A Stranger on Her Doorstep

by Julie Miller

  But there was something about running her hands along the man’s warm, muscular calves and thighs, then cupping the back pockets of his jeans to find he carried no wallet with identification on him, which spoke to something purely female and purposefully forgotten deep inside her. Lord, she hadn’t touched a man with anything other than a handshake since... She squeezed her eyes shut as a phantom pain sliced across her cheek. “Damn it, Ava. Stay in the moment.”

  Maxie moved to sit beside her, leaning against her and nearly toppling her over. Ava laughed before the tears could take hold and hugged her arms around her furry caretaker’s neck. “I’ll be okay, girl. Come on. Let’s turn this guy over.”

  Not that she needed the help, but it reminded Ava she wasn’t truly alone when the big dog propped a paw on the man’s uninjured arm and seemed to pull him with Ava off the top step until he lay flat on his back on the porch. Then her curious dog lowered her head and sniffed the stranger, nuzzling his neck with her cold, wet nose before slurping her tongue across his abraded jawline. “Maxie!” she chided, nudging the dog back to a more sanitary distance.

  But the raspy stroke of the dog’s tongue roused the man a little. A deep-pitched moan vibrated in his throat and he repeated the last word he’d heard in a husky whisper. “Maxie...”

  “Mister? Can you tell me your name?” It was then that she realized that her truck was the only vehicle parked in the driveway. Maxie hadn’t alerted to a car driving up. The dog had heard his footsteps on the gravel and jumped up, barking an alarm while Ava pulled her shotgun from the gun safe. “How did you get here? How did you get hurt?”

  It wasn’t hard to assess his injuries from this angle. Blood in a beard that was longer than the hair on his head. Scrapes and bruises along almost every sharp angle of his face and body—knuckles, elbows, knees. He’d taken a bad fall—or several of them. The hole in his shoulder was from a bullet. She picked up the wad of sleeve material he’d torn from his shirt and gently wiped the blood from his arm, giving her a clearer look at the tattoo he bore. An eagle sitting atop a globe with an anchor behind it. The words Semper Fi and numbers she assumed were a significant date circled the hollow of sinewed skin beneath the jut of his shoulder muscle. Muscles. Lots of muscles. He was big and built like a prizefighter...or a medieval swordsman. This man had been trained for battle. Despite her own self-defense instruction, if this guy were more cognizant, he’d easily be able to overpower her.

  Just imagining the possibility of their positions being reversed, with her at his mercy and him armed and towering over her, sent a chill rippling down her spine. She rocked back onto her heels, needing to put some distance between them and get her head right again. “Come on, Ava. You’ve got Willow Storm’s spirit running through your veins. You can handle this.”

  “Willow Storm—” he echoed, never opening his eyes “—can handle anything.”

  “What?” He wasn’t exactly parroting her words this time, but he wasn’t making sense, either. Ava squeezed the man’s chin, carefully avoiding the scrape there, and turned his undeniably masculine face to hers. “Are you awake or not? Sergeant? Lieutenant?”

  Mr. Dying on Her Front Doorstep.

  She couldn’t let that happen.

  “Need medic...call team for extraction...”

  “Extraction?” Oh, wow, was this guy out of it. “You have a team around here?” Of course not. Even if he were part of a National Guard unit starting their weekend drill, they wouldn’t be on maneuvers in blue jeans and dress shirts. Would they? And though neatly trimmed, that beard would be the first thing to go, right? This man was alone, and he was in trouble. She’d been too suspicious to believe his plea for help. Now she hoped she hadn’t waited too long to act.

  Ava tossed the soiled cloth to the ground and uncurled her legs to dash inside the cabin to retrieve clean towels and a first-aid kit. When she returned and knelt beside him again, she could see that the wound had reopened without the cotton material he’d packed it with if, indeed, it had ever stopped bleeding. And that puffy bruise and split in his scalp above his ear, along with the various scrapes she spotted on his hands, arms, face and through a tear in the knee of his jeans, indicated he’d been in an accident and had lost enough blood to pass out. Unless floating in and out of consciousness had something to do with the wound on his head?

  She folded a towel and pressed it against the wound in his shoulder. He caught his bottom lip between his teeth and moaned at the pressure, the only signs that he was aware of her ministrations as she unrolled a ribbon of gauze and lifted his arm to tie the towel into place. Then she bent his arm and fitted him with a sling made from a dish towel. Since she hadn’t seen an exit wound, that meant the bullet was probably still in him. She needed to immobilize the injury as best she could to prevent the projectile from traveling through his body.

  By the time she was done, he was breathing more deeply. That was a good sign, right? But he still wasn’t opening his eyes and responding to her in any way that indicated he was aware of his surroundings and what she was doing.

  Ava gently dabbed at the wound in his scalp, relieved to see that there was no blood coming from his ear, a sign of a skull fracture. She wasn’t a doctor, but she’d had basic first-aid training, had endured numerous injuries of her own and was highly suspicious of a concussion. Instead of applying any more pressure to the swelling, she lightly covered it with a gauze pad and activated a chemical ice pack that she placed against the injury, loosely wrapping a towel around his head to keep it in place.

  “Come on, mister. I need you to wake up and tell me your name.” A cursory search of the pockets of his shirt and the front of his jeans revealed the only clue she had to the man’s identity. He had no cell phone with a list of contacts or screen name, but she pulled a ring of keys from his jeans and found a stainless-steel key ring with the same Marine Corps emblem and the initials L.B. etched into the polished surface. “L.B.,” she read aloud. “L.B.? Hey, L.B.?” she called to him. But clearly it wasn’t a nickname he answered to. “Open your eyes, Sergeant? Colonel?” She had no clue what rank a man who appeared to be in his late thirties or early forties would be. But the fact he was military explained the gun and the buzz cut of hair, the mumblings about an extraction team and his ability to hike to her place from wherever the shooting event had occurred. With the mountain and trees reflecting sound for miles, she would have heard shots fired if they’d been anywhere close to her cabin. How much ground had this guy covered?

  “Listen up, Marine.” She tried another tactic to get a lucid response. “I need your name, rank and serial number.” That didn’t work, either. She exhaled a frustrated breath, studying the key chain for some other clue that refused to reveal itself before stuffing it back into his pocket. “With my luck, you’re probably some Larkin Bonecrusher wannabe.”

  He moaned again. “Bonecrusher...”

  “I need you to do more than repeat everything I say.”

  Was that a nod? The slight movement of his head could have been something else, but there was no mistaking the lines deepening beside his eyes as he squeezed them tight against a new wave of pain. “The Bonecrusher Chronicles,” he spat out, fighting to articulate every syllable. “Good books...”

  “You’ve read my books? Those books?” she hastily corrected.

  He was finally communicating in a way that made sense, and it was on the one topic she didn’t dare talk about.

  But even with an addled brain, he hadn’t missed the slip she’d made. “You? You write Bonecrusher...? Sweet. When’s the next book...? Why so long...?”

  She went back to work, finding scissors in the first-aid kit and cutting away the denim around the cut on his knee and cleaning it. “That’s right. You think I’m the lady who writes the books. You found me. It’s been two years since the last release and it ended on a cliffhanger between the rebels and the Fey alliance. You want Larkin and Willow to h
ave sex. You want Maximillia to find a mate, so the dragon line continues. You want me to kill off Lord Zeville because nobody likes the new villain.” Ava worked in sharp, sure strokes as sarcasm leaked into her tone. About the same time she realized he would need stitches in his leg and regretted her less than gentle touch, she realized that the man’s eyes had opened in slits, and he was watching her. Lousy timing. Of course, he’d focus in at just the time she was revealing more than she should. Ava ignored his assessing study of her and concentrated on bandaging the cut. “I can’t make any of that happen for you. You’ve wasted your time coming out here. You’ve got the wrong woman.”

  “Good books. Buddy put me on to them...last deployment... Willow’s hot... Series got me through rehab... Wait.” His eyes opened wide and he pushed himself up. “You write the books?” But he’d sat up too fast. The color quickly drained from his face. His arms buckled and he swayed.

  “Whoa, mister.” Ava moved quickly to slide her arms beneath him and catch his shoulders before he struck his head again. “Easy.” His head rolled onto her shoulder and his nose nuzzled her neck beneath the collar of her shirt. Suddenly, she had a lapful of man collapsed against her.

  One thousand one. One thousand two. One thousand three. Why wasn’t she pushing him away?

  He was heavier than Maxie’s cuddles, but the contact was completely different from the dog’s soothing comfort. The shoulder-to-chest contact and scrape of his beard against her neck and collarbone wasn’t soothing, but it wasn’t completely horrible, either. The urge to shove aside his unexpected touch didn’t immediately spike through her, and that should have alarmed her. He smelled of musk and heat from his ordeal, and of something spicy and uniquely male as his short, spiky hair tickled the underside of her jaw. Deployment? Rehab? She smoothed a comforting hand across his clammy forehead and savored the unfamiliar assault on her senses. “What am I going to do with you?”

  What should she do? Call the sheriff’s office? Sheriff Brandon Stout had been one of her childhood friends, a local boy who’d grown up in the area. They’d reconnected every summer when she’d visited, maturing from kids to teenagers. Brandon had been her first kiss during that last summer before she headed off to college at Northwestern. Even then, she’d sensed he’d wanted something more from her, but she had college degrees to earn and had wanted to travel the world and extend her adventures beyond the realm of Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains and the Chicago suburbs. She’d made it to forty-two states, ten countries and even the fictional world of Stormhaven before the night she’d been taken from the parking lot outside her campus office and everything had changed. Now she was back in Wyoming, and she knew Brandon would be more than happy if she called and asked him to do her the favor of removing this man from her property.

  But she didn’t want Brandon to think she wanted something more. She didn’t want him to think he was welcome to drop by whenever he wanted. He’d see a phone call from her as an invitation to take their relationship to the next level—to be something more than a friend to her. She needed a friend far more than she needed something more. And what she desired more than anything was to be left alone.

  Because she couldn’t make a mistake then. She couldn’t be hurt.

  Should she call the volunteer fire department? They’d descend en masse from all corners of the county. She hated crowds of people—there were too many possible threats to keep an eye on.

  Maybe she could tell this man to take a hike. Keep the towels, bandages and ice pack. But he was in no shape to send him on his way by himself. And as damaged as she was inside, life had made her fearful, not cruel. She couldn’t send an injured man out into the woods on his own to possibly die.

  As always, she looked to the clarity and reassurance of the dark, soulful eyes she trusted more than any other. “Maxie, girl—you know what we have to do.” The dog tilted her head in that responsive way that made Ava imagine the dog understood what she was saying to her.

  She’d already made her scheduled trip into town.

  But the thought of this man dying in her arms was even less appealing than facing the friendly people of Pole Axe for a second time this week.

  So she scooted out from beneath the man’s weight and laid him on the porch before gathering the first-aid supplies and climbing to her feet.

  The last thing she needed was an entire platoon of weekend warriors here, looking for their missing buddy—or the sheriff’s department and state police swarming the area for a crime scene and asking her questions about a gunshot victim.

  Dumping the first-aid supplies and soiled bandages in the kitchen, she pulled a spare blanket from the linen closet, looped the long strap of her bag with her keys and wallet over her neck and shoulder, grabbed the shotgun from inside the door and locked the cabin.

  “Maxie? Let’s go, girl. Up.” Ava marched to her truck and opened the door for the big dog to jump up onto the bench seat. Then she secured the gun in the rack in the back window and turned to find her mystery man had pulled himself up to a sitting position and was leaning heavily against one of the giant ceramic flowerpots at the edge of the porch.

  “Maxie’s ze dragon in your books...” His eyes were open in slits against the afternoon sun as he nodded toward the dog. “Better ’n a tank for backup...”

  Ava hurried back to kneel on the stair in front of him, checking the bandages to make sure they were still in place. “She’s not a dragon. That’s my dog, Maxie.”

  “Maximillia Madrona Draconella Reine. Queen Mother of the Dragons.”

  Yep. He’d read the books, all right. “Come on, Larkin. Can you stand if I help you?”

  “I want a pet dragon.” He straightened as she sat beside him and draped his uninjured arm over her shoulders, holding tight to his hand and circling her other arm around his waist.

  Ava grunted as she pushed to her feet, pulling him up with her. “Maximillia’s not a pet. She’s a comrade in arms. Part of the team.”

  He leaned his hip against the railing, gritting his teeth and breathing through his obvious pain. “Dog or the dragon...?”

  The man couldn’t remember his name. Why couldn’t he forget her alter ego?

  “Lean on me,” she ordered, bracing her legs to take his full weight. “We’re going to walk over to my truck, okay?”

  He nodded and dropped his foot onto the next step with her before sitting back against the railing. “Where’s the rest of my team? Did they make it back to the base?”

  Ava tugged at his waist, hooking her fingers around his belt to keep him upright and moving with her. She couldn’t be rescuing a welterweight? Still, while she wasn’t exactly an Amazon, she wasn’t a petite woman, either. And ever since the assault, she’d worked hard to get herself into fighting shape and stay that way. She could do this. With a little coaxing. “Right now, I’m your team. But you’re too big for me to carry, and I don’t want to drag you, in case it reopens your shoulder wound.”

  “Willow, Larkin and Maxie, off on a quest. Jus’ like the books.” She felt his chest expand against her and his grip tighten on her shoulder as he steeled himself against the pain and dizziness. She had to admire his sheer will and determination as he made it down the stairs and around to the passenger side of the truck with her. “You got a wizard and a thief hidden somewhere? Didn’t know I’d stumbled into Stormhaven.”

  Shaking her head at his refusal to let the story elements of her books go, she propped him against the truck while she opened the door. “You’re delirious.”

  Shielding his head, she got him inside the truck and covered him with the blanket. Ava jogged around the hood and climbed in behind the wheel to start the engine, secure in the knowledge that ninety-five pounds of Great Pyrenees sat between her and the man who had closed his eyes and leaned back against the corner of the seat. She pressed on the accelerator, speeding down the drive as fast as she dared on the gravel.


  She turned onto the asphalt road that led past a line of summer homes and rental cabins nestled in the trees against the side of the mountain. Since they were all currently occupied, the fact that he hadn’t stumbled onto one of their front porches meant he had come through the wilderness, not from the direction of civilization or even the main highway. But there was nothing in that direction for miles. He certainly wasn’t dressed for mountain climbing. Even the dress shirt and what had once been nice jeans weren’t what people wore to go hiking unless they were novices. And she had a feeling, judging by that fit, muscular body and those silvery-green eyes that saw more than someone who was dazed and confused should, that this guy wasn’t a novice at much of anything.

  But he was awfully quiet. Maybe she’d better keep him talking until she got to the clinic and handed him off to the emergency staff. “Hey, mister. You awake over there?”

  He was awake.

  When she reached the two-lane highway that would take them down the mountain into Pole Axe, she stopped for a black SUV that was moving at a touristy pace up the mountain toward a scenic overlook above the next ridge. The man flinched, groaning at the sudden movement, and hunkered down beneath the blanket.

  “Why did you do that?” Ava turned left and followed the blacktop that hugged the curves of the granite slopes, anxious to get the man to the hospital and relieve her conscience of the burden of caring for him. It took him a couple of minutes to sit up straight and lean back against the headrest again.

  “I’m not sure.” His slitted eyes were studying the sideview mirror. Ava glanced in the rearview mirror and watched the black vehicle disappear around the bend in the road before he continued. “Something about a black SUV. I wrecked my car.”

  That explained the blow to the head. Possibly the other cuts and scrapes, depending on how the accident happened. “How do you explain the bullet wound?”