Nicole Helm - Wyoming Cowboy Sniper

He was sweating by the time it clattered to the floor of the van, but he didn’t wait around to catch his breath. The sooner he got them out of their bonds, the better. He leaned back, managed to grasp the knife. In a few swift movements, he cut the zip tie off his wrists.

Sometimes military training did come in handy in the civilian world. He wouldn’t have guessed.

He didn’t take a second to enjoy the feeling of freedom, however. He shook off the plastic and immediately cut the one around his ankle, and then freed Vanessa.

“Well. You move...fast,” she said, as if that surprised her. “You better not have gotten me roped into this, Delaney.”

“Quite the opposite.”

“Figures. Always blame a Carson.” She rubbed at her wrists, then delicately touched her fingertips to the side of her temple. She winced. “Some blow to the head.”

“You folded like a card table and hit the ground before anyone could do anything.”

She scowled. “I find that story very hard to believe.”

“Well, I didn’t knock you around and then tie us both up. But someone with guns did tie us up, so we need to be quick about getting ourselves out of this mess.” But before they could do what needed to be done, she needed to recall one very important thing.

“You don’t remember why you came to see me?” he asked carefully.

“I’m assuming these goons had a gun to my head, because that’s the only way I would ever voluntarily go to see you. Unless you were being tortured. And I was invited to watch.”

“Nice.” Dylan sighed. This was going to make everything so much more difficult, but he didn’t have time to get his nose out of joint about it. “I need you to understand something, okay?” He took a deep breath. If she really didn’t remember years’ worth of stuff, he doubted she’d believe him. He doubted a lot of things, but he couldn’t let her go running around thinking it was just her. “You’re pregnant.”

She barked out a laugh. “Uh-huh.”

“I’m serious. That’s why we’re together. You came to tell me.”

“And why would I tell you... Oh. No. No.” She shook her head back and forth. “You really expect me to believe I slept with you ?”

“We were very drunk.”

She shook her head, eyes wide. “I don’t believe it. There’s not enough liquor in the world.”

“Okay. Don’t believe it. But I need you to understand you are pregnant, it’s thirteen years later than you think it is and bank robbers have kidnapped us to get a ransom. But I’m going to get us out of this, and when we escape you have to do everything in your power to keep the baby growing inside of you safe.”

She went pale at that, but they didn’t have time to keep discussing. The van had been moving too long, too far, and they had to make a serious jump-and-run effort here. She had to believe it, even if she didn’t want to.

“It can’t be ,” she whispered, pressing her hand to her stomach.

“But it is.”

Vanessa didn’t believe him. Maybe things were all wrong—from the lines on his face to the nausea in her gut to the van they were trapped in—but she would have never slept with Dylan Delaney, even with a blow to her head.

And he would have never slept with her .

Dylan was fiddling with the door, looking serious and in control. He’d been beaten up pretty badly, but he didn’t seem to pay it any mind. He wore a suit—and even though it was dirty and rumpled, she could tell it was expensive.

Her eyes stung, and it took a few moments to realize she wanted to cry. Everything was wrong, like a bad dream where only half the things made sense, no matter how real it all felt.

But cry? Not her. Not in this lifetime. She blinked a few times, and focused on the here and now. Not anything Dylan was claiming, but the fact they were tied up in the back of a van, and now Dylan was using her knife and his bloody hands to mess with the door.

“Can I help?” she managed to ask once she could trust her voice.

“Just sit back.”

She scowled. She wasn’t a sit-back kind of girl, but she wouldn’t have pegged Dylan as a take-charge kind of guy. Sure, to order people around maybe, but not to try and bust them out of a moving van.

How could this all be happening? She was about to demand he explain this and tell her the truth instead of his nonsense dream—lies—about her being pregnant with his baby.

She pressed a hand to her stomach, acknowledging that she might feel really off. But couldn’t that just be the head injury? Couldn’t Dylan have caused the head injury? Sure, he was all beat up, and he’d been tied up too, but...

She tried to remember. Tried to order her thoughts and memories, but the very last thing she remembered was flipping off Dylan’s dad as she left the Delaney General Store.

Not her finest moment, but...

But nothing. The old jerk deserved it. She opened her eyes to the young Delaney jerk in front of her, still trying to jimmy the back door open. He didn’t look right. He looked older. Was she really missing such a big chunk of time?

She looked down at her hands. There were pink marks and scratches where the zip ties had dug into her skin around her wrists, but otherwise her hands looked the same. Same rings she always wore... Well, maybe not exactly. She fiddled with a dainty-looking gold one in the shape of a mountain. She didn’t remember that one.

She had to find some kind of center—both a mental one and a physical one. This weakness in both wouldn’t save her, and it wouldn’t fill in whatever memory blanks she had.

But the van chose that moment to rumble to a stop, followed by the engine shutting off.

Oh, God.

Dylan swore, then sat down on the floor of the van right by the doors. “Stand behind me,” he ordered, like he knew what he was doing, like he could get them out of whatever this was. “Be ready to jump. On my signal, run as fast as you can for whatever cover you can find.”

“What about you?” Not that she cared about Dylan, but...

He flashed her a grin so incongruous with the Dylan Delaney she’d grown up alongside, she could only gape at him.

The door made a noise, like a lock being undone. “Be ready,” Dylan murmured, leaning back on his palms as he watched the door.

“What are you—”

The door began to open, and on an exhale Dylan kicked his legs out as hard as he could against the doors. There were twin grunts of pain as the doors hit something, but Dylan didn’t pause. He flung the doors back open and jumped out.

“Go!” he instructed.

Because she saw one man on the ground, struggling to get to his feet, with a huge gun next to him, she did as Dylan instructed. She jumped out of the van and immediately started to run.

“Opposite way!” Dylan yelled. She turned, ready to do whatever Dylan instructed if it’d get her out of here, and watched in the fading dusk as his yell ended on a grunt as one of the large men landed an elbow to his gut.

Dylan Delaney, a hoity-toity Delaney who was getting a fancy degree and likely hadn’t done an ounce of manual labor in his entire life, took the blow like it barely glanced off him. Then he pivoted, swept a leg out and knocked one large man on his butt. Dylan reared back a fist and punched the other guy in the throat, then whirled as the fallen man got back to his feet.

Vanessa blinked.

“Go!” Dylan yelled at her, and it got through her absolute shock at seeing him fight like he knew what he was doing. No, not even like he knew what he was doing. Like he was born to do it.

But there were angry men and guns, so she ran the opposite way she’d been going, toward the front of the van. It acted as a buffer between her and the men and gave her the opportunity to get away without them seeing exactly where she was going.