“Just keep driving,” he ordered. “As fast as you can.”
Gigi checked the rearview. The Mercedes plowed down the trail behind them, leaving a plume of dust in its wake.
The front right tire of the Jeep dropped into a deep rut in the road and then rebounded with a vengeance, catapulting Shane out of his seat. He grabbed the roll bar with both hands.
“Faster,” he ordered.
“I’m going as fast as I can.”
Gigi looked over her shoulder. The Mercedes was right behind them. The gun hung out the window.
“Duck!” Shane shouted. Several rounds dinged off metal. She couldn’t tell where. Keeping her head as low as she could and still see over the dashboard, Gigi pressed the accelerator to the floor.
“All right, get ready,” Shane called.
She glanced up warily. “Ready for what?”
He dropped into the passenger seat and climbed across the console until he was practically sitting in the driver’s seat with her. “Ready to hit the brakes and make a hard right turn.”
“Why?”
“Because the road ends right up there.”
“What!” She raised her foot to stomp on the brake, but he quickly kicked her foot away. Then he stomped on the gas.
“Move over,” he yelled.
Move? Move where? She crushed herself against the door, giving him haphazard control of the Jeep.
He pushed the accelerator to the floor once again and locked his fingers around the steering wheel. “Hold on! Five…four…”
The road ahead disappeared into nothingness. Gigi grabbed the door handle.
“Three…”
She let go of the handle and wrapped her arms around the headrest of the seat.
“Two…”
Her heart stopped, she let go of the headrest and, in a moment of sheer desperation, coiled herself around him. She buried her cheek against his chest.
“One… Now!”
Shane stood on the brake and yanked the steering wheel viciously around to the right, sending the Jeep fishtailing into a tight curve surrounded by a choking cloud of dust and gravel hail. Gigi ground her chin into him and held on.
He jerked the wheel back to the left, pulling the Jeep out of the spin within feet of the cliff and driving parallel to the precipice.
Over his shoulder, she saw that the driver of the car had finally seen the danger ahead. He was reared back from the steering wheel, elbows locked straight as if could push himself away from the cliff by physical force. The big sedan’s brakes ground and groaned with the effort, but couldn’t stop his momentum in time. Just as it slid to a halt, the nose of the Mercedes edged over the embankment. The car tottered forward, then back, coming to an unsteady rest with the front half of the car hanging precariously over the edge. A shower of pebbles clattered down the slope, then all went quiet.
Shane stopped the Jeep. Slowly Gigi uncurled her fingers from the front of his shirt and looked up at him.
He had the audacity to grin. “Antilock brakes aren’t so nifty when stopping fast is more important than stopping straight.”
“I can’t believe we just left him there. Aren’t you going to arrest him or something?”
Gigi glanced at Shane. His once golden tanned complexion had jaundiced. He hadn’t said a word in the ten minutes since he’d ordered her to drive, leaving the man who’d ambushed them dangling off the side of a cliff. For an experienced federal agent, he wasn’t taking a little thing like a shoot-out too well.
His eyes drifted shut. “You want to cross an open field in front of a man with a gun and try to take him down, you go right ahead, honey. Me, I prefer not to go out in a blaze of glory. At least not today.”
“You could have kept him pinned down or something while I went for help.”
“Yeah, I could have. Except the nearest help is in town, better than half an hour away, and I’m out of ammo.”
“Out of ammo?”
“Well, not technically out. I’ve got one round left. In case of emergency.”
“Don’t you carry extra?”
“Sure. In the glove compartment of my Blazer.”
The same Blazer that was twenty miles back in the other direction, at the rest stop, along with his police radio and his cell phone, no doubt.
Shane’s lips curled into a weak smile. “Besides, I wasn’t sure you’d come back for me.”
Gigi didn’t know what to say to that. She was desperate to get out of this town and away from Shane, but leave him one-on-one with an armed assassin… No, she wouldn’t do that. Would she?
“I would have sent someone back, at least,” she grumbled.
Shane sighed. “Well, I guess that’s something.” His eyes pulled open slowly, as if the small act required tremendous effort. “We’ll stop at the first phone we see and call the deputy, although I doubt he’ll find anything by the time he gets out to that cliff.”
Gigi’s stomach turned. The last thing she needed was more cops involved. “Then why bother?”
He scowled. “Because he’ll want to start a search for the guy before anyone else gets shot at, so why don’t you help things along by telling me who the hell that was and what he wanted.”
Gigi steered the Jeep off the county highway and braked to a stop behind a stand of birch. With shaky hands she shoved the transmission into neutral and shut off the engine.
His head rolled toward her. “What are you doing?”
“I need to stop.” Despite her best efforts at control, her voice cracked a little on the last syllable.
“We need to keep going.”
“I said I need to stop.”
He raised his eyebrows and cranked up one corner of his mouth. “You couldn’t have gone before you left the house?”
She wouldn’t dignify that with an answer. She reached up automatically to push her curly bangs out of her face until she realized she didn’t have bangs anymore. She’d almost forgotten. She lowered her hand, yanked at the door handle on the Jeep and bounced out of the vehicle.
“Where are you going?” he called out behind her.
“For a walk.”
“Lady, there’s a man out there with a gun. And you want to take a hike in the woods?”
Everything she knew about Shane Hightower told her this wasn’t going to be easy. He was smart, stubborn, and took his job very seriously. Some might say he was obsessive about it. So how was she going to talk him into walking away? Or letting her walk away?
The way she saw it, only one tactic had a chance of working. She stopped walking, but didn’t turn around. “That man is exactly why I want to take a hike. A very long hike. Who knows where I might end up? California maybe. Or Seattle.”
He snarled like a rabid dog. She heard the door on the Jeep open and close, and then his footsteps pounding up behind her. “Who is he?”
She faced him. “I have no idea.”
“No idea? Really? He just showed up and shot at you for no reason. Just like you were all dolled up and sneaking out of town to see your sick aunt.”
He reached up with his left hand and pulled on the fake hair. “Your wig is crooked.”
She slapped his hand away and slid the hairpiece off. With the pins removed, her short curls sprang free. She bent over, shook her head and fingered through the tangled mass. When she looked up, his eyes had narrowed again, and faint, pinched lines had appeared at the corners of his mouth.
“That’s better,” he said, clearing his throat. “Now the contacts.”
She blinked out the tinted lenses and shoved them in her pocket, oblivious to whether or not they’d be ruined. “Happy now?”
“No.” She didn’t doubt him. He didn’t look happy. “Who was that guy?”
“I told you I don’t know.” She started walking again, and he followed, the hairpiece swinging from his fist.
“And I told you I’m not buying it,” he said. “If you don’t start talking quick, you’re getting back in that Jeep and we’re going t
o town. You can sit in a cell at the sheriff’s office until your tongue loosens up.”
“You can’t do that!”
He caught up to her in one long stride and swung her around to face him. He loomed over her, purposely using every bit of his six-foot-one frame to intimidate her, she was sure. She searched his blue eyes—the same ones she used to think so soft—and found them hard as glaciers. A queasiness started in her stomach and worked its way up into her throat. He wasn’t going to let her go.
She glanced at the Jeep, judging her chances of making it before he caught her. No way.
How had this happened? How had her carefully crafted plan fallen apart so quickly? He’s a cop, that’s how. And she’d let him get too close.
Numbly she backed up until her spine hit the trunk of a birch tree. Nowhere else to go, she stopped, her mouth dry and her heart and lungs fighting to keep up with her body’s demands for blood, oxygen.
He must have sensed the raw panic racing through her veins. His voice gentled to a soothing tone, similar to one she’d use with some mistreated animal brought to her clinic. “Tell me, Gigi,” he crooned. “Tell me what’s going on.”
She shook her head, her hair snagging on the tree bark behind her.
“You’re in trouble. I can help.”
“No.”
“How bad is it? It must be pretty bad for you to be this scared.” The glaciers in his eyes fractured momentarily, replaced by familiar concern. His words stretched out, low and mournful, like an old forty-five record played on thirty-three rpm. “Let me help you.”
She swallowed hard. “You can’t help me. No one can.”
“Why are you running?”
“Because someone is trying to kill me.”
“I mean why are you running from me?” His pale-blue eyes bathed her in sincerity, intensity.
She shook her head, panic and confusion clogging her throat. For the second time in twenty-four hours, she fought an almost overwhelming urge to tell this man—the last man she should tell—the truth. A truth she hadn’t spoken in three years.
He lifted the wig in front of her. “Disguises can’t protect you from men like that. But I can, if you’ll let me.”
He edged closer. The tree bit at her back.
“Let me take care of you,” he said. He reached for her, and her panic reached full bloom, bursting forth in an explosion of movement that set the world back on the right speed.
She knocked his hand away, twisting his arm behind him and using her hip to throw him to his back as she pushed past him. He cursed as he hit the ground.
She almost made it. Almost got away. But she tripped over him as she tried to run. Her foot connected with his back and his gasp, sharper than it should have been from the light kick, made her turn instinctively. Already off balance, her sudden shift in direction brought her crashing to the ground facedown. Her chin hit the ground with a thunk, and she bit her tongue. The coppery tang of blood filled her mouth.
Before she could recover, he was riding her, his hands pinning hers to the ground above her head, just enough of his body weight grinding her chest into the dirt to effectively restrain her without crushing her.
“Get off!” she screamed. “Get away from me!”
She struggled mightily, but with little effect. Not against his superior size and strength. She resorted to mindless kicking and writhing, but facedown she had no leverage, no way to strike at him. He clamped one heavy thigh over hers and locked her legs in a vice grip between his.
Gradually, she went still. Everything but her heart, that is, which continued to pound so fast that she couldn’t separate one beat from the other.
“Are you through?” He sounded as if he were talking with his teeth clamped together. Like he was in pain.
She hadn’t thought any of her blows had connected. Or that they’d had the power to hurt him if they had. But maybe she’d been wrong.
She nodded, her cheek scratching in the dirt and decaying leaves beneath her.
“Good.” He loosened his grip on her wrists and lifted a measure of his weight from her back, but didn’t let her get up, or even turn over. She gulped in mouthfuls of cool, mountain air.
“Now what are you running from?” he asked. This time no sympathy, no sincerity tinged his voice. His words were flat and devoid of any emotion at all, except maybe disillusionment, if that could be called an emotion. “What have you done?”
When she didn’t answer, something cold and metal scraped over her left wrist. Handcuffs! “What are you doing?”
“People don’t live under assumed names or refuse to talk to the law after someone shoots at them. Not unless they have something to hide.”
“I’m not a criminal.”
He paused with the second cuff pressed against her right wrist. “Then tell me what’s going on.”
He didn’t understand. He couldn’t. And in his lack of understanding he would arrest her. He would take her to the pitifully defenseless sheriff’s office in town. There, he and the deputy wouldn’t have a chance against the man bent on getting to her, because getting to her meant getting through them. More good men would die because of her. Would the killing never end?
“It’s not what I did,” she explained, her voice sounding tinny. Trapped. “It’s what I saw.”
“What?”
She closed her eyes, and as always, the vivid images played out in her mind. Two men in the stable, talking in hushed tones. The squeal of car tires. Three firecracker pops. Blood and other matter sprayed on the wall across from where she stood, out of sight behind the wash rack.
The victims hadn’t even had time to cry out. They’d died quickly, their screams stillborn in their throats.
“Murder,” she whispered. “I saw a murder.”
Chapter 3
Murder. The word bounced off Shane’s chest like a stone flung by an angry mob. Hardly a fatal blow, but debasing, disparaging. A defamation of humanity, flying unfettered in the face of everything he stood for. A slur on the law he’d sworn his life to uphold.
It made him mad as hell.
But what had he expected? He’d known she was in trouble. Bad trouble. Any lingering doubt about that had vanished when she’d tried to fight her way past him. She had to have known she’d never make it. Only a desperate woman would even have tried.
That desperation had worked in her favor. The look in her eyes—terror, hot and unadulterated—had frozen him in that critical moment. By the time he’d moved, it had been too late to block her kick.
The throw that followed the kick had been smooth and practiced. She’d used his own momentum to take him down. Even scared half to death, she fought smart. He hadn’t known she’d had self-defense training.
Shane swallowed a bitter laugh. Why should he have known that? Hell, he didn’t even know her real name.
An odd feeling crept over him, lying so intimately with someone at once familiar and a complete stranger. Rigid as she held herself beneath him, she was still soft in all the right places. She’d fought hard, but the lush curves molding to the contour of his body made him well aware that she was no raw-boned tomboy. She was all woman, full and mature, he thought.
He also thought he had better get off her before he couldn’t think at all.
Slowly he rolled to her side, grimacing at the pain in his back, and propped himself up on one elbow. He hoped she didn’t run again. He wasn’t up for another round of hand-to-hand combat.
Saying nothing, she turned herself over and fixed her gaze on the sky. Guilt blanched his mind as he took in her disheveled appearance.
Her forehead still bore the abrasion from last night’s encounter with the steering wheel of her truck. Her indigo eyes were shadowed in deep sockets, her cheeks cherried with fatigue, her clothes rumpled. Her golden hair framed her head in a tangled halo.
But it was the single drop of blood clinging to the corner of her mouth that undid him.
No nameless gunman had done that to her. That wa
s his fault. He’d pushed her too hard. He knew she was scared and he’d panicked her instead of talking her down, the way he’d been trained. Damn, but he found it hard to think around her instead of just…reacting.
Slowly his hand moved over her hair, honey-colored silk kissing his fingers as he teased a twig out of a gleaming curl. His palm slipped down to cup her face. Her breath enchanted his fingertips, called them to dance, to touch again. He held them poised just over the arch of her cheek.
Then his thumb rolled over her full lips, swept away the violent evidence of battle, and she quivered beneath his touch. The terror he’d seen flashing in her eyes before dulled to blunt acceptance.
“Tell me what happened,” he said softly, not wanting to break the peace between them.
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“This isn’t your problem.”
“Someone tried to kill me. That makes it my problem.”
She turned her gaze away.
“Fine,” he said, reining in both his temper and the urge to pull her to him and rock away the despair in her eyes. How could he be so mad at her and ache to have her in his arms at the same time? Chagrined at his distraction, he gritted his teeth and continued, “You don’t want to tell me about the murder, then tell me about the shooter in the Mercedes.”
“I really don’t know who he is,” she said after only a moment’s hesitation.
He ignored the restless shifting in his gut. Patience was the key to interrogation. Patience and relentlessness. Getting information was like solving a maze. There were lots of paths. He just had to keep trying until he found the one that led where he needed to go.
He turned down an alternate hedgerow. “Then tell me who you are.”
She gulped in a breath of air, misery rising from her like steam off rocks in a sauna. “No.”
Her sharp refusal popped his patience like a pin on a balloon. Frustrated questions exploded out of him. “What do you want to do? Run away again? What if next time he finds you, he shoots at you while you’re crossing a crowded street or standing in front of a school bus? How many people will die because you ran away?”
The Lawman's Last Stand Page 4