She was quiet for a moment again, then gave the dispatcher more detailed information about how to find the trailhead, and her phone number and address.
“Yes. I’ll stay on the line until rescuers arrive,” she said.
“What’s going on, Tay?” he asked again, when it was obvious she’d been put on hold. “Why were you and Martin out there in the dark? How did he fall?”
“He had a gun. He made me go with him.” The panic that had receded during the emergency call flowed back into her features and her eyes looked huge, haunted.
“And he didn’t fall,” she said, gripping the phone tightly. “I pushed him.”
All the shock and horror of the last half hour surged back and her knees went weak, her head woolly. She might have fallen if Wyatt hadn’t reached for her.
“I was so scared, Wyatt. I didn’t know what to do. Martin killed Dru and Mickie. He admitted it to me.”
She swayed again and Wyatt growled a curse. “You need to sit down,” he ordered.
“I can’t. I need to stay on the line, then show search-and-rescue where to find him.”
“They’re not here yet and probably won’t make it up the canyon for another ten minutes or so. There’s nothing you can do for him until then. Just take it easy for a minute.”
She knew he was right, although it made her crazy that despite her medical training she was not able to help Martin—and that she was the one who had caused his injuries in the first place.
“Outside. I’ll sit on the porch so we can watch for the rescue workers,” she insisted.
He looked as if he wanted to argue but finally nodded. On the way out, he grabbed a fleece blanket from the couch and wrapped it around her shoulders. He sat on the porch swing, then pulled her—blanket, cordless phone and all—onto his lap.
The air was cold, bracing, and that along with the strength of his arms helped clear the lingering shock from her system.
“Tell me again. Why were you up there?”
“Martin wanted to kill me. He had a gun but he said he didn’t want to shoot me—he wanted it to look like an accident, unlike the mess he made with Dru and Mickie. That’s what he said, Wyatt. They were a mess he had to clean up and he did it by framing Hunter for the murder. As defense counsel, it was pitifully easy for him to ensure a conviction.”
The same emotions she had felt at learning the truth chased across his features—shock and disbelief and fury.
“Why kill you?”
“The same reason he killed Dru and Mickie—I threatened the safe little world he’d created. When I went to his office today, I made the mistake of asking him about the Valencia case. That’s what this is all about, a thirty-year-old murder trial. He must have panicked when I brought it up. Even though we hadn’t put all the pieces together yet, he couldn’t run the risk that we would.”
While they waited for rescue workers, he held her while she poured out the whole story, everything she had learned since walking into the cabin after leaving his ranch.
“Mickie wanted absolution, I guess,” she said after she finished. “She didn’t want to die with an innocent man’s death on her conscience. All she wanted was a little peace, and he killed her for it.”
“Poor Dru.”
“Right. With all the many people who might have wanted her out of the picture—John Randall, those she would have implicated in her police corruption story—she ended up being killed only because she tried to protect her dying mother.”
His arms tightened around her and they sat in silence until they heard the wail of sirens that heralded the arrival of rescue workers.
Though she was still shaky and exhausted, Taylor insisted on hiking back up with the rescue crew to locate the spot where Martin had slipped. As Wyatt refused to let her out of his sight, he went along too.
She was grateful for his support, she had to admit. Hiking back up that trail was one of the hardest things she’d ever had to do, emotionally and physically. With every step, she seemed to replay that horrible moment when Martin tumbled over the side.
What if he was dead? Even after everything he had done, she couldn’t bear to think about someone lying broken and bleeding and dying alone on that mountainside.
Not when she had been the one to put him there.
By the time they reached the shale bed, her stomach churned and she prayed she wouldn’t be sick again, especially when they were greeted at the spot by only a vast, terrible silence.
While a team of rescue workers set up ropes to rappel down the mountain, Taylor waited anxiously for news, her hands clenched together.
She nearly sagged to the ground when the two paramedics who had gone down to him reported back via walkie-talkies that Martin had a pulse—weak, but there—and was semiconscious.
It took rescuers nearly thirty minutes to load him into the stretcher and hoist him up the mountainside. Though Wyatt tried to convince her to go back down to the house and get out of the way of the recovery, Taylor insisted on staying. She had to see him for herself, to make sure he would survive to pay the price for his sins.
He had already paid in part, she acknowledged when he was pulled onto the trail in the stretcher. He was battered and bloody, his face nearly unrecognizable from the lacerations and his arm bent at an awkward angle.
She had done this to him, she thought. Yet she couldn’t be sorry. If she hadn’t somehow found the courage, she would be the one on the stretcher—or worse, she would be lying on that mountainside dead or dying.
“Strawberry Shortcake,” he mumbled when he saw her, out of lips that were swollen to twice their normal size. “So sorry. Guess I went a little crazy.”
Her mouth tightened. A little crazy implied one-time, aberrant behavior. This went far beyond that. Martin had spent thirty years covering his tracks—to do it, he had taken two lives. No, she corrected. Four, counting Paul Valencia and Dru’s unborn baby.
He had been ready to kill her and let Hunter die by lethal injection, after her brother spent who knows how long in that hell of a prison.
No, it would be a long time before she could feel any sympathy for Martin James.
After she watched the rescue workers start their trek down the mountain with Martin’s stretcher, Taylor turned back to Wyatt.
“Thank you for coming up with me. It helped.”
“You’re looking pale. Are you sure you can make it back down?”
The concern in his voice warmed her just as surely as that fleece blanket he had tucked around her earlier. Still, she had to wonder what kind of game he was playing. She wished she could trust her own instincts, could believe he was just as caring and tender as he seemed. Every time she let herself lean on him, though, she remembered that fax about Kate.
“I’ll be fine. I just want to go home.”
He nodded and led the way down the trail.
When they returned to the house, she found the county sheriff’s deputy waiting to talk to her about Martin’s injuries and about the events leading up to them.
While she spent two grueling hours giving them her statement, apparently Wyatt found plenty to occupy himself.
He lit a fire in the massive great room fireplace to take the lingering chill out of the air, ordered enough pizza to feed an army—and must have paid a small fortune to have it delivered this far up the canyon—and took time in between to make a few phone calls of his own.
One of those calls resulted in the arrival of a tall, dark-haired man in jeans and a leather jacket, who showed up just after the deputies finished their pizza and left.
“This is Nick Sinclair, a friend of mine,” Wyatt explained, and Taylor blinked, recognizing the name if not the man himself.
Sinclair was one of the most prominent criminal defense attorneys west of the Mississippi, with a reputation that exceeded Martin’s. He would have been her second choice to defend her brother—her first, if not for Martin’s connection to the family—but she knew how difficult it was to even talk to the man o
n the phone.
What kind of strings must Wyatt have pulled?
“I knew you would want to set the wheels in motion to free Hunter as soon as possible,” Wyatt said. “When I explained the situation, Nick was eager to help.”
She didn’t know what to say. Nick Sinclair lived on a vast private ranch in Wyoming, she knew. Wyatt must have moved heaven and earth to get him here so quickly.
To her dismay, tears welled up in her eyes and she tried to choke them back, unwilling to let this stranger see how much Wyatt’s actions had touched her.
At her silence, Wyatt started to look a little uncomfortable. “You can pick a different attorney of your own if you want, but Nick might be able to at least help you figure out what hoops you’ll have to jump through to get Hunter out as soon as possible.”
“Oh, thank you,” she exclaimed. She decided she didn’t care what some strange attorney thought of her—she threw her arms around Wyatt’s neck and kissed him fiercely.
“You’re very welcome,” he murmured against her mouth. Then, with reluctance in his eyes, he turned her over to Sinclair for a consultation.
For the next hour, she and the attorney discussed strategy. She knew it would take time to free her brother—the saying about the wheels of justice grinding slowly was an old one, but unfortunately also a true one. A judge would have to void his conviction based on new evidence, something that couldn’t happen overnight.
But at least those wheels were in motion, she thought as she showed Nick Sinclair out. At least the terrible fear she had lived with for nearly three years would soon be only a memory.
After he left, the adrenaline surge that had carried her through the long, difficult evening seemed to abate in an instant. She walked into the great room, conscious of two things—that every muscle in her body ached and that she and Wyatt were alone for the first time since rescuers had arrived at the cabin hours earlier.
She found him sitting on the couch in front of the fire, Belle at his feet and a pen and paper in his hand as he wrote, and she fell in love with him all over again.
Her sexy cowboy scholar, she thought, then winced as her heart gave a quick spasm. No. Not hers. She might want him to be—but what she wanted and what she was likely to get were two completely different things.
Still, when he realized she was standing there, he set whatever he was writing aside and held out his arms.
Though she knew it was foolish of her and would only delay her inevitable heartbreak, at that moment she wanted nothing more than the safe harbor he offered.
Taylor settled into his arms with a sigh that sounded as if it came from the depths of her toes.
She was too pale, he thought, concerned. Her eyes still had those dark, haunted shadows and she looked as if she would fall over if he opened the window to let in a breeze.
“How did it go with Nick?” he asked.
“Good. He thinks Hunter might be out within the week. Can you believe that? Even if Martin recants what he told me, Mr. Sinclair seemed to think it likely the unidentified partial on the gun will be traced to him, and that the eyewitness who saw a vehicle leave the murder scene could positively identify Martin’s vehicle. Added to my testimony about what he told me and his actions tonight, that should be enough for an indictment.”
“Good. It’s going to make a hell of a book. I wonder if Martin will give me a jailhouse interview.”
She made a sound that could have been a rough laugh, but all he heard through it was her exhaustion.
“Thank you for being here tonight,” she said. “I would like to think I could have handled things without you, but I’m so glad I didn’t have to. You made everything easier.”
“I didn’t do anything.” He couldn’t seem to keep the bitterness from his words. “I should have been here to protect you.”
“How could you? You didn’t know Martin would come here. You didn’t even know I was coming here.”
At that, her mouth tightened, and in her eyes he saw the memory of the afternoon they had spent in each other’s arms—and her mad dash from his apartment.
“Why did you leave?” he asked, although he was sure he already knew the answer.
She confirmed it. “I saw the fax you received about Kate. I wasn’t snooping, I just happened to see it and I was…upset. I didn’t know what to think.”
That damn fax. He was going to have to talk to her about it, he realized, ready or not. “I figured that must have been it.”
“I don’t understand why you had a private investigator run a background check on Kate. I’d like to.”
He sighed. “Can you trust me, just for a little while longer? I want to tell you everything but I just don’t think I can yet.”
A jumble of emotions played across her lovely fine-boned features. Confusion and doubt and uncertainty. Finally she nodded. “Okay.”
He had a feeling she never would have let the matter drop if not for the fatigue he could see clouding her eyes, weighing down her shoulders.
“You need to get some rest, Tay. Come on. I’ll tuck you in.”
She was silent for so long, he thought maybe she had already fallen asleep. When she spoke, her voice was low, so quiet he could barely hear her.
“Will you stay, Wyatt? Kate is working the graveyard shift at the hospital and I don’t want to be alone tonight.”
“I’m not going anywhere, sweetheart,” he promised.
“Thank you,” she murmured, and a moment later her breathing slowed as she slipped into sleep.
For a long time he sat on the couch and held her in his arms while the fire burned down and the wind rattled dry leaves against the glass.
They would have to talk soon—and not only about Kate. At some point, he knew he had to talk to Taylor about his feelings for her. He had started to that afternoon when he was wrapped around her, inside her, but the words had clogged in his throat.
He had been running from those feelings as long as he’d known her, he recognized now, especially in the past month that they’d been working together on her brother’s case.
He had thrown up barrier after barrier between them—her brother, the book he was writing, the threat to his objectivity—but now, in the honesty of the night, he admitted the truth.
He was scared, pure and simple.
Something about Taylor Bradshaw made him feel like the awkward nerdy kid he’d been at nine.
He had worked so hard after Charley had been taken to become as strong as Gage. He had worked out, lifted weights, started running. He had never built up much bulk—he just didn’t have the metabolism for it—but at least he had turned what he had into powerful muscles.
Toughness. That had been the secret. If he could be tough enough—mentally and physically—he could make sure nothing so horrible, so out of his control could ever happen to him again. He never wanted to experience that terrible sense of vulnerability he had felt when he realized Charley was gone, so he had carefully built walls around his heart.
He cared about his family—his mom, his dad, Gage, and now Allie and her girls—but he refused to let anything else inside.
Maybe that was how he was able to write the things he did—because he never allowed any of the ugliness to touch him.
Taylor reached inside, though. From the very first time he saw her she had been sneaking through those defenses.
She threatened that veneer of strength he had worked so hard to build and made him feel like he was a child again, like the world was an exciting, terrifying, wonderful place.
He loved her.
His arms tightened around her as the truth settled in his chest. It wouldn’t do him any good to run, because she would always be right there in his heart. If something had happened to her, if Martin had carried out the terrible crime he had intended, Wyatt didn’t know how he would have survived.
He loved her, and he meant what he said to her before she fell asleep—he wasn’t going anywhere.
Chapter 17
T
aylor awoke to the smell of coffee, sunlight streaming through the wide bank of windows and a warm tongue in her ear. Her eyes reluctantly lifted and she moaned when she found Belle two inches from her face.
“Ugh. Dog germs,” she muttered, using a corner of her quilt to wipe at her ear. “Go away, Belle.”
“Sorry.” A deep male voice jerked her the rest of the way out of sleep.
She turned her gaze to the doorway, where she found Wyatt leaning against the door frame, a steaming, spatterware mug in his hands and an odd expression in his eyes.
“I told her to let you sleep,” he said, “but she wouldn’t listen. She rushed right in here the minute my back was turned.”
“It’s all right.” Her voice sounded raspy with sleep and she cleared the cobwebs out. “I needed to get up anyway. What time is it?”
“Eight-thirty,” he answered.
Her mind processed that data, then she sat up abruptly. “Oh no! I have a nine a.m. class on Wednesdays. I’ll never make it.”
She scrambled to her feet in a panic, then with a jolt remembered the events of the night before—Martin, the mountain, his confession, everything—and she sagged back down to the sofa.
“I think you could take the day off from school—don’t you, Counselor?” he asked. “Or the week. While we’re at it, why don’t you take the whole semester off and just go back to finish medical school spring semester?”
She closed her eyes. Med school. If Hunter really was going to be released, she could go back and finish her last few classes, then start her residency. She couldn’t seem to comprehend it.
“I didn’t dream everything last night, did I?”
“No. It’s real.”
He walked into the room and sat down, his features suddenly solemn. “I called the hospital this morning and Martin’s been upgraded from critical to serious. He’s got a long road ahead of him but he’s expected to pull through, so he can face charges of attempted murder for what he tried to do to you—and who knows what other charges the prosecutor will come up with for the rest of it.”
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