“She’s smart, too. She came prepared this trip. I could smell gunpowder behind the seats as well as the scent of steel.”
Reese didn’t like to think of his mate carrying a rifle. If she tried to shoot one of the Holms boys again, they might have no choice but to fight back. “We have to keep her from doing anything that’ll get her into trouble.”
“We warned Daniel and Anderson that she was back in town. They’re laying low and having Shannon do the same. The only contact Shannon’s had is a couple of texts since Charlie left Boston. She thinks her sister may be trying a sneak attack to try to force Shannon to go home.”
Blane tracked his hand through his hair. Reese recognized his brother’s telltale signal that he was trying to come up with a solution and getting nowhere fast.
He decided to let him off the hook—for now. “Fine. I’ll back off, but not for long. If I get wind that she’s planning on hightailing it out of here, I’m grabbing her and hauling her back to the ranch.”
Blane grinned, and Reese could sense his relief. “Good. Just hang in there, bro, and keep out of sight. Our mate’s come back. The rest of it will go as planned.”
Reese swallowed the retort that sprang to his lips. No need to make Blane upset. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to keep an eye on Charlie Newman.
Chapter Two
Charlie kicked the wheel of the pickup and let fly with several curse words that would’ve made her mother drop dead in a faint. She’d gotten about halfway back to the rental home when smoke came pouring out from under the hood. The truck had sputtered then died as soon as she’d managed to pull it onto the side of the road.
“Damn and double damn!”
She took off the baseball cap and flung it into the pickup. So far she’d managed to get the hood up, but that was as far as her knowledge of cars went. Growing up with a chauffeur as well as a personal mechanic meant she’d never given a thought to what went on under the hood.
She stared at the jumbled mess of wires and machinery. “What the hell am I supposed to do now?”
Glancing both ways down the road, she knew she wouldn’t get any help from passing motorists. She rarely saw another vehicle when she drove down the one-lane road and had liked the remoteness of the house. Now she wished she’d stayed somewhere closer to Shatland.
She had no other choice. She was going to have to walk home. Grabbing her cap, she pulled it down over her face and glanced at her tiny arsenal in the space behind the seat. Should she take the rifle or, if anyone did happen by, would they think it strange to see an armed woman hiking down the road? But she didn’t like the idea of leaving the gun with the pickup either.
Then there was the matter of the stakes she’d stuffed under the seat. She glanced at the sun high in the sky and tried to calculate the time it would take for her to get home. If she made it back to the rental house before dark, she wouldn’t need to take the stakes. It was better to leave them where they were.
The last option was to call Shannon for help. She had no doubt her sister would pick her up. But would Shannon come alone even if she asked her to? Or would she have the two werewolf men along for the ride?
In the end, she stuffed her phone into her back pocket, checked the rifle to see if it was loaded, then held it in the crook of her right arm. She grabbed the water bottle that was only half-full, took one last look back the way she’d come, and started walking.
Texas could get hot year round. She’d known that from her research. Yet living with air conditioning and getting out for only brief periods of time hadn’t let her experience just how scorching the sun could be. Within a few minutes, sweat trickled down her spine and dotted her forehead. But she kept walking.
She trudged on, tormented on one side from the relentless sun and on the other from the heat filtering up from the black pavement. Her feet ached and her arm hurt from carrying the gun. Passing by cattle, horses, and crops she didn’t know the name of, she trudged on, muttering to herself to sue the rental company for renting her a broken-down wreck of a pickup.
She was squinting at a cow in the pasture next to the road and not paying attention to where she was going when she stumbled into a small pothole and fell. She landed flat on her face and cussed her head off.
“Shit! I swear, if I ever get out of this hellhole of a state, I’m going back to Boston and staying in civilization forever. No more cowboys, no more pickups, and no more walking.”
She pushed up then checked her hands and arms for scrapes. Although her hands had taken the brunt of the fall, they weren’t too bad. Still, she wouldn’t have sneered at a little antiseptic and water, but at least she’d had the gun’s safety on. Taking off her cap, she wiped the sweat from her forehead and saw it.