Smuggled Wonder

by Knight, Belle

Stallone and Boris moved into position.

  Darius sidled up next to her and twisted, grabbing her hand and squeezing it.

  “Step away,” Boris said.

  Darius let go and backed away. Their hands were still tied behind their backs, and hers had grown increasingly numb, but where he had touched her warmth spread. She tried to read his face, but it was like he wore a mask. She wanted to run her hands along the masculine lines of his face like he had run his hands through her hair.

  “Run!” Darius shouted and dived for Boris’ legs.

  Ashley felt her mouth drop open even as she froze at his shout. Someone fired a shot. Stallone snatched for her, but she planted her boot in his crotch and he stumbled to the ground, clutching his groin.

  Ashley sprinted away into the dark, an idea forming in her mind.

  Four guys with guns.

  She and Darius didn’t have a chance, but she suspected he knew that.

  She suspected he didn’t plan to get away at all.

  Well, she wasn’t having this knight-in-shining-armor bullshit from him. She raced back to the gate they had passed. King was a dozen yards away, startled at first by the gunshot, but then he saw Ashley throw the gate wide open.

  Come on, King. Show me what you got.

  She waited to make sure he had seen her open the gate. She waited another precious second to make sure he was starting to chase her down, even as her throat closed up in panic at the thought of Darius fighting four men in the dark. And when she was sure she had caught King’s attention, she sprinted back for Darius.

  There was this blurred moving mass on the ground, like men mud wrestling. The American stood to the side, gun raised, taking aim, correcting his aim by inches in the dark to hit the right target. Stallone and the fourth guy formed a triangle with The American around Darius and Boris. Each had their gun raised, taking aim, waiting for an opportunity.

  Well, this was her opportunity and she was going to take it.

  Stallone saw her coming first and shifted his aim to her, but she veered off at the last second and King rammed him, forehead lowered, spiral horns tossing Stallone one way into the darkness and his gun another way. Almost as if the contact had only increased King’s fury, he went immediately for the unnamed guy, tossing him over King’s back and onto the pair of wrestlers.

  Ashley held her breath because she knew King wasn’t done.

  She sidled herself over to The American when his attention was drawn to King and his men. Spotting her picnic blanket, she picked it up and crouched behind The American.

  King charged at The American.

  The American fired.

  She took a deep breath.

  King veered away, something dark appearing on one shoulder. Ashley jumped for The American, blanket in hand, attempting to blind him and take him to the ground. He stumbled, but threw her off. She landed hard on her butt. He swung his gun around. She flinched as a shot broke the night sounds.

  She waited for the pain.

  Instead, The American’s gun leapt into the air.

  She turned and the moonlight outlined Darius’ body. His wide-legged stance and broad shoulders exuded power. Three men were haphazardly laying unconscious near his feet.

  “Step away from her and—”

  King came back around, bloody shoulder and all, and rammed The American with a ferocious crack that spoke of broken bone.

  “Shit,” Darius said. “Get him back inside.”

  Ashley scrambled backward, whistling, as fast as she could, keeping her eyes on King. Once she knew she had gotten his attention, she sprinted for the gate. He followed her inside. At the last second, she launched herself back over to the safe side of the fence, grabbing a gate post for leverage to swing her up and around.

  King had too much momentum to stop. He was several yards into the paddock before he could turn. Ashley jumped down and closed the gate.

  King approached the fence, snorting, eyes rolling, head tossing. She took as good a look as she could at his wound in the dark, but couldn’t tell how deep it went.

  He’d tossed The American after getting it though, so she hoped it wasn’t more than a scratch. Either way, taking care of him would have to wait.

  She sprinted back to the group. The four men were in various states of unconsciousness. Darius had forced them into a row and held two guns on them.

  “Search them for other guns,” Darius said.

  She did, making quick work of it, but found nothing.

  The American sat up, dazed, holding an arm that looked broken. Stallone and Boris were both moaning and the fourth guy wasn’t even conscious.

  “Search the grass, there should be two more out there. Toss the bullets when you find them.”

  She swept bigger and bigger circles around the group until she found both guns. King had sent one of the guns flying over fifty feet away. She tossed the bullets like he asked and then tossed the guns themselves. They’d search for the guns again later, but for right now she wanted to make sure the guns couldn’t be used against them.

  She searched Darius over for any wounds. But like King, it was hard to tell in the dark if he was okay. He was standing, he was breathing, they were no longer at the mercy of Mirage. She had to believe that meant he was okay.

  “Now what?”

  “Now you run. Ashley, you run, and you call the police and you get them here quick.” Darius’ voice broke on the last word.

  She stepped closer to him and saw one side of his jeans was slick with something dark. “You’re shot!”

  She bit her lip. Of course he was shot, she’d been stomping out a fire when it had happened.

  She hurried over to The American, careful of his movements, but he was still out of it enough she didn’t think he could recognize anything yet. She stripped him of his belt and then came back to Darius.

  “You’re the only one who can do this. I have to stay here with them. I don’t know the area like you do. Ashley—hurry.”

  Ashley felt for the wound on his leg, trying to create a makeshift tourniquet, but that last word made her freeze for a second. It was full of pain and almost—almost panic.

  She stepped back after tightening the tourniquet, which elicited a grunt of pain from Darius, and looked over the four semi-conscious men. Darius stood over them on strong legs that had begun to waver.

  “Ashley—”

  “Stay alive, Darius. At least for long enough so I can find out your last name!”

  Without another second of hesitation, she turned and sprinted away, her boots suctioning in the mud, until she kicked them off and let them go so that she could run faster for help.

  Chapter 17

  The four men sometimes wavered and turned into six and then eight and then back down to four.

  Darius stepped back a few feet to make sure he had the distance he needed to get off a shot if one of the men went for him. He had both guns in his hands still, but his leg was shooting pain throughout his body and felt like it had almost gone dead on him. The crickets and frogs had picked back up their chorus once the echoes from the gunshots had returned Darius’ hearing. The moon and the stars were beautiful. It was one of the most gorgeous nights he had ever seen. No light for miles to pollute the utter beauty of the night.

  Darius wavered on his feet. He knew he was doing that because the four men had turned into eight again. It was lucky for him that King had been so thoroughly an asshole. The men were all pretty much incapacitated, but Boris and Stallone had begun to come around, sitting up, groaning and moaning, then becoming aware enough to hold themselves still when they realized the new facts on the ground.

  Darius had guns.

  They had none.

  Darius risked a sweeping glance across the ranch landscape. He hoped Ashley got to safety soon. He hoped at least he’d been able to keep her alive.

  His mind began to swim, but it couldn’t take away the thrill of her touch, or her words. I believe you.

  So simple and so powerful.


  He wished he could have built on that trust. Proved to her that he deserved it and would keep earning it and protect it.

  But at least she had gotten away.

  If she got lucky, really lucky, then the police would arrive in time to save her herd.

  He did not think he was going to get that lucky.

  Boris and Stallone were already exchanging looks. Darius couldn’t seem to muster up the strength to make them move apart, or to make himself move at all.

  He knew he only had a few minutes left, so he used them well. He took himself back to the first touch he’d gotten from Ashley. The way the length of her body had felt against his own as she’d slipped in the mud while cleaning off those blue striped boots of her.

  He swore he could see those boots now. The bluest of blues, like lights flashing in his brain, somehow mixed with red.

  Contentment and desire filled him up and then everything went dark.

  Chapter 18

  Ashley sprinted to the next ranch over, on the opposite side of Storm Weather Farm from the distillery. Her feet were bruised but she didn’t care. She leapt over fences, weaved her way through patches of oak trees, and then banged on the ranch door of an older homesteading couple like she was trying to raise the devil himself.

  But no one answered and she remembered Hal and Kylie worked nights sometimes at the local restaurant to make enough income to keep their farm going.

  She knew where the key was, just like they knew where all her keys were, and got herself inside.

  She made quick work of calling 911: armed men had attempted to burglarize Storm Weather Farm. A friend had the intruders at gunpoint until the police could arrive. Send an ambulance because her friend had been shot and was barely staying conscious.

  While she talked she threw off her socks, useless and muddy. When she got off the phone with 911, without missing a beat, she snatched up Hal’s keys for his second beater truck, and grabbed a rifle from the wall. Snatching a handful of bullets from a drawer, she dashed back out into the night.

  Once she explained later, she knew Hal would understand why she’d taken it all.

  As she started the truck and floored it with her bare foot, she only hoped she would get back in time.

  Chapter 19

  Darius woke up in a white room with lights. That was the only thing his brain could register at first.

  He thought he must have somehow ended up in a hospital, but for some reason he swore he could smell the kind of manure that belonged on a ranch. As he became more aware of his surroundings, he saw he wasn’t in a hospital room at all, but an ambulance truck. They had set him up on a carrier bed and attached an IV line into his arm.

  When he looked out the open back doors, red and blue twirling lights broke up the darkness like this was all some night out at the fair.

  His leg was wrapped in bandages and a policewoman in full uniform was speaking to Ashley at the foot of the ambulance.

  Ashley.

  His brain cleared a little more and he remembered her swooping in with a truck, headlights blazing. She’d jumped out, rifle in hand, like some kind of wonder woman just as he’d begun to really lose it.

  Boris had made a grab for his gun. She shot her rifle into Boris’ foot and Boris had hopped back, howling, just as Darius had slipped into unconsciousness.

  “Smith,” Darius called out from the ambulance cab.

  Ashley turned at the sound of his voice and looked inside.

  He liked that even though he wasn’t making much sense, all it took was his voice and he’d gotten her attention. Her expression was worried and full of feelings that made his heart swell.

  “My last name is Smith.”

  And then she smiled at him and he was pretty sure his heart was going to burst.

  Chapter 20

  Ashley picked up the picnic blanket she had dropped what had seemed an eternity ago. Dawn had begun to break across the sky, nothing big yet, just a hint of lightening, and a growing clarity that hadn’t existed before.

  Darius stood against the fence, watching her ewes. There had been hours of questioning. Mostly they questioned Darius and what he knew about Mirage. Finally, the both of them had been let go, though Darius was under strict conditions not to leave town yet.

  He’d laughed at that and looked at Ashley long enough to make her blush.

  They called animal control to take King and Gandalf away. Somehow that ram was part of something so much bigger than Ashley could quite imagine yet.

  International smuggling rings of illegal wildlife.

  Rhino horns and mammoth ivory.

  Genetic engineering and patents and contamination concerns.

  King really had been too good to be true.

  When the FBI had come out alongside Animal Control to take King away, they said having King as evidence might do some real good. They promised to reimburse her for her costs, but she’d waved it off.

  “Protect Darius’ parents,” Ashley had said. “They threatened his mom.”

  “Already on it,” the FBI had promised, though they said they doubted she would be in any further danger. Mirage was going underground and this little project and its clean up group’s tasks hadn’t been sanctioned by the Mirage leadership. Still, they were going to put a watch on his parent’s ranch in the meantime.

  Ashley kept searching the field until she found what she was looking for—her boots. Crusted over in dried mud that almost completely obscured the stripes, she shook them out and slipped her feet back inside. She hadn’t yet gone to her house to clean up.

  Janice had returned while the cops were still on site. She’d acted stoic and worried and apologetic for not being around. As soon as the questioning had ended and they decided that Darius hadn’t turned out to be one of the bad guys—though he had left out some of the finer details about the kind of work he had actually done for Mirage—Janice had declared today was going to be Ashley’s new day off.

  And then with a twinkle in her eye, Janice had slipped another condom into the butt pocket of Ashley’s jeans. “Just in case.”

  Ashley had frowned. “He’s been shot.”

  “He’s standing and walking around.” Janice held her hands up while heading backwards up the hill to her house. “Get yourselves cleaned up. I’ll be cooking up a storm of eggs, bacon, cheese, and coffee for you two. It’ll be ready in three hours.”

  Before Ashley could respond, Janice was gone, leaving her alone with Darius. That aloneness suddenly felt awkward, so she searched for her boots and the blanket. When she had found both and couldn’t make any more excuses, the sky had gone from dark grey to light grey.

  They walked in silence across the ranch to her little one room farmhouse. He used a crutch to hobble along and she picked a route for them that gave him the smoothest path.

  They both cleaned up—separately—in her shower and she’d thrown his clothes in the wash. She’d never had another soul in her place like this, not for all the time that she had worked for Janice. Darius was large, both in build and in presence, but somehow he was able to pull off being comfortable in her little place.

  She’d had some of The Wonder cheese and crackers left in her little fridge, so they devoured that until the real breakfast was ready in about two hours. The sky was blazing pink and orange through her little windows as they ate in her combo living room-kitchen-bedroom.

  “This really does make my mouth sing,” Darius said. “That chef wasn’t lying.”

  Ashley flushed with pleasure. The cook-off was that evening, not that she’d thought much about it while they were both running for their lives, but even still, now that things had settled down, it was all she could think about.

  Darius shifted, the movement tightening the shirt across his chest.

  Well, not all she could think about.

  He’d taken an overlarge t-shirt of hers and the cloth stretched tight against his biceps and chest, straining at the seams under his muscles. There was nothing she had
that even came close to fitting his lower half, so until his clothes were washed and dried he was resorting to a towel.

  “What did Janice slip you earlier?” Darius said, all innocence on his face, but he glanced at her bed and somehow she knew he had seen exactly what Janice had given her.

  She flushed beet red. To hide her embarrassment, she took another piece of cheese off the counter and popped it into her mouth.

  He reached out a hand and delicately touched the edge of her lip and then took that little bit of cheese into his mouth. Her exhaustion vanished as desire warmed her body and made her remember exactly how he could make her feel.

  She decided they had been dancing around this long enough. “Earlier…you know, when we… when we…”

  “Had sex,” Darius finished.

  Ashley didn’t know why this conversation was so hard for her. She was a sheep-wrangling, cheese-mongering, gun-dueling warrior woman, or at least that’s pretty much what Janice promised was soon going to be the rumors swirling around town about her. But all she really wanted right now was to be held by this man and feel his heartbeat against her ear and hear him say he wanted more than just to sleep with her again—

  “I’d like to get to know you, Ashley. If you’ll let me. If you think you can find a way to let me try to earn your trust back. I know it’ll take time. I know I’ve burned some bridges.” Darius rubbed a hand across his face like he was brushing away cobwebs. He used his other hand to help lean his weight against the kitchen countertop. “but I feel like I’ve been looking for someone like you my entire life and I don’t want to run away from this—”

  It was good that he had leaned his weight against the counter. She didn’t know it until it was too late to take it back, but her heart and body had already decided what she needed to do.

  She launched herself at him, cutting his words off with a kiss.

  Their kiss deepened into something more, and the counter became the only thing keeping them from drowning in each other.

  Bonus Scene