelong motto,” she mumbled.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” It was true, though, and hearing the words made it all too clear. She’d lived her entire life safe. She’d sent Del away, married Preston, spent too many years trapped in a bad marriage, all because it was the easiest way out. Suddenly she felt ashamed for always being so damned compliant. For letting other people guide her, as if she couldn’t make up her own mind. It had cost her Del, it had robbed her of too many years of her life, and now it was going to cost her Del all over again.

  She put away her purchases, taking the top drawer of the single chest in the room while Del dropped his own bag on his bed and made a quick phone call. He checked on his mother and Noelle again and apparently got a satisfactory report.

  When everything was put away, Vic sat on the end of the bed and pulled her hair back and up, into a ponytail high on her head. It felt good to have the hair off her neck. Cool air washed over the too-warm skin there. It was soothing, in a way she had not expected. A small pleasure when everything else was falling apart.

  “Are we going to talk about it at all?” she asked softly, without looking directly at Del.

  “Talk about what?” He remained angry, coiled tight and untrusting, and she couldn’t blame him.

  “Noelle.” She tilted her head and looked at Del, who took out a cigarette, played with it a moment, and then returned it to the pack and his pocket.

  “What’s to talk about?” he asked gruffly.

  “Don’t you want to know… anything?” she asked. “Don’t you want to know how she’s like you, and what her first word was, and what her favorite food is, and—”

  “Why?” he interrupted sharply. “According to you I don’t even deserve to know she’s mine.”

  “I never said you don’t deserve to know,” she whispered.

  He looked at her then, hard and unflinching. “You admitted it yourself, you weren’t going to tell me. Not now, not ever.”

  “Of course I wasn’t going to tell you,” she said, her voice rising slightly. “If there are criminals out there who would go to the trouble to track me down, what would they do if they knew you had a daughter? For God’s sake, Del, I’ve spent the past fifteen years doing everything possible to protect Noelle. I’ve dedicated my life to raising and protecting your child. She always comes first.” She felt her temperature rise, her heart thud. No, she had not planned to tell him anything, but now that he knew... “There were too many mornings that Noelle was my only reason for getting out of bed. Some days I put one foot in front of the other only because she was there. Would I lie to you and everyone else to keep her safe? You bet your ass I would.”

  He raised his eyebrows slightly, in obvious surprise, but then he hadn’t ever seen her angry. Not like this. She’d always been ice, not fire. Reason, not emotion. The Archards didn’t raise their voices. That’s what her father always told her.

  “That’s what this is all about?” he asked softly. “Keeping Noelle safe?”

  “Yes.”

  He wasn’t buying it, not entirely. “You don’t think I’m capable of protecting my own child. You don’t think I should even know she’s mine.”

  “Because I love her more than anything on this earth. Because I love her so much I would give my life to protect her.” She wondered if Del wanted or needed to know that part of the reason she loved Noelle so deeply was because she was his. It only took her a moment to make the decision to keep that information to herself.

  He shook his head. “You should’ve known I’d eventual
ly find out Noelle was a year older than you told me she was.” He seemed calmer, but not by much. At least he no longer looked like he was wound so tight something was about to pop.

  “I didn’t think you’d be around long enough to find out.” It was true—she’d expected Del to waltz in and out of her life without ever knowing that Noelle was his child. Without ever having the chance to break his daughter’s heart.

  “Are you going to tell her? Ever?”

  Vic’s heart climbed into her throat. She almost answered no, quickly and decisively, but something stopped her. “I’m not sure.” She shook her head gently. “A few days ago I knew the answer to that question, and I had no qualms about it. As far as Noelle is concerned, Preston is her father.”

  “And yet when you were trying to think of a safe place for her to hide, Presto wasn’t even an option. You don’t trust him, do you?”

  Vic shook her head. She didn’t trust Preston. Had she ever?

  Del gave her a smile that held no warmth, no hint of humor, as he reached out and snagged his own bag of purchases. “Can I trust you?”

  “Yes,” she whispered, wanting more than anything for Del to trust her again.

  He reached into the bag and came up with a pair of scissors. “With these?”

  Del sat perfectly still as Vic cut away the long strands of hair. She’d been hesitant at first, snipping cautiously. She’d even held her breath on occasion. He’d known because he’d heard her. A soft intake, a long pause, a snip of the scissors and then she’d exhaled slowly.

  But once she got under way, she put aside her caution and got into her role as beautician. She ran her fingers through his hair, cut quickly and mercilessly, and tossed what she could into the small trash can at her side. Even so, she missed some strands that drifted to the floor. Every now and then Del glanced into the garbage can. That was a lot of hair.

  “Why are you doing this?” she asked as her cutting slowed. She took her time, once again, searching for imperfect and uneven places, brushing her tender hands through what was left of his hair.