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“Is not going anywhere tonight. You can call a tow in the morning.” He smiled, even white teeth flashing in the darkness. Gigi didn’t see what he found to be so happy about. “Guess you’ll have to bunk with me for the night.”
She caught her gasp before it escaped her throat.
“Figuratively speaking, of course,” he explained. “The roads are nasty and getting worse by the minute. I only live a few minutes from here. We have a lot better chance of getting to my place safely than we do of making it all the way to your house.”
Suspicion honed by three years on the run kicked in her stomach. “You know where I live?”
Surprise registered in his eyes. “It’s a small town.”
“And you’re a cop.”
“Something wrong with that?”
“No. It’s just—”
Her mind suddenly changed tack. She knew where he lived, too. A woman like her kept tabs on men like him. And even taking into account that they had both been coming from the same place tonight—their mutual friends Eric Randall and Mariah Morgan’s engagement party—Shane shouldn’t have been here, on this road.
“What are you doing this far east?” she asked.
He paused, looking as sheepish as a teenager caught fingering a beer in his dad’s fridge. “The roads are slick and you left Mariah’s in a hurry. I wanted to be sure you got home okay.”
“You were following me?”
The guilty look on his face quickly turned to stubbornness. “And it’s a lucky thing for you that I was.” He nudged her forward. “Now let’s go.”
Her panic surged. This couldn’t happen. She couldn’t be anywhere near him, much less spend the night with him. “I—I can’t. Really.”
“Why not?”
He turned those trust-me blues on her, and for a moment she considered telling him the truth. About New York. Her father. The man in the Mercedes. But that would be foolish. Shane was a cop, the last person she should confide in.
But what choice did she have with him out there somewhere?
She glanced into the woods, and then up the ravine toward the shoulder of the road.
Shane looked at her quizzically. “What are you gonna do, walk home?”
“Maybe I should wait with my truck. You could call a wrecker.”
Shane shook his head, disbelief settling on his face, and let go of her elbow long enough to poke at the welt on her forehead. “Just how hard did you hit your head, anyway?”
She brushed his hand away.
“Forget it, Doc. I’m not leaving you out here.”
One look at the square set of his jaw and she knew resistance was futile. He wouldn’t leave her here, alone. He was a cop, and he obviously took his job very seriously.
But then, so did the man who was after her.
She held her breath and listened. Other than the slow patter of sleet on rocks, all was quiet. No one was there. No one except Shane, whom she couldn’t afford to make suspicious with unreasonable protests.
Maybe his cabin was the safest place for her to be tonight. She couldn’t go home. The man in the Mercedes undoubtedly knew where she lived by now. But he wouldn’t know about Shane.
She hoped.
Her heartbeat gradually slowed. “I guess you’re right,” she said. “Thanks for the rescue.”
He smiled again. Gigi tried not to notice the dimple that dented his right cheek as he swept his arm grandly toward the hillside. “M’lady…”
She turned toward the open door of her truck. “I need my bag.”
Shane dodged around her and leaned across the seat. “I’ll get it.” He reached to the floorboard and pulled out her tapestry handbag.
“Thanks,” she said, taking it. “But I didn’t mean this one.” She tried to keep her voice light, not to arouse suspicion. “There’s an orange backpack, behind the seat.”
He looked at her, his blue eyes brimming with curiosity.
“Sometimes I’m out all night on emergency farm calls. I keep a few…essentials…in the truck.” She forced herself to smile. The things she carried in that bag were essential all right. To survival. Which is why she called it her survival bag. But she had to think of some other excuse for Shane. “Believe me, by morning you wouldn’t want me around if I didn’t. A woman’s got to have her stuff in the morning, you know?”
He retrieved the bag. “I’d want you around in the morning,” he said, his voice grown suddenly husky. “Stuff or no stuff.”
He passed her the bag, and their hands brushed in the exchange. She retreated, and her sore knee buckled.
He caught her before she realized she was falling. Giving her a look that dared her to protest, he helped her up the slope to the road, where blue and red lights strobed over the icy pavement. He was still driving the sheriff’s Blazer. No wonder the guy in the Mercedes had left. He must have made Shane as a cop right away.
He steadied her as she stepped up into the cab and then he walked toward the front of the truck. Her fear redoubled for a moment. She half expected to see the Mercedes come gunning out of the darkness.
Relax, she told herself, studying the sparkling ice on the road. Breathe. No one was gunning anywhere tonight. Not without hockey skates. She was safe.
Shane circled the hood of the vehicle, moving with the natural grace of an athlete, despite the slippery footing. Watching him, she had the same funny feeling in her chest that she’d had the first time they’d met. An acute awareness.
Safe, huh? Safe from the man in the Mercedes, maybe.
Shane Hightower was another matter altogether.
He climbed behind the wheel. With the vehicle’s interior lights on, he switched the heat on full and turned all the vents toward her.
As he worked the knobs, a few strands of damp hair fell across his forehead. The hair on the sides and back of his head was trimmed short. But on top, where the sun had bleached dark blond to shining gold, a longer, heavier layer swept to one side. Brushed back, the cut appeared very conservative, very law enforcement. But when those locks tumbled forward, like now, they gave him a much less civilized look. Rugged. Careless. And very sexy.
She wished she could reach up and push those troublesome locks back in place. It would be easier to remember he was a cop that way.
“Buckle up,” he said.
When she didn’t move, her attention still captured by a silly lock of hair, he reached across her and pulled the shoulder harness over her chest. Her nostrils flared at the sudden scent of damp leather and understated aftershave.
He pushed the metal buckle into the fitting. “There. All set.”
She waited until he’d straightened up to breathe again.
He smiled at her. A very male, knowing smile like he knew what she’d been thinking. She would have called him arrogant, if he hadn’t been right.
Her fingers curled, tightening until her fingernails dug into her palms. As if being rescued by a cop wasn’t bad enough. Did she have to be so unbearably attracted to him, too?
“Sit still.”
“It stings.”
“It’s supposed to sting. It’s good for you.”
“What kind of logic is that?”
“The kind that keeps people from getting infections?”
“It’s not going to get infected.”
“No, it’s not, because you’re going to sit still and let me put this stuff on it.”
“I’m the doctor here.”
“You’re a veterinarian.”
“You didn’t seem so particular when you were the one bleeding to death.”
Exasperated, Shane rocked back on his heels where he squatted in front of the toilet. Gigi—Dr. McCowan, he reminded himself—sat on the porcelain lid wearing an old flannel robe he’d loaned her so she could get out of her damp clothes. She was wriggling like a trout on the line.
“I was not bleeding to death,” he said. “And neither are you.”
He had been wounded, though, thanks to a couple of local drug dealers, even if the injury wasn’t as serious as she made it sound. And Gigi McCowan, the first on the scene once all the shooting had stopped, and the only one around with any medical training, had provided first aid.
Shane had been hurt before in his eight years with the DEA, but never had he enjoyed being doctored—even if it was by a vet—as much as he had that day. She’d been his angel of mercy, sent from heaven to stanch the flow of blood with a gentle touch.
Then she’d turned her face up to him, and one look into her eyes turned his thoughts polar opposite of angels and heaven. Images more congruent with what was sure to be his ultimate fate sprang to mind. She’d made him think of fire and brimstone. A scorching desert sun and a sea of sand.
Sin and sweat and sex.
Even now, her eyes intrigued him. They were blue, like his own, but a shade wilder in color. Indigo, like a pair of jeans not quite broken in.
And mysterious. Those eyes held secrets.
She squirmed on the toilet seat and he realized he’d been staring. Pulling his gaze away, he found his attention captured by her feet instead. Her toes were wiggling, like the rest of her. Bright-pink paint adorned her toenails. He smiled to himself, finding that small vanity endearing. And suiting. Gigi was all movement and bright colors.
At least she had been until tonight. Tonight she was different. Still busy, but with a nervous, restless kind of energy.
“Why are you still in Utah?” she asked.
He glanced up. He’d been asking himself that question for days. The docs had cleared him for duty, and he sure as heck didn’t have anymore leave coming. He’d used that up months ago. “I was planning on leaving in the morning.”
At least he should have been planning on leaving. But the rent on the cabin was paid through the end of the month, and somehow he’d never gotten around to packing. The truth was he liked it here. The mountains were peaceful and frankly, small-town law enforcement was more his speed after what he’d been through the last couple of years than the fast-paced world of drug enforcement. He liked it that people here waved to him on the street and knew his name. And then there was Gigi…
Sometimes he wished he didn’t have to go back at all. But wishes weren’t horses, and sooner or later he had to leave. Most likely sooner. “I just wanted to stay for Eric and Mariah’s party.”
The party to which he would never have accepted the invitation if Mariah hadn’t let it slip that Gigi would be there. He wished the best for Eric and Mariah in their marriage and new life together, but he felt out of place at social events like that—family gatherings. Having grown up in a county youth home after being abandoned as an infant, family was a mystery to him.
Almost as much of a mystery as Gigi McCowan.
He went to the party hoping for a chance to prove that the electricity that had crackled between him and Gigi on the mountain had been a fluke. Nothing more than nerves on edge.
After all, he’d just busted a drug operation and nearly gotten himself killed. He’d been hurt, and high on adrenaline. He’d told himself it wouldn’t be like that when they met again.
But it had been. He’d clinked his wineglass against hers in a toast to Eric and Mariah, they’d locked eyes, and the energy had coursed between them. It had built more slowly—less like a lightning strike and more like a bank of circuits, their breakers thrown on one at a time—but it hadn’t stopped until the power to light a city flowed freely between them.
She had to be the source of the energy. Lord knows, his soul was dead as an old battery.
She recharged him.
Then Eric had called her over, given her something, and she’d left, in a hurry. Left Shane standing there with the burgundy he’d been drinking burning a path to his gullet and all his lusty imaginings about taking her out of there himself, taking her home, ending on a cold gust of wind and a slamming door.
And he didn’t know why.
Unsettled, he dabbed at her forehead with the cotton ball.
“Ow.” She swiped her hand out. “Give me that.”
“Fine. You finish your forehead,” he said, handing her the antiseptic and cotton ball. “I want to see that knee.”
Rebellion charged through her eyes before resignation set in. Slowly she slipped one leg out of the slit in the front of the robe. His irritation dissolved in a wave of masculine appreciation. He cupped one hand behind her calf and slid the other down to her ankle for support. Her leg was slender, firm and smooth to the touch. Very attractive.
He flexed her knee gently, carefully supporting her lower leg. “That hurt?”
She shook her head.
Even more carefully, he leveraged her lower leg sideways. Her stifled gasp stopped him.
“I’m sure it’s just bruised,” she said tightly.
“Uh-huh.” It was more than that, and he knew it. He suspected she’d wrenched it pretty good, but he didn’t press the issue. At least it didn’t seem to be swelling. He set her heel on the floor and rested his palm on her good knee.
She lowered her head. “I’m sure it will be fine.”
“I’m sure it will be, too. If you stay off it tonight.”
Before she could protest, he scooped her off of the toilet seat and into his arms. She planted her palms against his chest and pushed. “What are you doing?”
“Helping you stay off that leg.”
He paused in the hallway. A turn to the left, and he could settle her in his big bed, instead of the sleeper sofa he’d made up while she changed. But she was bound to argue. And having her in his bed for the night while he tossed and turned on the sleeper might be more temptation than he was ready for.
He turned to the right, toward the great room. Hell, it was the nineties. She could sleep on the couch.
