by Sharon Sala
“You sure you’re going to be all right?”
He nodded.
“I’m going home, then. Please forgive the intrusion.”
She was reaching for the doorknob when Wes stopped her again.
“Ally?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you for caring.”
“Yes…well…it’s what we do up here. If you’re going to stay, you’d just better get used to it.”
This time the smile made its way all the way to Wes’s lips.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Ally began to put her boots back on. She was pulling the poncho over her head when she realized he was helping.
“Thank you,” she said as he gave the poncho a final tug.
“You’re welcome,” Wes said softly.
She opened the door. Rain was still coming down.
It was the first time Wes realized exactly what she’d faced by coming alone in a storm.
“I didn’t know,” he said.
“Know what?” Ally asked.
He shook his head without answering, but he felt as if he were seeing her anew. Her hair was still damp from the ride up, but there was a jut to her chin he hadn’t noticed before.
“You’re tougher than you look, aren’t you, girl?”
Taken aback by his observation, Ally didn’t know how to respond.
“I’m thinking that you’re quite a little soldier. Ride safe,” Wes said.
Ally nodded. Moments later she was out the door and walking through the rain, dragging her leg as she went.
As Wes watched, she straddled the ATV, fired up the engine and threw it in gear. She left him without a backward glance, and yet he stood in the doorway, watching until she’d been swallowed up by the trees and the rain.
He was on his way into the house when the hair on the back of his neck suddenly rose. He turned abruptly, scanning the area. Nothing was visible, but his instincts for survival had rarely been wrong. Someone was watching him. He thought of Ally on that mountain road alone, and for the first time wished he had a phone, just so he could make sure she reached the safety of home.
He backed into the house, locked the front door, then hurried into the kitchen to make sure that door was locked, too. He stood for a moment, then remembered the root cellar. After a quick trip down into the cellar to bar the door from the inside, he began to relax. If whoever was out there was persistent enough, he could get in—but not without making a whole lot of noise. It would be all the warning Wes needed.
At that point his stomach began to grumble, reminding him that it had been a long time since he’d eaten. He headed for the kitchen to see the pantry about a can of soup.
Roland Storm was so angry he was shaking. When he’d seen Ally Monroe coming up the mountain on that ATV, he’d let himself toy with the fantasy that she was coming to him. Then, when she’d turned off the road and ridden up to where the stranger was staying, he hadn’t been able to believe his eyes. He’d staked out the stranger’s home, never imagining that Ally would appear.
But she’d walked in as if she’d been expected, and immediately, his imagination had taken root in carnal thoughts. After all, the stranger was well built and good-looking. He’d let himself believe that Ally Monroe was different from other women—that she’d held herself to a higher morality than the norm. But he’d been wrong—horribly wrong. And the longer he stood across the road in the rain, the more certain he’d become. She’d been in there for a long time—long enough to give herself to the stranger three times over.
He cursed. If she was giving it away, he wanted some.
Eleven
The can of soup was open and Wes was pouring it into a pan when a gust of wind blew rain against the kitchen window. He stopped, set it aside, then bowed his head. He couldn’t ignore his gut. Someone was out there. It remained to be seen whether the threat he sensed was to him, or to anyone in general, but until he saw Ally Monroe walk safely into her home, he wasn’t going to be able to rest.
With a sigh, he turned off the burner, stripped off his dry clothes and quickly re-dressed in the wet clothes he’d come home in. If he was going back out in this weather, there was no need getting two sets of clothes soaked.
The clothes were clammy against his skin, but in a few seconds they were going to be even wetter. He felt in his pocket for the switchblade, thought about a hat and discarded the idea. He was going to be moving fast.
He locked the door from the inside, then grabbed the house key. He locked the back door, as well, then went out through the cellar and began to circle the area. If there were footprints, the rain would have washed them away, but there were other ways to track a predator. He struck a trail into the trees, then began to veer to the left in order to come out on the other side of the road.
A loud rumble of thunder shifted the air. The sound settled between Wes’s shoulder blades like a blow to the back. He shook off the crawl of nerves in his belly and made himself focus on Ally.
Lean on me, she’d said. Lean on me. And he’d pushed her away. She had come out in this because of him. Because she had a gentle heart.
Wes had an enemy here. He didn’t know why, but he knew who it was. He could handle his own enemies, but he didn’t want them taking revenge on someone else. If Ally’s innocent visit had given Roland Storm the idea that hurting Ally would be a way to get to him, Wes had to stop him before the thought became deed.
Rain peppered down through the leaves, pelting him as he went. The sound brought back the memory of distant gunshots from an automatic weapon. Frustrated with himself for relating everything to a distant and ongoing war, he made himself focus. He kept his eyes to the ground, the trees and the brush through which he was passing, looking for broken limbs, a footprint protected by undergrowth—anything to prove his instincts had been right—but it was impossible to tell if anyone had been here. He was just about to give up when he saw a glint of metal half buried in the mud and leaves.
It was a key ring with car keys on it. He fiddled with it a couple of times and then dropped it in his pocket. Just because he found car keys across the road from his house, that wasn’t proof someone had been watching his place. There was no way to tell how long the keys had been here, or who they belonged to. Still, the keys were too shiny to have lain there long.
Then his focus shifted to Ally, and he began moving downhill, following the road while staying within the trees. Several times he thought he could hear the ATV in the distance, but there was too much wind and rain to be sure.
Just when he was at the point of believing he’d imagined the whole thing, he caught a flash of something dark moving through the trees ahead of him. He dropped into a crouching position and moved deeper into the trees.
From where he was standing, he could see the back of someone in a dark green parka with a hood attached. He couldn’t see a face, but he could tell it was a man, and from the way he was behaving, his presence was due to anything but an innocent stroll in the rain.
The man moved with an ungainly gait—his shoulders stooped, while his arms swung loosely at his sides. What made it even more obvious that he was up to no good was the way he kept moving from bush to bush, taking great care not to be seen.
Suddenly Wes heard the sound of an engine accelerating and knew it was Ally. Was she stuck? Had she driven that ATV into the ditch? Was she hurt? Forgetting about the stalker, he ran to the road for a better look. Then he saw her. Despite all she was doing to correct the motion, the ATV was sliding sideways in the mud. She was fighting for control while struggling to stay upright, and Wes mentally cursed himself a thousand times over for chasing her out of the house. A sane man would have insisted she wait until the storm had passed, but he hadn’t been sane in so long he’d forgotten how it went. He started to run after Ally just as the stalker suddenly appeared at the edge of the road about fifty yards ahead of him.
Wes saw him lift his hand, as if hailing Ally’s attention. When he began to run toward her, Wes panicked. He couldn’
t tell if the man was intent on saving her or attacking her.
A loud crash of thunder was followed by a shaft of lightning struck nearby. Wes winced, and had to fight the urge to throw himself to the ground and take cover.
“It’s not a bomb. It’s not a bomb,” he kept mumbling, while his teeth chattered and his fingers curled into fists.
The man was running all out now, drawing closer and closer to Ally, and Wes couldn’t seem to make himself move.
Then suddenly Ally had ridden out the slide and had the ATV under control. Steering it carefully around a deep set of ruts, she gave it some gas and sped down the hill at a steady pace.
As the distance between Ally and the man began to lengthen, Wes saw him trying to run faster; then he slipped and went facedown in the mud. By the time the man got up, Ally was nowhere in sight.
Satisfied that Ally was, for the moment, out of danger, Wes centered his attention on the man. He was getting up now, and even though Wes was too far away to hear what he was saying, he finally saw his face.
Just as he’d feared, it was Storm, and he was furious. Storm’s features were contorted in anger as words spewed from his lips. He was waving a fist in the air and then slapping it against his leg as he stumbled from the road into the trees. When Wes realized Storm was coming his way, he started to hide, then changed his mind.
Water squished in Roland’s socks and up the backs of his shoes with every step that he took. He was mud from head to toe, while, once again, he’d missed his chance with Ally. But he wasn’t giving up. He’d seen her first, and now that he’d discovered her true nature, he was through playing nice and waiting for a proper introduction.
Angrily, he wiped his muddy hands on the front of his jacket and, bowing his head against the rain, began the trek back to where he’d left his truck. He didn’t see the other man until he was directly in front of him. He stifled a gasp and wished he had a gun.
“You were following me,” Roland accused.
“You were following her.”
Roland frowned. He wasn’t a man who liked being on the defensive.
“Following who?” he said.
Suddenly there was a knife in the man’s hand, the same knife he remembered from their meeting the other night, and Roland was grateful for the rain soaking his clothes. It successfully hid the trail of warm urine running down his leg.
“Leave her alone,” Wes said.
It was the lack of emotion in the man’s voice that made Roland shiver.
“I wasn’t doing anything,” he spluttered, and took a slow step backward. “It’s a free country and—”
Wes shifted the switchblade from his left hand to his right, then back again.
“Stay away from her.”
Roland could hear the man talking, but his gaze was fixed on the water dripping off the end of the blade. Finally he made himself look into Holden’s face.
“Who are you?” Roland asked.
“If you so much as harm a hair on her head, I will make you disappear.”
Roland felt the warning as physically as if the words had been blows. He grunted in reflex and started moving backward.
“Who sent you up here to spy on me?”
“You heard what I said,” Wes said softly, then stepped aside and pointed up the hill. “Now get, before I change my mind.”
Roland started running and never looked back. Even after he’d reached his truck and locked himself inside the cab, he was still shaking. But when he reached in his pocket for the keys, he felt nothing but fabric.
“Shit, shit, shit.”
Frantically, he dug through every pocket in the raincoat, as well as his pants, but still came up empty.
He looked back the way he’d come, thought about that crazy man with a knife, and knew there was no way he was going looking for his keys, so he got out of the truck and started to run. When he finally got home, he took the extra key from under a rock near the door and locked himself in, then began to pace, trying to make sense of what had just happened.
The stranger’s presence was a threat to everything he held dear. The longer he paced, the angrier he became. He thought of the years of abuse he’d suffered at Lackey Laboratories, and then the years of frustration and failure before he’d perfected Triple H. Dooley Brown had been the first to threaten his discovery, and he’d had to deal with him accordingly. Now the stranger had come, threatening more than the crop. He was threatening Roland himself. The next time they met, Roland would be prepared.
As for Ally Monroe, Roland would deal with her, too, but all in good time. For now, Triple H had to take priority. On the next sunny day, Danny and Porter Monroe were to report for work. While they were harvesting, Roland was going to reconnect with the contacts he’d made from his days on the street. Once Triple H hit the pipeline, nothing would ever be the same.
When Ally finally pulled into the barn and parked the ATV, she was shaking. The ride down had been harrowing, but not as harrowing as coming face-to-face with Wes Holden in his home and being rebuffed. Her steps were dragging even more than usual as she walked to the end of the barn, unrolled the garden hose at the spigot and turned on the water. It seemed odd to be sheltered from rain and still be standing in water, but she needed to clean the mud from the four-wheeler before it dried. Porter wouldn’t mind that she’d used it, but he wouldn’t appreciate it being left in a filthy condition.
Once she finished, she covered it with a tarp, just as Porter always did, then turned the water on her feet and sluiced the worst of the mud from her jeans and shoes. After everything was finished and the hose rolled back up, she was reluctant to go back to the house.
When she’d been small, the barn had been her refuge. She’d played in the loft with the barn cats and made playhouses among the bales of hay. Her brothers would sneak cookies and cold bottles of pop up to her, despite her mother’s warnings that it would ruin her appetite. Back then, her world had been perfect.
Ally glanced up at the loft, then looked away. Like her dreams, those years were gone. The reality of life was that here in the mountains, she was a woman past her prime. It was likely she would never marry, but that didn’t seem quite as devastating as it once had. She’d grown accustomed to being alone. When a gust of wind blew rain in on her face, instead of stepping back, she walked out into the storm.
Wes watched Ally coming out of the barn. She walked with her head bowed and her steps dragging. Water was ankle-deep in the puddles, but she didn’t seem to notice. There was a defeated slump to her shoulders that he’d never seen before, and he hated himself for putting it there.
But there was a more urgent problem than her hurt feelings. He didn’t know what Roland Storm would have done if he’d caught up with Ally today, but he didn’t think it would have been good. He’d looked into Storm’s eyes. He’d seen the twitch at the corner of his mouth. The man was unstable.
Then Wes sighed. That was a case of the pot calling the kettle black. He wasn’t exactly Cool Hand Luke himself. Besides that, when he’d walked away from his stepbrother’s apartment, the last thing he had wanted was to get involved. He didn’t want to care. He didn’t want responsibility. Most of the time he hadn’t even been too crazy about taking his next breath. But all of that had changed because of a woman who had given him shelter.
Wes saw her stumble, but then she caught herself before she fell. When she got to the back door, she left her poncho and her shoes on the porch. It wasn’t until she shut the door that Wes finally breathed easy.
When he saw the lights come on, he knew she was safe, but only for the moment. He couldn’t just walk away in good conscience without warning her about Storm. He wouldn’t always be around as he had been this time, and from what he could tell, Ally was usually alone all day. It made her a perfect target for a man with no good on his mind.
Bracing himself for the confrontation, he headed for the back door, then knocked.
Ally was stripping out of her wet clothes when she heard footstep
s on the back porch. Startled, she reached for one of her father’s clean shirts from the laundry she’d folded earlier and was putting it on when someone knocked. The hem of the shirt brushed the tops of her knees, leaving her legs bare, but she was covered, and that was all that mattered.
When she peeked around the corner and saw Wes standing on the porch, her heart skipped a beat. She pulled the shirt a little tighter across her breasts, then called out through the door, “What do you want?”
“It’s me, Wes. I need to talk to you,” he said.
“You shouldn’t have come out in this weather in your condition,” Ally said.
“I’m suffering from a lack of good sense, not a fever,” he fired back.
Ally grinned in spite of herself and opened the door.
Taken aback by her bare legs and feet, Wes found himself staring, unwilling to remove the only obstacle between them, which was the screen door.
“Well…are you coming in or not?” Ally asked.
Wes gritted his teeth and opened the door.
“I’m getting water on your floor.”
She looked down at the growing puddle in which he was standing, and smiled.
“Yes, you are.”
Wes almost smiled back.
“Sorry.”
“I should hope so,” Ally said. “So I am assuming you have a good reason for coming down to my house in this rain…since you pretty much ran me out of yours.”
Water was dripping from the heavy braid in her hair, dampening the shirt just enough that it was molding itself to her body. The faint hint of soft, womanly curves made him ache—made him yearn to get lost in a sweet woman’s arms. But as soon as he thought it, he felt guilty again, as if he’d betrayed Margie—or, at the least, her memory. Because he was pissed off at himself, he blurted out the reason why he’d come without pretext.
“Do you know Roland Storm?”
The change of subject was abrupt, but she went along with it just the same.
“Yes…well, not really, but I know who he is. My brothers are going to work for him soon.”
