She pulled Hannah’s arms from around her neck, set the girl on a safe spot well back from the edge and yelled, “Don’t move!” Then she scrambled back to the place where the stairs had been, lay flat on her belly and poked her head over the precipice.
She saw a hand. A forearm. The top of a man’s head. Her rescuer was clinging to the edge of the building as the herd passed below in a deadly thunder of hooves and horns.
“Hang on!” Maya lunged forward and grabbed his arms, his shirt, anything she could get hold of to help him up and over.
His muscles were hard beneath her hands, his body powerful as he dragged himself over the edge and flopped down beside her, breathing heavily, one forearm thrown across his eyes.
“You okay?” he asked, voice ragged.
She took stock. Her body sang with the ache of bruises but not breaks, and when she glanced at Hannah, she saw that the girl was crying softly but appeared otherwise unhurt.
As the rumble of the stampede faded and human shouts and whistles took over, Maya cleared her throat of the hot, choking dust and the knowledge that without his help, she would have died. She swallowed hard and said, “We’re okay. I can’t thank you enough…” She trailed off, wanting a name for the stranger.
“Don’t thank me. Let’s just say this makes us even, okay?” He dragged his arm off his face, sat up and turned toward her.
Without the sunglasses, his eyes were two different shades of hazel, one so light as to border on amber, the other darkening to green, giving his face a skewness that should have been lopsided but instead was arresting. Interesting.
Familiar.
“Thorne!” she gasped, voice sharp with shock and memory.
For an instant, she was back in the High Top Bluff Police Academy. She’d seen him across the cafeteria, where he’d stood out from the others because he’d kept his long, sandy hair tied back in a ponytail, and wore a burnished gold, almost auburn five o’clock shadow at ten in the morning. He’d carried a casual air that was part poet, part surfer dude, and was the center of a growing throng. Maya later learned that people flocked to him, wanting to be included in the friendly, whiskey-laced charm that hid deeper things.
Darker things.
A murmur had run through the room, quick snatches of whispered rumor. He was out in the field…undercover with Mason Falk’s mountain men…captured…tortured…the drugs made him a little nuts…he’s teaching psych while he heals…
Uncomfortable with the sudden buzz, with the intimacy of knowing things about a complete stranger, Maya had gathered her things to leave, but when she passed the growing group, she’d glanced over at the man and found him watching her, found him nearer than she’d expected.
She had paused a moment, struck by the strangeness of his eyes, by the pull of him, by the click of recognition. No, she had never met him before, but she’d immediately recognized something about him. Something inside him, something deeper than the faint tang of alcohol that laced the air between them, though that, too, was a connection.
With the bruises of her marriage still fresh on her soul, Maya had pushed past the man, and had hidden in the back of his criminal psych class. He’d taught with an uncomfortable sort of detachment, as though he didn’t want to be there, couldn’t be anywhere else. More whispers had buzzed about him, rumors that he’d once identified a murderer by touching the victim’s hand, that he had visions.
That he drank to keep the visions away.
Maya had stayed away from him, wary of the reputation and the alcohol, but every now and then, when they had come face to face in the halls, or on the jog paths, or in the cafeteria, he would look at her, and those strange, knowing eyes would linger in her mind for days.
That had been the only contact between them, the only connection until that one stupid, stupid night, when Maya had given in to the temptation.
As much as she’d told herself, then and now, that it was her fault more than his, that mistakes happened, that sometimes even the strongest person stumbled off the path, she’d lost something that night, something more than the six charms she’d plucked off her necklace the next morning, and flushed down the toilet.
She’d lost a piece of herself.
She felt the same strength drain from her as quickly as the blood drained from her face when she saw those eyes, when his features realigned themselves into those of the man she had known. His beard was gone and his hair cut short, and he was leaner now, fitter.
But he was still Thorne.
She thought she caught a whiff of alcohol on the air between them, though that could have been a scent memory, kicked up by the shock of seeing him again, the shock of the bison stampede that had nearly killed her.
His face creased into a wry smile. “We don’t need to pretend this is a happy reunion. We don’t need to rehash why you took off before I even woke up that morning, and why you transferred all the way out of the academy to avoid me afterward. Frankly, I don’t think I care anymore. Just suffice it to say I owed you a good deed. Now we’re even. Okay?”
He rose gracefully to his feet and extended a hand to her, though she wasn’t sure whether he intended the gesture as a peace offering or a challenge.
Hell, she wasn’t even sure which was appropriate.
What would he do if she admitted she didn’t remember anything about that night? That everything after finding the dead battery on her car was a blur, culminating in her waking up the next morning in his bed, with his arm thrown across her waist and his breath in her ear?
“Fine.” She stood on her own, strangely reluctant to touch him when her fingers still buzzed with the feel of his body as she’d helped pull him to safety. “We’re even.”
But her stomach twisted at the look in his eyes, which implied an uncomfortable intimacy. For years she’d tried to block the memory of her single ignominious one-night stand, tried to tell herself that nothing had happened, that he’d been gentleman enough not to take advantage. His expression now told her she’d been lying to herself about him, about them.
They’d gotten drunk, they’d had sex, and then she’d run away.
Emotions she’d fought off five years earlier rose up to swamp her, to slap at her with feelings of failure, of humiliation, of disappointment—not with him, but with herself.
She drew breath to say something breezy, something that belied the turmoil within, but before she could speak, a small voice said, “I want my mommy.”
Startled back to the moment, to the case, Maya looked over at Hannah, who sat nearby with tears drying on her face.
Thorne crouched down near the girl. “And who is this?”
“She’s Hannah,” Maya answered. She bent down, picked up the girl—thankful that she was small for her age—and balanced the child on her hip, needing the contact perhaps more than Hannah did. “And she’ll need to spend some time with Alissa.”
Thorne’s strange eyes sharpened. “Why?”
Maya took a breath and tried to figure out how to summarize the situation without upsetting the traumatized girl further. “Let’s just say she wasn’t in the petting zoo by accident. She had help getting there, and my guess is that she was intended to draw more cops into the park before the stampede.” She paused and fussed with Hannah’s shirt so she wouldn’t have to look at Thorne. “I assume you’re on loan for the Master—” She broke off as the obvious conclusion clicked in her brain.
Oh, hell.
She spun and glared at him, as anger, frustration and a strange sort of betrayal flooded her system. “Tell me you’re not my replacement.”
BUT HE DIDN’T TELL HER that. He couldn’t. Instead, Thorne