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

You’re seriously having these thoughts about that woman?

He opened the door, forcing himself to focus on the task ahead and nothing else. He used the door as a shield and scanned the front yard. Since the house was nestled into one of the swells of land that wasn’t rocky mountain, the land in front of the house stretched far and wide. There’d be no place to hide within shooting range, and as he scanned the land around them, he didn’t see anything that might be people or the evidence of them.

The problem was going to be the back of the house. There was a small yard between the desert and the building, and walking back there would prove even trickier without having any kind of cover.

A piercing howl of a coyote echoed in the quickly cooling desert air. He always liked listening to them, but his sister had said they were as creepy as hell.

Apparently Ms. Torres agreed with his sister because her hand clamped around his arm. “That’s it. That’s the sound,” she said, her voice little more than a squeaky whisper.

Vaughn immediately relaxed. Dropping his gun to his side, he turned to face her. Her long and slender fingers still curled around his forearm. He glanced at her hand momentarily, not sure why such a simple touch was dancing over him like...like anticipation.

There was nothing to anticipate here. So that feeling needed to go.

“Why’d you put your gun down? What is it?” She looked at him with those wide, scared eyes, and he couldn’t help but smile. She blinked, clearly confused.

“It’s coyotes. We have them here, and they occasionally get close to the house and do the howling. But it’s just an animal. Nothing to be afraid of.”

She looked horrified, and for a second he thought he was going to have to give a lecture about how coyotes weren’t dangerous and there were far bigger things to worry about, but her hand dropped and she closed her eyes. Not fear etching over her face, but a pink-tinged embarrassment.

“I feel like such an idiot. Coyotes. That’s it?”

“You’ve never heard a coyote before?”

She heaved a sigh. “I’ve only ever lived in Houston and Austin. In the city. Animal noises are not my expertise. It didn’t sound...howly.” She shook her head, disgusted. With herself, he imagined.

“Sometimes they’ll sound like a big group howl, sometimes it’s not quite so delineated, but it’s definitely coyote.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said, all too sincerely, all too...worked up for an honest mistake. It made him itchy and uncomfortable, and irritably needing to soothe it away.

“There’s nothing to be sorry about. It was an honest mistake. Unless you’re apologizing for something else?”

Her mouth firmed. “No, I’m not apologizing for anything else. I... You...” Her eyebrows drew together, and those dark eyes studied him, some emotion he couldn’t recognize in their depths. “But it was an animal, and nothing, and... You aren’t mad that I woke you up and got you into police mode when it was nothing?”

“Of course not. You heard an unknown noise and you reacted exactly as you should have. Exactly as I told you to. Why on earth would I be mad?”

“I don’t understand you at all, Ranger Cooper. All the things I expect you to be hard on me about, you’re not, but the things I don’t expect you to be hard on me about, you are.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t expect either.”

She laughed at that. A bright, loud laugh, and it was a shock how much the sound of someone else’s laughter surprised him. When was the last time he’d heard anyone laugh? Sarcastic laughter, sure. All the time at work. But he had been so focused on getting somewhere in the cases connected to The Stallion there hadn’t been any banter at work, he hadn’t had any kind of social life and he hadn’t relaxed at all.

It was only now, here, in the middle of the desert and mountains, with this strange woman’s laughter ringing in his ears that he realized any of that. A very uncomfortable and unsettling realization prompted by a very uncomfortable and unsettling woman.

Maybe that was appropriate, all in all.

“You should call me Vaughn.” He had no idea where that instruction came from. Why on earth would she call him Vaughn? He should be nothing to her but Ranger Cooper.

And yet something about that smile and laugh made him... Well, stupid apparently. “Let’s head back inside.”

“Your name is Vaughn?”

“No, I’m lying,” he grumbled.

She laughed again as they stepped inside, and he found himself smiling. The last thing he should be feeling now was any kind of lightness, and yet that little exchange had done exactly that—lightened him. It had to be the sleep exhaustion.

“That’s a very unconventional name for a very conventional man.”

“How do you know I’m conventional?”

“Oh, please. You can’t possibly not be conventional. You showed up at that fire at three thirty in the morning all neat and unwrinkled. You don’t believe in hypnotism. You were nothing but...” She pulled her shoulders up to her ears and pretended to tense all over. “Like a tight ball of contained, by-the-book energy. Everything about you is conventional.”

“Ms. Torres, trust me when I say that you do not know everything about me.”

Her eyes met his, and he recognized that little weird energy that passed between them. He wished he didn’t, but there was no denying the flirtatious undertone to all of this. He should stop it immediately.

But she held his gaze and she smiled. “Natalie. You should call me Natalie, remember?”

That uncomfortable and unwelcome attraction dug deeper into his gut. The kind of deeper that led a man to make foolish mistakes and stupid decisions. The kind he knew better than to indulge in.

But it was also the kind that tended to override that knowledge.

Natalie’s breathing became shallow for a whole different reason than it had the past few days. Looking at Vaughn, because he said