Woman on the Run (new version) Read online

  The dog’s tail thumped weakly on the boards as Julia reached out gingerly to pat its head. She felt something wet and snatched her hand back, then realized that the dog was trying to lick her hand. The dog lifted its muzzle into her hand. Julia could swear that it was looking straight into her soul. The mutt looked lost and lonely.

  “You, too, huh?” she murmured and with a sigh, snapped her fingers to shoo him in. The dog quivered and tried to stand, then collapsed, whining loudly.

  “What’s the matter? Are you hurt?” Julia gently ran her hands over the dull coat, trying not to think about ticks and fleas, stopping when she felt the right foreleg.

  “Broken, huh?” she told the dog. He just looked at her and thumped his tail. “Or maybe sprained. I don’t know. God knows if Simpson has a vet. Well.” She took a deep breath and looked at him sternly. “You can come in tonight because it’s cold and you’re hurt, but just for the night and then you’re out…is that clear?”

  The tail swished again and he licked her hand.

  “Okay, just as long as we understand each other.” Julia lifted the surprisingly heavy dog in her arms, staggering a little. She thought of Fellini’s standards of cuisine. “And no home-cooked meals either. You’ll get some bread and milk and that’s it.” The dog whined again as they crossed the threshold. Julia sighed. “Well, maybe if you’re really good, you can have my leftover tuna salad.”

  She put some old towels on the floor in the corner of the little living room and stepped back. He was a big dog, but starved. His ribs were sticking out so clearly through the dull, matted coat that she could count each one of them.

  Julia went into the kitchen, poured milk into a plastic bowl and put the remains of her tuna salad on a plastic plate. She knew that tomorrow she would stop by the grocery store to pick up some dog food and inquire about a vet.

  You’re a fool, Julia, she told herself again as she put the food in front of the dog, but she was pleased anyway as she watched the dog gulp the food down and slurp up the milk. He gazed at her through slitted eyes.

  “Bed time, huh, big fellow?” Julia asked softly.

  The dog yawned hugely, showing a mouthful of yellow teeth, put its nose on its forepaws and went out like a light.

  Julia envied him. She hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in over four weeks. It would take more than a blanket and some leftover tuna salad to repair her shattered life.

  Julia shivered. Speaking of repairs…

  Reluctantly, she walked into the pantry—actually a little cubbyhole just off the kitchen—where some joker with a sick sense of humor had installed something that was supposed to act like a hot water heater and had pretensions to heating the house. The only thing the big tank did was take the edge off the chill in the house and provide—with an inordinate amount of moaning and groaning—a reluctant trickle of tepid water.

  Or had done, until this morning, when her shower had been icy cold and she had noticed a water stain on the wall. Something, somewhere had broken.

  Her wall was a metaphor for her life.

  The stain had spread. There was water on the floor and an alarming gurgling sound. Julia was sure that plumbers did something more than stare and wring their hands, but what?

  The front doorbell rang.

  With a last baffled look at the crisscrossing tangle of tubes and piping, she walked to the door and yanked it open.

  Windblown gusts of ice streaked diagonally across the cone of light from the streetlamp. Julia shivered. The temperature had dropped another ten degrees.

  Sam Cooper stood in her doorway, tall, dark, with a frighteningly grim expression on his face, dark eyes glittering. She stared at him for a long moment, then gathered her courage in both hands. If he was here, there could only be one reason for it. And it wasn’t good.

  “Are you going to press charges?” she asked, lifting her chin.

  He blinked. Something, some unreadable expression, crossed his dark, hard face. “No.”

  Even his voice was dark, low and deep.

  “Oh.” Some of the battle-tension deserted her. “That’s good.”

  “I came because—”

  There was a loud crash and the sound of water splashing on the floor.

  “Oh, no!” Julia groaned and ran to the pantry. Water was seeping from the wall, spreading out from where the water stain had been. Something popped and water cascaded out in an arc, taking great chunks of plaster with it.

  “Where’s the main distribution pipe valve?”

  Julia turned at the sound of the deep harsh voice behind her. She stared helplessly up at Sam Cooper. He snorted, felt his way around the watery mess until he found something and wrenched his wrist to the right. Like magic, the water stopped spouting.

  Then he knelt and started pulling out chunks of her wall. He stuck both hands into the innards of her house, eventually ending up on his side, his head stuck into the wall. Julia heard him grunt, then he pulled his head out.

  “Lug,” he said.

  Right to her face.

  Julia stiffened. Lug? He was calling her a lug? How dare he?

  She hadn’t the faintest idea what lug meant. Western dialect was still fairly new to her, but…but surely lug wasn’t very complimentary. Lug rhymed with plug. And mug. And slug.

  “I beg your pardon,” she said huffily.

  A faint smile crossed his austere features. “Need a lug wrench.” He pulled some keys from his jeans pocket. “Keys to the pickup. Toolbox’s on the front seat.”

  Julia took the set of keys from him, brushing his hand. It was harder than any hand she’d ever touched before. Hard and rough and warm.

  She hesitated a moment, holding the keys in front of her as if they were some form of talisman. She stared down into his face, taking in the dark features and dark eyes glittering at her. She couldn’t read what he was thinking at all. She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again and walked to the door, looking in dismay at the sleet falling on her little front garden. She peered and sure enough, a battered pickup was parked outside.

  Black.

  Figured.

  She scampered, shivering, to the pickup. Through the passenger window Julia could see a steel toolbox, the kind handymen had. The third key she tried opened the pickup door and she pulled out the toolbox. It weighed a ton. Puffing, she carried it inside and shook off the mixture of rain and ice.

  “Here.” If he was going to be John Wayne-laconic, then by God so was she.

  He rifled through the neatly arranged toolbox, picking up a wicked-looking implement Vlad the Impaler would have been proud to own.

  “This.” When she looked at him in bafflement, he sighed. “Lug wrench.”

  “Oh,” Julia said and smiled.

  Cooper would have been floored by the charm of that smile if he hadn’t been stretched out on the floor already. It transformed Sally Andersen’s face from beautiful to stunning. He’d seen her terrified and annoyed and baffled and now amused in the space of an hour. Each emotion had been so clearly visible it could have been tattoed on her forehead. It was an ability he lacked. Melissa had called him stone-face so often he’d begun to believe he couldn’t show an emotion if he tried.

  Sally Andersen’s smile faded and Cooper realized he was staring at her. He tried a smile himself, feeling unused cheek muscles crack. He couldn’t hold the smile for much longer, so he bent back to the task of putting Sally Andersen’s plumbing in order.

  He had his work cut out for him. No one had changed the fittings in her house for forty years. The pipes were rusted and more or less all the washers were ready to blow.

  That was okay, his toolbox was top of the line. It had to be. Something was always breaking down at the Double C and he’d turned into a hell of a handyman since he’d come back to run it.

  Concentrating on her washers kept him from staring at the gorgeous Miss Sally Andersen. She’d be a knockout even in a big city. In Simpson, she was a fucking miracle, like a rose in winter. It
took all his concentration not to stare at her.

  She was a beauty, a pocket Venus. The creamy ivory skin of a redhead, eyes the color of the sky over the Double C in summer, a smile that could give a man a heart attack at fifty paces.

  Though she looked like a redhead, she wasn’t. He’d never been able to resist redheads. If she had red hair instead of brown, he’d probably pick her up, throw her on her bed and jump on top of her. He was having enough trouble resisting her as it was, even with brown hair.

  She was one of those women who caught the light and gave it back with a glow. It was impossible not to look at her when she was in the room. At least Cooper found it impossible…which was why he was trying to concentrate on rusty pipes and leaky gaskets. Left to his own devices, he’d simply stop and stare at her endlessly. Probably scare the shit out of her, too.

  There was another reason to stay on the floor, curved in toward the wall.

  He had a hard-on.

  Just his luck. His cock chose now, of all times, to wake up.

  His cock had been basically dead meat between his legs since Melissa left a year ago and for most of the year before that, while his marriage was slowly, painfully imploding. He hadn’t had any sexual desire—none, nada, zilch—for what seemed like a lifetime. It was as if that part of his life had been switched off. He’d almost resigned himself to a nookie-less existence and here his dick was springing back to life, clamoring for what it had been missing all this time, at exactly the wrong moment. Now was definitely not the right time for a woodie.

  A dead dick was not anything he thought he’d suffer from, ever. He’d always enjoyed sex and had had a lot in his time. The dead dick thing had taken him totally by surprise.

  Part of it was the exhausting, back-breaking job of turning the Double C around from his father’s neglect during the last years of his life. Cooper worked eighteen-hour days—hard, physical labor as intense as the PT he’d done daily in the Teams without the adrenaline-releasing highs of combat—and bed was a place where he slipped into sleep so deep it could have been a coma the instant his head touched the pillow.

  Another part of it was the sheer hell he’d gone through during his marriage to a coldhearted woman, the memory of which made him wince even now. His marriage had been like being pushed through a meat grinder, slowly.

  That last year he’d as soon have put his cock between the jaws of a rattlesnake than between Melissa’s thighs. He’d have found a warmer welcome with the rattlesnake, too.

  But the biggest part of it was that attractive, single women didn’t grow on trees in Simpson. Or Rupert or Dead Horse for that matter. It had been a long, long time since he’d seen anyone as beautiful as this woman. If ever.

  The truth was, he’d fallen in instant lust with this Sally Andersen and now he had no idea what to do. He’d completely lost the knack of dealing with females. Human ones, at least.

  If this was when he was in the Teams, and she was a girl in a bar next to a base, he could buy her a drink without having to worry about coaxing or courting or even making conversation. The music was too loud in bars and anyway, no one went there to talk. They went there to find someone to fuck. Sex while in the Navy hadn’t been a problem at all, particularly in Coronado with its droves of SEAL groupies clamoring for a piece.

  Then Melissa had set her sights on him and basically dragged him to the altar without Cooper having much to say about it. To her disgust, it turned out being a rancher’s wife wasn’t any fun at all. Melissa had not been a happy camper and she’d made sure, day and night, that Cooper knew all about it.

  They’d been taught everything about Evade and Escape tactics in the Teams and he’d used that knowledge—a lot—during his marriage. He’d basically just shut his cock down and now that it had sprung to life he didn’t have a tool in his toolbox that would help him win his way into this lady’s bed.

  Sally Andersen was clearly a lady. A gorgeous, well-educated lady with an easy charm. Cooper wasn’t going to coax her into bed with his own charm. He didn’t have any. He didn’t have any smooth words or smooth moves.

  Maybe fixing her plumbing would do the trick.

  While Sam Cooper worked in silence, Julia mopped up the mess.

  She had to step more than once around his long legs stretching out forever. Nice legs, she thought. Very, very nice legs. Then she was ashamed of herself for ogling the legs of a man who was helping her. Though they were supremely ogle-able.

  Julia stopped for a moment, studying those legs.

  They were long and muscular with unusually strong thighs. The tight jeans showcased the long bands of muscles in his thighs, steel-hard and massive, swelling and bunching with his movements in a way Julia found utterly fascinating. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the play of those muscles. She’d rarely seen sheer male strength up close like that. She had to dig her fingernails into her palms to keep from reaching out and touching all that male power. Just for a second. Just to see what it felt like.

  Julia had always chosen her men for their conversation and charm. And, of course, they had to be readers and love old films and get along with Federico, which wasn’t easy. Federico was finicky about the company he kept.

  Thigh muscles had never really entered into the equation.

  It had never even occurred to her that she could be turned on by only the bottom half of a male body, as men were turned on by pneumatic breasts. This wasn’t like her. She valued conversation and culture and charm. It was appalling to be fixated on a man’s physical attributes. Lower body physical attributes at that. Stress and fear had morphed her into this…this redneck guy.

  She was absolutely certain that the man now repairing her plumbing had neither conversation nor charm, but apparently thigh muscles trumped charm out here, judging from the waves of intense heat prickling under her skin.

  Danger and stress were driving her insane. That was the only possible explanation.

  Cooper pulled himself further into the wall, doing something competent with the wrench, turning on his back for a moment and Julia got an eyeful of something else massive about Sam Cooper besides his thigh muscles.

  Either the man had an enormous erection or he belonged in the Guinness Book of Records. Julia’s internal temperature spiked in a flash of incandescent heat sapping her muscles.

  Oh, God. What was happening to her? Her legs were trembling and she couldn’t take her eyes off Sam Cooper’s jeans, old and white along the front and in the groin area where it was stressed by contact with his thigh muscles and his…

  Oh, this wouldn’t do.

  On rubbery knees, Julia went into the kitchen to rub ice cubes over her wrists since the water was turned off. When she finally had herself under control, she went back to where Cooper was working.

  He finally emerged from her wall. With an enormous whump!, her boiler came back on. As he had in the school after she’d brained him, Cooper stood in one smooth lithe powerful movement. He looked down at her. That dark, hard face was totally expressionless. He held his big hands up. They were covered in grease and she saw with dismay he’d nicked himself. Two of the knuckles were covered in blood.

  “May I wash my hands?” His voice was deep and raspy, as if he didn’t speak often.

  “Of course. Thank you so much.” The house was already beginning to heat up and Julia felt an enormous surge of gratitude towards him. Okay, so he didn’t talk much, and his thighs and what was between them messed with her head, but he’d repaired her plumbing and she was really grateful. “The bathroom is the second door to the right. The towels are clean.”

  He nodded his head gravely and turned. With a heroic act of self-control, Julia did not check his buns out. The front of him was quite enough distraction. She headed back into the kitchen.

  She’d make him a cup of tea—no, maybe cowboys preferred coffee. She was filling the filter when she heard a knock on the door.

  The house was starting to resemble Grand Central Station. In the entire month she’
d been here, no one had stopped by. Tonight was a circus. First the dog, then Cooper and now someone else.

  Julia opened the door and her worst nightmare came out of the swirling darkness.

  A pistol. Aimed straight at her head.

  Chapter Three

  Julia screamed and her heart tried to pound its way out of her chest. She scrabbled wildly for something to use as a weapon, though she knew it was too late. Crazily, she tried to brace herself for the shot.

  “Trick or treat.” The childish treble came from somewhere around her knees and she froze. A witch, a blond Harry Potter with fake round plastic glasses and a cowboy stared at her, frightened by her screams. The little cowboy dropped his plastic gun and the witch started crying.

  Not killers. School kids wanting a treat.

  The front door closed. Dimly, as if coming from a hundred miles away, Julia heard a deep male voice and the excited squeals of children from the porch. Then, a moment later, the front door opened again, letting in an arctic swirl of wind.

  She stumbled into the little living room, her fingers clenching hard on the back of the garish flower-covered sofa. She ignored the heavy pounding in her chest and tried to control the trembling in her arms. For a moment, colored lights danced before her eyes and the edges of vision started to fade like a yellowing photograph. A hot tear dropped onto her white knuckles.

  Terror, loneliness, despair all jostled sharply, painfully inside Julia’s chest, as if there were knives in there fighting their way out, slicing her heart into shreds. She drew in a long sobbing breath as another tear squeezed out from behind her closed lids. Rough tremors shook her. In the instant before her knees gave way, she felt herself half-lifted and turned against a broad expanse of chest.

  To Julia’s intense horror, short, stuttering sobs racked through her. She swayed and was held tightly. Strong arms held her close and she let herself go limp.

  It felt like a lifetime since she had been held and comforted by another human being. Since her parents’ deaths, in fact. And now Julia found herself weeping out her fear and rage and loneliness in great, uncontrollable gasping sobs she couldn’t have repressed had her life depended on it. She wept and wept and wept, knowing she was going to be flooded with remorse. Later. But not now. Now she needed the release like she needed air.