Vickie Taylor - The Lawman's Last Stand

She buried her face in the side of his neck. He smelled clean and strong.

“I don’t want to,” she said. “I don’t want to live looking over my shoulder anymore, wondering if someone is behind me with a gun, but I don’t ever want to go back to being the woman I was.”

When her breath had steadied, she asked, “So what do we do now?”

He pulled his head back until he could look at her. “Now we’re going to fix it so that you can be whoever the hell you want to be.”

His smile warmed her from the inside out. She felt her own lips curve in answer. A few more days—that was probably all they had left together.

So why did she feel like he’d just promised her forever?

Dear Reader,

Once again, Silhouette Intimate Moments has rounded up six top-notch romances for your reading pleasure, starting with the finale of Ruth Langan’s fabulous new trilogy. The Wildes of Wyoming— Ace takes the last of the Wilde men and matches him with a pool-playing spitfire who turns out to be just the right woman to fill his bed—and his heart.

Linda Turner, a perennial reader favorite, continues THOSE MARRYING MCBRIDES! with The Best Man, the story of sister Merry McBride’s discovery that love is not always found where you expect it. Award-winning Ruth Wind’s Beautiful Stranger features a heroine who was once an ugly duckling but is now the swan who wins the heart of a rugged “prince.” Readers have been enjoying Sally Tyler Hayes’ suspenseful tales of the men and women of DIVISION ONE, and Her Secret Guardian will not disappoint in its complex plot and emotional power. Christine Michels takes readers Undercover with the Enemy, and Vickie Taylor presents The Lawman’s Last Stand, to round out this month’s wonderful reading choices.

And don’t miss a single Intimate Moments novel for the next three months, when the line takes center stage as part of the Silhouette 20 thAnniversary celebration. Sharon Sala leads off A YEAR OF LOVING DANGEROUSLY, a new in-line continuity, in July; August brings the long-awaited reappearance of Linda Howard—and hero Chance Mackenzie—in A Game of Chance; and in September we reprise 36 HOURS, our successful freestanding continuity, in the Intimate Moments line. And that’s only a small taste of what lies ahead, so be here this month and every month, when Silhouette Intimate Moments proves that love and excitement go best when they’re hand in hand.

Leslie J. Wainger

Executive Senior Editor

www.millsandboon.co.uk

has always loved books—the way they look, the way they feel and most especially the way the stories inside them bring whole new worlds to life. She views her recent transition from reading to writing books as a natural extension of this longtime love. Vickie lives in Aubrey, Texas, a small town dubbed “The Heart of Horse Country,” where, in addition to writing romance novels, she raises American Quarter Horses.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Epilogue

Fight, or die.

The unspoken omen pierced the heavy cloak of semiconsciousness clouding her mind the way a foghorn pierced a misty sea. It surrounded her. Reverberated inside her. Rallied her senses to consciousness.

She didn’t want to die.

Forcing her sluggish eyelids to part, she found herself alone in the cold and the dark. Her first cognizance of where she was and how she’d gotten there came from the soft ping of ice crystals against glass. The windshield. The storm. The accident.

Or was it an accident?

Lying lengthwise across the seat of her old pickup, the woman the people of Pine Valley, Utah, knew as Gigi McCowan lifted her cheek from the frigid vinyl, uncurled fingers stiff from the cold, and probed her aching forehead. Wincing at the lump she found above her right temple, she pulled her hand away. Her aching head would have to wait, as would her throbbing knee. At the moment she had other priorities—like staying alive.

Outside, the wind that had howled earlier, driving a late winter storm before it, had diminished to a soft weeping. The creak of brittle branches added to its lament.

A footstep sounded somewhere above her, at the top of the ravine maybe, the light crunch of a boot on frozen ground.

Her nerves jangled, instantly clearing her pain-shrouded mind. Her senses went on full alert. Soundlessly she reached down to the floorboard and wrapped her fingers around the smooth, cold handle of the twitch. A fitting weapon for a veterinarian, she thought—an instrument designed to cause pain. The twitch was a baseball bat with a noose tied through a hole in the thick end. By pinching a horse’s muzzle through the loop and twisting the bat until the rope bit into the tender flesh, she could coerce even the most agitated animal into standing still while she treated its wounds.

Sometimes you had to hurt them a little to make them better.

Tonight her motives weren’t so humanitarian. She just wanted to hurt the man in the blue Mercedes who had run her off the road. Hurt him before he hurt her.

She tightened her grip on the twitch. Despite the cold, her palms were sweating. Her breath clouded in front of her face the way the mist had hung over the mountain peaks that morning. The sight had made her heart swell, and despite the chill in the air, she’d taken her coffee out on the porch, settled down in a weathered Adirondack chair, and just sipped, and stared.

Dawn bloomed against a backdrop of violet-and-peach-pastel mist many a morning in this part of Utah. Color Country, the locals called it. Paradise was a better word, to her mind. That was why she’d stayed so long. Too long. She’d fallen in love with the forested hillsides, the columns of rock that stood guard over the wilderness like Indian totems, the community that had taken her in as one of their own.

Now it was all gone to her, evaporated into nothingness, like the mist she’d watched that morning. Paradise lost. Even if she survived the night, she would have to leave Utah.

A twig snapped outside. A barrage of pebbles skittered down a slope.

Tears jammed up behind her eyelids. She blinked them back, fighting the need to sniff, not wanting to give herself away to the stalker nearby.

“Dammit,” a muffled voice rumbled.

Her sawmill breath and the pounding of her heart almost drowned out the word. From the sound of it, the stalker was trying to negotiate the steep wall of the ravine, and having trouble. With any luck, he’d fall and break a leg. But luck was fickle tonight. The uneven footfalls righted themselves and crunched toward the truck.

Too late, she noticed the driver’s side door was unlocked.

No time. No time.

Stretched out across the truck seat, her heels against the door handle, there was no room to swing the twitch. She would have to go for a punch. She hid the bat alongside her thigh and lay perfectly still.

The handle clicked. Hinges creaked. A gust of cold air rushed over her prone body.

And she struck.

She punched the bat out the door as hard as she could, sitting up and throwing her weight behind the blow. The rounded end of the bat hit bedrock in the midsection of a man. For a second, victory thrilled through her. Her attacker toppled backward, the breath whooshing from his lungs.