My Tye

by Kristin Daniels

  But it didn’t faze him. He grabbed Laine’s wrist as he found his footing, dragging her with him. They were precariously close to the rim of the gulley. One damned misstep…

  Fury raged through Tye’s veins. Not only no, but fuck no. He charged, hitting big guy with a shouldered power-drive directly where his bullet had ripped through moments ago. Big guy hollered out in pain and fell to his knees just as Laine twisted her wrist out of his grip.

  Tye spun on her, grabbing her shoulders. “Damn it, woman. What were you thinking?”

  Her wet hair clung to her face and her lips were damn near blue. But it was the terror in her eyes as she stared over his shoulder that had him dreading the worst.

  Tye turned, keeping Laine against his back.

  “She was thinking she could save you,” big guy snarled as he came to his feet. “But guess what? No one can.”

  Tye couldn’t so much as blink before he found a shoulder shoved into his gut. The force pushed him back into Laine. He dug his feet in, trying to stop the momentum, but it did no good. His feet were too wet, the grass too slippery. They were being bulldozed over the edge of the gully and there wasn’t a fucking thing he could do about it.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Tye tumbled over the edge of the ravine, crashing downward for what seemed like forever. The first ten feet or so of broken tree limbs and jutting saplings quickly gave way to the sharp and pointy outcropping of rocks lining the side and bottom of the gully.

  He landed with a boulder digging into the small of his back and a searing pain shooting through his calf.

  But he didn’t give a shit about any of that.

  Where in God’s name was Laine?

  Being behind him when big guy ran at them, she’d been the one to fall first, but only a split second before he had. He tried to grab her as they plunged, but he couldn’t reach out to her. He couldn’t grab onto her. He couldn’t do a goddamn thing but listen to her screaming.

  There were no screams now.

  The only sound came from the roaring of the heavy rain. He lifted his head and touched above his eye. Sticky red coated his fingers. He tried to clear his vision by squinting. Once. Twice. Three full times before he could see well enough.

  “Laine!”

  Nothing. No answer. He couldn’t see her. He couldn’t hear her.

  Fear like he’d never known grabbed him in a stranglehold, cutting off his air supply and making him lightheaded. She couldn’t be far. She just couldn’t be. He rolled to his side and came up on all fours. Blood spread out from a six-inch rip in his pant leg. Fire burned through his calf as he tried to stand.

  Over the din of the downpour, he heard a moan to his right. There. Quiet and muffled, but it was still a moan.

  “Laine. Baby. Answer me.”

  A downed oak tree lay sideways across the bottom of the ravine. The weak moan he’d heard was coming from the other side.

  He stumbled in that direction, ignoring the agony the jagged edge of the rocks created as they poked and sliced into his bare feet. Two steps and his injured leg threatened to give out on him. Pain ripped from the gash in his calf upward through his knee as he twisted hard so he wouldn’t fall face-first onto one of the rocks.

  Not good. Not good at all.

  Ten feet. Ten feet more and he’d get to her. His vision blurred again. He wiped at his eyes, coating the back of his hand with more of the viscous blood oozing from his forehead. With each torturous step he took, his calf burned and his knee throbbed like a mother. He knew only seconds had passed, but it felt like an eternity before he finally reached the monstrous fallen tree.

  He threw his body on top of the soggy oak, arms out in front, and searched for her.

  Hot damn and hallelujah. There she was, not five feet away.

  “Laine. Talk to me,” he cried out as he scrambled over the side of the tree. “Jesus, tell me you’re all right.”

  She moaned again and opened her eyes. “Tye?”

  “I’m here. I’m right here,” he breathed, coming up beside her.

  “Are you okay?”

  Figures that she’d be more worried about him than she was about herself. “Don’t worry about me. What about you?”

  Other than a few scratches, he didn’t see any visible blood on her. Later, though, she was going to end up with more than a few stellar bruises. Hell, they both were. He looked up the side of the ravine and followed what had to have been her trajectory on the way down. He was so thankful that she’d plummeted down a more moss-covered and plant-strewn section than the craggy path he’d tumbled through. Still, they’d both taken one hell of a serious fall.

  “I’m all right…I think.” She lifted onto one elbow, swiping at the rain on her face before looking down at the bloody rip in his pants. “Oh God. You’re bleeding.”

  “It’s…” he started, only to stop when she looked up at his face. He was going to say he was fine, but there was no point in lying. He wasn’t anywhere near fine.

  She paled and reached out for him, stopping only inches away from the gash above his eye. He took her hand and pressed it to his chest. “Can you stand? We need to get out of here.”

  “Hold on,” she said. “We need to take care of your leg first.”

  She pried the knot on the wide sash of her soaked robe loose and pulled it through the loops at the sides. Working quickly, she wrapped the belt around his calf to put pressure on the wound. He bit back a curse. Fuck, that hurt.

  “It’s not going to stop the bleeding, but it’s better than nothing.”

  He got to his feet, hopping on his good leg to keep his balance, and then held his hand out to her. The robe slipped open as she grabbed hold and pulled herself up. Damn, he could hardly believe that just minutes ago he’d been sinking into that luscious body of hers. Now they were both battered and bloody and fighting for their lives.

  “I hate to admit this, but I think you’re going to have to help me to the top.”

  Watching her step so she wouldn’t gouge her feet on the rocks, she sidled up beside him and drew his arm over her shoulder. She held him by the wrist while circling his waist with her other arm. “Don’t ever be afraid to admit anything to me, no matter what it is. We’ll help each other to the top. Deal?”

  Damn straight they had a deal. He nodded once and hopped again, letting her take the lead. The trek was slow going, and he found himself getting more and more pissed the higher they climbed.

  “He had to have seen us,” she said, sliding a glance up to him. “On the porch. He had to have been watching us.”

  Yeah, that’s what Tye figured too. But what concerned him more was what big guy was doing there in the first place. If the jackass hadn’t made a ruckus in the stables, if Tye and Laine had made it into the house and gone back to bed…

  A chill swept over his skin at the thought of what could have happened.

  “Try not to think about it,” Tye said through gritted teeth. “Let’s just get to the top and back to the house. I’d lay a hundred to one odds that he’s already long gone, but I’ll call my guys in anyway. We’ll call Mac too, to tell him about this and see what he found out about the van. Hopefully he’ll have some news for us.”

  Her ankle pitched on a slippery rock. He held her up, unintentionally putting weight on his bad leg for a moment. He bit back the shout he wanted to let loose and replaced it with a deep-seated growl.

  “Easy. No, wait. Over this way,” she said. “There are more exposed roots to grab on to.”

  The sky began to lighten some as the deluge morphed into a drizzle. Thunder rumbled off in the distance, signaling that the storm was moving on.

  “Sure,” she murmured. “Now the rain decides to stop. Perfect timing, Mother Nature.”

  Tye couldn’t help but agree. Moments later, after a slew of grunts and groans and a few not-so-politically-correct curse words thrown out—more on his part than hers—they inched their way up and over the crest of the ravine. And just as he had suspected, th
eir man was nowhere to be seen.

  “We should look for my gun,” Tye said, turning them in the direction he thought it had flown.

  “Oh no. I’m getting you back to the house. You’re going to need a doctor to look at not only your leg, but that cut on your head too. Your gun can wait. Last thing I need is you bleeding out on me.”

  “It’s not that bad.”

  “It’s bad enough,” she countered, steering them through the pasture and back toward the house. “I’m not taking no for an answer.”

  He glanced down at her tucked against his side, dripping wet and half-naked. She was hellfire and full of venom one minute, while bowling him over by being so soft and perfectly submissive the next. The combination was one he’d craved for so long, yet never thought he’d find. But he had. In her. And he wasn’t ever going to let her go.

  “Now who’s being the bossy one?” It hadn’t been that long ago that she’d called him bossy when he was taking care of her. For the moment, however, the tables were turned. She was the one calling the shots and he was powerless to do anything but let her hold the whip and crack the hell out of it.

  But his compliance was only for now. Because once they made it back to the ranch, once he finished making his phone calls and had his cuts sewn up and taken care of, all bets were off. The motherfucker who hurt her was going down, and he was going down by Tye’s own hands.

  It was clear to him now that big guy would stop at nothing to exact his revenge on Laine. But it was even more clear, in both his heart and his mind, that Tye was never going to allow that to happen. Catch him off guard once, shame on him. Catch him off guard twice?

  Not a fucking chance in hell.

  * * * * *

  Earl Harlan trudged along the edge of the tree line, hopped up on the adrenaline firing through his blood. He wasn’t parked that far out, just a few hundred yards or so off the sheriff’s property. As he cornered the copse of crabapple trees hiding his van, he headed straight for the cracked side mirror. He twisted the thing sideways, turned around and carefully lifted up his soaked and bloody t-shirt. From over his shoulder, he could see the entrance wound where that asshole had shot him. The bullet went clean through, so he at least had that going for him. Other than that, and the damn-near hard-on he’d gotten from dumping those two over the side of the ravine, nothing else had gone as planned.

  He’d been so close—just seconds from slipping away from his hiding spot in the stables so he could sneak up behind the bitch as she sat on the fence. She would’ve tried to scream as he grabbed her, he knew, but one well-placed crack to the side of her head and that would’ve quickly become a non-issue.

  But no. Because of Carter, Earl had his glory stolen from him. He’d had his vengeance ripped out from underneath him.

  And that simply wouldn’t do.

  Earl used the wet t-shirt to clean up the blood coating his skin. He wiped harder, faster, until he got so pissed he ended up throwing the damn shirt and kicking the door of his van. A chunk of rust fell from the running boards, which upped his mad all the more. But what made it worse, what made him grit his teeth and go at the metal slider on his piece-of-shit van with a few dozen one-two punches, were the images seared into his brain of what happened when the sheriff had first come outside.

  He hadn’t been happy, yet Morgan all but threw herself at him. Earl couldn’t hear everything Carter had yelled at her or the few words she’d shouted back, and he didn’t really care to. Still, after Carter had fucked her, they’d gotten quiet. Downright fucking cozy. It was like the rest of the world could’ve blown up and they wouldn’t have heard it, felt it, or even given a shit.

  No woman had ever looked at him the way Morgan had looked at Carter. No woman had ever thrown herself at him without wanting his money, his car, or his blood and guts in return. And, buried deep down inside, what killed him was that he knew no woman ever would.

  To hell with it. He didn’t want that anyway. No man in his right mind should. And if he wasn’t going to have it, then he’d make damn sure they weren’t going to, either. Besides, they were the ones who decided to raise the stakes this go-round, not him. Too bad for them, it was his turn now.

  And with the little prize he now had tucked into the waistband of the jeans he wore, he was more than ready to raise the stakes.

  * * * * *

  Within twenty minutes of Laine and Tye making it back to the ranch, all hell had broken loose. Tye had insisted on searching the house right away and she wasn’t about to try to talk him out of it. He made call after call, practically yelling into the phone as he went through each room of the house, all the while telling and retelling what they’d just gone through. Laine followed close behind, since he wouldn’t let her out of his sight, not even for a minute.

  He found nothing out of place, thank God.

  After they’d changed out of their dripping wet clothes into dry jeans and t-shirts, Tye checked all of the locks on the windows and doors while she tried to find something to do. She needed to keep busy or her thoughts would end up wandering—which, considering her freaked out and scared state of mind right now, was not a good thing. She diverted her attention by making a pot of hot coffee. Lame and cliché, maybe, but it was working for her, so she’d be damned if she’d knock it.

  Not long afterward, Deputy Tom Wyland showed up. Dr. Seaver, making a rare but much-needed house call to stitch up Tye’s wounds, ran a close second. Mac was the last to arrive. He wore a scowl on his face and worry riddled his eyes.

  He pulled Laine into a warm hug as soon as he walked in. “You’re okay.”

  He wasn’t asking her, he was telling her. She felt the resolution these two men possessed to find the assailant, and she felt it clear to her bones.

  Mac kept one arm around her, holding her close. He clasped Tye on the shoulder, just as Tye stood from where Seaver had been working on his wounds so he could wrap his leg in gauze.

  “Based on the age, make and model of the van you chased, we’ve got a good lead on a name and address. There aren’t too many old vans like that still in commission around here, or anywhere else for that matter.”

  Laine stepped out of Mac’s arms. “You have someone? Who is it?”

  “We don’t have him, but we have a name. An ex-con named Earl Harlan. Sentenced to two years on a drug charge, but he ended up serving nineteen months and some change. Was released a month ago.” Mac pulled his phone from his pocket and tapped the screen. “Someone in your office was the PD assigned to his case. An Amy Phillips.”

  “Amy. She’s good. She was a little green back then, but she’d graduated near the top of her class. I’ve never heard any complaints about her.”

  Mac nodded. “I checked out the address we came up with before I drove over here. The apartment was empty and the neighbors said they hadn’t seen anyone going in or out for the last day or two. From the physical description they gave me, though, it’s got to be our guy. I assigned patrols to circle the area. We’ll know if he shows back up.”

  Tye grimaced. “He won’t.”

  Laine’s gaze shot to his. “What makes you say that?”

  “Gut feeling,” he said, rolling down his pant leg now that Doc Seaver was done. “He’ll want to finish what he started. Which is doing whatever he can to make sure we’re…taken care of, for lack of a better term.”

  Laine shivered just as Mac added, “There’s more.”

  Her stomach cramped. “Oh God. What?”

  “I’m ninety-nine percent sure what he did to you was premeditated. I made a few calls on my way over and ended up having a hell of a conversation with the warden at the state pen. Turns out our little friend Earl liked to complain. A lot. He’d go on and on about how the DA had fucked him over and how the County Public Defender had to have been in on it for it to go down the way it had.” He reached for her hand and squeezed her fingers when she started to bristle. “Those were his words, not mine. I also found out something else. Harlan’s cellmate was none othe
r than Jeffrey Perry.”

  “The man convicted of hurting all those women years ago?” Laine asked.

  “The very same one,” Mac answered.

  Tye’s face and neck flushed a crimson red. “I’ll be a son of a bitch.”

  All the unusual circumstances from the last two weeks began to fall into place at Mac’s revelation. She forked her fingers through her hair, pressing her palms hard against her scalp. She was afraid that if she didn’t, her head might explode. She hadn’t been the victim of some random act of violence. She’d been sought out. Followed. Hurt because of the job she held, not because of some secret fantasy she’d looked to fulfill.

  She’d been the one to lead him to Club Euphoria. Back to the scene of the crime, so to speak. Back to exactly where he wanted her to go in the first place.

  Nausea rolled up from her stomach to settle in her throat. She spun away from the men, but there was nowhere for her to go. Tom was there, as was the doctor. All of this was too much for her handle, and these men were taking up way too much space. She headed for the door, flung it open and stopped dead in her tracks.

  Haven Sims held her hand poised to knock on the door. Instead, she smiled, albeit a bit sheepishly. “Ms. Morgan.”

  Tye came up behind Laine. He brushed her back with his tight chest, and she swore she heard him growl. Apparently, his leftover fury from the fight hadn’t quite dissipated just yet. “Ms. Sims. What are you doing here?”

  Haven hitched her thumb over her shoulder. “Um. The police scanner. I have one in my car. I heard there’d been some trouble out here.”

  Laine slumped her shoulders. She’d had just about enough of this. “So you thought you’d just show up and get the scoop?”

  “Ms. Morgan, I’m a reporter. It’s what I do.”

  Tye’s voice barely veiled his vehemence. “Then do it somewhere else.”

  “No, wait,” Laine said.

  Tye looked at her like she’d lost her mind. And well, maybe she had. But it was either give this woman a generalized statement to make her happy and send her on her way or deal with her popping up whenever the shit hit the fan again. And honestly, if Laine’s position as Public Defender had taught her anything, it was how to deal with reporters with stealthy evasiveness and simple tact. She could totally nail this.