Woman On the Run (8 page)

Julia opened the door and her worst nightmare came out of the swirling darkness.

A pistol. Aimed straight at her head.

Chapter Three

Julia screamed and her heart tried to pound its way out of her chest. She scrabbled wildly for something to use as a weapon, though she knew it was too late. Crazily, she tried to brace herself for the shot.

“Trick or treat.” The childish treble came from somewhere around her knees and she froze. A witch, a blond Harry Potter with fake round plastic glasses and a cowboy stared at her, frightened by her screams. The little cowboy dropped his plastic gun and the witch started crying.

Not killers. School kids wanting a treat.

The front door closed. Dimly, as if coming from a hundred miles away, Julia heard a deep male voice and the excited squeals of children from the porch. Then, a moment later, the front door opened again, letting in an arctic swirl of wind.

She stumbled into the little living room, her fingers clenching hard on the back of the garish flower-covered sofa. She ignored the heavy pounding in her chest and tried to control the trembling in her arms. For a moment, colored lights danced before her eyes and the edges of vision started to fade like a yellowing photograph. A hot tear dropped onto her white knuckles.

Terror, loneliness, despair all jostled sharply, painfully inside Julia’s chest, as if there were knives in there fighting their way out, slicing her heart into shreds. She drew in a long sobbing breath as another tear squeezed out from behind her closed lids. Rough tremors shook her. In the instant before her knees gave way, she felt herself half-lifted and turned against a broad expanse of chest.

To Julia’s intense horror, short, stuttering sobs racked through her. She swayed and was held tightly. Strong arms held her close and she let herself go limp.

It felt like a lifetime since she had been held and comforted by another human being. Since her parents’ deaths, in fact. And now Julia found herself weeping out her fear and rage and loneliness in great, uncontrollable gasping sobs she couldn’t have repressed had her life depended on it. She wept and wept and wept, knowing she was going to be flooded with remorse. Later. But not now. Now she needed the release like she needed air.

Finally the giant gulping sobs subsided into hiccups and she leaned against Cooper’s chest, drained and spent. His sweater was wet from the water leaking from her rusty pipes and her eyes.

She breathed deeply, aware suddenly of whose chest she was leaning against, whose embrace she was in. One large hand held the back of her head, covering it. A hard arm was pressed against her waist, holding her tightly to him.

It was an erection. A very big one and, amazingly, it was still growing, pulsing and lengthening against her stomach. She could feel the heat of his penis through his jeans and her dress and wondered if he could feel the sudden flush of heat blooming inside her.

Julia instantly went from cold despair to a hot burst of lust. She morphed in a flash from distressed woman comforted by perfect stranger, to woman tightly held in the arms of an aroused man. It was enough to give a woman the bends.

She should step back. This was completely inappropriate. She knew nothing about this man except that he wasn’t a talker and he knew how to fix plumbing.

Well, that was a lie.

She knew how big his penis was.

Enormous.

Julia stepped back immediately and tottered to her ugly couch. She collapsed on it, closing her eyes.

I can’t deal with this
, she thought. Any of it.

Being the object of a woman-hunt, exiled to Simpson, being terrorized by school kids trick-or-treating, lusting after an aroused non-talker with superb thighs. It was all too much.

The tears had dried up, but the hot hard tangle of pain in her chest still hurt.

She sensed Cooper’s presence by her side.

“Here.” He curled Julia’s hand around a glass half full of liquid. Gratefully, she gulped it down then yelped as it burned its way to her stomach.

“What was that?” she gasped, looking up at him. Her eyes filled again with tears, but a better variety of tears.

“Whisky,” Cooper said and took the glass from her numb hand. All of her was numb, except the parts that were hot.

“Where did you get whisky?” Julia gave one last cough then put a hand to her stomach, where a ball of warmth had settled. “I don’t have any.”

“I do.”

“In your
toolbox
?” Julia blinked at Cooper in amazement.

“Nope.” Cooper’s mouth twitched, which she supposed was cowboy body language for amusement. “In the pickup. For emergencies.”

For a second, Julia wanted to ask what kind of emergency, but one look at that angular, shuttered face had her biting her tongue.

Well, of course. In the movies, cowboys were always getting shot and pouring whisky over the wound. Just before digging the bullet out with a hunting knife by the light of the campfire.

The whisky was going to her head. Or the adrenaline deserted her body in a rush. Whatever the cause, Julia was completely drained. Cooper sat down on the matching armchair next to the couch, dangled large hands over his knees and watched her steadily.

Whoever had decorated her house had a taste in upholstery matching the taste in plumbing—terrible. The armchairs were covered with huge cabbage roses in unlikely shades of clashing pinks and reds. When Cooper sat down, with his black shirt and black hair, he seemed to absorb all the light like an eclipse of the sun. There was a man-shaped black hole in her armchair surrounded by a nimbus of fiery colors.

Silence fell over the room, broken only by the needle-sharp arrows of sleet hitting the windowpane. Julia hated silences and usually filled them with chatter. There was always something you could talk about to another human being. She’d often been in places where politics and religion were conversational no-nos, but the weather was usually good neutral ground.

Except in Saudi Arabia—where politics and religion had definitely been out—and where there had been no weather to speak of. There, she usually fell back on American films. Everybody in Saudi Arabia, from the lowliest camel driver on up, had a DVD player and was absolutely hooked on Hollywood’s finest.

But now she had no idea how to talk to Sam Cooper. She had attacked him, been rescued from freezing to death by him, had sobbed all over him, had given him an erection, in return had felt incredibly intense stabs of lust for him and she still didn’t have the faintest idea what to say to him.

She didn’t have the energy to lie and the truth was too dangerous. There was a reason she was in such turmoil, jumping at shadows. A reason why her nerves were on a hair-trigger. A reason why she was so insane as to be able to fall in lust with a man she didn’t know. But she couldn’t say it. Davis had been quite clear on that point. Her life depended on no one knowing she was in the Witness Security Program.

Silence. Cooper watched her out of expressionless dark eyes. She had no idea at all what he was thinking. It couldn’t be good, though.

“I can’t talk about it,” she blurted out when the silence began to be embarrassing. She lifted her chin.

Cooper nodded his head once, gravely, as if that were the most reasonable statement he’d ever heard and Julia slumped in relief.

She jumped when something cold and wet poked at her hand.

“Oh!” Julia bent over the arm of the chair and looked down into soulful brown eyes. It was crazy, probably induced by stress and alcohol, but she had the feeling that the dog understood everything she was going through. He gazed at her adoringly, then licked her hand. There wasn’t a human being on earth who would have licked her hand in gratitude for leftover tuna salad and an old blanket.

“Do you repair animals as well as plumbing, Mr….ahm…Cooper?”

“Just Cooper’ll do, ma’am.”

He rose easily from the armchair, which was no mean feat. Julia knew the springs on that armchair were broken. She had struggled more than once to get out of it. Had she been a little less befuddled, she would have warned Cooper that he was sitting in a man-eating armchair. But Cooper rose out of it just as smoothly as if the chair had lifted itself up to tip him out, which meant that he had fantastic abdominals to go with the amazing thigh muscles. Actually, Julia thought abstractedly, as Cooper bent over the dog, he had fantastic everything.

He moved with an incredibly lithe, powerful grace. Long lean hard muscles showed through the black sweater. His hands moving gently over the dog were large, long-fingered, graceful. When he hunkered down to murmur softly to the dog, Julia was drawn again to those thighs. How did anyone develop thigh muscles like that? Well, he bred horses for a living, so he probably rode a lot.

Julia had a sudden searing vision of Cooper riding
her
, those incredible thighs flexing strongly as he…

Cooper looked up at her and Julia blushed furiously, the blood pumping hard and hot from her chest up into her face. Oh,
God
, she hoped he wasn’t a mind reader.

His big hand was fondling the top of the stray dog’s head and she grabbed the chance to focus on something other than this man’s thighs. And worse…what was between them.

“The dog’s not really mine, you know. I’ve seen him around for days. He’s been scrounging food from the garbage bin for a few days and I’ve been shooing him off, but this evening when I came home after…” …
after braining you with a pumpkin
…

Julia blinked and felt the blood pour back up into her face.

Cooper gave no notice. Those large, gorgeous male hands were running over the dog’s body and stopped at the right foreleg.

“I noticed that too. Is it broken?” Julia peered over the couch’s arm.

“Nope.”

“What then?”

“Sprained. And someone’s been mistreating him badly.” Cooper made some reassuring sounds in a deep low voice to the dog that even had Julia lulled, then looked up again. “He have a name?”

“No. I told you. He just showed up this evening.”

“Needs a name.” Cooper gently ruffled the matted fur between the dog’s ears.

“Ahm…” The mangy, yellow-haired dog was as far away from her sleek Siamese, Federico Fellini, as it was possible to be. Still…the mutt had four legs and a head, just like Federico. Close enough. “Fred. I want to call him Fred.”

“Fred it is. Hey, Fred.” Cooper let the dog sniff his fingers once again. “He’ll be all right in a few days if he keeps his weight off that paw. Couple of good meals and a warm place to sleep is all he needs.” Cooper picked out a burr then stood up suddenly. Julia craned her neck to look up at him.

“Are you going?” She had a sudden, unexplained panicky feeling.

“No.” He looked down at her a moment, expressionless, and she found herself wishing she could read what he was thinking, though she probably wouldn’t like it. His thoughts probably ran along the lines of how best to exit gracefully from a madwoman’s house.

He opened the door and disappeared. It was night now, and Julia caught a glimpse of darkness and windborne needles of sleet slanting across the light thrown by the streetlamp. Before she had time to feel the cold from the door he was back, holding a first aid kit.

“Does that come from the magic pickup, too?”

Again, she had a fleeting impression of a smile. “Yup.”

Cooper knelt down to Fred and started murmuring again, soothing, senseless noises. Julia was astonished to see that the dog made no protest, even when Cooper examined the forepaw carefully and wrapped an elastic bandage around it tightly. There was a deep scratch on the right haunch and though Fred whined when Cooper examined it carefully, he didn’t move. Cooper cleaned the wound, but didn’t bandage it.

Julia leaned over the arm of the sofa and watched Cooper with interest. He worked quickly, quietly and competently.

“What do you suppose happened to him?”

Cooper sat back on his heels, stretching the jeans. Julia carefully kept her eyes on his face. This sudden fascination with his lower body was embarrassing. Her life had become low-rent enough as it was. She was terrified of turning into the kind of woman who got horny and went to bars to proposition men.

“Car accident most likely,” he said. “Either hit by a car or thrown out of one.”

Julia sucked in her breath sharply in outrage. “Thrown out! You mean someone would deliberately throw an animal out of a moving car?”

“Yup. Happens all the time. Someone thought they wanted a pet, then changed their mind. Fred is definitely someone’s dog, though. Or was. Got good clean lines, probably make a good hunter.” Cooper’s large hand brushed the top of Fred’s head, thumb idly scratching behind his ears. Fred’s bushy tail thumped heavily.

“If you say so.” Julia looked doubtfully at Fred. The good lines, if they were there, were hidden beneath dirty, matted fur. “I’m not a dog person myself and I really have no intention of keeping him. I just felt sorry for him tonight.”

Cooper stood up and stuck his hands in his back jeans pockets. “Might want to keep him for a while. Be company when you…” He stopped suddenly.

“When I fall apart?” Julia asked dryly. “I assure you, Mr. Cooper, I’m not in the habit of falling to pieces every evening.”