Page 2 of Lone Star Christmas Mission

Kayla’s house was way out in the sticks on acres of ranch land jammed with trees. Some smack dab right outside the windows. That moonlight was spearing through the winter-bare branches and creating a sort of spooky-assed shadow puppetshow of skeletal fingers reaching out for him. Those shadow fingers skittered and snaked over the walls, bed, and floor.

Bringing up his gun and steeling himself for an attack from the kidnapper, Cash stepped into the bedroom and immediately whirled to his right when he heard the muffled sound.

“Hell,” he spat out.

Kayla.

She was slumping sideways in the doorway of a walk-in closet that was pitch black. Cash couldn’t tell if there was anyone behind her. But he had no trouble seeing her face. The fear.

Oh, and that blasted blood.

Along with it being splattered pretty much everywhere on her clothes and hands, it was streaming down the side of her head and smeared into her blonde hair. She had a strip of duct tape over her mouth, and there were plastic cuffs securing her wrists. Despite the cuffs, she was holding something.

A Bowie knife.

The blade was glistening with more blood.

Cash hurried to her, dropping down on his knees beside her and pulling off that tape from her mouth while he continued to keep watch around them. “You’re hurt,” he blurted.

She muttered his name, and the tears spilling down her cheek cut through the blood. “I knew you’d come,” she muttered on a rise of breath. There was both hope and desperate worry in that whisper.

Of course, he’d come. He would have literally walked through fire and anything else to get to her.

“Who did this to you?” he asked, easing the knife from her grip so he could use it to free her from the plastic cuffs.

Kayla was trembling when she tipped her head to the pitch darkness behind her.Shit. Was the kidnapper right here, hiding and waiting to strike?

Hoping he wasn’t hurting her more than she already was, Cash took hold of Kayla’s arm and dragged her out of the closet doorway and into the bedroom, positioning himself between her and whatever monster was inside.

With the fury of a million fires raging through him, he felt around the closet wall for the light switch, knowing that he was destroying what was essentially a crime scene, and he didn’t care. Cash had one goal—to deal with the sonofabitch who’d done this to Kayla.

He finally located the switch, flipping it so hard that it probably came close to breaking, and the overhead light flared on, blinding him at first. But not for long. His vision quickly adjusted, and what he saw first was the spray of blood. It was every damn where. On the clothes hanging on each side, the carpet, the walls. Even on the ceiling.

Cash had no trouble figuring out the source.

A man dressed in a blood-drenched Santa suit was sprawled out on the floor. And this Santa was very much dead.

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Chapter Two

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Because Kayla knew that Cash was watching her, she tried not to wince as the ER nurse continued to stitch the cut on her head. Cash no doubt already had enough concerns about her, and she didn’t want to add more.

She failed.

The wince came anyway, coupled with a sharp sound of pain, and, yeah, Cash noticed, thanks to his amazing ability to multitask. He was talking to two county cops while keeping an eye on both her and the door to the examination room. Judging from the way he kept glancing at that door, he seemed to be anticipating another attack.

Kayla prayed not.

One nightmare at a time was all she could handle, and she was still recovering from this latest one.

Recovery might take more than a while, considering she’d apparently killed a man. Of course, said man had been attempting to murder her at the time, so it wasn’t as if she’d had choice about doing what she’d done. Still, she’d killed a human being, and that wasn’t going away anytime soon.

Cash wouldn’t either.

Despite their pasts—and what a hell of a shared past it was—he had shown up to face down a kidnapper and rescue her. And he’d done that with no backup. He’d just charged right in, readyto save the day. Or rather the night. What he hadn’t known was that seconds earlier she’d already ended her kidnapper’s life.

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