The McRae Series 01 - Twelve Days Sam and Rachel

you?"
    "I'm not pointing it at you anymore," he reminded her.
    She pouted a bit. "You have to be careful with something like that. It's dangerous, unless you really know what you're doing—"
    "I really know what I'm doing."
    "Did you put the safety on, at least?"
    He held up the weapon. "It's on, princess. Let's talk about you."
    "Call Zach," she insisted.
    He frowned at her, but pulled out his phone, changed the settings to speaker, flipped down to Zach's name. They both heard the phone dialing, the line crackling, and then... maybe Zach answering.
    "Zach, it's Aidan. Zach?" And then the line went dead. He looked at her. "Try your phone, princess."
    She gave an annoyed sigh. "No one calls me princess."
    "Really? Why do I find that hard to believe?"
    "They don't!"
    "Then what do they call you?"
    "Grace."
    He scoffed. "No, there's something else. Come on. What is it?"
    "None of your business."
    "I'm babysitting a giant, goofy-looking dog named Tinkerbell. How bad can it be?"
    She rolled her eyes. "Angel. Sometimes, they call me angel."
    Oh, yeah. He could see that.
    The golden hair, blue eyes, beautiful face she was bound to have if she ever stopped crying.
    Yeah, that worked.
    "And sometimes, people still call me Sunshine," she admitted.
    Which was even better. An angel was all well and good, but just a little bit too good.
    Sunshine.
    A woman named Sunshine would have a little heat, a little fire.
    "Although, I doubt you believe the last one," she said. "Since I'm not feeling very sunny right now."
    No, not today, but he'd bet the girl could shine when she wanted to.
    "Call Zach," he said. "Same deal. Speaker phone, so I can hear."
    She pulled her phone out of the pocket of her jeans and dialed, getting the same result, static.
    "So, what?" she asked as she clicked off the phone. "We just sit here until we get him?"
    "You have somewhere you're supposed to be, Sunshine?"
    "No, I just.... People have never really been scared of me. I'm not a threatening woman. There's really nothing here worth defending with a gun. It seems obvious that if you wanted to overpower me, you could easily do that all on your own. So, I don't get it. Why the gun?"
    Great, Aidan thought. He got a woman who could think at gunpoint.
    He sighed, shifted in his chair hoping to get a little more comfortable.
    "Oh, my God, you're hurt! You're bleeding!" she cried, pointing to his side.
    He looked down and saw that she was right. Just above his hipbone on his right side, soaking through his shirt, there was blood, or if he was lucky a combination of blood and mostly rainwater. Shit. Right over the damned incision. He hadn't even felt it bleeding, because he was soaked through and through and cold as hell.
    "Did I do that? Did I hurt you? I'm so sorry," she said.
    "Honey, I had a gun at your back. You're allowed to try to get away."
    Her expression was almost comical then, like the angel-girl couldn't stand the thought of hurting anyone, even when she was scared half out of her mind and trying to get away from a guy with a gun.
    "Relax, it's an old injury. And I might have done it earlier today. I did help pull a tree off of Tink's owner, and getting the tarp over the hole in the cabin roof was no picnic."
    She was up on her knees, looking like she just had to get to her feet, that she couldn't stand to do nothing. "You can't just stay there like that, bleeding."
    "Believe me, I've been hurt much worse than this and survived."
    She looked around the cabin. There really wasn't much to it. "There must be towels in the bathroom somewhere. I could get you one."
    "Grace, I'm in no danger of bleeding to death," he insisted.
    "Are you in some kind of trouble? Is there some reason you think someone might be looking for you? To hurt you?"
    Give the angel-girl a prize.
    "I doubt it," he said, regardless.
    "Because, I'm really not scary," she went on.
    "Yeah, I get that. I'm sorry about the whole gun thing. It's highly unlikely that anyone's looking for me or trying to hurt me. But it's possible, so I'm being extremely cautious right now. That's all."
    Well, that and the fact that Maeve, injured and pinned under a tree, had brought back some really bad memories, and he was still jacked up on adrenaline from both what had happened today and what happened three and a half months ago. But he wasn't going to explain that to a girl who actually had him apologizing for defending himself against what he had every right to believe was an intruder who'd broken into