Sun Kissed (3 page)

In his spinning vision, Tucker saw Tinkerbell advancing on the other man. He wanted to yell at her to stay back, that he didn’t need a half-pint female to rescue him, but his tongue wouldn’t respond to the commands from his brain. To his horrified amazement, she lengthened her last three strides for momentum and followed through with the pointed toe of her riding boot, executing a drop-kick that would have done any kickboxer proud.
Bull’s-eye.
With a grunt of pain, the drunk crashed to his knees, cupped his hands over his crotch, and started retching.

The lady—stupidly, Tucker took measure of her height and confirmed that the top of her raven head barely reached his shoulder—dusted her hands on the legs of her jeans. “I asked you to stop,” she told the drunk thinly. “It’s your own fault I had to kick you. Why wouldn’t you just
stop
?”

Dizziness sent Tucker staggering sideways. Small but surprisingly strong hands grasped his arm. He looked down. The pale oval of her face came clear and then went blurry again. Large, pretty brown eyes and a wild tangle of black curls swam in his vision.

“Are you all right?”

Tucker tried to answer, but his tongue still wouldn’t work.
Damn.
He’d been rescued by a pixie. Now he was glad his brothers weren’t there. They would never let him live this down.
Oh, man.
He wasn’t feeling so good. His head hurt like a son of a bitch, and his stomach was lurching.

The horse chose that moment to wheel and run. People
screamed, grabbed their children, and scattered to get out of the frightened animal’s way. As the sound of retreating hooves faded, an eerie quiet blanketed the area.

“Are you okay?” the woman asked again.

To Tucker, the question seemed to come from a great distance, and it wasn’t one he could readily answer. The whole front of his face throbbed, for one, and it felt as if his nose had been shoved into his brain.

Soft fingertips plucked at his wrist. “Move your hand so I can see.”

Tucker hadn’t realized he was holding his nose. He dropped his arm. She gently touched his cheek, making him wince.

“It’s broken, I’m afraid. I am so sorry about this. I can’t even think what to say.”

Tucker could think of plenty, but nothing fit for mixed company. He couldn’t
believe
this. His nose was broken? And even worse, a lady no bigger than a minute had felt it necessary to leap into the fray to save him. How humiliating was that? He stood six feet, four inches tall in his stocking feet, weighed in at two-twenty stark naked, and had taken first place in state wrestling bouts throughout high school and college. He should have rescued
her,
not the other way around.

His head was starting to clear, and he felt a little steadier on his feet. The throbbing had given way to a strange numbness, similar to when a dentist injected too much Novocain. Shock, he guessed—Mother Nature’s remedy for pain. He saw it in his patients all the time.

He took stock of the woman’s injuries. An angry red mark flagged her right cheekbone, and the delicate hollow
under one eye was starting to swell. He shot the drunk a searing glare. The no-account bastard still huddled on his knees, his upper body convulsing each time he gagged. Tucker hoped he choked on his gonads.

He drew his gaze back to the woman. “I’m fine,” he managed to say. “I’m more worried about you.”

She gingerly prodded her cheekbone. “It’s nothing an ice pack won’t fix. Thank you for jumping in to help me. I was dialing nine-one-one when he knocked the phone from my hand.” With a lift of one shoulder, she flashed a regretful smile and then began scanning the sawdust-strewn ground nearby. “Heaven knows where it landed.”

Tucker felt a little better now, but he wasn’t quite ready to sift through sawdust to help her look. He was checking out his nose when the stranger in possession of his cell phone approached.

Hand extended to return the device, the man said, “I never got through to fairground security, so I called the sheriff’s department. Someone should be here shortly.”

“Good.” Tucker hooked a thumb toward the drunk as he took the phone. “He’ll recover in a minute. I’d rather let a deputy deal with him.”

“I hear you,” the man replied. “Sorry I didn’t help you out. I’ve got a bad back.”

“It’s good you stayed out of it then.” Tucker scanned the crowd that had gathered to watch the excitement and saw several other men. In his opinion, there wasn’t one of them worth the powder it would take to blow him to hell. “Thanks for calling the authorities for me.”

“No problem. Least I could do.”

Just then Tucker heard a low growl. He spun around to
see the drunk lumbering to his feet. Before Tucker could move, the man charged at the woman, who’d turned her back on him in search of her phone. It took Tucker an instant to react, and in that instant the man tackled her from behind. She went down hard in a face-first sprawl, her lower legs manacled by strong, thick arms. When she tried to rise to her knees, she was knocked flat again by an elbow jab to her spine.

Tucker launched himself at the drunk again. Upon impact, they both went rolling, much as they had before, only this time momentum broke them apart before they came to a stop. The drunk staggered to his feet just as Tucker did, and they met halfway in a teeth-jarring body slam. He couldn’t believe this guy had attacked a woman, not once but twice.

The whip handle was attached to the older man’s wrist by several wraps of a leather thong, making it impossible for Tucker to dispense with the weapon. His only recourse was to duck his head against his opponent’s beefy shoulder to protect his face and deliver uppercut jabs to the man’s belly. With each punch, the drunk fell back a step, carrying Tucker along with him until they reached the horse trailer.

Having a barrier behind his adversary suited Tucker’s purposes just fine. The stomach blows would have more impact against a solid surface. At some point the whip handle connected with Tucker’s right ear. Pain momentarily paralyzed him, but he quickly regained his senses.

Finally the rain of blows to Tucker’s shoulder stopped, and he felt the other man’s body sliding toward the ground. Releasing his hold, Tucker stepped back. The
drunk plopped rump-first on the sawdust, the whip handle lying uselessly beside him.

“You’ll go to jail for this piece of work,” he slurred.

“If I do, it’ll be worth it,” Tucker flung back. “Where I come from, manhandling a woman doesn’t fly.”

The drunk called the lady a filthy name. Tucker was tempted to knock his teeth down his throat. He settled for kicking sawdust in his face. Then he turned away to check on the woman.

She was sitting up but still looked dazed. Tucker hunkered beside her. “Are you all right?”

She blinked and swatted sawdust from her hair. “I think so. He knocked the breath out of me.”

Tucker thrust out a hand to help her up. She studied his outstretched fingers for a moment. Then she glanced up to search his gaze before placing her hand in his. Tucker got the oddest feeling—like maybe she was afraid of him or something. And then the moment passed.

After allowing him to pull her to her feet, she laughed shakily and dusted off her jeans. “That’ll teach me, I guess. Never kick a guy where it hurts and then turn your back on him.”

Tucker couldn’t see the humor. The arrival of a bubble top saved him from having to reply. He turned to watch a pencil-thin deputy in a khaki uniform push through the crowd. His pocket badge flashed in the sunlight. A pair of green aviator sunglasses and the shadow cast by the bill of his cap made it difficult to make out his features. He strode swiftly toward the older man and bent to help him up.

“Are you all right, sir? What in the Sam Hill happened here?”

“Hell, no, I’m not all right!” The drunk jerked his arm from the deputy’s grasp. “They attacked me, and I’m pressing charges. I want them both arrested!”

The officer sent Tucker a questioning look. “Is that so, sir?”

Tucker opened his mouth to say the other man was lying, but that wasn’t precisely true. “It’s a little more complicated than that,” he began.

The deputy raised a staying hand. “Before we get into explanations, just answer the question. Did you or did you not attack this gentleman?”

“The son of a bitch isn’t a gentleman,” Tucker shot back.

Tucker’s temper had always been his downfall. He couldn’t remember exactly what he said after that, only that the woman jabbed him twice with her elbow, signaling him to shut up.

The next thing he knew, he was being read his Miranda rights and escorted to a patrol car.

C
uffed and stuffed.
In Tucker’s profession, having a bad day was commonplace. He had been kicked by horses, waded through polluted ponds to reach mired patients, fallen face first in fresh cow manure, gotten his arm stuck in the vaginal passage of a bovine, and had once even been trampled by panicked pigs. With over four years of veterinary practice behind him, he had experienced just about every pitfall of the profession and usually laughed about it later.

But
arrested
? He couldn’t frigging believe it. With the help of two fellow officers who arrived shortly after he did, the skinny deputy had handcuffed both Tucker and the drunk, shoved them into the backseats of different patrol cars, and was now taking Tinkerbell’s statement while his colleagues spoke with people in the crowd.

At least the woman was getting a chance to tell her side, Tucker reasoned. It was a cut-and-dried situation, the drunk clearly in the wrong. Once the deputy heard the story, he would apologize, turn Tucker loose, and haul the intoxicated instigator off to jail.

Not.
Watching through the rear passenger window, Tucker saw the woman put her hands behind her back and turn to allow the deputy to handcuff her. Incredulous fury had Tucker’s blood throbbing in his temples again. She was getting hauled in, too? Why? It made absolutely no sense. She’d tried to help a defenseless animal, and this was the treatment she received?

To Tucker’s surprise, the woman was led toward the vehicle he sat in. The deputy opened the opposite rear door, cupped a hand over the top of her head, and pushed down as she swung onto the seat beside Tucker.

“I can’t believe they’re sticking you in here with me,” he said. “Is this normal procedure?”

She shifted her hips to avoid getting bumped by the door as it was slammed closed. Even in his agitated state, Tucker couldn’t help but notice the attractive curve of those hips and how they nipped in at her slender waist. Snug, faded jeans had never looked so good.

“I have no idea of normal procedure. I’ve never been arrested before.” She leaned forward to get her arms positioned comfortably behind her, then settled back with a sigh. “I think it’s more a matter of necessity. The third deputy has to go on another call, and that’ll leave them with only two cars. From the sound of it, Rodeo Days has them hopping.”

Tucker felt no sympathy for the law enforcement officers. “You shouldn’t even be here. The bastard hit you first. Everything that happened afterward was completely his fault.”

“True,” she agreed, “but it’s my word against his. My stars, what
is
that smell?”

“I think the last passenger got sick back here. They tried to clean up the mess, but it still stinks in this heat. What do you mean, it’s your word against his? What about all the witnesses?”

She let her head fall back against the seat. “Not everyone in the crowd saw exactly the same thing.”

Tucker peered out his side window at the deputy, now powwowing with his colleagues and taking notes in a little black book. Glancing back at her, Tucker asked, “How could they not see the same thing?”

“It’s a phenomenon that often occurs with witnesses,” she explained. “One person says a perpetrator was tall, another that he was short. You see it all the time on television.”

“That’s fiction,” Tucker bit out. “This is reality, and our bacon is on the plate.”

“I don’t blame you for being angry,” she said softly. “If not for me, you never would have gotten mixed up in this.”

Tucker strained his wrists against the metal bands. Popeye without his emergency can of spinach flashed through his mind. “I’m angry, yes, but not at you. I just can’t believe this. The bastard belted you square in the face.”

She cut him an apologetic glance. “I know, but some people didn’t see that part.”

“What
did
they see, for Pete’s sake?”

“You tackling him from behind and me kicking him.”

“Well, damn.” Tucker wanted very badly to ram his fist into something. “If this isn’t a hell of a mess.”

A wan smile touched her mouth. “A few people told it
straight. But overall, the deputies got conflicting stories. When they can’t get to the truth, I guess the policy is to arrest everyone and sort it out later.”

“Fantastic.” Tucker’s temper fizzled out, replaced with resigned acceptance. He’d been arrested only once before, when he was attending university—an underage-drinking charge that had ultimately been dropped when he’d proved he was twenty-one. Nevertheless, he could still remember how long it had taken for him to be released. When you dealt with law enforcement from the wrong side of a cell door, there was always tons of red tape. “I can think of better ways to spend my afternoon.”

“Me, too. I’m sorry the situation got out of control, forcing you to step in.”

Even handcuffed in the back of a police car, Tucker didn’t regret his decision to help her. “No worries. You tried to call the cops. It’s not your fault the guy went ballistic when he saw you with a phone.”

“I could have walked away when he knocked it from my hand.” A dark, distant look filled her eyes. “Somehow that didn’t seem like an option at the time. The horse was just standing there, waiting for more blows, too well trained to do otherwise.” Her voice trailed off. Then she swallowed and went on. “People are like that sometimes, conditioned all their lives to follow the rules and expecting everyone else to do the same. When that isn’t the way it happens, they don’t know how to react.”

Tucker had an uneasy feeling she might be talking about herself. Reacting to a situation had never been a problem for him. Reacting
appropriately
was his only challenge.

“You did what had to be done,” he said. “And it took a lot of courage.”

Her cheeks went pink with embarrassment. “Courage? I was scared to death.”

“Isn’t that what courage is all about? The guy who dashes into a burning building without fear isn’t brave. He’s just an idiot.”

She laughed softly. Tucker decided he liked the sound, a melodic tinkling that lingered lightly in the air. He also enjoyed her smile, a hesitant curve of her lush mouth that tipped up the corners and then slowly blossomed.

For the second time since meeting her, he noted how pretty she was. Feature by feature, her face wasn’t perfect. Her nose was a little too pronounced along the bridge, her cheekbones a bit too high, her mouth a shade too generous, but overall the effect was stunning. Lush black lashes lined her dark eyes, lending them depth a man could drown in if he wasn’t careful. In the afternoon sunlight that slanted through the side window, her sun-kissed, ivory complexion put him in mind of peaches drizzled with cream, its flawless texture set off to perfection by her ebony hair, which wisped and curled in an untamed cloud.

Sitting with her spine arched to accommodate her cuffed hands had thrust her breasts forward like plump little melons beneath her blue plaid shirt. Not wanting to stare, he slid his gaze to the graceful slope of her neck, to the shell-like curve of her ear peeking out through the curls, and finally to her mouth.
Damn
. All his life his mother had preached that sometimes less was more. The saying had baffled him until now. This lady wasn’t very
big, but every inch of her packed a wallop. In retrospect, he wondered how he could have compared her to Tinkerbell. No pixie, real or imagined, could be so delightfully curvaceous.

Uneasiness washed over Samantha. He was staring at her as he might a strange bug pinned to velvet. Even worse, her skin warmed and tingled beneath his gaze.

Since her divorce, Samantha had maintained a bulletproof immunity to the opposite sex. Flirtatious grins left her cold. Suggestive innuendoes either revolted her or ticked her off, sometimes both. The only male company she really enjoyed anymore was that of her father, brothers, or ranch foreman, and she tried to maintain some emotional distance even with them. For that reason, it came as something of a shock that everything about this man appealed to her.

Even with his nose swollen and leaning sharply to one side, he was handsome in a rugged way—tall and lean yet broad-shouldered and muscular, with the look of someone who was no stranger to hard work. His tousled sable brown hair fell across his high forehead in lazy waves. His eyes, a clear sapphire blue, were almost startling in contrast to his skin, which had been burnished to teak by the sun. She especially liked the cut of his features, which were purely masculine, each line as sharp and hard as chiseled granite. He had a strong jaw, a square chin, and a firm yet sensual mouth. In addition to all of that, he was chivalrous, charming, and just impulsive enough to be interesting.

She would never forget how he had grumped at the deputy. Most people knew to keep their mouths shut in
situations like that. But this man had spoken his mind, devil take the consequences. She liked that about him. She liked it a lot.

And that scared her to death. Instant attractions were dangerous. The little thrill she felt every time she looked into his eyes was a warning sign. She’d fallen fast and hard for a man once. It had been the worst mistake of her life.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

Samantha jerked her thoughts back to the moment, gathered her composure, and forced a smile. “I’m a lot more okay than you are. When we get this ironed out, you’ll be spending the rest of the night in the ER getting your nose fixed. It’s leaning over so far it’s almost touching your cheek.”

He crossed his eyes, trying to assess the damage. Then he shrugged. “In my line of work, getting my nose busted every once in a while is par for the course. Another knot will add character.”

Samantha was about to inquire about his profession, but his complete lack of concern about his appearance made her lose the thought. When her ex-husband had gotten a pimple, he’d fretted over it for days, afraid it might leave a scar. It was refreshing to meet a man outside her immediate family who didn’t obsess about his looks.

There had to be something about this guy she didn’t like, she thought a little desperately. She had only to keep asking questions until she discovered what it was.

“My name’s Samantha Harrigan,” she blurted.

Mention of her last name rarely failed to weed out the jerks. Her father, Frank Harrigan, a self-made million
aire, was almost a legend in rodeo circles. Seven years ago Steve Fisher had been hugely impressed when he learned Samantha was Frank’s daughter. Unfortunately she’d been so young and gullible back then that she’d failed to notice the dollar signs flashing in his eyes when he’d professed his undying love for her.

This man rolled her first name over his tongue as if savoring its flavor. Then he nodded. “Samantha. It suits you. I’m Tucker Coulter.”

That was it? She’d expected more of a reaction, and stared at him, nonplussed. “Are you new to Crystal Falls?”

“No, born and raised here. Why do you ask?”

Samantha shifted her position, trying to regroup. Most rodeo enthusiasts knew the Harrigan name.

The deputy returned to the car just then. After slipping behind the steering wheel, he slammed the driver’s door, started the engine, and turned up the air conditioner. “Sorry about the delay. It’s a wonder you didn’t suffocate in here.”

As he nosed the vehicle through the throngs of milling people to reach the gravel road that led from the com pound to the highway, he grabbed the radio mike. There followed an exchange between him and a female dispatcher that was mostly a bunch of number codes Samantha couldn’t follow.

“Ten-twenty means your location,” Tucker translated, as if sensing her confusion. “ETA means estimated time of arrival. Code four-A means no further assistance needed.”

She sent him a wondering look. “And you know this because…?”

“When I was a kid I wanted to be a cop, and memorized most of the codes.” He inclined his head at the deputy. “A possible ten-one-zero-two means possible cruelty to an animal. UTL means unable to locate. I’m assuming he means the horse.”

Samantha frowned. “Have they even bothered to look?

That poor animal has some pretty nasty cuts. He needs veterinary care ASAP.”

Tucker’s eyes narrowed in thought. “The cuts were superficial. He’ll be fine on that count. I’m more worried about him being at large and possibly injuring himself—or someone else.” He returned his attention to the radio exchange and shook his head in disgust. “You didn’t hit the drunk first. Damn. What’s this guy been smoking?”

“He’s just repeating what the witnesses told him.”

“Right.” Not bothering to lower his voice, he added,

“Pardon me for pointing it out, but a good cop should have enough common sense to sort through the malarkey. What woman in her right mind would push an abusive, angry drunk into a physical confrontation?”

Samantha couldn’t argue the point.

Hoping to calm him down, she said, “I’m amazed you can recall codes you memorized as a kid.”

He shrugged. “I’ve always been good at remembering stuff.”

As the county vehicle entered the stream of highway traffic and began picking up speed, Samantha’s thoughts circled back to this man’s total lack of reaction to her fa
ther’s name. Given his sharp memory, he would surely re member if he’d ever heard of Frank Harrigan.