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 was 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?”
Her jaw wavered and her eyes turned shimmery, but she held her tears back.
“You can stop this,” he implored her, “Whatever it is, I’ll help you. But you’ve got to trust me.”
“I—I can’t.”
“Can’t what? Can’t stop it? Or can’t trust me?” Impatience flared again. He already knew the answer. “Dammit, you know who I am. You know what I am. All I know about you is that you’ve lied to everyone in this town, and yet I still took a bullet to protect you back there. And you don’t trust me?”
“I—” She stopped before her second word. “You what?”
Raking a hand—the one he could move without feeling as if someone was taking a razor blade to his back—through his hair, he struggled to his knees. The effort required more concentration than it should have. “Never mind,” he said, hoping his voice was steadier than his hand, “Just—”
“You’re hurt?” She looked him up and down, her tears suddenly pooled in wells of deep-blue concern. “Where are you hurt?”
He locked gazes with her as she grabbed the flap of his jacket and peeled it back. Resignedly, he shrugged it off his shoulder and rotated to give her a partial view of his back.
From the way his shirt was stuck to his skin—not to mention her startled gasp—he guessed there must be a fair amount of blood.
“Ow, sh-” Shane gasped, sitting in the passenger seat of the Jeep. He never finished the expletive. More because he ran out of air than because he was worried about insulting Gigi’s—or whoever-she-was’s—sensibilities.
She stopped whatever she’d been doing that set his back on fire and stepped around in front of him. A bloody gauze pad still in her hand, she peered
