“What do you mean? This town is microscopic. How hard can it be to find one man named MacKenzie?”
I laughed again and jiggled the doorknob, sighing as the warmth from the roaring fire immediately hit my icy skin. “This town is tiny but more than half the year-round residents are MacKenzies. Men, women, children…they’re all part of the MacKenzie brood. The sheriff is a MacKenzie, the town doctor is a MacKenzie. You can’t throw a rock in Surrender without hitting one of them.” I tended to avoid them. Most of the men had ties to the military and different clandestine government agencies. They worked to put the kind of people I spent a lifetime doing business with down. I didn’t want to be on the wrong side of MacKenzie-style vengeance, which was another reason I knew the Marshals dropped me here. It was easier to keep my nose clean when I was living smack dab in the center of a lion’s den.
Those blue eyes widened and then squeezed shut like my words had hit her right in the heart. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Not really a kidding kind of guy.” I walked over to my bed, which was still messy from last night, and gently laid her down on it. She went to push herself up into a sitting position but let out a strangled scream that echoed loudly in the small space when she put pressure on that left arm. We were going to have to do something about that shoulder. “Gotta try and get your shoulder back in the socket, Pop-Tart.”
She glared up at me and put her other hand on the offending limb. “Do you have any idea how to do that?”
I shrugged and rubbed my still-cold hands together. “I’ve seen it done a bunch. The place where I’m from had bareknuckle fights every weekend. No rules, no regulations. Bones broke all the time and they often ended up dislocated. It’s gonna hurt like a mother, but it’ll feel better once it’s back where it belongs.” I sounded far more confident than I was.
She gazed at me skeptically and sucked her bottom lip between her teeth. She let it go with a pop and asked me, “Where in the hell are you from that bareknuckle fighting on the weekends is a common activity?”
That made me chuckle. “That’s a story for another time. Let’s do this, okay?”
She slowly nodded and let her good hand drop. She sucked in a breath as soon as I grasped her wrist and I could feel her pulse pounding like a runaway race horse under my fingers. A single tear leaked out of the corner of her eye and for the first time in my adult life, I regretted that I was going to have to purposely cause harm to another person.
“Gonna count to three.” She nodded stiffly and sucked in a breath. I held mine as I told her “One,” and then yanked as hard as I could until I felt muscle and bone slide back into the place it belonged. It happened so fast she didn’t get the chance to scream and I wasn’t surprised at all when she passed back out.
It had been a long time since I had someone as pretty as she was in my bed. Being locked up was not conducive to getting my dick wet, not unless I was up for a little convict-on-convict action…which I was emphatically not. And when I got out, my ass belonged to the feds and they were watching my every move, so the chance to scratch that itch hadn’t yet presented itself. I had plans to pounce on the first ski bunny that crossed my path.
After all, wolves ate rabbits for dinner.
There was something different about this girl. Something special. She’d survived a crash that should have killed her and she was fighting through pain, both physical and emotional, that would cripple almost anyone else. Sadly, I knew that the old me wouldn’t have stood a chance with someone as strong as her and I knew down to my bones the new me absolutely didn’t deserve someone like her.
Chapter 3
Echo
It was still dark when my eyes popped back open. I was disoriented, sore from the top of my head to the soles of my bare feet, and I couldn’t move my left arm. I wasn’t sure if it was the same night I’d been rescued by the contradictory stranger or if I had been out for too many hours to count on my one working hand.
Groaning, I looked over at my unresponsive shoulder and snorted when I noticed the reason it was immobile was because there was a heavy bag of frozen French fries resting on top of it. After a quick scan of the rest of my aching frame, I noticed that I had a variety of bandages and Band-Aids holding together the places where my skin had torn open and shredded during the accident. Lifting my good hand, I reached up to touch the top of my head in search of the gash that hadn’t seemed like it was ever going to stop bleeding, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the blood that had caked and matted my curls together was no longer there. The wound and the area around it had been cleaned. It was still swollen and obviously needed a stitch or two to shut it, but it was no longer bleeding, which I was going to consider a win under the circumstances.
“How you feeling, Pop-Tart?” His voice came from somewhere across the room. I squinted into the dimly lit surroundings until I spotted him hunched down in front of an old potbelly stove, feeding logs into a fire. I could hear it popping and crackling and the sounds were surprisingly soothing. The material of his dark, thermal shirt pulled tight across his broad shoulders and when he glanced over at me again, I was struck by how clear and sharp those fog-colored eyes of his were.
“I feel like I was in a car accident and was lucky to survive it. Did you chop all that wood?” I knew I sounded incredulous, but for the life of me I couldn’t picture a guy named Benton, one who wore a ring like that, and clearly cared more about his hair than most women I knew, laboring over something as rustic and old-fashioned as chopping wood for a fire.
A low chuckle rumbled out of his chest and he lifted a dark eyebrow at me. “Maybe. Would it impress you if I told you that I did?”
“Only if I believed it was true. I don’t think there’s such a thing as executive lumberjacks or corporate woodsmen.” I shifted my legs under the thick quilt that was covering me and frowned when I realized my legs were bare and that I had on a pair of thick wool socks that were definitely not mine. “Did you take my clothes off?” The question came out more of a squeak than a defiant burst of outrage.