Rolling her head from side to side to ease the tension in her neck, she grunted as she began to make her way down the hill.
Jesus, he was heavy, and the fact that he was out cold made him heavier. Condensation puffed from her lips as she dragged her still-out-of-shape body down the hill and toward the river. She’d better pump up her jam if she hoped to get him to the truck and tie him down before the effects of the dart gun wore off.
But then two things happened at once.
Those three loud, constantly arguing women must have caught sight of her because there was a whole lot of caterwauling coming at her from behind.
Simultaneously, Cormac stirred, struggling against the hold she had on him at the back of his knees.
“What the fu…?” he yelped. His upper body, thick against her smaller shoulder, began to rear up.
She’d had a bad feeling the tranq gun didn’t have enough sedative in it to contain someone his size, but she’d doubted her assessment at the last minute and decided to only nail him with one dart.
Just another poor judgment call on her part, she thought with a grunt as Cormac wrapped his arms around her thighs and, with his abs of steel, managed to take her down by tipping her backward, using the weight of his body and the press of his bent knees. They fell against the packed snow, making her cry out on impact and sending her backpack flying.
He rolled from her and, before Teddy even realized where he was, Cormac pounced, pushing her back into the snow, knocking the wind right out of her.
“For the love of fuck, what’s going on, Marty?” one of the women bellowed as she ran down the hill, just as the other two appeared above Teddy.
Two lovely, put-together women with eyes of ragey-ish suspicion and their hands on their slender hips.
“Oh! Aren’t you pretty? Doesn’t she have lovely eyes poking out from that ugly-ugly mud-brown hat, Wanda?” the blonde with sparkling sapphire-blue eyes asked.
“Not the time for a color wheel assessment, Marty!” said the woman with an air of sophistication and the smoothest hair she’d ever seen in all of Colorado.
Teddy attempted to shake the snow from her face and wrestle her way out from beneath this enormous beast of a man. She was no weakling, but damn he was strong.
Gripping her wrists with a single calloused hand, Cormac yanked them over her head, pulled the dart from his neck and hurled it to the ground, then growled down at her, full of fire and brimstone, “Who the hell are you?”
The woman who’s going to slap your ass in the pokey and collect a lot of cash? Probably not the way introductions should go if she was to keep her identity a secret.
Teddy attempted to struggle in his GI Joe grip of kung-fu steel one more time—and that was when she caught sight of his eyes.
They were green. Okay, so yeah, they were angry, too, but she saw beyond that.
Oh, sweet-sweet mother of pearl, his eyes were so green. Beautiful orbs in his head that shone like colored glass. Sharply defined jaw and cheekbones, ruddy skin and a beard of thick, coarse-looking hair on his face, all giving him that hot, casually laid-back look.
Teddy’s heart sped up again as he settled on her torso completely—and a tingle of heat in her belly swished upward to her cheeks as she got an even closer look.
Thick lashes gave the appearance of guy-liner, but in her gut, she knew a man like Cormac would never wear makeup. He was too gruff—too involved in other things to care about his appearance enough to be concerned about how to enhance that thick fringe of lashes and make his eyes stand out.
Teddy’s breath left her chest in a whoosh of air as he straddled her with thick thighs and his eyes bore a hole in her face.
But his anger didn’t matter. None of that mattered. What mattered was what she had just discovered.
Jesus Christ, how could this be?
“Who are you?” He ground out the demand.
“I—”
“Cormac!” the pretty blonde—Marty—shouted, yanking at his shoulder. “You’re hurting her! Get off!”
Who was this woman and why did she care if he was hurting her? Did they know each other? As she’d tracked Cormac tracking them, that wasn’t the impression she’d had at all.
His head swiveled upward, his eyes blazing hot. “For that matter, who the hell are you two?”
“Three!” the gorgeous brunette, Nina—wrapped up like she was planning a move to Antarctica—wheezed out as she stumbled down the hill, stopping short next to Marty and placing her hands on her knees in order to catch her breath. “Holy shitballs, it’s Lumberjack Bob.”
“Who are you people and what the hell do you want with me?” Cormac looked back down at Teddy, his eyes glowing with suspicion and rage. “Are you with them, too?”
Teddy only managed to shake her head, still in utter disbelief. This was wrong. Everything was all wrong!