"Hey, asshole, I got your girlfriend!" Woz said in a taunting voice. His arm, in a bulky twill coat, was wrapped around her neck. He held her so that there was no possibility of escape, with his pistol pointed at her head.
Charlie clutched the screwdriver and prayed.
Sadie came running up, yapping frantically at this assault on her mistress, and launched herself at Woz's leg.
"Get out of here!" Sadie was too small to do much damage, but Woz glanced down, and angrily shook his leg. The pistol wavered and fell...
Charlie took a deep breath, and drove the screwdriver with all her might into his thigh. It pierced his pants, and sank deep, feeling like a fork going into tender meat.
He screamed, and let her go, and dropped his gun, clapping both hands to his punctured thigh and falling writhing to the ground.
"Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!"
"That was for Laura," she said, and went diving after Woz's dropped gun.
Jake did something violent to Denton, but Charlie didn't know exactly what because she was sliding across the floor just about then. When she came up with the gun, scrambling to her feet and gripping it in both shaking hands, it was to discover that the fight was over.
Denton was on the floor near Woz, and Jake, gun in hand, was taking careful aim...
"Oh my God, don't kill him!" Charlie gasped, knowing that she couldn't be a party to cold-blooded murder even though Woz and Denton deserved it. Jake didn't even look at her before he fired. Denton screamed, clutched his leg, and rolled around on the floor.
"I'm not going to kill them, just make sure they won't be coming after us," Jake said grimly, glancing at her before repeating the exercise with the already shrieking Woz. Then he turned to Charlie, and held out his hand. "Here, give me that gun, and grab us some clothes. Time to get the hell out of here."
It was only then that Charlie realized that she, like Jake, was as naked as the day she was born. Trying not to listen to the cries and curses of the men writhing on the ground, she snatched up what clothes she could find— the flannel shirt and sweatpants, both of which were still on the bed—and pulled the one over her head and tossed the other to Jake. As he juggled the guns in one hand and yanked the pants on, she scooped up Sadie. Then the three of them headed cautiously out the door.
Only to find, parked neatly in the driveway beside the cabin, Critter Ridders' own Jeep, smashed front end and all. Charlie was embarrassed to realize that she and Jake had been so engrossed in what they were doing at the time that they'd never even heard it pull up.
"Yee-haw, I think we're in business," Jake said when he saw it. "Let's go."
The bad news was, the smell of skunk was still so strong that, after stopping to call the state police and Jake's boss from the convenience store, they had to drive all the way to Nashville with the windows rolled down, and it was cold. The good news was, the snake was long gone. But the raccoon and the possums were still in their cages.
"I've got to go," Jake said, after driving her clear back home. An unmarked car was already waiting for him in front of her mother's house, where she had told him to take her after he'd refused to let her drive on from the convenience store alone. Two men in suits got out of the car as they pulled up. Jake, wearing nothing but too-large sweatpants, lifted a hand at the men in greeting and then turned to Charlie.
"Jake." But she couldn't say anything else, because she knew it was good-bye and her throat was suddenly aching. He leaned over and kissed her, quick and hard, on the mouth.
"See ya," he said, and bestowed a quick scratch on Sadie before getting out of the Jeep. Her mother came out of the house just then, standing on the porch and staring, but Charlie stayed where she was, watching as Jake slid into the back of the car, which promptly drove away.
Only then did she climb out, and, carrying Sadie, walk toward her mother, who hurried down the walk to embrace her.
Even as her mother exclaimed over her, and hustled her toward the house, Charlie couldn't rid herself of a terrible sense of loss.
She'd taken a risk, given him all she had to give, and now he was gone. The question now was, would she ever see him again?
12
BY NINE O'CLOCK SATURDAY NIGHT, Marisol was still trying to explain to her insurance company exactly what had happened to her Jeep. Parachuting drug smugglers and undercover DEA agents and ticked-off skunks did not seem to fit into any categories that would ensure a prompt payout. Marisol was growing increasingly exasperated, and, though she knew it was not Charlie's fault, some of that exasperation naturally was vented at her little sister. Especially since Charlie had made the gigantic error (in Marisol's opinion) of quite firmly breaking up with Rick. Charlie had to have dog food for brains, as Marisol told her. The man was good-looking, nice to kids and animals, and had a good job.
What more could Charlie want?
Something a little more exciting, Charlie answered stubbornly. And it was so unlike Charlie to be stubborn that Marisol was truly concerned.
Whatever had happened on the night the Jeep had been wrecked—and Charlie had told her, but the whole story sounded so fantastic that Marisol couldn't help but wonder if perhaps her sister had hit her head hard in the crash and imagined two-thirds of it—the bottom line was that Charlie, sweet, sensible Charlie, had been changed ever since.
Take tonight, for instance. Charlie never suffered from stage fright—she shouldn't, she'd been singing in public since she was a little girl—but she'd been jumpy as a cat at a dog convention getting ready for tonight's performance. She'd changed costumes three times, which meant that Marisol had had to change as well, because they had to match, then in the end had gone back to the one they'd originally decided on, the new gold-sequined evening dresses with the long white gloves. This appearance at the Yellow Rose was important, for God's sake, it could be their big break, and Charlie was in a dither.
Charlie never got in a dither.
They were getting ready to go on, the emcee was announcing them, and Charlie kept peeking around the curtain, looking out at the audience as if she was searching for somebody in particular.
Charlie hadn't really told her, but Marisol knew her little sister well enough that she was willing to bet she could even guess who: this Jake guy, this DEA agent who had, in some tangled fashion that Marisol still didn't quite have sorted out in her head, been responsible for the ruination of her Jeep.
For Charlie's sake, she hoped he showed up.
Then they were on stage, breaking into their opening song. Marisol was shaking her booty along with her tamborine and looking beautiful and Charlie was strumming her guitar and singing like an angel and looking beautiful, and everything was going just as it should, when Charlie's eyes fixed on something beyond the stage and she stopped singing and broke into this absolute shit-eating grin and missed two whole chords.
Horrified, Marisol tried to take up the musical slack even as her gaze followed Charlie's. In just a couple of beats Charlie was with her again, but not before Marisol spotted him.
Not that it was hard. He was the only gorgeous hunk in the place with a pair of ladies size seven, black ostrich leather cowboy boots sitting on the table in front of him.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KAREN ROBARDS lives in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, with her husband, Doug, and their three sons: Peter, sixteen; Christopher, ten; and Jack, four. Besides her family, books are the great passion of her life. The award-winning author of twenty-six novels describes herself thus: "I read, I write, and I chase children. That's my life!"
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