Stony Creek Cowboy [Stony Creek] (Siren Publishing Classic) (30 page)

Gwen started to cry and was gasping for breath under the weight of her terror as Len now directed the gun on her. Billie herself took a deep breath and forged ahead.

“Len, Len, wait, please. You don’t need to kill either of us. Let us show you how we can calm you, together. Maybe we can please you enough that you might want to, say, keep us.” She prayed his hormones would overcome his common sense. She closed her eyes in revulsion as she let go of Gwen and stood to face Len. With trembling fingers, she started to unbutton her blouse while desperately trying to look like she wanted him to be interested in her. Ugh, men really did only think carefully about one thing. Len looked like a bomb could go off on his head and it wouldn’t have distracted him from eating up the vision of what she looked like as she revealed her breasts encased within a lovely lacey bra. Yuck, the first thing she would do after Jackson saved her and had sex with her was to burn this bra and thong, pronto!

“Len, let’s go inside and have a drink. I think we know where this is going to go, no?” Billie tried really, really hard to give him a come-hither look but wasn’t sure it was believable as she wanted to take a stick and poke out his eyes so he couldn’t look at what she considered Jackson’s property anymore.

Len shifted his glazed glance from the whimpering, sniffing woman who lay cringing on the ground to the pretending-to-be-confidant woman with her breasts hanging out of her shirt. Lust overtaking any sense of self preservation, Len put the gun down. He rubbed his hands against his crotch and licked his lips in anticipation.

“Why the fuck not?” he murmured.

The men riding in the truck containing Jackson were solemnly silent. Jackson sat in the passenger seat with rage and tension radiating out of his body. His father leaned over from the backseat and gently rubbed his shoulder for a short moment before leaning back and sighing. Jackson felt none of the usual comfort that his dad normally provided him. He wanted to kill something, or rather, someone. How was he supposed to sit here calmly while Hunter drove at breakneck speed up the winding roads with the other truck of men in close pursuit?

“Hunter, stop driving like a fucking sissy and floor it, man!” he growled out in his intended direction.

Jackson knew that Hunter deliberately didn’t even respond or make eye contact with the fire-breathing dragon that he was acting like, barking orders from the seat next to him.

Hunter had known Jackson for years and knew that his calm, controlled veneer was being mangled at this moment. Jackson never had his feathers ruffled, not when his uncle passed away, although incredibly saddened, and definitely not with his divorce from the Gweninator.

Wow, he thought, Jackson never doubted that any man in Stony Creek would give his right nut to love that woman, but knew that Hunter must be aware of how in love he really was. She was smart, beautiful, articulate, funny, and just an amazing person. Jackson knew that Hunter was very upset by the current situation, as he cared very much for not only Billie but him as well.

“Jackson, I think it might be best if you hang back and let us take the lead. You aren’t in any shape to be objective here, brother,” Ben tried to reason from the backseat. Jackson was unmoved by Ben’s comment as he sat stonily still in his seat. Every man became tense as the trucks pulled up just short of the cabin. It had been forty-five minutes since Jackson had received the text from Billie alerting them as to her destination as well as Len being armed. Forty-five fucking minutes. No one knew what they would find and the air was so thick with the strain you could cut it with a knife. The men split up into groups of two and surrounded the small cabin. They were to wait for Sly’s signal that he needed back up. Jackson wanted to storm into the cabin and kill that asshole. He didn’t even care. The loss of Len’s life wouldn’t mean a thing to him since he had his love and obviously was terrorizing her in some fashion. He kept a clamp on his thoughts as he refused to imagine how the bastard was either hurting or frightening her. It wouldn’t help her any and wouldn’t serve him any good in not trying to stay calm. Both Sly and Nat had their guns drawn and were edging toward the only door. Sly indicated that he didn’t hear anything from inside, causing shivers of fear to envelope Jackson’s soul.

As if on cue, the front door slowly cracked open. Jackson and the others hefted their rifles onto their shoulders in sync. Jackson held his breath as his heart felt like it was going to pound out of his chest.
Please let her be all right, please god, please. I am going to marry her on the spot and never let her out of my sight again if only she could be all right.

A small, feminine hand softly pushed the door open from the inside. Jackson let his rifle fall from his shoulder as he took off in an all-out run as Billie came into view. She flashed Sly and Nat a brilliant smile as she took notice of her Neanderthal running like a wild maniac in her direction. Jackson grabbed her up and ran off with her to safety behind one of the trucks.

She hung on to him for dear life as she prayed that she hadn’t just survived one ordeal to start another as her love ran way too fast with her precariously hanging in his embrace so far from the ground. Billie just breathed in his sexy scent as he clutched her almost painfully tight to his chest.

Jackson couldn’t even formulate words for a moment. It was Bill, who came to supervise the emotional release that his son was sure to have at any moment, who was the voice of reason.

“Honey, are we sure glad to see you. You have blood on you, sweetheart. Can you show me where you are hurt?”

Billie looked over in confusion. She wasn’t really hurt. Before she could get any words out, Jackson gently put her down and began running his hands all over her, right in front of his father.

“Jackson, I am not hurt, baby.” No verbal response.

She tried to take his hands off her rear. “Jackson, listen to me. I am not really injured honey, just a scratch, I promise.” The look on his face told her that he was close to losing control. She noted that he continued to not acknowledge any of her comments. She frowned as Bill began to laugh as Jackson pulled the front of her shirt out to look down at her chest to assure himself that the blood was not coming from her gorgeous, plump breasts. She knew that Jackson would view that as a tragedy if they were damaged. Bill wisely and quickly had turned his back as Jackson had started to pull up her skirt hem to see if there were any, ah, feminine injuries.

“Jackson!” she very firmly yelled out. That got his attention.

“If you ever get in a vehicle with another man other than me, I swear that I am going to spank that sweet ass of yours for a week straight and you will never sit down again in your life! I have never been so scared in my life, baby!”

Billie nodded only in the effort to help him calm down.

“Where is all this blood coming from, baby?” he gently managed to growl out. He pulled her into his arms and began to softly rub his hands from her head down to her ass and back up again. Over and over she watched as Jackson tried to reassure himself that she was okay. Bill moved closer and put his hands on both their backs in a protective, fatherly way as he let out a sigh.

“It’s mostly not my blood. It’s Gwen’s. She is okay, though.” She figured that he would find the place that Len’s knife had cut her anyway, so she didn’t try to hide it from him. That was all she could manage as the intensity of the situation began to crash around her. Suddenly, Billie realized that she was safe and sagged against Jackson’s strong, comfortingly hard body.

Jackson tried to suck her in as he bent over, pulling her now-sobbing body as tightly as possible against his. He saw his father reached over and took the gun he had just noticed from her shaking hand.

Sly and Nat had just walked back out of the cabin, guns holstered. “All clear. They are dead,” he yelled out.

The men ran over to Billie and Jackson to see for themselves that she was okay. She barely felt that loving pats that the men gave her and Jackson. Bill cleared his throat out loud and decided to handle things from here on out to calm Billie down.

“Um, honey. You want to tell us how you managed to get his gun? I am just gonna die from waiting to hear this one!”

A loud rumble of male laughter encircled Billie and Jackson. Billie looked up at Bill and Sly with watery eyes. She knew she shouldn’t care at the moment but she had to rub her eyes with a non-bloody section of her shirt. She must have had raccoon eyes with the mascara that had to be running down her face.

“I have never been so scared, but somehow I got control of myself,” she began.

“Go on, baby,” Jackson said, starting to rejoin the world of the living as she explained what had happened.

She looked up into his gorgeous face, one that she hadn’t been totally sure that she would ever see again. “I tried to convince Len to let me go but that plan wasn’t going very successfully so I moved on to plan B.”

Jackson let himself move away from her a few inches so he could look directly into her eyes. He had a sneaking suspicion that she did something he was not going to love at first.

“Plan B was to buy myself more time by convincing Len that I might be willing to, you know, instead of him being, well, forcing himself on me.” The men around began throwing around curses and expressing their anger. Only Sly and Bill remained calm. Sly asked her politely, if she could, to please continue.

“Well, I unbuttoned my blouse…and I convinced him to let us all have a drink together.” Jackson took off verbally with a string of vocabulary that would have had his mother slapping him for a year, but Billie figured that he was allowed to say whatever he wanted to. She had been terrified and revolted at the same time while she had to bare some of her intimate self to that slimeball.

“Go ahead, honey, tell me the rest,” Sly encouraged her. Sly himself was a big, muscular man, intimidating like Hunter because he was quiet more often than not. He normally had a great sense of humor and was a gentle man. It showed in how he encouraged her to proceed.

“I just tried to do what I thought Jackson would want me to do. Think and talk. So that is what I did. It saved my life.”

Jackson’s eyes softened and didn’t even bother to hide the love and warmth that was emanating from them as he listened patiently.

“While Gwen and Len went out to argue outside for a moment, I just…”

“You just what, baby?” Jackson asked, taking her chin in his hand.

When he got that look, Billie went a little weak and felt compelled to do whatever this vital man wanted. “I took the sleeping pills that I still had in my purse from when Matthew died. I haven’t needed to take them since I moved out here and met you, honey. So I just quickly crushed them up and put them in their beers. Apparently, revenge against you made them very thirsty. They aren’t dead, just sound asleep.”

The only sound was the wind dancing through the trees. All the men just looked at her in shocked disbelief. Nat went and confirmed that they were indeed breathing. He came back out grinning from ear to ear letting everyone know that he had slapped cuffs on the sleeping beauties.

Sly shook out of the shocked stupor first and yelled over to Jackson, “Hell, Jackson, if you act like an idiot much longer and don’t marry this woman the first chance you get, well, then I am going to!”

Jackson held Billie close to him as though his life depended on it. The gaze in his eyes told her that his terror and wrath had been exchanged for undisguised love and adoration. It was so naked for everyone to see, it made her heart flutter.

“There will be zero chance of that happening, Sly. She is mine.”

Jackson lay with his hands behind his head in the tangled disarray of Billie’s bedsheets. After what was an endless marathon of crazy loving throughout the night and a good portion of the morning, he amazingly didn’t even feel tired, just really, really relaxed. He couldn’t exactly say the same for his poor bedmate. She lay curled into his side, breathing deeply against his chest where her head lay. Mine, he thought. He had almost lost the greatest thing to ever happen to him in his life. There was no way that was ever going to happen to him again. She was going to have to give up medicine and ride double with him on Lachlan every day to tend the ranch. She was never going to be more than a foot from his body ever again! He knew that she might protest a bit at his happy little utopia-like dream but he found it amusing and comforting. He inwardly shuddered at how close the psycho twins had come to taking away this remarkably intelligent, sexy, and gorgeous woman from him. He lowered his arms to wrap around her in comfort, probably more so for him than for her.

Jackson allowed himself to indulge in what he referred to as his own pity party for a moment as he reflected on that.

Suddenly he heard something that actually concerned him, ripping him from his negative recollections. His crazy nemesis and waste-of-two-years-of-his-life ex-wife were in jail, but he tensed up as he heard noises that made him more wary than a crazed man armed with a gun.

He knew he was hearing the sounds of his mother, aunt, and who knows what other women who were downstairs making enough food and noise to wake the dead. How the hell had they gotten in here? He would stand down a million Len Drexels any day, but he didn’t have the nerve to go downstairs and face all those cackling women. He was pretty sure that they knew why he and Billie were still in bed at eleven a.m. and that they knew that it had nothing to do with her ordeal, directly. He had to laugh to himself.