Deputy US Marshal.” The voice rang through the night, shooting into Lauren’s heart like one of the flying bullets.
Deputy US Marshal. Of course, they were hunting Ryan. Thousands of marshals existed. He could be any of them. It didn’t have to be him.
Heart racing, Lauren charged toward the still-open door. Bullets whizzed past her head. One slammed into the doorjamb, the other soared into the house’s interior. Lauren dived for the floor of the deck and rolled behind the woodpile.
More gunfire exploded.
This time not from the trees.
A whimper escaping her lips despite her best efforts, Lauren curled into a fetal position behind the cords of wood stacked at the end of the deck. She shivered so hard from cold and fright she feared her chattering teeth would chip. If someone didn’t shoot her, she was going to die from exposure. If only she had stayed in the house, closed the shutters, pretended she hadn’t seen her brother racing across the lakeshore...
“Drop your weapons.” Nearby, the authoritative voice cracked like breaking icicles—cold, sharp, familiar.
Silence fell. Lauren uncurled enough to peek around the end of the woodpile. She saw nothing but the trampled and stained snow where Ryan had run. She heard nothing but wind in the trees and the creak and crack of ice on the lake. Perhaps danger had moved on and she could return to the warmth of her house. Unable to feel anything but the warning tingle in her face, fingers and toes, Lauren crawled from behind the piled wood and started to rise.
Gunfire and shouts erupted across the clearing, one from the far side where Ryan had vanished, the other close at hand. Too close.
Before her shocked senses reacted, strong hands grasped her arms and dragged her back behind the woodpile. More gunfire. Louder. Closer. The man holding her grunted. One of his hands released. The other held tight, compelling her down, down, against the snow-coated wood. The logs rumbled and began to roll.
Lauren wrenched herself to one side, avoiding the avalanche. The man holding her wasn’t so fortunate. He landed hard, a deadweight with wood piling atop him.
A deadweight.
Lauren prayed he hadn’t been shot or killed, not for her sake. He’d had to rescue her because she was out trying to save her brother. If she hadn’t gone after Ryan, this wouldn’t have happened. Whether marshal or miscreant, she must help this man who had probably saved her life.
Conscious she was an easy next target, Lauren began to toss logs aside to get to the man beneath. He was going to be crushed. He was going to die. He might have been dead before the wood cascaded upon him. He had fallen against the cords of fuel immediately after the last gunfire.
Anxiety over the horror she might encounter didn’t stop her. In the event he still breathed, she couldn’t leave him there. She couldn’t take the time to call for help. Once she knew one way or the other, she would contact the emergency responders.
“Don’t let him be dead. Please, God, don’t let this man be dead.”
Removing another log, she saw he wasn’t crushed at all. Logs had tumbled in a pyramid over him, forming a hollow beneath. But he was injured. Blood marred the pristine snow, just as she’d feared. He had been shot.
The last of the wood sailed out of her hands and landed with a kerchunk atop its fellow sawed logs. Lauren got her first sight of the prone man from head to toe. He was tall and athletic, the latter obvious even through his bulky winter clothing. A rip in that clothing showed Lauren where the bullet had struck, yet no blood seeped from the hole. Instead, it matted his short dark hair.
For a moment, she stared at the hole in his coat. Then she touched it. No, the fabric was not absorbing any liquid. The wound was dry.
His head was another matter. If he’d been shot in the head, his situation could be dire. She needed to look, discover the extent and cause of the damage.
Not that she was much of a medic. Her skills lay in software engineering, not skull fractures.
Before inspecting the fallen man’s head wound more closely, Lauren checked for a pulse. Beneath his down coat, his skin was warm, his neck a little rough with a day’s growth of whiskers. But his pulse was strong. He was only unconscious.
And likely smothering in the snow. Somehow, she had to get him up and out of the frosty night before he died of hypothermia.
“Before we die of hypothermia.” Lauren spoke between teeth clenched to stop their chattering. “Sir, can you hear me? Sir?” She shook his shoulder.
He groaned.
“Sir, I need you to wake up and get into the house. I’m not strong enough to carry you.”
She was a small woman, and he was nearly twice her size.
“I can help you.”
Briefly, she recalled something about not moving someone with a head injury in the event their spine was involved. Moving the victim could cause more damage. Yet staying out in the cold would definitely cause damage—permanent damage, like death. Given the choice, she decided to do what she could to move him.
She curved one hand around the back of his neck and gripped his uninjured shoulder with the other to roll him onto his side. He groaned again and strong fingers inside leather gloves gripped her wrist.
“The other way.” He spoke in a raspy murmur, yet the voice was familiar—that authoritative ring, that masculine timbre.
Her heart squeezed at the idea of who this might be chasing down her brother, saving her from gunmen, making breathing difficult and speaking even harder. “You have a hole there. I didn’t want to grab the shoulder where you were shot and cause more harm.”
“Kevlar vest.” He took a deep breath and moaned.
Despite the softness of his words, she knew for certain who had saved her from a gunshot wound. Christopher Blackwell, the man she’d never expected to come near her again after how she’d treated him. And she was sure he wouldn’t have if her brother were not a fugitive and Chris weren’t a deputy US marshal.
If Chris weren’t a deputy US marshal, they would be married, not estranged.
As though nothing unpleasant had ever lain between them, he continued to speak. “Bullet didn’t go through, but hurts like...crazy. And my head...” He raised one hand toward his temple.
Lauren caught his wrist. “Don’t. You’re bleeding. You’ll ruin your gloves.”
She could play this we’re-just-strangers-caught-in-a-weird-situation-together game as well as he could.
“And I’m going to need them.”
He was right about that. Wind gusted off the lake, and clouds thickened across the moon.
The chattering of Lauren’s teeth increased too much to disguise, and she wished blood wasn’t smeared over her hands so she could free her hair from its nighttime braid to serve as a sort of cloak for her ears and shoulders.
“We c-can’t stay out-t here any l-longer.” She shuddered with
