The Lawman's Last Stand

She almost made it. Almost got away. But she tripped over him as she tried to run. Her foot connected with his back and his gasp, sharper than it should have been from the light kick, made her turn instinctively. Already off balance, her sudden shift in direction brought her crashing to the ground facedown. Her chin hit the ground with a thunk, and she bit her tongue. The coppery tang of blood filled her mouth.

Before she could recover, he was riding her, his hands pinning hers to the ground above her head, just enough of his body weight grinding her chest into the dirt to effectively restrain her without crushing her.

“Get off!” she screamed. “Get away from me!”

She struggled mightily, but with little effect. Not against his superior size and strength. She resorted to mindless kicking and writhing, but facedown she had no leverage, no way to strike at him. He clamped one heavy thigh over hers and locked her legs in a vice grip between his.

Gradually, she went still. Everything but her heart, that is, which continued to pound so fast that she couldn’t separate one beat from the other.

“Are you through?” He sounded as if he were talking with his teeth clamped together. Like he was in pain.

She hadn’t thought any of her blows had connected. Or that they’d had the power to hurt him if they had. But maybe she’d been wrong.

She nodded, her cheek scratching in the dirt and decaying leaves beneath her.

“Good.” He loosened his grip on her wrists and lifted a measure of his weight from her back, but didn’t let her get up, or even turn over. She gulped in mouthfuls of cool, mountain air.

“Now what are you running from?” he asked. This time no sympathy, no sincerity tinged his voice. His words were flat and devoid of any emotion at all, except maybe disillusionment, if that could be called an emotion. “What have you done?”

When she didn’t answer, something cold and metal scraped over her left wrist. Handcuffs! “What are you doing?”

“People don’t live under assumed names or refuse to talk to the law after someone shoots at them. Not unless they have something to hide.”

“I’m not a criminal.”

He paused with the second cuff pressed against her right wrist. “Then tell me what’s going on.”

He didn’t understand. He couldn’t. And in his lack of understanding he would arrest her. He would take her to the pitifully defenseless sheriff’s office in town. There, he and the deputy wouldn’t have a chance against the man bent on getting to her, because getting to her meant getting through them. More good men would die because of her. Would the killing never end?

“It’s not what I did,” she explained, her voice sounding tinny. Trapped. “It’s what I saw.”

“What?”

She closed her eyes, and as always, the vivid images played out in her mind. Two men in the stable, talking in hushed tones. The squeal of car tires. Three firecracker pops. Blood and other matter sprayed on the wall across from where she stood, out of sight behind the wash rack.

The victims hadn’t even had time to cry out. They’d died quickly, their screams stillborn in their throats.

“Murder,” she whispered. “I saw a murder.”

Chapter 3

Murder. The word bounced off Shane’s chest like a stone flung by an angry mob. Hardly a fatal blow, but debasing, disparaging. A defamation of humanity, flying unfettered in the face of everything he stood for. A slur on the law he’d sworn his life to uphold.

It made him mad as hell.

But what had he expected? He’d known she was in trouble. Bad trouble. Any lingering doubt about that had vanished when she’d tried to fight her way past him. She had to have known she’d never make it. Only a desperate woman would even have tried.

That desperation had worked in her favor. The look in her eyes—terror, hot and unadulterated—had frozen him in that critical moment. By the time he’d moved, it had been too late to block her kick.

The throw that followed the kick had been smooth and practiced. She’d used his own momentum to take him down. Even scared half to death, she fought smart. He hadn’t known she’d had self-defense training.

Shane swallowed a bitter laugh. Why should he have known that? Hell, he didn’t even know her real name.

An odd feeling crept over him, lying so intimately with someone at once familiar and a complete stranger. Rigid as she held herself beneath him, she was still soft in all the right places. She’d fought hard, but the lush curves molding to the contour of his body made him well aware that she was no raw-boned tomboy. She was all woman, full and mature, he thought.

He also thought he had better get off her before he couldn’t think at all.

Slowly he rolled to her side, grimacing at the pain in his back, and propped himself up on one elbow. He hoped she didn’t run again. He wasn’t up for another round of hand-to-hand combat.

Saying nothing, she turned herself over and fixed her gaze on the sky. Guilt blanched his mind as he took in her disheveled appearance.

Her forehead still bore the abrasion from last night’s encounter with the steering wheel of her truck. Her indigo eyes were shadowed in deep sockets, her cheeks cherried with fatigue, her clothes rumpled. Her golden hair framed her head in a tangled halo.

But it was the single drop of blood clinging to the corner of her mouth that undid him.

No nameless gunman had done that to her. That was his fault. He’d pushed her too hard. He knew she was scared and he’d panicked her instead of talking her down, the way he’d been trained. Damn, but he found it hard to think around her instead of just…reacting.

Slowly his hand moved over her hair, honey-colored silk kissing his fingers as he teased a twig out of a gleaming curl. His palm slipped down to cup her face. Her breath enchanted his fingertips, called them to dance, to touch again. He held them poised just over the arch of her cheek.

Then his thumb rolled over her full lips, swept away the violent evidence of battle, and she quivered beneath his touch. The terror he’d seen flashing in her eyes before dulled to blunt acceptance.

“Tell me what happened,” he said softly, not wanting to break the peace between them.

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“This isn’t your problem.”

“Someone tried to kill me. That makes it my problem.”

She turned her gaze away.

“Fine,” he said, reining in both his temper and the urge to pull her to him and rock away the despair in her eyes. How could he be so mad at her and ache to have her in his arms at the same time? Chagrined at his distraction, he gritted his teeth and continued, “You don’t want to tell me about the murder, then tell me about the shooter in the Mercedes.”

“I really don’t know who he is,” she said after only a moment’s hesitation.

He ignored the restless shifting in his gut. Patience was the key to interrogation. Patience and relentlessness. Getting information was like solving a maze. There were lots of paths. He just had to keep trying until he found the one that led where he needed to go.

He turned down an alternate hedgerow. “Then tell me who you are.”

She gulped in a breath of air, misery rising from her like steam off rocks in a sauna. “No.”

Her sharp refusal popped his patience like a pin on a balloon. Frustrated questions exploded out of him. “What do you want to do? Run away again? What if next time he finds you, he shoots at you while you’re crossing a crowded street or standing in front of a school bus? How many people will die because you ran away?”

Her jaw wavered and her eyes turned shimmery, but she held her tears back.

“You can stop this,” he implored her, “Whatever it is, I’ll help you. But you’ve got to trust me.”