by Tara Janzen
The question was moot. In truth, she’d go with anybody to get out of there, even if it meant swallowing the last of her pride and looking at Walker Evans. She did both, carefully and slowly turning back around.
Walker met her gaze straight on, without any of the hesitation he saw in her eyes. “Get her things,” he said to Taggart, still watching Blue. She looked worse than when he’d found her. Her hair was limp and tangled, her expression more closed, without a hint of the sweetness he’d found in her kiss. Pale-blue smudges below her eyes bespoke of her lack of sleep. Lines of strain around her mouth told him she’d been thinking too hard and too fast.
“How’s my dog?” she asked, and he could see the effort it cost her. A small muscle twitched in her jaw. She looked ready to jump out of her skin. He knew the feeling; he hadn’t liked jail either.
“I had the vet come out to the house to check him over. He took a stitch or two, but he’s fine,” he assured her.
“Thanks for taking care of him. He’s . . . he’s a good dog. The best.” Dark-brown eyes met his for a second before she looked away again.
Taggart returned with a manila envelope and her rifle. “Here’s your stuff. You’ll have to sign for everything.” He started to hand them both to her, but Walker intercepted the rifle, his hand closing around the barrel just above hers. She didn’t look at him this time, but her hand tightened and pulled. He pulled harder and reached down with his other hand and pried her fingers loose.
“We’re doing this my way.”
She knew she was no match for him. With a muttered curse she released the gun. Angry but compliant, she checked the contents of the envelope and scrawled her name across the clipboard Taggart held out. Walker had gotten her out of jail. She’d let him hold the rifle if he wanted to, until she was out of the place. But the minute she breathed fresh air, she was going to set him straight about a lot of things, including her map. Her moment of insanity had passed.
“Been real nice having you, Miss Dalton,” Taggart teased. “You’re welcome back anytime.”
Her reply shocked the smile off the deputy’s face and brought one to Walker’s. The lady sure likes playing with fire, he thought, grinning broadly, but her mouth needs a good soaping.
“Come on, Blue. Let’s get out of here before Taggart loses his sense of humor.” He turned and walked toward the door, confident she would follow but listening for her footsteps nonetheless.
He stopped at the door and held it open for her. She slipped by him, obvious in her attempt not to touch him. He didn’t blame her. He hadn’t exactly cast himself in the role of the noble hero. They both knew why he’d come for her, and it had more to do with Dalton’s Treasure than the craziness in front of the fireplace, or so he’d been telling himself for the last twenty-four hours. Looking at her, he didn’t know what had caused him to kiss her in the first place. She wasn’t the type who usually brought kissing to mind. With his coat hanging past her knees, and her rolled-up jeans, she resembled a bag lady.
Outside, David waited by his silver Mercedes, drinking coffee out of a Styrofoam cup.
With a touch of his hand Walker guided her toward the car. “There’s someone who wants to meet you.” Blue took one look and balked, but Walker kept pushing.
“Let go of me, you—”
“Play nice, Blue. Don’t bite,” Walker whispered, tightening his grip. Louder, he said, “Blue, I’d like you to meet your lawyer, David London. He drove all the way up from Denver to get you out tonight.”
“Thanks,” she said, not sounding in the least as though she meant it. She tried again to pull away from him. Walker held her tighter.
“Miss Dalton,” David said, extending his hand. Blue ignored the gesture, and he let his hand drop back to his side. “Do you have any questions?” Walker noted the exchange and added etiquette lessons to his list of what Blue Dalton needed.
“How much are you costing me?” she asked point-blank.
The figure the lawyer named slackened her jaw. She stared at him, dumbfounded. Then her gaze drifted over the Mercedes, back to his cashmere coat, and slowly up to Walker’s face. “Thanks a lot.”
“You’re welcome,” he said, nonplussed by her sarcasm.
“The man you shot is recovering without complications,” David continued. “You can pick up your Jeep as soon as you get a new set of tires. If you’d like to press charges, I’ll be happy to represent you.”
“What kind of charges?” she grumbled, more intent on freeing herself than listening to an outrageously expensive lawyer she couldn’t afford. The man at her back was having none of it, though; his one hand held her in a grip she couldn’t break without causing a scene.
“Attempted rape,” David said.
Blue slanted an angry glance at Walker. “He never laid a hand on me,” she said between gritted teeth. “I shot him before he had the chance.”
Walker took the words and the flash in her eyes as fair warning, and he took them as a challenge.
“Assault?” David offered.
Blue shifted her gaze to the lawyer. “He nicked me and I shot him. Now who do you think got the wrong end of the assault?” She didn’t want to get balled up in a court case over a knife cut, not when the man was already going to jail. She’d dished out her dose of justice in the cabin, and she’d learned her lesson. From now on she’d make sure no one backed her into a corner.
“How about destruction of property? Your tires.”
“Hiring you would probably cost me more than buying a new set,” she said bluntly.
“Yes . . . well, then I guess we’ve covered everything.” David coughed discreetly into his hand, hiding a smile. “Walker knows how to get in touch with me if you have any other questions.”
“What about theft?” she asked.
The high-priced lawyer looked at her, then up at Walker. “There wasn’t anything about a theft in the report.”
Walker was going to strangle her. All he had to do was decide whether to do it now, in front of David, or wait until he got her alone. “There wasn’t any theft,” he said, sliding his hand across Blue’s shoulders in warning.
Dark-brown eyes met his steadily. “Easy for you to say. You’re the one who sto—”
He whipped her around, muffling her words against his coat as he hugged the daylights out of her. “Lord, I missed you, Blue. Let’s go home, darlin’, and let David get back to Denver. We’ve got so much to talk about.” He squeezed her tighter and sidestepped the kick he felt coming. He cupped her head in his palm, keeping her face buried against his chest. “David, thanks a lot for coming.” He winced as she landed a boot on his shin.
“Walker?”
Ignoring the confusion on David’s face, Walker tightened his grip around her waist and in one smooth move hefted her over his shoulder, knocking the breath out of her for the seconds he needed. “She’s mad. I was late.” He backed off a step. “I was supposed to pick her up early this morning. You know how women get.” Walker was sure he’d heard weaker excuses, but he couldn’t remember when.
Luckily, David accepted the explanation, not because he was easily fooled, which Walker knew he wasn’t, but probably because he was tired. Then again, anyone who lived with his sister had to be pretty well versed in the vagaries of the female mind, and anyone who didn’t know Blue Dalton wouldn’t know the usual female vagaries didn’t apply.
He saw David cast a curious glance at the woman grappling in his arms. Walker hefted her again to keep her quiet, knocking the breath out of her as gently as possible. “Thanks for helping us out,” he said by way of good-bye.
“Good luck.” David gave up with a shrug and slid into the plush leather seat of the Mercedes. Before he closed the door, he glanced up and nodded at Blue. “You’re going to need it.” A moment later he drove off.
Blue found her breath and her voice the same instant the Mercedes purred to life. “Put . . . put me down.” She tried to free her legs and found his hold unbreakable. “I’m warning y
ou, Walker Evans. You’ve got more nerve than is healthy.”
“Spare me the idle threats.” He started walking toward his truck, taking long strides, and trying not to bounce her on his shoulder. “Have you ever heard of the word gratitude?”
“Gra-gratitude? For wh-what? B-breaking my ribs?” Blue knew what he wanted, and she’d be damned if she’d give it to him. Not when he was hauling her around like a sack of flour.
“I’m sure you can come up with a reason if you put your mind to it. Or do you want me to leave you here where Taggart can find you and pick you up for vagrancy?”
“Talk about idle threats.”
Walker opened the driver’s-side door and dumped her inside. “Scoot over,” he ordered, getting in next to her after he slipped her rifle behind the seat.
“Where are you taking me?” She moved as far away from him as the truck cab allowed.
“Home.”
“Good,” she said with a huff, staring out the windshield. She could put up with him for another hour.
“Not the North Star, Blue. You’re going home with me.”
“The hell I am.”
“Woman”—he sighed, gripping the steering wheel with both hands—“you’re pushing your luck, and it ran out twenty-four hours ago.”
“About the same time yours did, pretty boy.” The words were out before she gave them the thought she should have.
Her quick glance proved the mistake. She’d never seen anyone get so angry so quietly. His hands twisted around the steering wheel, his jaw went tight, but neither action compared to the cold hardness in his eyes. Bright glints of steel bore down on her across the dark cab, sending a nervous tremor through her heart. Her hand slid to the catch on the door, ready for the fast escape she knew she’d need if he gave in to his silent fury.
His gaze went to her hand, and his eyes darkened another degree. “Don’t even think it, Blue.” He turned the key and jammed the truck into gear.
She grabbed the door handle as he wheeled the truck in reverse out of the parking spot.
“Buckle up.” He slammed on the brakes and checked the street both ways before shoving the gearshift up into first. “There’s one thing you better get straight in your mind.” He quelled her with a long, hard look, his face grim. “I won’t take that pretty boy crap off of you, ever. Remember that, Blue. I won’t tell you twice.” He stepped on the gas, and the wheels kicked up gravel as they took off into the mountains and the night.
Blue wanted to breathe a sigh of relief—she knew she’d gotten off easy—but the easy breath wouldn’t come. She was still in the mountain lion’s den, and the lion was bigger and faster and stronger than she was. She hoped to high heaven she’d prove to be smarter.
Forty minutes later his quietness and the rattletrap shimmy of the truck had worn down her patience to a frayed edge and her anger to a dull throb.
“You lied to me,” she said, breaking the silence before it broke her.
Walker thought about her statement for a minute, then said, “A couple of times, but I didn’t think you’d noticed.”
“When?” She cast him a curious glance. She hadn’t expected him to agree so easily with her insult.
“Why don’t you tell me which lie you’re talking about first.”
“Jail. Either you’ve never been in one, or you’ve got a twisted sense of what’s bad and what isn’t.”
“I didn’t lie. I’ve been in the old Jackson County jail twice. I figured the new one had to be better.”
“Well, the new one looked pretty old to me. What were you? A juvenile delinquent?”
He shifted his weight in the seat, not bothering to reply, but Blue wasn’t going to be put off that easily.
“What did they get you on? Kidnapping? Or theft?” Both options were high on her list of complaints against Walker Evans—very high.
He slanted her a dry look, then went back to watching the road. After a while he said, “I got in a couple of fights.”
“Must have been pretty bad ones. I never knew anybody to get thrown in jail for a little one.”
He shrugged and kept driving.
“You must have broken something,” she said following her train of thought out loud. “Something . . . or somebody.” Her train of thought ran into a brick wall, and her voice trailed off. She’d been angry with him since he’d tracked her down on the mountain, but she’d never been truly afraid of him, and this was a distinctly inopportune moment to start.
From beneath her lashes she glanced in his direction. He had a rugged profile, made up of shadows and angles softened only by the length of his hair. A slight crease in his cheek attested to more years in the sun and the wind than she’d previously attributed to him, years enough for him to have learned the wilier ways of getting what he wanted out of life. What did she really know about him?
As if drawn by her doubts, his gaze met hers across the dim interior of the truck.
“Okay, Blue,” he drawled softly. “You can quit thinking so hard. You’re fogging the windshield. I was sixteen the first time I landed in jail. I caught one of my father’s poker buddies hanging around my little sister’s bedroom. It’s true, I tried to kill him, but I was kind of skinny at sixteen, and all I managed was to break his nose before he broke my arm.” He saw her eyes grow wider, and he would have stopped, except he didn’t want any more of those kinds of problems cropping up between them. He needed her trust not her fear to find Lacey’s Lode. “The second time I was nineteen. No excuses that time. I was drunk, my father was drunk, and I guess we’d pretty much had it with each other. We tore up the bar in Gould and as much of each other as we could get a handhold on. Satisfied?”
Shocked was more like it. She lowered her gaze to her hands in her lap and pressed her lips together. Her own childhood hadn’t been much better, but she’d grown up thinking everyone else lived normally. Walker Evans hadn’t, though. The similarity in circumstances disconcerted her, made her resentment harder to hold on to.
Walker felt her shying away, and he sighed deeply, lifting one hand off the steering wheel in a gesture of resignation. “I don’t know what else I can tell you, except if I was inclined to hurt you, last night would have been a prime opportunity.”
“That’s . . . that’s not what I meant. It’s just that, well, I fought with my father a lot, too, but we . . . we never—”
“Good,” he interrupted her. “A man who abuses a woman ought to be shot, but I guess you already figured that out for yourself.”
“I didn’t want to shoot him,” she said softly.
“And I already figured that out. Don’t worry, Blue. You did the right thing.” He looked over at her and was struck once again by her delicacy. The dashboard lights caught the slight upturn of her nose, the gentle curves of her brow and cheekbones, and the worried frown tightening her full mouth. Suddenly he found himself feeling the same cold anger he’d felt at sixteen when Ralston had stood at the foot of Janelle’s bed and watched her sleep. “Listen to me, Blue. Every time you feel guilty, I want you to remember one thing. O’Keefe wanted to break you into a thousand different pieces, inside and out. You were smart enough and quick enough to stop him. That’s control, and you took it. The only problem I’ve got with what you did is that you missed, but in the long run that’s probably better for your peace of mind. In the same situation I wouldn’t have been as generous.”
“I tried to shoot you too,” she reluctantly reminded him, glancing up.
“And missed again, thank God.” He flashed her a quick grin. “I’m beginning to wonder why you carry a rifle.”
“I usually don’t miss, Walker. That’s the truth. I guess my nerves were frazzled, and I was pretty worn out.”
“Considering that you passed out when I grabbed you, I’d guess your guess is a pretty good one.”
“Then you’re not holding a grudge?”
Walker let his grin slip into a sly smile and captured her gaze with his own. “Not about what happened on the mou
ntain,” he drawled, his voice silky smooth, leaving no doubts in her mind about what he meant.
Blue shifted uneasily in her seat. She wished he wouldn’t look at her like that, as if he knew more about what she was thinking than she did, because suddenly what she found herself thinking was way out of line. It had something to do with his mouth and maybe his eyes—and the enforced intimacy of the truck cab. She was definitely out of line.
Taggart was wrong about him. He wasn’t pretty, not with his square jaw, not with those shoulders and those hands, and not with that wolfish gleam in his eyes.
Every predator needed its prey, and she instinctively knew which role she’d been cast in. Walker was no O’Keefe; he didn’t want to break her. He wanted to consume her. For the life of her she couldn’t imagine why, but she’d felt it last night in his kiss, and she saw it now in the night-darkened depths of his eyes.
He wasn’t for her, any fool could have seen the fact. She didn’t know why the possibility even crossed her mind. Men like him were for prettier women who knew how to play the mating game—a game, if last night was any indication, he had mastered long ago. She still didn’t believe what had happened to her when he’d kissed her, how warm and soft his skin had felt beneath her fingers, the hard angles of his face, the softness of his hair falling over her hands, the tautness and the sheer masculine power of his body as he’d drawn her close and held her as if he’d never let her go. He’d intoxicated her with his strength and the gentle way he’d yielded it to her with his kiss. She remembered cupping his jaw with her hand and feeling his mouth shift and open and close over hers, the tightening of the muscles when he’d sucked her tongue into his mouth, the ensuing relaxation when he’d released her to trace her lips. She remembered too much.
He slowed the truck, and the barest beginnings of panic caught on the edges of her emotions. She looked out the window, recognized his cabin, and knew she should have fought harder in front of the jail, map or no map. Staying with him was like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire; she was bound to get burned.