Her Cowboy Defender. Kerry Connor

       “I was going to try to give her as much time as I could to get away. I have a map in my bag that I was going to leave in the car with a note telling her to drive to Colorado to get to the police or FBI there and to avoid the main roads. I didn’t think they would expect her to go there and would have a harder time tracking her that way. I also didn’t think she could trust anyone around here in case the kidnappers had connections with the police or the locals. There had to have been a reason they chose this area for the meeting. Pam had two guns in her house. I had one on me and left the other in the car for Tara. I also had the suitcase I brought with me to Dallas so she would have clothes, though I didn’t have time to grab it before I got in your truck. My ATM and credit cards are in my bag, along with enough cash to see her through for a few days. I would have left it in the car for her, too. It was the best I could come up with on the spur of the moment, but I had to pray it would be enough to get her to safety.”

       Cade studied her, too stunned to do anything else. She really had thought the whole thing through. There was no doubting it. This had been a suicide mission. She’d come here fully expecting to die, and had done so willingly, to save her sister. No, it hadn’t just been willing. She’d been desperate to do so, fighting tooth and nail and doing whatever it took to get to a rendezvous where she thought she would die.

       She had to understand the enormity of the sacrifice she’d been willing to make. Yet there was no sign of it on her face—no pride, no regret, no misgivings. Just simple straightforwardness, as though it was clear what she’d had to do, as though it were nothing at all.

       Maybe it was to her.

       He tried to think of anyone he’d ever known who would have been willing to do that for him. Not his father, who’d never wanted a kid in the first place and only cared about what he could find at the bottom of the nearest bottle. Certainly not his mother, who’d walked out on them when he was a boy. Not Caitlin, the one person he thought he would have been willing to do anything for—yeah, probably even die—who’d walked out on him, too. There was Matt Alvarez, his right-hand man on the ranch and the closest thing he had to a friend in this world, but he didn’t know if Alvarez would be willing to make such a colossal sacrifice, and frankly, Cade wouldn’t expect him to.

       He wondered what this sister of hers was like, wondered if she was worthy of the sacrifice this woman had been willing to make. Obviously Piper Lowry thought so.

       It suddenly struck him that he was just standing there, staring at the woman in front of him. He cleared his throat, his anger gone, replaced by an emotion he couldn’t really name. Any doubts he’d had about her story were gone now. It was far too detailed and she’d related it so unwaveringly she certainly hadn’t been making it up on the spot. All that remained was the question of what to do now.

       Only one answer came to mind, one he wasn’t happy with. But it seemed he didn’t have a choice any more than she thought she had.

       “Come on,” he said roughly. “Let’s get out of here.”

       She frowned. “Where are we going? Back to my car?”

       “No. My ranch isn’t far from here. It’ll be safer there. We can figure out what to do next.”

       “‘We’?” she echoed faintly. “Why would you want to help me?”

       It was a good question, one he would have asked if he were in her shoes, one he was still asking himself.

       He gave the only answer he could. “Because somebody needs to.”

       He damn well wished it wasn’t him. If he had a brain in his head, it wouldn’t be. A smart man would get away from this woman and her mess as fast as humanly possible.

       But it seemed he wasn’t that smart. And like it or not—and he sure as heck did not—it looked like he was all she had.