“I could hit you one time, jag-off, and you’d never get up,” Preacher snarled into the man’s face.

“John!” Paige cried. “John!”

Preacher felt Jack’s hand on one of his arms. “Preach, go get Paige.”

He looked over his shoulder at her, sitting up, crying, her hand pressed over her nose and blood running down her chin. He held Lassiter off the ground effortlessly; he wanted to pummel him till he cried. He looked back at Lassiter’s shocked face, staring into his frightened eyes for a second, and thought, I can’t do violence in front of her. She might think I’m like him. I’m not like him. Preacher dropped the man to the ground. He bent his face close to Lassiter’s and said, “Do not get up.” Then he straightened, whirled and went to Paige a few feet away.

“God,” Preacher said. He got down on one knee and lifted her off the ground, into his arms. He stood with her against him.

“I’m okay,” she wept against his chest. “I’ll be okay.”

He pulled her hand away from her face, saw the blood coming from her nose.

“Aw, Paige, that should never have happened to you,” he said. He started to carry her to Doc’s.

Jack helped Mel to her feet. She brushed herself off and stood for him. “I’m not hurt,” she said. “I just got off balance….”

“You sure?” Jack asked.

She nodded and Jack turned toward Lassiter, still crumpled on the ground. His look of fear was gone and replaced with a narrow-eyed sneer that made Jack furious.

Rick bravely put himself between Jack and Lassiter. When Jack turned from Mel, Rick took one look at the storm gathering on Jack’s face, the way he clenched his fists open and closed, and stepped out of his way.

Jack walked over to Lassiter and stuck out a hand to assist him in standing. “Good thing you stopped him,” Lassiter said, putting out his hand for assistance. “I’d have had his ass.”

Jack pulled him to his feet with a snarl, and once he was upright, threw a punch into his face that blew him across the street four feet. He walked the few feet and stood over Lassiter, looking down at him. “Now you gonna have mine?” he asked.

Lassiter looked up at him, blood immediately spurting from his nose. “What the hell…?” He got clumsily to his feet and faced off with Jack, his fists up as a boxer would do. He shuffled his feet a little, dancing, ready to land a blow with a closed fist.

Jack actually laughed, completely loose, relaxed. “You’re kidding me, right?” he said. He wiggled his fingers. “Come on.”

Lassiter came at him, then retreated suddenly, whirled in a crouch and came up with a high kick aimed at Jack’s head. But Jack stopped the assault of Lassiter’s foot with a fast hand that grabbed his ankle. Jack yanked hard and Lassiter landed on his back, his ankle still in Jack’s grip. “What you going to do, buddy? Kick me?”

“Let go!”

Jack dropped the leg and reached down to pull him to his feet by the front of his expensive shirt. He threw a punch into his gut, doubling Lassiter over. Then another one to his face, reeling him backward onto the ground.

At Doc’s porch steps, Preacher turned around and looked over his shoulder at what Jack was doing, then continued on.

“You’ve had it now,” Lassiter said with a strained, breathless voice.

“I haven’t had it quite yet,” Jack said, pulling him up again. He delivered one more blow to the man’s face, sending him airborne a few feet before he landed in the dirt, rolling around, semiconscious. Jack brushed his hands together to remove the stain. “Now, I’ve had it,” he said. “Rick, tie his hands behind his back. I’m going to call the sheriff.”

“Sure, Jack,” Rick said, sprinting off to the bar in search of rope.

Mel shook her head. “Shame on you,” she said to Jack.

“I’m sorry, Melinda. But someone had to knock the shit out of this asshole at least once, and if Preacher had done that, this idiot would never walk again.”

“Well, if you get into trouble, don’t come crying to me,” she said, and turned to follow Paige and Preacher into Doc’s.

Paige lay on the examining table in Doc’s clinic and Preacher held her hand in both of his. “I let you down,” he was saying, so softly Mel barely heard.

“No,” she whispered. “No.”

“Paige, were you afraid I was going to hurt him?” Her eyes shifted away from his face and he brushed a soft hand against the hair at her temples. “Paige, I could’ve hit him—but I don’t lose control. Paige,” he said, putting a finger and thumb on her chin, turning her eyes back to his face. “Paige, I don’t lose control. Okay?”

She nodded weakly. Mel put an ice pack on Paige’s face and told her to hold it there, then noticed that a dark stain was spreading in the crotch of her jeans. “Preacher, please step out of the room and call Doc so we can examine Paige.”

“I’m sorry,” he said to Paige. “I let you down.”

Paige put a hand on his face. Preacher put a light kiss on her forehead and left, hanging his head. Mel knew the only way this could have turned out differently was if Preacher had been strapped to Paige’s side twenty-four hours a day. Lassiter was quick and mean. Obviously crazy.

And Paige was bleeding, perhaps miscarrying.

Mel shook out a sheet to cover Paige. She leaned over her and said, “Help me pull off your jeans, Paige. We have a problem. You might be miscarrying.”

Although she cried softly, she was able to lift her hips enough for the pants to be removed. Blood immediately began to pool beneath her and Mel decided not to examine her; she didn’t want to aggravate a hemorrhage. Rather, she fixed her up with a Peripad, covered her with the sheet, and told her she’d be right back.

She met Doc in the hall before he came into the examining room. “We need to transport her, at least to Grace Valley—and maybe on to Valley Hospital. Will you call John Stone and have Preacher bring the gurney?”

“Spontaneous AB?” he asked.

“At least. I just hope it’s not a uterine hemorrhage. The girl is only twenty-nine. I’m not going to examine her. I’m going to leave that to John. Will you please tell him there was severe abdominal trauma? Bastard kicked her.”

Doc grimaced, but then he nodded and went to talk to Preacher.

Back in the exam room, Mel bent over Paige. “I’m taking you to the OB in Grace Valley, Paige. We need a specialist. Possibly a surgeon.”

“Am I losing the baby?” she asked weakly.

“I’ll be honest with you—it doesn’t look good. I’ve asked that Preacher bring the gurney back. Would you like him to go with you?”

“No. I have to talk to him, though.”

When Preacher rolled the gurney to the exam room, Mel told him to take a moment with Paige, quickly, then she would need his help to load her. He stepped into the room and took her hand, the one that wasn’t holding the ice pack to her face. “John,” she said, “please make sure Christopher is all right. That he doesn’t see his father. That he knows Mama is okay. Please.”

“Mel and Jack can—”

“No, John. Please. Take care of Chris. I’ll be all right, but I don’t want him scared and I don’t want him to see his father. Please?”

“Anything you want,” he said. “Paige…”

“No, no more apologies,” she said. “Take care of Chris.”

Preacher assisted Mel in sliding Paige from the exam table to the gurney, and the bright red puddle of blood left behind as she was moved caused his own blood to roar in his ears. As he pushed the gurney out of Doc’s office, Rick ran to help him lift it down the porch stairs to the waiting Hummer. His vision blurred as his eyes clouded with unshed tears. “Everything will be all right, Paige,” he said. “I’ll take care of Chris.”

Wes Lassiter had achieved a kneeling position in the street, his hands bound behind his back, his face bloody and swelling. He’d begun to draw a crowd. Several men were leaning on the rail or sitting on the porch chairs at Jack’s while Jack and Preacher sat on the steps, watching. Jack’s hand was plunged into a bowl full of ice when the sheriff’s deputy pulled into town. He had to carefully drive around the man in the street and parked at the bar, right in front of Jack.

It was the same deputy who had attended the shooting Jack had been involved in over a month ago when a drug addict, looking for narcotics from Doc’s drug cabinet, had held a knife on Mel. The deputy, Henry Depardeau, got out of the car and hitched up his gun belt. “Sheridan,” he said. “I’m seeing a lot more of you these days than I like.”

“Ditto,” Jack said. He lifted his swollen hand. “I’d shake, but…”

Henry threw a look over his shoulder. “You do that?”

“I did. The man threw my pregnant wife to the ground so he could kick the shit out of his own pregnant wife.”

“Whew.” Henry shook his head and looked down. “He punch you?” Henry asked, pointing to his own cheek, indicating the bruise Jack still wore.

“Nah. I wasn’t going to let him hit me. This is old,” he explained. “I walked into a door. A big, stupid door.”

“Then you beat him. That’s two batteries, Jack. His and yours. Might have to hook you both up.”

“Whatever you have to do, Henry. He did try to kick me in the head, though. That count for anything?”

“Maybe. At least you didn’t kill him.”

“Saved his life,” Preacher said. “I was going to kill him.”

“How’d you get that blood on you there, big fella?” Henry asked Preacher.

“Carrying Paige to Doc’s. Paige being his wife,” Preacher said, looking down at the wide smear of blood on his shirt. To Jack he said, “Shew—I better change this shirt before Chris wakes up from his nap. The things you don’t think about with kids.” And he got up quickly, going inside.

“So,” Henry said to Jack. “You did that all by yourself.”

“All by myself.”

“And the woman?”

“She’s been taken to a specialist—an OB. She might be losing that baby. He knew she was pregnant, by the way,” Jack added, throwing a glance in Lassiter’s direction. “Last I heard, besides being thrown to the ground by her hair and kicked in the stomach, she’s bleeding real bad.”

“Witnesses to this beating?”

“Plenty. There’s me, Preacher, Rick here, my wife, who took the woman to the doctor in Grace Valley. You can catch up with her later. It was an emergency.”

“Hey!” Lassiter yelled. “I’m over here!”

Henry glanced lazily over his shoulder and said, “Yeah? Then shut up.” Back to Jack, he said, “I suppose I can trust you to stay right here?”

“Where am I gonna go, Henry? I want to be sure Mel’s okay.”

“Tell you what we’re going to do. I’m going to book him. And if the sheriff wants you to come in, you drive on over. Okay?”

“Sure thing, Henry.”

He shook his head again. “I just can’t figure out why anyone in his right head would bother these Virgin River women.”

“Yeah. Makes no sense,” Jack said.

The baby spontaneously aborted—miscarried—before Doc and Mel could even get Paige to Grace Valley. John Stone and June Hudson loaded her in their ambulance and took her to Valley Hospital where, thankfully, a D and C caused the bleeding to slow and no further surgery was required.

When Paige woke from her procedure, she was told that fortunately it appeared there had been no further damage to her reproductive organs. She would only stay through the night for observation and could be released in the morning, but Dr. Stone wanted her to stay off her feet for at least a couple of days.