The McRae Series 01 - Twelve Days Sam and Rachel

his shrink, his commanding officer, his brother and the guy who'd loaned him the cabin. None of them would just drop by or let themselves in, except for Zach, but surely the man wouldn't tear his own cabin apart.
    Burglar? Aiden had a hard time thinking so. The place looked like a wreck from the outside. It was okay on the inside, but certainly nothing fancy. Surely there were more promising places to rob.
    More likely, someone who was hungry and just looking to get out of the rain, maybe stay a while, probably not cause any trouble. So it was highly unlikely he'd need the Sig, but he'd been shot before. He wasn't going to take chances on being gunned down in a tiny town in southwestern Ohio.
    Of course, it was possible that someone had come looking for him, someone who wanted to hurt him, but he really didn't think so. There'd been vague threats, but he'd been sure his CO had made more of them than was warranted to get Aidan out of the hospital before he really went nuts.
    Still, he'd nearly died three and a half months ago, still wasn't a hundred percent recovered, so he wasn't interested in a fight of any kind, not when he could simply pull out the Sig and knew well how to use it.
    He eased around the corner to press his back against the wall that led to the bedrooms and bathroom. As small as the place was, it couldn't take that long for even the sloppiest, most amateur thief to toss it, and there was only one exit. When the guy walked back into this room, Aidan would have a gun pressed against the guy's back before he knew what was happening.
    Minutes ticked by, the dog whining and dancing around, making the biggest damned mess on the floor, and sometimes over the noise of the storm, Aidan thought he might have heard someone else crying, too.
    Finally, he heard footsteps.
    A shadow appeared, halting a step inside the room and staring at the dog. For once, the damned thing proved useful.
    Aidan stepped to the left, pressed the gun to the shadow's back and hooked an elbow across the guy's throat. "Don't move."
    He barely got the words out before he heard a scream, a distinctly feminine scream, and if that weren't enough to convince him that his would-be thief was female, her height and small frame would have.
    He planned to wait out the screaming, so she could hear him when he spoke, so he could back this down, slow and easy. He really didn't want to hurt her. But the dog either took exception to the whole thing or got scared and wanted to huddle against their legs. The girl elbowed Aidan hard in his gut, managing to catch a still-healing incision from his surgery.
    Fuck, that hurt.
    She lunged away from him, tripping over the dog, and he went right after her, not willing to let her go while also trying to protect her as they fell. The dog howled in outrage or maybe fear, and scampered out of the way. Aidan and the girl landed hard on the floor, although he managed to twist sideways with her and take most of the blow on his right side, the rebuilt hip hurting like a son of a bitch. She landed half on top of him and half on the floor, struggling like mad.
    Did she not realize that if he wanted to, he could have killed her three times over already?
    Rolling her over, he pinned her facedown on the floor, straddling her hips as he sat, purposely putting all his weight on top of her. He pulled one of her arms behind her back, hard enough that if she tried to move too much, it was going to hurt, but if she just relaxed and stayed there, it wouldn't.
    Took her a minute to figure that out, screaming the whole time, the dog dancing around the two of them, seemingly unable to figure out if this was some kind of game or if Aidan was trying to hurt her. He whined, barked, cried and then finally licked the girl's face, bringing forth a howl of outrage from her, and then, finally blessed silence.
    "God, thank you," Aidan said. "I don't know how much more of that I could take."
    "How much more you could take?"
    She sounded even more pissed than before, started struggling again, and he tugged a little harder on the arm until she stilled. Once she did, he could feel that she was trembling badly and felt guilty about that, but not enough to let her up yet.
    "Who are you? What do you want?" she cried.
    "Right now, just to talk."
    "Oh, I'm sure. If you hurt me, you'll be sorry—"
    "I'm already sorry—"
    "My family is insanely protective," she insisted. "They will hunt you down. The whole town will—"
    "The whole town? Think a lot