If You Know Her: A Novel of Romantic Suspense

What can I say … he hates you as much as I do. I couldn’t just leave him here.”
    The gun pressed harder and she swayed, thrown off balance. She caught herself by shifting a foot to the next step, but she almost pitched forward down the next six steps. Which actually would have been fine with her, if it wasn’t for the dog. She didn’t want to hurt him any more than he already was.
    “You should be more careful, considering I’ve got a gun in my hand, considering I’m pointing it at your head,” he snarled. He enunciated each word with a harder push.
    She stumbled down another couple of steps, swearing. “Be careful?” She laughed. “Why? You’re going to kill me anyway.”
    He chuckled. “Well, there is that. I’d like to get both you and Lena. Wouldn’t have minded killing Reilly. But you and her? I really wanted you two dead. I might have to settle for you.”
    As he drilled the gun’s muzzle harder into her head, forcing her down two more steps, she said, “If you keep pushing me, you’ll have to settle for me with a brokenneck—it’s hard to balance here with an eighty-pound dog.”
    “Then why don’t you drop it?”
    “No.”
    She heard an ominous click. Her knees turned to water and she tucked her chin, hunched her shoulders—like that would help.
    “I said, drop it.”
    “Why?” she asked. She opened her eyes—from the corner of her eye she saw something—through the railing on the second level of the steps, leading down to the floor. Swallowing, she took a deep breath, tried to sound like she wasn’t quite so terrified. “Why should I? We’ve already established I’m dead, right?”
    “Well, this is true.” He shoved her with more force this time and she fell, gritting her teeth against the scream and trying to curl her body around Puck’s. The dog fell from her arms and she hit hard on her side, smacking her head against the small table tucked under the little window on the landing. She rolled away, tried to come to her feet, but she barely made it to her knees before he was there.
    He fisted his hand in her hair, jerked it back. As he nestled the gun against her chin, he said, “Do you have any idea how badly you fucked things up for me? How much you ruined my life?”
    “Not even half as bad as you fucked mine,” she said, panting, trying to breathe around the obscene pain spreading through her. Her side—shit, it hurt. She saw movement—
    Nia jerked and twisted, ignoring how much
worse
that made the pain.
    “Stupid bitch—”
    “Drop the gun, Carter.”
    The sound of the sheriff’s voice was a welcome relief, but Nia didn’t dare relax, barely dared to breathe. Furyblistered through Carter Jennings’s eyes, and the hand he had fisted in her hair tightened until she thought for sure he’d rip it out by the roots.
    “Hell, Sheriff, you made good time,” Carter said, a vicious smile lighting his face. He moved the gun away from Nia’s chin, but now it was pointed at Ezra. Not exactly an improvement.
    “Let her go. Put the gun down,” Ezra said. He held his own gun, steady and level, his eyes flat. “You can walk away from this. You hurt her, and you won’t.”
    Carter chuckled. “But I don’t
want
to walk away. And I want to
hurt
her. I can have everything I want.”
    Nia’s gut clenched. A man who didn’t care if he lived or died … or a man who
wanted
to die … was there anything more dangerous?
    She swallowed, blinked back the tears. Damn it. She wasn’t ready to die with this arrogant, cruel sack of shit—
    “Nia …”
    His voice was a ragged whisper, coming from too far off.
    She could barely turn her head. Wheeling her eyes to the right, she saw him, standing in the doorway of the house. Law had his arm draped around Remy’s shoulders and the other clutched at the door frame.
    Maybe there was one thing more dangerous than a man who wanted to die, and that was a woman who was determined she
wasn’t
ready to die. As the hard, hot knot of fury settled in her heart, it burned the fear away. Shaking under the onslaught, she shifted her gaze forward, blocked out everything. She didn’t care about the deputies crowding in behind Ezra, didn’t care about Carter.
    She only cared about Law.
    Carter shouted something at Ezra.
    Ezra only shook his head in response.
    Nia didn’t know what they were arguing about, didn’t care.
    She had a shot, maybe only one, right then, while Carter was focusing on something
other
than her.
    Fisting