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“As much as I love your—your gutsiness—it was hell last night. You have no idea. I thought I’d watched you being gunned down before my very eyes, and then when you collapsed the way you did, I was sure you were dying—”
Frowning, she shook her head. “I-I’m really sorry you had to see that. And even more sorry that once again I endangered your life with my problems.”
“Your problems are my problems,” he insisted. “So forget that. But now the idea of risking your life again, of seeing you hurt on my account or worse—So please, what if you sat this one out. For me? If you—”
“That’s awfully sweet, Ace, but this is what I do. What I will always do because I love it and I’m damned good at it—go in and dig out fugitives, sometimes even armed ones, from their hidey-holes. Just like I did with you.” Her green eyes softened as she gently ruffled the hair at his temple, where he still had a slight lump from the left cross she’d landed in the pitch-dark the night the two of them had met. “You forget already?”
“But that was before you were injured. And before I fell for you. It’s like—I can’t explain it, how it feels. But watching you struggle, worrying about your health, your safety and your happiness—it’s like the world has taken you as its hostage, and I can only be happy knowing you’re all right...because that’s how much you matter to me. How in love I am with you.”
Wiping at her eyes, she shook her head. “No, you aren’t. You can’t be. Because I can’t—I can’t risk—”
She cut herself off, looking away and rocking forward. Distress radiated off her, but she couldn’t seem to say more.
“You can’t risk what, Sierra?” he pressed. “I’ve just taken my damn heart and laid it out on a platter for you so tell me. Use your words for once, damn it.”
“You know I have to leave,” she erupted, her rushed words edged with anger. “You know I’m putting your family in danger with every day and every minute that I linger. And anyway, is that what you want for me, to have to stay hidden, living under an assumed name and hoping that the people hunting me—who are no idiots, I can assure you—never put two and two together?”
“So live under my name, Sierra, under Colton protection on the ranch.”
She stared at him in clear confusion, her lips slightly parted.
“Marry me,” he told her, “and I swear I’ll keep you safe—”
“Safe? You mean like zip-tied in an attic someplace? Or wrapped in cotton in your secret bunker? Absolutely not,” she told him before picking up the handgun. “Now, let’s go and catch your father’s killer, before we lose what little time and light that we have left.”
* * *
You’re here to earn a bounty. It’s all you were ever here for. Again and again, Sierra repeated the words to herself, struggling to focus on the mantra as she tuned out the dull throb in her head and the pain of her injured ribs and picked her way up the rocky ridge ahead of Ace. It was almost impossible to keep from turning to look—or maybe to shout—back at him, with the words of his confusing—frankly infuriating—proposal still running through her brain.
But as aggravated as she was by the idea of a man who’d spent his life as a boardroom warrior being so hell-bent on physically protecting her from danger, even when she didn’t need it, the lump in her throat was more about the realization that, impossible as it seemed, Ace Colton truly imagined that he loved her.
Just as she loved him, heaven help her... But how long would that last once he realized that what he was feeling was partly lust and partly pity, mixed up with whatever spell their mutual survival of the Ice Veins situation had cast over them on that first fateful night? How would he fit her into his new life as family man and father when he found out who she really was, a lifelong loner whose own mother hadn’t even cared enough to stick around? She clenched her jaw, thinking of that kid who’d had to toughen up fast to mostly raise herself, keeping both her inattentive father and everyone who’d ever tried to help at arm’s length. She’d found that less painful than giving anyone else the power to ever wound her so deeply again. And remembering those few occasions when she had forgotten, a young girl alone and vulnerable without real friends and family to watch for her, occasions that had taught her even harsher lessons. Lessons that had left her more fit for the company of the fugitives she brought in than good people like the Coltons. And forget the whole idea of being anybody’s wife or mother.
Blinking back the threat of tears, she heard Ace coming up behind her, his breath scraping as he struggled to keep pace. Moments later she spun, gasping, as a soccer ball-size rock she’d accidentally dislodged went clattering downslope behind her.
“Sorry!” she whispered urgently as it bounced past him. “I didn’t mean to do that!”
They both flinched when they heard it crash into the side of his poor, abused sports car, which she feared would never be the same.
“Just be careful, Iris,” he whispered up at her, his voice droll as he emphasized the detested name, “because I’d really hate it if that sorry excuse for a proposal ended up being your last memory of me.”
“Duly noted,” she said, biting back a smile. “Though right about now, you’re seriously risking my bowling your sorry rear end off this hill with the Iris nonsense.”
The sexy rumble of his chuckle all but curled her toes. And told her that leaving this man and this crazy bond that they shared behind was going to be the hardest thing she’d ever done.
As she reached the ridgeline, however, she pushed aside such thoughts to take in perhaps a dozen or so structures that made up what was left of the mining town of Gila Gulch some thirty or forty feet below. With a newly risen quarter moon adding its thin illumination to that of the emerging stars, she could barely discern a roofless building—a church, perhaps, given what looked like rough pews inside, and the most solid of the buildings, a squared-off adobe with barred windows—that once had to have been the town’s jail—just across the dusty street. The others were in worse shape, many consisting of little more than foundations and a standing wall here and there—one of which, she noted with a thrill of excitement, partly concealed the parked Camaro.
As Ace arrived beside her, she pointed it out to him before gesturing her intention to head down and check out the church ruins, which were where she suspected the shooter might be waiting to ambush the two of them as they came up the road around the switchback.
Ace nodded to show that he understood her intention before pointing to his own chest and then gesturing to indicate that he meant to split off from her, to check out the more intact jail building. Fear clutching at her stomach at the thought of him being surprised by the shooter while he himself was unarmed, she shook her head emphatically.
“We need to stick together,” she insisted in a low voice. “If I see movement in the darkness, I don’t want to worry I might shoot you.”
“I’m right behind you, then,” he whispered. “Careful on your way down.”
Sierra, whose practical boots had heavy tread, was more worried about Ace as she started down the treacherous slope. But in the poor light and unstable surface, it turned out that neither footwear nor experience stalking felons was the deciding factor.
Erosion was the culprit that made the loose scree beneath her feet collapse and sent Sierra skidding, sliding on her rear end, and finally tumbling head over heels downhill.
