1
Her bedside draweremitted only a whisper when she slid it open to remove the loaded .22 caliber handgun. Genevieve Boden cocked and raised the weapon in a smooth motion as she sat up, ready to fire even before her eyes could adjust to the darkness in her cabin. She held her breath and strained her ears, picking apart the normal nighttime sounds of her home and the forest in search of the unfamiliar.
Though she listened for it, the thump from outside shot a pulse of adrenaline through her veins and made her flinch.An animal, she told herself, as she slipped from the warm bed on silent feet. Strays often showed up on her doorstep. The reassurance didn’t do much to ease the knot of tension twisted in her gut.
She reached the front door to hear another thump, louder than the first, and then a scratching noise, as if claws raked against the plank floor outside.
A big animal. With long nails?
A moan resonated through the house, launching goose bumps all over her skin.
Yeah, right. She couldn’t think of any animal that sounded like that. Not of the four-legged variety, at least.
Genevieve kept the gun ready and knelt next to the front window. A trickle of sweat snaked down her spine as she twitched aside the curtain and peered out.
At first she could see nothing out of the ordinary, but then the tiny sliver of visible moon managed to do its job and a lump on the steps of her porch separated from the shadows. She squinted. Correction, a very large, still lump.
She reached up to hit the switch to activate the outdoor light.
Genevieve inhaled sharply.
The glow of the single bulb wasn’t much, but it illuminated the face of the unconscious stranger sprawled flat on his back.
Whole and hearty, this man’s features would have been a gift from God, with his fiercely masculine beauty, a series of hard planes and rough angles. It was just too damn bad he looked as though he had tangled with the devil. An angry swollen knot, as big as her fist, took center stage on his forehead against a landscape of bruises and cuts, visible beneath the light dusting of snow on his face.
Genevieve stood and unlocked her deadbolts before she dragged her instinctive response to a halt. Men didn’t just fall from the sky on a daily basis to land, literally, at her feet. The guy might very well be beaten up, but something was fishy. Where had he come from?
Occasionally, she might stumble across a camper, but rarely in late November when the West Virginia mountain nights were so cold. The first snow of the season had started to fall earlier that day, and there were already a few solid inches lying on the ground. Even in good weather, her home was quite a hike for a healthy person to make on foot from the nearest town. If the roads were still in drivable condition, a car could get you pretty close, but she didn’t see any horse or car in the darkness of her yard.
She nibbled her lip and watched the man, counting the seconds he lay there without moving. She got to twenty before she gave up, cursed her conscience and opened the door a crack.
“Hey. Mister.” She hardened her tone, careful to keep the gun pointed in his direction and her finger on the trigger. When there was no response, she opened the door wider and leaned out. “You okay?”
The man moaned and she jumped, her hand tightening on the weapon. His eyelids fluttered open and his head turned toward her movement. He focused on her, his black eyes commanding despite the supplication in his hoarse one-word plea. “Help.”
Self-preservation warred with the desire to help. Undecided, Genevieve stood her ground while he flattened his hand against the plank floor and struggled to rise a few inches. He managed to heave himself further onto the porch before collapsing on his back again. The meager pool of light spilled over his upper body, revealing a dark stain over the shoulder of his shredded jacket.
Holy crap, that’s a lot of blood!Horror trumped her caution, and she hurried out to kneel beside him, laying the pistol within her reach. His jacket was light and completely inappropriate for the weather. Genevieve fumbled for a minute with the zipper, and then just gripped both sides of the material and ripped it apart. When she spread the windbreaker open she got her explanation for the state of his outerwear. The man must have torn the lining out with his hands to wrap a wad of material around his shoulder. The light blue nylon had turned dark red.
The knot was difficult to undo, but it finally came apart. The material actually stuck to his skin. Luckily, she wasn’t given to squeamishness, or peeling it off would have made her gag. The rip in his tan shirt was convenient, and she stuck her fingers in it to make it wider. She drew in a startled breath at the sight of his torn flesh underneath.
The jagged hole in his shoulder left little doubt he had met the wrong side of a gun. He flinched when she probed her fingers underneath him, but the quick inspection told her the bullet had gone clean through. That was the only good news, though. An unhealthy combination of dried blood, dirt, insect bites and scratches caked it, and the skin around the jagged edges of the injury was purple and puffy with infection. Now that she was close enough to feel the heat radiating off him, she realized his half-open eyes were too bright with fever. “When were you injured?”
His mouth worked. “Two—days? Don’t remember. Saw your smoke…”
Two days? He’d been crawling around the cold woods with a serious wound for a couple of days? No wonder he was so bad off. She’d heard of a man who got shot while stranded outdoors once and died of infection within seventy-two hours. This man was lucky he hadn’t also been attacked by animals or succumbed to dehydration.
The mystery as to his lightweight jacket was solved though. Weather turned quickly in the mountains. A couple of days ago, or even yesterday, the windbreaker would have been more than sufficient. Had he stayed out all night tonight, he would have frozen to death. “Who did this to you?”
“Don’t know…tried to get police…” The man shook his head, dazed. “Lost my phone.”
Phone. Yes. Why hadn’t she thought of that? No police, never, but she could get help. “Stay here.” As if he could go anywhere.
Leaving him down for the count, she palmed her gun and darted into her cabin. After Mom had died, she’d broken down and bought the telephone hanging on her kitchen wall.
By the time she got to the second digit in the closest hospital’s number, though, Genevieve realized she wasn’t hearing any telltale beeps. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” She slammed it down into the cradle and picked it up again. No dial tone. Dead. What a time for one of her few modern conveniences to fail her.
Genevieve returned to the porch and studied the guy for a second. Though she knew nothing would happen, she tried to slow her racing mind and focus past the man’s physical plane.
