Charlotte Douglas - The Christmas Target

“I’ve already been hit,” Jessica said hotly. “And if I hadn’t been in the middle of the road, you wouldn’t have seen me, and I would have frozen to death in this godforsaken wilderness.”

She doubted he understood a word she’d said, since her teeth were chattering so hard, her speech was almost incomprehensible.

He must have comprehended enough, though, because his anger seemed to leave him, like the air from a deflating balloon. “Are you hurt?”

“Luckily,” she managed to utter through her chattering teeth, “not as badly as my car.”

She nodded toward the ditch, and the sheriff followed her gaze.

“Aw, sh—” He bit off the curse, then turned and loped back to his car. He returned seconds later with a blanket, and without giving Jessica time to react, he’d wrapped her tightly, lifted her in his arms and settled her on the front seat of the deliciously warm SUV, his official car from the looks of the radio and shotgun mounted on the dash.

Before she could say a word, he returned to the roadside and made a quick inspection of the wrecked sedan. After gathering her luggage from the shoulder, he placed it in the back of the SUV and climbed into the driver’s seat.

She opened her mouth to speak, but he grabbed the microphone off the dash and depressed a button. “I need a tow truck on Highway 7, eighteen miles south of town. Car’s in a ditch. Tell Pete he can wait till the storm passes. I’ve picked up the driver.”

“Ten-four,” a no-nonsense female voice replied. “Need medical assistance?”

“Negative.” The sheriff gave a call number, signed off and replaced the microphone on the dash.

Warmth from the heater was slowly thawing Jessica, and either the bump on her head or the welcomed heat was making her drowsy. She seemed to be floating, a state she’d experienced only once before, when she’d drunk too much champagne at Max’s New Year’s Eve party last January. In such a blissful state, she found maintaining a good head of steam over her situation difficult.

And ignoring the attributes of the man next to her impossible.

She’d sworn off men, she reminded herself, except as the occasional dinner date, although Max never gave up playing matchmaker, hoping she’d find the right man and settle down to raise a family. Having witnessed the chaos and heartbreak that emotional entanglements had created in her parents’ lives, she wanted none of it. Her life was full enough as it was. She had her fantastic job, her South Beach condo, her friends. She didn’t need love or anything slightly resembling it. She’d avoided infatuations as fiercely as she avoided accounting errors. She’d never had a broken heart, never shed a tear over a man, never sat by the phone for a call that never came….

Never intended to.

“Now—” The sheriff, who appeared even more attractive at close range than he had in the bank, turned to her. “Want me to take you back to the hotel?”

Even in its groggy state, her mind somehow continued to function. If she went back to town, she’d have to rent another car, drive the same treacherous roads and arrive hours, if not an entire day, later than she’d planned. And she had no intention of remaining in Montana a day longer than she had to. She hated the dinky little town, the monotony of the landscape, and, most of all, the intolerably frigid weather.

To plead her case, she lifted her lips in what she hoped was an alluring smile. “I don’t suppose you could take me to the Shooting Star Ranch?”

He started the engine and put the car into gear. “Sure you don’t want to have a doctor check you out? You must have been shaken up pretty bad.”

“Nothing a few aspirin won’t cure.”

He gave her a quick head-to-toe glance as if to assure himself. “Then the Shooting Star Ranch it is.” He pulled onto the highway and drove slowly through the swirling snow as confidently as if he knew the route blindfolded. “You’re not used to driving in these conditions.”

She resented his implication that the accident had been her fault, and that irritable feeling helped squelch any danger of succumbing to his aw-shucks Western charm. “I was doing fine until someone sideswiped me and knocked me off the road.”

“They didn’t stop?”

She could hear the anger in his voice and was glad it wasn’t directed at her. “If they did, I was unconscious. No one was around when I came to.”

“Get a license-plate number?”

She shook her head and winced at the pain the movement caused. “All I saw was a dark-colored pickup with tinted windows.”

He stifled another curse. “You’ve just described ninety percent of the vehicles in this county.” Flicking her a glance that seemed to pierce straight through her, he asked, “You sure you were hit? I can’t believe no one stopped to help, especially in this weather. People here are friendlier than that.”

“Have the garage check the car’s driver’s-side panels.” She didn’t like his suggesting that she’d lied, and the frost in her voice matched the temperature outside. “The damage has to be there. Whoever it was, hit me hard. Twice.”

This time he seemed to accept her account. “I’ll ask for a paint sample from the damaged area. See if I can track the truck down.”

“Isn’t that a lot of trouble for a fender bender?” His thoroughness impressed her.

“Hit-and-run’s bad enough.” His scowl emphasized the rugged contours of his face. “If you’d frozen to death back there, it would also have been manslaughter. At least.”

“At least?”

“If someone ran you off the road on purpose and you’d died from the accident or the cold, it would have been homicide.”

She shook her head, unable to comprehend the notion that the wreck had been intended. The movement was not a smart reaction, with her head and body still painfully sore. “Do all sheriffs think like you?”

“How’s that?”

“Paranoid. I’ve only been in town a few hours. Who would want to run me off the road, much less murder me?”

“Ever heard of road rage?” His expression was dead serious, and she couldn’t decide if he was better looking when he smiled or was solemn. “The perpetrators seldom know their victims.”

“I didn’t have time to do anything to make him mad. This guy came out of nowhere.”

“Anyone else you’ve ticked off since you came to town?”

“Nobody but the shotgun Santa.” Her eyes widened at a sudden thought. “You haven’t released him, have you?”

“No way.”

“Has he robbed other banks?”

The sheriff’s tanned forehead wrinkled in a frown. “The guy has no record. Holds a respectable job in Grange County north of us. He isn’t on drugs. In fact, he doesn’t fit the profile of a bank robber at all. And whatever his motive, he’s not talking.”

“Maybe the coming holidays affected his reasoning. Not everybody’s crazy about Christmas,” Jessica said with more intensity than she’d intended. The knock on her head had made her talkative. She rarely felt so at ease with strangers. “Maybe he was… What do the psychologists call it? Acting out?”

“We’re still running a check on him. All we know for certain is that he wasn’t the one who ran you off the road. Anybody else who might be out to get you?”

Jessica could think of dozens, business executives whose get-rich-quick-at-someone-else’s-expense schemes she’d thwarted with her investigations. But none of them was within a thousand miles of Montana.

Unless…

“I haven’t met the people at Shooting Star Ranch yet,” she said. “Don’t know if someone there has something to hide, something they’re afraid my audit might unearth.”

The sheriff coughed harshly, as if something had caught suddenly in his throat. Once he was able to speak again, he gave her a megawatt smile that warmed her more than the superefficient car heater. “Guess you won’t know that until you meet them and do your homework.”