Under Threat by B.J. Daniels (reading the story of the .TXT) 📕

coming, Natalie jumped when the shot rang out. Ranger Cooper was back in the truck in the blink of an eye, and Natalie glanced at the store where the two men had disappeared from the windowed doors. No doubt looking for another exit.

“That’ll buy us some time,” Ranger Cooper muttered, zooming out of the parking lot without so much as buckling his seat belt.

“What about those police officers? The cashier?”

He merely nodded into the distance. “Hear that?”

She didn’t at first, but after a few seconds she could make out sirens.

“Backup,” he said, his eyes focused on the road, his hands tight on the wheel. “Since the guys fought back, they can arrest them. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t more tails on us. We have to be vigilant. I want you to keep your eyes peeled. Anything seems suspicious, you mention it. I don’t care how silly it sounds. We can’t be too careful now.”

Natalie gripped the handle of the door with one hand, pressed the other, in a fist, to her stomach.

She was in so far over her head she almost laughed. She knew Ranger Cooper wouldn’t appreciate that, and she was a little afraid if she started laughing, it’d turn into crying soon enough.

She was too tough for that. Too determined. No more crying. No more shaking. No more panic. If they had bad guys to face down, she was at least going to pull her weight.

Because if she did, if they could get through all this, Gabby might be on the other side. Everything she’d been working for over the past eight years.

Yeah, no more panic. She had a sister to save.

Chapter 4

Vaughn didn’t know if he trusted how relatively easy it had been to fool the tail. Or the fact another hadn’t taken its place. All in all, he didn’t understand what that tail had been trying to accomplish, and without knowing...

Frustrated, he scanned the road again. The Guadalupe Mountains loomed in the distance of an arid landscape. The hardscrabble desert stretched out for miles, the craggy, spindly peaks of the Guadalupes offering the only respite to endless flat.

The cabin was still forty-five minutes away, and they were the only car on this old desert highway. If he had a tail, it was a much better one.

He flicked a glance at Torres. Thinking about her as a last name helped things. He could think of her as a partner, as just a person he had to work with. Not a complicated mystery of a woman.

The only problem was, he didn’t trust her as far as he could throw her, and that was the key to any partnership.

She sat in the passenger seat, her eyes still too big, her hands still clenched too tight. Her olive skin tone had paled considerably, but she’d gotten control of her shaking.

“You did good,” he found himself saying, out of nowhere. She had done good for a civilian, but he had no idea why he was praising her. What the hell was the point of that?

“I just did what you told me to do.”

“Exactly.”

She rolled her eyes and shook her head. “You really are a piece of work, Ranger Cooper.”

“Not everyone could have gotten through that, Ms. Torres. Some people freeze, some people cry, some people...” Why was he explaining this to her? If she didn’t want to believe she’d done a good thing, what did he care? But his mouth just kept going. “There’s a lot of pressure when you’re under a threat, and the smartest thing you can do is listen to the person who has the coolest head. You did that. You made good choices and had good instincts.”

“Well, thank you.” She blew out a breath, and he noted that the hands she’d had in fists loosened incrementally.

“I wish I didn’t know just how much I can stand up in the face of a threat,” she muttered.

“Unfortunately, that was only the beginning.”

“You’re a constant comfort, Ranger Cooper.”

She fell silent for a few moments, and he thought maybe they could make it all the way to the cabin without having any more of the discussion, certainly not any more of him telling her she’d done well. But she began to fidget. The kind of fidgeting that would lead to questioning.

It appeared that whatever nerves or fear that had kept Ms. Torres from interrogating him about what was going on had been eradicated or managed.

“Who’s after us? And why? What do I have to do with any of this?” she asked, thankfully sounding more exasperated than scared.

Scared tended to pull at that do-gooder center of him. He tried to focus on cases rather than people. But he could get irritated with exasperation. Why couldn’t she just trust him to keep her safe and leave it at that?

But he knew that she wouldn’t, and he had been given permission to share certain details with her.

Considering he still didn’t trust this woman, he wasn’t about to give her really important details.

He focused on the road, the flat, unending desert ahead of him. “You were in the interrogation room when Herman talked.”

“He didn’t even say anything that was any kind of incrimination. Certainly nothing that I would understand to be able to tell anyone. And I ruined your interrogation. They should be sending me flowers, not...fire.”

The corner of his lip twitched as if...as if he wanted to smile. Which was very...strange. But the fact she owned up to ruining the interrogation, while also making a little bit of a joke in what had to be a very scary situation for her, he appreciated that. He almost admired it. God knew he didn’t make light of much of anything.

“In all likelihood, they don’t know what exactly was said,” Vaughn told her. Nothing about his tone was self-deprecating or light, which he never would have noticed if not for her. “All it took was the knowledge that he was interrogated, and that we started looking into the name he mentioned. When you’re mixed up