frightened. Her police academy training kicked in and she took evasive action.
Darting behind a row of bread and pastries, she warned him a second time. “Put the gun down and your hands behind your head.”
The man answered with another shot.
“Charley, get down!” Shannon yelled at the store owner. When he dived behind the counter, she had a clear view and squeezed the trigger.
The robber screamed as a red spot blossomed on his left shoulder. He spun away and slumped over the counter. The sudden silence was shocking.
Shannon cautiously stepped from behind the stacks of bread. “Drop the gun on the floor. Put your hands above your head. Don’t turn around,” she ordered, surprised at how calm she sounded, considering that her heart was going like a jackhammer. She’d never shot a man before.
The man slowly straightened.
“Watch it!” the owner shouted, his white face appearing beyond the cash register.
An explosion of light, white-hot and brilliant, blinded her. It seared through her head with a loud ringing noise that drowned all other sound. Through a strange rosy haze, she squeezed off another round. Her last thought was that she couldn’t die. She had work to do, a future planned….
Rory Daniels clicked off the cell phone and muttered an expletive. His father and stepmother were coming to visit him sometime in January after spending Christmas with her mother in Phoenix.
Don’t do me any favors, he’d felt like saying.
But of course he hadn’t. As a dutiful son, he’d replied that he would look forward to seeing them. Ha.
His stepmother was a flirt and a social climber. The woman had tried to seduce him the summer he’d turned fourteen and grown to six feet in a spurt of maturation that had left him feeling gangly and confused. That had been eighteen years ago.
It had taken him a while to realize females of all ages were attracted to his looks, his money and his family name, one of the oldest in the county. None of which was him, the real person.
He’d learned to keep his distance during the years he’d had to dodge his stepmother and try not to hurt his father, who doted on the woman. College had been a relief in comparison to his home life.
But he’d learned another lesson while there.
After falling for a fellow student and thinking she felt the same, he’d realized she was concerned only with appearances when he heard her tell a friend that his black hair and blue eyes were a perfect foil for her blond hair and blue eyes, and that they were by far the best-looking couple on campus. With him as her escort, she’d be the Christmas Carnival Queen easily.
Her words had made him furious at the time. Now he only spared a cynical lift of an eyebrow over the episode and put both it and his stepmother out of his mind.
Yawning as fatigue and the warmth from the pickup’s heater stole over him, he thought of a hot shower and a warm bed. He’d been through a difficult birth with a kid’s pony for the past three hours.
The little mare had been too small for the size of the foal, but he’d managed to pull both through, the anxious but trusting eyes of the ten-year-old owner on him all the while. The girl had given him a strangling hug when he’d finished and pronounced both mare and foal well and safe.
If he could find a woman who would gaze at him in adoration for his skills or something besides looks, money and name, he’d marry her in an instant.
So far, at thirty-two, he hadn’t run across that paragon. He knew what he wanted—a woman who was soft-spoken, smart and loyal, someone gentle and safe.
Safe? Now that was a weird thought.
Also, his wife would have to be a good mother. He wanted kids, at least two or three of ’em. Yeah, a librarian or teacher would do just fine.
A picture of Shannon Bannock came to mind—her smile as she led the children across the street, the way the kids in the parade had called to her. As a cop, she was sharp and competent. She was also headstrong, independent and argumentative. Not exactly the woman he had envisioned. So why had he invited her to the café?
An impulse born of illogical attraction.
The way she looked a man over as if judging his every thought and action was a challenge any red-blooded male would find hard to ignore. And she was built nicely, he added, amused by his thoughts.
Glancing at the gas gauge, he saw he had less than a quarter tank. Better fill up in case of an emergency over the holiday. Tomorrow was Christmas Eve. The whole county would close up at five so store owners could go home to their families. Nothing would be open on Christmas Day.
He wheeled into the gas station and stopped at a pump. Fishing his credit card out of his wallet, he noticed the Out-of-Order sign on the machine.
“Damn,” he muttered and headed inside to pay. “What the hell?” were his next words as he stood inside the store.
It looked like a scene from a bad movie—bodies lying in pools of fake blood, an eerie silence over the place.
Only the blood wasn’t fake. The salty, metallic scent of it filled his nostrils. It was real. And fresh. The smell of gunpowder hung in the air.
Putting his wallet away, he bent to examine the first figure on the floor.
Shannon Bannock, the cop he’d spoken to earlier at the parade, lay with a gun clutched in one hand, a pair of glasses in the other. She was on her stomach, her face to one side, her expression serene, as if she were merely napping for a moment.
Blood pooled under her head from a gunshot wound. He couldn’t see any other injuries. She opened her eyes briefly as he examined her.
“I knew…you would come,” she said cryptically, then gave a sound like a sigh and fainted again.
“Yeah,” he agreed, checking her for other injuries.
He’d just bought a small acreage bordering the Windraven Ranch owned by Shannon’s grandfather, which was probably where she was heading when she stopped at the gas station. Relieved that she wasn’t dead, he quickly examined the other two and found them breathing. After calling 911, he retrieved his medical bag from the truck and began first aid on the three wounded people.
The police officer was the most serious. It looked as if a bullet had entered her temple, then exited under her lower jaw. He thought of what a bullet could do to a person’s brain.
A few hours ago this same woman had been directing traffic, efficient and confident at her task. He wondered what her future was going to be now and experienced an odd stab of pain or pity or something under his breastbone. He looked out the plate-glass window. Where the hell was that ambulance?
Chapter Two
Shannon woke to complete darkness, totally disoriented. She put a hand up to her eyes and discovered bandages.
A hand caught hers. “Don’t disturb the bandages,” her cousin said.
“Kate?”
