“Your sister pass away? You said she was Xanthe.” I swore as my boots slipped on the snow and as the leather strap attached to the shotgun dug into my shoulder. I’d been lying on a prison infirmary gurney less than five months ago, losing most of my blood. I still didn’t have my full strength back and this trek was taking more out of me than I wanted to admit. I was going to be lucky if I got us both back to the cabin in one piece.
“She died.” Her voice was quiet and I could tell the pain laced throughout it had nothing to do with the physical pain she was in from the accident. “Just a few days ago actually.” It was still fresh. No wonder she sounded like she was going to start sobbing. “What’s your name?”
The question was clearly a way to change the subject and return the focus to me, but that was a question I really didn’t want to answer. I looked down at her and saw that she had sharp lines dug into the center of her forehead and along the edges of her mouth. I kind of hoped she passed back out. It was much easier being the new me when she was unconscious.
I blew out a breath and watched the cloud form in the air in front of me. Fuck, it was cold. My ears were starting to sting and I couldn’t remember when I’d last felt the tip of my nose.
“The folks around here call me Ben.” It was actually a shortened version of my name, but ever since I could walk I’d been a Benny. Dropping the last part was hard but not as hard as convincing the Marshals that I wasn’t going to be Carl or Steve when they relocated me. They wanted me to be a different person...and I understood why. But my name was the only thing I had left from my old life and I refused to let it go entirely.
She squinted up at me and then moaned and lifted a hand to her forehead. As she moved I had to adjust my hold on her. I swore again as she started wiggling and grunted when my palm grazed the side of her breast under the thick fabric of my coat. She was stacked, rounded in all the right places and my new resolve to not be an asshole couldn’t beat back the fact that I had always been a boob man. She was working with all my favorite attributes and it was classic old me to notice that while she was bleeding all over both of us.
“What flavor of Ben are you? A Benjie, a Benjamin, or maybe a Bernard?” Her voice was getting thready and weak but I could smell smoke from the fire I had started at the cabin earlier in the evening. I sent up some silent thanks that we were both going to be under a roof and warm soon.
I shook my head, which sent snow flying in every direction, and felt my lips twitch, which made my beard move. I always preferred polished to rugged, but the way women eye-fucked me on the regular with the face fuzz made me wonder if I had been missing out on a surefire way to get laid all these years. I liked women…a lot. In fact, that had been one of my biggest complaints about getting dropped in no-man’s-land. The pickings were slim, unless I wanted to keep my options limited to tourists and weekend warriors. I didn’t mind the hit-it-and-quit-it type of woman; that’s what I tended to gravitate toward. However, now that I was working out how to be the new me, I figured the way I went about spending time with the opposite sex needed to change as well. I needed to be the kind of guy that deserved a woman’s attention for more reasons than the fact I had a pretty face, prettier words, and was blessed with a big dick that I knew how to use.
Grunting and pulling my thoughts away from the kinds of women I was going to be fucking in the future, I answered her question about my name. “None of the above. My mom had high hopes for me; she wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer. She wanted me to do something that would get us both out of the shithole city where we lived, so she named me Benton. She said it sounded sophisticated and classy.” Unfortunately for her, I was always much more a Benny than a Benton. I’d barely made it through high school and by the time I graduated, I was already breaking knees and collecting debts for the monster who called all the shots on my streets. I was making enough money to get my mom out of the Point, but she refused to take it, saying it was dirty and she wouldn’t make a deal with the devil. I sold my soul the first chance I got and never looked back. At least, I hadn’t until I almost died. That was enough to make a man question every move he made that got him to that point…and landed him in the Point.
The Point was kind of like Surrender in the fact you couldn’t pinpoint it on a map. It was the nickname for the bad part of the big city I grew up in. It was a place no one wanted to talk about, and very few made it out of in once piece.
The fed that was in charge of my case would lose his mind if he knew I had given this woman my real name, but I figured she had a concussion and was barely conscious so it wouldn’t hurt anything. Plus, I wanted her to know me…well, the me that I’d just decided to be. I wanted to see if I could actually pull off being a guy who deserved a shot at getting it right.
“You don’t look like a Benton.” Her voice was weak and I could see she was struggling to keep her eyes open.
“Oh yeah? What do I look like then?” I was curious and also leery of what her answer would be. I was supposed to be doing my best to fit in here, to make a new life, so if this banged up and barely awake girl could pinpoint that I didn’t belong, I was in deep shit.
Her eyelids fluttered and drifted back over those intense sapphire eyes. Her lips moved slightly and on a whispered breath she exhaled, “You look like trouble.”
She had no idea how right she was. I snickered at her words and it bled into a sigh of relief when the clearing where my cabin sat came into view. I hugged the woman closer to my chest and to see if she was still coherent asked, “What are you doing out in the middle of nowhere Montana in the middle of winter and after midnight anyways?”
She didn’t respond for a long minute so I assumed she was blacked back out. I almost dropped her when she whispered, “I’m looking for someone. I drove up here to find him.”
I looked down at her curiously and her eyes were back open. They were so pretty I found myself staring into them and not moving, even though shelter was a mere hundred yards away. “Who are you looking for?”
She blinked up at me and cocked her head to the side like she was trying to decide if I was friend or foe. Foe. I was always foe, but she didn’t need to know that.
“MacKenzie. I’m looking for a MacKenzie.”
I couldn’t stop the laugh that shook out of my chest. I tilted my head back and hooted up at the night sky as I regained my footing and hauled ass toward the door to my cabin.
“Pop-Tart, you’re going to have to narrow those search parameters down.”
She squinted her eyes at me and wiggled in my grasp, which made us both moan, her in pain, me at the way everything behind my zipper started to tighten and harden. She didn’t ask me about the nickname and I was glad. They had been my favorite things to eat when I was a kid. I used to watch and wait for the sweet treat to pop up out of the toaster like it was my reward for making it through the previous day.