High Desert Hideaway

by Jenna Night

  “Someone shot out the window on the truck and we crashed.” Now that Nate knew Lily would be safe, his fear was replaced with burning fury. He’d had enough of hiding. “Then the guy came up the hill and took a shot at me. I’m going after him.”

  “Whoa.” Elijah held up a gloved hand. “You don’t need to chase after anybody right now.” Nate glared at him, but Elijah didn’t back down.

  “Why not?” Nate spat out the words.

  “Because that would be a stupid, hotheaded move.” He tilted his head slightly. “And that’s not your style.”

  * * *

  “It’s a good thing you came along when you did,” Lily said to the biker standing in front of her.

  “This is Elijah Morales.” Nate made the introductions between Elijah and Lily.

  Lily looked into the nearly black eyes of the dark-skinned man with small scars across his face. He wore his hair in a buzz cut and he stood and moved with a military bearing. “I’m glad to meet you,” she said. “Especially after what just happened.”

  That spacey, detached feeling of shock was gone and her leg was starting to throb.

  “I’m happy to meet you, too.” His smile was slight but the warmth in his voice sounded sincere. He gestured toward his fellow riders, who had parked along the side of the road. “And these are a few other members of Vanquish the Darkness.”

  One of the riders stayed close to Elijah, the one named Jonathan. The others stayed farther back, intently watching the scene. Lily counted eight of them. One was a woman. Each of them nodded or waved a greeting. She waved back.

  Lily turned back to Elijah and Jonathan, who had both gotten off their bikes. All the other members of Vanquish were still on their motorcycles. “How did you know we needed help?”

  Jonathan answered. He was tall and slender with spiky gelled hair and a small tuft of hair below his bottom lip. He looked like he was in his early twenties. “My brother here thought he was going to ride out alone to meet you and escort you to Painted Rock.” He hooked a thumb toward Elijah. “He was getting ready to leave right after he spoke to Nate on the phone, but I suggested he wait until we could get a few people together. Just in case there was trouble.”

  It was starting to sound like Nate and Elijah might be cut from the same cloth.

  Elijah glanced at his younger brother and sighed.

  “Thank you,” Lily said. “You just saved our lives.”

  Jonathan nodded and Lily could see a slight blush under his dusky skin. “My family is looking forward to having you stay at our ranch for a while.”

  “You know, we could all be riding right now instead of yammering,” Nate snapped at Elijah. He glanced enviously at the Vanquish leader’s powerful-looking motorcycle. “Even after we’ve stood here wasting time for so long I could still catch up with that jerk.”

  “Not a good idea,” Elijah repeated calmly.

  Nate glowered in the silence that followed. Lily could see his jaw muscles tense. And then she heard a sound. A siren.

  She looked up the road and saw flashing blue and red lights between the trees on the switchback ahead. A few seconds later a sheriff’s department patrol car rounded a corner and came into clear view. A second patrol car followed.

  The vehicles stopped just behind the parked Vanquish motorcycles. Deputy Rios got out of the first car. Lily heard Bubba barking excitedly and saw him moving impatiently in the backseat. A second deputy Lily didn’t recognize got out of the other patrol car and stepped up beside Rios.

  “Get back in your car and let’s go,” Nate said to Rios when she got closer to him.

  “Go where?”

  “The idiot who shot at me took off just a few minutes ago. I’ve seen his vehicle. I can find him.”

  Rios held up a hand. “Wait. What are you talking about? We just got a call reporting an accident. The guy said he and his buddy stopped to help after they saw a wrecked truck on the road and some big crazy man with a gun threatened them. I’m guessing that’s you. Now you’re saying someone shot at you?”

  “First someone shot out Lily’s window. I didn’t see that shooter. But then a guy drove up here, stopped his SUV, walked up carrying a rifle and took a shot at me. Maybe it’s the same shooter. Maybe not.” He glanced toward Elijah and his brother. “I know if these guys hadn’t showed up I’d be in the middle of a gunfight right now. So let’s go get the jerk in the SUV.”

  Nate tried to step around Rios and get to her patrol car. She was half his size but she got in his way again. “What did the SUV look like? Did you see the plates?”

  “He left it in the shadows. I couldn’t see the plates.” Nate rattled off a description of the SUV. The second deputy started talking into his collar mic and then jogged back to his patrol car.

  Nate turned to follow him.

  “Nate!” Rios called out. “Stop!”

  Lily could see how much respect Nate had for his fellow deputy when he actually stopped and turned around to listen to what she had to say.

  “You don’t have to do this by yourself,” she snapped. “Glenn is talking to Dispatch.” At that point the deputy pulled away in his patrol car and shot down the highway.

  “Everybody will be looking for the SUV, Nate. Your friends in the department will make sure they find it. Though it will probably be a burned-out shell by then. Meanwhile, you’ve got to take care of yourself. I’ve never known you to toss aside your common sense and act without thinking.” She glanced at Lily, her gaze lingering for a few seconds, and then turned back to him. “Don’t start now.”

  Nate blew out a breath. At some point he’d balled his hands into fists. He unclenched them, nodded at Rios and then walked back to Lily.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said quietly, leaning down toward her, his breath tickling her ear.

  She could feel her heart thudding in her chest. “Sorry? For what? For keeping me alive?”

  “What are all of you doing up here, anyway?” Rios asked, walking closer to Nate and Lily and the Morales brothers.

  “We’re out here helping our brother and sister,” Jonathan said exuberantly.

  Elijah looked at the ground and shook his head. But Lily could see a slight smile on his lips.

  Nate explained why they had to leave the Blue Spruce Ranch in a hurry and why they were on their way to Painted Rock. “Apparently someone’s been watching us since we left,” he said. “And it’s obvious by now they know where we’re going. I’m going to have to come up with another plan.”

  “Maybe not.” Rios chewed her bottom lip for a few seconds. “Normally you live and work up here. Though lately you’ve been fooling around down in Phoenix while I’ve done your job for you.”

  “You just play with your dog and pretend to work,” Nate joked back.

  Rios smiled. “I’ll drive you two to your apartment in Painted Rock. You can sneak out the back of the property and Elijah can drive you to the Morales ranch. The bad guys might not have realized that’s your ultimate destination. Especially if they aren’t from around here.

  “We’ll leave some lights on at your place. I’ll go to the hardware store and buy a timer so they’re off during the day and on for a few hours after dusk. If anyone’s watching the apartment they might think you’re actually there. It could buy us some time to track down your shooter from the highway and hopefully figure out where Eddie Drake is. Or if he was the actual shooter.”

  “All right,” Nate said. “We’ll do things your way for now. But if we don’t get results, I’m going to start doing them my way.”

  TEN

  Nate’s apartment building was a hacienda-style structure located one street over from what passed for the city center of Painted Rock. The town had started out as a stagecoach relay station and expanded from there, but it still kept its frontier feel after all these
years. Nate liked the town well enough, but it didn’t feel like home.

  He scanned the living room of his apartment, trying to imagine how it looked to Lily. Plain furniture, bare walls, none of the small extras that make a room feel cozy. She probably thought he spent the least amount of time possible here and she’d be right.

  He shook his head. Why did he even care what she thought about his place? He was trying to keep her alive. He wasn’t dating her. And flying off the handle like he had on the highway after the attack, determined to hunt down the man who’d dared try to hurt Lily, wasn’t like Nate at all. He prided himself on keeping a level head. Clearly he needed to take a step back from her, emotionally, and remind himself she was simply an old acquaintance he was helping for the sake of an old friend.

  And yet he still couldn’t resist watching for her reaction to what she saw in his home. What she might see in him.

  He stole a glance at her as she scanned the books on his bookcase. Fiction, mostly. Lots of Westerns. If work or life was getting to Nate, he could lose himself better in reading than he ever could in a movie or TV. And it helped still his mind on those nights when he couldn’t fall asleep.

  Rios was on Nate’s landline, updating Sheriff Wolfsinger and getting departmental approval to buy the timers for the lights. The sheriff was well aware of the search for the man, or possibly men, who’d shot at Lily and Nate today, but so far there was no new information.

  “I’m heading to the store,” Rios said after she got off the phone. She gestured to Bubba and he stood up from his position near a water bowl. “I’ll bring back the timers and hook them up.”

  “Elijah should be by here to pick us up in a few minutes,” Nate said, glancing at the screen on his phone. He’d received a text a short time ago. He looked up at Rios. “We’ll be gone before you’re back. Thanks for your help.”

  “No problem.” Rios turned to Lily. “We’ll get these guys. Don’t let yourself get discouraged.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You hungry?” Nate asked Lily after Rios left.

  “Kinda.”

  He walked into the kitchen. “This is my first time back here since I left for Phoenix,” he called out to her in the living room. “I don’t think I have much here except for snack food.”

  “That’s fine.” She walked toward the serving bar between the living room and kitchen. He saw her limping before she pulled back one of the wooden bar stools and sat down with a grimace.

  “Your leg hurts,” he said. He pulled a couple of glasses down from a cabinet and glanced in the fridge, but decided the orange juice in there was questionable, so he filled the glasses with tap water instead. “I’ll grab your purse for you and you can take a pain pill.”

  “No.” She reached over and touched his arm, holding him in place. He froze, not wanting to break contact. Despite every crazy thing that had happened since he ran into her in the Starlight Mart, there was something about Lily that was soothing. Something about her touch that made him feel like he mattered to her and that he mattered as something more than simply a lawman who could help keep her from getting killed.

  Which was ridiculous. Obviously he needed to get a grip. He moved his arm away from her hand and opened some cabinet doors. “Why don’t you want to take your medicine?”

  She didn’t move for a few seconds, her expression turning to something that looked like disappointment. Then she sighed and glanced away. “If you’ve got some over-the-counter pain medicine that would be great. The prescription stuff makes me a little woozy so I don’t want to take it until we’re at the Morales ranch. Just in case there’s more trouble.”

  He found a pain reliever for her. He also found some canned soup, which didn’t sound too thrilling, and some dried noodles. But in the drawer where he normally kept cookies he did find something exciting.

  “Chocolate bars, graham crackers and marshmallows?” she said when he set them on the counter in front of her.

  “How about s’mores?”

  She nodded. “Perfect.”

  He lined up some graham crackers on a plate and topped them with pieces of chocolate bar, then stabbed a couple of forks into big marshmallows. He turned on the gas stove top and set the marshmallows on fire, waving them a little to keep the smoke from getting to the smoke detector. When they were just right he let Lily blow them out and then smushed them onto the chocolate.

  Lily’s huge, chocolate-smeared grin after she bit into her s’more gave him an absurd, heart-lifting feeling of accomplishment.

  They were both pretty hungry so he made a second round.

  “Those were great,” she said, wiping the last crumbs from her lips. “Where’d you learn to make them?”

  He hesitated. Maybe they’d be friends when all this was over. He would like that. But he needed to know he could talk honestly to her, otherwise what was the point of a friendship? “I learned it from one of my mom’s boyfriends. He was around for an entire summer, which was the longest any of them stayed. He liked to sit outside while he drank and talked and looked at the stars at night. And he liked to make s’mores. He was a nice guy.”

  Nate watched her closely, waiting for a reaction. His past was his past and he had his own perspective on it. Disgust, pity or anything like that would tell him things would never go anywhere between him and Lily. It would prove their worlds were too far apart and it might even be a relief to know that.

  She gave him a lingering look. And then she smiled. “Sounds like a good memory.”

  For him, it actually was. Nate found himself staring at her face and feeling that soothing connection again without even touching her. It felt as if his heart was expanding in his chest.

  And then his phone chimed and he looked down at the screen. For a few brief moments he and Lily had been able to forget she was in danger. That respite was over. “Elijah and his wife are waiting out back. Time to go.”

  * * *

  Outside, the golden late-afternoon sunshine had turned to purple dusk. Nate and Lily hurried to meet Elijah in his pickup truck in the alley behind the apartments and they quickly lay down in the backseat. Lily’s leg hurt, but at least this time she wasn’t scrunched down on the floor. Nate introduced Lily to Elijah’s wife, Olivia, though for the sake of keeping Lily and Nate hidden they couldn’t look at one another.

  The truck started to move down the road and Lily soon learned Elijah’s wife was very friendly and much chattier than her taciturn husband. They made a series of turns over several minutes before finally slowing down and turning onto an obviously unpaved road.

  “We’re in the clear,” Olivia called out. “I haven’t seen anyone on the road behind us for a while. And we’re on Morales ranch property now.”

  Lily and Nate cautiously sat up.

  Through the front windshield Lily saw a sprawling ranch house with a few trees around it and a couple of motorcycles parked beneath the trees. The larger windows appeared darkly tinted, but lights glowed in the smaller windows.

  Elijah parked by the front door. As they all got out of the truck, Olivia Morales reached over to wrap an arm around Lily’s shoulders and give her a squeeze. “Welcome. I was in a dangerous situation when I first came to town. People here want to help you.”

  “Thank you.” Right now she was open to all the help she could get.

  “I arrived alone and scared and a certain deputy sheriff had his suspicions about me at first—” she looked pointedly at Nate “—but things ended up okay.”

  “I’m paid to be suspicious,” Nate said blandly.

  Olivia tucked a few strands of reddish-blond hair behind her ear and grinned at him.

  They stepped into a large living room with comfortable-looking furniture and a huge fireplace at one end. A fire was burning, chasing away the outside chill. Lily was introduced to several people, including
Elijah’s parents, the owners of the property. She recognized some of the people in the room as riders with Vanquish the Darkness that she’d seen on the highway earlier today.

  Something delicious involving barbecue sauce was cooking in the kitchen and her stomach growled. Turned out the s’mores weren’t very substantial.

  Lily spotted a couple of laptops on a low coffee table, the screens showing multiple sites on the ranch where security cameras had been set up.

  “What is this place?” Despite Nate’s description, Lily hadn’t imagined anything like this. “Why do you need this kind of security?”

  “We’re a working cattle ranch,” Elijah answered. “We’re also members of a committed outreach program with some specialized experience.” He glanced at Nate. “And some very helpful friends. Some people don’t like that and we have to be able to keep an eye out for them.”

  “Oh.” Lily didn’t know what else to say. It was a little unnerving, but also comforting at the same time.

  “Dinner will be ready in a half hour,” Olivia said to Lily. “Let me show you to your room.” Lily’s bedroom was upstairs, and she was able to shower and change clothes before coming back downstairs for dinner.

  After dinner, Elijah suggested Nate and Lily join him in a den off the living room to talk. Elijah’s parents, Jonathan, Olivia and a young man named Bobby, who was introduced as their tech expert, would also be there.

  Walking into the den, Lily noticed a couple of oil paintings of eagles on the wall. She sat down on a couch below the paintings. Nate sat next to her and for a moment her heart felt light in her chest. It felt good to be near him, but she reminded herself not to enjoy it too much. She might have renewed her conviction that ultimately God was in control of her life, but she still had a lot of hard work ahead of her when things went back to normal. She didn’t have time for an elaborate social life. And Nate had his own life to get back to, anyway.

  Nate stretched his arm up along the top of the couch behind her, which was almost like having him put his arm around her shoulders, and that lighthearted feeling threatened to turn into a mild panic. She didn’t want to have this reaction to him. She’d been happily unconnected to any man before this nightmare started. And eating s’mores together didn’t change anything. Even if it felt like it had.