Touching it again had been like reaching for a ghost and discovering that what he’d thought was long dead had been given new life. Except Shaw didn’t remember him gifting her with it on her sixteenth birthday, or that it had once belonged to his mother. She didn’t remember anything about him, particularly not the violent, deadly way their relationship had ended. Basically, his babysitting assignment had just become a goatfuck. One he couldn’t walk away from no matter how loudly his instincts were clamoring for him to do so. Not yet.
The job of everyone from the Marshals Service to the Bureau would be made significantly easier if Shaw were taken into custody instead of merely stranded on a mountain in the middle of nowhere. The weak, circumstantial evidence that an unsub might possibly have her in his sights actually gave Cole hope. It was a stroke in favor of her innocence. But some of the concerned parties weren’t going to be happy that there might be more to Shaw’s situation than met the eye.
He couldn’t allow them to railroad her a step closer to prosecution. Not until he’d done everything he could to prove her innocence.
He turned to head downstairs.
A crash shattered the night, followed by a muffled cry that sent him racing down the steps, pulling his Glock from the shoulder holster he’d concealed beneath his T-shirt. He halted outside the kitchen’s closed door, just long enough to register the sound of a sharp inhale of pain on the other side.
Damn it.
He blew through the door in a forward lunge that became a tucked roll, rotating him up onto the balls of his feet. He stilled, resting in a perfectly balanced crouch. He leveled his weapon on the only moving target in the room.
Then pulled up. It was Shaw, trembling against the counter by the sink, holding her hand before her in an awkward way—a hand that was bleeding all over the place.
Alarm stabbed through him. His reflex was to go to her, assess her injury, soothe her. But the cold-as-ice agent within him scanned the scene first, left then right, his back pressed to the refrigerator to give him an optimum angle to take out anything stupid enough to challenge him. When he was satisfied there was no one else, he lowered the Glock and refocused on Shaw.
Blood had soaked through a kitchen towel she’d wrapped around her left hand. She was shaking so hard her teeth were chattering.
“You…” Her eyes were wide and as wild as an owl’s, her stare fixated on the weapon in his hand. “What are you doing with a gun?”
“What am I doing?” It grated when it shouldn’t matter, her mind’s insistence that she should fear him first and ask questions later. He returned his weapon to the holster that enabled him to carry his gun low and at his side, hidden beneath his T-shirt. He stepped toward her, ignoring how she shrank back as far as she could against the counter. He nodded toward her injury. “You’re bleeding like a stuck pig. I heard your cry of pain all the way upstairs. What the hell are you doing?”
She glanced down at her hand.
“Oh.” She gave him a sheepish smile. “Sorry.”
Then she promptly fainted into his outstretched arms.
Chapter Six
“Shaw…Shaw?” Calloused fingers tapped at her cheeks. “Darlin’, can you hear me? What the hell happened? Wake up and talk to me.”
There was another touch at Shaw’s wrist, feeling her pulse. Then pressure on her injured thumb that sent pain shooting up her arm, ripping her eyes open.
“Stop.” She gasped and tried to pull away. “Oh, God. Did I faint? Again? Give me a break!”
Cole had knelt beside where she’d slid to the floor in front of the sink. Her legs fought awkwardly, unsuccessfully, for the traction to stand and move away from him. She slipped on the silverware she’d spilled from the drawer after she’d searched for a teaspoon and somehow cut herself. Everything scattered in even more directions, until she relented and dropped back onto the floor.
Cole applied more pressure to the towel she’d wrapped around her hand.
“Ow!” she cried. “Don’t do that.”
“You’ve cut yourself.”
“No kidding.”
Weak. She’d felt weaker by the day since coming to this place. And she hated it. Especially each time she let herself think about giving up, the way she had earlier tonight when she’d run. She was supposed to be getting stronger, not squandering her chance to heal.
And then there was the matter of how all this nonsense must be making her look to her drop-dead-gorgeous neighbor.
“Just leave me alone,” she said, mortified by the fact that he’d thought it necessary to come to her rescue twice in as many hours. “Please. I’m going to be fine.”