His Forever Valentine. Marie Ferrarella

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      Chapter Two

      Stunned, Val held her ground. His response made no sense to her. What did it have to do with what she’d just asked him?

      “What?” she demanded.

      “Run!” Rafe repeated, this time shouting the word at her.

      Was this some sort of a joke? Val stared at the cowboy in confusion. She still didn’t understand why he’d say something like that.

      “Run?” Val echoed incredulously. “Why would you tell me to...?”

      This was no time for a debate. Instead of biting off a few choice words of explanation, Rafe grabbed her hand. Rather than pushing her ahead of him, he went the other route. He pulled her in his wake.

      Hard.

      And then she finally heard it. She heard the cause for his alarm. The sound of something pounding on the ground felt as if it reverberated right through her, like an earthquake in the distance.

      The “earthquake” felt like it was coming closer by the moment.

      Val turned her head in the direction the sound was coming from.

      That was when she saw it.

      A bull.

      A huge, black bull was charging directly at them.

      At her.

      Val needed no further incentive to take flight. A veteran of several marathons—every one of them undertaken for some sort of a good cause—she immediately upped her game. With her pouring it on, Rafe no longer had to pull her in his wake. Despite the situation, a hint of admiration at her speed filled him when he realized that she was now keeping up with him and that at any moment she was going to pull ahead of him.

      “He’s gaining on us!” Val cried, beginning to realize that just maybe this competition between the charging bull and them might not end well after all.

      Less than a minute later, Val saw that they were not just running from something, they were running toward something. Directly up ahead was a long stretch of wire fencing.

      “Will that keep him from trampling us?” she managed to ask as she continued running alongside of Rafe for all she was worth.

      “It damn well better,” was all he allowed himself to say.

      There was no point in telling her that he had a plan B. That if worse had come to worst and Valentine had frozen with fear, he’d been prepared to divert the beast, to get the bull’s attention so that it would run after him rather than attack the woman who had turned up on his property unannounced like this. Rafe hadn’t been raised to subscribe to the “every man for himself” school of thought. His father would have never allowed it.

      But luckily, the woman with the improbable first name was not only sexy as hell, she was fit, which in this case meant that she was capable of keeping up with him and—for now—keeping ahead of Jasper, the whimsical name that Alma had awarded the bull that they had bought a year ago to breed with some of their cattle.

      Reaching the fence less than a minute ahead of the charging bull, Rafe quickly pushed his uninvited guest up and over the fence. The next second, he dove over it himself. Rafe managed to clear it—all except for his left boot, the tip of which got caught on the very edge of the fence.

      What began as a clean execution became less so as he found himself falling short of his intended mark.

      Rather than hitting the grass, Rafe landed on top of Val, who was just in the process of turning around. Instead of gaining her feet, she gained added weight. Enough weight to push the air right out of her.

      A startled cry, comprised of protest and surprise, echoed through the morning air, riding on the air he had knocked out of her.

      As for him, Rafe was acutely aware that what he was on top of bore no resemblance to either the ground or the grass. It was soft, warm, enticingly fragrant and damn stirring. His body absorbed the sensations before his mind could even frame them.

      Banking down the major part of his reaction, he allowed his concern to come to the foreground. Though he’d attempted to buffer his weight, he had come down rather hard on her.

      “Are you all right?” he asked.

      Right now she couldn’t help thinking she was really far from all right, but not in the sense he meant it. Generally warm and outgoing, Val still kept a part of herself in reserve. The part that had, at the age of nineteen, run off with Scott Walters, a ruggedly handsome stuntman with the gift of always saying the right thing. He’d been her first love and she had loved him fiercely. Until, recklessly, he’d unintentionally broken her heart.

      Since that day, she had carefully guarded her heart and kept a tight СКАЧАТЬ