by Paula Graves
“The police didn’t believe you?”
She looked up quickly. “We’d already talked to the sheriff about the way Clinton had been harassing us. We’d made reports, played it by the book. Let’s just say, they weren’t surprised.”
“Then why did you have to run?”
“The sheriff isn’t the real power in Boneyard Ridge.” Her voice lowered with anger. “That would be the Bradburys. And they didn’t care what Clinton had done to earn that load of buckshot. They just knew one of their kinfolk was dead, and I’d done it.” She could still hear old Abel Bradbury’s rough-edged voice. “You don’t kill a Bradbury in Boneyard Ridge and get away with it.”
“So you had to hide from them.”
“If I wanted to live. They damn near killed me once already.” She pulled aside the neckline of her sweater and showed him a bullet scar that marred her skin just above her left collarbone.
Hunter muttered a profanity.
“The cops couldn’t find the person who took a potshot at me right outside my own door. If my grandmother hadn’t been there, if she hadn’t dragged me inside before they could get off another shot—” She wrapped her arms around herself, even though she no longer felt cold. “The cops never found the rifle that shot me, so they couldn’t tie the shooting to the Bradburys.”
“A lot of places in the hills to hide your sins.”
She nodded. “But I knew who shot me. Besides my grandmother, nobody else in Boneyard Ridge gave a damn about me one way or another. Nobody but the Bradburys, and they just wanted me dead.”
Hunter touched her cheek. She tried not to flinch, but it was too soon, her emotions too raw, to handle the feel of his fingers on her flesh. He dropped his hand away. “I’m sorry.”
She shook her head. “It’s not you. I promise, it’s nothing to do with you. It’s just—” She stopped short, her gaze sliding toward the now muted television, where the news had ended and a judge show had begun. She reached for the remote on the table beside Hunter and turned off the television. “I look different now. I do. I dyed my hair brown and started wearing it long, and I wore those brown contacts. I changed the way I talk, the way I walk, the way I hold my head, the way I think. I changed my name, legally. I’ve kept to myself, made no close friendships, never let myself get involved with a man who might want to know more about my past. And for twelve years now, I’ve managed to avoid detection by the Bradburys.”
“But hiding in a crowd is one thing. Hiding when your face has been splashed on the news—”
“I look different,” she repeated. “Just not different enough.”
“You’re going to have to run again.”
She nodded. “They’ll know the name I’m going by now. They can find out where I was living. I can’t go back there now, can’t get any of my things. I have to leave everything behind. My savings, what few keepsakes I’ve allowed myself.” She bit her lower lip until it hurt, but she managed to keep the tears at bay. “Good thing I never got that cat I’ve been wanting, huh?”
He reached toward her again, his hand stilling midair before dropping back to his lap. “Maybe you don’t have to keep running.”
She stared at him. “Didn’t you hear anything I just said?”
“You’re alone. So you run.”
“Yes.”
“What if you weren’t alone?”
“But I am alone. I have to be alone.”
This time, he did touch her, his big, rough hand closing over hers. “No. You don’t.”
The conviction in his voice sliced into her heart like a razor. “Hunter, no. There’s nothing you or anyone else can do.”
“I was a soldier, remember? Protecting people is what I did. It’s still what I do. It’s what I’m doing right now.”
“You can’t protect me 24/7. You have a life. A job.”
“So I make you my job.”
“That sounds terrible.”
One corner of his lip quirked. “For you or for me?”
She turned her hand over, pressing her palm to his. “For you. And for me. I can’t live my life in a cage or wrapped up in cotton batting like a piece of china stored in a drawer. And I could never ask you to make my safety your priority.”
“You didn’t ask. I offered.”
“Because you’re a soldier with nobody to protect.” She felt a surge of emotion at the thought, equal parts admiration and pity. “You don’t know how to be anything else, do you?”
His green eyes darkened, and he looked away. “You don’t know me.”
“I don’t. And I don’t reckon you know me, either. And that’s why I could never ask you to put your life on hold to protect mine.”
He slid his hand from her grasp. “It’s not right that you have to run. You did nothing to deserve it.”
“I killed a man.”
“Who was trying to rape you.”
“Be that as it may, I killed him. It’s on my soul, whether he deserved it or not.” She tried to push aside the memory of Clinton Bradbury’s body bleeding out on her bedroom floor. “I’m not willing to give my life as penance, no. But I’m sure as hell not willing to give anyone else’s life, either.”
“Well,” he said, lifting his gaze to meet hers, “what happened to you years ago changes nothing about tonight, does it? We still have a job to do, and if we get caught by the wrong people while we’re doing it, what the Bradburys want to do to you may not matter, anyway.”
He was right about that much. The Bradburys, while a threat hanging over her head for over a decade, weren’t her most pressing concern.
The Blue Ridge Infantry and their plans for the conference tomorrow were. And instead of sitting here feeling sorry for herself, she should be focusing her attention on how they were going to get inside the hotel without being caught—and what they were going to do once they were inside.
She and Hunter rose at the same time, their bodies gliding into each other and tangling for a long, breathless moment. She reached out to steady herself, her palm flattening against the solid, hot wall of his chest. Beneath her fingers, his heartbeat stuttered and began to gallop, as if racing to catch up with the sudden acceleration of her own pulse. His arm roped around her waist, tugging her closer, and in the glimmer of his green eyes she saw fierce, feral intent that should have frightened her. But it didn’t.
It thrilled her.
His thighs pressed against hers, driving her back toward the sofa. She wrapped one arm around his shoulders to keep from falling, drawing him even closer. His breath heated her cheeks, his grip tightening as he held her in place.
She should pull away from him. Put distance between them, between what he was offering and what she could afford to have.
But as his gaze dipped to her lips, and he tugged her body flat against his, she couldn’t move. Couldn’t think about anything at all but how strongly, how desperately she needed to know what it was like to kiss him.
She imagined his kiss would be fierce and demanding, as strong and relentless as she knew from experience he could be. But what she hadn’t reckoned on, what shocked her lips apart and sent her heart rate hurtling toward oblivion as his lips claimed hers, was the tenderness that trembled beneath all that tightly leashed passion.
He might not know her, but he knew exactly what she needed, as if he’d looked deep down in her well-buried heart and saw all the secret longings that writhed there, desperate for discovery.
His fingers threaded through her hair, holding her still as he slanted his head to deepen the kiss. His tongue swept over hers, setting off fireworks behind her closed eyelids, and she dug her fingers into the stone-hard muscles of his chest just to keep from tumbling off balance. When he dragged his lips from hers, she couldn’t seem to breathe for a long, shivering moment.
“We have to focus.” His voice came out in a raspy growl as he edged clear of her, retreating to a spot near the windows.
She groped for the arm of the sofa and perched there before her trembling knees
gave out from under her. “Right.”
He was breathing hard, as if they’d just hiked up Lamentation Rise again. As if he’d carried her on his back the whole way. But after a few seconds, the harsh sounds subsided, and as she watched, he visibly composed himself, a soldier packing his kit until it was pin-neat.
“I’ve got something I need to do,” he told her. “Can you start packing our rucksacks? We need food for three days, in case we have to run for it and can’t get back here. Lightweight as you can make it.”
She nodded. “What’s the one more thing you have to do?”
He flashed her a brief, mysterious smile. “You’ll see soon enough.” He headed down the hall and disappeared into the bathroom.
* * *
“IT’S HER, ISN’T IT?”
Asa Bradbury turned his attention from the television screen hanging over the bar and looked at his cousin Ricky. He should be feeling triumph, he supposed, at having found her after more than a decade of searching, but there wasn’t really much pleasure in finally tracking down the girl. None of it would bring Clinton back. And, if Asa was honest with himself, he hadn’t missed the trouble that seemed to follow Clinton around like a viperous pet, leaving nothing but havoc in his wake.
But family honor was family honor, and the girl had killed one of his kinsmen. Letting her go unpunished was neither wise nor proper, not if he wanted the Bradbury name to mean anything in these hills.
“What are we going to do about it?” Ricky asked.
Asa slanted a gaze at the younger man, disappointed that he’d even felt the need to ask the question. “We’re going to find her, of course.”
There was no other option.
* * *
IT HAD BEEN a year and three months since he’d worn his hair high and tight. Since he’d been completely clean-shaven and spit-polished. His so-called comrades in the Blue Ridge Infantry had never seen him looking like anything more than the down-on-his-luck, chip-on-his-shoulder Army washout he’d presented to them.
The man in the mirror was achingly familiar, a face he’d seen thousands of times in the past twelve years. A man of honor and purpose.
But somehow, the face staring back at him remained a stranger, far removed from who he’d become since his world blew up around him in a valley in Afghanistan.
Fraud, he thought, staring back at the familiar stranger. Poser.
He looked away, squaring his shoulders and lifting his smooth-shaven chin toward the bathroom door. He could afford to be neither, not when there was a woman out there with the soul of a warrior who needed him to watch her back. He had to figure out how to be a soldier again, at least for a few more days.
He could do that, couldn’t he?
He found Susannah in the kitchen, packing what looked like protein bars, small tins of meat and bottles of water into the backpacks. She glanced up as he entered, did a double take that made him smile, then turned fully toward him, her head cocked and her lips quirked in a bemused half smile.
“Well, hello, soldier,” she murmured.
“That’s Army First Sergeant Bragg to you, ma’am,” he shot back with a grin he almost felt.
Leaving the rucksacks on the table, she made a slow circle around him, observing his new look from all angles. “I think I approve.”
“I was holding my breath.”
The grin she flashed his way felt like a shot of adrenaline blazing straight to his gut. He felt his spine straighten to attention, along with a quickening somewhere south of his backbone.
Bringing himself back under control with the speed of the well-trained warrior he used to be, he nodded at the packs. “Anything else we need?”
She showed him what she’d included—food, lightweight tools, more first-aid supplies, even a folded map of Tennessee. “In case we need to make a run for it, at least we’ll have some idea where we are when we get there.”
“Good thinking.” He zipped up one of the sacks and slung it over one shoulder. “How are your feet?”
She looked down at the tennis shoes she wore. “They hurt. But I’ll deal. How’s your leg?”
“Still held together with nuts and bolts. I’ll deal, too.”
Cocking her head, she let her gaze fall to his left leg, her scrutiny intense and disconcerting. “What’s under there, exactly?”
He considered and rejected a salacious retort, knowing that such an obvious attempt at distraction would only make her more curious. “Some missing muscle tissue. A lot of scarring.”
“Can I see it?” Almost as soon as the words slipped from her mouth, her gaze snapped up to meet his, a flush of pink color darkening her face. “I’m sorry. I did not just ask you that.”
“I think you did,” he answered, stunned by the fact that he was actually standing here in the middle of Alexander Quinn’s kitchen, seriously considering dropping trou so she could see his bum leg.
All because she’d asked him to do it.
“I just—” She pressed her lips to a thin line, her brow furrowing. “I don’t know why, but I want to know—”
“What it looks like?”
She shook her head, still frowning. “It’s not curiosity. It’s—” She blew out a long breath. “Never mind. Forget I said anything.”
Perversely, her change of heart only made him want to show her what his jeans were hiding. It wasn’t pretty. It might even be shocking—there were still days, even now, when he looked at his scarred leg and cringed at the sight.
But it would be honest. As honest as the moment when she’d looked up at him with those big gray eyes and confessed she’d killed a man with a shotgun.
Before he lost his nerve, he unzipped his jeans and pulled them down, baring his bad leg to her searching eyes.
Chapter Twelve
Susannah’s gaze flicked down toward the road map of scars that circled his leg from thigh to ankle. Her mouth dropped open and she released a shaky gasp.
Hunter followed her gaze, trying to remember what it had been like to get that first look at his injury. It had been so much worse then, of course, the edges of torn skin raw and discolored and barely held together with hundreds of sutures.
Even now, with the wounds long healed, the contours of the leg were misshapen in places where the blast had destroyed muscle tissue. There was one particularly large patch of skin on his calf where doctors had used skin grafts to repair the damage from a large piece of flaming debris. And the scars were still purple and angry-looking, potent reminders of the horrors of that day in the Helmand Province.
“Oh,” she said. The word came out long and slow, like a lament.
He reached for his jeans and started to pull them back up, but in the span of a heartbeat, she was at his side, her fingers brushing over the long scar on his thigh with exquisite delicacy.
“Does it hurt?” she asked softly, her gaze lingering on the scar.
“No,” he lied. It hurt, horribly, but not the way she meant.
And even worse, her fingers on his flesh felt as good as anything he’d experienced in a long, long time. So good that every inch of his skin, even the broken patches that were still partly numb, seemed to burst into flames at her touch.
“I can’t believe I let you haul me around on your back.”
He pulled away from her pity, dragging his jeans back into place and zipping the fly with trembling fingers.
“I didn’t mean—” She broke off midsentence, frustration evident in her pale eyes. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”
“No. I shouldn’t have.” He scraped his hand through his hair, shocked by how effortlessly it ran across the short spikes of his newly shaved cut.
“You don’t think it makes you less—” Once again, she stopped short.
He made himself look at her and saw her gazing back at him with a look so full of misery that he felt like a heel.
“Less what? Less virile? Less of a man?”
“Do you?”
He didn’t know how to answer that ques
tion. The injury certainly hadn’t done a damn thing to quell his sex drive, if his current state of arousal was any indication.
But he hadn’t had sex since the injury. Never even really considered it seriously, not to this day.
And he was pretty sure the mangled condition of his leg figured into that equation somewhere.
“I know guys aren’t as sensitive as women about their looks,” she said quietly. She still stood close to him, close enough to touch. Close enough to catch fire if the flames surging inside him broke loose of his faltering control.
“Probably not,” he admitted. “I’m not ashamed of my scars.”
He was ashamed of what had led to them, however. If he was being perfectly honest with himself, a circumstance he mostly avoided these days. Honesty was painful, and he was tired of hurting.
“You shouldn’t be.”
He wanted to argue with her, the urge to spill the whole ugly tale so powerful it felt like poison in his gut. His leg was bad. It couldn’t do the same things he’d once asked of it. But he was stronger now than he had been in the middle of that burning hell.
He’d never known that level of utter helplessness before in his life. He prayed to God he’d never know it again.
He willed Susannah to step back from him, to take away her soft warmth, her sweet scent, her gentle, disarming gaze.
Of course, being Susannah, she stepped closer, her hands lifting to his cheeks, ensnaring him. “I have no idea what to say to you,” she said, her voice a whisper. “I don’t know what you need.”
You, he thought with growing dismay. I just need you.
When she leaned in, he thought she was going to kiss him. But then her face turned, her cheek glided like silk against his, and she pulled him into an embrace that threatened to deconstruct him completely.
He tried not to return the embrace, tried not to let his arms wrap around her slim waist and tug her closer, tried not to bury his face in the curve of her neck. Tried not to need her so desperately.
