He tossed the phone onto the bed and swung his long legs over the side. “Is everything okay?”

He looked down at me as he snatched up a pair of jeans and shoved his long legs into them. “That was Elma’s home care nurse. Apparently she fell this morning in the bathroom. She’s refusing to go back to the doctor. The nurse asked me to come over and talk to her.”

“Oh no.” The words whispered worriedly between us. I was worried about Elma, but in all honesty I was more worried about Church. He wouldn’t take something happening to the older woman well. He would see it as more evidence that every time he let someone get close, something bad worked its way in to harm them. “Well, I’m the new guy, so I have no problem going head to head with her if it’s for her own good.” I could do tough love for the cause because it was still love and that was sort of my specialty.

“The nurse said she’s in a mood, so you can stay here if you want. I got this.”

I reached out a hand and put it on the center of his back as he sat down on the edge of the bed in order to tug his boots on. “I know you have this, but I’m here and I want to help you with it.”

He looked at me over his shoulder and the corners of his lips twitched as he reached around to snag my wrist so that he could pull me flush against his warm skin. “Always trying to fix everything, aren’t you, pretty girl?”

I gulped a little and kissed his shoulder again. “I mean, I have to try.”

“No, you don’t, but you always do. That makes you something pretty special, Dixie.” He let me go and bent over so he could snag a shirt off the floor. “You can come with me, but Elma is stubborn, so if she’s in a mood I might have to pick her up and put her in the car and force her to go see the doctor if she’s hurt.”

I cleared my throat and slid off the bed. “You’ll take care of her. That’s what you do, and that’s what makes you special, Church.”

We walked up the block and around the corner hand in hand. We didn’t say much, but he never did and the fact he had his fingers wrapped around mine felt like it said a whole lot more than words would anyways.

His eyes never stopped shifting over the area around us. There were obvious lines of tension in the set of his shoulders and in the turn of his mouth. It was like he was waiting for the other shoe to drop, or for whoever had been terrorizing us since we left Denver to jump out of one of the perfectly maintained rose bushes that lined the neighbor’s yard. His alertness made me anxious and had me craning my neck to make sure danger wasn’t lurking as we rounded the corner and started up Elma’s driveway.

The nurse’s plain economy car was parked in front and the big white door leading into the home was open. The screen door was still shut and the sound of Elma’s TV could be heard well before we reached the porch. I went to run up the stairs like I always did, but Church threw out a hand and gently shoved me behind him as he took the steps one at a time. He was always doing that. He put me first in bed. He put me first when it came to the idea and thought of me getting what he thought I justly deserved. He put me first when it came to my comfort and well-being, and he put me first when it came to my safety and security by putting himself between me and whatever line of fire might be in front of us. I could take care of myself, but around him I didn’t have to, because he always stepped up to take care of me. Somewhere along the line on this wacky journey he’d convinced me to take with him, his need to protect and defend felt less like an obligation and more like an honor that he was more than happy to have the responsibility for.

He rapped his knuckles on the frame of the screen and called Elma’s name. There wasn’t a response for a long minute, which made him frown. “Do you think she can’t hear me over the TV?”

I shrugged and reached around him to tug open the door. “She might be in a lot of pain if she fell hard. Her nurse probably gave her some medication to help with that. Maybe it finally kicked in and she’s down for the count. That will make kidnapping her and hauling her back to the hospital easier if that’s the route you decide to go with.”

He gave me a narrow-eyed look as he pushed into the house, me close on his heels. “Not funny, pretty girl.”

It wasn’t. But I hated the idea of Elma hurting as much as I hated the idea of him hurting because someone else he cared about had fallen to that bad that hung around, heavy and dark like a stormy day.

I was opening my mouth to shout for the nurse when suddenly there was a crack that sounded like a thousand firecrackers going off. One second I was standing behind Church in the entrance of Elma’s stately and romantic house and the next I was being shoved bodily through the screen door without it being opened. Another crack ripped through the air and I heard him swear as he pushed my head down and continued to shove me through mesh and out of the house.

I heard him grunt in pain and swear as he yelled at me to run, his hands hard on my shoulders as he kept pushing me farther and farther away from the deafening pops and pings that I belatedly realized were gunshots.

I tumbled and landed on my hands and knees at the bottom of the porch steps. The gravel of the driveway slit the skin of my hands open as I screamed at Church when I realized he was still standing on the porch. He had one hand wrapped around the opposite bicep as crimson oozed fast and thick through his fingers.

“What …” I didn’t even get the rest of the question out before Church fell back a step as the tattered and torn screen door was kicked open and a squirming, swearing Elma Mae was wrenched through it, clasped in the arms of a man that I recognized immediately. He looked different. Insanity and fury did that to a man. It twisted features and erased any traces of humanity that might have been there before.