Undercover Groom

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While the helo’s engines revved up to full lift power, he pulled a red ball cap from his back pocket and tugged it low on his forehead. In well-worn jeans, a sturdy plaid shirt and blue sleeveless down vest, he’d fit right in with the other hunters and anglers who drove hundreds of miles to hunt game and fish the jewellike lakes that dotted the Black Hills. He had no idea if the sportsman’s cover was necessary, any more than he knew why Chloe had chosen Crockett to hide out in. But he intended to find out.

Under the curved brim of the ball cap, Mase’s jaw locked tight. He was past feeling the cumulative effects of too little sleep, too many gallons of black coffee and the six kinds of hell he’d gone through since Chloe’s disappearance. Even now, despite confirmed reports that she was alive and safe, the mental image of her Mercedes nose down and abandoned in that ditch could still put a kink in his intestines.

He drove the narrow two-lane road, remembering that fear, tasting its bitter residue once again. Now, however, a healthy dose of anger added its own flavor to the fear. At this point, Mase was almost as furious over the torment Chloe had put him and her family through as he was relieved to have found her.

As the Blazer crested a hill dotted with tall pines and dropped down toward the half dozen weathered wooden buildings that comprised Crockett, he couldn’t decide whether to hustle her back to Minneapolis or haul her to the nearest motel and stake his claim the way he’d wanted to since the day she proposed to him. He was still debating the issue when he pulled up at the Crockett General Store and killed the Blazer’s engine.

Mase climbed out, disappointment rising sharp in his throat. They’d tagged the wrong woman. Chloe couldn’t have stayed in this place for almost three weeks! Not his Chloe, anyway.

Eyes narrowed behind his mirrored sunglasses, Mase returned the blank stare of the bleached cow skull mounted above the much-patched screen door. Those weren’t the only bones to grace the store. Entwined elk antlers twisted up and around its four wooden porch supports like prickly white ivy.

Against the weathered wood, the antlers were a startling white. In contrast, the rusting South Dakota license plates framing the two front windows provided a riot of color, as did the wooden bins and baskets filled with fall produce that fought for porch space alongside a bagged-ice locker and a bait bucket set under a hand-lettered sign advertising worms and crawlers. The whole weathered wooden structure seemed to list a few degrees to the right, giving the distinct impression that a good wind could topple it over completely.

Warily, Mase mounted the sagging front steps. The boards creaked a protest, but the bell above the door jangled a cheery welcome when he stepped inside. Tangy wood smoke from the cast iron stove in the center of the store caught at his senses along with the equally compelling aromas of fresh-brewed coffee, ripe apples and tobacco.

Mase stopped just inside the threshold, sweeping the store with a searching glance. Enough light filtered through the dust-streaked windows to illuminate the nooks and crannies of the single room, crammed with every imaginable necessity from work boots to cereal to beeswax candles. If there was an order to the jumble of products and produce filling the floor-to-ceiling shelves, he couldn’t see it.

Nor did he see anyone resembling Chloe. The tension coiling his body had just torqued up another few degrees when a woman called from a back room.

“I’ll be right there.”

Relief crashed through him. He would recognize his fiancée’s voice in his sleep. Soft and musical, with the rounded Minnesotan vowels that winters in Palm Springs and two years in Paris couldn’t erase, it was as much her signature as her silky blond hair and violet eyes.

Still, Mase had to look twice before he recognized the creature who backed bottom-first into the room a few moments later. Bent double, she fishtailed a fifty-pound sack of rock salt along the wooden floor and added it to the others propped haphazardly against the far wall. Mase watched, stunned, as she straightened with a small grunt. Raising an arm, she swiped it across a forehead streaked with sweat and dust.

The face was the same. Classic Chloe, all high cheekbones, creamy skin and full mouth. Her hair was silvery gold, glinting with warmth even scraped back in a no-nonsense ponytail instead of sweeping to her shoulders in its usual sleek fall. The clothes... Mase blinked, trying to remember the last time he’d seen his fiancée poured into thigh-hugging jeans and a thin yellow T-shirt that displayed a provocative patch of sweat between her firm breasts...or when she’d greeted him with such cool, distant politeness.

“Do you want something?”

He went still, thrown off balance for a moment as much by Chloe’s appearance as by her deliberate remoteness. His every sense alert to possible danger, he searched the store again. Why was she pretending not to know him?

The possibilities he’d forced himself to consider during his long hunt for Chloe leaped instantly to life once again. Was she trying to warn him? Had someone forced her to stay in this remote town? Was she under duress? With a speed that made her start in surprise, Mase rounded the end of the counter and edged through the door behind her.

“Hey, you can’t go in there!”

Ignoring her startled protest, he did a quick visual of the storeroom. It held cardboard cartons stacked almost to the ceiling, several unused display cases and a jumble of seasonal sporting goods, but no imminent threat that Mase could determine. An open door in the opposite side wall led to a long, dim hallway and, presumably, the attached living quarters. Frowning, he spun around to confront a decidedly irate Chloe.

She reached behind him and closed the storeroom door with a snap. “I don’t know what you’re looking for, but whatever it is, I’ll find it for you. If I can,” she tacked on in a low mutter.

Slowly, Mase peeled off his sunglasses and stared down at her. If this was an act, it was a damned good one. If not... His gut twisted.

Why would she pretend not to know him? What the hell was going on? He searched her face, her eyes, trying to find a hidden message.

The woman who called herself Chloe Smith lifted her chin and matched the stranger stare for stare. In the almost three weeks she’d lived in Crockett, she’d learned to cope with the kind of looks he was laying on her. As Hannah had dryly pointed out, Chloe was the only nubile young female within fifty miles who didn’t come on the hoof. Word that she’d been hired to work the store while Hannah was laid up with multiple fractures to her left ankle had spread faster than a range fire. Every horny cowboy working the ranches around Crockett suddenly found himself needing new work boots or a supply of chewing tobacco. The vet from over at Custer came by twice as often to check the penicillin supplies Hannah kept in the cooler alongside the milk and soda. Even the transient sportsmen who flocked to the area to hunt deer and elk and to fish the mountain lakes had started joining the regulars who clustered around the potbellied stove in the mornings.

Chloe had grown used to being ogled...but that didn’t mean she liked it. Especially when the ogler raked her with a pair of iron gray eyes that glittered with an unsettling intensity.

“Did you want something?”

Instead of answering, he shot back a question of his own. “What’s going on here?”

Not liking his low growl, she backed up a step. “You tell me.”

He followed, too quick and too close for Chloe’s peace of mind. Like a hammer striking an anvil, her temple started to throb. The bruise that had marked it had long since faded, but she still suffered from occasional headaches. The accident that caused them remained only a blur in her mind. Vaguely she remembered climbing out of a car and stumbling for miles along a dark, deserted stretch of highway. She could recall the trucker who gave her a ride and the doc who X-rayed her. She couldn’t remember who she was, however. Somewhere along that empty stretch of road, she’d lost her identity, her direction and her memory. All she retained were the clothes she was wearing, the sapphire ring that had given her a first name, if not a last, and a vague sense of having run away. From what or from who, she didn’t have a clue.

Maybe... Her heart began to echo the pounding in her skull. Maybe from this man.

She eyed him warily. At first glance he didn’t look like the kind of man a woman would run from. Tall and muscular, with shoulders that strained the seams of his flannel shirt, he had the healthy tan of an outdoorsman without the weathered, sun-creased skin that characterized so many of the locals Chloe had met. His black brows slashed across a strong brow and defined a face stamped with a hardness she sensed came from within as much as from without. His clothes, she noted, marked him as a fisherman or a hunter. A transient. Here only to bag a trophy kill. She didn’t doubt he’d bring down his prey.

Was she his prey? A sudden fear rippled down Chloe’s spine. She disguised the shiver with a facade of sheer bravado.

“Back off, mister.”

Her brusque warning had just the opposite effect from the one Chloe intended. Instead of putting the stranger on notice, it seemed to spark a flame in his slate gray eyes. Deliberately he took another step forward.

“Back off,” she said again.

“Oh, no,” he said with a tight little smile. “I think that’s been my problem all along. I always back off, when what I really want to do...what I should have done...is this.”

Before Chloe could grasp his intent, he wrapped an arm around her waist and hauled her against his chest. She squawked a protest as his mouth came down on hers. Shock held her immobile for a moment or two, just long enough for him to blast through her defensive barriers and shatter her senses.

The searing kiss answered one of the questions whirling around in Chloe’s head. She didn’t know this man. Or more correctly, she’d never kissed him before. Not like this. There was no way she could have forgotten the rough thrill of his mouth on hers. No way she would have run from the heat his touch flushed in her veins. For an absurd moment she felt as though this kiss was what she had been running toward when she’d landed in Crockett.

Then the confusion and wanness that had plagued her for the past few weeks shuddered back. She pushed free of the stranger’s hold and stepped away, as furious now as she’d been frightened a moment before.

“Who are you?”

He didn’t answer for a long time. Too long for Chloe’s thin-stretched nerves. Thoroughly shaken and still seared with anger, she whirled and put the long counter between them.

Her nails dug into the wood. Her voice shook with fury. “Who are you? And what in the blue blazes gives you the right to come on to me like that?”

For a moment the taut planes of his face seemed to shift, become even harder, if that was possible. A frown slashed deep grooves between those coal black brows.

“My name’s Mase,” he said deliberately. “Mason Chandler.”

Chloe tested the name in her mind, willing a spark of recognition. Nothing came. Not even a flicker. Crushing waves of relief and disappointment rolled through her. For a moment there, she’d feared... She’d hoped...

The unmistakable snick of a trigger cocking brought her head snapping around. Across the counter from her, every muscle in the stranger’s body seemed to lock. Taut as a steel cable, he turned and stared down the twin barrels of a .12 gauge shotgun.

Three

Her heart hammering, Chloe spun around to face the leathery faced woman who stood with a shotgun cradled under one armpit and a metal crutch propped under the other.

“Hannah!”

The store proprietor didn’t take-her eyes from the man at the other end of the gun barrel.

“Got a problem here, girl?”

The laconic question shattered the tension that gripped Chloe. More concerned now with the fact that her employer had dragged herself out of bed against her doctor’s vehement orders than with her response to the stranger’s kiss, she shook her head.

“Nothing I can’t handle.”

“Funny way of handlin’ things, if you ask me,” the older woman twanged.

Chloe flushed, but she’d learned that Hannah Crockett’s tart tongue came part and parcel with a heart wider than the blue Dakota sky. She’d wandered into town only a few days after the general store proprietor had tumbled off a ladder and crawled into the street on her belly to get help, dragging her shattered ankle behind her. The cantankerous invalid had hired Chloe on the spot to tend the shop while she was laid up. Hannah had brushed aside such piddling trifles as references and identification. She was good at sizin’ up people, she informed Chloe testily. It didn’t matter a horse’s spit where the girl had come from, or where she was driftin’ to. The job was hers, if she could handle it. A spare bedroom came with it, and any meals she wanted to fix up. Otherwise, she could order for them both from the café in town.

Chloe had snatched at the offer, assuming that her duties would center primarily on ringing up sales in the old-fashioned brass cash register that dominated the counter. Three weeks and countless hours of stocking shelves, sweeping floors, breaking down boxes and scuttling fifty-pound sacks across the floor had taught her differently. The work was back-breaking and seemingly endless. With the store open from eight in the morning until nine at night, she earned every penny of the salary Hannah paid her in addition to her room and board. She’d also taken on the duties of nurse and companion, despite Hannah’s grumbling that she could take care of herself.

Worried by the deep white lines grooved on either side of her reluctant patient’s mouth, Chloe hurried around the counter. “We need to get you back to bed. The specialist in Rapid City said you should stay off that ankle until he takes the pins out.”

“If I listened to him and laid on my backside for six weeks, I’d sprout carbuncles the size of Idaho potatoes.” Keeping the shotgun level with the ease of one used to its heavy weight, she shifted her stance and gave the stranger another once-over. “What did you say your name was?”

“Chandler, Mason Chandler.”

“Hmmmm. You go around kissin’ up every girl you happen to come across, Chandler, or is there something special ‘bout our Chloe here?”

Mase debated how best to answer that one. He’d already blown any need for a cover by giving Chloe his name...not that his real identity seemed to matter to her. The absurd thought occurred to him that she might be putting him through the hoops for the scene in his office with an elaborate pretense of not recognizing him. He dismissed that thought as soon as it formed. To all intents, it appeared Chloe really didn’t know him.

A trickle of cold sweat formed between Mase’s shoulder blades. His medical training as an undercover operative had consisted of such useful field techniques as packing gunshot wounds, administering antisnakebite serum and treating frostbite. The little he’d read about amnesia made him hesitant about blurting out her identity. He needed expert medical advice, and fast. In the meantime, he owed Hannah an answer.

“There’s definitely something special about Chloe,” he said with perfect truth. “Any man with eyes in his head could see that. But I shouldn’t have come on to her the way I did.”

“Hmm.”

The woman’s watery blue eyes held his for another second or two, then she lowered the shotgun and uncocked the hammer with an agile flick of her thumb.

“Did that sound like an apology to you, Chloe?”

“Close enough,” she bit out, obviously unimpressed. “Come on, Hannah, let’s get you back to bed.”

“In a minute, girl, in a minute.”

The older woman angled a head haloed by short, feathery, white wisps of hair. Her flyaway hair might have given her a pixielike appearance if it hadn’t topped a face toughened by wind and sun and shrewd blue eyes.

“So what brings you to these parts, Chandler?”

“Hunting ”

“Elk season doesn’t start for another two days.”

“I thought I’d get in some fishing first.”

“You did, did you?”

Impatient now to get to a phone, Mase brought the inquisition to an end. “I came in to buy a fishing permit. I’ll come back later, after you get off that ankle.”

“I never turn away a payin’ customer, boy.”

All brisk business now, Hannah laid the shotgun on the counter and hobbled toward a slotted wooden box...or tried to. After only a single step, her crutch hit an uneven patch of floor. Her good leg buckled. She grunted in pain and started to topple backward. Mase caught her just before she hit the hard wooden floor.

With Chloe hurrying ahead to show the way, he carried a muttering, thoroughly disgusted Hannah through the cluttered storeroom and down the hall he’d glimpsed earlier. The hall gave onto a kitchen on one side and a combined living room and office that had been converted into a downstairs bedroom for the invalid. A narrow flight of stairs led, Mase guessed, to the upstairs bedrooms.

Edging sideways to avoid any contact between the bulky cast encasing Hannah’s ankle and the door frame, he deposited her gently on the blankets mounded on the sofa. By the time she’d stretched out and propped her leg on a pillow, the blood had drained from her face.

Chloe clucked in concern. “You’d better take one of your pain pills. I’ll get some water.”

“I’m not taking those damned pills,” her patient snapped. “They make me feeble-minded.”