She followed his gaze and blanched. “Oh. I guess I should call 911.”
“You haven’t?” He swore and reached for his phone at his belt.
“I didn’t exactly have time.” She looked and sounded affronted.
Noah held up a finger. Once he had the promise of units on the way, he glanced around. Here the two of them were, out in the open. “Is he gone?”
“Yes. I think he must have seen you coming.”
“Shit,” he growled. “An SUV went flying by.”
“Silver?”
“That was it. Oh, hell. I didn’t pay any attention except to think he was driving too fast.”
“He?”
Noah shook his head. “No idea. I made an assumption.”
She told him what happened, not all in sequence, but he could see why.
“Your tire was shot out,” he realized, and she bit her lip and nodded.
“I didn’t know. I heard a sort of pop, but I thought I just had a flat, like maybe I’d hit a rock and the tire had split open or something. Do they do that anymore?” she asked as if it mattered. She didn’t wait for an answer. “I wasn’t going very fast because I’d already turned in here, but the drop is really steep.” She gulped. “It was hard to keep the car on the road.”
That tightened the tangle in his chest some more. “We’d better call your brother,” he said.
“Yes.” She sank back until she was leaning against the bumper again. “My phone.”
They discovered she was almost sitting on it. Noah rose to his feet while she dialed. She’d worn that sunny yellow suit today, the one that had inspired such an idiotic and uncharacteristic flight of fancy in him, and she was right—it was ruined. The sight of her sitting there in the dirt, her palms skinned and her face filthy and her mascara smudged, looking defeated as he’d never seen her, filled him with an unfamiliar fury he had no way to vent. He listened with half an ear to the brief conversation, his gaze moving over the car, noting the crumbled glass beneath the open door.
If he hadn’t decided to follow her out there…
She’d be dead.
The knowledge slammed into him, a kick to the chest that felt as if he’d been shot.
Not a single other vehicle had passed since he had pulled in. Her assailant—why not name him, Blake Ralston—would have had all the time in the world to finish her off.
When she started to struggle to her feet, he reached down to help her. She wasn’t wearing heels, he saw; she had changed to athletic shoes before she’d headed out on this expedition. The rusty red dirt coated the gray-and-white leather and mesh.
“It’s lucky you weren’t wearing heels,” he said hoarsely.
She looked at her feet as if she hadn’t noticed, but then she shook her head. “It wouldn’t have mattered. I was already out of the car when—um, when I think I saw the gun. I just…fell. And then I crawled.”
Churning with emotions he had no ability to decipher, Noah couldn’t help himself. He yanked her back into his arms, with no consideration for her fragile state. If she noticed, she didn’t protest. She leaned into him as if she belonged right there, resting against him. Was that a very distant siren? He didn’t care.
“Cait,” he said hoarsely.
She looked up, her eyes dark, and the power of all that rage, helplessness and tenderness overcame him.
He kissed her.
Not as gently as he should have. He nipped at her lips, rocked his until she opened her mouth and let him in. And then his tongue drove in, as if, God help him, he was claiming her.
She didn’t sag in his arms; she hugged him hard and responded with a ferocity to equal his. The kiss got deep and slick and hot. One of his hands closed over her ass and lifted her. She helped by rising on tiptoe and trying to climb him. He’d have laid her back on the hood of that car and hiked her skirt if…
His long-lost sense of self-preservation awoke with a jolt. The siren was screaming now. A blue-and-white police unit screeched to a stop at the head of the access road. His large SUV blocked some of the responding officers’ view, thank the Lord, but he needed to unpeel her body from his now.
No matter how fiercely his body protested the loss.