Page 34 of The SEAL and the Sheriff

A waste of time.

Except.

He glanced back at Sarah, already turning for the door, hat pulled low against the wind. The sound of her laughing, loud enough that Captain’s ears had flicked back at her. Somewhere between Bon Jovi and Wyatt singing in the Pacific, he’d stopped thinking about the case.

There had only been Sarah.

He pocketed the notebook and joined Sarah outside. The lake lay white and wind-scoured beneath the mountains, the surface unbroken except for long shadows thrown by blue-black spruce.

The ridge rose above it all, dark against the winter sky.

Light slanted off the frozen lake. Walking behind her toward the horses, he let himself have one full second of it. Sarah. The morning. Whatever it had been.

Something flashed high on the ridge. A hard glint where there shouldn’t have been one.

Hudson moved.

The fraction of a second between recognition and consequence.

His shoulder drove into Sarah’s waist and took them both into the snow. A round punched into the snow where she’d been standing. A beat later, the report cracked across the lake, its echo reverberating back off the mountains, deafening and strange in the cold air. He rolled them behind a frozen rise.

Sarah went taut under him, twisting and reaching for her gun.

“Stay down. Don’t look up.” His voice dropped to a register not quite his own—the old one, the one that belonged to rooms he didn’t talk about. He had her covered, his weight over her, already checking the tree line below the ridge for a second muzzle flash.

Wind left to right. No follow-up movement. The shooter hadn’t relocated.

“I’m not going anywhere, but I can shoot from down here as well as you can.” Her voice was muffled, and her heartbeat hammered against his forearm.

The second shot struck closer. Snow kicked up four feet to their left.

The horses screamed. Captain reared, jerking his lead rope taut, and Bon Jovi went sideways in a panic. The ties gave, and both animals broke for the tree line at a dead run, stirrups flapping.

“Hudson—”

“I see it.” He couldn’t move off her until he understood the angle, the distance, and what kind of shooter could put two rounds that close without hitting either of them.

“Talk to me, Hudson.”

“North ridge.”

“One shooter?”

“I think so.”

She wriggled under him. “You think or you know?”

His gaze swept the tree line again. “One firing point doesn’t mean one shooter.” His eyes kept moving, searching for the spotter he hoped wasn’t there. One rifle and one glint didn’t mean only one set of eyes.

“Okay. What’s the angle?”

“Long shot. Six hundred yards plus.”

“Which means?”

“Which means if he’s that far out and still landing rounds this close, he’s good.”

Trained. No lucky bastard or local yokel with a hunting rifle.