The Lawman's Last Stand

Dawn bloomed against a backdrop of violet-and-peach-pastel mist many a morning in this part of Utah. Color Country, the locals called it. Paradise was a better word, to her mind. That was why she’d stayed so long. Too long. She’d fallen in love with the forested hillsides, the columns of rock that stood guard over the wilderness like Indian totems, the community that had taken her in as one of their own.

Now it was all gone to her, evaporated into nothingness, like the mist she’d watched that morning. Paradise lost. Even if she survived the night, she would have to leave Utah.

A twig snapped outside. A barrage of pebbles skittered down a slope.

Tears jammed up behind her eyelids. She blinked them back, fighting the need to sniff, not wanting to give herself away to the stalker nearby.

“Dammit,” a muffled voice rumbled.

Her sawmill breath and the pounding of her heart almost drowned out the word. From the sound of it, the stalker was trying to negotiate the steep wall of the ravine, and having trouble. With any luck, he’d fall and break a leg. But luck was fickle tonight. The uneven footfalls righted themselves and crunched toward the truck.

Too late, she noticed the driver’s side door was unlocked.

No time. No time.

Stretched out across the truck seat, her heels against the door handle, there was no room to swing the twitch. She would have to go for a punch. She hid the bat alongside her thigh and lay perfectly still.

The handle clicked. Hinges creaked. A gust of cold air rushed over her prone body.

And she struck.

She punched the bat out the door as hard as she could, sitting up and throwing her weight behind the blow. The rounded end of the bat hit bedrock in the midsection of a man. For a second, victory thrilled through her. Her attacker toppled backward, the breath whooshing from his lungs.

Her victory was short-lived, though. Before his backside hit the ground, he grabbed hold of the end of the bat and yanked, his weight and momentum dragging her out of the truck before her panicked fingers could release their grip.

She wound up in a heap on top of him. Instinctively she raised her fists to fight, but strong hands locked her wrists in iron grips, staving off her blows. She opened her mouth to scream—

“Gi-gi?”

The wail died in her throat.

He had spit out her name in two short gasps, like he didn’t have enough air for words with multiple syllables—which he probably didn’t, given the way she had planted the bat in his gut. Still, the voice had sounded familiar.

A new chill raised along her spine as she put a name to the voice. Shifting her gaze down, she groaned.

Familiar, silver-plated eyes shone up at her. Odd that the cloud-muted moonlight should give his eyes such a cold sheen. In the daylight, she knew, his eyes were warm and soft, and blue as cornflowers. Trust-me-baby blues, she and her girlfriends had called those kinds of eyes as teenagers, for all the innocent girls eyes like that had lured into the dark recesses under the high school bleachers. But Gigi knew better than to fall for trust-me-baby blues.

Or at least she thought she did, until she met Shane Hightower.

“Are you…all right?” His breath warmed her cheek.

No! She was definitely not all right. She was splattered across a man’s chest like spilled paint. And not just any man, but Shane Hightower—Special Agent Shane Hightower, of the DEA—a man she’d spent the better part of the last two months avoiding. Even before she had known he was DEA, she’d known enough to stay away from him. He’d been introduced to her and everyone else in town as the interim sheriff when the old geezer who used to run the county had retired suddenly. Shane’s true identity as an undercover agent, sent to Pine Valley to ferret out a narcotics ring run by a couple of local deputies, had been revealed just three weeks ago when he’d made a dramatic arrest on the mountain.

Looking down, she saw he still wore the Washington County Sheriff’s badge pinned to his leather bomber jacket—helping out until a new interim sheriff could be named, she’d heard. But sheriff or federal agent, the difference didn’t matter much to Gigi. One kind of cop was as dangerous to her as another.

Yet here she was, lying as intimately with him as two people could lie without…well…being intimate. Knee to breastbone, not a molecule of air wedged between them. Her softness molded to his hardness. Her curves pressed into his hollows. She should move, but she couldn’t. She felt frozen in place, frozen in time.

“Dr. McCowan? Are you all right?”

His words lifted her stupor. She couldn’t afford to have this man worried about her. She couldn’t afford to have him think about her at all.

She lurched away from him, disengaging tangled arms, legs, and knees, as she rose. “I’m fine,” she assured him.

He followed her up slowly, eyeing her all the while. “You’re sure?” He twisted right, then left, methodically brushing slush and wet leaves from the sleeves of his coat and the back of his khaki trousers.

“I said I’m fine.” Regretting the snap in her voice, she crossed her arms over her chest and took a deep breath. She did not need to pick a fight with a federal agent, but she was scared, tired and cold. And her head hurt.

“Good.” Very slowly, very precisely, he turned toward her. When he looked at her, his gaze pulled her pulse to her extremities. She could feel her heartbeat in the soles of her feet. The pounding made her head ache even worse.

“Then what the hell did you think you were doing coming at me like that?” he asked.

Her jaw fell slack. So much for not picking a fight. “Coming at you? What were you doing sneaking up on me?”

“I wasn’t sneaking. I thought you might be hurt. Your truck is twenty feet off the road in a ditch!”

His words hit like tom-toms inside her skull. “You could have called out. How was I supposed to know who was out there?”

“I did call out.” He swung his hand up the ravine toward the roadside. “Up there. Why didn’t you answer me?”

She reached for her throbbing forehead, squeezing her eyes shut. “I might have—” all this shouting was making her woozy “—if I’d been conscious.” The drumroll in her brain built to crescendo and she swayed on her feet.

“Whoa, there.” He reached out and steadied her elbow. “I thought you said you were all right.” Just like that the ire was gone from his voice, replaced by concern.

“I’m fine.”

“Sure you are.” She tried to step away, but his grip on her elbow tightened, preventing her escape. “That idiot could have killed you.”

A surge of fear jolted her. She jerked as if she’d touched a live wire. “How did you know?”

“I was above you on the switchback curve. I saw that car sideswipe you. Did you get a look at him? A license plate?”

Her heart fluttered, and she told herself to stay calm. He didn’t know anything; he was just curious. Cop curious, a voice in her head warned. Not good.

“No, nothing,” she told him, hoping he would drop the interrogation.

A heavy pause hung between them. Shane’s brows drew down in to a frown. “The sorry pissant didn’t even stop. Least he could have done was come back and made sure you were all right.”

A shudder that had little to do with the cold and everything to do with a sorry pissant in a midnight-blue Mercedes racked her body. If Shane hadn’t come along, the man would have come back, all right. But it wouldn’t have been to help.

Had he really left? Or had he sneaked back while she and Shane had been arguing?

She peered into the darkened woods surrounding her. Her mind twisted tree trunks into burly bodies, gnarled limbs into outreached arms, the glitter of moonlight off wet leaves to the gleam of a cold steel barrel trained on her, or Shane.

She wrapped her arms around herself and squeezed.

Shane’s scowl deepened. “Let’s get you out of here,” he said.

“But my truck—”