Chapter Two
Pain clamped on Hawk’s ass like a bear trap, and he hit the ground before his brain caught up with his body.
For one disoriented second he ran through every possibility. A bullet made the most sense, but there was no sound of a shot fired before the sharp pain hit.
Could be a knife blade, but someone would need to be a master thrower to strike a target at any distance let alone through this thick cover.
The better guess was that Sinead threw at him for his half-finished sentence accusing her of having an attitude.
Then the pain spread in a scorching heat across his muscle and up into his lower back.
Snake.
He’d grown up forty miles from here, and every summer of his childhood had come with the same warning drilled in by his grandfather—watch the rocky ground, watch the ridgelines, watch where you kneel.
Wyoming had fourteen species of snakes and only a couple worth losing sleep over.
But from his position on the ground with his heart already hammering from the firefight minutes earlier, Hawk wasn’t in a position to identify which kind of snake had just decided his ass was worth biting down on.
Training took over before panic could.
Heart rate down. Keep it low. Keep it slow.
Panic was the actual enemy here—more than the snake or the two dead men twenty yards back. If he let his pulse spike, he’d shorten his chances of survival.
An elevated heart rate meant faster circulation, and faster circulation meant venom moving through his system quicker than his body could compensate. He had to buy time to get out of the forest.
He forced his breathing into an even rhythm. Four breaths in. Four breaths out. He lay down flat, letting gravity keep the bitten site lower than his heart as he willed himself to stay calm, stay calm, stay calm.
Sinead had frozen in her tracks, and she stared at him, eyes wide and face pale. “What happened? Are you hit?”
“Rattlesnake.”
Her eyes flew wider, the whites circling the deep brown. “What should I do?”
“Don’t move.” His voice came out steadier than he expected given the circumstances. He raised his weapon and cocked it. “I need a clear shot.”
If he was going to survive, he needed the snake to find out if it really was a rattler or another species. His team would need to know which antivenom to treat him with.
He twisted, gun already up even though his arm felt heavier than it should. He squeezed off a shot at the shape a few feet from his boot.
The shot scraped the dirt, and the rattler recoiled, gathering itself for another strike.
Hawk’s vision blackened at the edges, and he told himself it wasn’t the venom causing his vision to tunnel.
It was the fact that he’d never once in his career missed a target—and now missed the most important one of his life.
In his peripheral, he saw a feminine hand. Suddenly, Sinead pulled the weapon out of his grip before he could protest.
She put the snake down in a single shot with an air of deadly calm, as though she’d been doing it her whole life.
The forest silenced, making it more obvious how fast his heart was pumping.
“You’re welcome.” Sinead crouched to check that the snake was dead before straightening.
Hawk swung his gaze from her to the snake and tried not to think about the numbness starting to crawl up his leg or the fact that an heiress in one-thousand-dollar hiking boots had just outshot him with his own sidearm.
Those boots cost more than my first truck.
He was losing it if he was noticing things like expensive boots.
“There’s antivenom at the ranch,” he said, mostly to himself, working out the logistics because that was the only thing keeping the panic at bay.
The ranch was closer than the hospital by at least twenty minutes on these back roads.
The therapy lodge had a clinic and a doctor on staff. If they moved fast—
Sinead crouched beside him, sweeping a look over his face. “You’re shaking.”
He wanted to say no wonder he missed the shot, but that would only sound like an excuse.
“Well, I just got bitten by a rattler.”
“Do you need me to suck out the poison?”
He stared at her. Suck the poison out of his ass?
“Definitely not.”
“It’s a legitimate question.”
“It hasn’t been medically recommended in decades. And just…no.”
She didn’t argue, which surprised him as much as two armed men following her had.
She stood and brushed the dirt from her knees with the same brisk efficiency she’d applied to pacing off her mysterious dig site minutes before. “What do you need me to do?”
“My truck. Bring it as close as you can.” He fished the keys from his front pocket and held them out.
Long brown hair swung forward, carrying a scent of fresh citrus as she leaned over him. Her fingers brushed over his palm as she took the keys. “Stay put.”
“Ms. Winthrop—”
“I’ll be right back.”
Though it was totally against his better judgement, she still gripped his weapon, and he knew she could shoot.
She turned and was gone, moving fast through the trees.
And he was on the ground with a numb ass cheek and thigh, two dead men and a rapidly swelling certainty that he just watched the last person on earth obligated to help him disappear into the Wyoming woods.
He lay there and ran the numbers of his next debriefing. One client who fired him mid-op. The same client then witnessed him getting bested by a fucking reptile.
Now here he was, flat on his stomach with venom working through his body that had survived two combat deployments and would apparently be taken out by a snake in front of the one civilian he’d been assigned to protect.
This would be, by a wide margin, the worst debrief of his career. With any luck, the Malone brothers wouldn’t want details.
The ridge had few trees, and he twisted to see where Sinead Winthrop had gone. Sweat ran down his back and soaked the band of his cowboy hat.
The noise of tires crunching over rock sounded close. His vision blurred, and he blinked to clear it as the truck rocked to a stop a few feet from him.
Sinead leaped from the driver’s seat and crouched next to him before he could get a word out. His throat was dry, but his mind was still surprisingly clear.
“Can you sit up?”
He rolled to his good hip and pushed to a stand. His ass was numb where the snake sunk its fangs, but he was able to shift his weight to one leg.
She reached out to steady him.
“If you will just get out of the way, I can walk.” His jaw was clenched.
“If you will only be honest, you’d admit you’ve been lying in the dirt planning your own funeral for at least five minutes. Let me help you.”
He didn’t have the energy to argue, mostly because what she said was accurate. She got a shoulder under his arm—stronger than her frame suggested—and half hauled, half walked him to the back door.
She folded him in with more competence than he expected from someone who, an hour ago, he’d assumed was frightened by a deer.
He collapsed on the back seat, one side of his body throbbing, and his pride in worse shape than his ass.
* * * * *
Sinead had the GPS pulled up on the dash, the blue line unspooling ahead of her through switchbacks. It wasn’t worse than her evening commute in Boston, but she did grip the wheel tighter.
Behind her, Hawk muttered directions she hadn’t asked for and didn’t need.
“Left up here. No—left, the actual left not—”
“I have the GPS, Mr. Hawk.”
“Left.”
“I’m taking a left.”
He fell quiet, and she used the reprieve to focus on the road, which narrowed to a trail barely wide enough for the big truck. Gravel gave way to washboard ruts that jolted the vehicle every few seconds and couldn’t feel good to her passenger.
She glanced in the rearview, checking on him, and found him paler than he’d been ten minutes before. Sweat stood out on his brow.
He lifted his head and caught her stare in the mirror. “This is a stick shift.” He said it like he’d offered a revelation. “Can you drive a stick?”
She almost laughed. The venom must really be working its way through the muscled bodyguard enough to scramble his memory enough to make him forget she’d driven the vehicle to the ridge to get him inside.
“Of course I can drive a stick.” She downshifted through a curve to prove it. “That’s all they have in Kenya.”
“Who said anything about Kenya?”
“When I was on safari in Kenya, a lion attacked my guide. I had to get him into the vehicle and drive him back to base camp myself. Manual transmission, no power steering, and a very upset lion somewhere behind us the whole way.”
A pause, long enough that she checked the mirror again.
“That sounds made-up.” His voice had gone tighter around the edges, breath shallower between words than it had been a minute ago, and she felt a small unwelcome twist of worry.
“I thought strong men always suffered in silence.”
“I’m allowed to question your safari credentials while actively dying.”
“You’re not going to die, Mr. Hawk.”
She dialed Black Heart Security’s number and put it on speaker without slowing down, both hands locked on the wheel through the next bone-jarring rut.
“This is Sinead Winthrop. I’m five minutes from the ranch. Your man’s hurt—we need medical staff ready when we get there.”
Willow’s voice projected into the vehicle. “What kind of injury?” Her voice sharpened, all the warmth from their earlier exchange replaced as she went into triage mode. “Knife? Gunshot? How much blood are we talking?”
“Snake bite.”
A beat of silence on the line. “Where?”
Sinead glanced once at the rearview. Hawk had his head tipped back against the seat, jaw set with pain.
“Don’t tell her,” he grated out.
“She’s going to find out anyway.”
He looked like he was bracing for her response. She decided he deserved it, mostly because he’d spent the last mile questioning her lion story.
“His ass.”
Willow laughed—a real, surprised bark of a laugh, the kind that escaped before she could stop it. Then she tried to smother it into something more composed.
“I can hear you,” Hawk announced from the back seat.
“Sorry.” Willow didn’t sound remotely sorry. “Pregnancy brain. I could have sworn I hit mute.”
“I’m sending pictures of the two men I neutralized. Get someone out to collect the bodies,” Hawk told her.
Sinead didn’t know if he was trying to preserve his ego by shifting the focus from his ass to the protection he’d provided, but his hands shook as he brought up his phone and thumbed the screen.
“Copy that,” Willow said.
Sinead took the last curve faster than she probably should have, and the ranch gate rose up ahead of them, the heavy metal already swinging open. The road to the ranch seemed endless, but in no time, she pulled the truck to a hard stop in front of a log building.
A cluster of people were already waiting, a stretcher between two of them like they did this every week. Maybe they did.
They had Hawk out of the back before she’d even cut the engine. Two men hauled him up with brisk efficiency and flipped him face down onto the stretcher. Hawk grunted—a sound of protest or just pain.
She moved to the back of the truck and collected the dead snake. Following at a slight distance, she carried the dead snake by the tail, slightly held away from her body.
They entered a side door and moved fast down a corridor. They carried Hawk into an oversized, sterile room, and she was surprised to see an actual infirmary.
She stood off to the side, letting them work. The men who carried him in laid the stretcher on the bed and a man in scrubs rushed to Hawk’s side. They surrounded him as they stripped off his boots and cut away his jeans to see the damage.
Through the people crowded around him, she saw Hawk covered in a sheet, lying there and glaring.
She stepped up beside one of the men who carried Hawk in. “I’m Sinead Winthrop. I brought Hawk to the ranch, and this”—she held up the creature in her hand—”is the snake that bit him.”
A man in a tan Stetson, with eyes that looked as if he’d seen every variety of disaster, took the snake from her outstretched palm. He laid it on a second table and leaned over it.
Another man joined him, and both examined the snake. The first man’s expression went carefully neutral in a way that made her stomach drop.
Then it cracked into amusement.
“This is a bullsnake.” He sounded almost apologetic as he lifted it by the tail, holding it up for everyone to see.
“Same coloring as the rattler—browns, blotches. The whole look. Gets mistaken for one constantly, especially in rocky areas.” He paused and sent Hawk a look like he was breaking bad news. “It’s not even venomous.”
She bit down hard on the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing, but that only made it sound like she’d choked.
A man with gray eyes turned to look at Hawk. “Two.”
Hawk turned his head. “Two what?” His voice was muffled against the stretcher padding.
“Two fang marks.” The man didn’t even try to hide his grin. “In your ass.”