Page 41 of Outlaw Ridge: Hayes

“I’m returning fire,” Hayes let Aiden know so his brother wouldn’t accidentally shoot him when he leaned out.

Hayes rolled to the side, landing on his stomach and with his gun already aimed. He fired and fired and fired. More than anything he wanted to blast this sonofabitch to shreds. He wanted to make him pay for hurting Jemma.

He heard the sharp sound of pain. Thank God not from Jemma this time. This had no doubt come from the shooter because the gunfire instantly stopped, and there was the thud of someone landing on the ground.

“Don’t move,” he reminded Jemma. “Aiden, come here to cover Jemma and call for an ambulance.”

Hayes got to his feet and sprinted toward their attacker. He was hoping it was one of their suspects. Hoping it was the killer. If not that, then it could be someone the killer had hired. Maybe the asshole would have just enough breath left in his body to say who’d put him up to this.

He only had to run a few yards on the trail before he spotted the man sprawled out on the ground. He was wearing all black and had on a ski mask. There was a rifle still gripped in his right hand.

And there were no signs of life.

Hayes kicked the rifle out of the shooter’s reach and bent down to touch his fingers to the man’s neck and cursed when there was no pulse. That meant they’d be getting no answers from this piece of shit.

Well, no verbal ones anyway.

But he lifted the ski mask to see if it was someone he recognized. And it was.

Damn it all to hell, Hayes knew exactly who this was.

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Chapter Thirteen

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Jemma walked into the inn and faced, well, the worried faces. Her father, Owen, Molly, Declan, Aiden, and Reed. All were studying her to see if she was all right.

She wasn’t.

Her head was throbbing, her ears were aching, and there was still a sharp burning pain where the bullet had hit the Kevlar vest right on her collarbone. There was also the exhaustion that came with the adrenaline crash from hell.

But none of those symptoms was serious.

She was alive and ready for duty. More or less. She wouldn’t mention thelesspart and would lie if anyone asked how she was. No one did though, perhaps because they knew she wouldn’t tell them the truth.

Her father was the first to step forward from the others, and he reached for her as if about to pull her into a hug. He seemed to change his mind at the last moment, no doubt because he had no idea where she was hurting, and he didn’t want to add to her pain.

So, Jemma hugged him.

Gently. Very gently. And she kept the embrace short. She eased back to give him that lie about her being fine, but her father moved on to Hayes, who was right by her side.

“Thank you for getting her out of the line of fire,” her father said.

It didn’t surprise her that he, and everyone else in the reception area, knew what’d happened to her—and what Hayes had done. While the EMTs had loaded Jemma into an ambulance, Aiden had called Owen to fill him in on the attack. Word of the shooting must have gotten back to her father since he’d tried to contact her several times while she was being treated, and when his calls and texts had finally stopped, she had assumed that Owen had let Stefano know what was going on.

And what was going on was the aftermath of a full-blown shitshow.

One with an eighteen-year-old shooter now dead. A shooter that just the day before had chatted with Hayes and her when they’d visited Duane’s school.

Zander Emerson.

Jemma hadn’t actually seen the young man, but he’d been positively IDed first by his fingerprints that’d been on file from an underage drinking charge only three months earlier in San Antonio. Then, there had been a second ID from his parents while Jemma had still been at the hospital being examined. So, they were certain this was Zander Emerson, but they had no answers as to why he’d fired those shots.

Apparently though, Hayes was ready to get some of those answers.

“Any word from Duane yet on why his student tried to murder Jemma?” Hayes asked Owen. “The sonofabitch tried to shoot Jemma in the neck, and he came damn close to succeeding.”

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