Harlequin Romantic Suspense March 2021

by Anna J. Stewart

  He pushed a strand of hair off her damp forehead from where it had stuck to her porcelain skin. It delighted him to see her mussed up by sex, her skin flushed with color he’d put in her cheeks, her eyes sparkling with pleasure he’d put in them. Normally, she was so polished, so put together. But this side of Jessica, breathless and messy, was his absolute favorite version of her.

  “I wasn’t fighting with you,” he explained. “I was fighting against myself. Against my desire for you. I’m done fighting this, whatever this is that we have between us.”

  Her eyes lit with excitement. “You mean we get to do that again...a lot?”

  He laughed under his breath. “God help me, but yes. You and I may end up burning each other to the ground and completely wrecking each other’s lives, but so be it. You’re an addiction I can’t shake.”

  “Just call me nicotine and heroin.”

  He eased her other leg off his hip and took a step back from her, righting his clothes. “That’s what I’m afraid of. Both of those kill the foolish and unwary.”

  “Is that what we are?” she asked softly. “Foolish and unwary?”

  “How would you describe us?”

  She tilted her head, considering him more seriously than he’d expected. “Star-crossed, maybe. Inevitable, definitely.” She paused and then added, “And who says being foolish and unwary is a bad thing, anyway?”

  He dropped a kiss on the end of her elegant, perfect nose. “I do. But damned if I can stop being either.”

  * * *

  Jessica snuggled deeper under the new down-filled duvet she’d put on Wes’s bed. This was a lightweight one, appropriate for the warmer nights of spring and summer, and its gentle warmth was weightless and wonderful.

  Or maybe that was Wes’s body heat wrapping around her so perfectly—effortless and natural beside her.

  Why on earth had it taken them so long to find this simpatico again? They never should have broken up the first time, her father’s wishes be damned. She was just grateful that Wes had finally stopped fighting his feelings for her and given in to them. If only it hadn’t taken someone shooting at each of them to bring them to this point.

  She was worried about this shooter of his. She didn’t believe for a minute that it was a simple poacher that Wes had stumbled across. Her instinct told her in no uncertain terms that it was the same person who’d tried to kill her on the Westlake Road.

  Her contentment destroyed, she lay awake, staring at the new ceiling, idly counting the planks lining the roofline between the heavy, gorgeous ceiling beams.

  How long she lay there, she didn’t know. An hour maybe.

  She heard a strange sound faintly—like a woman screaming a long ways away. Must be a coyote howling or something.

  She heard the noise again, and it was louder this time. That didn’t sound like any canine howl she’d ever heard before.

  “Wes,” she whispered.

  He was awake instantly, his consciousness tangible in the darkness.

  “What’s that sound?” she asked him. “You’ll hear it in a minute. It’s like a woman screaming.”

  He sat up, the duvet and flannel sheets pooling around his waist. She reached up to touch the shadowed planes and valleys of his muscular back. She never got tired of looking at him.

  The sound came again, and Wes swore. He leaped out of bed, yanking on jeans and his cowboy boots and forgoing even a shirt before he raced out of the bedroom at a dead run.

  Alarmed, she followed suit, pulling on her own jeans, a T-shirt and her new cowboy boots. She stepped out into the living room and stopped, staring at a strange flickering light coming in the new picture windows. What was that—

  And then it dawned on her. The flickering light was yellow and orange and red.

  Fire.

  Stone-cold terror roared through her.

  The animals.

  Wes.

  Oh, God. Not Wes. She tore outside and flew across the front yard toward the old horse barn. The north end of it was engulfed in flames, spiraling up into the night, throwing sparks easily a hundred feet in the air as the old, dry, seasoned wood went up like an enormous pile of tinder.

  She saw Wes’s shirtless form race inside the south end of the barn, from which heavy smoke was pouring like a river of death, and her heart stopped beating. No kidding, stopped.

  She sprinted toward him, flying over the wet grass with speed born of sheer terror at the idea of losing the man she loved.

  No way was he going in there alone.

  The cloud of smoke began to swirl around her, blinding her eyes with agonizing pain and making her cough so hard she couldn’t draw a breath. She slowed. She’d lost her bearings when the smoke had blinded her. Panicked, she stumbled back to figure out where she was before charging forward again.

  As she squinted into the smoke, she thought she saw tongues of flame licking at something overhead in front of her.

  And then a black apparition raced toward her, fast, bearing down on her as if to run her over and consume her. The fire itself had come to life and was coming for her to kill her—

  The giant shape took form, and she realized with a start that it was Wes, leading a squealing and lunging horse beside him. The beast was blindfolded with a white towel, but every time an ember fell on his hide, the horse kicked and screamed.

  “Get the hose!” Wes shouted hoarsely at her, coughing violently on the last word. His face was black and sweat had drawn hellish streaks through the soot coating his face and chest.

  She ran over toward the big loafing shed he kept the entire herd of cattle in when it was wet or windy and turned on the faucet to the garden hose he used to water the cattle. Surely one lousy hose wouldn’t begin to fight the conflagration now engulfing the entire barn!

  “Hose us down!” he shouted over the rising roar of the fire.

  Who knew a fire could be that loud? She could barely hear him over it.

  And then the wisdom of his order hit her. He was making sure neither he nor the horse had any live embers on them that would further burn them. She sprayed him and the horse with the water until both of them were drenched and shivering.

  “Water the roof of the loafing barn!” he shouted as he led the trembling horse toward the calving barn.

  She pointed the spray at the roof of the next closest barn to the fire, frantically wetting the wood to protect it from flying sparks and embers. She spotted a tiny fire licking at a spot on the roof and sprayed it immediately.

  Her back was roasting with the heat, so painfully hot it felt as if her skin was starting to peel off her body. She spared a second to hit herself with the hose, and steam rose from her shirt. She went back to work trying to save the barn.

  Wes came over to her and took over the hose.

  She ran to the calving barn and turned the water faucet there on, and she sprayed the far side of the loafing barn, as well.

  The fire itself rose up a good fifty feet in the air, and a tornado-like vortex of fire whirled up demonically. The heat was unbelievable. She heard cattle bellowing and stomping behind her in the calving barn, terrified. She prayed the calves weren’t being trampled, but there was no help for it. They had to save the barn and prevent the spread of the fire. If the loafing barn went up, it could very well light up the calving barn, too, and then they would start losing cattle.

  She couldn’t even bring herself to consider the horrifying possibility of Wes’s prized cows being burned alive.

  Three sets of headlights tore across the pasture, and a dozen men spilled out of pickup trucks, John and Miranda Morgan leading the charge. “We saw the fire!” John shouted. “What can we do?”

  For a gray-haired guy of at least sixty years, the man could move. He ran up to his son, embracing him fiercely for a second, and then took the hose from Wes’s hands and passed it to one of his
men.

  Several of John’s ranch hands opened the calving barn and let the terrified cattle streak out into a pasture, well away from the fire, while other ranch hands commenced spraying the wall of the loafing barn that faced the fire with foam from big metal canisters. She assumed it was some kind of fire retardant.

  After that was done, a couple of intrepid guys in heavy canvas duster coats climbed a ladder onto the roof of the loafing barn and walked around on it with fire extinguishers.

  The hands took turns going up on the roof, spelling each other from the intense heat every five minutes or so.

  Miranda served cold water and hot coffee to the men, and Jessica helped her, running back and forth from the house with fresh jugs of water for the men to drink. Grateful to have a job, she ran off and returned over and over, staggering under the weight of a big orange cooler she filled with ice water. She and Miranda passed out cups and the men guzzled water continuously.

  Somewhere in the nightmare, Joe Westlake and several of his deputies showed up, and they too pitched in to keep the fire from spreading to the other barns.

  The horse barn was a total loss. But as the fire finally began to burn itself out, it became clear that they’d saved all the other barns. No animals or humans had been seriously hurt. There were minor burns here and there where embers had landed on exposed flesh, and the cattle were agitated and restless, refusing to settle down or even to come back into the calving barn to eat.

  The men monitored the loafing barn carefully for hours after the main fire had died down to make sure there were no flare-ups. With daybreak came exhaustion, and Jessica sagged over the water jug, her eyes gritty, the taste of smoke thick and acrid on her tongue, her arms so weak she could barely lift them.

  Miranda had left sometime before, and she returned now with Willa and the cook, Ella, in tow, with a veritable truckload of food prepared for the men. Everyone grabbed sandwiches and ate in exhausted silence for the most part.

  The men finally started to congregate on the front porch of the house. They were filthy, blackened and streaked with sweat and water and grime. They loaded up in trucks and started to head out, back to Runaway Ranch.

  John looped an arm around Wes’s shoulders and the two men walked toward her, one the carbon copy of the other. They were much more alike than they were different, at the end of the day, and they shared a common love of their land, their homes and their animals.

  Wes disengaged himself from his father’s arms as they approached, and he walked into her arms wordlessly. She hugged him as hard as she could, doing her best to share whatever strength she had left with him.

  John said from behind Wes, “The good news is the cattle are fine. Everything else can be rebuilt as long as the herd is safe.”

  “Thank goodness you’re safe,” she murmured to Wes. “I died when I saw you run into the fire.”

  “I had to save Mac. He saved my life today. He didn’t deserve to die like that.”

  John rumbled, “What do you mean, he saved your life today? What happened?”

  Wes turned wearily to head for the house with her tucked under his arm. “You’d better come inside, Dad. We need to talk.”

  The minute John heard about the attempt on Wes’s life, which had been followed immediately by one of his barns going up in flames, John ordered a half dozen of his remaining men to go back to Runaway, get shotguns and ammunition and come back to Outlaw Ranch.

  Grim faced, his men complied with alacrity.

  Except when the trucks came back a half hour later, Miranda Morgan climbed out of the first one. And, God love her, she was carrying a deadly looking rifle.

  Jessica hugged her tightly. “You’re a lifesaver. What would we do without you?”

  “I expect you’d all perish, eventually,” Miranda replied tartly. But beneath the woman’s crusty tone, Jessica sensed terror and profound relief that her son was alive and unharmed.

  An SUV turned into the drive, and Jessica recognized Joe Westlake’s official sheriff vehicle. He must have gone home, cleaned up and come right back out here, this time in an official capacity. He went straight to the burned-out hull of the barn and began poking around and taking pictures.

  “At this rate, all of Sunny Creek will be here soon,” Jessica commented.

  Joe said without looking up, “Welcome to a small town. We rally around each other in times of trouble.”

  Wes remarked quietly, “I don’t think this was trouble. I think it was arson.”

  Jessica stared at him in dismay. “The shooter?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. That whole damned end of the barn went up all at once. The whole thing was engulfed in a matter of minutes. If you hadn’t heard Mac screaming when you did, he would have died.”

  “Speaking of your horse,” Miranda said, “let me trailer him over to my barn. We’ll have Doc Hamilton take a look at him. Make sure he doesn’t get sick from inhaling all that smoke.”

  “He’s got some bad burns where embers landed on him,” Wes replied.

  Miranda smiled. “I’ll treat him like one of my own babies.”

  “Oh, Lord. He’ll come back so spoiled he’ll be unridable,” Wes groaned.

  Miranda just smiled serenely. She went outside to talk to one of the ranch hands and send him back for a horse trailer.

  Jessica turned to Wes. “If Mac was burned, does that mean you were, too? Take off that sweatshirt and let me check you out.”

  She didn’t know where he’d gotten the garment from, and she watched in alarm as Wes winced, pulling it over his head cautiously.

  “Uh-huh. As I thought. You’ve got some burns yourself, mister. Any chance I can get you to go to a hospital and get these properly treated?” she asked.

  “Nah. I’m fine.”

  “Knowing you, you’d throw a piece of duct tape over them and call it a bandage, and then you’d press on with your life,” she accused.

  “I would probably use electrical tape, but yeah,” he replied sheepishly.

  “Sit down,” she ordered. “And don’t move till I get back.” Jessica fetched the first aid kit and opened it on the kitchen table. She cleaned his burns as gently as she could, but he hissed with pain as antiseptic hit the raw wounds. She smeared them liberally with antibiotic cream, covered them with squares of rayon and then covered them with gauze and medical adhesive tape.

  When she was finished, she realized her legs were about to give out from under her and she sank into one of the brand-new kitchen chairs. “You took ten years off my life when you ran into that barn, Wes. Please never scare me like that again. I don’t ever need you to be a hero again.”

  He shrugged. “I did what I had to do.”

  “What will you do next?”

  “I’ll rebuild the barn, I suppose. This time with a metal roof and siding. The good news is I can lay it out more efficiently than the last barn.”

  “What about the shooter? What’s to stop him from coming back and torching another barn, this time with livestock in it?”

  “My dad is lending me some of his hands to guard the place until we can figure out who’s been shooting at the two of us.”

  She sagged with relief. Thank goodness his pride wasn’t so inflexible that he wouldn’t take help from his family. It was one thing to be stubborn and independent. It was another thing entirely to be suicidally pigheaded.

  “I want you to leave,” Wes announced.

  “No!”

  “You’re not safe here. I’m not willing to take chances with your life, Jessica.”

  “And I’m not willing to take chances with yours!” she exclaimed. “I’m not leaving your side.”

  “It’s not open to debate. I already talked with my father about it, and he agrees with me. You should go stay at Runaway where there are a bunch of people who can protect you.”

  “Wes, you�
�re all the protection I need. I trust you with my life.”

  “I’m not doing a hell of a good job keeping you safe so far,” he muttered.

  “I would be a nervous wreck without you,” she declared.

  “And I’ll be a nervous wreck if you stay.”

  “We’re in this together. Let me stand by you and fight with you. I can shoot a gun and handle myself under stress.” His expression remained stubborn. “Please,” she begged. “You and I let circumstances separate us once before, and look how much harm was done and how long it has taken for us to get back together.”

  He didn’t budge.

  “You need me, Wes. You draw strength and comfort from me, and I do the same from you.”

  “She’s got a point,” a new voice said from behind her. Miranda had come inside and stopped just behind Jessica.

  “She’s not safe out here—” Wes started.

  “No one’s safe living on a ranch in wild country like this. This is a hard life and requires strong women.”

  “She’s a city girl. She knows nothing about this life!”

  “Don’t sell Jessica short, son. I’ve seen her backbone. She’s got what it takes to stand beside you and make a go of this place. Goodness knows, she’s plenty smart enough to learn how to live and work on a ranch. What would it hurt to let her try?”

  “For starters, there’s the whole business of her, oh, I don’t know, dying.”

  “She’s not dead yet, and she’s been shot at and survived a fire. Not to mention she managed to talk you into remodeling this ramshackle excuse of a house. Which looks lovely, by the way, dear.”

  “Thanks, Miranda,” Jessica replied, pleased.

  Wes scowled back and forth between the two women. Perhaps he sensed defeat at hand when both his mother and Jessica ganged up on him. “Fine,” he huffed. “But she’s not setting one foot outside this house without an armed bodyguard. Not until this bastard is caught.”