“You can’t hide out forever,” Shane murmured, folding Gigi gently into his arms and rocking her.

She buried her face in the side of his neck. He smelled clean and strong.

“I don’t want to,” she said. “I don’t want to live looking over my shoulder anymore, wondering if someone is behind me with a gun, but I don’t ever want to go back to being the woman I was.”

When her breath had steadied, she asked, “So what do we do now?”

He pulled his head back until he could look at her. “Now we’re going to fix it so that you can be whoever the hell you want to be.”

His smile warmed her from the inside out. She felt her own lips curve in answer. A few more days—that was probably all they had left together.

So why did she feel like he’d just promised her forever?

Dear Reader,

Once again, Silhouette Intimate Moments has rounded up six top-notch romances for your reading pleasure, starting with the finale of Ruth Langan’s fabulous new trilogy. The Wildes of Wyoming— Ace takes the last of the Wilde men and matches him with a pool-playing spitfire who turns out to be just the right woman to fill his bed—and his heart.

Linda Turner, a perennial reader favorite, continues THOSE MARRYING MCBRIDES! with The Best Man, the story of sister Merry McBride’s discovery that love is not always found where you expect it. Award-winning Ruth Wind’s Beautiful Stranger features a heroine who was once an ugly duckling but is now the swan who wins the heart of a rugged “prince.” Readers have been enjoying Sally Tyler Hayes’ suspenseful tales of the men and women of DIVISION ONE, and Her Secret Guardian will not disappoint in its complex plot and emotional power. Christine Michels takes readers Undercover with the Enemy, and Vickie Taylor presents The Lawman’s Last Stand, to round out this month’s wonderful reading choices.

And don’t miss a single Intimate Moments novel for the next three months, when the line takes center stage as part of the Silhouette 20th Anniversary celebration. Sharon Sala leads off A YEAR OF LOVING DANGEROUSLY, a new in-line continuity, in July; August brings the long-awaited reappearance of Linda Howard—and hero Chance Mackenzie—in A Game of Chance; and in September we reprise 36 HOURS, our successful freestanding continuity, in the Intimate Moments line. And that’s only a small taste of what lies ahead, so be here this month and every month, when Silhouette Intimate Moments proves that love and excitement go best when they’re hand in hand.

Leslie J. Wainger

Executive Senior Editor

The Lawman’s Last Stand
Vickie Taylor

www.millsandboon.co.uk

VICKIE TAYLOR

has always loved books—the way they look, the way they feel and most especially the way the stories inside them bring whole new worlds to life. She views her recent transition from reading to writing books as a natural extension of this longtime love. Vickie lives in Aubrey, Texas, a small town dubbed “The Heart of Horse Country,” where, in addition to writing romance novels, she raises American Quarter Horses.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Epilogue

Chapter 1

Fight, or die.

The unspoken omen pierced the heavy cloak of semiconsciousness clouding her mind the way a foghorn pierced a misty sea. It surrounded her. Reverberated inside her. Rallied her senses to consciousness.

She didn’t want to die.

Forcing her sluggish eyelids to part, she found herself alone in the cold and the dark. Her first cognizance of where she was and how she’d gotten there came from the soft ping of ice crystals against glass. The windshield. The storm. The accident.

Or was it an accident?

Lying lengthwise across the seat of her old pickup, the woman the people of Pine Valley, Utah, knew as Gigi McCowan lifted her cheek from the frigid vinyl, uncurled fingers stiff from the cold, and probed her aching forehead. Wincing at the lump she found above her right temple, she pulled her hand away. Her aching head would have to wait, as would her throbbing knee. At the moment she had other priorities—like staying alive.

Outside, the wind that had howled earlier, driving a late winter storm before it, had diminished to a soft weeping. The creak of brittle branches added to its lament.

A footstep sounded somewhere above her, at the top of the ravine maybe, the light crunch of a boot on frozen ground.

Her nerves jangled, instantly clearing her pain-shrouded mind. Her senses went on full alert. Soundlessly she reached down to the floorboard and wrapped her fingers around the smooth, cold handle of the twitch. A fitting weapon for a veterinarian, she thought—an instrument designed to cause pain. The twitch was a baseball bat with a noose tied through a hole in the thick end. By pinching a horse’s muzzle through the loop and twisting the bat until the rope bit into the tender flesh, she could coerce even the most agitated animal into standing still while she treated its wounds.

Sometimes you had to hurt them a little to make them better.

Tonight her motives weren’t so humanitarian. She just wanted to hurt the man in the blue Mercedes who had run her off the road. Hurt him before he hurt her.

She tightened her grip on the twitch. Despite the cold, her palms were sweating. Her breath clouded in front of her face the way the mist had hung over the mountain peaks that morning. The sight had made her heart swell, and despite the chill in the air, she’d taken her coffee out on the porch, settled down in a weathered Adirondack chair, and just sipped, and stared.

Dawn bloomed against a backdrop of violet-and-peach-pastel mist many a morning in this part of Utah. Color Country, the locals called it. Paradise was a better word, to her mind. That was why she’d stayed so long. Too long. She’d fallen in love with the forested hillsides, the columns of rock that stood guard over the wilderness like Indian totems, the community that had taken her in as one of their own.

Now it was all gone to her, evaporated into nothingness, like the mist she’d watched that morning. Paradise lost. Even if she survived the night, she would have to leave Utah.

A twig snapped outside. A barrage of pebbles skittered down a slope.

Tears jammed up behind her eyelids. She blinked them back, fighting the need to sniff, not wanting to give herself away to the stalker nearby.

“Dammit,” a muffled voice rumbled.

Her sawmill breath and the pounding of her heart almost drowned out the word. From the sound of it, the stalker was trying to negotiate the steep wall of the ravine, and having trouble. With any luck, he’d fall and break a leg. But luck was fickle tonight. The uneven footfalls righted themselves and crunched toward the truck.

Too late, she noticed the driver’s side door was unlocked.

No time. No time.

Stretched out across the truck seat, her heels against the door handle, there was no room to swing the twitch. She would have to go for a punch. She hid the bat alongside her thigh and lay perfectly still.

The handle clicked. Hinges creaked. A gust of cold air rushed over her prone body.

And she struck.

She punched the bat out the door as hard as she could, sitting up and throwing her weight behind the blow. The rounded end of the bat hit bedrock in the midsection of a man. For a second, victory thrilled through her. Her attacker toppled backward, the breath whooshing from his lungs.

Her victory was short-lived, though. Before his backside hit the ground, he grabbed hold of the end of the bat and yanked, his weight and momentum dragging her out of the truck before her panicked fingers could release their grip.

She wound up in a heap on top of him. Instinctively she raised her fists to fight, but strong hands locked her wrists in iron grips, staving off her blows. She opened her mouth to scream—

“Gi-gi?”

The wail died in her throat.

He had spit out her name in two short gasps, like he didn’t have enough air for words with multiple syllables—which he probably didn’t, given the way she had planted the bat in his gut. Still, the voice had sounded familiar.

A new chill raised along her spine as she put a name to the voice. Shifting her gaze down, she groaned.

Familiar, silver-plated eyes shone up at her. Odd that the cloud-muted moonlight should give his eyes such a cold sheen. In the daylight, she knew, his eyes were warm and soft, and blue as cornflowers. Trust-me-baby blues, she and her girlfriends had called those kinds of eyes as teenagers, for all the innocent girls eyes like that had lured into the dark recesses under the high school bleachers. But Gigi knew better than to fall for trust-me-baby blues.

Or at least she thought she did, until she met Shane Hightower.

“Are you…all right?” His breath warmed her cheek.

No! She was definitely not all right. She was splattered across a man’s chest like spilled paint. And not just any man, but Shane Hightower—Special Agent Shane Hightower, of the DEA—a man she’d spent the better part of the last two months avoiding. Even before she had known he was DEA, she’d known enough to stay away from him. He’d been introduced to her and everyone else in town as the interim sheriff when the old geezer who used to run the county had retired suddenly. Shane’s true identity as an undercover agent, sent to Pine Valley to ferret out a narcotics ring run by a couple of local deputies, had been revealed just three weeks ago when he’d made a dramatic arrest on the mountain.

Looking down, she saw he still wore the Washington County Sheriff’s badge pinned to his leather bomber jacket—helping out until a new interim sheriff could be named, she’d heard. But sheriff or federal agent, the difference didn’t matter much to Gigi. One kind of cop was as dangerous to her as another.

Yet here she was, lying as intimately with him as two people could lie without…well…being intimate. Knee to breastbone, not a molecule of air wedged between them. Her softness molded to his hardness. Her curves pressed into his hollows. She should move, but she couldn’t. She felt frozen in place, frozen in time.

“Dr. McCowan? Are you all right?”

His words lifted her stupor. She couldn’t afford to have this man worried about her. She couldn’t afford to have him think about her at all.

She lurched away from him, disengaging tangled arms, legs, and knees, as she rose. “I’m fine,” she assured him.

He followed her up slowly, eyeing her all the while. “You’re sure?” He twisted right, then left, methodically brushing slush and wet leaves from the sleeves of his coat and the back of his khaki trousers.

“I said I’m fine.” Regretting the snap in her voice, she crossed her arms over her chest and took a deep breath. She did not need to pick a fight with a federal agent, but she was scared, tired and cold. And her head hurt.

“Good.” Very slowly, very precisely, he turned toward her. When he looked at her, his gaze pulled her pulse to her extremities. She could feel her heartbeat in the soles of her feet. The pounding made her head ache even worse.

“Then what the hell did you think you were doing coming at me like that?” he asked.

Her jaw fell slack. So much for not picking a fight. “Coming at you? What were you doing sneaking up on me?”

“I wasn’t sneaking. I thought you might be hurt. Your truck is twenty feet off the road in a ditch!”

His words hit like tom-toms inside her skull. “You could have called out. How was I supposed to know who was out there?”

“I did call out.” He swung his hand up the ravine toward the roadside. “Up there. Why didn’t you answer me?”

She reached for her throbbing forehead, squeezing her eyes shut. “I might have—” all this shouting was making her woozy “—if I’d been conscious.” The drumroll in her brain built to crescendo and she swayed on her feet.

“Whoa, there.” He reached out and steadied her elbow. “I thought you said you were all right.” Just like that the ire was gone from his voice, replaced by concern.

“I’m fine.”

“Sure you are.” She tried to step away, but his grip on her elbow tightened, preventing her escape. “That idiot could have killed you.”

A surge of fear jolted her. She jerked as if she’d touched a live wire. “How did you know?”

“I was above you on the switchback curve. I saw that car sideswipe you. Did you get a look at him? A license plate?”

Her heart fluttered, and she told herself to stay calm. He didn’t know anything; he was just curious. Cop curious, a voice in her head warned. Not good.

“No, nothing,” she told him, hoping he would drop the interrogation.

A heavy pause hung between them. Shane’s brows drew down in to a frown. “The sorry pissant didn’t even stop. Least he could have done was come back and made sure you were all right.”

A shudder that had little to do with the cold and everything to do with a sorry pissant in a midnight-blue Mercedes racked her body. If Shane hadn’t come along, the man would have come back, all right. But it wouldn’t have been to help.

Had he really left? Or had he sneaked back while she and Shane had been arguing?

She peered into the darkened woods surrounding her. Her mind twisted tree trunks into burly bodies, gnarled limbs into outreached arms, the glitter of moonlight off wet leaves to the gleam of a cold steel barrel trained on her, or Shane.

She wrapped her arms around herself and squeezed.

Shane’s scowl deepened. “Let’s get you out of here,” he said.

“But my truck—”

“Is not going anywhere tonight. You can call a tow in the morning.” He smiled, even white teeth flashing in the darkness. Gigi didn’t see what he found to be so happy about. “Guess you’ll have to bunk with me for the night.”

She caught her gasp before it escaped her throat.

“Figuratively speaking, of course,” he explained. “The roads are nasty and getting worse by the minute. I only live a few minutes from here. We have a lot better chance of getting to my place safely than we do of making it all the way to your house.”

Suspicion honed by three years on the run kicked in her stomach. “You know where I live?”

Surprise registered in his eyes. “It’s a small town.”

“And you’re a cop.”

“Something wrong with that?”

“No. It’s just—”

Her mind suddenly changed tack. She knew where he lived, too. A woman like her kept tabs on men like him. And even taking into account that they had both been coming from the same place tonight—their mutual friends Eric Randall and Mariah Morgan’s engagement party—Shane shouldn’t have been here, on this road.

“What are you doing this far east?” she asked.

He paused, looking as sheepish as a teenager caught fingering a beer in his dad’s fridge. “The roads are slick and you left Mariah’s in a hurry. I wanted to be sure you got home okay.”

“You were following me?”

The guilty look on his face quickly turned to stubbornness. “And it’s a lucky thing for you that I was.” He nudged her forward. “Now let’s go.”

Her panic surged. This couldn’t happen. She couldn’t be anywhere near him, much less spend the night with him. “I—I can’t. Really.”

“Why not?”

He turned those trust-me blues on her, and for a moment she considered telling him the truth. About New York. Her father. The man in the Mercedes. But that would be foolish. Shane was a cop, the last person she should confide in.

But what choice did she have with him out there somewhere?

She glanced into the woods, and then up the ravine toward the shoulder of the road.

Shane looked at her quizzically. “What are you gonna do, walk home?”

“Maybe I should wait with my truck. You could call a wrecker.”

Shane shook his head, disbelief settling on his face, and let go of her elbow long enough to poke at the welt on her forehead. “Just how hard did you hit your head, anyway?”

She brushed his hand away.

“Forget it, Doc. I’m not leaving you out here.”

One look at the square set of his jaw and she knew resistance was futile. He wouldn’t leave her here, alone. He was a cop, and he obviously took his job very seriously.

But then, so did the man who was after her.

She held her breath and listened. Other than the slow patter of sleet on rocks, all was quiet. No one was there. No one except Shane, whom she couldn’t afford to make suspicious with unreasonable protests.

Maybe his cabin was the safest place for her to be tonight. She couldn’t go home. The man in the Mercedes undoubtedly knew where she lived by now. But he wouldn’t know about Shane.

She hoped.

Her heartbeat gradually slowed. “I guess you’re right,” she said. “Thanks for the rescue.”

He smiled again. Gigi tried not to notice the dimple that dented his right cheek as he swept his arm grandly toward the hillside. “M’lady…”

She turned toward the open door of her truck. “I need my bag.”

Shane dodged around her and leaned across the seat. “I’ll get it.” He reached to the floorboard and pulled out her tapestry handbag.

“Thanks,” she said, taking it. “But I didn’t mean this one.” She tried to keep her voice light, not to arouse suspicion. “There’s an orange backpack, behind the seat.”

He looked at her, his blue eyes brimming with curiosity.

“Sometimes I’m out all night on emergency farm calls. I keep a few…essentials…in the truck.” She forced herself to smile. The things she carried in that bag were essential all right. To survival. Which is why she called it her survival bag. But she had to think of some other excuse for Shane. “Believe me, by morning you wouldn’t want me around if I didn’t. A woman’s got to have her stuff in the morning, you know?”

He retrieved the bag. “I’d want you around in the morning,” he said, his voice grown suddenly husky. “Stuff or no stuff.”

He passed her the bag, and their hands brushed in the exchange. She retreated, and her sore knee buckled.

He caught her before she realized she was falling. Giving her a look that dared her to protest, he helped her up the slope to the road, where blue and red lights strobed over the icy pavement. He was still driving the sheriff’s Blazer. No wonder the guy in the Mercedes had left. He must have made Shane as a cop right away.

He steadied her as she stepped up into the cab and then he walked toward the front of the truck. Her fear redoubled for a moment. She half expected to see the Mercedes come gunning out of the darkness.

Relax, she told herself, studying the sparkling ice on the road. Breathe. No one was gunning anywhere tonight. Not without hockey skates. She was safe.

Shane circled the hood of the vehicle, moving with the natural grace of an athlete, despite the slippery footing. Watching him, she had the same funny feeling in her chest that she’d had the first time they’d met. An acute awareness.

Safe, huh? Safe from the man in the Mercedes, maybe.

Shane Hightower was another matter altogether.

He climbed behind the wheel. With the vehicle’s interior lights on, he switched the heat on full and turned all the vents toward her.

As he worked the knobs, a few strands of damp hair fell across his forehead. The hair on the sides and back of his head was trimmed short. But on top, where the sun had bleached dark blond to shining gold, a longer, heavier layer swept to one side. Brushed back, the cut appeared very conservative, very law enforcement. But when those locks tumbled forward, like now, they gave him a much less civilized look. Rugged. Careless. And very sexy.

She wished she could reach up and push those troublesome locks back in place. It would be easier to remember he was a cop that way.

“Buckle up,” he said.

When she didn’t move, her attention still captured by a silly lock of hair, he reached across her and pulled the shoulder harness over her chest. Her nostrils flared at the sudden scent of damp leather and understated aftershave.

He pushed the metal buckle into the fitting. “There. All set.”

She waited until he’d straightened up to breathe again.

He smiled at her. A very male, knowing smile like he knew what she’d been thinking. She would have called him arrogant, if he hadn’t been right.

Her fingers curled, tightening until her fingernails dug into her palms. As if being rescued by a cop wasn’t bad enough. Did she have to be so unbearably attracted to him, too?

“Sit still.”

“It stings.”

“It’s supposed to sting. It’s good for you.”

“What kind of logic is that?”

“The kind that keeps people from getting infections?”

“It’s not going to get infected.”

“No, it’s not, because you’re going to sit still and let me put this stuff on it.”

“I’m the doctor here.”

“You’re a veterinarian.”

“You didn’t seem so particular when you were the one bleeding to death.”

Exasperated, Shane rocked back on his heels where he squatted in front of the toilet. Gigi—Dr. McCowan, he reminded himself—sat on the porcelain lid wearing an old flannel robe he’d loaned her so she could get out of her damp clothes. She was wriggling like a trout on the line.

“I was not bleeding to death,” he said. “And neither are you.”

He had been wounded, though, thanks to a couple of local drug dealers, even if the injury wasn’t as serious as she made it sound. And Gigi McCowan, the first on the scene once all the shooting had stopped, and the only one around with any medical training, had provided first aid.

Shane had been hurt before in his eight years with the DEA, but never had he enjoyed being doctored—even if it was by a vet—as much as he had that day. She’d been his angel of mercy, sent from heaven to stanch the flow of blood with a gentle touch.

Then she’d turned her face up to him, and one look into her eyes turned his thoughts polar opposite of angels and heaven. Images more congruent with what was sure to be his ultimate fate sprang to mind. She’d made him think of fire and brimstone. A scorching desert sun and a sea of sand.

Sin and sweat and sex.

Even now, her eyes intrigued him. They were blue, like his own, but a shade wilder in color. Indigo, like a pair of jeans not quite broken in.

And mysterious. Those eyes held secrets.

She squirmed on the toilet seat and he realized he’d been staring. Pulling his gaze away, he found his attention captured by her feet instead. Her toes were wiggling, like the rest of her. Bright-pink paint adorned her toenails. He smiled to himself, finding that small vanity endearing. And suiting. Gigi was all movement and bright colors.

At least she had been until tonight. Tonight she was different. Still busy, but with a nervous, restless kind of energy.

“Why are you still in Utah?” she asked.

He glanced up. He’d been asking himself that question for days. The docs had cleared him for duty, and he sure as heck didn’t have anymore leave coming. He’d used that up months ago. “I was planning on leaving in the morning.”

At least he should have been planning on leaving. But the rent on the cabin was paid through the end of the month, and somehow he’d never gotten around to packing. The truth was he liked it here. The mountains were peaceful and frankly, small-town law enforcement was more his speed after what he’d been through the last couple of years than the fast-paced world of drug enforcement. He liked it that people here waved to him on the street and knew his name. And then there was Gigi…

Sometimes he wished he didn’t have to go back at all. But wishes weren’t horses, and sooner or later he had to leave. Most likely sooner. “I just wanted to stay for Eric and Mariah’s party.”

The party to which he would never have accepted the invitation if Mariah hadn’t let it slip that Gigi would be there. He wished the best for Eric and Mariah in their marriage and new life together, but he felt out of place at social events like that—family gatherings. Having grown up in a county youth home after being abandoned as an infant, family was a mystery to him.

Almost as much of a mystery as Gigi McCowan.

He went to the party hoping for a chance to prove that the electricity that had crackled between him and Gigi on the mountain had been a fluke. Nothing more than nerves on edge.

After all, he’d just busted a drug operation and nearly gotten himself killed. He’d been hurt, and high on adrenaline. He’d told himself it wouldn’t be like that when they met again.

But it had been. He’d clinked his wineglass against hers in a toast to Eric and Mariah, they’d locked eyes, and the energy had coursed between them. It had built more slowly—less like a lightning strike and more like a bank of circuits, their breakers thrown on one at a time—but it hadn’t stopped until the power to light a city flowed freely between them.

She had to be the source of the energy. Lord knows, his soul was dead as an old battery.

She recharged him.

Then Eric had called her over, given her something, and she’d left, in a hurry. Left Shane standing there with the burgundy he’d been drinking burning a path to his gullet and all his lusty imaginings about taking her out of there himself, taking her home, ending on a cold gust of wind and a slamming door.

And he didn’t know why.

Unsettled, he dabbed at her forehead with the cotton ball.

“Ow.” She swiped her hand out. “Give me that.”

“Fine. You finish your forehead,” he said, handing her the antiseptic and cotton ball. “I want to see that knee.”

Rebellion charged through her eyes before resignation set in. Slowly she slipped one leg out of the slit in the front of the robe. His irritation dissolved in a wave of masculine appreciation. He cupped one hand behind her calf and slid the other down to her ankle for support. Her leg was slender, firm and smooth to the touch. Very attractive.

He flexed her knee gently, carefully supporting her lower leg. “That hurt?”

She shook her head.

Even more carefully, he leveraged her lower leg sideways. Her stifled gasp stopped him.

“I’m sure it’s just bruised,” she said tightly.

“Uh-huh.” It was more than that, and he knew it. He suspected she’d wrenched it pretty good, but he didn’t press the issue. At least it didn’t seem to be swelling. He set her heel on the floor and rested his palm on her good knee.

She lowered her head. “I’m sure it will be fine.”

“I’m sure it will be, too. If you stay off it tonight.”

Before she could protest, he scooped her off of the toilet seat and into his arms. She planted her palms against his chest and pushed. “What are you doing?”

“Helping you stay off that leg.”

He paused in the hallway. A turn to the left, and he could settle her in his big bed, instead of the sleeper sofa he’d made up while she changed. But she was bound to argue. And having her in his bed for the night while he tossed and turned on the sleeper might be more temptation than he was ready for.

He turned to the right, toward the great room. Hell, it was the nineties. She could sleep on the couch.

When he deposited her carefully on the cushions, he didn’t have to turn to know what had gathered her attention over his shoulder. The entire east wall of the great room was glass.

He straightened, following her gaze to the midnight void. “The view is a lot nicer during the day,” he explained self-consciously. Not everyone appreciated sitting on the edge of the world the way he did, especially at night.

She looked down into the dark valley below. “It’s beautiful, even in the dark. It’s like the whole world doesn’t exist. Never existed,” she whispered. “But it’s so…lonely.”

“Yeah, well. I guess growing up in a home with thirty other kids taught me to appreciate solitude.”

She smiled wanly, pale in the near darkness. “I know what you mean.”

“Grow up a ward of the state, too, did you?” He wouldn’t have believed her if she’d said yes. She didn’t have the look about her. She hadn’t always been alone.

“No,” she confirmed. “Boarding schools.”

“Ah, the life of the privileged.”

“Privileged, maybe. But also crowded.”

She surprised him, finding that small common ground between them despite their obviously different backgrounds.

“I like the view better at night, myself,” he admitted.

Her expression brightened as she angled her head up. “Look at all the stars.”

Yeah. Look at the stars, shining in her eyes, Shane thought. And he knew, with as much certainty as he knew his name that he’d make love to her some night, with the starlight glancing off her eyes like that.

But not tonight. Tonight he just wanted to make whatever had put the tension in her body and the raw, disturbing look on her face go away.

He cleared his throat, turning his attention to making her comfortable. He got her a blanket and pillow, then when she was settled, he rubbed his hands together. “How about a fire? It’s chilly in here.”

Soon he had a blaze building. He held his hands up to it, feeling the warmth of the flames on his palms. “How’s that?”

He sat on the edge of the couch, next to her thigh. Firelight danced across her cheeks, giving her fair skin a tone more like ruddy honey. She tossed her head and her short, blond curls gleamed, catching the flickering light.

She eased the blanket up to her chin and tucked her arms underneath. “It’s nice. Thanks.”

Her words were sincere enough, but that was no cozy tone of voice. “You’re welcome,” he said, wishing he knew what else to do for her. To help her relax.

Outside, the call of an owl mingled with the whisper of wind through the trees. Pupils dilating, her gaze flew to the window, and the sound, straining to see through the darkness.

Watching her reaction, he wondered if the edge on her nerves might be due to more than just the accident. She should have shaken off the effects of the wreck by now.

Three loud knocks sounded above them like footsteps. She jumped visibly beneath her cover.

“Easy. It’s just limbs on the roof. I’ve been meaning to cut those trees back.”

Still, worry lines creased her forehead. She breathed in shallow, silent gasps, and he felt the lack of oxygen as if it were his own. He hated the vulnerability marring her otherwise flawless features. “Do you want me to sit with you awhile?”

She jerked her head toward him. “No, that’s not necessary.”

Her wide eyes said differently. Unable to resist, he reached out and stroked a springy yellow curl back from her forehead, wishing he could brush away her fear as easily. She’d said she didn’t want him, but he couldn’t leave, not with her so out of sorts.

And himself so out of sorts, as well. Damn she was beautiful in the firelight. In any light.

Forgetting his manners, he searched the depths of her mysterious eyes. Searched beneath the surface of whatever was bothering her to see if she felt what he felt.

And he found it.

Buried deep, the answering call to his cry. A spark of attraction. He studied it with the same awe that early man must have studied fire. She turned her face up as if she might say something, and without thinking he lowered his mouth to hers.

Her lips were incredibly soft. Incredibly warm. He kept his touch light. It was meant to be a kiss of comfort. At least at first. But when her initial shock faded and she leaned into him with a soft sigh of acquiescence, comfort became need. Then need bordered on greed.

He touched his fingertips to the graceful arch of her cheek and slid his hand down, past her jaw, until his palm splayed around the fragile column of her neck. Holding her, he raised over her, slanted his head and probed at the entrance to her sweet mouth. He wanted to feel her, taste her. All of her. He’d wanted her from the moment she’d pushed her way through a dozen armed DEA agents and ordered him to sit still and shut up while she tended his wound and he hadn’t dared do anything but comply.

He surged against her, long-denied desire curling in his blood. Her lips parted, and for an instant he felt the moist slip of her tongue against his.

Then she reared back, pushing at his shoulders with fisted hands. “No!” Panic laced her eyes. She braced against the back corner of the couch and clutched the blanket to her chest with both hands.

He lurched to his feet and took two steps back. The sight of her fear soured his stomach until he had to turn and stalk away. That reaction hadn’t been caused by any accident. It was much too sudden, much too intense. Only one thing could have caused it.

Him.

Whatever had possessed him to kiss her? He’d known she didn’t want him. She’d proven it often enough since that day on the mountain. Her medical training had kicked in during the crisis, but afterward, every time he’d tried to get a word with her in town, she’d made a hasty escape.

If he turned north on a street corner, she turned south. If he walked in someplace, she walked out. Just like she’d left Mariah’s tonight almost as soon as he’d arrived.

In a moment of stark self-awareness, he realized that was why he’d followed her. He’d wanted to see her safely home, yes. But he’d also wanted to find out why she was avoiding him. Why she got such a trapped look in her eyes whenever he got close.

In the darkened doorway to the great room he stopped, his back still to her. The spit and hiss of the fire mingled with a barrage of curses heard only in his mind.

“Are you afraid of me?” he asked, his jaw tight.

“Of course not. You’re a cop.”

“You say it like it’s a dirty word.”

She didn’t respond for a long time. “I’m sorry. I’ve had a long day.”

An apology, or a hint for him to make himself scarce? He had no idea. Still wondering, he left the firelight behind and let the darkness of the hall devour him.

Long into the night, Gigi stared at the fire, dreading the moment the last ember would flicker out. Quietly she reached over the side of the couch and picked up her handbag, the tapestry one with horses galloping gaily across the side. From it she drew a folded square of newspaper. The golden glow of the fire shed light across the banner at the top of the page—Oil Exec Returns to Scene of Crime—For Wedding.

Eric had given her the clipping at the party just hours earlier. How quickly her life could change.

The story had run in the business section of a major Los Angeles newspaper. It described how Eric Randall—an oil executive and now Mariah’s fiancé—had helped the DEA— Shane—bring down a drug operation here. And how in the process Eric had fallen in love with Mariah and resigned from his position with the oil company to return to Utah to marry her.

But the article wasn’t what bothered Gigi. That right belonged to the accompanying picture. A photographer had caught all four of them—Eric, Mariah, Gigi and a wounded Shane unloading from the DEA helicopter that had carried them off the mountain. She’d never even seen the cameraman.

That was how they’d found her. It had to be.

Why she had to leave.

In a way, leaving Utah would be a relief. Her life here was a lie. A necessary one, but still a deception. The more she came to care about this place and its people, her friends, the harder the deception became. And the worst lie of all was the lie she had told to herself. That she was safe here. That they wouldn’t find her, this time. What a fool she’d been.

Feeling the thrum of fear strike up a new beat in her breast, she put the news article back in her handbag, set the handbag on the floor, and picked up her survival pack. She hadn’t been without the bag since she’d left New York, three years ago. The bag was her safety net.

Whether he knew it or not, tonight it was Shane’s safety net as well. If the man after her somehow did manage to find her, he wouldn’t hesitate to kill one unsuspecting DEA agent. He’d killed federal agents before.

Guilt struck a sour chord in her head. She really didn’t believe anyone would find her in the next few hours, but she still should have told him. Her silence—her very presence—put him at risk.

Glancing down the darkened hallway, she thought about telling him now. But he was probably long asleep, and she couldn’t knock on his door in the middle of the night wearing nothing but her bare feet and a soft flannel bathrobe that smelled like him. Not after that kiss.

Not after the way she’d treated him after the kiss. She had no right to ask him for anything, least of all to watch over and protect her. Besides, he was a cop. He would ask questions she couldn’t answer. So tonight, like every night, she would watch over and protect herself.

And she would protect him, too.

Digging past the assorted getaway paraphernalia in her backpack, Gigi wrapped her hand around a solid shape folded inside a cotton T-shirt.

She’d never loaded the gun before. Didn’t want to do it now. But she had no choice. By letting him bring her here, she’d taken Shane’s life in her hands. She had to be prepared to defend it.

With the pistol on her lap, she unzipped an outer pocket of the pack and pulled out the ammunition. Carefully, just like she’d been shown in New York, she inserted the shells.

By sheer will, she kept her hands from trembling. All she had to do was make it to morning, she told herself. Then she would leave Utah forever. Because she’d stayed too long. Because she’d let a cop get too close.

And because somewhere out there, a cold-blooded killer was looking for her.

Chapter 2

After a chilly morning at his cabin—one due more to the frosty demeanor of his houseguest than the unusually cool spring weather—Shane dropped Gigi off at John Lane’s scrap yard. She’d called John not thirty seconds after sunrise, the moment the ice on the roads began to melt, and talked the tow truck driver into going after her truck. Then she’d banged around the kitchen under the pretense of making coffee until Shane couldn’t stand the noise and got up to see what the racket was about. She’d seemed so desperate to leave that Shane had joked that if she was in such a hurry, she needn’t have bothered to wait for him to take her to town. She could have just stolen his truck and driven herself.

Gigi hadn’t laughed.

Shaking his head, he pushed his way through the door to the Washington County Sheriff’s Office with one hand, carrying a cup of coffee from the diner in the other.

Bailey Henrickson, the young state trooper sent to keep an eye on things until a new sheriff was appointed, greeted him. “Hey, Agent Hightower.”

“Hey yourself.”

He hurried past Bailey, hiding his grin. Shane couldn’t help it. He liked Bailey. The kid seemed to be a fair enough lawman, but his ears were just too damned big for his head. Especially when he put on his smoky hat and it pushed them out to the side.

Keeping his head lowered, Shane sat at the desk in the corner. The one with the computer. He felt Bailey watching him, but he didn’t look up.

“Something I can help you with?” Bailey finally asked.

“Nope.”

A minute, maybe two passed while the PC booted up.

“Something you need?” Bailey said.

“Just a little information.”

He heard the kid shuffle some papers. “You know, you aren’t officially supposed to be using that equipment anymore. You’re supposed to be headed back to Phoenix and the almighty DEA today.” He grinned. “You can leave the sheriff’s badge and the keys to the Blazer with me.”

Shane smiled into his coffee cup. “You kicking me out, Trooper?”

The paper shuffling stopped. “Well, no sir. But…”

“Good. Because I’ll be done before you could call for backup.”

“Ha!” Bailey barked. “State Trooper needing backup to handle one sissy DEA agent. That’ll be the day.”

Shane grinned wider, tapping out a few commands on the keyboard.

A chair scraped back and Bailey’s footsteps echoed across the wood floor. Shane looked up, and raised his hand to his mouth, coughing to cover his laugh. The kid had put on his hat.

“If you’re going to be here a few minutes, would you mind catching the phone if it rings?” Bailey asked. “Think I could use a cup of that slimy diner coffee myself.”

“Sure. You go ahead. I’ll keep an eye on things.”

The deputy left. All the better. Shane could do what he needed with Bailey here, but it was best if he wasn’t. Accessing people’s private information for personal reasons wasn’t strictly legal, but Shane had questions that needed answering.

He didn’t know why Gigi’s reaction last night bothered him so much. He’d been rejected before. It wasn’t like he was any great prize. He was leaving town today, anyway. Even if he weren’t, it wasn’t like they had any future. It wasn’t like he was dreaming of blond-haired babies with wild blue eyes. Shane wasn’t family material. Never had been, he guessed.

But Gigi had responded to him—hell she’d electrified and incited him—at least at first. Until she’d remembered what she was doing. Or who she was doing. A cop.

He’d lain in bed after he’d left her, thinking about her. His nose had wrinkled, catching a scent eight years in the DEA had taught him never to ignore. He smelled trouble—a wispy tendril, like the first curl of smoke from kindling—but trouble nonetheless. He just wasn’t sure what kind.

From here, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, he had access to every database available to law enforcement, as well as a few that weren’t supposed to be available to anyone, law enforcement or not, courtesy of many hours in the computer lab at Arizona State. He’d worked the night shift to put himself through school, and in those long stretches before dawn, he’d learned a great deal about computer systems that wasn’t in the textbooks. In half an hour, maybe less, he’d know everything there was to know about Gigi McCowan. Then he could head back to Phoenix.

His fingers laced together, he cracked his knuckles and set to work. Sixty-five minutes later he sighed, rolled his head around his shoulders and admitted he’d been wrong.

Hunched over the flickering screen, he pinched the bridge of his nose, then scanned the text again to be sure he’d read it right. “Well I’ll be damned.” He definitely wouldn’t be going back to Phoenix today.

He didn’t know who the woman who’d spent last night in his cabin was, but he did know one thing—

She wasn’t Gigi McCowan.

Gigi took one last look around as she waited for John Lane to dig out his paperwork. Her pickup truck was still strapped to his wrecker in the drive.

She spun slowly, her gaze skimming over the junkyard to the mountains beyond, trying to memorize everything from the piney smell of the mountain air to the calls of birds in the treetops. She had to memorize it, because soon memories would be all she had left of Utah.

She took a deep breath and turned, hearing Mr. Lane walk up behind her.

“You’re sure you want to do this? Trade your pickup for my old Jeep?” John Lane asked. “Damage on your truck doesn’t look too bad. I can have her good as new in a day or two, and it’s bound to be worth twice what my heap is worth.”

She put on a false smile. She loved her old pickup. It was worn in all the right places. But she couldn’t afford to wait a day, much less two, for him to fix it. “I’ve been thinking I need something that eats a little less gas,” she said. “And after that ice storm last night, four-wheel drive sounds pretty good, too.”

“All right then.” He handed her the keys and title.

“You’ll be sure to take the rest of the veterinary supplies out of the back and give them to Mariah Morgan out at the Double M?” She’d already taken the few supplies she might find useful and boxed them up in the back of the Jeep. The remaining supplies weren’t much to offer Mariah in the way of goodbye, but they were all she had to give. Besides, it would be a shame to let them go to waste.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Nodding, she turned to survey her new vehicle.

Once, the Jeep had probably been fire-engine red. Now it had faded to the color of weak tomato soup. But the motor sounded fine and it had a full tank of gas. It would do.

The road blurred in front of her as she headed south, out of town. She tried not to think about never coming back here. She’d always known she would have to leave one day. She just hadn’t thought it would be in a run-down Jeep with nothing except her survival bag and the clothes—dirty clothes at that—on her back.

She wished she could have risked stopping by the house, just for a minute. Besides her clothes, she’d like to have picked up the few prizes she’d gathered on her frequent mountain hikes—a pine cone as big as her forearm, a smooth, round stone with grain in it in the shape of a peace sign, and a walking stick. Not much to show for twenty-eight years of living, but it was all she had.

Used to have. Even those few treasures were gone now. It was time to move on to a new life.

Except she liked this life.

Her eyes stinging, she pulled into a small rest stop fifteen miles outside of town. In the women’s room, she pinned her hair back and slipped on the wig from her emergency bag. Dark contacts came next, coloring her eyes from blue to brown. She studied her new image in the cracked mirror over the sink. Not bad for two minutes’ work. She didn’t look anything like herself.

That random thought almost brought her tears back. She couldn’t help but feel she’d finally given up the last vestiges of her true self. There was nothing left of the person she used to be. But that couldn’t be helped.

A new life was better than no life at all. Better than death.

Squaring her shoulders, she slung her pack over her back and stepped out of the washroom.

And stumbled into a broad male chest.

Shane.

He steadied her elbow, setting her back on her feet. Her hand brushed the fine, crisp hair of his forearm as she pulled away. The sensation shot up her arm like a jolt of static electricity.

His head tipped a fraction, and she felt his gaze peruse her slowly, even if she couldn’t see it behind his reflective sunglasses. She burned under his scrutiny, from the tips of her ears to the ends of her curling toes.

Shane.

He straightened, his jaw set perfectly square, and stood with his hands behind his back, his feet shoulder width. He looked very tall. Very disciplined.

Very cop.

“This is a new look for you, Doc,” he said, reaching out to finger her shoulder-length fake hair. He let the wig go and folded his sunglasses into his shirt pocket.

Being able to see his eyes heightened the effect of his gaze. She felt her face heat.

“A girl gets tired of same ole–same ole.” The quaver in her voice didn’t sound too convincing, even to her. She swallowed hard. “Did you need—I mean, is there something I can do for you?”

“You didn’t mention that you were leaving town today.”

“No, well, yes…it was sudden. My aunt is…sick.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Thank you.” She jangled her keys in her hand. “I hate to run like this, but I really should get going.”

Shane moved himself between her and the Jeep. “You know, all this time I thought you were avoiding me because you just didn’t like me.”

Her heart leaped. “Of course not. I mean, I haven’t been avoiding you. And I—” Her mouth suddenly felt like she’d been lost in a desert for days. “I like you.”

“Yeah, I figured that out last night when I kissed you. That’s what finally tipped me off.”

“Tipped you off to what?”

“That it’s not me you’re afraid of.” He thumbed his badge off his chest. “It’s this.”

“No, it’s just—”

“I know,” he said, the challenge in his words clear despite the dead calm in his voice.

Her heart bucked. “Know what?”

“That Gigi McCowan, D.V.M., is sixty-two years old and lives on the thirteenth hole of a nice retirement community in Ocala.”

She’d thought her plan was perfect. The forger from whom she’d purchased her false identification in New York was reputed to be the best. The real Gigi McCowan, her mentor in vet school, had even gone along with the scam, providing authentic diplomas and transcripts so that she could apply for and receive a real veterinary license from the state of Utah. She didn’t see how anyone could have figured out she wasn’t the real thing.

But then Shane Hightower wasn’t anyone.

Knowing it was the wrong body language to send, but unable to stop herself, she crossed her arms over her chest. “There must be some mistake.”

“No mistake. You lied to me. You’ve been lying to everyone. The town, your customers, your friends.”

Her throat bobbed, grasping for words and finding none. She clenched her upper arms to stop her fingers from trembling. The lies that should come easily weren’t there anymore. In their place, she found only deep, cutting remorse.

Shame.

The tremor in her hand became a full-fledged quake. Her keys fell and clanked on the gravel. She bent to retrieve them.

Without warning the Jeep’s driver’s side window exploded over her head. Before she knew what had happened, Shane tackled her and rolled along the ground, cradling her against him as tires squalled.

Over Shane’s shoulder she glimpsed an arm holding a pistol out the window of a midnight-blue Mercedes—the same Mercedes that had run her off the road the night before.

How had he found her? Had he been following her all morning, waiting for his chance to attack, or had Shane brought him?

Fire flashed from the gun’s muzzle. He was shooting at them! But there hadn’t been any noise. No shots.

She didn’t have time to decipher the meaning of that, as Shane tucked her head against his shoulder and rolled again, this time propelling her behind the bumper of the Jeep. With the vehicle as cover, he raised up and pulled a weapon from under his jacket in one fluid movement. Gigi sat up beside him, and he pushed on the top of her head with his free hand. “Get down.”

She took his advice as another volley of bullets skittered across the hood of the Jeep. Still no gunshots. They must be using a silencer. But then, they were pros, she knew that.

Shane returned fire. He certainly wasn’t using a silencer. The explosions from the muzzle of his gun pounded her eardrums. The Mercedes sped past the rest stop, and Shane grabbed her hand and pulled her into the Jeep, snagging the keys off the ground as he went.

He shoved her into the driver’s seat, handing her the keys, and then climbed in the back. “Drive,” he shouted as the Mercedes did a one-eighty a few yards down the road.

“Me?” She yelled, stabbing the keys into the ignition. “Why me?” He was the DEA agent; she was just a civilian. She wasn’t trained for this sort of thing.

“Because I’m going to be busy shooting.” To prove his point, he leveled his weapon and squeezed off two rounds at the approaching Mercedes. A slug from the sedan clinked off the roll bar, convincing her that starting the Jeep’s engine was more critical than arguing at this point.

The Jeep roared to life and she slammed it into reverse so hard that the lurch almost sent Shane flying into the front seat. He grabbed the roll bar for support. “Go! Go!”

She blasted onto the roadway, turning the Jeep so that she faced the attacker head-on. She stomped on the gas, and this time Shane was nearly flung out the back of the Jeep. They flew by the Mercedes before either Shane or the other driver could regroup and get off another shot. The unwieldy luxury car squealed into another one-eighty, giving Gigi and Shane a few seconds’ lead.

“That way. That way.” Shane waved with the gun in his hand to one of the county roads that wound down the mountain.

Gigi complied, bringing the Jeep around in a screeching turn. In the rearview mirror, the sun gleamed off the polished hood of the sedan, too close behind them.

Shane clambered into the front of the Jeep then turned around, kneeling backward in the passenger seat, his gun arm braced on the seat back as he squeezed off another shot at the sedan. “Faster!” he yelled. “He’s gaining on us.”

The wind whipped through the Jeep’s open canopy. “Faster? We’re on a mountain. That’s a sheer cliff over there. If we skid over the side, we’re dead!”

“And if that guy catches up to us in the open, we’re dead! Take your choice.”

Holding her lip between her teeth, Gigi pushed the accelerator to the floor. Briefly, the Jeep pulled away from the Mercedes, but the car soon matched the Jeep’s speed, and then some.

The driver behind her was firing again, but the bullets weren’t hitting the body of the Jeep. He was probably aiming at the tires. Gigi said a silent prayer that he didn’t hit them. Not with those cliffs so close to the side of the road.

Pointing at a break in the trees, Shane said, “Turn there, up ahead. On that gravel road.”

Gigi slammed on the brakes and swung the Jeep into the narrow opening. She swung her head from side to side, not liking what she saw. Walls of trees hemmed them in, pushed them forward. They were trapped. The trees encroached so closely on the road that they had no maneuverability.

But neither did the car behind them. Even with its superior speed, the sedan couldn’t pull alongside for a clean shot.

Shane checked the progress of the car behind them. “All right, scum. You wanna play, let’s play.”

“Play?” Gigi adjusted her clammy grip on the steering wheel. “You think this is a game?”

“Just keep driving,” he ordered. “As fast as you can.”

Gigi checked the rearview. The Mercedes plowed down the trail behind them, leaving a plume of dust in its wake.

The front right tire of the Jeep dropped into a deep rut in the road and then rebounded with a vengeance, catapulting Shane out of his seat. He grabbed the roll bar with both hands.

“Faster,” he ordered.

“I’m going as fast as I can.”

Gigi looked over her shoulder. The Mercedes was right behind them. The gun hung out the window.

“Duck!” Shane shouted. Several rounds dinged off metal. She couldn’t tell where. Keeping her head as low as she could and still see over the dashboard, Gigi pressed the accelerator to the floor.

“All right, get ready,” Shane called.

She glanced up warily. “Ready for what?”

He dropped into the passenger seat and climbed across the console until he was practically sitting in the driver’s seat with her. “Ready to hit the brakes and make a hard right turn.”

“Why?”

“Because the road ends right up there.”

“What!” She raised her foot to stomp on the brake, but he quickly kicked her foot away. Then he stomped on the gas.

“Move over,” he yelled.

Move? Move where? She crushed herself against the door, giving him haphazard control of the Jeep.

He pushed the accelerator to the floor once again and locked his fingers around the steering wheel. “Hold on! Five…four…”

The road ahead disappeared into nothingness. Gigi grabbed the door handle.

“Three…”

She let go of the handle and wrapped her arms around the headrest of the seat.

“Two…”

Her heart stopped, she let go of the headrest and, in a moment of sheer desperation, coiled herself around him. She buried her cheek against his chest.

“One… Now!”

Shane stood on the brake and yanked the steering wheel viciously around to the right, sending the Jeep fishtailing into a tight curve surrounded by a choking cloud of dust and gravel hail. Gigi ground her chin into him and held on.

He jerked the wheel back to the left, pulling the Jeep out of the spin within feet of the cliff and driving parallel to the precipice.

Over his shoulder, she saw that the driver of the car had finally seen the danger ahead. He was reared back from the steering wheel, elbows locked straight as if could push himself away from the cliff by physical force. The big sedan’s brakes ground and groaned with the effort, but couldn’t stop his momentum in time. Just as it slid to a halt, the nose of the Mercedes edged over the embankment. The car tottered forward, then back, coming to an unsteady rest with the front half of the car hanging precariously over the edge. A shower of pebbles clattered down the slope, then all went quiet.

Shane stopped the Jeep. Slowly Gigi uncurled her fingers from the front of his shirt and looked up at him.

He had the audacity to grin. “Antilock brakes aren’t so nifty when stopping fast is more important than stopping straight.”

“I can’t believe we just left him there. Aren’t you going to arrest him or something?”

Gigi glanced at Shane. His once golden tanned complexion had jaundiced. He hadn’t said a word in the ten minutes since he’d ordered her to drive, leaving the man who’d ambushed them dangling off the side of a cliff. For an experienced federal agent, he wasn’t taking a little thing like a shoot-out too well.

His eyes drifted shut. “You want to cross an open field in front of a man with a gun and try to take him down, you go right ahead, honey. Me, I prefer not to go out in a blaze of glory. At least not today.”

“You could have kept him pinned down or something while I went for help.”

“Yeah, I could have. Except the nearest help is in town, better than half an hour away, and I’m out of ammo.”

“Out of ammo?”

“Well, not technically out. I’ve got one round left. In case of emergency.”

“Don’t you carry extra?”

“Sure. In the glove compartment of my Blazer.”

The same Blazer that was twenty miles back in the other direction, at the rest stop, along with his police radio and his cell phone, no doubt.

Shane’s lips curled into a weak smile. “Besides, I wasn’t sure you’d come back for me.”

Gigi didn’t know what to say to that. She was desperate to get out of this town and away from Shane, but leave him one-on-one with an armed assassin… No, she wouldn’t do that. Would she?

“I would have sent someone back, at least,” she grumbled.

Shane sighed. “Well, I guess that’s something.” His eyes pulled open slowly, as if the small act required tremendous effort. “We’ll stop at the first phone we see and call the deputy, although I doubt he’ll find anything by the time he gets out to that cliff.”

Gigi’s stomach turned. The last thing she needed was more cops involved. “Then why bother?”

He scowled. “Because he’ll want to start a search for the guy before anyone else gets shot at, so why don’t you help things along by telling me who the hell that was and what he wanted.”

Gigi steered the Jeep off the county highway and braked to a stop behind a stand of birch. With shaky hands she shoved the transmission into neutral and shut off the engine.

His head rolled toward her. “What are you doing?”

“I need to stop.” Despite her best efforts at control, her voice cracked a little on the last syllable.

“We need to keep going.”

“I said I need to stop.”

He raised his eyebrows and cranked up one corner of his mouth. “You couldn’t have gone before you left the house?”

She wouldn’t dignify that with an answer. She reached up automatically to push her curly bangs out of her face until she realized she didn’t have bangs anymore. She’d almost forgotten. She lowered her hand, yanked at the door handle on the Jeep and bounced out of the vehicle.

“Where are you going?” he called out behind her.

“For a walk.”

“Lady, there’s a man out there with a gun. And you want to take a hike in the woods?”

Everything she knew about Shane Hightower told her this wasn’t going to be easy. He was smart, stubborn, and took his job very seriously. Some might say he was obsessive about it. So how was she going to talk him into walking away? Or letting her walk away?

The way she saw it, only one tactic had a chance of working. She stopped walking, but didn’t turn around. “That man is exactly why I want to take a hike. A very long hike. Who knows where I might end up? California maybe. Or Seattle.”

He snarled like a rabid dog. She heard the door on the Jeep open and close, and then his footsteps pounding up behind her. “Who is he?”

She faced him. “I have no idea.”

“No idea? Really? He just showed up and shot at you for no reason. Just like you were all dolled up and sneaking out of town to see your sick aunt.”

He reached up with his left hand and pulled on the fake hair. “Your wig is crooked.”

She slapped his hand away and slid the hairpiece off. With the pins removed, her short curls sprang free. She bent over, shook her head and fingered through the tangled mass. When she looked up, his eyes had narrowed again, and faint, pinched lines had appeared at the corners of his mouth.

“That’s better,” he said, clearing his throat. “Now the contacts.”

She blinked out the tinted lenses and shoved them in her pocket, oblivious to whether or not they’d be ruined. “Happy now?”

“No.” She didn’t doubt him. He didn’t look happy. “Who was that guy?”

“I told you I don’t know.” She started walking again, and he followed, the hairpiece swinging from his fist.

“And I told you I’m not buying it,” he said. “If you don’t start talking quick, you’re getting back in that Jeep and we’re going to town. You can sit in a cell at the sheriff’s office until your tongue loosens up.”

“You can’t do that!”

He caught up to her in one long stride and swung her around to face him. He loomed over her, purposely using every bit of his six-foot-one frame to intimidate her, she was sure. She searched his blue eyes—the same ones she used to think so soft—and found them hard as glaciers. A queasiness started in her stomach and worked its way up into her throat. He wasn’t going to let her go.

She glanced at the Jeep, judging her chances of making it before he caught her. No way.

How had this happened? How had her carefully crafted plan fallen apart so quickly? He’s a cop, that’s how. And she’d let him get too close.

Numbly she backed up until her spine hit the trunk of a birch tree. Nowhere else to go, she stopped, her mouth dry and her heart and lungs fighting to keep up with her body’s demands for blood, oxygen.

He must have sensed the raw panic racing through her veins. His voice gentled to a soothing tone, similar to one she’d use with some mistreated animal brought to her clinic. “Tell me, Gigi,” he crooned. “Tell me what’s going on.”

She shook her head, her hair snagging on the tree bark behind her.

“You’re in trouble. I can help.”

“No.”

“How bad is it? It must be pretty bad for you to be this scared.” The glaciers in his eyes fractured momentarily, replaced by familiar concern. His words stretched out, low and mournful, like an old forty-five record played on thirty-three rpm. “Let me help you.”

She swallowed hard. “You can’t help me. No one can.”

“Why are you running?”

“Because someone is trying to kill me.”

“I mean why are you running from me?” His pale-blue eyes bathed her in sincerity, intensity.

She shook her head, panic and confusion clogging her throat. For the second time in twenty-four hours, she fought an almost overwhelming urge to tell this man—the last man she should tell—the truth. A truth she hadn’t spoken in three years.

He lifted the wig in front of her. “Disguises can’t protect you from men like that. But I can, if you’ll let me.”

He edged closer. The tree bit at her back.

“Let me take care of you,” he said. He reached for her, and her panic reached full bloom, bursting forth in an explosion of movement that set the world back on the right speed.

She knocked his hand away, twisting his arm behind him and using her hip to throw him to his back as she pushed past him. He cursed as he hit the ground.

She almost made it. Almost got away. But she tripped over him as she tried to run. Her foot connected with his back and his gasp, sharper than it should have been from the light kick, made her turn instinctively. Already off balance, her sudden shift in direction brought her crashing to the ground facedown. Her chin hit the ground with a thunk, and she bit her tongue. The coppery tang of blood filled her mouth.

Before she could recover, he was riding her, his hands pinning hers to the ground above her head, just enough of his body weight grinding her chest into the dirt to effectively restrain her without crushing her.

“Get off!” she screamed. “Get away from me!”

She struggled mightily, but with little effect. Not against his superior size and strength. She resorted to mindless kicking and writhing, but facedown she had no leverage, no way to strike at him. He clamped one heavy thigh over hers and locked her legs in a vice grip between his.

Gradually, she went still. Everything but her heart, that is, which continued to pound so fast that she couldn’t separate one beat from the other.

“Are you through?” He sounded as if he were talking with his teeth clamped together. Like he was in pain.

She hadn’t thought any of her blows had connected. Or that they’d had the power to hurt him if they had. But maybe she’d been wrong.

She nodded, her cheek scratching in the dirt and decaying leaves beneath her.

“Good.” He loosened his grip on her wrists and lifted a measure of his weight from her back, but didn’t let her get up, or even turn over. She gulped in mouthfuls of cool, mountain air.

“Now what are you running from?” he asked. This time no sympathy, no sincerity tinged his voice. His words were flat and devoid of any emotion at all, except maybe disillusionment, if that could be called an emotion. “What have you done?”

When she didn’t answer, something cold and metal scraped over her left wrist. Handcuffs! “What are you doing?”

“People don’t live under assumed names or refuse to talk to the law after someone shoots at them. Not unless they have something to hide.”

“I’m not a criminal.”

He paused with the second cuff pressed against her right wrist. “Then tell me what’s going on.”

He didn’t understand. He couldn’t. And in his lack of understanding he would arrest her. He would take her to the pitifully defenseless sheriff’s office in town. There, he and the deputy wouldn’t have a chance against the man bent on getting to her, because getting to her meant getting through them. More good men would die because of her. Would the killing never end?

“It’s not what I did,” she explained, her voice sounding tinny. Trapped. “It’s what I saw.”

“What?”

She closed her eyes, and as always, the vivid images played out in her mind. Two men in the stable, talking in hushed tones. The squeal of car tires. Three firecracker pops. Blood and other matter sprayed on the wall across from where she stood, out of sight behind the wash rack.

The victims hadn’t even had time to cry out. They’d died quickly, their screams stillborn in their throats.

“Murder,” she whispered. “I saw a murder.”

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