Page 57 of Hunted

Chapter Fourteen

He ought to be excited, knowing he was so close. But instead, as he poked around the little garden shed with a flashlight in search of a shovel, he was thinking about Lexi. As if getting inside her head—inside her heart—had suddenly become more important than finding the formula. More important than getting White. More important than anything.

Ridiculous. He knew that. But still his mind seemed obsessed with the puzzle of Lexi to the exclusion of anything else. She’d gone from devastation to rage to something else in a matter of minutes. He still hadn’t identified the final emotion. The one she’d reached as she’d stormed out into the snow. Acceptance, maybe, and a decision to leave everything behind, including him, and to start fresh somewhere, free of the emotional baggage she’d been lugging around all her life.

He was living proof it wasn’t that easy.

Hell, when he’d heard her ranting at her dead father, he’d had no choice but to go to her. He’d wanted to comfort her the way she’d managed to comfort him.

It was true. She had comforted him. She’d found a way, despite his determination not to let her. She’d reached right through his pain and held his frozen heart in her warm hands, thawing it. She’d even begun to heal some of the fractures he’d thought went too deep to mend.

He’d never known anyone who felt things as deeply as Lexi did. To cry so easily for a pain that wasn’t even her own … the way she’d cried when he’d told her about his family. And he’d never known anyone with a more soothing way about her. Every time she touched him, even if it was only with her eyes—no, especially when it was with her eyes—it felt as if she was healing his deepest wounds.

She deserved better than what her father had given her. And in spite of himself, he knew she deserved better than what he’d given her.

Upstairs, when she’d been raging at her dead father, she’d blurted out that she loved him. Him. Connor Romano, a man so hollowed-out, there was nothing left but a shell.

Or was there?

He was beginning to think there might be, because he didn’t feel like a used-up husk anymore. He felt as if there was some spark of life left in him. Maybe he wasn’t quite as dead inside as he’d thought.

He located the garden tools, pocketed the flashlight and grabbed a pick and a shovel.

Hell of a time to be thinking this way, Romano. Hell of a time. Because if you dig up what you think you’re going to, it’s all over. Time to get her as far away from you as possible. Time to deliver the formula to the good guys, and lie in wait for White. Time to exact the punishment he so richly deserves.

There aren’t going to be any fairytale endings. Not here. Not now. And not for you, Romano. Never for you.

He dropped the pick and shovel onto the ground outside, half-hoping Lexi was wrong about this, just to prolong his time with her. A stupid thought but an honest one. Maybe the first honest one he’d had in quite a while.

She huddled deeper into her parka, wondering how on earth Connor could stand to work with no coat at all. He’d started out with one, but had shrugged it off, warm with the effort of digging ground. He wore a T-shirt and stood in the knee-deep hole he’d dug. Lumpy brown chunks of frosty earth lay scattered around him like cobblestones. He’d put an ugly brown scar in the snow’s flawless face.

And then he stopped and said, “I think I found something.”

He looked up at her, and the yellow glow of the kerosene lamps she’d brought out, painted his face with light and shadow.

Lexi swallowed the lump in her throat. It wasn’t caused by fear of what she might learn about her father. She’d already been dealt that blow. And it had staggered her and hurt her. But she’d survived it. Her heart was sinking now for a far different reason.

They both knew that once the formula was found, their time together would end. Connor hadn’t said it out loud, but it was there, real and black and devastating. To her, at least.

She lifted her chin deliberately. “Let’s see what it is.”

He held her gaze for a long moment, and there was something there in the midnight-blue depths of his eyes, some fire in them that went beyond the lamplight they reflected. Then he dropped to his knees in the frozen dirt. Using the shovel like a whisk broom, he scraped the rest of the dirt away. When he tossed the shovel aside, he worked with his bare hands, digging down along the square outline’s edges with his fingers. Lexi picked up the flashlight and aimed it into the hole. He clenched his jaw as he worked a small metal box free of the earth, and picked it up.

He stared at the box while she stared at him. “This is it,” he said, his words so soft they were all but lost in the slight breeze that ruffled his sable hair. “It has to be. What else would he bury out here?”

Her throat burned. “There’s a padlock.”

Connor nodded. “That’s easy to fix.”

“You’re not going to blow it up, are you?”

It should have been funny. He should have laughed and then she should have joined him. But instead he only looked into her eyes with a sad little smile. She wanted to cry.

He set the box down on battered brown earth, reaching for the shovel again. Then he hit the padlock with it until the lock broke free.

And again, he surprised her by seeming more eager to see what was going on in her eyes than what was inside that box.

He paused, searching her face. “You want to go inside for this?”

---