In The Arms Of A Stranger

She would follow the light and she would make it to safety. Her hands cradled the baby beneath her jacket.

She had to.

The rifle felt good, like an old friend. The woman’s form appeared in the crosshairs of the scope.

Taking down a target was like riding a bicycle. Some things you never forgot…. Things like going hungry, like waking with your own breath frozen against your pillow and hearing your father slowly choke to death on the black silt from the mines.

A lifetime ago, but yesterday. The nose of the rifle trembled, despite the determined fingers that gripped it. If the bitch thought she could waltz in and take everything away, she was wrong.

Dead wrong.

There was no going back. Not after you’d risen from the dirt. The girl should have understood that the first time she was warned. The shot cracked through the frigid silence, and the woman fell. But just as quickly she stood again, darting toward the road.

“Dammit.” The word was whispered, controlled, even in the face of desperation.

She’d merely slipped on the ice and the shot had missed its mark. That the girl had survived the accident was an insult to the original plan. She’d scrambled back up that ledge like some nasty bug that refused to die. The rifle’s scope found the woman again but she slipped into the cover of the woods. It was obvious where she was headed. And when she got there it would all be over.

No more bug.

“Damnation!” Luke killed the headlights and pushed the vehicle’s door against the side of the ditch. He squeezed out, the space he’d made barely allowing his six-foot-four frame to pass. Snow and half-frozen mud clung to his jeans and boots as he climbed from the ditch and onto the road. He squinted through the falling snow, staring at the mangled mess that used to be his Jeep Cherokee.

That ice don’t care whether you got a four-wheel-drive or not, his grandfather had said when he’d urged Luke to go home. Get on outta here while there’s still a road to steer that fancy lump of steel on.

He should have listened. Luke doubted that Seth Carlisle had been wrong often in his eighty-five years. Besides being his maternal grandfather and the only person in this godforsaken town he considered a friend, Seth lived in the middle of nowhere. Luke had to make sure he had firewood and food, at the very least.

He stared at the useless form of his vehicle and sighed. The storm had turned toward Sweetwater with the fury of a scorned woman and was bearing down hard, adding a layer of snow to the frozen mountain. Thanks to his determination, the town’s chief of police was now stuck in the middle of nowhere during the worst storm in living memory. Not good. He touched the cut on his forehead, reminding himself that it could have been worse.

“If I’m in this mess, you’re in this mess,” Luke called, stamping the circulation back into his already numbing feet. “Get out here.”

Sam managed the narrow opening with more grace than Luke, but he had twice the traction. The yellow Lab bounded up the side of the ditch and looked at him expectantly.

“Aren’t you supposed to have a keg of beer or something?”

Sam cocked one round eyebrow and wagged his tail.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

A gunshot cracked through the still night and Luke instantly dropped to the ground, drawing his gun.

“What the hell…?”

A second shot shattered the silence that had followed the first, and Luke heard someone cry out. The voice was muted but distinctly female. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise in response. He crouched on the balls of his feet, listening as he reached for his two-way radio at his waist. Damn. He’d left the radio in the Jeep.

The road took a sharp turn a short distance down the mountain, following a treacherous cliff and creating a natural overlook. Luke jogged, crouching, until he reached it.

The sound he heard next was unmistakable. Someone was running—crashing—through the forest. He could hear the underbrush snapping, even hear their panicked gasp for breath. He cocked his head, listening. The shots had come from the right, he calculated, making the person below him the woman.

He knew with every lawman’s instinct he possessed that she was running for her life. What was going on? There wasn’t time to make sense of anything other than the fact that she needed his protection.

He intentionally slowed his breathing, concentrating on what few facts he had. He couldn’t pinpoint exactly where the shots had come from. He scanned the area below him. There was only blinding darkness to his left with one exception. A faint light glowed through the cover of the trees. The old forest ranger’s station, he realized.

When the woman reached it, she would find it locked. Worse, she would discover that it had been built on the furthermost point of a natural rock crag, chosen to provide rangers with an unrestricted view of the forest below. Flanked only by the impossible rock face of the mountain behind it, there was only one way in—and out.

She would be trapped.

Chapter 2

She wasn’t going to die. Gonzalez—it had to be Gonzalez—wasn’t going to win. Dana clawed at the doorknob, rattling it against the solid pine door. It was locked. The baby was silent inside her jacket. Too silent. Fear cut through her. Oh, God, had she hurt him while running? She had to check, had to get inside.

Hot tears of frustration burned her eyes. She stepped back, admitting that the door was not going to open. Her heart pounded as she frantically paced the cabin’s porch, searching for a way in. It looked as if the porch wrapped around the cabin but it was difficult to tell. A bare lightbulb burned next to the door but the light didn’t extend…

Dana stopped abruptly. The window. There was a window near the door. Hope filled her. She needed something to break it, something hard. A dark object was on the porch stoop next to her feet. She knelt, curling her fingers around solid metal. A boot scraper. She could use it to—

Glass shattered above her and the porch light was instantly extinguished, plunging her into darkness. Rough fingers curled over her mouth, swinging her body up and against a solid form.

Oh, God, he was here. He’d found her. She was going to die…. As soon as the thought formed in her head, the baby squirmed against her chest, reminding her that her life wasn’t the only one at stake.

She would not let him die.

Dana brought the boot scraper up as hard as she could, aiming for the man’s face. It met flesh with a solid thump, then fell against the wooden planks of the porch. She heard the man curse beneath his breath. She’d hit him, but the heavy metal had connected with flesh rather than bone. He’d been too tall for her pitiful weapon to hit its mark.

She tried to scream then, even knowing that the effort would go unheard.

“Shut up,” a deep voice whispered next to her ear. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

He was dragging her, she realized, and she was helpless to fight with one hand securing the baby beneath her jacket. Her feet shuffled against the wooden porch. Was he was hauling her to the back side of the cabin? She heard the sound of keys rattling, and her mind struggled to make sense of what was happening. As Dana felt the man’s grip on her relax, she realized he was fitting a key into the door.

It might be her only chance.

Maybe he felt her muscles tense or maybe he read her mind, but his grip returned to her arm, pulling her against his side, his other hand still firmly wrapped over her mouth. “Who’s out there?” he whispered.

The words stopped her, and she repeated them in her head to try and make sense of what he’d asked. She heard the door creak on its hinges and a gust of stale air flowed over her as he dragged her inside. He used their coupled bodies to push the door closed behind them, then leaned his head near her ear.

“I’m here to help you.” He didn’t whisper this time, and the deep sound of his voice vibrated against her ear. “I’m a law officer. Do you understand?”

Relief, mixed with wary disbelief, poured over her. She wanted to believe. She nodded against his hand.

“If I let go of you, are you going to hit me again?” There was a tinge of humor in his voice that comforted her far more than his words had.

She shook her head.

She scrambled backward as he released her, connecting with something hard. She used her free hand to steady herself in the darkness. A stone fireplace. She took in huge gulps of air, never taking her eyes off the dark form of the man.

“Who was shooting at you?” His voice resonated in the dark. “What’s going on?”

Her thoughts tumbled over one another. The only logical answer was Gonzalez. But she was wary. After all, she didn’t know this man. He’d appeared out of nowhere, just as the shots had. Was she supposed to believe more than one person was crazy enough to be in the middle of nowhere during an ice storm?

“I don’t know,” she finally answered, her voice hoarse.