Mary Sullivan - Cody's Come Home

Her dark-eyed gaze slid away. “I’m—I’m going to need help. With the shape my shoulder’s in, I don’t think I can get out of these.”

He liked her shyness. “I can help. Let’s start with your jacket.”

After only one touch, he realized how difficult the task was going to be. “You’re hurt pretty bad everywhere, aren’t you?”

“It was a hard fall.”

Five minutes later, with great care, he’d managed to take off her jacket and sweater. He reached for the buttons of her blouse.

She brushed his hands away. “I can at least do that.”

When she’d finished, he took over because she couldn’t shrug out of it without using her shoulder. Underneath, she wore a mauve bra. A livid, dark, round bruise colored her chest between and onto her breasts. Cody hissed in a breath. “How did that happen?”

“I landed on my camera, on the lens.”

“Christ, that must have hurt.”

Her cheeks, he noticed, were pink against the slowly warming gray of her skin. In college, he’d had plenty of girlfriends. Seeing a woman in her bra was not a big deal for him. Being in front of him in her underwear was apparently a big deal for Aiyana. Obviously, showing herself to a man was not something she did often, or casually.

“It hurt.” An understatement, he was sure. “I couldn’t breathe for a long time after I hit bottom.”

He palpated her bruised shoulder, tested it to see how far she could move it. Not far. “This will be cold, but it has to be done.”

He took her damp sweater, ran back to the rushing stream and dunked it into the icy water then returned and pushed her bra strap aside to place the wet sweater on Aiyana’s shoulder. She flinched.

“I know, it’s cold.”

“It isn’t that.” She hesitated before pushing the sweater aside. “It’s...this.”

A red slash across her upper arm looked sore. “A sharp tree branch on the way down?”

She bit her lip and glanced away.

His hair stood on end. “What is it?”

A lungful of air gusted out of her. “I didn’t want to say anything, but...it’s a graze from a bullet. Someone shot at me.”

“What?”

“I said someone shot at me.”

“I heard you.” He’d said it too sharply and moderated his tone. “What do you mean, someone shot at you? That’s not possible.”

“It is. It happened, Cody.” Her expression had closed, flattened.

He rummaged in the first-aid kit and dabbed at the graze with a sterile wipe. She winced. “Gunshots? Out here? That’s outlandish.”

“It happened.”

He went cold.

She could have been seriously hurt, or killed. “It must have been hunters. They need to be more careful. Why didn’t the guy apologize, or even help you? Maybe because he would have been hunting illegally.” He covered the cut with antibiotic cream and taped gauze into place. “There shouldn’t have been hunters in the park. It’s illegal, especially given the heavy foot traffic this place gets. This is exactly what the law is meant to protect against—someone being shot by accident.”

“It wasn’t an accident.”

He’d been checking out her arm, front and back, but stopped to sit back and look into her eyes. Everything inside him stilled. He was afraid to think what he was actually thinking—that someone shot this woman on purpose. “What are you saying?”

“I thought it was an accident, too, until the man started chasing me. He shot at me more than once, but luckily missed.”

Icy, icy breath caught in his lungs. “In the name of God, why?”

“I don’t know. I just started running and he kept right on chasing me.”

Cody couldn’t wrap his head around it.

“You don’t believe me.” Her voice sounded flat.

“Of course I do.” His voice sounded fake.

“No, Cody, I can see in your eyes that you doubt me.” She grasped fists full of his jacket and leaned forward, willing him to believe her. “I’m not hysterical. This was no accident. He chased me away from the popular paths. Whenever I tried to head somewhere safe, he shot at me. I was terrified because it was real.”

Cody turned away and packed his bag, afraid to let her see his rage. She’d been intimidated yesterday, frightened out of her wits. He didn’t need to make her afraid of another man.

“Why didn’t you phone out?”

“I didn’t have time! Whenever I stopped to catch my breath, he was right there behind me.”

“Did you yell for help?”

“I tried, but he chased me into this remote area of the park. There was no one here. And then I figured it was best to stay silent because the only person who’d hear my screams would be him. I was frightened. And then the trail fell away right from under my feet—I lost my phone, hurt myself. I was angry by that point.”

“What happened after you fell?”

“I lay still for a long time hoping he would leave.”

Cody’s blood rushed through his veins. He wanted to find the guy and hurt him. Badly. He couldn’t imagine the sheer terror she must have felt while waiting to see whether her pursuer was going to come down to kill her. He cursed under his breath.

“I guess he either didn’t want to climb down to check on me,” Aiyana said, “or he assumed I was dead.”

Cody still couldn’t wrap his head around this. It was so far outside anything that should be happening in Accord, Colorado. LA? Yeah, sure. Violence was a fact of life there. But Accord? Never.

Of all the scenarios he’d been ready to face if he found Aiyana, this was so far out of the box he didn’t know how to deal with it.

He glanced around, but all he saw were trees and brush. He wanted to steer the conversation to something positive, but he also had to know what he was dealing with here. “Is that why you were defensive when I showed up?”

She nodded. “I prayed it was help but also thought it might be him coming back to finish me off.”

He hated that she looked so scared. “Has there been any trace of him today?”

She shook her head. “I haven’t heard or seen a thing.”

“That’s good, okay? I’m here now. Nothing’s going to happen to you. Okay?”

She nodded. Her worried frown eased. A bit.

He held her hands until they warmed and she smiled, weakly, but at least she seemed less frightened.

Using the strength of his will to calm her, he set about cataloging her injuries: badly bruised chest and wrenched shoulder, serious bullet graze on arm, useless ankle, not to mention a whole host of bruises all over her body.

Anger churned in him as riotously as the stream whose banks had overflowed through the night. That someone, anyone, would do this to a girl as wonderful as Aiyana...

Not a girl. A woman. He turned away from the golden skin tempting him. Wanting her was the last thing he should be feeling at a time like this.

“Sorry to do this to you, but we have to get you out of those soaking jeans. The last thing we want is for you to get hypothermia.”

“I don’t know how we can, though—not with the way you’ve bandaged my ankle.”

“I know, and I’m not going to undo it. We need to keep the swelling down as much as possible.”

He took his Leatherman out of his pocket and grasped the hem of one of the pant legs. “I hope you aren’t in love with these. They’re about to be toast.”

“I can’t go out of here without pants.”

“I brought clothing for you.”

He flipped out the small, sharp scissors and lifted one eyebrow.

She nodded. “Do it.”

He cut a straight line up the outside of one leg and then the other. Aiyana lay down and raised her hips. Together, they slipped the jeans out from under her butt.

Her underpants, Cody noted, were the same mauve as her bra, the color beautiful against her naturally tanned skin.