She was hanging on to the far side of the gate with both hands. The moment she saw him, she turned and climbed into the front seat of a small pickup truck and slammed the door.
He clicked the padlock loose and began to pull the tall wire gates open. “Tomorrow I’m ordering an electric gate opener,” he snarled into the teeth of the wind. He wouldn’t, of course. Any extra money went to feed his girls, not to make his life easier.
The moment he’d shoved the left-hand gate open far enough for her to squeeze the pickup through, she floored the thing. He’d been intending to climb into the passenger seat beside her. Instead, her tires threw up a wall of icy muck that hit him square in the face. He yelped.
“Thanks a bunch!” he called after her as he closed the gate and hooked the open padlock over the hasp. He wiped his face with one hand and strode back to the office. She’d slammed on her brakes and now stood beside the bed of the truck. She was wearing a dark parka with the hood pulled forward over her face. He could tell nothing about her except that she was maybe five foot six and slim.
“Help me. I can’t move her.”
He leaned over the back of the truck expecting to see whatever dog or possum or coon she’d run over with her car. His mouth fell open. He turned to the woman. “Is she yours?”
“No. I found her on the road. She’s so still. She’s not dead, is she?”
He reached a tentative hand next to the animal’s rib cage. He felt a flutter. “She’s alive, but I don’t know for how long.” Without glancing at the woman, he said, “Go around the side of the building to the parking area and in through the small door. Inside you’ll find a button that raises the overhead door. I’ll drive her in.”
He realized as the woman started away that if she disappeared at this moment he would have no idea what she looked like or who she was.
He spun the tires getting the truck started, then moved it toward the growing oblong of light as the door lifted. He drove into the cavernous room, turned off the engine and stepped out of the truck. “Okay, close the door,” he said. “Sleet’s getting in.”
She punched the button again, and the door began to lower. He jabbed at the intercom button on the telephone mounted on the wall beside him.
“There’s no time to call anybody,” she said urgently.
He waved her away. After a moment, a sleepy voice answered.
“Dad?” he said. “Throw on some clothes and get over here fast. Bullet wound. No, the elephants are fine.” Pete glanced at the truck. “You are not going to believe this. Some crazy woman’s just dragged in a half-grown female African lion.”
“OKAY, BOY, what’s all this about a lioness?” Mace Jacobi slammed the door to the parking area behind him, shucked his parka and gloves and walked over to the pickup truck.
“Take a look,” Pete said. He’d hung his poncho beside the side door and slipped into a sweatshirt. He knelt on the lowered tailgate. “Can you believe this?”
Mace peered over his son’s shoulder. “Well, I’ll be damned!” He turned to the woman who hung over the side of the truck. Her fingers gently caressed the golden pelt of the animal. “She yours?”
“No. I almost ran over her on the road. At first I thought she was a big yellow dog, but the tail was too long, and she didn’t move like a dog. Then she turned and looked at me and her eyes went red in the headlights and…” She took a deep breath. “She just keeled over. I jammed on the brakes and slid all over the road. Almost wound up going over the side of Bryson’s Hollow.”
“Bryson’s Hollow?” Pete asked. “What’s a lone woman doing driving the Hollow road this time of night?”
“I live down there. Please, there’s no time for this. Can you help her?”
“Got to get her out of this truck and onto the examining table,” Pete said. “Can’t do it alone. Don’t know how you managed it.”
“I carry a big piece of plywood in the back of my truck. I dragged her onto it and used my trailer winch to haul her up.”
“Madam,” Mace said formally, “I take my hat off to you.”
“She could have bitten your head off,” Pete said. “Come on, Dad, she can’t weigh more than a couple of hundred pounds.”
“More or less. Madam, please be so good as to position your truck so that the rear end backs up to that steel table over there. No sense in carrying her farther than we have to.”
Five minutes later, Pete and Mace Jacobi had the unconscious cat on the steel table. She was limp, but the heavy bones and sinews of her body looked like steel cables under her fur.
“What can I do?” the woman asked.
“You’ve done your part,” Pete answered. “Dad, better get a full syringe of ACE ready in case she starts to come around. She’s going to be pretty pissed off when she does.”
“If she does,” Mace said as he slid his stethoscope onto the animal’s rib cage.
Pete gently probed the blood-matted pelt on her shoulder. “Doesn’t seemed to have nicked any major vessels, and it’s so damned hog-killing cold, the bleeding’s pretty much stopped. Somebody shot her all right. No obvious exit wound. Bullet must still be in there.”
“I’ll get the X ray.” Pete turned and nearly fell over the woman. “Why don’t you go sit down back there out of the way and let us work.”
She backed off as Pete rolled a heavy piece of steel equipment out of a cabinet in the corner by the office door.
“Listen, I can’t keep calling you lady. You got a name?”
“Newsome. Tala Newsome.”
Tala? Odd name. He wasn’t certain he’d heard her correctly. But Newsome he recognized. The Newsomes owned most of the county and half the businesses in Hollendale. Irene Newsome was on the county council Mace had dealt with when he built the sanctuary.
Tala Newsome shoved back the hood of her parka and began to unzip it. Her long black braid was soaked and hair stuck to her cheeks in pencil-thin tendrils. Her nose was red, her cheeks and lips denim blue. And her eyes…
He stopped in midstride as her eyes hit him like a cannon shot. Then his father’s voice jerked him back to the present.
“Don’t stand there, boy. She’s starting to warm up. Don’t need her jumping up and tearing our heads off.”
TALA SANK into a wooden kitchen chair propped against the metal bars that closed off the back section of the enormous room. The moment she sat down she realized how tired she was and how badly her shoulders ached.
Even without the lioness, the drive out to the farmhouse in Bryson’s Hollow was no picnic. After midnight with winter sleet pelting the road, it was downright treacherous. Nights like this she wished she still lived in town with Irene, Vertie and the kids.
But she couldn’t—not permanently. She’d tried staying in the big old Newsome mansion after Adam died, but as wonderful as Vertie and Irene were, she’d felt as if by leaving the farmhouse she’d somehow broken her last connection to her dead husband. She needed to be in Bryson’s Hollow for now. Maybe someday she could move on, but not now, not yet. Not with so much unfinished business and so many promises to keep.
Besides, if she’d stayed with the Newsomes tonight, she’d never have found the lion.
She blinked her eyes, shook her head to clear it, and watched the two men working in the circle of light over the