Running Blind Read online

  “Stop what you’re doing and come out behind the barn. I’ve set up a target for you to do some shooting.” The door shut, telling her he wasn’t waiting for her.

  Shooting! Real shooting? Her pulse rate shot up, and not just for one reason. She’d thought a lot about taking shooting lessons since Zeke had first mentioned it, and still couldn’t make a firm decision about whether or not she wanted to go that far. Arming herself seemed like such a drastic step. On the other hand, Brad was definitely armed, and if by some nightmare she found herself face-to-face with him she never, ever wanted to be empty-handed and defenseless.

  There was her answer right there, reluctantly arrived at or not.

  Add in the fact that it seemed Zeke himself was going to teach her, no wonder her pulse rate was skyrocketing. Part of her, the masochistic part, had hoped Zeke would be the one who gave her lessons, because when she thought about it, learning how to shoot was a lot like learning how to play golf, with the instructor’s arms around the student, demonstrating and guiding. Or maybe not; maybe that was just a movie invention. Never mind reality; she’d still hoped—which meant she was an idiot, but an excited one.

  She grabbed a jacket from the line of coat hooks and pulled it on. The jacket was brown, and smelled like horses and cows. The fumes made her sinuses burn. How could she not have noticed the smell before? Oh, right—because most of Zeke’s dirty clothing, which was in a laundry basket right there, smelled the same. She made a mental note to toss the jacket in the washer when she got back to the house. Smelly or not, the jacket was welcome when she stepped outside, because the air was cold and crisp. She’d have liked to have on a pair of gloves and thought about going back for her own, but wasn’t certain she’d be able to shoot with them on. They weren’t the sleek leather gloves assassins always wore in the movies, but thick fleece ones meant to keep her hands warm, not prevent her from leaving fingerprints behind.

  Carlin rounded the back corner of the barn and skidded to a halt, taken aback by the cluster of men waiting for her arrival.

  Everyone turned to look at her. Yep, they were all here: Walt, Spencer, Eli, Patrick, Micah, Bo, Kenneth, plus Zeke himself. Good Lord, what was going on?

  “What’s up?” she asked uneasily, edging backward. This had to be a sign that learning how to shoot was a bad idea. Humiliating herself in front of a crowd had never been her favorite pastime.

  Somehow when she had envisioned shooting lessons she’d thought of it as a semiprivate endeavor, not a social event, with every hand on the Rocking D gathered to watch her failures. Had her cooking somehow gravely offended them? Was this payback for the initial Never Fail White Cake failure? She’d have expected retribution if she’d made them actually eat it—on the other hand, if she’d made them eat it, they would all still be sitting around the table gnawing on the culinary mystery. And hadn’t she made up for it by cooking approximately two tons of potatoes for them?

  “They all want to help,” Zeke said. An unholy light in his eyes said he was enjoying her discomfiture. That unholy light might actually be a smile, which made her stomach turn flips. He indicated a rough worktable set up behind the barn, on which a variety of weapons were lined up.

  “We thought you might want to learn about more than one kind of gun,” Walt said. He held up a shotgun. “But this double-barrel right here will take care of any kind of human trouble you might run into, and most of the animal kind.”

  Carlin cleared her throat. She’d seen shotguns in movies, and knew the shotgun was a shotgun because it had two barrels; as far as she’d ever heard rifles had just one barrel. Shotguns kicked, didn’t they? “Oh, I get it. All of you want to see me shoot that thing and get knocked on my butt, right?”

  Spencer looked shocked. “We’d never do that to you, Miss Carly!” Then he hesitated, shot a look at the others. “Well, maybe.” That was Spencer, honest to a fault, and completely unable to keep his mouth shut.

  “No, ma’am, I wouldn’t try to give you a weapon you couldn’t handle,” Walt said firmly. “She has a little kick to her, but not bad. My ten-year-old grandson can handle it just fine.”

  “I like a thirty aught-six, myself,” Eli put in, lifting a rifle outfitted with a scope.

  “She isn’t going deer or elk hunting,” Kenneth groused. He lifted a pistol, one that looked as if Wyatt Earp would have been proud to haul it around. “She needs something that’s easy to carry, and easy to handle.”

  That was easy to carry and handle? Good lord, it was a foot long! The mental picture of herself was so ridiculous she burst out laughing as she pointed at the pistol. “If I wore that in a holster, it would reach all the way to my knee! And it sure wouldn’t go in my purse.”

  “Get a bigger purse,” Kenneth advised, which, when she thought about it, was, from a man’s point of view, a completely logical solution—but then, men didn’t carry purses. Neither did she, anymore. If it didn’t go in the pockets of her TEC jacket, or her jeans pockets, then she didn’t carry it, which brought up another issue.

  “Wouldn’t I have to get a permit to carry a pistol?” Anything that required a background check was off the table.

  “Not in Wyoming,” Zeke said. “Concealed carry is legal.”

  Holy cow. That changed everything. She eyed the pistol with renewed interest. On the other hand, if she could shoot the shotgun without getting knocked on her keister, how cool was that? When it came to the fear factor, a shotgun beat a measly little pistol hands down—and hitting a target with a shotgun was way easier than hitting one with a pistol.

  “We’ll let her try everything,” Zeke said, moving to the table and picking up a set of ear protectors. “That way she can tell which one suits her best.”

  Evidently the men had all contributed their own favored weapons for her initial lesson. The gesture gave her a lump in her throat. Despite her sometimes less-than-stellar cooking efforts, they were showing her they cared about her well-being. Tears welled in her eyes, and she got sniffly. “This is so sweet of all of you,” she choked out, and gave them all a beaming if somewhat watery smile.

  There was some scuffling of boots all around, and a chorus of incoherent muttering that she took to mean something along the lines of “aw, it isn’t anything much.” She’d seldom been so touched. A few months ago when she’d arrived in Battle Ridge she’d felt completely alone in the world, prevented by fear from so much as calling anyone in her family. She’d been on the run, seeking a safe burrow to hide in, but always feeling as if any moment might be her last. Since the day she’d walked into The Pie Hole, she’d found friends, she’d found safety, she’d found people who cared. And she’d found Zeke—maddening, sexy, stubborn, capable, sexy … oh, wait, she’d already said that. And she shouldn’t think along these lines, shouldn’t let herself even dream that maybe someday she might be able to think of something she could do about Brad, that when she didn’t have a target on her back she could come back to Battle Ridge and, if Zeke was still single—

  Stop it, she sternly ordered her imagination, or her libido, or both. She couldn’t plan her life around maybes. She had to deal with reality. And for some reason, she had to keep telling herself that.

  Zeke handed her the ear protectors. She started to put them on, then stopped. There was just the one set. “What about everyone else?”

  “Everyone else can stick their fingers in their ears,” he replied, then took a cotton ball out of his pocket, pulled it in two, and stuffed a half into each of his ears. “We’re the only two who won’t be able to do that.”

  She looked at the men. “Don’t all of you have ear protectors?”

  “Fancy ones,” Walt said, grinning. “The kind that kill the sound of gunfire but let you hear a deer tippy-toeing through the leaves. But why get ’em out when we can just stick our fingers in our ears, like the boss said?”

  That made her feel better; she didn’t want to deafen anyone, and maybe sticking their fingers in their ears was more manly than wearing the ea