Chapter 24 Maya
MAYA
The fence post was crooked.
Not by much. Maybe five degrees off vertical, small enough that most people wouldn’t notice. But I’d been staring at it for a solid minute without doing anything about it, which said a lot about where my head was at.
It was on Nate’s hands gripping my hips in the shallows, his mouth hot against my throat, and the desperate sound he’d made when I’d rocked against him. It was on the faint purple bruises on my skin that I’d examined in the bathroom mirror this morning with feral satisfaction.
With a shake of my head to clear it, I adjusted the post, packed the dirt, and moved to the next section. I was further along the boundary than I’d planned. My hands had kept working while my brain kept wandering, and now I was a good twenty minutes past my turnaround point.
And honestly, can you blame a girl? I was caught between the warm afterglow and a frisson of doubt.
Because I knew Nate’s patterns. Kiss, retreat, rebuild the walls. And this had been so much bigger than a kiss. If he showed up with that shuttered expression and careful distance, I didn’t have a plan for that.
I snipped a length of wire and twisted it tight.
No. I was done bracing for the worst version of Nate O’Hare. I chose to be the girl who jumped. And jumping meant consequences. Whatever happened next, I could deal.
My pliers bit into the next stretch of wire, and his voice curled through my head again, wrecked and shaking. Maya. Like it was the only word he knew. A heavy sigh escaped my lips.
A sound cut through the daydream. Tinny, insistent, and coming from the quad parked twenty feet behind me.
The two-way radio. Not just a single beep either. The steady, rhythmic pulse of someone who’d been trying to reach me and was running out of patience.
I jogged over, grabbing the handset. Before I could get a word out, Nate’s voice hit me like a slap.
“Where the fuck are you?”
His deep, rumbly voice washed over me, making me shiver. “Well, good afternoon to you too.” I leaned against the quad, lips twitching. “For a former US Army captain, you have terrible radio etiquette.”
“Maya.” No warmth. No amusement. Just my name, clipped and urgent.
The smile slipped off my face.
“Northern boundary,” I said. “Past the creek crossing. What’s going on?”
“Have you looked at the sky?”
I looked up.
My stomach dropped.
The angry northern sky formed a wall of dark cloud rolling along the mountain line with enough speed to turn a clear afternoon into something else entirely.
A gust of wind hit me from the side, hard enough to snap my ponytail across my face, and the temperature had dropped several degrees in a heartbeat.
How long had I been out here? How long had the sky been doing that while I stood here twisting wire and thinking about Nate’s hands?
“I see it.” My voice was steady, at least.
“It’s moving fast. Brody says you were due back thirty minutes ago.”
“I went further along the line than I planned.”
A beat of silence that managed to communicate a truly impressive amount of frustration.
“Storm’s going to hit before you make it back to the station.”
Thunder rolled across the sky, low and long, like the weather had decided to back him up in real time.
I ran through my options. “I can probably make it to Fogarty’s Hut.”
“How far is that?”
I ran the mental map. The hut sat at the junction of the northern and eastern trails, tucked into the tree line at the base of the ridge. From where I was standing, it was closer than the station by a good margin.
“Fifteen minutes on the quad. Maybe twenty if the trail’s rough.”
“Get there. Now.”
“Copy that.” I was already moving, shoving the pliers into my pack and reaching for the wire cutters. “I’m packing up now.”
“Radio me when you get there.”
“I will.”
Another pause. Shorter this time, but weighted.
“Be careful.”
Two words. Quiet and rough around the edges. And just like that, the urgency in his voice shifted into something else, something that landed in my chest and stayed there.
“I will,” I said again, softer this time.
The radio clicked off.
I moved fast. Tools into the cargo rack, pack strapped down, the loose wire coiled and clipped to the side. My hands worked on autopilot while my eyes kept flicking to the sky. The cloud bank swallowed the ridge line.
The first drops hit as I got onto the quad. Fat and heavy, splatting against the seat and darkening the dirt in coin-sized spots. Not a drizzle. A warning.
The engine kicked to life, and I pulled onto the trail, heading south toward the junction. The canopy overhead offered some cover, but the wind was already tearing through the gaps, sending leaves spiraling across the track in frantic little eddies.
Thunder again. Closer now, a sharp crack that rent the air before rolling out into a long, low growl. The trees swayed overhead and something large crashed in the undergrowth to my left. A branch, probably, but I didn’t stop to check.
The trail narrowed where it cut between two rock outcrops, and I had to slow down to navigate the turn.
Rain was falling steadily now, not the scattered drops from a minute ago but a proper downpour, flattening my hair against my skull and streaming down my forearms. The track was turning slick under the tires, the quad losing grip on the sharper corners.
I knew this trail. Every rock, every root, every dip where water pooled after heavy rain. I’d ridden it a hundred times. But my hands gripped the handlebars tight, my jaw clenched, as I rapidly calculated the speed of that front against the distance I still had to cover.
Lightning split the sky, a jagged white vein that lit everything up for one harsh second before plunging it back into premature twilight. The thunder came almost immediately, so loud it vibrated through the frame of the quad and up through my arms.
The storm was on top of me.
I leaned forward, squinting through the rain, and pushed the quad harder. The trail opened up ahead where it met the eastern junction, and through the curtain of water and the thrashing trees, the dark shape of Fogarty’s Hut loomed solid and squat against the tree line.
Close. So close.