Wyoming Cowboy Marine
But the sound of a gun going off and the sharp sting in his arm happened at just about the same time. He looked down at his arm, the slight tear in his jacket and shirt and the blood now trickling out of a slice in his skin.
“Okay, you are going to shoot me,” he muttered at the mostly superficial wound.
“The next one will be worse,” she warned.
He no longer doubted her.
* * *
HILLY KEPT ALL her panic below the surface. You had to be calm when facing the outside world, and Dad had never believed she could be. That was why she had to stay hidden away. That was why he handled anything that meant leaving the property.
Shooting the man hadn’t been calm, not by a long shot. Especially since she’d only meant to scare him...not actually hit him.
At least she appeared calm from the outside.
On the inside? Panic city. Actually shooting the man advancing on her had been panic, even if she hadn’t exactly meant to.
Could he put her in jail for that? Surely not. She’d warned him, and he’d been coming at her. It was self-defense, intent or not. She hoped.
Where was Dad? Why had he left her alone like this? She didn’t know how to deal with it. With this stranger. Who was now staring at his arm where she’d shot her glancing blow.
It could have gone worse. She could have hit him somewhere vital, done significantly more damage. But he’d been advancing on her and home and...
“You should go get that looked at,” she said. Even though her heart and pulse beat hard in her neck, she sounded calm, and like the kind of woman who shot people every day.
But would he go home and tell everyone about the girl in the shack he thought might shoot people every day?
Oh, this was a mess.
“You’ve shot me now—you can at least give me your name.”
She shook her head, not trusting her voice.
“What are you so afraid of?”
Everything. The fact she wanted to trust the kindness in his voice even though Dad had told her to never trust kindness. The fact she’d somehow involved someone in this. She was very afraid of everything that existed beyond this clearing.
She’d braved it today because she’d been out of her mind with worry about Dad, but never again would she think she was strong enough to handle the world out there.
Except, if something happened to Dad you’ll have to.
She eyed the man and his bleeding arm. He said he’d wanted to help find Dad, but why should she trust him? An outsider who wasn’t even a police officer in any way she could tell.
But maybe that was good. Dad said you didn’t trust police, but men were motivated by one thing and one thing alone. Money. If he wasn’t police and she offered him money...
Except the whole you-shot-him thing.
Free kept growling low in her throat. Hilly had to think. She had to get this man out of here.
“Go away, mister.”
“You expect me to hike the four miles back with blood dripping down my arm?”
She wasn’t sure why, but she got the impression this man could handle it well enough. Still, guilt pricked at her conscience. Though it shouldn’t. She owed him nothing. He wasn’t just an outsider, he was an aggressor.
He’d stalked her. He hadn’t listened to her warnings. He deserved that wound on his arm, and yet that little seed of guilt sprouted and tried to surface.
“I’ll get you a bandage, and then you can be on your way.” She crouched down and scratched Free behind the ears, whispering her command. “Free. Guard.” The dog growled in agreement, her eyes never leaving the man with the bloody arm.
Hilly hurried back into the cabin. They had an extensive first-aid kit, but it was kept hidden away behind all the daily necessities. Dad insisted anything of value or that hinted at having more reserves than for a few days be kept out of plain sight.
She could pay the man outside. She could pay him to find Dad. No, she didn’t trust him, but it was an option. Enough money could keep a man under your thumb, Dad said, and there was money. Hidden in drawers and sewn into mattresses. She didn’t even know how much was hidden in this cabin, but she could use it to find her father.
Who wouldn’t approve of getting help from the outside world.
It was stupid. Impossible. She could not trust this man who’d followed her. Whom she’d shot.
But she didn’t have anyone except Free, and as handy as dogs could be, they could not communicate, investigate or lend a hand with obtaining supplies from the outside world.
Dad had left her alone. She had to survive that, which meant she had to make her own decisions. Not ones Dad would make.
She gave herself a moment to close her eyes and take a deep breath. Take stock of the situation. Dad was missing. She was on her own. A strange man had followed her home under the guise of help.
Dad would scare him off. Hilly had no doubt about that.
She thought about the woman officer she’d spoken to at the police station. The woman had been in charge. Of herself, of her job. She hadn’t looked to anyone for help. She’d made the decisions and she’d told other people what to do.
Hilly had been in awe of her. She wasn’t allowed to call any shots, and Dad didn’t listen to her about anything. Not that he was mean about it. It was just that Dad was in charge. Dad made the choices.
And Dad had left her alone. Which meant she was in charge, and when she found him—no matter how—Dad would just have to accept that. Because he hadn’t left her with the adequate tools to deal with this. Hopefully now he would.
If he’s alive.
She shoved that thought out of her brain as she got to her feet. She held the bandage in her hand, and though it went against everything she’d ever been taught, she left the rest of the first-aid kit out.
It felt thrillingly wrong. She nearly smiled as she stepped out the front door. Except the sight in front of her stopped her short in shock.
Free was on her back, wriggling joyfully as the large man rubbed her belly.
“You little traitor,” she muttered.
The man smiled up at her, and it felt like something unleashed low in her stomach, fluttering upward and into her throat. She didn’t care for that sensation at all.
She still had her gun, though, so him turning her dog into a pathetic little affection fiend was only taking away one of her weapons. Not all of them.
She aimed the gun at him again as she held out the bandage. “Here. Now be on your way.”
He eyed the gun as he slowly got to his feet. Free whined. This close Hilly was uncomfortably reminded of just how large he was. Tall and broad and someone who could definitely outmuscle her if he wanted to.
But she had a gun. A gun. She tightened her grip on it.
“Are you going to shoot me if I reach for that?” He motioned to the bandage.
“Not if you reach for that and that alone.”
His mouth curved, some foreign thing in his eyes. Something like laughter, but sharper. Her cheeks heated. But he carefully reached for the bandage and plucked it from her outstretched fingers.
He shrugged off his coat. Then, in a mesmerizing move, he tore the sleeve from where it was ripped from the bullet. Two tugs and the sleeve was completely off, just a few threads hanging down over his biceps.
His arm was...an arm. Why was it fascinating? Dark hair dusted his forearm, but his biceps looked smooth, except the slight slash of the cut and the smudge of blood around it.
“I could help you, you know,” he said conversationally as he wound the bandage around his cut.
She wrenched her gaze from his arm and the easy way he dressed it as if he tended wounds every day. “I—I’d have to trust you,” she said, hating herself for the stutter. “I don’t.”
He nodded thoughtfully, then those hazel eyes pinned her where she stood. “What would you need? To earn your trust, what would I have to do?”
Nothing. Nothing at all. Which was just stupidity and she would not be stupid. That was what Dad would expect her to be. Too innocent and weak-willed to find him, to survive.
Well. She’d just have to find him and prove to him she could make choices, too. Even if it meant trusting an outsider.
Chapter Three
She looked confused for a few seconds, then something like determination chased over her face. Too bad Cam didn’t know what she was determined to decide.
He finished wrapping the cut and picked his coat back up, pulling it on again. He ignored the shudder of cold that worked through him. “You’re worried about your father.”
“I am,” she said, chin lifting. “He goes away sometimes, but never this long.”
“And you don’t know where he goes?”
She paused. Not the kind of pause that preceded a lie either. That lost look in her eyes from the sheriff’s department stole through her once more, though she quickly hardened against it.
She was definitely young, but not that young. Early twenties, if he had to guess. She was strong enough to fire off a warning shot, kind enough to get him a bandage and smart enough not to give him her name.
No number of strange situations he’d found himself in as a Marine prepared him for this puzzle.
“I didn’t actually mean to shoot you,” she said, eyeing him. He noted it wasn’t an apology.
“I know.”
“How do you know?”
“If you’d meant to shoot me, I’d have a lot bigger hole in my arm. Clipping this close without doing much damage? That’s pretty much luck of the try-to-get-close-enough-to-scare shooting variety.”
She studied the bandage he’d tied off, then him. “And you know a lot about shooting?”
“Enough.”
“You want me to trust you for no reason, and then you’re evasive?” she said with such utter contempt he had to believe she’d been hurt before. There was a reason she and her father were tucked away here, and judging from the weapon she’d used on him and the one she’d carried with her, cash flow wasn’t the problem, or the only one.
Unless the guns were obtained illegally, which was always possible. Too many questions. Not enough answers. Mostly, she was right not to trust him and find his evasion lacking.
If he wanted to help her—and he couldn’t explain to her or, even worse, to himself, why he wanted to help her—he’d need to offer up some truths. Besides, offering truths to her was better than finding the answer to that question inside himself.
“My name is Cameron Delaney, though I go by Cam,” he began, trying to think what would be important for a scared young woman to know. “I grew up in Bent, Wyoming. If you’ve ever been there you’ve probably heard of the Delaneys. My sister was the deputy you spoke with. I was in the Marines for almost fifteen years, but I decided to come home last year and open a security firm. Hence the knowledge of guns and shooting them. Is there anything else you’d like to know?”
“Why?”
“Well, there aren’t a lot of security options in—”
“No, why did you leave the Marines?”
He had practiced responses to that question. Responses he’d given his family and friends. The rote answers weren’t coming right this second. He had to search for them.
“It was time.”
“Why?”
“It’s grueling, and I wasn’t...” Fit. He’d known he wasn’t fit for duty anymore. Not with Aaron’s suicide hanging over him. Not with that utter failure to notice, to help. He hadn’t been able to get past that.
“You weren’t what?” the woman demanded.
He owed her nothing. He could turn around and go home. He had all the choices in the world. But if he could help her... If he could help people, surely at some point it would make up for what he hadn’t helped.
“A man in my unit committed suicide.” His voice sounded rough and strained, and he wasn’t sure what he expected the woman’s response to be, but she only blinked. “I had a hard time coping after that.”
“They kick you out?”
“No, I was granted an honorable discharge.” Honor. What a laugh.
“If I let you help me, what’s in it for you?”
“Having helped,” he replied with all the sincerity he had.
“You don’t know me. What would helping matter?”
He shouldn’t be baffled or irritated by her pressing the issue, demanding some kind of proof he was a decent human being. She shouldn’t believe he was. She shouldn’t trust him. “Haven’t you ever helped someone simply because you could?”
“No.”
“It feels good. There’s a pride to having helped and having done the right thing.”
“So. You’re going to help me find my father. Then what?”
“Then I go about my life and you go about yours.” Assuming the father was missing under some kind of favorable circumstances. There was always the chance he was dead, or that he’d disappeared on purpose. Cam didn’t need to tell her that, though. Either she knew or she didn’t need the worry.
“Just because you want to help someone. Because it feels good.”
“You don’t believe me.”
She didn’t respond, but she looked at his arm. Even though he’d put his coat on, he had a feeling she was thinking about the fact she’d shot him. “How would you help?”
“I’d need some information about—”
She shook her head and patted her leg, the dog jumping to stand next to her. “No.”
“No... No?”
“No information.”
Something was so completely wrong here. People didn’t live off the grid for no reason, and he might have been able to chalk it up to some innocuous thing like environmentalism, but the woman’s evasion coupled with her utter lack of trust in a stranger meant all things pointed to shady.
“How can I help you find your father without information?”
She shrugged and started walking to the shack door. “I guess you can’t.”
“I have to know what he looks like. His name. Where he may have gone. I can’t wander around not knowing anything about the man I’m trying to find. If you don’t give that information to anyone, no one can help you.”
She stopped at that, her back still to him. She didn’t turn as she spoke. “I don’t think he goes by his name out there,” she said quietly.
“Out where?”
She sighed irritably and turned, making a broad arm gesture around them. “Beyond here.”
An uncomfortable chill shivered down his spine. Something was seriously wrong here. “What’s beyond here?”
“The outside world. That’s where he goes, and I don’t think he uses his name out there. Maybe that’s why the police couldn’t find records of him. He must use a different name.” Her eyebrows drew together, and she looked confused and definitely worried.
Whatever was off here, Cam had the sneaking suspicion this woman wasn’t part of it. She was in the dark about this “outside world.” Who talked about things like that? “And you don’t go into the outside world?”
Her brown eyes widened a little, but she kept the rest of her expression carefully blank. “I did today.”
“But that was rare. You don’t have transportation.”
“We have a horse.”
“But you don’t. Still, that helps. A middle-aged man on a horse. What are the names he answers to?”
She let out a shaky breath. “He wouldn’t want me to give out his name. He wouldn’t want me to have gone to the police.”
“But you did.” Cam couldn’t make sense of her fear, because it didn’t look like the kind of fear he’d experienced or seen. She had such a calmness, such a handle on it, and yet he could sense that what vibrated inside of her was fear. “How long have you lived here?”
Her eyes snapped to his, sharp and on the offensive. “My life and his are none of your business. Poking into us isn’t help, Cameron.”
“No one calls me that.”
“Guess what? I do.” She squared her shoulders, somehow looking imperious and regal even though he was taller and broader and just so much larger than her small, narrow frame. “I’ll pay you to—”
“I don’t ne—”
“I’ll pay you to help me, mostly because I need transportation. But the money I’m giving you means I don’t have to answer any questions I don’t want to, and it means you go away when I say. I’m using you as a tool to help me find my father. That’s it.”
He eyed the shanty of a cabin. “You don’t have to pay me.”
“Those are my terms. Stay put.”
* * *
CAMERON MADE HER ACHE. It wasn’t an ache she fully understood. It twined around her much like when she was sick and wished someone would take care of her. There was this yearning for something she couldn’t fully grasp because she’d never seen it in action, only read it in the fiction books Dad used to bring her from his trips outside.
Dad. Missing. Dad, who would hate that she was taking help from anyone. But she needed help. It was Dad’s fault she needed help.
She strode into the shack, Free at her heels, though the dog looked longingly back at the big man in their yard. Longing. Hilly didn’t understand it, or what exactly she was longing for, but it was there regardless.
She tried to put it out of her mind as she forced herself over the threshold of Dad’s room. He didn’t like her in here unsupervised. She had her own tiny closet of a room after all, and he never invaded her privacy, did he? She was only allowed in here to monitor his security setup, or fix it if anything was buggy. To come in and snoop through his things? Unheard of.
But she had to force all those old rules out of her mind and habits as long as Dad was missing. She was an adult, and she could handle any disapproval she got from Dad as long as she brought him home.
Do you need to?
That internal question stopped her in her tracks. It echoed inside of her, and something desperate clawed at her chest. What if she just got to live her life her way?
No. No, she didn’t know how to do that. She went for Dad’s desk and pulled out one of his ledgers. He worked on them sometimes in the kitchen, so she knew he kept track of supplies bought, money in from the odd jobs here and there and money out on said supplies. And that he would stash cash in between the pages of said records.
She flipped through the first one, pulled out a few hundreds. She had no idea what the going rate was for a fake detective helper, but she’d offer Cameron a hundred up front. If he laughed, well, she could up it.
She glanced at the monitors set up across Dad’s desk. Cameras that kept watch on the entirety of the woods that surrounded the cabin. They were always taping.
She’d already gone through the footage of the day Dad left, and she’d watched what he’d taken and which direction he’d gone, but it didn’t tell her anything. Everything had been usual, ordinary.
Maybe she should show it to Cameron. Maybe he’d—
Her brain stuttered to a stop as two men appeared on the east side of the cabin. Men with weapons.
The front door opened, quiet and with just the tiniest creak she only noticed because she was holding her breath. She looked around the room quickly, but Dad had all of his weapons hidden away.
“Free, guard,” she whispered, but the dog laid happily by the bedroom door, tail swishing calmly. Today of all days her dog was completely failing at every command she usually followed unerringly.
But then Cameron stepped into the room. “Someone’s out there.”
He was warning her. She didn’t know what to do with that so she glanced back at the screen where she saw the two men slowly inching their way toward the cabin.
“They see you?” she asked quietly.
“I don’t think so. I heard them more than anything. I thought it could be your father, but two people seemed ominous.”
She pointed to the screen. “Friends of yours?”
He frowned at the two men on the video, studying them closely. He shook his head. “I know most everyone in Bent, or I did. Those two don’t look familiar. They’re armed, though.”
Again Hilly nodded sharply. In all their years here, in all Dad’s excessive surveillance, they’d never had unwanted visitors that Hilly knew of. She knew he had his reasons for being careful, and she’d never questioned them...to his face.
“You don’t know them?” Cam asked gently.
I don’t know anyone. But she didn’t say that out loud. She studied their faces, trying to find some detail that would give her an idea of what they were after. “Maybe my father sent them. To get me a message.”
“I don’t know that messengers would carry Glocks, or sneak around the woods outside your cabin.”
“You did.”
“I didn’t sneak, per se.”
She spared him a glance, but when he only smiled at her, she quickly turned her gaze back to the screen.
Free started to growl, low in her throat, as if she sensed or heard the approach. “Easy,” Hilly murmured.
“What are you going to do?”
“We’re going to wait. And watch.” She glanced around the room. The cabin only had two windows. One here, facing the west, and one in the front facing the east. “Go close the curtains in the front for me,” she ordered. “Lock the door.”
“Already locked,” he said, even now on his way out front to close the curtains. She watched the screen with growing alarm as the two men conferred about something, and then split up.
Cam returned and Hilly couldn’t think about how much her world had changed in just a few hours. Being in her father’s room, with a man, two other men sneaking around her cabin.
“You might want to get one of those firearms you’re so free and easy with,” Cam said grimly. “I don’t think a locked door is going to keep those two out.”
Hilly broke her gaze from the monitors. She quickly moved through the cabin, gathering the rifle and the revolver, before she returned to Dad’s room and Cameron.
A strange man in her father’s room. She couldn’t fathom it even as it was happening. “I also have shotguns,” she said.
He nodded. “Get them.”
After a brief hesitation, she handed him the revolver and the rifle before she strode to her father’s closet. She knew his shotguns were in a hidden compartment at the back of it, though she didn’t think her father knew that she knew that.
But he wasn’t here, and she was in danger. She turned to study Cam. Was she really going to trust this stranger?
When she heard a rattle at the door, she knew she didn’t have a choice.
Chapter Four
Cam studied the unfamiliar guns. He had experience with a wide variety of weapons, so he’d figure them out no problem, but it was still strange to hold another man’s—or woman’s—weapon.
“Shells?” he asked.
“Everything is loaded.”
He raised an eyebrow at her as the rattling on the door became more pronounced. He had certainly walked into something, and completely unprepared at that. It wasn’t a particularly good feeling, but he wouldn’t let that show. He was a former Marine. He knew how to handle a few surprises.
“Who would be after you?” he asked, shoving the revolver in the waistband of his pants much as she had, and testing the weight of the unfamiliar rifle.
“No one,” she said flatly.
He gestured to all the security monitors. “People with this kind of security, loaded guns and refusal to give their names aren’t usually innocent bystanders.”
He watched her expression change as he spoke. A kind of confusion as if she’d never considered how over the top the cabin’s protections were. But then those eyes trained on him, determined all over again. “But you’re inside with me, instead of out there with them.”
She didn’t seem scared exactly, but she did seem concerned and puzzled. If she had a clue what her father’s dealings were—whatever they were—she would have more fear than confusion. She also wouldn’t have gone to the police and she certainly wouldn’t be letting him be in here with her. Not when she was clearly capable of shooting someone.