No. He couldn’t go there.
She screamed. The sound burst out of her. It was one word, his name. “Dare!” Her voice was nothing more than a croak; she was cold and hoarse and exhausted. But it was loud enough that he reined in the horse, the flashlight beam sweeping around, and she heard his gravelly voice call back.
“Angie? Where the fuck are you?”
Yeah, it was definitely him. If she’d been the crying type, she’d have burst into tears.
He kneed the horse forward, straight toward her. She raised a shaky arm in the air, and almost fell on her face in the mud. Oh my God, she was so happy and relieved to see him she might cry anyway. She couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe he was actually there, couldn’t believe she was actually happy—no, make that ecstatic—to see Dare Callahan. Wasn’t that a kick in the pants?
His voice called out as he came closer. “Where are you? Talk to me, goddamnit. Say something.”
“Here,” she said, louder than before, trying to grab a tree branch and pull herself up, and failing miserably. She sat on her ass in the mud, instead, with rain running down her cheeks, and tried to smile. “I’m here.”
Chapter Thirteen
Dare’s gut was tight as he swept the flashlight beam back and forth, looking for movement that would pinpoint Angie’s location for him, but visibility was low and the landscape around him was in constant motion anyway, with the wind whipping everything back and forth; one more motion wouldn’t necessarily stand out. Angie’s voice had been weak, so weak he couldn’t locate her by sound alone; the rain almost drowned her out entirely. A roll of thunder said another line of storms was approaching; he needed to find her, and fast, so they could get under some kind of shelter.
He’d been pushing his luck with the lightning from the moment he’d left the camp; only a damn fool went horseback riding during a storm, so he guessed this made him a damn fool. Hell, he knew it did. Anyone with a lick of sense would have taken shelter, but instead he’d pushed on, fighting his horse the whole way. He figured that meant the horse had more sense than he did; instead of getting used to the weather and settling down the young buckskin had gotten more fractious by the minute. Controlling the horse was taking almost all of his attention, which meant he couldn’t concentrate on his search. Once more he swept the flashlight from side to side, trying to blink the stinging rain from his eyes and cursing every drop that fell. Then a pale gleam close to the ground caught his eye, and he snapped the light downward. There was something small and muddy, an animal of some kind—Then he took a closer look, and a kind of furious disbelief roared through him.
No, not an animal: Angie. She was just sitting there sort of hunched over, a strange, twisted expression on her face as if she were trying to smile, for fuck’s sake. Something was seriously wrong, because no way in hell would she ever smile at him under normal circumstances.
He reined in hard, an action the buckskin took exception to, but the damn horse had taken exception to everything else from the moment Dare had ridden him out into the storm, so why stop now? Adrenaline flooded through him, throwing his body into automatic combat mode as he pulled his rifle from the scabbard and swung down from the saddle. The horse was too skittish to take him close to Angie, so Dare looped the reins over a low-hanging tree branch and gave the big animal a quick pat on the neck to reassure him, then reached Angie with four long strides.
“Where are you hurt? What the hell happened?” he snapped at her, going down on one knee beside her. He shone the flashlight over her, starting at her head and working down. He didn’t see any blood, but she was so covered with mud that he wouldn’t be able to spot anything short of arterial spurting. He noted the bulging saddlebags beside her, and she was clutching a rifle so caked with mud it looked more like a club than a firearm. If she’d needed to shoot, she’d have been shit out of luck.
She was shaking from head to foot, unceasing quakes that were hard enough to rattle her bones, but she grabbed the flashlight and switched it off. “We have to move.” Her voice was thin and hoarse, but forceful for all that. “The light … our position.”
That one word, position, was enough to flip a switch in him, because it could only mean trouble. His heart began pumping hard, but his brain was icy cold and clear as he took an immediate three-sixty threat assessment, looking for whatever had Angie Powell crawling through the mud over a mile from her camp.
He didn’t see anything except trees and rocks and mud, lashed by wind and rain, but his senses stayed on high alert. Just because he couldn’t see trouble coming didn’t mean it wasn’t there. His nerves and instincts had been forged in combat; a lifetime away from war wouldn’t be enough to counteract those instincts. Until the day he died, a part of him would always be ready to react to a split second of warning, and that part immediately understood what she was saying. Someone else, possibly the same someone who had fired those shots tonight, was out there hunting her. He hoped like hell Angie was the one who’d done the shooting, but he figured she’d have hit whatever she was aiming at, so it seemed more likely she’d been the target rather than the shooter.
His spidey sense didn’t pick up that crawly sensation of being watched, though, and his memory of the land told him that they were in such rugged folds of the mountains that, combined with the low visibility, someone would have to be close by to have any chance of seeing the light. Tracking someone in this weather would be impossible and she wasn’t on the trail anyway, which wasn’t even a real trail, just the path of least resistance. In the deluge of rain he’d gone off it himself, which was why he’d doubled back. Thank God he had.