Delores Fossen - Rustling Up Trouble

Mercy.

Not from one of the two gunmen but from another direction. To their far left.

Rayanne pivoted toward the newcomer and fired. This time she didn’t miss, but again she couldn’t tell if the man was just injured or dead, because the shots from the other gunmen drowned out any telltale sounds.

But there was no mistaking one sound.

Even over the blasts and her own heartbeat crashing in her ears, she heard—and felt—one of those bullets. It didn’t slam into her.

It hit Blue.

And it didn’t just hit him. It tore off a chunk of rock that smacked against his left temple. She knew the exact second of impact from both the bullet and the rock. Blue groaned in pain.

And Rayanne could only watch as he collapsed against her.

She didn’t look at him. Was too afraid of what she might see. Besides, she had to deal with the person who’d fired that shot.

The anger slammed into her, along with the fear she had for the baby. She tried to shut out all thoughts when she took aim. However, she didn’t get a chance to fire. That was because the moron stopped shooting and started running.

Escaping.

Rayanne nearly bolted after him, but then she looked down at Blue. Unconscious. He was breathing, sucking in shallow breaths, and there wasn’t a drop of color in Blue’s face.

But there was color everywhere else. Lots of it.

From his blood spilling onto her.

Chapter Two

Blue heard the voices and opened his eyes.

Big mistake. The light stabbed through his head like razors, and a very unmanly sounding groan clawed its way through his parched throat.

That stopped the voices.

He heard movement. People shuffling around, and despite the pain, he reached for his gun.

Not there.

Even though it was hard to think, he figured this couldn’t be good. Unarmed and in god-awful pain. He hoped he didn’t have to fight his way out of there, because judging from the way he felt, he’d already had his butt kicked bad.

Blue had another go at opening his eyes. This time he took things slower and cracked just one eyelid so he could have a look. There was an elderly man with salt-and-pepper hair looming over him. No gun, either, but he was sporting a very concerned expression.

“I’m Dr. Wilbert Howland,” the man said. “I did your surgery.”

It took Blue a moment to process that. Surgery likely meant a hospital, so he glanced around.

Yep.

He was in bed, flat on his back, surrounded by sterile white walls and an antiseptic smell.

“Surgery?” Blue repeated. He tried to pick through the images and sounds that spun like an F5 tornado through his head.

“You were shot,” the doctor provided. “And you have a concussion.”

With the help of the ache in his left shoulder nudging him, Blue remembered getting shot and being smacked in the head with a piece of flying rock. Hard to forget the blistering pain from those two things. He also remembered the gunmen.

Three of them.

That gave him a jolt of concern. “Where are the guys who shot me?”

“Two are dead. The other one’s missing.”

Blue groaned again. “The missing one will come for me.” At least Blue thought he would.

“You’re safe here. And you’re going to be fine,” the doc assured him. “The bullet didn’t hit anything vital, but you did lose a lot of blood because it took a while to get an ambulance out there to you.”

No memory of an ambulance. Zero. No memory of how much time had passed, either. Definitely something he should be able to recall.

“Where are my clothes?” he asked, glancing down at the hospital gown.

“Bagged. I’ll have someone bring them to you if the sheriff doesn’t need them for processing.”

Right. Because the clothes might be needed for an investigation. “I want the Stetson and the vest. They’re my good-luck charms,” he added.

The doc gave him a funny look. No doubt because he was in the hospital. But he was also alive.

That meant the good-luck charms had worked again.

The doctor leaned closer and waved a little penlight in front of Blue’s eyes. More pain. Heck, breathing made it worse, too.

“If it hadn’t been for Rayanne,” the doctor said, “you might have bled out. She added pressure to your wound to slow down the blood flow.”

“Rayanne,” Blue managed to say, and he got a glimpse of her peering over the doctor’s shoulder.

The relief was instant, and Blue released the breath he didn’t even know he’d been holding.

Yeah, it was her, all right.

She had her ginger-brown hair pulled into her usual ponytail, though strands had slipped out and were dangling around her face and shoulders. When she stepped to the doctor’s side, he saw the blood on the front of her buckskin-colored jacket.

“You’re hurt.” Blue tried to sit up, but the doctor stopped that.

Rayanne shook her head. “That’s not my blood. It’s yours.”

More relief. It was bad enough that he’d been shot, but it would have been much worse if the bullet had gone into Rayanne instead.

But why did she look so, well, riled at him?

This wasn’t the first time they’d gotten shot at together. As an ATF agent, he had worked on a few cases with her when the investigations had landed in her jurisdiction. So why was she eyeing him now as if she wanted to rip off his aching head?

And the questions just kept coming.

Why had he been shot, and where the heck was he? He knew the hospital part, but he’d been in several hospitals in San Antonio, his hometown, and this wasn’t one of them.

“Why’d those men want you dead?” Rayanne asked. “Why aren’t you dead?” she tacked onto that.

Clearly she had some questions of her own.

Blue opened his mouth to get busy answering them and realized he didn’t have a clue. “Start from the beginning,” he insisted. “I want to know what’s going on. Why can’t I remember how I got here?”

Rayanne huffed. More eye narrowing, and those gray eyes that at times could take on a warm, sensual glow certainly weren’t warm or sensual at the moment. They were like little slabs of ice jabbing at him.

“A sensor alarm went off at the ranch,” she finally said, “and when I rode out to check, I found you trying not to draw the attention of three gunmen who drove up on the back side of the fence.”

On one level that gave him a serious shot of adrenaline, but on another it was just plain confusing.

Think, Blue.

Not easy to do, but he sorted through some of the fog and remembered going to the ranch that Rayanne’s family owned.

Estranged family, he mentally corrected.

Rayanne had told him that she might have to go back to Sweetwater Springs because her mother was possibly going to be arrested for the decades-old murder of an alleged lover, Whitt Braddock.

And that was where Blue’s memories came to a grinding halt.

“Why were the gunmen there?” he asked. “And why are you so mad?”

Her next huff was considerably louder. “Could you give us a minute?” Rayanne asked the doc.

Dr. Howland didn’t seem exactly comfortable with that, but he eventually nodded. “Only for a minute or two. And go easy on him.”

“You want to know why I’m mad?” Rayanne repeated once the doctor had stepped out. “Well, for starters you slept with me almost five months ago and then disappeared without so much as a Post-it note.”

Oh, man.

He’d slept with her?

Blue remembered the attraction between them. Felt it blood-deep even now. But he’d always fought falling into bed with her because he had a strict rule about not having sex with coworkers.

Blue shook his head. “I don’t remember.”

And that was saying something. Rayanne wasn’t exactly forgettable, and sex with her should have stuck in his mind like permanent glue.