of undress. Not that I was embarrassed. Except for the size of my goose bumps, Hank didn’t seem the least bit interested in my present condition. After all, we were both adults, and the average bikini top showed more skin than my sports bra.
“I’m fine.” My answer was as automatic as an enlistee’s quick salute and had nothing to do with a thorough assessment of my body’s current temperature.
Silently, he unbuttoned his shirt, hooked it on one finger by the collar, and held it out to me. I accepted his offer and slipped my right arm through the sleeve. I came up short as I reached back for the other armhole. Pain radiated down to my hip and up across my left shoulder and I sucked in a choppy breath.
“What’s wrong?” Hank grabbed the free end of his shirt to assess the damage hidden beneath.
I stood stock-still and closed my eyes, awaiting the inevitable questions about the tangled web of pink scar tissue surrounding the divot in my shoulder where the bullet had ripped and chewed its way through me. A stab of heat burned my skin as his laser focus touched it. To my surprise, he didn’t comment. Then his fingers brushed against my side.
“Ouch!” I yelped and jerked away, raising my left arm slowly to examine my side. There was an angry black bruise at the bottom of my ribcage about the size of my fist where I must have landed on a rock. A long, wide strawberry radiated down my side and dipped beneath the band of my jeans like the tail of a comet. Serum had oozed from the edges of the shredded skin, gluing dust to my side like a dirt bandage.
“Jesus, Parish.”
“Could be worse,” I commented.
Hank repositioned the armhole for easy entry and I slipped my arm in as he gently lifted the fabric over my shoulders. A light breeze billowed the tail of the shirt behind me and I caught the scent of him on the fabric—a potent mix of clean sweat and ground-in dirt. It reminded me of desert sand and a hundred and twenty degrees in the shade half a world away.
I buttoned up the shirt, the fabric a little stiff with dried sweat at the shoulders, but the heat his body had left behind warmed me.
I turned back to my horse and mounted up. Hank was already in the saddle with a lead rope attached to Jenna’s horse. Jenna’s horse rubbed her face on Hank’s horse’s rump then gave it a light nip. Hank’s horse didn’t move, but it flipped an ear backward with an expression I could only describe as a sneer.
We rode back in silence. I knew Hank must have questions, about what happened to the dog, about what happened to my shoulder, but he kept them to himself. I wasn’t particularly in the mood to talk anyway. My shoulder throbbed, my open wound rubbed against my jeans, and my inner thighs were aflame with friction burns.
Still better than my best day in Iraq.
* * * *
An hour later, I was back at the barn. After stripping Jenna’s horse of its tack, Hank turned the mare out in the big grassy paddock with the other horses, grabbed a new shirt from the cabin, then pointed his horse back out on the range to catch up with the other men from this morning. There were still fences to check.
Since Santos and I didn’t know our way around the ranch, we stayed behind to clean stalls, and I was up to my elbows in urine-soaked shavings and horse manure. Despite the coolness of the barn, sweat rolled between my breasts and down my back, dampening my clothes. My shoulder muscles ached and my side stung but it gave me something to focus on besides Dink’s mangled leg.
“It’s not right,” Santos complained.
“What’s that?” We had been mucking the stalls for about forty minutes and my mind was lost in the thunk and scrape of the manure forks as we dumped the heavy scoops into the wheelbarrow. We had gone so long without speaking I didn’t know if he had a problem with the work we were doing or if something else was bothering him.
“The dog,” he said.
I stopped mid-shovel. “What about him?”
“The trap. Never shoulda been there. Jenna says they don’t use any on the ranch for that reason. So someone set it there.”
“Who would do a thing like that?” It was rhetorical. Santos hadn’t worked here any longer than I had so I didn’t expect him to know the answer. “Besides, Dale said their trouble was behind them. “Maybe it was set a while ago and they only came across it now.”
“Maybe,” Santos said, as he shoved his rake into a thick clump of manure. “Maybe not.”
Chapter 3
Hank and the other men had ridden in as the rest of us sat down to dinner. Jenna hadn’t yet returned from the animal hospital and the conversation at dinner had consisted of a few grunts, the scrape and clatter of forks and knives on the plates, and words mumbled around large bites of food.
It was dark by the time I made it back to the cabin. I figured I had time before Hank ate and came in, so I quickly stripped out of my clothes and hopped into the shower. I hissed and choked down a curse as the water stung my abrasion and hammered the deep purple bruise. The swelling wasn’t as bad, but only because gravity had taken over and the excess fluid had sunk toward my hip. As I cleaned the ground-in dirt from my side, every nerve ending pinged and I knew what it must feel like to be skinned alive. By the time I’d finished scrubbing, bright red blood seeped to the surface.
I dressed in a clean pair of jeans and threw on another sports bra. As soon as I sat down at the table with the antibiotic cream and bandages I’d found in the medicine cabinet, Hank swept through the front door, bringing with him a flood of fresh cold air.
He froze as he took in the sight of me at the table, then stepped over to his side of the cabin to hang his hat and coat on the hooks by his bed.
He had a slight limp in his walk, not as if he didn’t hurt much, but as if it hurt like hell and he didn’t want anyone to know. For the first time, I wondered what his story was. Why was he here? What happened to his leg?
“Let me help you with that.” He stepped over and took the cream from my hand.
“I can get it.”
Hank grunted as he sat down next to me. He was slow to sit and extended his right leg behind me instead of folding it under the chair. “Unbutton your pants,” he said.
I looked him up and down and pretended to assess his chances with me. Aiming for a little levity, I said, “I’m not that easy.”
He rolled his eyes and made a hurry-up, no-nonsense motion with his hand. “Your skin is abraded below your waistband, I can’t get to it.”
I waited a beat before complying and rolled the waistband of my jeans down below the edge of the wound. “In some countries, you would have to marry me after something like this.”
A snort broke free and a spark of amusement flared in his blue eyes. “Is that what you want?”
Images of my boyfriend in Iraq came tumbling back, the love, the betrayal, the pleasure and the pain. “Not in a million years,” I stated unequivocally.
The way he smiled with his gaze turned inward made me wonder. “What about you?”
“Double that time and then maybe we’ll be getting close,” he said with a wry grin.
“What about Jenna?”
The smile slipped from his face. “Our relationship is…complicated.”
He reached out and painted my side with the antibiotic cream with gentle, deft strokes. His eyelid twitched. He probably wanted to throttle me for bringing Jenna into the conversation.
There was something between them. A familiarity, an intimacy I couldn’t put my finger on. It was none of my business, so I folded my arms on the table and buried my head to hide my grimace of pain. The minor wound stung like I’d gone a couple bad rounds with a mad chef’s cheese grater.
“Any news on Dink?” I asked.
Hank