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Finally victorious, she tossed the jeans aside, then turned back. The sight of his white briefs made nearly transparent from the damp, had her drawing a sharp breath.
She’d been with one man in her life. She’d only seen one man naked in her life. She averted her gaze, feeling as if she’d invaded the man’s privacy.
He shivered violently, and Shannon realized her shyness was not only immature, but possibly dangerous to the man’s health. What did privacy matter to a person who was injured and cold?
Feeling a little unnerved anyway, she stripped off the briefs. She kept her gaze on his face as she draped a bath towel over his hips.
Glad to have the task completed, Shannon took a few minutes to wash the dirt and blood off his long muscular legs. She treated and bandaged the cuts on his knees, wishing there was something she could do to ease the painful-looking bruises, too. The more she saw of him, the more she realized what an ordeal he must have been through.
She moved up to sit beside him. She didn’t want to hurt him, but she had to see how his arm was under the jacket. She started on his left side, moving the sleeve down his arm slowly. In spite of her care, he moaned. He pushed weakly at her, trying to fight her off.
“Don’t! Leave me alone!” His eyes remained closed. He seemed to be in the middle of a nightmare. “Have to find Brandon. Have to find Brandon.”
“I don’t know who Brandon is, big guy, but you’re not going anywhere.”
His eyes opened suddenly, pale blue and feverish in his dark face. “Who are you?”
She smiled, relieved he was awake. “Shannon. How about you?”
He eyed her suspiciously. “What am I doing here?” He sat up gingerly. “Where are my pants?” He tried to stand, causing the towel to drop to the floor, leaving him bare from the waist down. He swayed and dropped back onto the couch, clutching his head with his good arm. “God, my head hurts like hell.”
Cheeks flushed, Shannon replaced the towel, then took an instant-ice pack out of the first-aid kit and handed it to him. “Here, hold this on that bump. It looks like you took quite a knock. It’s possible you have a concussion.”
The man did as he was told, evidently realizing he wasn’t in any shape to argue. “There was a landslide. The last thing I remember was a rock or something hitting me in the head.” He took the ice off his head and looked at her. “How’d I get here?”
Shannon reached over and guided the hand with the pack back to his head. “Keep that there.” His big hand was warm, but not feverish. Feeling a little tingle from the contact, she drew her fingers from his. “I have no idea how you got here. I found you collapsed on my porch not long after the electricity went out.”
He nodded, winced, then laid his head against the back of the sofa and closed his eyes.
Shannon could see he was hurting, but she didn’t want him falling asleep again. She knew the first twenty-four hours in a concussion were crucial. She had to keep him talking. What’s more, she had to find out who he was. “What’s your name?”
“My name?” His voice slurred. “What’s my name?”
He sounded as if he was about to doze off. “You said something about a landslide?” she asked.
She heard the trace of suspicion in her own voice. Caleb opened his eyes, and she realized he’d heard it, too. “The ground started to shake,” he told her. “I looked up and it seemed like the whole mountain was coming down on me. I tried to run for cover. The next thing I knew, I was hit and everything went black.”
“Do you know how long you were out?”
He looked at his watch, and she saw that the crystal was cracked. The time had stopped at three o’clock.
“What time is it now?” he asked.
“About seven.” Four hours, she thought, a long time to be wandering around in a storm. “Do you know how far you walked?”
Caleb tried to come up with an answer to her question, but cold seemed to seep through to his bones, making him shiver. He dropped the ice pack and wrapped his arms around his chest, but the dampness of his shirt and jacket only made his trembling worse.
Shannon placed the ice pack on the coffee table. “We’ll figure it out later. We’ve got to get the rest of your wet clothes off.”
Caleb looked at her. She was a beautiful woman. Tall, with feminine curves, tawny-gold hair and skin like satin. Her eyes were shadowed, full of secrets, the color indistinguishable in the flickering light. He’d certainly never expected to find an angel in the midst of hell, but it appeared that was exactly what he’d done. If circumstances had been different, he would have enjoyed hanging around for a while.
But his partner was out there in the storm. A vicious drug dealer was after them both. He couldn’t forgive himself if he led trouble here, to the home of an innocent woman.
If she was innocent…He gathered the towel around his hips and rose slowly. How did he know he could trust her? What if the Driscoes and Larkin showed up? Would she just turn him over? His head throbbed in time with his heartbeat. Just because she’d taken in a stray didn’t mean she wouldn’t cave in to pressure, endangering both him and his partner. He had to get out of here. “Do you have a phone I can use?”
Shannon stood beside him. “Phone lines are down, along with the power.”
Caleb’s head started to swim. “You don’t understand. I have to make a call.”
“I’m sorry. That’s not possible right now.”
He tried to listen to what she was saying, but he couldn’t make sense of the words. He swayed, then felt strong arms go around him.
“Hang on, big guy.”
Her voice was gentle, kind, with a touch of humor. He did what she said and hung on. And found a gentleness he’d never known. He wanted to sink into the softness, to savor it.
Her arms tightened. “Don’t pass out yet,” she commanded sternly. “We have to get you to the bed.”
Caleb’s woozy mind thought bed sounded like a great idea. He imagined cool sheets and a tawny-haired woman lying beside him as he explored her luscious curves. He felt a stirring in his loins, then realized he’d dropped his covering. “The towel.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said matter-of-factly, guiding him along. “You’ll be under the blankets in no time.”
They entered a dimly lit room.
“Come on, just a few more feet.”
A few more feet. It felt like a mile.
“Okay, sit.”
She pushed him back gently until he felt a mattress give beneath him. The quilts had been drawn back, and the sheets felt cool against his skin. He started to shiver again. He grabbed at the blankets and tried to lie down.
Shannon held him up. “Oh, no, you don’t. We need to get your jacket off and your shirt, too.”
She tugged at his jacket. At her urging, he moved his arm out of the sleeve. She slid off the right sleeve, sending fire through his arm. He gasped involuntarily.
“Sorry. I’ll take care of that as soon as we take off the shirt.”
Caleb tried to tell her he understood, but when he looked at her bending over him, her lovely face intent, her hair spilling around her shoulders like golden silk, he couldn’t form the words.
He reached out to touch a skein of her hair. It felt like the finest silk. “God, you’re beautiful.” His voice sounded as though it came from the other end of a tunnel.
She frowned a little. “We really have to take care of that arm. So help me take off this shirt of yours, okay?”
He suddenly felt very tired. “Okay, then can I go to sleep?”
“For a little while,” she said in a serious voice.
With her help, he took off his long-sleeved knit shirt. Then he lay on his left side, his head against the cool pillows. He felt her draw a blanket over him.
“I’m going to get the first-aid kit.”
Caleb closed his eyes against the pounding in his head. “I’ll wait here, all right?”
“All right, big guy.”
He liked the way she said “big guy” and wondered if hearing her say his name would sound as sweet. “Caleb,” he said as a black hole started to swallow him. “My name is Caleb.”
“All right, Caleb.”
A half smile revealed a dimple in his right cheek. Shannon watched him sleep for a few minutes. Maybe he wasn’t as hard as he looked.
Or felt.
But the last thought was quickly quashed. She turned and left the room. A sensible woman didn’t think such thoughts about an injured stranger who landed on her doorstep. Even if the stranger was lying naked in her bed.
Especially because he was lying naked in her bed.
If being with Tony had taught her nothing else, it had taught her that she was better off being sensible. The roller coaster of their life together had left her at the bottom, hurt and disoriented. She had no intention of getting on that ride again. Its effects were devastating.
Retrieving the first-aid kit from the living room, Shannon returned to find Caleb dozing against the pillows. The quilt had fallen down around his waist, revealing his bare chest. Shannon’s breath caught. Broad, tanned, with a black mat of hair, his chest revealed that he was indeed a big strong man. A spurt of longing went through her, in spite of her earlier resolve to be sensible. He looked solid, down-to-earth, the kind of man who would walk through hell to protect a woman, the kind to hold that woman forever.
She turned away abruptly. She had no right to be looking at the man as anything other than someone hurt and in need. Just because she hadn’t had much human contact since she’d lost Tony didn’t mean she should turn this man into a romantic fantasy, even if he was tall, dark, dangerously attractive and mysterious as the night.
Shannon walked back to the foot of the bed. He’s a stranger, she reminded herself deliberately. Once the storm was over, he would go back to his own life, leaving her to her solitude. That was the way she wanted it, and that was how it would be.
Caleb opened his eyes and smiled wryly. “I can’t seem to stay awake.”
Hardening her heart against his vulnerability, Shannon moved around the bed to his right side and set the first-aid kit down on the quilt. “You’ve been through quite an ordeal,” she said stiffly. “It’s only natural your body should want to rest and recover.” God, she thought, I sound like some frightened schoolmarm. The man could barely stay awake. What did she think he was going to do to her?
Caleb’s eyelids drifted shut again.
Shannon frowned, worried a little about his sleepiness. She’d done enough research on the subject of concussion to know she mustn’t let him sleep long.
His eyes opened suddenly. “What ordeal?”
Shannon raised a brow. His question had bordered on suspicious, which seemed a strange reaction. “You mentioned a landslide. Don’t you remember it?”
He gazed at her for a moment as if trying to read her mind. “It all happened so fast.”
His answer unsettled her a little. It sounded like the truth, yet she sensed something more was going on. She thought about questioning him, then decided against it. The man had been banged around so much he probably didn’t have any idea what he was saying. Besides, it didn’t really matter to her, anyway.
She turned her attention to his arm. “I’m going to clean this and put some antibiotic ointment on it. I’ll try not to hurt you.”
Caleb nodded. “Do what you have to. I really appreciate everything you’ve done. A woman alone, you could have left me out on the doorstep.”
“Well, it did cross my mind,” she admitted, venturing a smile.
She looked at the deep red groove on his upper arm. Suddenly she didn’t feel like smiling.
What had she done? What kind of man had she taken into her home? Only one thing could have made a wound like that.
A bullet.
She stepped back from the bed. “Who are you?”
His light-blue eyes showed bewilderment. “What’s wrong?”
Shannon glared at him. “You didn’t receive that cut in any landslide. That wound came from a gun. Someone shot at you and grazed your arm. Now, I want to know who you are and what you’re doing in these hills.”
Chapter Three
The fact that Shannon was more angry than afraid intrigued Caleb. A woman alone in a remote cabin, a wounded stranger collapses on her doorstep. Turns out he’s been shot. It would be only natural for her to feel fear at her discovery. But the angry flush on Shannon’s cheeks showed nothing of the kind. He wondered why.
Hands on hips, Shannon glared at him. “I’d like an answer, Caleb, or whatever your name is.”
She was really something. It took guts to question a stranger when there was a very real possibility he could be dangerous. Because of that, his first instinct was to reassure her. His second told him that reassuring her couldn’t be his first priority. She might be gutsy and gorgeous, but she was still an unknown quantity.
“Well?” she said impatiently.
Time for some fast thinking. He’d already made the mistake of giving her his first name, but that didn’t mean he had to tell her the last, or his reason for showing up on her doorstep bloody and torn, beyond the landslide.
He’d learned in his undercover work that the key to successfully hiding your identity was to keep as close to the truth as possible. “My name is Caleb Joseph,” he said, using his middle name. “A friend and I were visiting a cabin up here.”
“In the middle of one of the worst winters this area has known?”
He shrugged off her suspicion. “We didn’t know the hillside was going to fall down on us.”
“I can imagine,” she said dryly. “So what were you doing up here?” She glanced at his arm. “Hunting?”
The horror that filled her gaze brought an immediately denial. “Of course not!”
He realized his mistake just as her eyes narrowed.
“Dammit, I should have known. You’re a cop, aren’t you?” The conclusion seemed to raise her ire even more.
He regarded her with genuine surprise. “What makes you say that?”
“The lack of detailed information in your answer. And the fact that you have a bullet wound, yet you weren’t hunting. Either you’re a cop or you’re a criminal.”
Good deduction, he thought. Convincing his hostess that she had nothing to fear without revealing his identity was going to be harder than he thought. “Well, I hate to disappoint you, but the gunshot wound was the result of a ricochet, just some guys doing target practice.” He thought it better not to mention that he was the target. “And I work in computers.” Everything he’d said was the truth, as far as it went.
She still looked skeptical. Time to try a different tack. “I have to say I’m a little surprised by your earlier reaction. Most people would be thrilled to find out they had a cop collapse on their doorstep, rather than some criminal on the run.”
“I’m not most people,” she snapped. “One was enough.” She crossed her arms in front of her chest. “And you are not some dweeb from Silicon Valley, so cut the bull.”
“A man can work in the computer industry and not be a dweeb,” he countered, doing his best to sound offended.
