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  “Can you walk?” she cried, her eyes trained on the now-retreating back of the man who had followed Hawk here and tried to kill him. “Hawk, can you hear me?” she all but shouted when he didn’t answer her. She didn’t allow herself even to contemplate the reason why he wouldn’t answer her.

  “Yeah,” Hawk managed to bite off, swallowing most of a string of curses. His arm felt as if it was on fire.

  He should have seen that coming, Hawk angrily upbraided himself. But he’d been so preoccupied with the thought of seeing Carly, the thought of being with Carly, that he had let his guard slip. He hadn’t been as careful as he should have been. And worst of all, he hadn’t realized that he had a tail following him.

  What a damn stupid rookie mistake, he thought angrily. He should have never allowed this to happen.

  Carly was suddenly beside him, down on one knee as she kept shooting, providing their cover fire.

  “Here!” she ordered, presenting her shoulder to him. “Lean on me.”

  Before he realized what she was doing, Carly had her shoulder wedged under his. With one massive effort, she struggled to bring him up to his feet. He did what he could to make it easier, willing himself to be stronger.

  Their shadows fused together to appear as one wide, awkward creature, Hawk and Carly made their way quickly into the house, never turning their back on the shooter, even though it looked as though he’d given up and was fleeing.

  The moment she had Hawk inside the house, Carly quickly slammed the front door and bolted it. Only then, with her arm wrapped around his middle now, did she half walk, half drag Hawk over to the sofa.

  “Here, lie down on the couch,” she ordered, all but dropping him there as she released the heavy weight of his frame from her aching shoulders. There was blood all over one side of her. “I’m checking the other windows and doors to make sure we don’t get any uninvited pests slithering in.”

  As good as her word, Carly quickly and methodically checked each and every window, testing its integrity just to make sure it held. She also made sure that the back door was still secure.

  “What was that all about?” she asked, raising her voice so that Hawk could hear her.

  “Had to be one of Grayson’s men,” Hawk guessed. He closed his eyes for a moment, gathering his strength to him. The bullet was still lodged in his shoulder, and it had to come out. If they went to the nearest hospital in the next town, he might bleed out before they got there. And there was no way he could go to the Urgent Care Center in Cold Plains. He’d be dead before morning.

  No, this was something that Carly was going to have to do. He wondered if she was up to it, or if, ultimately, she’d be too squeamish.

  The woman who had come running to his rescue without a thought for her own safety had been magnificent—and not even remotely acquainted with the term squeamish.

  “I think he feels that I’m getting close to something, although damned if I know what,” he speculated. There was no other reason for the man to want to kill him, he thought. And he was sure that Grayson was behind this attack. As sure as he was that the sun was coming up tomorrow.

  “He just doesn’t want you nosing around, asking questions. It undermines his authority and his hold on ‘his’ people,” Carly called back.

  Satisfied that the windows were as secure as she could get them, Carly hurried back to the living room. It suddenly occurred to her, a second before she reached the living room, that by rushing to Hawk’s aid, she had blown her cover.

  She couldn’t go back to the community center to try to see Mia. After she had just fired on one of his men, there was no doubt in her mind that Grayson would kill her if he saw her.

  She didn’t regret it. In her heart, she knew that if she hadn’t been there, or if she’d hesitated and played it safe, Hawk would be lying dead in her front yard—instead of bleeding on her sofa.

  Getting him patched up was all that mattered, she told herself as she hurried over to him.

  “Did the bullet go through?” she asked even as she gently began to examine the wound herself. There was no through and through, which could only mean one thing, she thought, her stomach sinking as she heard Hawk answer her question.

  “No,” he told her, “I think it’s still in there.” Looking up at her, he said, “You know what you have to do.”

  Throw up comes to mind, Carly thought, doing her best not to turn a very sickly shade of green.

  Chapter 14

  This was no time to think about herself, Carly silently chided. There were a number of different possibilities if the bullet was left where it was, none of them good. Besides, it wasn’t as if she’d never seen a wound up close before, or cleaned one for that matter. It had just never involved someone she loved the way she loved Hawk.

  “You’re going to need some alcohol, bandages, a needle and thread—and your sharpest knife,” Hawk said from the kitchen chair she’d helped move him to, trying his best to focus on details and not the sharp pain. The amount of blood he’d lost was making him feel light-headed, and he needed to remain conscious so that he could help Carly. He really should go to a hospital but he didn’t trust anyone, and for this case, he had to fly under the radar.

  She had already returned to the kitchen from the bathroom, her arms filled with the items he had just rattled off.

  “I know,” she said, depositing them one by one on the kitchen table, lining them up in front of him. “I’ve done this before.”

  He looked at her in surprise. “When?” he asked.

  It wasn’t one of her fonder memories and up until now, she’d kept it to herself. “Dad and his friend used to go out hunting with enough alcohol in them to stock a small liquor store.”

  That was after her father had decided that drinking and hunting with his buddies was a lot more fun than going out for target practice with a little girl, she remembered. There was a time when that realization had pinched her stomach and made a sadness descend over her. But that time had long since passed. Now whenever she thought of her late father or anything associated with him, she felt nothing. She was completely removed from that period of her life. It no longer mattered.

  “One time his friends came back carrying Dad between them—not exactly an easy feat since they were all falling-down drunk. Seems that one of the guys had accidentally mistaken him for a deer when he was in the bushes, relieving himself, and shot Dad. There was no time to take him to the next town to see a doctor, so I was drafted.”

  Hawk frowned. She couldn’t have been that old. “Why not one of the other men?” he asked.

  That would have probably hastened her father’s demise. “Would you want someone trying to remove a bullet out of you when their hand was as steady as an earthquake?” To emphasize her point, she held out her hand and showed him how badly the men’s hands had shaken.

  He saw the point. “Guess not.”

  She went over to the sink and poured the rubbing alcohol liberally over the knife, disinfecting it. “Well, neither did my dad. He wasn’t that drunk. So I was elected.”

  He wondered why she’d never told him about this before. What else hadn’t she told him about? At one point he would have sworn that they had told each other everything. Everything because they had so much in common and had come together, seeking solace and comfort in the fact that the other knew exactly what they were going through, having an irrational drunk as a father. Now he was no longer so sure.

  “Just how old were you?” he asked.

  She didn’t even have to think about it. “Almost eleven. It was the year after my mother died,” she added in a quieter voice. There were times when she caught herself still missing her mother. That was never the case with her father. He had died years after he’d been lost to her.

  Checking everything she’d laid out on the table, she said, “I need one more thing before I get started.” With that, Carly hurried out of the room.

  He looked at the items on the table. “What else do you need?” he call
ed out, curious.

  “Technically, I don’t need it. But you do,” she told him as she walked back into the room.

  She placed an old bottle of whiskey on the table right in front of him. The bottle was dusty. It was also unopened. He glanced at her sharply. If asked, he would have easily bet that there was no liquor in the house. Obviously he would have lost that bet.

  “What are you doing with that?” he asked.

  Grabbing a kitchen towel, she quickly cleaned the dust on the bottle. She tossed the towel onto the back of a chair, removed the bottle’s cap and set it to the side.

  “This is the last bottle my father bought. He dropped dead of a heart attack just as he started to open it. I’m not exactly sure why I’ve kept it all these years, but now I’m glad I did. It’s not going to knock you out,” she told him, getting a glass from the cupboard, “but at least it might help you put up with the pain a little.” Saying that, she poured a liberal amount of the amber liquid into a glass, then held it out to him. “Here.”

  Maybe it might help, he thought as he accepted the offered glass. Rather than just sip the drink slowly, as was his habit if he drank at all, Hawk tilted the glass back and drank down the contents quickly, draining it. He put it back down on the table with a “thwack” that resounded through the room.

  The whiskey dulled his senses, dragging a fire through his belly and his limbs. He was still having trouble focusing, but now he didn’t mind as much.

  “Have at it,” he told her, shifting in his chair so that his injured shoulder now faced her. “I’m ready, Dr. Finn,” he declared, deliberately emphasizing the title she had no claim to.

  Well, he might be ready, she thought, but she really wasn’t. Still, this needed to be done, and the longer she delayed, the worse the consequences might be for Hawk. She brought the knife over to the sink and repeated the ritual of liberally pouring the last of the rubbing alcohol over both sides of it. And while she was doing that, she also did one more thing.

  “Your lips are moving,” Hawk noticed. “But I don’t hear anything.”

  “You’re not supposed to.” That was her answer, but he was obviously waiting for more, so she explained very quietly, “I’m praying.”

  The admission surprised him. He thought for a moment, then found that between the triple shot of whiskey he’d just consumed and the blood he’d lost, he really couldn’t do that well.

  “Didn’t know you did that,” he told her.

  Carly took a deep breath. The rubbing alcohol was all gone and, with it, her excuse for stalling. She was ready, whether or not God was.

  “On occasion,” she answered, then nodded at the bottle on the table. “Want another drink before we get started?”

  “I’m good,” Hawk told her, bracing himself. He had no intention of passing out like his old man had habitually done. Drinking himself into a stupor was his father’s usual way of operating. “Go ahead.”

  Oh God, was all Carly could think, over and over again, as she applied the point of her knife to Hawk’s flesh and began to go in. Although she knew that this wasn’t his fault, she found that digging for the bullet was exceedingly difficult. For one thing, the muscles in Hawk’s arm were as hard as rocks. Pushing the knife into his flesh was far easier in theory than in actual practice.

  Amazingly, Hawk wasn’t making any noise. Muscles or not, this had to hurt. “You all right?” she asked, slanting an uneasy glance at him.

  “I’ve been better,” he answered through solidly clenched teeth.

  She didn’t want to hurt him like this, but she had no other choice. “I’m sorry—”

  “Just find it,” he ordered, doing his best not to snap at her.

  “I can’t,” she cried, growing more frustrated the deeper she probed for the bullet.

  And then, finally, she felt it, felt a definite resistance of another kind. The point of her knife had touched metal.

  “I think I found it.”

  Thank God, he silently cried. Out loud he merely muttered, “Good for you.”

  “Just a little longer,” she promised, hoping she wasn’t lying as she angled the knife in her hand, trying to get under the bullet to move it along.

  And then, in what felt like a million light-years later, she finally managed to get it out. Such a little thing, causing so much damage, she couldn’t help thinking as she put it on the table.

  But there was no time to take a breath or admire her handiwork. Without anything to hold it back, Hawk’s blood began to flow freely from the hole in his arm. Acting fast, Carly jammed a large wad of cotton against the wound, temporarily stemming the flow until she could reach for her needle. Her stomach, in turmoil, all but rose up into her mouth.

  She felt sick. Whether with relief or the thought of what could have happened, she wasn’t sure. But the one thing she knew was that she wanted desperately just to throw up.

  As if sensing what she was going through, Hawk said in a very soothing voice, “You’re doing just fine, Carly. Better than I could have hoped.”

  “I bet you say that to all the women who stitch you up,” she quipped, releasing a huge sigh. There were at least half a dozen sighs just like that inside of her, waiting for release.

  “Believe it or not, this is the first time I’ve ever been shot.” He’d gone nine years with the Bureau without incident. He couldn’t say that about himself anymore.

  Something didn’t make sense to her. “Then how did you know what I’d need to use?”

  He supposed that was a valid question. “It’s not the first time I’ve been around a bullet wound, just the first time I was the one on the receiving end,” he clarified.

  “Oh.”

  A sense of triumph suddenly hit her. She’d done it. She’d gotten the bullet out, cleaned the wound and sewn it up to prevent it from bleeding. He was going to make it. The relief continued to flower within her.

  She took a large gauze pad, opened it and placed the white square on the wound she’d just closed. She then secured it in place with strips of tape around the perimeter of the gauze. That done, she sat back to look at her handiwork.

  “I’m done,” she announced with no small pleasure in her voice.

  “Nice work,” he commended. After making a quick call to his crew to make sure everything was okay there, he leaned heavily on his good arm and pushed himself up on his feet.

  She was instantly alert and on hers. “Where are you going?” she asked.

  This wasn’t the time to sit back and take it easy. Good men lost their lives that way, he recalled. “To look around outside and make sure that the guy who shot me isn’t coming back to finish the job.”

  “Only place you’re going is to bed, mister,” she informed him, sounding more stern than he could ever recall hearing her. “I can check to make sure that coward hasn’t come back.”

  “I’m not going to bed,” he told her firmly.

  She knew that tone, knew there was no arguing with it. She compromised. “Okay, then sack out on the sofa if that suits you better. You’ve got a clear view of the front door as well as the window that way,” she pointed out. “But you are not going outside, understood?” she said in a firm, take-no-prisoners voice.

  If he’d had more strength, he would have argued with her. But as it was, he really didn’t have the wherewithal to conduct an argument. He just was not in control the way he normally was. Between the blood loss and the quickly consumed alcohol, which had gone straight to his head, he felt as if the room insisted on making a circular journey, and it seemed to be spinning more and more quickly.

  “Understood,” he murmured, surrendering. “Did you get a look at him?” he asked her as, with her help, he made his way unsteadily to the couch. Somehow, the distance had become farther than he remembered.

  “Yes, at the very last minute,” she told him. And when she recognized the sniper, it was both a shock—and quite honestly—something she’d half expected. “The guy who shot you was Grayson’s pretty boy, Charlie
Rhodes.” She set her mouth grimly as she told Hawk, “He’s going to be best man at Mia’s wedding.” It was the startling contrast of blond hair against the dark night that had triggered recognition for her.

  All but collapsing onto the sofa, Hawk looked up at her. His brain was foggy, but he struggled to make sense of what he was being told. Rhodes had clearly seen her coming to help him. It was because of her that he was still alive. That meant that, in Rhodes’s eyes, she was a traitor.

  Rhodes would go straight to Grayson with that. There was no reason not to. And he knew the consequences.

  “The wedding,” Hawk echoed. “How are you going to stop it?”

  “Now that they know I’m not one of them?” Was this what he was asking her? The answer was heartbreakingly simple. “I’m not. Grayson is never going to allow me to get anywhere near my sister after what happened here tonight.” Had she been as brainwashed as Grayson had believed her to be, she would have never even been seeing Hawk, much less coming to his rescue by firing at a member of his handpicked circle of associates.

  Even exhausted and weak, Hawk knew how huge a sacrifice Carly had just made to save him. “I’m sorry, Carly.”

  She forced a smile to her lips, trying to appear as if she’d made her peace. “Not your fault.”

  But it was, and he knew it. If he hadn’t turned up, she wouldn’t have had to choose between coming to his rescue or saving her sister. He had to make it up to her. He began to say as much, but discovered to his confusion, that the words just weren’t coming out. Not only that, but his thoughts now moved aimlessly about in his head in slow motion, like disoriented puffs of cotton at the mercy of the hot summer breeze.

  Hawk couldn’t think clearly.

  He would have to wait to tell her.

  Later, he’d tell her later.

  It was the last thought that drifted through his head before his eyes slid closed.