The Sheriff's Daughter Page 2

  His eyes locked on hers, then blurred with recognition. He jerked away and she nearly collapsed in shocked relief. Only then did the fear take over.

  What had she been thinking? She’d run toward the bullets, crashed into a blind situation, with nothing but a—

  “Damn it, woman.” Logan leaned close, face tight with anger and something else. “I told you to stay inside the clinic!”

  Though she knew she’d been wrong, Sam’s hard-learned bravery forced her to snap back, “And leave you over here alone? No way. Those hunters might have been drunk. Don’t you know how dangerous it is to go into a firing zone?”

  “Of course I do!” he shouted. “That’s my damn job!”

  “You’re a doctor, not an entire SWAT team!” The squeal of tires on dirt and gravel jolted them both, until Jimmy’s familiar voice hailed them from the road.

  “Sam? You okay in there? You find the poachers?”

  Not wanting to analyze the unsteady thump of her heart or the tension that was nearly visible in the air around her and Logan, Sam answered her childhood friend and current…well, she honestly wasn’t sure what Sheriff Jimmy Donahue was to her at this point. Especially not after the lightning bolt that had slashed through her body when Logan crowded her up against the tree. “We’re over here, Jimmy. And no, we didn’t find the shooter.”

  Brush crashed nearby and Sam stepped away from Logan, though she couldn’t have said why. Moments later, Jimmy appeared, walking carefully and fanning his weapon in a neat arc. His tan uniform hung slightly askew on his lanky frame, and he’d ditched his official hat for a Red Sox cap again.

  James Donahue had grown from an earnest, fair-haired boy into a loyal, strong-willed man who would, by his own admission, do pretty much anything Sam wanted him to. Their friendship was a comfort. Recently, he’d been pushing for more, but she hadn’t been sure how to respond. Part of her wanted the safety and steadiness he represented, so different from her past experiences.

  But another part of her craved flash and the flame, and the sexual delirium that never seemed to go hand in hand with safety and steadiness.

  No, it came from the men who were bad for her, the ones who didn’t stay put, didn’t slow down. She was a confirmed sucker for that sort. Because of it, and because she’d vowed not to put herself through the pain again, she edged even farther away from Logan as Jimmy joined them.

  The sheriff glanced at her, brow furrowed. “You okay?” He turned to Logan. “You’re the tenant, right?”

  Used to Jimmy’s habit of carrying on multiple conversations at once, Sam nodded and answered both questions. “Yes, he’s renting the cottage. And yes, I’m fine.” She brushed at her hip, which stung like fire. “Though I think I caught a splinter.”

  That was when she looked down and saw the blood.

  The men followed her gesture and Logan swore inventively. “Damn it, woman, the bullet must have creased you!”

  The pain came then, swooping down on Sam as though it had been waiting for her to notice. It vised her head and hip and sent her reeling back against the tree that his virile male body had pressed her into mere minutes earlier.

  Shot. She’d been shot. Oh, hell. The cadence of the words beat through her with the tempo of her heart, but it didn’t sweep away the sight of Logan’s eyes, or the flash of guilt deep within them. The sight reminded her of the words not safe, and of the professional way he’d slid off the porch and double-timed it across the road toward danger.

  As he came toward her, she leaned against the tree and looked up into his hard-set eyes. “What the hell just happened here?”

  His lips tightened on an oath, or maybe an apology. She could see both in his eyes. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll take it with me when I go—and I’m out of here as soon as we get you patched up.”

  With that, he scooped her up into his arms as though he had every right, and carried her away from the estuary. Away from the bright glitter of rifle shell casings.

  She struggled against his iron-hard grip. “Put me down. I can walk!”

  “You’re bleeding,” he replied calmly, the dark rumble of his voice resonating from deep within his chest. “And whatever else I’ve been, I’m a doctor first and foremost.”

  She half expected Jimmy to demand that Logan put her down, but the sheriff’s attention was focused elsewhere. He crouched down near the footprints and frowned, then looked up at her. Their eyes met over Logan’s shoulder.

  In his face she read the truth she had feared, and her stomach clenched into a fist.

  The shots had been deliberately aimed at her house.

  Someone had tried to kill Logan Hart on her front porch.

  Chapter Two

  The lady vet was a handful in more ways than one, but Logan’s mind wasn’t on the curvy bundle of woman he carried up the narrow stairs to her apartment over the clinic, or on the stubborn daring that had sent her across the road after him. No, he was focused on the salty smell of fresh blood and the seeping stain on the torn jeans just below her waistband.

  The wound wasn’t fatal. Probably wasn’t more than a shallow crease. But that didn’t stop his brain from showing him images of a pretty blonde with a bullet hole through her forehead and most of the back of her head blown away.

  Sharilee Winters.

  He’d thought her one of Trehern’s women and despised her for it. He’d found out too late that she was undercover just as deep as him, working for an offshoot of the federal government that wasn’t accountable to any of the other branches involved in the operation.

  Afterward, when Logan had asked for the group’s name, the others had looked away. When he’d asked how to reach Sharilee’s family, he had received vague mumbles and disconnected numbers. So he’d been left to remember her face and her death and wonder who mourned her loss.

  In the six long months since Trehern had been jailed, Logan had almost convinced himself he couldn’t have stopped the bastard from executing Sharilee. He’d almost convinced himself his reflexes hadn’t been slowed by his belief that Sharilee was nothing more than a hooker, or by his vague notion that Trehern’s right-hand man, William Caine, was an undercover operative, that he would help if things went south before the sting.

  But Sharilee had been the operative, not William. And she had died horribly for her work. For justice.

  “Logan?” Sam’s voice recalled him to the present, to the new guilt. The shooter had come for him, not her. He needed to get out, and get out fast. His employers had a high-security apartment set aside for him in the city, where he could stay until the trial resumed later that week.

  Let Trehern’s goons try to get him there.

  “We’ll get you fixed up in no time,” he said, falling back on a surgeon’s platitudes when nothing else made sense. When he got no response, he looked down at the woman in his arms. A quiver of surprise ran through his body when he found her eyes open and alert.

  And focused on his face.

  A second tremor worked its way through his body, this one hotter than surprise.

  More urgent, and unexpected for its power.

  When he reached the living area of her small apartment, he set her on her feet, afraid that if he carried her into the bedroom and lowered her to the rumpled bed he glimpsed through a half-open door, he might act on the ideas that had been flitting through his skull with annoying regularity since he’d first rented her cottage.

  Take a few months off, his bosses had said. Remember what it’s like to be you. Zachary Cage, his immediate superior at the Boston General branch of Hospitals for Humanity, had even gone so far as to lift an eyebrow and suggest that Logan have a fling.

  But he barely knew what it was like to be him anymore, and he had no stomach for flings—or relationships, for that matter. His low-grade interest in happily-ever-after had been shot to hell three months ago when his sister Nancy’s husband had gone overseas on HFH orders and never come home. Her teary-eyed vigil while she waited for word of Stephen’s fate
had reconfirmed what Logan had learned during his eighteen months undercover.

  It wasn’t fair for a man in his business to love a woman, to have a family. It had torn Nancy to pieces when Logan had gone under for that year and a half, and to lose her husband so soon after had been nearly a crushing blow.

  He’d juggled the trial as best he could, and spent time with her when she let him, waiting. Hoping. But as the days passed, then weeks, hope had begun to fade, and with it his sister. These days, she was hanging on to optimism by her fingernails, rejecting the other option.

  Love just wasn’t worth it, Logan had decided. It wasn’t worth the pain of the one left behind. And he was too old, too jaded for the temporary affairs the younger members of HFH indulged in between assignments. So even though attraction had sizzled through him the moment he’d first seen his new landlady, he’d stayed away and banished her from his thoughts when her image sneaked back in.

  At least he’d tried.

  But now, standing a breath away from her, conscious of the rise and fall of her breasts beneath the blue-patterned vet’s smock, he realized he’d failed. She’d been at the edges of his thoughts all along.

  And that was a complication he didn’t have the time or the heart for. Not now.

  So he focused on her bloodstained hip. The best thing he could do for her was to treat her and get the hell out of Black Horse Beach. He gestured toward the shallow crease, which had stopped bleeding. “You want me to take a look at that, or would you rather manage it yourself?”

  He hadn’t spent much time in the small beachfront town, but the few conversations he’d had with the locals all came back to his landlady somehow. The year-round inhabitants of Black Horse Beach saw her as a cross between Dr. Dolittle and Florence Nightingale. In the space of ten minutes at a coffee shop one morning, he’d learned about her work with the local animal pro tection agency, her spay-a-stray program, and her father, the former sheriff.

  Logan had no doubt from the conversations that Dr. Blackwell could treat her own hip if she wanted, but the pale, blue-eyed woman standing opposite him looked little like the invincible picture the neighbors had painted of her.

  She looked fragile. And tired. And hurting.

  The last, at least, was his fault.

  “Go on.” He nudged her toward the small bathroom he saw off the narrow hallway that separated her teacup-sized living room from the modern-looking kitchen. “You change into something loose while I run down to my truck and get my field kit, okay?” When she merely stared at him, he gentled his voice. “It won’t hurt, I promise.” Foolish words, empty words, he thought to himself. Of course it would hurt. She’d been nicked by a bullet meant for him.

  But still, she didn’t move. Finally, she reached out a steady hand and touched his cheek. He nearly flinched at the spark of contact and the compassion in her voice when she said, “Please tell me who you are. Why aren’t you safe? Why was someone shooting at you? Tell me. Maybe we can help.”

  Startled by her calm and by her offer of help to a stranger who’d nearly gotten her killed, he stared back at her for a moment. The urge to tell her everything warred with the need to get the hell out of town, forming a messy ball of unease in his chest. The former won out because part of him didn’t want her thinking he was a criminal, even if it had been his miscalculation that had brought the shooters to her doorstep.

  He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I work for a group of medical investigators called HFH. Earlier this year, we helped bust Viggo Trehern.”

  Her quick indrawn breath and the flash of comprehension in her eyes told him she knew some of the story. “That was you?”

  “In part.” In large part, but she didn’t need to know how large. “Now he’s up on trial, and it looks like he’s decided to win the old-fashioned way. By killing the witnesses.”

  This time her gasp was louder, but she mastered the reaction quickly, and a hint of relief crept into her vivid eyes. “Then you work for the government. You’re one of the good guys.”

  Technically, it was true, but eighteen months in Trehern’s world had marked him. He was harder than he’d been when he went in. Less certain of right and wrong, less willing to deal with the necessary shades of gray.

  And even though he’d told her about HFH to prove that he wasn’t one of the bad guys, Logan couldn’t bring himself to claim the alternative.

  Hell, he wasn’t sure what he was anymore. And that, more than anything, had prompted the bosses to give him this enforced time off. Time to figure it out. Time to decide.

  Time to heal.

  Because he hadn’t figured it out or decided, and because the scar tissue on his soul wasn’t even close to set, he stepped forward until he could feel the warmth of her body against his skin. She leaned back slightly and her pupils widened a fraction with nerves, though she still didn’t look scared enough for his purposes.

  “Dr. Blackwell,” he said quietly, “you have no idea what I am. So I’d suggest that you let me patch up your hip so I can get the hell out of your town before something worse than a shooter comes looking for me. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  She surprised him by lifting her chin. “Yes. I understand.”

  But when she turned and limped toward the tiny bathroom, Logan was left with the feeling that what he’d meant and what she’d understood had been two very different things.

  And what the hell was he going to do about that?

  The door closed with a final-sounding thud. Logan muttered a curse and headed for the stairs. A few four-by-four gauze pads and he was out of there.

  In the city, with HFH backup, he could lure Trehern’s men into a trap. Here, he could do nothing but involve innocent bystanders.

  Jimmy Donahue met him at the bottom of the stairs wearing a scowl edged with worry. The sheriff stood with his shoulders braced, his arms folded across his chest. Tall and lean, maybe a year or two younger than Logan, he wasn’t physically overwhelming, but Logan sensed a core of strength that told him the sheriff wasn’t a man to be underestimated. Jimmy frowned and asked, “She’s going to be okay, right?”

  Logan nodded. “Yeah, she’ll be fine. Barely a scar. I just need to grab my field kit from the truck.”

  The sheriff followed. “Does the shooting have to do with the Trehern trial?” At Logan’s startled look, Jimmy shrugged. “We do have cable Internet down here, you know.”

  “And you look up every stranger who comes to town?”

  “Nope. Only the ones who rent from Sam.”

  Only the thirty-something, seemingly unattached men who rented from Samantha, Logan guessed, figuring that number was pretty small. This was a family-and-beach-ball sort of place, not a singles’ retreat.

  He glanced over, wondering whether Samantha and the sheriff were an item and knowing he shouldn’t care. “How much do you know?”

  “I know that Viggo Trehern is scum.” Jimmy’s glare told Logan the only reason he scored better was his opposition to the murdering crime boss. “And I know it’s a damn shame the only thing they could nail him on was buying a boatload of prescriptions from dirty doctors.”

  “Capone was put in Alcatraz for tax evasion when nothing else would stick,” Logan pointed out as he reached into his truck and pulled out his HFH field kit.

  “That doesn’t make it right. Anyway, I couldn’t get as much information as I would’ve liked, but you’re listed as one of the expert witnesses. Something about medical investigations.”

  “I’m impressed you got that far. That data is supposed to be buried deep.”

  “It was.” Jimmy met his eyes, a faint smile tipping the corners of his mouth. “Just because we’re not big city, big hospital doesn’t mean we don’t have…skills.” Then his expression hardened. “Tell me what I need to know about the shooter.”

  His tone brooked no argument.

  Quickly adjusting his first impression of the local law, Logan turned back to the clinic and tried to decide whether the prickle
at the back of his neck was a guilty conscience or watching eyes. “Shooter? Just one?”

  The sheriff nodded and matched him stride for stride. “Yeah, one set of footprints. One set of casings.”

  That seemed odd. Trehern left little to chance, so Logan would have expected a backup shooter. Then again, he would have expected them to hit what they were aiming at. The bullets had come close, but not close enough.

  How had the assassin missed? More importantly, why?

  They reached the clinic and pushed through into the waiting room. Knowing the sheriff wasn’t done with him yet, Logan paused and turned to the other man. “I’ll head back to the city after I doctor her wound. Get myself put in protective custody.” Technically, it would be HFH protection, but the sheriff didn’t need to know that. The Investigations Division tried to keep a low profile to the non-medical types. “I’ll make it real obvious I’m going, so there won’t be any question in the minds of Viggo’s goons.”

  The sheriff considered for a moment, then nodded. “It’s probably best if you leave.” Logan didn’t think they were talking about the shooter anymore. Jimmy’s quick glance to the stairway confirmed the suspicion, as did his next words. “Sam doesn’t need any more drama in her life.”

  Logan didn’t care. He couldn’t care. But he found himself asking, “What drama?”

  “Her mother up and left when she was in grade school, said she couldn’t live in such a pissant town married to the local sheriff. Sam’s daddy raised her, but damned if she hasn’t paired off with a couple of tough guys just like him except for one thing—they don’t treat her right.” Jimmy shot him a sidelong glance. “I wouldn’t be telling you this if I hadn’t seen the way you two were looking at each other in the woods.”

  Logan remembered the moment. It was burned in his brain. Under his skin. When he’d pushed her up against that tree, the man in him had howled at the feel of soft curves and the smell of warm woman even as the undercover operative in him had identified her as friend, not foe. He could have moved away sooner, but he hadn’t wanted to.