LITMIR.BIZ

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her head. The hairs on his nape prickled. It was too quiet. Why weren’t the birds chattering?

      “Whoa, girl.” Wondering if his subject had doubled back, he realized he’d just made a rookie’s mistake. Damn.

      Tugging on the reins, he nudged the mare’s sides with his heels, sending her quickly backward. Simultaneously he slid the Heckler & Koch .45 from his holster and swung it upward. Adrenaline cut through his gut when he saw a pair of dirty sneakers dangling from the branch of a lodgepole pine ten feet up.

      “I’m a police officer.” He backed Brandywine to a safer distance. “Show me your hands.”

      Two hands emerged, dirt-streaked but empty nonetheless.

      “Come on down out of that tree, ma’am.”

      Barely visible from the ground, she was perched precariously on a branch. Jake craned his neck to get a better look at her, hoping to gauge her frame of mind. The instant he made eye contact, the blood stalled in his veins. He’d never seen eyes that color. An intriguing mix of violet and midnight spun into velvet as soft as the mountain sky. Her hair was a jumble of brown streaked with blond. It fell in disarray over her shoulders, each strand curling as tight as a spring, too wild and unusual to be anything but natural.

      Jake upheld his earlier opinion that she didn’t look like an escaped convict. The photograph the D.O.C. official had shown them that morning didn’t begin to do this lovely creature justice. From all appearances, neither did the psychological profile. She looked more rational than some people he’d run into in these parts. She even seemed a tad embarrassed at having been caught up in that tree. But, of course, she was the only blonde in prison grays around. Sitting ten feet above the ground on the branch of a lodgepole pine, she fit the bill.

      “Ma’am, I’m a deputy sheriff with the Chaffee County Sheriff’s Department. I’d like for you to climb down before you get hurt,” he said. “Right now.”

      “How do I know you’re really a cop?”

      Her voice drifted down to him like smoke. Her accent held a hint of Appalachia. Jake wondered how in the world this lovely young woman had gotten herself into such terrible trouble with the law.

      Unclipping his badge from his belt, he held it up for her to see. “Jake Madigan, Chaffee County Sheriff’s Office. Come on down. Now.”

      He heard her sigh, then watched as she slid her feet along the branch, and moved toward the main trunk. “Okay. I’m coming. Just…wait a second. And put that gun away, will you? They make me nervous, especially when they’re pointed at me.”

      Jake held the gun steady. “Be careful,” he said.

      “Like you care.”

      He arched a brow. “Well, I’d hate to have to haul you all the way back to Buena Vista with you screaming your head off because you broke your ankle jumping out of a gosh-darned tree.”

      “Believe me, mister, at this point in my life a broken ankle would be the least of my problems.”

      He wasn’t going to argue with that; she was definitely in serious trouble. Jake dismounted and ground-tied Brandywine. He looked up to see the woman set both feet on a lower branch. The branch would have been strong enough to support her weight—if it hadn’t been pecked full of holes by a persistent woodpecker. “Ma’am, you don’t want to put your weight on that branch.”

      “Don’t tell me how to climb, cowboy. I’ve been climbing trees since I was three years old.”

      “That may be true, ma’am, but—”

      “I know what I’m do—”

      The branch snapped with an audible crack! The woman yelped once, then crashed through a dozen smaller branches on her way down. Jake barely had time to holster his sidearm when a blur of blond hair and prison grays tumbled down and hit the ground with a thud hard enough to make his own spine ache.

      “Easy,” he said, approaching her. “Just be still a moment.”

      Lying sprawled on her side, she made an inaudible sound that sounded suspiciously like a curse, but she didn’t move.

      Oh, hell. Just what he needed—an injured, obstinate and pretty-as-sin prisoner to haul down the mountain. What the hell was he doing volunteering for this stuff when he could be at home shoveling horse manure?

      Jake knelt, set his hands firmly against her shoulder, trying not to notice when a mass of curly blond hair swept over his hand. “You all right?”

      A grunt emanated from beneath that mass of hair. “Just let me…catch my…breath.”

      “Can you move your toes for me?”

      He looked down a stretch of leg that seemed to go on forever, saw her toes move beneath the canvas of her sneaker. “Yeah,” she said.

      “What about your fingers?”

      She wiggled her fingers. “Wow, that really hurt.”

      Jake didn’t think she was seriously hurt. But his EMT training—and the ever-present threat of lawsuits against police departments by disgruntled suspects—told him it was always wise to rule out the serious stuff first. “Roll over for me, okay?”

      Grunting with the effort, she rolled slowly onto her back. “Ow. Oh, Jeez.”

      Jake’s heart rate spiked when he found himself looking down into violet eyes framed by thick, black lashes and a whole lot of attitude he had absolutely no desire to deal with. He’d had his fill of women with attitude and didn’t much like the idea of another helping—especially the con and liar variety.

      “Anything hurt?” he asked.

      “My hip hurts. And my elbow. Jeez, it feels like I landed on a rock.”

      “You just got the wind knocked out of you,” he said.

      “Yeah, well, I don’t know about you, but I just happen to be partial to keeping oxygen in my lungs. Makes breathing a hell of a lot easier.”

      “You should have thought of that before you climbed that tree. That was a damn fool stunt.”

      “For the record, I’m an expert on the damn fool bit, so you may as well get used to it.” Pulling a stick from her hair, she tossed it at him, then sat up.

      The prison-issue jumpsuit didn’t do much for her figure, but Jake couldn’t help but notice the body beneath it. She was long and athletic and the material fell over curves he was a fool for noticing at a moment like this.

      “What the hell were you doing up in that tree, anyway?” he asked.

      She gave him a that’s-a-really-stupid-question glare that was hot enough to melt snow. “Well, I wasn’t building a tree house.”

      “Running from the law isn’t very smart. You always get caught sooner or later.”

      “Yeah, that’s exactly what I was thinking when you rode by the first time.”

      Jake shoved down a rise of annoyance. He could do without the smart mouth. He could damn well do without the way he was responding to those eyes of hers. Eight years in the Marine Corps had taught him discipline, and he’d lived by that code ever since. Twelve years of law enforcement had taught him control, and he’d adopted that code into his personal life, as well. The ethics came from inside the man. Jake prided himself on all those things, characteristics that defined who he was. He wasn’t about to let a siren such as this lure him into the shallows so he could crash on the rocks and die a watery death.

      “Are you alone?” Jake stood and stepped back.

      She rolled her eyes. “You don’t think there’s anyone else stupid enough to go tromping through this godforsaken countryside for six hours with me, do you?”

      “Stand up,” he said.

      Grumbling, she struggled to her feet and

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