She made a noise and those obscenely long lashes of hers blinked away the snowflakes that were clinging to the tips. “No, my name is Echo, not Snow White.”
I lifted an eyebrow and let out a low grunt. “Echo? That’s different. Is it your real name?” I was used to strippers named Honor and hookers named Roxie, so I knew it was possible for her to go by something else if there was a role she was playing in her life. I was used to everyone having two faces and multiple personalities. Where I was from, you were whoever you had to be in order to survive.
She groaned again and her eyes closed. “You wouldn’t believe how often I’ve had to show my driver’s license to prove it’s my real name. My parents had a flair for the unusual. My little sister was Xanthe and my little brother is Horatio.”
Those were uncommon, but what caught my ear was the was when she mentioned her sister. I was good at hearing the things people didn’t say. It had kept me alive for a long time in a place that ate the weak for breakfast.
“Your sister pass away? You said she was Xanthe.” I swore as my boots slipped on the snow and as the leather strap attached to the shotgun dug into my shoulder. I’d been lying on a prison infirmary gurney less than five months ago, losing most of my blood. I still didn’t have my full strength back and this trek was taking more out of me than I wanted to admit. I was going to be lucky if I got us both back to the cabin in one piece.
“She died.” Her voice was quiet and I could tell the pain laced throughout it had nothing to do with the physical pain she was in from the accident. “Just a few days ago actually.” It was still fresh. No wonder she sounded like she was going to start sobbing. “What’s your name?”
The question was clearly a way to change the subject and return the focus to me, but that was a question I really didn’t want to answer. I looked down at her and saw that she had sharp lines dug into the center of her forehead and along the edges of her mouth. I kind of hoped she passed back out. It was much easier being the new me when she was unconscious.
I blew out a breath and watched the cloud form in the air in front of me. Fuck, it was cold. My ears were starting to sting and I couldn’t remember when I’d last felt the tip of my nose.
“The folks around here call me Ben.” It was actually a shortened version of my name, but ever since I could walk I’d been a Benny. Dropping the last part was hard but not as hard as convincing the Marshals that I wasn’t going to be Carl or Steve when they relocated me. They wanted me to be a different person...and I understood why. But my name was the only thing I had left from my old life and I refused to let it go entirely.
She squinted up at me and then moaned and lifted a hand to her forehead. As she moved I had to adjust my hold on her. I swore again as she started wiggling and grunted when my palm grazed the side of her breast under the thick fabric of my coat. She was stacked, rounded in all the right places and my new resolve to not be an asshole couldn’t beat back the fact that I had always been a boob man. She was working with all my favorite attributes and it was classic old me to notice that while she was bleeding all over both of us.
“What flavor of Ben are you? A Benjie, a Benjamin, or maybe a Bernard?” Her voice was getting thready and weak but I could smell smoke from the fire I had started at the cabin earlier in the evening. I sent up some silent thanks that we were both going to be under a roof and warm soon.
I shook my head, which sent snow flying in every direction, and felt my lips twitch, which made my beard move. I always preferred polished to rugged, but the way women eye-fucked me on the regular with the face fuzz made me wonder if I had been missing out on a surefire way to get laid all these years. I liked women…a lot. In fact, that had been one of my biggest complaints about getting dropped in no-man’s-land. The pickings were slim, unless I wanted to keep my options limited to tourists and weekend warriors. I didn’t mind the hit-it-and-quit-it type of woman; that’s what I tended to gravitate toward. However, now that I was working out how to be the new me, I figured the way I went about spending time with the opposite sex needed to change as well. I needed to be the kind of guy that deserved a woman’s attention for more reasons than the fact I had a pretty face, prettier words, and was blessed with a big dick that I knew how to use.
Grunting and pulling my thoughts away from the kinds of women I was going to be fucking in the future, I answered her question about my name. “None of the above. My mom had high hopes for me; she wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer. She wanted me to do something that would get us both out of the shithole city where we lived, so she named me Benton. She said it sounded sophisticated and classy.” Unfortunately for her, I was always much more a Benny than a Benton. I’d barely made it through high school and by the time I graduated, I was already breaking knees and collecting debts for the monster who called all the shots on my streets. I was making enough money to get my mom out of the Point, but she refused to take it, saying it was dirty and she wouldn’t make a deal with the devil. I sold my soul the first chance I got and never looked back. At least, I hadn’t until I almost died. That was enough to make a man question every move he made that got him to that point…and landed him in the Point.
The Point was kind of like Surrender in the fact you couldn’t pinpoint it on a map. It was the nickname for the bad part of the big city I grew up in. It was a place no one wanted to talk about, and very few made it out of in once piece.
The fed that was in charge of my case would lose his mind if he knew I had given this woman my real name, but I figured she had a concussion and was barely conscious so it wouldn’t hurt anything. Plus, I wanted her to know me…well, the me that I’d just decided to be. I wanted to see if I could actually pull off being a guy who deserved a shot at getting it right.
“You don’t look like a Benton.” Her voice was weak and I could see she was struggling to keep her eyes open.
“Oh yeah? What do I look like then?” I was curious and also leery of what her answer would be. I was supposed to be doing my best to fit in here, to make a new life, so if this banged up and barely awake girl could pinpoint that I didn’t belong, I was in deep shit.
Her eyelids fluttered and drifted back over those intense sapphire eyes. Her lips moved slightly and on a whispered breath she exhaled, “You look like trouble.”
She had no idea how right she was. I snickered at her words and it bled into a sigh of relief when the clearing where my cabin sat came into view. I hugged the woman closer to my chest and to see if she was still coherent asked, “What are you doing out in the middle of nowhere Montana in the middle of winter and after midnight anyways?”
She didn’t respond for a long minute so I assumed she was blacked back out. I almost dropped her when she whispered, “I’m looking for someone. I drove up here to find him.”
I looked down at her curiously and her eyes were back open. They were so pretty I found myself staring into them and not moving, even though shelter was a mere hundred yards away. “Who are you looking for?”
She blinked up at me and cocked her head to the side like she was trying to decide if I was friend or foe. Foe. I was always foe, but she didn’t need to know that.
“MacKenzie. I’m looking for a MacKenzie.”
I couldn’t stop the laugh that shook out of my chest. I tilted my head back and hooted up at the night sky as I regained my footing and hauled ass toward the door to my cabin.
“Pop-Tart, you’re going to have to narrow those search parameters down.”
She squinted her eyes at me and wiggled in my grasp, which made us both moan, her in pain, me at the way everything behind my zipper started to tighten and harden. She didn’t ask me about the nickname and I was glad. They had been my favorite things to eat when I was a kid. I used to watch and wait for the sweet treat to pop up out of the toaster like it was my reward for making it through the previous day.
“What do you mean? This town is microscopic. How hard can it be to find one man named MacKenzie?”
I laughed
again and jiggled the doorknob, sighing as the warmth from the roaring fire immediately hit my icy skin. “This town is tiny but more than half the year-round residents are MacKenzies. Men, women, children…they’re all part of the MacKenzie brood. The sheriff is a MacKenzie, the town doctor is a MacKenzie. You can’t throw a rock in Surrender without hitting one of them.” I tended to avoid them. Most of the men had ties to the military and different clandestine government agencies. They worked to put the kind of people I spent a lifetime doing business with down. I didn’t want to be on the wrong side of MacKenzie-style vengeance, which was another reason I knew the Marshals dropped me here. It was easier to keep my nose clean when I was living smack dab in the center of a lion’s den.
Those blue eyes widened and then squeezed shut like my words had hit her right in the heart. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Not really a kidding kind of guy.” I walked over to my bed, which was still messy from last night, and gently laid her down on it. She went to push herself up into a sitting position but let out a strangled scream that echoed loudly in the small space when she put pressure on that left arm. We were going to have to do something about that shoulder. “Gotta try and get your shoulder back in the socket, Pop-Tart.”
She glared up at me and put her other hand on the offending limb. “Do you have any idea how to do that?”
I shrugged and rubbed my still-cold hands together. “I’ve seen it done a bunch. The place where I’m from had bareknuckle fights every weekend. No rules, no regulations. Bones broke all the time and they often ended up dislocated. It’s gonna hurt like a mother, but it’ll feel better once it’s back where it belongs.” I sounded far more confident than I was.
She gazed at me skeptically and sucked her bottom lip between her teeth. She let it go with a pop and asked me, “Where in the hell are you from that bareknuckle fighting on the weekends is a common activity?”
That made me chuckle. “That’s a story for another time. Let’s do this, okay?”
She slowly nodded and let her good hand drop. She sucked in a breath as soon as I grasped her wrist and I could feel her pulse pounding like a runaway race horse under my fingers. A single tear leaked out of the corner of her eye and for the first time in my adult life, I regretted that I was going to have to purposely cause harm to another person.
“Gonna count to three.” She nodded stiffly and sucked in a breath. I held mine as I told her “One,” and then yanked as hard as I could until I felt muscle and bone slide back into the place it belonged. It happened so fast she didn’t get the chance to scream and I wasn’t surprised at all when she passed back out.
It had been a long time since I had someone as pretty as she was in my bed. Being locked up was not conducive to getting my dick wet, not unless I was up for a little convict-on-convict action…which I was emphatically not. And when I got out, my ass belonged to the feds and they were watching my every move, so the chance to scratch that itch hadn’t yet presented itself. I had plans to pounce on the first ski bunny that crossed my path.
After all, wolves ate rabbits for dinner.
There was something different about this girl. Something special. She’d survived a crash that should have killed her and she was fighting through pain, both physical and emotional, that would cripple almost anyone else. Sadly, I knew that the old me wouldn’t have stood a chance with someone as strong as her and I knew down to my bones the new me absolutely didn’t deserve someone like her.
Chapter 3
Echo
It was still dark when my eyes popped back open. I was disoriented, sore from the top of my head to the soles of my bare feet, and I couldn’t move my left arm. I wasn’t sure if it was the same night I’d been rescued by the contradictory stranger or if I had been out for too many hours to count on my one working hand.
Groaning, I looked over at my unresponsive shoulder and snorted when I noticed the reason it was immobile was because there was a heavy bag of frozen French fries resting on top of it. After a quick scan of the rest of my aching frame, I noticed that I had a variety of bandages and Band-Aids holding together the places where my skin had torn open and shredded during the accident. Lifting my good hand, I reached up to touch the top of my head in search of the gash that hadn’t seemed like it was ever going to stop bleeding, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the blood that had caked and matted my curls together was no longer there. The wound and the area around it had been cleaned. It was still swollen and obviously needed a stitch or two to shut it, but it was no longer bleeding, which I was going to consider a win under the circumstances.
“How you feeling, Pop-Tart?” His voice came from somewhere across the room. I squinted into the dimly lit surroundings until I spotted him hunched down in front of an old potbelly stove, feeding logs into a fire. I could hear it popping and crackling and the sounds were surprisingly soothing. The material of his dark, thermal shirt pulled tight across his broad shoulders and when he glanced over at me again, I was struck by how clear and sharp those fog-colored eyes of his were.
“I feel like I was in a car accident and was lucky to survive it. Did you chop all that wood?” I knew I sounded incredulous, but for the life of me I couldn’t picture a guy named Benton, one who wore a ring like that, and clearly cared more about his hair than most women I knew, laboring over something as rustic and old-fashioned as chopping wood for a fire.
A low chuckle rumbled out of his chest and he lifted a dark eyebrow at me. “Maybe. Would it impress you if I told you that I did?”
“Only if I believed it was true. I don’t think there’s such a thing as executive lumberjacks or corporate woodsmen.” I shifted my legs under the thick quilt that was covering me and frowned when I realized my legs were bare and that I had on a pair of thick wool socks that were definitely not mine. “Did you take my clothes off?” The question came out more of a squeak than a defiant burst of outrage.
He rose to his feet with a smooth shift of muscle and crossed his arms over that broad chest that I could tell was distinctly cut with powerful muscle and obviously latent strength. A shiver of unease slithered down my spine as the reality of how isolated we were hit me, right along with the awareness of just how big and capable he seemed to be.
He lifted a shoulder and let it fall in a careless shrug. “I had to. I wanted to make sure that wound on the top of your head was cleaned and flushed out since I don’t have anything on hand to close it and the last thing you want is to get a head injury infected. There was no way to wash it and your hair out without drenching you. Don’t worry, I behaved myself. When I have a woman in my bed, I like her to have a little more fight in her then you’ve had since we’ve met.”
I blinked up at the wooden ceiling and lifted my hand to rub my eyes. They felt grainy and dry. “How long have I been out?” I didn’t have a recollection of anything after him grabbing my arm and jerking my shoulder back to where it was supposed to go.
“Around twenty-four hours. It’s almost the same time as I found you yesterday. I’m running out of frozen shit to put on your shoulder. It’s so warm in here, none of it stays cold for very long. Why did you call me an executive lumberjack?” His lips quirked when he asked the question as he moved across the room to a microscopic kitchenette. He’d called it a cabin when he was carrying me through the woods and he wasn’t lying. There didn’t seem to be much to the space besides four bare walls, a couple of windows, the ancient stove, and the admittedly plush and comfy bed I was currently sprawled across.
“Because you’re dressed like you live in the woods but not like you’ve lived here forever. The clothes are practical but it almost seems like you’re wearing a costume. You look good in jeans and flannel but something tells me you would prefer a three-piece suit. One that costs a mint, if that ring you wear is anything to go by.” That was a lot of words for a mouth that hadn’t had anything to drink in a very long time. I tried to prop myself up on my good arm but my battered body protested immediately. S
ighing at the ceiling, I quietly asked, “Would you mind getting me a glass of water? My mouth feels like the Sahara.”
I heard a faucet turn on and seconds later the bed dipped on my good side. A glass was held in front of me as I contemplated how I was going to sit up without sending spears of pain throughout my body. Ben solved the predicament by putting his free hand on the center of my back and slowly lifting me up. My shoulder still screamed in protest and the pain made my vision go spotty, but when that subsided, everything else seemed to be nothing more than a low ache and a dull throb.
I stared into those amazing eyes of his and offered up a weak thanks. His lips twitched like he found the entire situation amusing and he gave his dark head a little shake. “No problem. You picked a good day to come crashing down my mountain, Pop-Tart. It was the day I decided to turn over a new leaf.”
My eye skimmed over the jagged scar marring his throat. It was impossible to ignore. This close to him, it looked even more brutal and violent. He was also lucky to be alive.
“If things like that happened under your old leaf, I’m thinking it was a good call.” I tilted my chin in the direction of his marked throat and he lifted his fingers to touch the vivid reminder that he should probably appreciate every moment he was still breathing.
“Things like this were par for the course under my old leaf, and you’re right…I used to wear a very different uniform when I was there.” He pushed off the bed and ran a hand over his beard. “I’m trying to convince myself this leaf isn’t so bad, but I’m not quite there yet.” Bringing obvious truth to his words, he twisted that big, blingy ring on his finger.
I sucked back the water and held out the glass in response when he asked me if I wanted another. “So, where exactly was your old leaf located? That’s the second time you mentioned that you weren’t from around here originally.”