Avenged

  It would be so easy to drift away. That was what my best friend had done, even though she had a little boy she was leaving behind. It was what my sister had done, even though she knew I wouldn’t be able to handle it and that our parents would inevitably blame me for her taking her own life. It seemed so much easier to let go when hanging on required so much more effort.

  An owl hooted from somewhere overhead and somewhere in the darkness there was a lonely howl that had to belong to a wolf that broke through the eerie silence. It was a reminder that you were either predator or prey and I wasn’t ever going to be the type of woman that let herself be hunted down. I was a fighter through and through—which meant I had to put the effort into hanging on and getting up. I refused to let go of anything.

  When my best friend died because she chose to be in the wrong place at the wrong time with absolutely the wrong man, I did everything I could to find her son the best home possible. I wanted to keep him—I loved him like he was my own—but with my past and the glaring mistakes in it, there was no way the state was going to let me do that. They put him in foster care, ready to call it a day, but I was determined that Hyde would have better. I tracked down his father, a giant, bearded badass my bestie had indulged in an illicit one-night stand with, and sprang the news on him that he was a daddy. Of course, I checked the guy out before telling him he had a son. I was pleased to learn that, despite a few hiccups in the past, he was a standup guy, more than willing to give his son a good home.

  I also refused to let go of the fact that my baby sister was no longer with me. Xanthe had always been special, a sweet soul who was too trusting and too soft. She was precious and delicate, always a little too fragile and breakable for the reality of the world around her. My entire family did their best to protect her, to shelter her, but Xanthe was like any other twenty-something and she wanted to live. She wanted to experience love and relationships. She wanted to mess up and try again. She wanted to be normal…but the fact of the matter was, she wasn’t wired the way the rest of us were. I did my best to protect her while helping her live as normal a life as possible, but that was a full-time job and there were times I couldn’t be there. My parents always accused me of encouraging her, of enabling her whims. They swore I was going to be the reason she ended up hurt. I told them she needed professional help, that there was something chemically wrong in her brain. They insisted she was nothing more than a special snowflake that needed to be coddled and loved.

  There wasn’t any time left for either of those theories because Xanthe was gone, her life stolen away too soon at her own hand. She fell in love, fixated on a man, couldn’t let it go, and when he left, she decided she couldn’t live without him…even though he’d never encouraged her in any way. She was shattered, fundamentally broken, and forever lost to me.

  Now I was bleeding out on the side of a mountain in Surrender, Montana. I’d taken off minutes after the funeral so I could find Xanthe’s mystery man and tell him what happened when men weren’t careful with delicate hearts. He probably didn’t care and it wouldn’t change a thing, but for my own peace of mind, I had to say something…had to take a stand for my sister. Her death needed to be avenged and the only way I could do that was to confront the MacKenzie that broke her heart. I didn’t have his first name…just his last…but in a town the size of Surrender, I figured it couldn’t be that hard to track him down. I’d say what I had to say, make my point, get my own kind of vengeance, and go back to Denver ready to face my parents’ wrath. After all, I was the one who’d encouraged Xanthe to get out and get a job so she wouldn’t be so melancholy and depressed, so dependent on everyone else for what she needed.

  I flipped over to my hands and knees, swearing into the darkness as my left shoulder gave out and left me face-planted in the snow. It hurt worse than anything I’d ever felt before and there was no way I was going to be able to use it. The burn made my eyes cross and had me sucking frigid air through my teeth. I lifted myself up onto my knees and squinted into the shadowy forest as I heard a twig snap and the sound of heavy footfalls. My breaths were suddenly annoyingly loud as they wheezed in and out of me.

  I had no idea what was going to come out of the surrounding trees, but my instincts told me it wasn’t going to be something friendly and eager to help.

  I was right.

  Around a tree twice as big as the one that was holding up my SUV stepped a man. A big man. A burly man. A dark man. An angry man.

  He had a shotgun grasped firmly in his hands and a scowl on his face that was easy to read, despite the darkness and the distance that separated us.

  The lower half of his face was covered by a dark beard, but his equally dark hair was cut in a style that didn’t match his mountain man look. The sides were cut super short with a severe part shaved into a harshly defined and trendy part. The top was longer and slicked up and back in a style that looked like it should be in a watch ad of a high-end fashion magazine. There was also an obnoxiously large gold ring on his middle finger. I could see the glint of diamonds off it as he moved several steps closer to me. The ring was seriously at odds with his heavy canvas jacket and worn jeans. His boots looked expensive but had heavy tread and were the right kind of footwear for trekking up a mountainside in the middle of the night. I wasn’t sure why, but they seemed out of place. He seemed out of place.

  “Are you okay?” His voice was deep and sounded extra loud in the silence surrounding us.

  I lowered my head and couldn’t keep back a strangled laugh. “Do I look okay?” He was probably my only option for rescue and I wanted to bite my tongue after the waspish remark. Something about him and his mix-and-match appearance had the hairs on the back of my neck rising.

  “How not okay are you?” He sounded faintly amused and if I’d had working use of my arm, I would have flipped him off.

  “Dislocated shoulder, possible concussion, various nicks and cuts…I’m pretty sure the top of my head is sliced open from when the roof caved in because I’m still bleeding. I don’t think it’s anything fatal but I’m an insurance adjuster, not a doctor.”

  His gaze shifted to the mangled SUV and he let out a low whistle. “I heard the impact from down at my cabin. I figured you would have rolled all the way to the bottom of the mountain. I was planning on finding a body.”

  I lifted an eyebrow and winced as it made my whole head throb. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  He smirked and lifted the rifle he was carrying to his shoulder so he could stroke a hand through his beard. “Can you walk? I’ll call the accident in to the sheriff but the roads are bad so I doubt anyone will be able to get up here until sometime tomorrow or the next day. They’re shutting the highway down, no way in, no way out for the next few days. You must have been on the road right when they made the call.”

  I groaned and put a shaking hand to my head as the rough noise made everything throb. “Lucky me.”

  He took a few steps closer and I squinted up in the darkness so I could really see him. He was alarmingly attractive in a surprisingly polished way. The dark hair led me to believe he would have dark eyes as well, but they weren’t. They were a clear and stunning shade of gray. I also had dark hair and light-colored eyes, so I knew how striking the combination could be. People, mostly men trying to get in my pants, complimented my coloring all the time.

  He took my breath away. In my pain-addled haze, I also noticed he had a scar that bisected one of his eyebrows, another one off center on his bottom lip, and one that made me gasp because it started below his ear, ran all the way down the side of his neck and across until it disappeared into the collar of his coat. It was raised, still pinkish in color, and brutal looking. It also looked very, very recent. It looked like someone had tried to slit the man’s throat and that meant he was more than likely not a man I wanted to be alone in the middle of the woods with, especially if the roads were closing and there was no way for help to get to me. Being isolated with a man that someone hated enough that they tried to k
ill him was not a wonderful option. Too bad I didn’t have many others to choose from at the moment.

  “So, can you?” Now he sounded impatient and his thick eyebrows pulled into a frown over those amazing eyes.

  “Can I what?”

  “Walk? We need to get you out of here and someplace warm. My cabin is a few hundred yards south, so I’ll take you there until I can get someone from Surrender up the mountain to collect you.”

  My trepidation must have shown on my face because his scowl deepened as he growled, “What are your other options, Snow White? You gonna stay out here and freeze to death?”

  I lifted a hand to my forehead, where blood continued to trickle over my brow. “I might bleed to death before that.”

  With a resigned sigh, I did my best to climb to my feet. He didn’t offer to help, which annoyed me, even though I wouldn’t have taken him up on it. Once I had my feet under me, I lifted my chin so I could look at him with pride and defiance…only as soon as I was upright, everything began to swim and blur together in a nauseating swirl. I gasped, putting my hand out to catch myself as I pitched forward, everything fading to black and slipping away.

  The last things I remember were rough hands wrapping around my upper arms and the bite of that big-ass ring as the cold of the metal seeped through the wet fabric of my shirt and into my skin.

  He didn’t offer to help me up…but he refused to let me fall.

  Chapter 2

  Ben

  I called her Snow White and I wasn’t far off the mark.

  Hair, almost as dark as my own, trapped innocent snowflakes as her head dangled over my arm where I held her unresponsive body clasped to my chest. Her eyelashes were an obsidian fan that cast a shadow on her milky cheeks. I would bet good money that her lips were normally a ruby red, but at the moment they were tinged blue and tinted red with streaks of blood. Her eyes, when they narrowed and challenged me, were the clearest, deepest blue I had ever seen. I thought nothing on Earth could rival the massive, untouched Montana sky in blueness, but this injured woman’s gaze won the prize hands down. Even though she was currently covered in blood and badly shaken from the accident, I could tell she was attractive in a way that might prove to be distracting. When she fell into my arms, literally, I got a handful of soft curves and toned flesh that let me know everything she was working with under her layers of clothing was just as nice as what I could see in the dense darkness surrounding us.

  She was a looker, one that had no business being out in the middle of nowhere with a guy like me. One would think she was lucky to have survived such a horrific crash. They wouldn’t be saying that if they knew I was the only person available to ride to her rescue.

  She might be Snow White, but there was no way in hell I was anything close to Prince Charming, or any fairytale prince, for that matter. Hell, I wasn’t even the Huntsman that showed mercy and refused to end an innocent life. I was more along the lines of the Big Bad Wolf. I lay in wait for my prey, ready to pounce, all while wearing a civilized front that very few could see through. I had sharp teeth and even sharper claws and I’d been using both for as long as I could remember.

  The old me would eat this girl up without a second thought. I would have left her to her fate in the snow. I was impressed as hell with the way she popped up to her feet, with all types of adorable indignation and sexy pride radiating off of her, even though she was obviously hurting and about to fall over.

  I was the old me as recently as this morning.

  I was the old me until I looked in the mirror after my shower and finally took the time to examine the still-healing slice across my throat. In a rare moment of clarity, I realized how close I had come to meeting my maker. The wound had been there, healing for months, but today was the day I really saw it and realized I no longer wanted to be the kind of man that deserved to have his throat slit open every time he was distracted and not on the defense. There was no way I would have a halo waiting for me on the other side; I had known that for a long time. It was always bound to be horns and a tail for me because I’d been actively courting my own corner in hell for as long as I could remember. I was the guy that had waterfront property on the lake of fire but I no longer wanted to watch the world burn. Those flames got too close and they were leaving scars on more places than my neck.

  I wasn’t a guy that deserved a second chance.

  I wasn’t a guy that deserved redemption.

  I wasn’t a guy that deserved forgiveness.

  I wasn’t a guy that deserved compassion or pity.

  I wasn’t a guy that should have been rewarded with a shot to redo and retry everything I had done wrong…but I was a guy that was given that shot. And for whatever reason this morning, while I was looking in the mirror, I told myself it was time to stop squandering it.

  I could be the guy that deserved forgiveness. I just had to work at it…harder than anyone else ever had. That was why I caught the pretty little brunette before she hit the ground. It was also why I bundled her up in my coat and tucked her matted and bloody hair into my wool beanie that was in my pocket before trekking the forty-five minutes over uneven and rough terrain back to the secluded cabin I had been calling home for the last four months.

  It was like the universe, or maybe the man down below, had heard my morning vow and put the perfect test in my path. Was I really ready to be a standup guy, a decent human being, a man who actually gave a shit about someone or something other than myself? I couldn’t answer that question just yet, but the unconscious woman in my arms sure had good timing. If she’d come crashing down the mountain yesterday, I wouldn’t have lifted a finger to help. Yesterday, I was still the old me and that guy was a real fucking bastard. That guy absolutely deserved to have his happy ass dropped a million miles from nowhere, cut off from everything he had ever known. He undeniably deserved being stripped of everything he had fought and killed for. That guy deserved to have no power and no prestige.

  That guy also deserved to have his throat slashed and the shit beat out of him while he rotted in prison.

  The new me, hopefully, wasn’t going to have to watch his back every second of every day. The new me was going to keep his nose clean, make good choices, and fake being an average Joe and a good Samaritan. The new me wasn’t going to put himself in situations where both the good guys and the bad guys wanted him dead. The new me sounded like the kind of guy I used to shake down and shake up for my old boss. I wanted to kick my own ass and I hadn’t even been the new me for a full twenty-four hours yet.

  The babe in my arms let out a little moan and shifted. I had to tighten my hold on her and fight for my balance on the slick and slippery ground under my boots. I was a city boy through and through. When the US Marshals dumped me in this burg that I couldn’t even find on a map, it was the first time I’d seen anything as green as the forest of trees around my cabin. The trees where I was from had broken limbs and rotten roots. They were brown and twisted, gray and grungy, just like everything else in the Point. It was the first time I could see stars because here they weren’t obscured by smog and pollution. And it was definitely the first time I had ever experienced snow. The Marshals wanted me somewhere remote, somewhere that I would see anyone coming from miles and miles away. They said they wanted me somewhere secure because I was such a valuable asset and everyone and their brother back home thought I was six feet under. They didn’t want me pulling an Elvis and coming back from the dead over and over again. I was smart enough to know they wanted me somewhere that I couldn’t cause any trouble. Presumed dead or not, I had a lot of connections that I could use to create chaos, so this was a prison, albeit one with a much prettier view than the one they’d sprung me from.

  I couldn’t be more of a fish out of water if I tried. I was used to tailored suits and Italian leather shoes, not denim, flannel, and boots with heavy tread. I liked expensive cologne and fancy food. Back home, I drove a sports car that hugged the road and cost a small fortune. Here I had a four-by-four with
snow tires and a winch on the front of it. I’d also never had a beard in my life. I wasn’t even sure I could grow one, but decided I should try. Within the first few weeks of getting dumped on the side of the mountain I had a face full of fuzz that made me look like an entirely different man. The locals knew I didn’t belong, but strangers like this girl and the tourists I encountered never gave me a second look. I was just another big, bearded mountain man living life rough and wild. I was forgettable…something I had never been. Something I had sold my soul to the highest bidder to assure I never would be.

  The little tart in my arms twitched and those heart-stealing baby blues flickered open as she let out another moan of pain. She needed a doctor and it pissed me off that I couldn’t get her to one with the roads being impassable. I could patch her up street style but that gash on the top of her head and the dislocated shoulder were going to require more care than I could give.

  “You hanging in there, Snow White?” I was huffing and puffing, partly because the cold was bitter and sharp. It hurt to breathe. I was also not used to hiking through the snow with a load. Every few steps I had to fight to keep my balance so that I didn’t drop the woman on her delightfully rounded backside. Back in the city, I was the guy that gave the orders to the younger guys who did the dirty work. I clearly needed to hit a gym and start running a few miles if I was going to get back to my previous fighting form. New me needed to get his ass back in shape.

  “Echo.”

  The word was mumbled and slurred, so I wasn’t sure what she was saying. I frowned down at her and tightened my hold as I ducked to avoid a low-hanging limb. “You’re hearing an echo? You did hit your head pretty hard.” All I could hear was my own labored breathing, her occasional whimpering, and the rustle of the wildlife we disturbed.