Courting Carolina (2 page)

Okay then, the dog was on her side. Hoping it realized he was also on the woman’s side, Alec drove his boot into the ribs of the man she’d bitten, sending him sprawling into a tree just as lightning struck so close, the percussion knocked Alec to his knees. And since he landed next to the woman, he caught her fist swinging toward him, grasped her waist with his other hand, and lifted her to her feet. “Run! Up!” he shouted as he gave her a push. “God dammit, go! The dog and I will catch up!”

She hesitated only a heartbeat, but it was long enough for him to see the uncertainty in her eyes as she glanced at the dog before she turned and ran uphill. The guy he’d kicked lunged
at her on the way by, and Alec leapt to his feet when he realized the bastard had a knife.

The woman scrambled sideways, crying out as she grabbed her leg and kept running. The man started after her again, but suddenly turned at Alec’s roar. Alec caught the wrist holding the knife and drove his boot into the man’s ribs again, twisting the guy’s arm until he felt it snap before plunging the blade into the bastard’s thigh. He then spun around when the dog gave a yelp to see it regain its footing and lunge again at the other man, this time going after the arm holding a goddamned gun.

Alec slammed into the guy, grabbing his wrist just as the weapon discharged. The dog tumbled back with a yelp, and Alec snapped the bastard’s arm over his knee, causing the gun to fall to the ground. He then shoved the screaming man headfirst into a tree, watching him crumple into a boneless heap before he turned and rushed to the dog that now had its teeth clamped down on the other man’s neck.

“Hey, come on!” he shouted over another sharp crack of thunder. He grabbed the dog by the jowls and pulled it away. “That’s enough,” he said, holding its head from behind so it couldn’t turn on
him
. “I know you’d like to see them both dead, but they’re not worth the hassle it’s going to cause us. Easy now, calm down,” he said loudly over the raging storm, guiding the dog uphill several steps, then giving it a nudge with his knee. “Go on. Go find your lady.”

The dog hesitated just as the woman had, its eyes narrowed against the rain and its lips rolled back, then suddenly took off in the direction she’d run and disappeared into the storm. Alec looked down at the man cradling his broken arm against the knife in his thigh, knelt to one knee, and drove his fist into his face. “Sleep tight, you son of a bitch,” he muttered, glancing over to make sure the other guy was still out before he also headed uphill at a run.

Only he hadn’t gone two hundred yards before he found the woman lying facedown on the soaked forest floor, the dog licking her cheek. Alec approached cautiously, crooning calm words loud enough to be heard over the pounding rain,
and slowly knelt on the other side of her. He laid a firm hand on the dog’s raised hackles when it stiffened on a warning snarl. “You’re going to have to trust me, ye big brute. Your lady’s hurt, and I need to see how badly.”

He felt the dog—which he suspected was a wolf or at least a hybrid—tremble with indecision, and Alec slowly reached out with his other hand and touched the woman’s hair plastered to her head. “Easy now,” he said when the snarling grew louder, moving his fingers to her neck to feel for a pulse. He breathed a sigh of relief to find it strong and steady, and carefully rolled her over. “There we go,” he said, releasing the dog when it lowered its head and started licking her face again. Alec slid an arm behind her shoulders and a hand under her knees and stood up.

He carried her uphill until he came to the trail and turned toward camp. “No, heel!” he snapped when the dog stopped and looked back down the mountain. “They’re not going anywhere.” The animal fell into step beside him, and Alec repositioned the woman’s head into the crook of his neck to keep the driving rain off her face and blew out a harsh breath to tamp down his own anger. Christ, it had been all he could do to keep from killing the bastards himself when he’d caught them brutalizing her.

What was she doing out here? Had the men brought her into the wilderness to rape and kill her and bury her body? The nearest old logging tote road was six miles to the south, and the resort he worked for was over ten miles away on top of the mountain. But she’d been running up from the fiord—just a mile below his camp—which meant they’d probably come by boat.

Alec scaled the lean-to steps, then dropped to one knee and carefully set the woman on the plank floor beside his sleeping bag, keeping her upper half cradled against his chest. He slid his hand from under her knees, then had to shove the dog away when it started licking her again. “Nay, ye let me check her out,” he murmured as he smoothed the hair off her face—only to suck in a breath.

She was beautiful but for the angry welt on her pale
cheek and the darkening bump on her forehead that ran into her hairline. Alec looked down at her endlessly long legs and saw the bastard’s knife had drawn blood. Realizing she was shivering violently, he started undressing her, but stilled in surprise again when he pulled her soaked blouse out of her pants and saw the dark bruise on her side. It ran over her ribs into her sheer blue bra, and he recognized that it was two or three days old. Filled with renewed rage, he carefully worked the blouse off her shoulders, only to find her arms also covered in small bruises, some of them appearing to be fingerprints.

It was obvious the woman had been struggling against them for several days, and he started rethinking his decision not to kill the bastards as he continued exposing the full extent of her nightmare. Feeling much like the storm raging directly overhead, Alec fought back the darkness that had been his life for eight years when he caught himself thinking there wasn’t any reason he couldn’t bury the
men
out here; quietly, efficiently, and with the calm detachment he’d once been known for.

The woman had been bound, as evidenced by the raw chafing on her wrists. He found more bruising on her legs when he carefully peeled down her slacks, and she was missing a shoe. Alec pushed the dog out of the way, lifted back the edge of his sleeping bag, and carefully set her inside it.

He pulled over his duffel bag and dug around until he found a T-shirt. “Sorry, sweetheart,” he murmured as he sat her up and unhooked her bra. “But I’m afraid getting you completely dry trumps modesty at the moment.” He worked the T-shirt over her head, carefully slid her arms into the sleeves, and smoothed it down over her utterly feminine, rose-tipped breasts all the way to her thighs. He pulled her heavy mess of long, wet hair out of the collar and laid her down, then grabbed a towel hanging on the back wall of the lean-to and wrapped it around her head. Setting his jaw determinedly, he slid his hands under the T-shirt and carefully worked off her matching blue panties, but stopped when he reached the knife gash. “Damn,” he growled, pulling off the panties and tossing
them beside the discarded bra. He tucked the sleeping bag over her upper half and opposite leg, then dug through his duffel for the medical kit.

The dog settled against the woman’s side and rested its chin on her shoulder, keeping a guarded eye on him. “You’re a good friend,” Alec said conversationally as he examined the wound on her thigh. “Ye can guard my back anytime you’re wanting.”

It wasn’t a deep gash that needed stitching, he was relieved to see as he carefully cleaned it with gauze then started placing butterfly bandages along the length of the cut. He dabbed it with salve and covered it with another piece of gauze, taping it into place before tucking the baby-soft leg into the sleeping bag.

“Had ye reached the end of your strength or is that bump on your head making you sleep?” he asked the unconscious woman, carefully lifting first one and then the other of her eyelids. Again relieved to see her pupils appeared normal and even, Alec sat down and took off his boots. He then stood up and started stripping off his own wet clothes as he studied what was definitely a full-bred wolf, its long guard hairs muted black over a soft pelt of gray, with piercing eyes of hazel-gold watching him from a broad wet face. “Aye, you’re a good partner in a fight,” he said as he shoved off his pants and boxers. “And I thank you for not going for
my
throat.”

The wolf’s brows were all that moved as its gaze followed Alec around the shelter as he dried off with another towel and slipped into clean clothes. He pulled the band off his wet hair, toweled it dry as well, then combed his fingers through the shoulder-length waves before tying it against the nape of his neck again. He crouched down and laid a hand on the woman’s forehead, gently smoothing her brow with his thumb. “She’s going to be okay,” he promised the wolf as he stood up and walked to the front rail of the three-sided lean-to that sat twenty yards up from the trail.

The storm was finally making its way north between the mountain they were on and the one at the end of the fiord,
leaving in its wake an almost obscene silence but for the water gently dripping off the leaves. Alec glanced in the direction of the men and blew out a sigh, then walked to the rear wall and pulled down a small backpack. He placed a coil of rope inside, along with the resort’s satellite phone and the medical kit, and slipped the pack over his shoulders. He sat down and dug two pairs of socks out of his duffel, putting on one pair followed by his boots, then rolled to his knees and peeled back the bottom of the sleeping bag.

He slid off the woman’s socks—one of them shredded from her running in only one shoe—and covered her feet with his hands to take away some of the chill. He then slipped his oversized socks on her and tucked the bag around her legs before moving to her head. Alec reached inside the sleeping bag, pressed his palm just below her collarbone, and felt her steady heartbeat and even breathing.

“Ye stay here and keep warming her up,” he told the wolf, tucking the bag tightly around the woman before standing up, “while I go tie our two sorry friends to a tree and call the sheriff to come get them. And I’ll call the resort to come get your lady.” He grinned down at the wolf. “I hope ye like riding in a helicopter.”

Alec started to leave, but stopped when the woman suddenly moaned, and he turned to see her lift a hand from the confines of the sleeping bag when the wolf licked her face. He crouched down beside her again, laying a steadying hand on her shoulder when she tried to sit up. “Easy, now. You’re safe. No one’s going to hurt you.”

She pressed back into the pillow, confusion clouding the deepest green eyes he’d ever seen. “Who are you? Where am I?” she asked, her gaze darting around the shelter. She started to pull her other hand free, only to gather the oversized T-shirt she was wearing into her fist, her gaze snapping to his. “You undressed me.”

He nodded. “I needed to get you dry to warm ye up,” he explained, stifling a grin when her other hand moved inside the bag and she gasped. “Don’t worry, I kept my eyes closed,” he said with a wink when her emerald gaze narrowed, her
indignation assuring him she was well on the road to recovery. “What’s your name, lass?”

She blinked up at him, saying nothing.

Alec shrugged and stood up. “If you’ll excuse me, then, I have some trash I need to deal with. I’ll call the sheriff and then the resort to have their helicopter come pick you up.” He nodded toward the wolf. “Does your tenacious protector have a name, at least? Because I’m thinking he deserves a few slobbering kisses in return for the way he ran to your rescue.”

She pulled the sleeping bag up to her chin, again saying nothing.

“Okay then, I guess I’ll be on my way.”

“Wait,” she said when he walked down the steps, making him turn back. She rose up on one elbow, causing the towel to fall off her hair. “I don’t…Could you please not…” She took a deep breath. “Please don’t call the authorities. I don’t want anyone to know I’m here.”

“You can’t be serious,” he said, scaling the steps to crouch down beside her again. “Your family must be going out of their minds looking for you.” He touched her bruised wrist. “You’ve obviously been missing for several days.”

“But nobody knows I’m missing,” she whispered, clutching his arm. “Please, could you let me stay here with you for a few days, just until I get my strength back and can decide what I need to do?”

Was she serious? “Hell, woman, for all you know I could be more dangerous than the bastards who had you. You don’t know a damn thing about me.”

“I know you didn’t hesitate to save me from two armed men.”

“The wolf took care of one of them,” he snapped, standing up. Why in hell was she asking him to stay? Was someone still after her? Or was that bump on her head making her delirious? “What’s your name?”

Her gaze lowered. “Jane.”

“Jane what?”

“Smith,” she said, her cheeks darkening with her obvious lie.

“Well, Jane Smith,” he muttered, walking off the platform again. He stopped and looked at her. “We’ll discuss your staying when I get back from dealing with the trash before it crawls away.”

“You could just kill them,” she said quietly, “and bury their bodies under a rock.”

Okay then,
he
must be delirious, because he’d swear she’d just asked him to commit murder. “No, I can’t,” he said just as quietly, “because then I would have to kill any witnesses.”

She didn’t even bat an eyelash. “I won’t watch.”

At a complete loss as to how to respond, Alec strode off—only to stop when she called to him again. “I have a couple of bags,” she said. “But I had to leave them when I realized the men were gaining on me. Could you get them for me, please?”

“Are they full of gold? Stolen art?
Drugs?
”

“No,” she said, startled. “They’re full of my clothes.” She reached behind her and gave the wolf a shove. “Kitty knows where they are.”

Alec closed his eyes. “Please tell me ye didn’t just call that noble beast Kitty.”

“And could you feed me when you get back from dealing with the…trash? I haven’t eaten for three days.”

She was a rather bossy victim. “I’ll see if
Kitty
and I can’t hunt down a squirrel or two while we’re at it,” he said, turning away to hide his grin and jogging down the trail before she thought of something else she’d like him to do—other than commit murder and find her clothes and rush back and feed her.