The Miracle Man

by Sharon Sala

  “Oh, my God!” Saying it a second time still had not conjured up any heavenly helpers. Her shock gave way to rage. “Damn you. Let me go! You repay me for saving your worthless life by doing this? Let me go!”

  Not only didn’t he answer, but she wasn’t even sure he was still breathing. This was bad. Really bad. She was handcuffed to a man who could be anything—even dead.

  Dismayed by the possibilities, Toni crawled as far away from him as possible, relishing the fact that his elbow thumped on the floor with a rather sharp thud when she gave the cuff a vicious yank.

  She sneezed. Her lower lip quivered as she tried not to cry. Big girls didn’t cry. But no girl, no matter how big or small, wanted to be bound to the unknown as Toni was. Either he came to and did her harm, or he died, and she found herself arm in arm with a corpse.

  She stared, then glared. All of her compassion for him was gone. But as she watched him, to her utter dismay she saw a single tear roll out the side of his eye and down into the hairline above his ear.

  “Ah, God, help me,” Lane whispered, unaware that he’d even spoken.

  The whisper was soft, almost inaudible. But Toni heard it just the same, and she bit her lip as she considered the fact that this man, whoever he was, had called on a higher power for help. That had to mean he was one of the good guys, didn’t it?

  She leaned forward. Just a little. It was a move that she shouldn’t have made. As quickly as before, without opening his eyes, the man reached up, then pulled her down. Now, not only was she bound to him by a metal bracelet, but her neck was firmly caught between the crook of his elbow and the wall of his chest.

  “Snufabch.”

  Toni’s curse was muffled and as weak as the candle’s glow above her head. She had a worm’s-eye view of the floor, as well as the tear on his shirt pocket. From her new angle, she had only two options. Either she struggled until she hanged herself, or she lay still and hoped that he would turn her loose as suddenly as she’d been caught.

  While she was cursing the mysteries of fate, wondering if she had enough guts to search his pockets for a key to unlock the cuffs, the candles had the grace to burn out. She was literally in the dark. What remained to be seen was whether it was man or monster that she had fished out of Chaney Creek.

  * * *

  Antonette Hatfield had wished all of her life for a man, one that would take her in his arms when they went to bed and only reluctantly turn her loose when it was time to get up.

  This wasn’t exactly what she’d had in mind.

  The only thing pertinent to this mess with regard to her dream was the fact that he was a man. In every sense of the word.

  During the long and miserable night, she had been under him, on top of him and beside him. And during that time, she’d learned a few facts about the fish that she’d landed, as well as some shocking facts about herself.

  It felt as though he weighed a ton. After the initial shock of having his weight upon her body, and further adjusting her breathing to it so that she would not be smothered, she hadn’t minded nearly as much as she knew she should. Without her assent, she’d been dragged on top of him in the most intimate of positions, under him in a frightening and demanding manner and beside him in an “up close and personal” view of his neck and chin. And in every possible, miserable position, the man held fast to her body.

  Not only hadn’t she been able to put an inch of distance between them, but even in semiconsciousness, he’d found a way to fit her curves to his valleys and vice versa, until Toni knew the man’s shape as well as she knew her own. It was daunting to know that when they were body to body, face-to-face, the tips of her toes were still inches above the ankle area of his boots. She knew the size of...everything...about him. And yet, she didn’t even know his name.

  More than once during the night, when she should have been screaming in panic, she’d actually felt safe. As big as he was, she’d expected to be crushed bone by bone.

  And she always knew when he slid from one dream into the next, because the texture of his touch would drastically change. He didn’t actually hurt her, but if she survived this mess, she knew she would have bruises in places she couldn’t even see.

  * * *

  Dawn broke over a calm sky. Toni awoke with a numb left arm, nose to nose with the bluest eyes that she’d ever seen. That they were wide and colored with pain and confusion didn’t seem to matter, not when she wanted a bathroom and a change of clothes worse than anything she’d ever wanted in her life.

  “Oh, my God, are you still here?” she muttered, halfway between hope and sleep that it had all been a bad dream.

  But her disgust was nothing compared to the shock that Lane Monday felt when he had come to only moments earlier and found himself in possession of someone other than his prisoner, Emmit Rice.

  That the someone was female and looked mad as hell, had yet to sink in. He was more amazed that he was still alive.

  “Get off of me,” Toni groaned, flexing the fingers in her lifeless hand and wondering if they would ever be the same.

  Lane jerked in response to the demand, then gritted his teeth as the room rocked and pain left him flat on his back, too breathless to speak.

  Toni sat up, staring coldly at her other half and willing herself to look formidable. But she felt like hell and suspected that formidable was too much to expect.

  Lane groaned, then clasped his head with both hands. He wasn’t prepared for the woman who came flying across his chest with the action.

  “What in the hell are you trying to do, lady?”

  If he didn’t already have a dozen bumps and bruises and one particularly ugly-looking gash she could vaguely see through the tear in his jeans, she would have given him an answer he wouldn’t have liked.

  She rolled off of him, then held up her arm without speaking, letting the chain that bound them speak for itself.

  Lane stared, first at the handcuffs that bound his wrist to hers, then up at the fury on her face.

  “How...?”

  “You did it.” Her answer was starkly succinct.

  “When...?”

  “Last night.”

  Her chin jutted mutinously. Lane had seen mad on a woman plenty of times, but never quite this pronounced.

  “Why did I...?”

  “I've been asking myself that same question for hours,” Toni said, then scooted back as far as she could before she continued. “What I came up with does not make me happy. I've been asking myself why a man would be wearing handcuffs to begin with,” Toni muttered. She looked away, unwilling to let him see her fear.

  Lane frowned, then winced as the motion sent pain all the way to his back teeth before he managed to speak.

  “I'm a lawman. I've got a key.”

  Toni glared. “I would love to see it. I haven’t gone to the bathroom since before eight o'clock yesterday evening.”

  Lane flushed, then forgot that they were still connected, once again yanking her on top of him when he started to dig through his pocket. But the only hand to get anywhere near his pockets—and his manly parts—was hers.

  “Will you please quit doing that?”

  The woman’s voice was barely above a snarl. The hiss burned the side of his cheek as he stared up into eyes that reminded him of the underside of a burned cookie. They were dark, and brown, and looked hot as hell.

  “Sorry,” Lane said. “I can’t reach that pocket with my free hand. You'll have to use yours.”

  Toni’s eyebrows arched and her face flushed. She’d wanted a man. She’d even prayed more than once for one to be delivered unto her. But this was not what she’d had in mind.

  “You want me to—”

  The image of Bob Tell’s broken neck, and the last sight he’d had of the plane and the prisoners, made his stomach roll. And because he was sick and in so much pain, his words were sharper than he’d intended.

  “Damn it, woman, I don’t know how this happened, but I have more things to worry about than
your sense of propriety.”

  Toni jammed her hand into his front pocket, stuffing it as far as it would go. She ignored everything in her quest for the key that would get her out of this hellish mess. But there was too much of him to ignore, and the key was nowhere to be found.

  “It isn’t there,” she hissed again.

  “Oh, God.” Lane’s head dropped to the floor with a thump. “Try the other pocket, lady. Please. One of us has got to be a man about this, and I'm not in any position to volunteer for the job.”

  At that moment, Toni hated him. She didn’t want to be a man about anything. But fate, and the fact that she was taller than most, hadn’t given her much choice.

  To her growing dismay, the other pocket yielded exactly what the first one had. Nothing.

  “It’s not there, either,” she said, then yanked her arm up, ignoring the pain that racked his face when she did.

  “It has to be,” Lane said, closing his eyes, and trying not to think about turning her over his knee. Damn, he needed to get to a phone.

  “Not if you never had one,” Toni said. “Not if you were the prisoner instead of the lawman.”

  Lane grew still. For the first time since he’d awakened, he realized how frightened she must be. He opened his eyes and stared up into her face. His voice was low, but the promise was there if she would only hear it.

  “Lady, I swear to God, I am not a criminal. I am a United States marshal. And I need like hell to get us loose.” The walls tilted, and he closed his eyes to keep from getting sick by the motion.

  Toni sighed. She had no other choice. Whether she believed him or not was moot. They were connected in body, if not in spirit.

  “Good grief,” she mumbled. “Like I don’t need it as badly as you?” She crawled to her knees and leaned over him. “If I helped you, could you stand?”

  Lane sighed, then inhaled slowly. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had offered him a shoulder, or anything else to lean on.

  “I don’t know, lady, but I'm damn sure willing to try.”

  Because of their combined size, going through doorways side by side was impossible. And as luck had it, there were two doors between them and the kitchen. By the time they staggered into the room, both of them were reeling from the effort.

  Lane felt sick down to the toes of his boots. The room kept spinning. Pain racked him. More than once, he’d felt his leg buckle and knew that it was solely due to this woman’s gutsy determination that he did not fall flat on his face.

  “Just a little farther,” Toni coaxed. “I need to get to my tool drawer.”

  Lane gritted his teeth and complied, his left leg dragging with every step.

  A few minutes later, he was seated at a table, his forehead resting in the crook of his free arm, hoping that the room would stand still. But he feared that wasn’t going to happen as long as this damnable woman kept hammering on the handcuff chain with muleheaded determination.

  With each blow of the tool, his ears buzzed and his head pounded. She might as well be using the hammer on him, instead. It couldn’t possibly hurt any worse.

  “Oh, shoot,” Toni muttered beneath her breath. “It keeps slipping.”

  Lane reacted before thinking. He yanked the hammer from her hand and tried not to see the fear that spread across her face when he raised it above his head. She looked as if she expected him to hurt her with it right there and then.

  He pulled until the chain that bound them was on the edge of the table. “Don’t move,” he warned, swinging the hammer with every ounce of strength he had left.

  The chain and the table broke simultaneously. Frozen by the image of what lay before her, Toni gawked at her table lying broken on the floor, its legs upturned like a dead possum, then she staggered backward in shock.

  To hell with the table, she thought. She and the man were no longer bound. She bolted from the room. Seconds later, she’d shut herself in the bathroom, leaving the man with the hammer to his own devices.

  Relief came as she quickly washed her face and swiped her hair from her face. She would kill for a bath and a change of clothes, but first things first. There was a big, strange man in her house. If he was a criminal, she would know soon enough.

  Toni came out of the bathroom much slower than the way she’d gone in. When she walked back into the kitchen, the man was nowhere in sight.

  “Hey?” she called, then waited for an answer that didn’t come.

  She found him in the hall, using the wall for a leaning post and wearing a disoriented expression on his face as he kept trying to talk into a phone that had no power.

  Toni took it from his hand and listened, then replaced it on the cradle.

  “Phone’s still out,” she said.

  “Ah, damn.”

  The soft complaint put her off guard. But when he turned and started toward her with the hammer still clutched tightly in his other fist, she screamed, then bolted for the living room.

  Oh, my God, I was right. He’s going to kill me!

  The front door was stuck. Tight. It had been sticking every time it rained for more than twenty-nine years, but that was not a fact that Toni was ready to deal with right now. She was just at the point of going headfirst out a window and taking chances on cutting her own throat, when he staggered into the room with a blank look on his face.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Lane growled, and then slid down the side of the wall because he could no longer stand.

  Toni saw her chance and yanked open the closet near the front door. It had once served as a closet for all the Hatfield children’s coats and hats. Now it was simply full of junk.

  “Oh, God, oh, God! It’s here somewhere, I just know it,” Toni muttered, digging through the mess with shaking hands.

  When her fingers closed around the cool metal barrels of her daddy’s double-barreled shotgun, she yanked it free, spun around and aimed as smoothly as if she’d done it a thousand times.

  “Drop that hammer,” she ordered from across the room. When he did not comply, she came a little closer, thinking she could intimidate him with the yawning holes of the twin barrels.

  Lane blinked. Once. Twice. His vision cleared enough to see that she had drawn down on him. In spite of his misery and pain, he started to grin.

  Toni froze. The small smile had done things to his face that she hadn’t expected. There were matching grooves on either side of his mouth that she knew, in his youth, had been dimples. The twinkle in his eyes was obvious, even through the misery of his drawl.

  “If you're gonna shoot, you might want to knock the mud daubers' nests out of the barrels first, or it could blow up in your face.”

  She gawked at him, then turned the barrels up. Both were plugged tighter than her daddy’s jug of whiskey.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” she said, and turned the gun down toward the floor.

  “No, lady, for mine. Please get me to a phone. I have to report a plane crash and too damn many victims.”

  The misery in his voice was impossible to miss. A flashback of the explosion that she’d witnessed just as the storm hit last night made her shudder. Had that been his plane going down? Dear Lord, had she been an unwitting witness to people’s deaths?

  “Oh, no,” Toni whispered. “I'm sorry. So sorry.”

  The gun slid out of her hands and onto the floor. She kicked it aside as she knelt at his feet. Gingerly, she took the hammer from his hand and saw the shock on his face when he realized he still held it.

  “You are for real, aren’t you?” Toni asked.

  Lane groaned. “I'm about as real as it gets, lady. Now help me up again. We've got to get to a phone.”

  Toni shook her head. “If what you say is true, you're not moving unless it’s in an ambulance. I can’t carry you to my pickup, and you can’t walk. Besides, your leg is bleeding badly. I need to get it stopped before I go for help.”

  She got to her feet.

  “Where are you going?” Lane asked.


  “To get some scissors and cut those clothes off of you. I can’t fix your injuries unless I can see where they are.”

  Lane gritted his teeth once again. But this time, there was force in his words as well as his grip when he stopped her departure by grabbing her ankle.

  “Lady, you would be well-advised not to cut anything off of me, unless you don’t mind seeing me buck naked.”

  Toni shook off his hand and took several hesitant steps back. “I don’t get it,” she said.

  Lane swallowed a rush of water that bubbled up his throat. If he didn’t lie down somewhere fast, he was going to either throw up or pass out.

  “Look at me. I'm willing to bet that there aren’t four clothing stores in the state that would have clothes to fit me. If you want something off, I'll help. But for God’s sake, don’t tear up any more of it than has already been.”

  “Oh.”

  If Toni had been in a mind to doubt, the width of his shoulders and the length of his legs were a vivid reminder of the truth of his words.

  Long minutes later, Toni had all but dragged him into her father’s room just off the hallway and was helping him off with his clothes.

  “Damn, damn, damn.”

  It was all Lane was able to say as Toni pulled off his other boot. His head hurt like the devil, and his leg was a mess. He just hoped to hell that nothing was broken. There was a long rip in the leg of his Levi’s and blood all over the place. Whatever was down there couldn’t be good.

  “I'm sorry,” Toni muttered.

  Lane blinked. It was the only indication that he acknowledged her apology. “I'll unbuckle and unzip. You pull.”

  His order went in one ear and out the other when his hands went to the belt at his waist, then unzipped the fly of his Levi’s. Toni’s mind boggled at what he was about to reveal.

  After last night, she’d already felt every bulge and bone on his body. But feeling was one thing, seeing was another.

  “Pull, damn it. I'm so close to passing out, it doesn’t even matter,” Lane said, his voice breaking on the last word. Sweat beaded across his upper lip as the room spun again.

  Refusing to admit how intimidating he was, Toni grabbed hold of the cuffs of his jeans. As best he could, Lane lifted himself from the bed when she pulled. The jeans slid down his hips and legs without a hitch, leaving him bare below the waist, except for a very revealing pair of cotton briefs.