High-Risk Affair

“Who’s there? Anybody there?”

So much for concealing his presence. He groaned to himself, his stomach in knots. He’d blown it, big-time. He could hear the killer making his way up the incline toward him. He had to hide. He couldn’t make it to the entrance without exposing his location.

Another shaft led off to the left, but he’d never gone that way and didn’t know what he might encounter. He had no choice, though. The man had already killed once. Somehow Cam knew he wouldn’t think twice about doing it again.

He made his way cautiously down the tunnel, careful to make as little noise as possible until he was far enough away that he thought it would be safe to run. He moved as fast as he could, until the night vision goggles were useless and the batteries had faded.

He slid down the side of the tunnel wall into the dirt, his breathing ragged and his heart still racing. He couldn’t think like a Navy SEAL now, on a secret mission to save the world from the bad guys.

For now, he forgot all about his dad, about terrorists, about pretending to be something brave and heroic.

As he stared through the blackness, he could only be what he was—a scared nine-year-old boy who suddenly wanted his mom.

Chapter 1

2:00 a.m.

Megan Vance arose with a jerk, not sure whether the echo of screams in her ears had been real or imaginary.

Fear knotted her insides, every muscle was contracted, and her breathing came harsh and fast. For one wild, panicky moment she was consumed by a single overwhelming need—to check on her children.

She listened intently but heard nothing except the summer rain clicking against the glass of her bedroom window.

After a moment, she sagged back to the pillow, embarrassed at herself. It was only a nightmare, nothing to send her into a panic. She forced herself to relax her muscles one by one and deliberately moderated her ragged breathing until it was slow and even.

She hadn’t had one of those in a while. Though already the details had mercifully faded and she couldn’t remember what had left her so terrified, she knew by the sick feeling still lingering in her stomach it must have been a bad one.

She sat up, scrubbing at her face while the last tendrils of the nightmare uncoiled from around her chest. After Rick had died, she used to have them nearly every night—gruesome, twisted journeys through her subconscious, full of monsters and demons.

She could remember a few of the more vivid dreams and they usually involved the horrible deaths of everyone she knew and loved.

Little wonder, she supposed. She had already lost so much. The roll call of people she had loved and lost seemed to grow longer all the time. Her mother—cancer when Megan was twelve. Her father—a cop killed in the line of duty a year later. Her baby brother Kevin—a New York City firefighter killed on 9/11 in Tower One.

And Rick.

Last month had marked two years since her husband’s death. She wondered when she would stop expecting his phone call in the middle of the night, telling her his SEAL team had been called up to some trouble spot or another.

I’ll be back soon, babe. Love you.

Oh, how she had dreaded those phone calls.

She had lost much but not everything. She still had Cam and Hailey, the joys of her life.

She rolled over onto her back and thought about them. Her children. Hailey, funny and sweet and girlie but with a tough streak that always took Megan by surprise. And Cameron, smart and stubborn and courageous even when he had to endure things no child should have to face.

They had saved her these last two years. The normal routine of mothering them—the car pools and soccer games and doctor’s appointments—had taken the wild edge off her grief and given her something else besides herself to focus on.

She sighed, praying again that moving them away from San Diego to the wilds of Utah had been the right decision for all of them. Her children needed family. She needed family and a support system, and her sister Molly was all she had left.

Moving closer to her and her noisy brood and strong, kind husband had seemed like a stroke of genius, in theory. Her job as a CPA was mobile, and she could find work anywhere helping small businesses with their payroll and accounting.

Rick used to tease her about her obsession with numbers. To a man who jumped out of airplanes and climbed every mountain he could find, she supposed it was an obsession. But Megan enjoyed what she did and was good at it.

In only the few short months they had been in Moose Springs, she had already built up a nice client list. Everything seemed to be working out just as she hoped.

Still, Megan couldn’t help worrying. Oh, Hailey seemed to be adapting all right, but Cameron had been angry about leaving behind all his friends, his soccer team, the climbing wall Rick had built for the children inside their San Diego home.

Most of all, he hadn’t wanted to leave his dad’s SEAL team members, who had taken the boy under their considerable wing after they had lost one of their own.

He would adjust, she told herself again. Lately he seemed to enjoy exploring the foothills around their house and once school started in a few weeks he would make new friends, find a new soccer team, develop new interests.

The wind rattled raindrops against the glass again and Megan sat up, reaching for her robe. She would just peek in on them. That didn’t make her a neurotic mother, just a loving one.

She automatically went to Cameron’s room first. His seizures tended to hit when he was awake but he’d had a few in his sleep.

In the glow of the night-light shaped like a soccer ball, she could see his form under the covers, the blankets over his head as he preferred.

She stood for a moment looking around the room. She always found it a little painful to see this shrine to his father’s memory. Navy recruiting posters covered all the walls and Cam had hung one of Rick’s SEAL T-shirts in a place of honor, along with his father’s picture and the many medals he’d been awarded, both before the Afghanistan helicopter crash that killed him and posthumously.

Her sister thought Megan shouldn’t encourage his obsession with all things military. With his epilepsy, he could never be able to serve in any branch of the service, let alone a physically demanding special forces unit like the SEALs.

But Megan hadn’t the heart to take this away from him, not when it was the only way he knew to connect with the father he had idolized.

With one more look at the bed, she closed the door and walked across the hall to check on Hailey.

Unlike her brother, who liked to sleep like a potato bug all curled up under his covers, six-year-old Hailey sprawled across her bed, her quilt thrown off and her pink ruffly nightgown riding up to her knees.

Her bedroom was like her—pink and girlie, with a cupboard full of Barbies and her American Girl doll on the nightstand, standing guard over the only discordant element in the room, Hailey’s pet rat Daisy.

The rat blinked at her, turned around once in her cage, and went back to sleep. Megan shuddered. She hated the darn thing and had lobbied hard to leave her behind with a classmate back in San Diego, but Hailey wouldn’t be swayed.

She tucked the blanket back up over her daughter, knowing it would be down again in a few moments, then left Hailey’s door ajar.

In the hallway, she contemplated going back to bed but she wasn’t at all sleepy. With her mind racing now, she knew trying to sleep would be futile for some time.

She would go down and make some tea, she decided, and perhaps grab her knitting bag and knit a few rows on her latest project to calm herself and relax enough to go back to sleep.

She walked down the stairs and out of habit checked the dead bolt and the security system.

She started for the kitchen then paused, something niggling at her. The nightmare she couldn’t even remember now had left her unsettled, uneasy. She frowned and turned around, some motherly instinct guiding her back up the stairs to Cameron’s room.

She had learned not to question that intuition. More than once she had been guided to drop whatever she was doing to search for him, only to find him in the grips of a seizure.

His epilepsy had been under control with medication for some time and he had been sleeping soundly five minutes ago, but she knew that could change in an instant.

She studied the shape on the bed under that Army green blanket. Something was off. Though she hated to wake him, she reached for the blanket and tugged it down, then felt her whole world turn ice-cold.

Instead of Cameron’s tousled blond hair and freckled nose, she found a rolled-up sweatshirt. She yanked the blanket off and gasped at the pillows stuffed there to approximate a nine-year-old boy’s shape.