Colton Cowboy Protector

by Beth Cornelison

  The shooter’s head snapped back from Jack’s punch, but he recovered quickly. With a two-handed grip on the rifle, he jerked the weapon from Jack’s reach, then swung it in an arc that crashed into Jack’s head with a blinding force. Skull throbbing, Jack staggered and fell to his knees. From his peripheral vision, he saw the man level the weapon at him. The click of the lever cocking echoed in his ears, and rolling to his butt, he swept a leg toward the back of the shooter’s knees.

  His opponent swayed, and though the man didn’t fall, the move bought Jack the time he needed to surge to his feet. Grunting, he plowed a shoulder into the trespasser’s gut. They stumbled together, Jack shoving the man until his back came up against a cottonwood tree. When the shooter tried to reaim his weapon, Jack wrapped both hands around the rifle and jammed the fore stock against the man’s throat. He held the gunman trapped against the tree and struggling for a breath.

  “Who are you?” Jack barked. “Why are you here? Why are you shooting at Tracy and my son?”

  The man gasped for a breath but made no effort to answer. He narrowed a glare on Jack while fighting for the leverage to push the rifle away from his neck.

  Jack shoved harder, snarling at the man. “Who the hell are you? Who are you working for?”

  His prisoner bit out a pithy and vulgar slur. Jack silenced him by shoving harder on the rifle, until the man’s face grew red from lack of air.

  “Help!” Seth cried from his tree house, the fear in his tone drawing Jack’s attention.

  That split second of distraction was all his opponent needed to lift a knee, land a glancing blow to Jack’s groin, and shove the gun away from his throat. The groin strike hurt but wasn’t incapacitating. As the man twisted away, he rammed an elbow into Jack’s ribs.

  In return, Jack swung a fist into the gunman’s jaw. And they continued to trade blows until the shooter managed to break free of Jack’s grasp and fled. Though winded from their fight, Jack gave chase. He followed the man through the knee-high grass of the bull pasture to a section of cut fence. There, the gunman mounted an ATV and sped away.

  Jack bent at the waist, sucking in deep gulps of oxygen as his quarry escaped.

  As he hurried back across the pasture, eager to check on Seth, a prickling awareness crawled through him. Tracy was sure she’d been targeted, been pushed when she fell into traffic earlier in the week. Now a gunman had sneaked onto Lucky C property and fired at her. Two incidents in one week. This was no random act of violence. Someone was determined to kill Tracy. But Jack was just as determined to find out why...and keep her safe.

  * * *

  “Miss Tracy, you’re bleeding!” Seth’s face was unnaturally pale as he gaped at the crimson smear on his fingers.

  Tracy glanced over her shoulder to the spot on her upper back that stung like fire.

  No shots had been fired in several minutes, but she kept Seth pinned down, her body protecting his until she could be sure the danger had passed.

  For the past several minutes, she’d been singing to him in a whisper, trying to keep him calm...and ease her own nerves.

  She could hear some sort of ruckus a short distance from them, but she didn’t risk giving away their position or getting shot by stealing a peek. Taking slow breaths and struggling to stay calm, she examined her wound as best she could from her vantage point. She had a growing red stain on her shirt, but she gave Seth a half smile through her pain. “It’s just a graze. I’ll be fine. Are you hurt?” She ran a hand over his arms, turning him to check for injuries.

  He shook his head, tears blossoming in his eyes. “I want my daddy.”

  Me, too, sweetie. She stroked a hand over his back and closed her eyes. “We’re going to be okay, Seth. I promise.”

  She knew she had no right to make promises that were beyond her control, but she fully intended to protect Seth, even if it cost her her own life. They huddled together for long minutes while the wind soughed in the leaves and birds twittered overhead.

  Laura’s little boy sniffed and clung to Tracy, then jerked his head up. “Did you hear that?”

  She shook her head. “Hear what?” Tracy had been focused on her own prayers that they’d survive the attack, and on the quiet sounds of nature.

  Seth wiggled away from her, and she gasped, reaching for his shirttail to stop him. “Seth, no! Stay down!”

  “I heard my dad.” Before she could stop him, he cupped his hands to his mouth. “Help!”

  “Seth!” she whispered, tugging his sleeve. “Get down! The shooter will see you!”

  “But I heard my daddy. I know I did!” The earnest plea in his eyes broke her heart.

  “Seth, you—”

  Then she heard what the boy had. Voices. One was definitely Jack’s. A staccato beat thumped in her chest.

  “Stay down.” She emphasized her order with a firm hand on his shoulder. “Let me look.”

  When she peered over the top of the tree-house wall, she carefully scanned the woods and pasture. In the distance, she spotted two men struggling, heard the harsh tones of arguing, saw the long-barreled gun that had no doubt been the one fired at them.

  Identifying Jack was easy. His tall frame, shaggy hair and tightly muscled body were as familiar to her in just a few short days as if she’d known him for years.

  The second man was also large. Frighteningly so. His hair was dark, heavily streaked with gray and cropped shorter than Jack’s. A shiver raced through her, and as she watched, horrified by the scene, Jack’s opponent broke free and ran. Within seconds, Seth’s father was in pursuit.

  While she couldn’t be sure the shooter didn’t have an accomplice, she knew she needed to get back to the ranch and get help. For her bleeding shoulder and for Jack. He might have been ably handling the gunman, but things could turn bad quickly.

  “Okay, Seth.” She pressed a hand to her stomach, where acid churned. “We need to make a run for it. Get back to your house and find help.” She didn’t consider herself especially brave or heroic—after all, she’d cowered at her husband’s intimidation for years—but to protect Seth, she’d mine every ounce of steel in her resolve that she could.

  * * *

  “I don’t need to see a doctor. I just need to disinfect the wound and—”

  “Too late. I’ve already called both Eric and Ryan to meet us here.”

  Tracy sighed, though she appreciated Jack’s concern. He and Brett had showed up at his house a few minutes after she and Seth had. Once he’d seen for himself that Seth was safe and given his son a lingering hug, he’d been on the phone to Ryan at the Tulsa Police Department, then left a message for Eric at the hospital. While Brett had taken Seth into his bedroom to distract him with a video game, Jack had helped clean Tracy’s bullet wound and given her the fifth degree. Who was the shooter? Did she recognize him? What had happened, and how did they escape?

  She’d tried her best to answer all his questions, knowing she’d have to repeat everything for the police when they arrived. As they waited for his brothers, Jack held a sterile bandage over the injury to her shoulder, and with constant pressure to the ragged flesh, most of the bleeding had stopped. Tracy gripped her cell phone in her hand. Jack had handed it to her when she and Seth turned up back at the house, and she assumed he had found it in the woods.

  His phone buzzed with a text from Eric saying he was headed into surgery and couldn’t come.

  “Good,” Tracy said. “He won’t be wasting a trip out here.”

  “Then we’ll meet him at the ER again.”

  She growled in frustration. “Jack, I don’t need a trauma surgeon for a little cut. You’re the one who should be getting medical help!” She met Jack’s gaze in the bathroom mirror. Already his right eye was purpling from a bruise, and his jaw and knuckles had swollen. Lord only knew what other injuries he hid under his T-shirt.

  He waved her off. “I’ve had worse and survived. Don’t worry about me.”

  “I’ve had worse, too,” she told him, and hi
s gaze darkened with understanding.

  A deep voice called down the hall from his front room. “Jack? Where are you?”

  “We’ll be right there,” he called back, still holding her stare. “That’s Ryan.” When Jack finally tore his lingering gaze away, he jerked open the cabinet and took a tube from the shelf. “Let me apply some antibiotic before we go out there.”

  She nodded and turned her injured shoulder to him. He dabbed the cool cream on her wound with gentle strokes, pausing to blow on the sting when she winced in pain, much the way she’d doctored Seth’s wound more than a week ago.

  When they met his brother in the living room a few minutes later, she took a seat on the sofa and carefully recounted the events of the afternoon. After she was finished, Jack gave his statement, detailing his description of the shooter.

  “I’ll arrange for a sketch artist to meet with you later today so we can get a composite together for the department,” Ryan told his brother.

  “Jack,” Tracy said, a tremor low in her belly, “your description sounds a lot like the one that woman gave of the guy who pushed me in town last week.”

  His jaw tightened and his eyes narrowed on her. “I thought of that.”

  “Whoa,” Ryan said, eyeing them both. “What guy? Was there another incident like this?”

  Taking a deep breath for patience and calm, Tracy explained to him about the man who’d pushed her into traffic. “And before you ask, I don’t know why he would have done it. Jack already asked all those questions last week, and I have no answers.”

  Jack stroked his sore jaw and divided a look between Ryan and Tracy. “Whether she knows why or not, she’s become someone’s target. Someone wants her dead.”

  Tracy’s already pale skin grew even more ghostly white. She closed her eyes slowly, and her shoulders drooped. Her nod was subtle and defeated, and Jack’s gut wrenched. The urge to swallow her in his embrace and chase away the shadows of vulnerability in her expression nearly knocked him over.

  “Sounds that way. In law enforcement, we don’t believe in coincidence,” Ryan said, folding his arms over his chest as he planted his feet in a wide stance. “I’ll do everything I can to find out who is behind this and why, but I’ll need your complete honesty and cooperation.”

  Tracy raised a startled look to Ryan. “I have been honest.”

  “But have you been completely forthcoming? I get the feeling there is something you are not telling us.”

  Jack had had the same sense many times with Tracy, but he didn’t voice that opinion now. He simply watched the fragile-looking woman shrink farther into the cushions of his couch.

  Tracy twisted the ring on her right hand with her left, staring at her lap in silence for several minutes. Ryan said nothing, in turn. He let Tracy stew and the silence drag on. Jack was familiar with the interrogation technique. Eventually, the pressure of the quiet, the expectant and patient stare his brother had mastered, would crack even a hardened criminal.

  Finally, she sighed and said softly, “The car accident that killed Laura happened when I was fleeing my marriage, running away from my husband.”

  “Running away?” Ryan repeated. “Why?”

  But the truth was obvious. Jack had suspected it from the day he’d met Tracy and questioned her in the barn about her motives regarding Seth.

  “He was violent. And...verbally abusive.”

  Even though he’d been expecting this truth, hearing it confirmed sent a blaze of fury and disgust through Jack. His hands fisted, itching to slam into a man he’d never met but loathed just the same.

  “Laura had finally convinced me to leave him,” Tracy continued, in a voice that shook with shame and regret. “She’d promised to help me find a new place to live, get a job and change my name.” Tracy paused for a breath and knuckled away the moisture at the corner of her eye. Jack called on all his inner strength not to scoop her into his arms and kiss the tears away.

  “But Cliff found out what was happening...somehow. He came home from work early. He showed up at the house just as we were leaving. Laura was driving. He chased us, and we ended up on a twisty road in the foothills not far from our house. He forced us off the road, then his car crashed into the guardrail. He was unconscious until the cops revived him and arrested him. Laura...was killed instantly.”

  “And you?” Jack asked, feeling tension vibrate in him like a tuning fork.

  “I had a broken collarbone and internal bleeding. The air bag left bruising on my face.” She frowned and waved her injuries away as if they were nothing. “My injuries don’t matter, not compared to the price Laura paid to help me.” She dropped her face to her hands, and her shoulders shook as she sobbed. “My only comfort is knowing she didn’t suffer. The coroner said her neck broke. She died instantly. But it’s my fault. She was saving me from a marriage I should have left years earlier.”

  “I’m not sure I see how this is relevant to what happened today,” Jack said. “You told me Cliff was killed in prison.”

  “He was.”

  He flipped a palm up. “Then it clearly wasn’t him who was shooting at you today.”

  She tipped her head, conceding the point. “No, but you asked what I had been keeping from you.” She twisted her fingers together, fidgeting. “I didn’t want to tell you about my marriage when I arrived because I wasn’t looking for sympathy. And, to be honest, I’m still a little ashamed that I stayed with Cliff as long as I did. More ashamed that Laura died helping to free me from him.”

  Jack and Ryan exchanged a look.

  “And?” Jack prompted.

  Her brow furrowed. “And what? That’s it. I’ve been completely open and truthful about everything else.”

  Ryan tapped a pen against a small notepad, his gaze hard and probing. “If someone is targeting you, as we believe, then there must be something in your past—”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head vehemently. “I really can’t think of anything.”

  Jack paced to the window with a growing sense of disquiet roiling through him. Knowing that somebody was trying to kill Tracy was bad enough, but not knowing who was gunning for her, not knowing where the threat was coming from, made the situation all the more untenable. Jack didn’t do uncertainty. He hated feeling exposed. And he loathed the idea of someone innocent being harmed on his watch.

  The primitive instinct to protect Tracy that had been simmering inside Jack since he met her roared to life. Despite any qualms or doubts he might still have about her, he knew he had to step up the safeguards around her, and he couldn’t delegate the job of protecting her to anyone else.

  “There’s no one who has a personal beef against you or a legal dispute?” Ryan pressed, and Jack turned back to the room, eyeing the petite woman on the couch with renewed determination to keep her safe.

  Tracy sat straighter, meeting his brother’s gaze evenly. “I’m not the sort of person who goes through life making enemies at every turn. In fact, before today, I’d say the person with the most animosity toward me was you, Jack.”

  Ryan raised his dark eyebrows and shot his brother an openly questioning glance. “What’s this?”

  Guilt tripped through him, and Jack waved off his brother’s curiosity. “My issues with Tracy have nothing to do with the shooter today. Just...personal business.” He narrowed a hard look at Tracy, not quite ready to believe she wasn’t still protecting a secret. “Is there anyone with something to gain if you were gone?”

  “No. No one. Nothing,” she repeated firmly, as she shook her head again.

  “When Cliff died, did you inherit a large estate?” Ryan asked.

  Her shoulders sagged, proof that she was growing weary of their questions. “He had a life-insurance policy, and we had some savings, but not enough that I would think it was worth murdering me over.”

  “So you don’t think his family might be behind this?”

  “Well,” Tracy said, then hesitated, “there was no love lost between me and his parents.
I think Cliff poisoned them against me soon after our marriage. They didn’t think I was good enough for their little boy. In fact, his mother made many comments about how she thought Cliff would be better off without me.” Her tone and expression made clear how this opinion hurt her. “But...I can’t see Mrs. Baxter as a murderer.”

  “And his father?” Jack asked.

  “I—” Tracy rubbed her forehead and closed her eyes. “I don’t know. What would he have to gain from hurting me? This is all just so bizarre to me.”

  “Well, we can certainly start with Cliff’s parents. I’ll contact the Denver police department and have the Baxters questioned.” Ryan flipped his small notebook closed and stashed it in his shirt pocket. “If you think of anything else let me know.”

  Tracy nodded wearily. “I will.” With what seemed a tremendous effort, she pushed to her feet, swaying slightly. “So...it looks like you win, Jack. Clearly, I can’t stay here if my presence is going to bring the threat to Seth and the rest of your family. I’ll go back to the main house and pack my things to leave.”

  An uneasy thrumming started low in Jack’s belly. “Sit down.”

  She angled a startled glance at him. “Wh—”

  He aimed a finger at the couch. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  Chapter 11

  Tracy blinked at him, incredulous. “Excuse me?”

  “I can’t in good conscience let you leave the ranch knowing that there’s a threat against you. In fact, I don’t want you staying at the main house any longer. I want you where I can keep an eye on you.” When she lifted an eyebrow in consternation, he added, “In order to protect you, not because I don’t trust you.”

  “Does that mean you trust me now?”

  Jack glanced away as if weighing his words. “Let’s just say...I believe you have Seth’s best interests in mind. He told me how you protected him when the shooting started, how you sang to him to calm him.”

  She flipped up a palm. “He’s a little boy. I did what anyone would do.”