lot stronger, he didn’t have the high stakes. He wasn’t fighting for Joelle’s life. Dallas rammed his elbow into the man’s jaw and followed it by bashing his gun across his face.
Cursing and spitting blood, the man reared up to charge at Dallas, but before he could do that, the shot rang out. From the corner of his eye, Dallas saw that Clayton had put a bullet in the man’s leg.
Dallas didn’t take the time to see if that would stop the guy. Clayton had his back, but Clayton still didn’t have a clean shot to stop Sarah. Praying it wasn’t a mistake, Dallas launched himself toward the woman, hauling them both to the ground.
The shot was deafening.
It blasted through Dallas’s head, and he could have sworn his heart, too. That’s because the bullet hadn’t hit him, and that meant it could have Joelle.
He heard himself shout out her name, but it sounded like an echo with the blast still ringing in his ears. Dallas latched on to an arm and gave it a fierce tug.
Joelle.
She was moving. Alive. But since she was coated in mud, he couldn’t tell if she’d been wounded.
Sarah came up off the ground. “I won’t let this happen!” she yelled. “I won’t go to jail for killing that bastard.”
And she pointed the gun right at Joelle.
Dallas still had hold of her arm, and he slung Joelle behind him. In the same motion, he aimed his own gun, praying that there wasn’t too much water or mud in the barrel.
He fired.
And his shot slammed into Sarah’s chest.
Unlike his brother, Dallas had to go for a kill shot. He couldn’t risk Sarah pulling that trigger.
The woman froze, the gun slipping from her hand and onto the ground. Her stare was frozen, too, fixed on Dallas. She said something.
Three words.
Words that Dallas didn’t catch because of the rain.
He didn’t get a chance to ask her what she’d said because Sarah dropped to the ground right next to the gun she’d just tried to fire at them.
Clayton hurried closer to cuff the injured gunman, but Dallas’s attention went straight to Joelle. He grabbed her, pulled her closer to make sure she hadn’t been shot.
“I’m okay,” she said, but her voice was as shaky as she was.
Dallas didn’t take her word for it. He swiped away the mud and looked for any signs of injury. She had some cuts and scrapes on her face, and while it turned his stomach to see them, it was far better than the alternative.
Relieved, he pulled her into his arms. “I’m sorry.” It was just one of the things he needed to say to her, but the others could wait.
“Sarah’s alive,” Clayton relayed to them, and he took out his phone and called for an ambulance.
Joelle pulled back and placed both hands on Dallas’s face. “Did you hear her?”
Her voice wasn’t just shaky now. It was pretty much frantic, and he wanted to dismiss it as part of the slam of adrenaline she was no doubt feeling.
But there was something else.
“Did you hear what Sarah said?” Joelle asked.
Dallas had to shake his head. Three words. But he hadn’t heard. “What?”
Joelle moved closer to him and put her mouth right against his ear. He heard the shuddering sound her breath made. “Sarah said I had help.”
Chapter Nineteen
Dallas was tired of waiting. Joelle, his family and he had been through hell and back, and here he was waiting in his boss’s office for his brother, Wyatt, to return with reports and updates. Yeah, he wanted to hear those, but he also wanted to get Joelle out of there and try to ease that worried look on her face.
They’d managed to shower off most of the mud and grime before Saul had ordered them all to the marshals’ building so that Wyatt could brief them. But all of them—Harlan, Clayton and especially Joelle—looked ready to collapse. Dallas was sure he looked the same.
Dealing with adrenaline crash was always a bear.
Plus, there was all the other stuff going on. He’d shot a woman just hours earlier. It’d been a necessity, but that didn’t make it easy to swallow. As if Joelle knew exactly what he was thinking, she reached out and slid her hand over his.
Their gazes met, and he saw a lot of emotion in her eyes. “Thank you,” she whispered, “for saving my life again.”
You’re welcome didn’t seem like the right thing to say. For that matter, neither did anything else he could come up with.