Perfect Wyoming Complete Collection: Special Agent's Perfect Cover ; Rancher's Perfect Baby Rescue ; A Daughter's Perfect Secret ; Lawman's Perfect Surrender ; The Perfect Outsider ; Mercenary's Perfect Mission

by Marie Ferrarella

  A life that didn’t include her.

  “Don’t think that far ahead,” she chided herself. “He’s still here for now, and all any of us have is now. Make the most of it,” she ordered herself as she went around the house, turning on lights and chasing away the gloom.

  With the house now well lit, Carly made her way into the kitchen to prepare dinner. It seemed rather ironic because she hardly bothered with dinner when she was alone. Usually it meant just grabbing something out of the refrigerator and eating it over the sink while doing three other things at the same time.

  But for Hawk, she prepared dinner. Looked forward to dinner. Even if they didn’t speak, she still loved to sit there beside him at the table, watching him eat what she’d made for him. Doing so gave her a warm feeling of normalcy she’d been lacking for longer than she could actually remember.

  Maybe that was why Mia wanted to get married, Carly thought abruptly. Why her sister seemed to cleave to this sham of a life she saw being offered to her. Because she wanted what everyone wanted. A little piece of the normal life.

  Except that marriage to Brice Carrington wouldn’t be normal. Not in the way Mia wanted in her heart. Mia would be nothing more than a baby machine.

  After taking the roast she’d made yesterday out of the refrigerator, Carly glanced at her watch. What was keeping Hawk? Not that there was a specific time that had been agreed upon. It was just that Hawk was usually here by now.

  Leaving the roast on the counter, Carly suddenly felt an uneasy need to watch for him through the large bay window that faced her private road. The road that led away from the heart of Cold Plains.

  Carly picked up her pace and made her way to the living room.

  She passed by the gun rack where she still kept her late father’s weapons primed and cleaned. They represented the only really good memory she had of the man. On the occasions that he’d been sober when she was a child, her father had tried to take her hunting. When she’d burst into tears the first time because he’d told her they were going to hunt for deer, he’d relented and taught her how to shoot at targets instead. She wound up shooting at pictures of snarling, vicious wolves.

  She knew that her father had hoped to get her acclimated to shooting animals, wanting to make sure she would always be safe because animals could turn on her in a heartbeat, he’d explained, but she never did.

  Eventually, her father began to drink more and more, and those Sunday afternoons in the woods, shooting at the pictures he’d posted for her, became a thing of the past. But she never forgot how to shoot and, on occasion, still went out to practice on her own. With Grayson and his cronies spreading their scourge here, who knew when that ability—to hit whatever she aimed for—might just come in handy?

  Reaching the front window, she got there just in time to see Hawk pulling up.

  The smile on her lips spread all through her. He was here!

  She was about to hurry to the door to open it when a light in the distance caught her eye. It took her less than half a second to realize that it was actually two lights, not one. Two, like the headlights of an approaching vehicle.

  Had Hawk brought someone with him?

  But if he had, why weren’t they both traveling in his car? And why was he now getting out of his vehicle without so much as a backward glance at the other car? It was as if he had no idea that there was another car approaching in the distance.

  Nerves stretched taut began to dance through her. She had come to realize that she had grown to be a great deal less trusting than she had once been.

  Backing away from the front window, Carly hurried over to the gun rack, the phrase better safe than sorry drumming through her head.

  The last thing she wanted was to be sorry.

  She had just unlocked the chain that she kept threaded through the weapons when she heard it.

  A sound pealing like the crack of thunder.

  Except that it wasn’t thunder. She’d heard it often enough to know the difference between distant thunder and a gunshot.

  There was no hesitation.

  Grabbing the rifle closest to her, Carly hurried back to the front door. With no children in the house to worry about, she knew the weapon in her hand was fully loaded and ready to be discharged.

  Carly threw open the door, then got her weapon ready, just in time to fire at whoever was firing a second shot at Hawk. Carly returned fire even before she realized that Hawk was down, obviously hit by that first shot she’d heard.

  Rushing out to him, her heart pounding madly, Carly kept firing in the general direction of her quarry. She was intent on providing cover for herself and, more importantly, for Hawk, who she now realized was bleeding profusely from his left arm.

  “Can you walk?” she cried, her eyes trained on the now-retreating back of the man who had followed Hawk here and tried to kill him. “Hawk, can you hear me?” she all but shouted when he didn’t answer her. She didn’t allow herself even to contemplate the reason why he wouldn’t answer her.

  “Yeah,” Hawk managed to bite off, swallowing most of a string of curses. His arm felt as if it was on fire.

  He should have seen that coming, Hawk angrily upbraided himself. But he’d been so preoccupied with the thought of seeing Carly, the thought of being with Carly, that he had let his guard slip. He hadn’t been as careful as he should have been. And worst of all, he hadn’t realized that he had a tail following him.

  What a damn stupid rookie mistake, he thought angrily. He should have never allowed this to happen.

  Carly was suddenly beside him, down on one knee as she kept shooting, providing their cover fire.

  “Here!” she ordered, presenting her shoulder to him. “Lean on me.”

  Before he realized what she was doing, Carly had her shoulder wedged under his. With one massive effort, she struggled to bring him up to his feet. He did what he could to make it easier, willing himself to be stronger.

  Their shadows fused together to appear as one wide, awkward creature, Hawk and Carly made their way quickly into the house, never turning their back on the shooter, even though it looked as though he’d given up and was fleeing.

  The moment she had Hawk inside the house, Carly quickly slammed the front door and bolted it. Only then, with her arm wrapped around his middle now, did she half walk, half drag Hawk over to the sofa.

  “Here, lie down on the couch,” she ordered, all but dropping him there as she released the heavy weight of his frame from her aching shoulders. There was blood all over one side of her. “I’m checking the other windows and doors to make sure we don’t get any uninvited pests slithering in.”

  As good as her word, Carly quickly and methodically checked each and every window, testing its integrity just to make sure it held. She also made sure that the back door was still secure.

  “What was that all about?” she asked, raising her voice so that Hawk could hear her.

  “Had to be one of Grayson’s men,” Hawk guessed. He closed his eyes for a moment, gathering his strength to him. The bullet was still lodged in his shoulder, and it had to come out. If they went to the nearest hospital in the next town, he might bleed out before they got there. And there was no way he could go to the Urgent Care Center in Cold Plains. He’d be dead before morning.

  No, this was something that Carly was going to have to do. He wondered if she was up to it, or if, ultimately, she’d be too squeamish.

  The woman who had come running to his rescue without a thought for her own safety had been magnificent—and not even remotely acquainted with the term squeamish.

  “I think he feels that I’m getting close to something, although damned if I know what,” he speculated. There was no other reason for the man to want to kill him, he thought. And he was sure that Grayson was behind this attack. As
sure as he was that the sun was coming up tomorrow.

  “He just doesn’t want you nosing around, asking questions. It undermines his authority and his hold on ‘his’ people,” Carly called back.

  Satisfied that the windows were as secure as she could get them, Carly hurried back to the living room. It suddenly occurred to her, a second before she reached the living room, that by rushing to Hawk’s aid, she had blown her cover.

  She couldn’t go back to the community center to try to see Mia. After she had just fired on one of his men, there was no doubt in her mind that Grayson would kill her if he saw her.

  She didn’t regret it. In her heart, she knew that if she hadn’t been there, or if she’d hesitated and played it safe, Hawk would be lying dead in her front yard—instead of bleeding on her sofa.

  Getting him patched up was all that mattered, she told herself as she hurried over to him.

  “Did the bullet go through?” she asked even as she gently began to examine the wound herself. There was no through and through, which could only mean one thing, she thought, her stomach sinking as she heard Hawk answer her question.

  “No,” he told her, “I think it’s still in there.” Looking up at her, he said, “You know what you have to do.”

  Throw up comes to mind, Carly thought, doing her best not to turn a very sickly shade of green.

  CHAPTER 14

  This was no time to think about herself, Carly silently chided. There were a number of different possibilities if the bullet was left where it was, none of them good. Besides, it wasn’t as if she’d never seen a wound up close before, or cleaned one for that matter. It had just never involved someone she loved the way she loved Hawk.

  “You’re going to need some alcohol, bandages, a needle and thread—and your sharpest knife,” Hawk said from the kitchen chair she’d helped move him to, trying his best to focus on details and not the sharp pain. The amount of blood he’d lost was making him feel light-headed, and he needed to remain conscious so that he could help Carly. He really should go to a hospital but he didn’t trust anyone, and for this case, he had to fly under the radar.

  She had already returned to the kitchen from the bathroom, her arms filled with the items he had just rattled off.

  “I know,” she said, depositing them one by one on the kitchen table, lining them up in front of him. “I’ve done this before.”

  He looked at her in surprise. “When?” he asked.

  It wasn’t one of her fonder memories and up until now, she’d kept it to herself. “Dad and his friend used to go out hunting with enough alcohol in them to stock a small liquor store.”

  That was after her father had decided that drinking and hunting with his buddies was a lot more fun than going out for target practice with a little girl, she remembered. There was a time when that realization had pinched her stomach and made a sadness descend over her. But that time had long since passed. Now whenever she thought of her late father or anything associated with him, she felt nothing. She was completely removed from that period of her life. It no longer mattered.

  “One time his friends came back carrying Dad between them—not exactly an easy feat since they were all falling-down drunk. Seems that one of the guys had accidentally mistaken him for a deer when he was in the bushes, relieving himself, and shot Dad. There was no time to take him to the next town to see a doctor, so I was drafted.”

  Hawk frowned. She couldn’t have been that old. “Why not one of the other men?” he asked.

  That would have probably hastened her father’s demise. “Would you want someone trying to remove a bullet out of you when their hand was as steady as an earthquake?” To emphasize her point, she held out her hand and showed him how badly the men’s hands had shaken.

  He saw the point. “Guess not.”

  She went over to the sink and poured the rubbing alcohol liberally over the knife, disinfecting it. “Well, neither did my dad. He wasn’t that drunk. So I was elected.”

  He wondered why she’d never told him about this before. What else hadn’t she told him about? At one point he would have sworn that they had told each other everything. Everything because they had so much in common and had come together, seeking solace and comfort in the fact that the other knew exactly what they were going through, having an irrational drunk as a father. Now he was no longer so sure.

  “Just how old were you?” he asked.

  She didn’t even have to think about it. “Almost eleven. It was the year after my mother died,” she added in a quieter voice. There were times when she caught herself still missing her mother. That was never the case with her father. He had died years after he’d been lost to her.

  Checking everything she’d laid out on the table, she said, “I need one more thing before I get started.” With that, Carly hurried out of the room.

  He looked at the items on the table. “What else do you need?” he called out, curious.

  “Technically, I don’t need it. But you do,” she told him as she walked back into the room.

  She placed an old bottle of whiskey on the table right in front of him. The bottle was dusty. It was also unopened. He glanced at her sharply. If asked, he would have easily bet that there was no liquor in the house. Obviously he would have lost that bet.

  “What are you doing with that?” he asked.

  Grabbing a kitchen towel, she quickly cleaned the dust on the bottle. She tossed the towel onto the back of a chair, removed the bottle’s cap and set it to the side.

  “This is the last bottle my father bought. He dropped dead of a heart attack just as he started to open it. I’m not exactly sure why I’ve kept it all these years, but now I’m glad I did. It’s not going to knock you out,” she told him, getting a glass from the cupboard, “but at least it might help you put up with the pain a little.” Saying that, she poured a liberal amount of the amber liquid into a glass, then held it out to him. “Here.”

  Maybe it might help, he thought as he accepted the offered glass. Rather than just sip the drink slowly, as was his habit if he drank at all, Hawk tilted the glass back and drank down the contents quickly, draining it. He put it back down on the table with a “thwack” that resounded through the room.

  The whiskey dulled his senses, dragging a fire through his belly and his limbs. He was still having trouble focusing, but now he didn’t mind as much.

  “Have at it,” he told her, shifting in his chair so that his injured shoulder now faced her. “I’m ready, Dr. Finn,” he declared, deliberately emphasizing the title she had no claim to.

  Well, he might be ready, she thought, but she really wasn’t. Still, this needed to be done, and the longer she delayed, the worse the consequences might be for Hawk. She brought the knife over to the sink and repeated the ritual of liberally pouring the last of the rubbing alcohol over both sides of it. And while she was doing that, she also did one more thing.

  “Your lips are moving,” Hawk noticed. “But I don’t hear anything.”

  “You’re not supposed to.” That was her answer, but he was obviously waiting for more, so she explained very quietly, “I’m praying.”

  The admission surprised him. He thought for a moment, then found that between the triple shot of whiskey he’d just consumed and the blood he’d lost, he really couldn’t do that well.

  “Didn’t know you did that,” he told her.

  Carly took a deep breath. The rubbing alcohol was all gone and, with it, her excuse for stalling. She was ready, whether or not God was.

  “On occasion,” she answered, then nodded at the bottle on the table. “Want another drink before we get started?”

  “I’m good,” Hawk told her, bracing himself. He had no intention of passing out like his old man had habitually done. Drinking himself into a stupor was his father’s
usual way of operating. “Go ahead.”

  Oh God, was all Carly could think, over and over again, as she applied the point of her knife to Hawk’s flesh and began to go in. Although she knew that this wasn’t his fault, she found that digging for the bullet was exceedingly difficult. For one thing, the muscles in Hawk’s arm were as hard as rocks. Pushing the knife into his flesh was far easier in theory than in actual practice.

  Amazingly, Hawk wasn’t making any noise. Muscles or not, this had to hurt. “You all right?” she asked, slanting an uneasy glance at him.

  “I’ve been better,” he answered through solidly clenched teeth.

  She didn’t want to hurt him like this, but she had no other choice. “I’m sorry—”

  “Just find it,” he ordered, doing his best not to snap at her.

  “I can’t,” she cried, growing more frustrated the deeper she probed for the bullet.

  And then, finally, she felt it, felt a definite resistance of another kind. The point of her knife had touched metal.

  “I think I found it.”

  Thank God, he silently cried. Out loud he merely muttered, “Good for you.”

  “Just a little longer,” she promised, hoping she wasn’t lying as she angled the knife in her hand, trying to get under the bullet to move it along.

  And then, in what felt like a million light-years later, she finally managed to get it out. Such a little thing, causing so much damage, she couldn’t help thinking as she put it on the table.

  But there was no time to take a breath or admire her handiwork. Without anything to hold it back, Hawk’s blood began to flow freely from the hole in his arm. Acting fast, Carly jammed a large wad of cotton against the wound, temporarily stemming the flow until she could reach for her needle. Her stomach, in turmoil, all but rose up into her mouth.

  She felt sick. Whether with relief or the thought of what could have happened, she wasn’t sure. But the one thing she knew was that she wanted desperately just to throw up.