shook down patches of snow and leaves.
Adan’s eyes held hers as they stood nose to nose. He saw a certain horror there in her startled gaze. She held onto the gun with surprising agility, but Adan was stronger. He wrestled the gun away and stared over at her.
“Okay, now that we’ve settled that, I’m not here to hurt you,” Adan said, holding the twenty-gauge down. “If we could just go inside and talk this through, I can prove to you that I’m who I say I am.”
“You never said your name,” the woman replied, a kind of triumphant gleam in her eyes.
In the next second, Adan heard the whack of something hitting him. And then he felt the intensity of a hard sharp pain. Her face was the last thing he saw before the world went black.
* * *
SOPHIA GRABBED THE gun back and stared down at the tall man lying at her feet. “Miss Bettye, I hope you didn’t kill him.”
Sophia’s seventy-year-old neighbor, Bettye Scott, stood over the big man, her hands tight on a cast-iron frying pan, her braided gray hair falling around her shoulders. “He ain’t dead. I see his chest rising and falling. Is he the one?”
“The one?” Sophia was used to her neighbor’s strange ways and quirky attitude on life, but sometimes Miss Bettye really didn’t make any sense. Then at times like this, the woman zoomed in on the glaring truth.
Miss Bettye tugged at her moth-eaten wool hat and smiled over at Sophia. “The man you’re hiding from, honey.”
Sophia had shared lots of secrets with her feisty neighbor but Bettye didn’t always remember the details. Sophia decided now was not the time to jar Bettye’s memory. But Sophia hoped the man she’d gotten away from wasn’t the man this Ranger might be looking for. Because as far as she knew, that threat had been neutralized. She thought. She hoped. She prayed.
She shook her head and gave Bettye what she hoped was a calm glance. “He says he’s a Texas Ranger, and he is wearing a badge.”
Bettye squinted, her chin dipping as she pushed her hat back. “Is his badge over his heart?”
Sophia glanced down at the unconscious man. His heavy jacket lay open to expose his plaid flannel shirt. The round badge with the star-shaped Texas Department of Public Safety emblem winked at the growing dusk. And scared her into backing up a few steps.
She nodded to Bettye. “Yes. Is that a good thing?”
Bettye stomped one of her booted feet. “Dang, I done hit a Texas Ranger over the head. And he’s a mighty pretty thang, at that. I guess I’ll be hauled off to jail.” She shook her head and held down the frying pan she’d used to hit him, her attitude resigned and nonchalant. “You don’t ever mess with a Texas Ranger.”
She said that with a little too much assurance. Sophia had learned to never ask any of her neighbors about their past and in return, she didn’t have to tell anyone much about hers. It was an unwritten rule of this isolated mountain of misfits and outcasts to keep things to themselves and to protect each other. They’d helped her when she’d first arrived. Helped her and welcomed her, no questions asked.
“What should we do?” Sophia asked, glancing around.
If the Ranger was telling the truth, then she had to be on watch. She should have asked him the name of the man he’d come looking for before she’d let Bettye knock him out.
But it can’t be him. He’s...he can’t hurt me again, ever.
“Let’s drag him inside your cabin,” Bettye suggested in a meek voice. She sounded as if they’d just discovered a kitten.
“Why?” Sophia didn’t like that idea. She’d stared into this man’s golden-colored eyes and...well...there was something about him. Something that made her think of a big tiger about to pounce, and that could be even more dangerous than running from your crazy ex-husband.
“We gotta hide him until he wakes up,” Bettye said. “We need to convince him that we meant him no harm. After all, we’re two innocent, helpless women living in a wild and wondrous world.”
Sophia would have laughed if the situation hadn’t been so serious. But with a shotgun and a frying pan, they didn’t look all that innocent or helpless. “I tried to shoot him and you knocked him out. How do we explain that?”
Bettye stared down at him, then kicked one of his snow-encrusted boots with her foot. “I got a plan. Let’s get him inside where it’s warm and I’ll explain.”
* * *
ADAN HEARD A band beating a marching tune somewhere close to his ear. Over and over the thump, thump struck at his consciousness until he could feel the hit of a big bass drum inside his brain. He really wanted it to stop. Now.
He woke up with a killer headache and two women staring down at him. One of them was old and scrawny and full of what looked like a daring glare.
The other one was young and pretty and full of what looked like apprehension.
And then he remembered.
He tried to speak and realized his mouth had been taped shut. He tried to sit up and realized his hands were tied with rope to the old iron bedposts just above a sagging mattress.
Had he been dropped into a century gone by? That movie The Beguiled with Clint Eastwood came to mind. That thought did not bode well for Adan. He’d left Austin in a hurry to get this man and get home to his five-year-old daughter by Christmas Eve. Adan didn’t intend to break the promise he’d made to Gaylen.
The women kept staring at him, their hands held down in a prim manner that belied the assault they’d landed on him. Okay, so this was a first. Tricked and hog-tied and now at the mercy of two obviously determined women.
This was why he didn’t go on blind dates.
Adan closed his eyes and willed the pounding pain and this bad dream to go away. Neither did. So he opened his eyes again and grunted. Crescent Mountain had not been kind to him.
He’d left Austin during a massive winter storm that covered the whole state of Texas, and now he’d managed to get stuck on this mountain in the middle of a brutal chill. The icy roads and a raging snowstorm full of daring, crazy drivers had stalled him for hours. He’d slipped and slid his pickup right through that and taken way more time than he’d planned, but he’d at least found the last road up the mountain before nightfall.
Only to take a mean slide toward the left and into a towering rock face that dented and banged his truck, and then he got stuck in a snowdrift. So he’d walked uphill the rest of the way and spotted a cabin that appeared to be empty. He’d come up here to see if he could get help or at least get in out of the cold until he could continue to look for the fugitive he’d been tracking. Maybe he should have asked a few more questions in the process.
Now he’d been attacked and accosted by two fierce women.
It was about time for him to retire.
He tried to speak. Tried to sit up. Gave up and grunted again, his gaze passing between the two crazy women before he pinned his eyes on the young, pretty one.
*
