Protector for Hire (16 page)

Janelle nodded, her arms still in the air, her brain doing mental calculations. If she’d guessed right and the cat was two hundred feet away, it was out of the range of fire. Schwartz would have to give chase, or the animal would have to advance. How quickly could it close the distance between them?

“I’m going to fire a shot, okay?” Schwartz said. “I’ll fire into the trees over there, but it’s gonna fall short.”

Janelle nodded, but didn’t speak, her eyes still on the cougar. Beside her, Sherman whined his impatience.

“If the warning shot doesn’t scare him off and the cougar comes at us, I’ll shoot to kill. Understood?”

“Yes,” she whispered. She didn’t know if he was doing it to appease her or because the bullet couldn’t reach that far. It didn’t matter. Either way, she trusted him to keep her safe. To inflict the minimum amount of harm, if he could.

The gun barked in Schwartz’s hand, his arm jerking as he fired. She heard a soft whimper as he fired again, and she closed her eyes, wondering if the sound came from her or Sherman or the cat. The scent of gunpowder was sharp in the air, and she buried her nose in Schwartz’s coat, breathing in the smell of wool and wood and man.

“He’s gone.”

Janelle opened her eyes. “You killed him?”

Schwartz turned and looked at her. “No. He ran off. The opposite direction.” He grabbed her arm again, his gaze scanning her. “Are you okay?”

“Yes. I—”

“Come on,” he said, pulling her forward. “We’re going back to the cabin. Stay close and stay in front of me. If we see the cat again and I’m in range, I’ll take the shot. Got it?”

“Yes,” she agreed, moving ahead of him as fast as her legs would carry her. Sherman fell into step beside her, sticking close. His ears were pricked, and his ruff was still raised like a lion’s mane around his neck.

Janelle ran, her heart slamming in her chest. She scrambled through the dense trees, pretty sure she was headed the right way, totally sure Schwartz would tell her if she wasn’t. She could feel him close behind her, his breath fast and ragged, his body a shield between her and the danger.

She’d never felt so scared.

She’d never felt so protected.

Fear still coursed through her and she gave a terrified yelp when her feet tangled in a fallen tree branch. But Schwartz caught her elbow and lifted her up, pushing her ahead of him.

“Just a few hundred feet,” he coaxed. “We’re almost there. Turn right at that tree.”

“The dead one?”

“It’s not dead, it’s a tamarack.”

She kept running, trying to focus on the tree so she wouldn’t focus on the danger. “Its needles are falling off.”

“It happens in the fall. The needles turn gold and drop off, but they always come back.”

She knew there was probably a metaphor in there somewhere, but she didn’t have the bandwidth to process it now. She lunged past the tree, breaking left into a clearing.

“We’re almost there,” he said. “See the woodshed up there?”

“Yes,” she panted, daring a glance over her shoulder. She saw no sign of the cougar, but Schwartz was right on her heels. His eyes still scanned the trees around them, his mind and his body and his pistol all poised to protect her.

She could see the cabin now and picked up her pace, pretty sure she’d never felt such a hot surge of relief in her entire life. She gave a strangled cry and kept running, tears threatening to choke her now.

“You’ve just about made it, baby,” he urged, and the softness of the endearment left her whole body tingling with something besides the adrenaline coursing through her veins.

Her hands found the doorknob and she fumbled with it, her fingers too shaky to grip it.

“Here, I’ve got it.” He nudged her aside and shoved a key into the lock, pushing the door open with his shoulder.

“In you go.” He pushed her ahead of him, Sherman following close behind and Schwartz bringing up the rear. He slammed the door behind him, then turned and pressed his back to it, his body still shielding her even now.

Janelle stood panting at the edge of the living room. Her breath was coming in little wheezes, and she knew the cat allergy had nothing to do with it. The taste of adrenaline was thick in her throat, and the smell of wet dog was strangely comforting.

She sagged with relief, her knees giving out beneath her. Schwartz lunged forward, catching her before she hit the ground.

“Easy does it,” he said, leading her to the sofa. “You’re okay now. You’re safe.”

She nodded against his shoulder as he set her gently on the sofa, then eased himself down beside her. The leather dipped beneath his weight, and she felt herself falling into him.

Falling for him.

She looked up, her eyes blurry with tears as she studied the man who’d just saved her life.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “You saved me.”

He squeezed her hand, then released it. “You saved yourself. You and your damn cat allergy.”

“If I’d been out there alone—”

“I’d never let that happen.”

“But if I had, I never would have known. The cougar would have been on me before I had a clue.”

“Probably. They’re silent hunters. They’ve been known to attack people.”

“I can’t believe you thought of the allergy,” she murmured. “I can’t imagine—”

“I can,” he said. “I can always imagine the worst-case scenario. Then I plan for it.”

She nodded, not sure they were still talking about cougars. “I owe you, Schwartz. I owe you my life.”

He shook his head, already distancing himself from her on the couch. “You don’t owe me anything. I’m just doing what I promised my family I’d do.”

“No, you went above and beyond.” She got to her feet, legs still shaky. “And I’m going to repay you. Right here, right now.”

“Janelle, you don’t have to—”

“I do,” she insisted, shrugging off her jacket and letting it fall to the floor behind her. “I have to because I want to. I really, really want to.”

…

Having Janelle smear mud on his face was not exactly what Schwartz had in mind when she’d pledged to repay him
.

Then again, this was probably a whole lot safer than a blow job.

“Hold still,” she commanded. “I’m almost done.”

“Be sure to tell me when we get to the fun part. I wouldn’t want to miss it.”

“This is going to make you feel fabulous, I promise.”

“Yeah, I think that every time I go out and rub my face in the dirt.”

“Is your skin still tingling from the willow bark water?”

“I have skin left?”

She laughed, and he felt a warm kick of relief to know she recognized he wasn’t really pissed. Truth be told, he kinda liked this. Or maybe he just liked having her hands on him. Did it matter?

Janelle plunked down on the sofa beside him, angling up to dab more muck on the side of his cheek. Her face was covered in the same gray goo his was, and he wanted her to look ridiculous with her hair piled on her head and pale rings of flesh around her eyes and mouth making her look like some sort of homeless clown.

But she didn’t look ridiculous. She just looked beautiful. Beautiful and very, very scantily clad.

“You couldn’t wear a shirt to do this?” he muttered as she dabbed something cold on his earlobe.

“I’m wearing a shirt. It’s just a small one. A tube top. I don’t want to get clay all over my other shirts.”

“Who the hell brings a tube top to a remote cabin in the Montana wilderness?”

“I didn’t know I was going to be in a remote cabin in the Montana wilderness, remember?” She leaned across his body to swipe at his other cheekbone, giving him the opportunity to stare down the front of her shirt that wasn’t really a shirt. “You kept it so top secret where I was headed that I could have been going to the moon for all I knew.”

“Excellent point. I’m sure they wear a lot of tube tops on the moon.”

She sat back again and grinned at him. “Laugh all you want. At least neither of us is getting our clothes muddy.”

“And now I have the added bonus of finding out what it’s like to scrub clay out of chest hair.”

She laughed, then stood up and ran to the kitchen to rinse off her hands. When she trotted back to the living room, Schwartz forced himself not to pray for the tank top to go slithering down.

“Now what?” he asked.

“We wait about thirty minutes for the clay to dry.”

“What happens then?”

“We wash it off.”

“Are we to the fun part yet?”

She grinned and snuggled up next to him on the couch, not seeming the least bit perturbed by his grumbling. He felt grateful for that. Grateful and really, really turned on.

Dammit, what the hell was wrong with him? Since when did he find it sexy to have a woman smearing his face with wet dirt?

Since you met Janelle.

True. Hell, she could make him
eat
dirt and he’d still find her irresistibly sexy.

“Really, Schwartz, thanks again,” she said. “I’m still freaking out a little thinking about what I would have done if I’d been out there alone.”

“Wouldn’t have happened,” he said. “I’d never let you be alone.”

She looked up at him then, those pale blue eyes locking with his and making him think he should have chosen his words more carefully.

“Tell me another story,” she said.

“My tale of the ashtray condom wasn’t scintillating enough for you?”

“Tell me how you ended up in Montana.”

He started to protest, to tell her it was no one else’s business why he’d chosen to wall himself off out here in the middle of nowhere.

Then he realized she’d asked
how
, not
why
. It was a simpler question to answer.

“I grew up a military brat, so there wasn’t any one place I thought of as home,” he said. “After college, I ended up at Fort Irwin at the National Training Center. Grant was just a few hours away at Camp Twentynine Palms. ”

“What did you do at the National Training Center?”

“Staff sergeant. I ran tactical training exercises for units that came there to certify before deployment. I got damn good at it.”

“Did that feel like home?”

“Not really,” he said, mulling the question. “But I liked being near my brother. I liked following my family’s military path. And then I met a girl.”

He waited to see if she’d respond. Grant had told him that he’d shared bits and pieces of this story with Anna. It would have been Grant’s version of things, not Schwartz’s, but still. Had the details traveled from one sister to the other?

Janelle looked up at him, her blue eyes curious and encouraging. “Tell me about this girl.”

He shrugged. “Not much to tell, really. I’d actually forgotten her name until Grant brought it up a couple months ago. Jenny something. We had a whirlwind romance and got engaged.”

She blinked at him, surprise registering in her eyes. “You were engaged to be married and you don’t remember her name?”

“It wasn’t important. Not for long, anyway. Things came unraveled in a hurry when she set out to fuck someone else and—well, anyway, that part of the story doesn’t matter.”

Janelle nodded, waiting for him to continue. Waiting to see where he was heading with this story.

He was kinda wondering the same thing.

“Anyway, after the shit hit the fan, I needed a change. I needed to be where the action was.”

“What did you do?”

“I gave up my gig doing tactical training at the NTC and volunteered to join a unit headed to Anbar Province. In a matter of weeks, I was down there in the thick of it. The danger zone. It’s where a lot of the fighting was happening at the time.”

“Did that—um—did that feel like home?”

“Home,” he repeated, remembering how they’d started this path of conversation in the first place. “No, not exactly. Not the physical location, anyway. But being there in a combat zone, surrounded by some of the bravest men and women I’d ever met, it was the first time I’d really felt—”

He trailed off there, not sure what he meant to say. This was getting ridiculously touchy-feely, and it would probably be best if he got up and washed this crap off his face and chopped some wood or skinned a deer or ripped a tree out of the ground with his teeth.

But he stayed put, with Janelle’s gaze fixed on his.

“You felt like part of your family,” she supplied. “Is that it?
One of these things is not like the other.
Only right then, you were like them. Like the whole legacy of Patton men and women before you.”

He nodded, too surprised to speak. Even before he knew where he was headed with the story, Janelle had figured it out. How the hell had she done that?

“That’s right,” he said at last. “Or something like that, anyway.” He hesitated, not sure where to go from her. Not sure how much more he was willing to share. She kept her gaze on his, waiting to see what he’d say next.

“So how about you?” he asked. “San Francisco always been home?”

She studied him a few seconds more, probably wondering whether to press him about the abrupt subject change. At last, she nodded, and Schwartz breathed a sigh of relief.

“San Francisco has always felt like home,” she said. “I tried staying with Anna in Portland once for a couple months, but I missed the big city. The
bigger
city, I should say. I’m sure Portland would seem massive to you compared with life out here.”

“It does,” he admitted. “I spent some time there one summer in college. Nice place. Not too many cities let you drive twenty minutes in any direction from the skyscraper-filled center of it and find yourself in the middle of the wilderness.”

“Yeah, that’s what a lot of people like about Portland. It’s a city, but with farms and forests on all sides.”

“And you didn’t care for that?”

“I don’t know.” She leaned back against the sofa, her body small and warm tucked up against his. “It’s been seven years since I tried living anywhere else. Maybe I’ve changed since then.”

“Since when?”

“In seven years or—well, maybe in seven days.” She laughed, and Schwartz felt the vibration traveling from her bare arm to his. “That’s stupid, isn’t it?”