A Stranger on Her Doorstep

by Julie Miller

  A shadow fell over him again. He heard the unmistakable sound of a bullet being loaded into a chamber.

  “You’re awake?” His would-be killer hesitated. Yeah. It was a hell of a thing to look a man in the eye when you pulled the trigger.

  The man squatted beside him and pressed two thick fingers to his neck. Then he muttered a curse at determining he hadn’t cooperated by dying for him. “Nothing personal, Captain. Orders are orders.”

  The man pushed to his feet and took aim.

  Option B.

  Luke rolled. He bet every heartbeat left in him that he wasn’t plunging to his death as he slipped beneath the guardrail and tumbled off the overhang into the abyss.

  The man with the gun swore.

  He heard the crack of a gunshot, felt a burning hot poker drill through his shoulder. And then he was falling.

  He dropped a good ten feet until he crashed into the first ledge. But loose gravel and his momentum carried him over the edge, and he hit another rocky outcropping, jarring a fresh wave of pain through his side. He instinctively snatched at a sapling growing out of a fissure between the rocks, then tall grass, flowers, rocks, anything he could claw his grip into.

  He heard more bullets.

  The answering whiff of air and sharp pings of the tiny missiles hitting a rock or tree or dirt created a cacophonous symphony that chased his crazy fall down the mountain.

  By the time he slammed to a stop near a copse of trees at the bottom of the ravine, his battered body and jumbled brain made him think he should be dead.

  He prayed the man with the gun on the road above him thought the same.

  * * *

  HE’D BEEN RUNNING for hours.

  Well, running was a relative term, considering how often he’d stumbled or fallen. But he’d kept moving. He hoped to hell it hadn’t been in circles. It was hard to get his bearings with all these trees and no compass. Yet even with throbbing gelatin for a brain, he knew enough to keep going downhill. Away from the bullets. Away from the option of winding up dead. He’d followed the current of the creek, had even walked through the icy, rushing water itself for half a mile or so to avoid leaving footsteps and any scent that could be tracked, in case whoever was after him had dogs.

  At least the cold water had stimulated his senses and kept him conscious when every weary bone in his body begged him to lie down and sleep. He’d torn up the button-down shirt he’d been wearing to tie off a bandage for the hole in his shoulder. He’d stemmed the bleeding for a little while, but now his shirt was soaked and the blood was trickling down his arm again, leaving a distinct trail of red droplets for anyone who had the skills to track him through the trees, scrubby grass and exposed gray rock of the mountain. He hoped he hadn’t attracted the attention of some bear or mountain lion—they’d be able to follow the blood trail, too.

  He’d sustained an injury to his head. Although his hair was cropped close to his scalp, it was matted with blood. But without a mirror or proper med kit, he had no way of assessing or treating the wound.

  He could feel cognition slipping away as steadily as his life’s blood was ebbing from his body. Only his training was keeping him alive.

  Imminent threat. Behind enemy lines. Keep moving.

  Why was he running? How did he get hurt? Was he being followed?

  He’d never heard any footsteps or vehicle pursuing him. Only a serious climber or someone willing to break his neck and fall like he had could make that descent quickly. He’d avoided anything that resembled a road or even a hiking path, so trailing him in a vehicle was next to impossible. Why did he think he was being chased? Someone tried to kill him. Someone nearly succeeded.

  Who was the enemy?

  Keep moving.

  He caught the toe of his boot on a rock and stumbled. He paid dearly for the instinct to catch himself. Pain ripped through his wounded shoulder and bum knee, and his lungs seized up in his chest.

  Medic. He needed to reach a medic.

  If he didn’t get help, he would be dead soon. He rolled onto his back and gazed up at the dark green of pine needles and the lighter green of deciduous leaves arching high over his head. Trees like that didn’t grow in the sand. And he was wearing jeans, not a uniform. He mentally shook off his confused thoughts. “You’re stateside, Captain. You’re out of the Corps.”

  Captain. The Corps. That meant he was a Marine.

  That didn’t mean he knew where he was in the good ol’ US of A.

  He had a feeling there was a lot he didn’t know.

  He squeezed his eyes shut against the dapples of light dancing through the trees. Every now and then, the lights hit his retinas straight-on, piercing his brain like shrapnel. He’d taken a hard blow to the head. He fought the urge to surrender to his fatigue or succumb to the dizziness that made him want to puke.

  So he dragged himself to his feet and kept moving.

  Find help. Survive.

  He felt the ground change beneath his feet before he recognized the clearing in the trees. The grass, dirt and pine needles gave way to the crunch of tiny rocks beneath his boots. The uneven terrain became a relatively flat surface. A gravel road. No, a driveway.

  Driveways led to houses or businesses.

  Driveways led to help.

  The gravel was evenly distributed and there were no ruts in the road, making him think it hadn’t been used very often. He’d made a pretty fair assessment of how isolated this place was long before he crested a rise and saw the two-story log cabin with an attached garage and a heavy-duty pickup truck parked out front.

  The porch ran the width of the house, and there were big pots of colorful flowers on either side of the steps he tripped up. He heard a dog’s loud, deep barking before he ever reached the front door and knocked.

  Maybe he should rethink this. Guard dog? Sounded like a big one with that booming voice. Unknown location? What if he’d circled back to the very doorstep he’d been running from?

  He swiped his palm across the bristly buzz cut of hair on his head and came away with blood on his fingers, making the desperate decision for him. He braced that bloody hand against the doorjamb, falling weakly against it before pounding the door with his fist again.

  The dog’s bark vibrated the door beneath his hand. It definitely didn’t sound friendly. But the grain of the wood beneath his hand was spinning into bizarre patterns, and he wasn’t sure if it was his eyes or his thoughts that couldn’t keep things straight anymore.

  He heard a chain scrape across the inside of the door. A dead bolt flipped open. There was a sharp, sotto voce command and the dog fell silent a split second before the door swung open.

  “Sorry to bother you, but...”

  He stared into the twin barrels of an over-under shotgun.

  The dog was a big, white furry thing with black markings around its eyes and muzzle. But the dog wasn’t what captured his attention. He was caught by a pair of blue eyes, dark like cobalt and twilight skies and every hushed, intriguing fantasy he’d ever had about a woman.

  “I don’t like surprise visitors. What do you want?” She was a little younger than him, probably in her thirties, but there was no mistaking that she had the advantage here.

  “I’m wounded. Need help. Can you call an ambulance?”

  “Is this some kind of joke? Who are you?”

  “My blood and your shotgun are a joke?” Who had a sick sense of humor like that?

  “How do I know that blood is real?”

  He had no answer for that.

  She shook her head slowly from side to side, stirring the long cascade of coffee-colored hair that hung in a loose ponytail over one shoulder and revealing the long, thin scar that curved from her cheek to her jaw. If the gun wasn’t evidence enough, he could see that this woman was a warrior. “You run along. I don’t sign books for desperate fans who trespa
ss on my property. And I won’t reward your cleverness or diligence in tracking me down by writing you into one of my stories.”

  Her words made no sense. He must have taken a really hard blow to the head. “What are you talking about?”

  “Call 9-1-1 yourself. Don’t bother me again.”

  He was leaning heavily on his good shoulder now, the sturdiness of the house about the only thing holding him up. “No phone,” he managed to eke out. “Please. I need...sanctuary. Place to rest...to think...”

  She shook her head, but the gun never wavered. “The last time a stranger asked for my help...”

  He saw the muscle of uncertainty twitching in her jaw, the fear and compassion warring in her expression. Yet he knew the moment her eyes hardened like dark ice that she’d made the decision not to help him.

  He pushed away from the door, willed his legs to hold him upright, even though that made him a good six inches taller than her and probably looked like he was trying to threaten her. “I fell down the mountain, lady. I’ve been shot,” he argued. There was more to tell her, but he couldn’t find the words. “I swear I won’t hurt you.”

  “I’ve heard that before, too.” That’s when he saw the other scars. Through the spinning haze of his vision, he spotted the matching puckers of healed skin on each hand. There was another at the vee of her tank top beneath the long-sleeved blouse she wore. He recognized marks like that. She’d been tortured. Some time ago, because every mark had healed, and he glimpsed the patch of what had been a skin graft along the underside of her arm, beneath the cuff of her rolled-up sleeve.

  Fists of anger and compassion squeezed around his heart at the suffering she had endured. “Whatever happened to you, I won’t—”

  “Town’s that way.” She inclined her head to the left. “They’ve got a clinic.” With the shotgun still aimed at him, she tossed that beautiful ponytail behind her back and retreated a step. “Maxie, heel.”

  The dog retreated with her and she closed the door in his face.

  The decisive click of the dead bolt and the scrape of the chain locking him out sent the clear message that he wasn’t finding refuge here.

  When he didn’t immediately leave, she shouted through the door. “I’ll call the sheriff if you don’t go.”

  Yes. Do that. The sheriff can help me. He needed to say the words, but his body was shutting down. His brain was refusing to work.

  If he were one hundred percent, he could bust down the door and overpower the woman. But he was closer to ten percent, probably less than that, and the pellets from that shotgun would be embedded in his chest before he could even break through a window, much less get to her phone.

  He turned, looking for the next option, but the forested mountainside swirled into a miasma of greens and grays. His knees buckled and the world faded away as he collapsed onto the porch.

  Chapter Two

  Ava cringed at the thud from the other side of the locked door. “Don’t do that. Do not need my help.”

  She peeked through the window beside the door and saw dusty, grass-stained jeans and a broad back sprawled across the edge of her porch and top step. He looked different from this angle, unexpectedly vulnerable and deceptively harmless without the stern line of his bearded jaw and piercing silvery-green eyes. A bloodstained wad of material had fallen loose from beneath the shoulder seam of his missing sleeve. Trickles of blood mingled with lines and curves of an intricate tattoo adorning his upper arm and circling the firm muscles of his biceps and triceps. More blood seeped from a gash and goose egg above his left ear, soaking into the collar of his blue shirt. With trembling hands, Ava hugged the shotgun to her chest and pressed her back against the door, turning away from the man on her doorstep. “Oh, damn. He’s really hurt.”

  Or was this a really convincing charade?

  She’d fallen for that once before. And it had nearly cost her everything.

  A blow to the head. Waking up blindfolded and cold. Strapped to a wooden chair that left splinters in her back and thighs because she was wearing nothing more than her bra and panties. But that discomfort was only the beginning of her pain.

  Just as panicked thoughts clouded her vision, she felt a soft bump against her hip and a cold nose nuzzling her hand where she held the shotgun. Ava blinked away the traumatic memories that threatened to overwhelm her and looked down into the big white dog’s steady black eyes. Ava dropped her hand from the butt of her shotgun to smooth her palm across Maxie’s warm head and bury her fingers in the dog’s thick white-and-black coat.

  “Good girl, Maxie.” Although she’d gotten the Great Pyrenees as a guard dog to give her advance warning of anyone coming within shouting distance of her isolated cabin, the gentle giant had turned out to be a natural therapy dog. More than keeping Ava company while she avoided the world that had nearly killed her, Maximillia Madrona Draconella Reine—named after the lead dragon character in the books she wrote, and answering to the more practical Maxie—had sensed, even as a puppy, when Ava’s post-traumatic stress was kicking in and the waking nightmares were filling her head. The big, furry caretaker had learned to touch Ava, even crawl into bed and lie down beside her if necessary, to offer strength and comfort—a warm body to cling to and dark eyes or a gentle touch to focus on whenever the panic attacks threatened, or the flashbacks dragged her into the terrors from her past. With Maxie at her side, Ava had learned to handle the simple intricacies of human interaction again—when it was on her terms and in small, planned doses.

  Surprise visits from dangerous-looking men who were bleeding on her front porch hadn’t been checked off her list of encounters she was comfortable with yet. After the weekend two years earlier that had changed her face, her life and her ability to trust, she might never be comfortable with things she couldn’t control.

  Weekly check-ins with her online therapist assured her she was improving, that she was more than capable of returning to normal, given enough time. Dr. Foster had promised Ava that trusting her own instincts was the first step to learning to trust others again. She trusted Maxie. She trusted her therapist. She trusted her editor and agent in New York, so long as she didn’t have to travel there to see them in person. She trusted that leaving Chicago and moving to her late grandparents’ isolated cabin in the mountains near Pole Axe, Wyoming, where she’d spent the summers of her childhood was the right decision for her. Here she could find the space and healing surroundings she needed. She’d found comfort and security in the dog by her side. She’d found confidence in the weapons training and self-defense courses she’d taken. And with every cautious foray into town, she’d reconnected with old friends and was on her way to making new ones. Given enough time, she’d learn to interact with the real world as easily as she did the fictional world of fantasy creatures and noble quests that she wrote about. She hoped.

  Ava concentrated on the soft texture of Maxie’s fur beneath her fingers and inhaled deeply. She could do this. Here in Wyoming she was the anonymous Ava Wallace, big-city transplant turned small-town girl who’d inherited her grandparents’ cabin. Despite her quiet, cautious life, she was accepted in Pole Axe because she was Jim and Myrna Wallace’s granddaughter, not because she was A. L. Baines, the New York Times bestselling author who’d disappeared from the limelight at the peak of her success. Here, she wasn’t the obsession of a depraved kidnapper. She could answer her front door to help a neighbor, or even a tall, desperate stranger with silvery-green eyes and intertwining tattoos she was far too curious to identify.

  Every survival instinct that made her a well-armed recluse, who lived as far off the grid as her necessary links to technology allowed, warred with her innate compassion. She knew better than most what it was like to be desperately hurt and at the mercy of another. The old Ava wouldn’t have hesitated. But caring had gotten her into trouble before. Compassion had nearly gotten her killed. She rubbed her cheek against the gun’s cool steel ba
rrel before clutching it in a firm grip once more. “Damn it, Maxie, we have to help him.”

  A soft, deep woof backed up her resolute vow to help the man outside.

  “This better not be a trick.” Ava unhooked the chain and dead bolt and opened the door, urging Maxie out ahead of her. Tucking the butt of the gun against her shoulder, she kept it aimed at the intruder’s back as she crossed the wood planks of the porch. Although she wielded a gun instead of a bow and arrow, she could put on a tough-chick facade like Willow Storm, the heroine in her books. Ava nudged her toe against the man’s boot, as far away from the blood and potentially grabbing hands as she could get. “Hey, mister? Are you dead?”

  Right. Because he’d answer that question with a yes if he was. With no reply to either her voice or her boot, Ava exhaled a resolute breath and propped the shotgun just inside the door, beyond the man’s reach if he came to. Maxie sat with curious eyes near the man’s head, panting, as Ava knelt beside him and checked for hidden weapons and identification, a hard-earned skill she wished she’d known two years earlier.

  Starting at his leather boots, she dipped her fingers inside. No hidden knife. She found an ankle holster with a short-nosed Springfield Armory pistol, which she removed. After discovering it was loaded, but that there was no bullet in the chamber, she tucked the weapon into the back of her jeans. Unless she squeezed the trigger, she knew the safety was engaged. Teaching literature and composition at a small college in Chicago, and attending Renaissance fairs and Comicons to get ideas to make up spells and to portray her fictional costumes and weaponry with accuracy in her books, she never would have expected that she’d become an expert in modern guns, knives and homemade torture devices. Her reaction to the stranger’s weapon was clinical—identify its potential threat, neutralize it, move on to the next task. Allowing herself the luxury of feeling shock or fear would only delay her reaction in ensuring her own safety. That sort of discipline had been a hard lesson to learn. Now those routine assessments were second nature to her. It was the only way she could get through personal encounters anymore.