7. Callum
7
CALLUM
“So,” Chuck says as we step out of the cabin and into the snow-covered forest outside. “Now that it’s been a couple of days, are you going to tell us what the hell happened between you and that girl?”
“Charli,” I correct him, stuffing my hands into my pockets to ward off the cold. “Her name is Charli.”
“Charli, right,” he muses. “So what exactly happened between you and Charli, then?”
I ignore him, glancing up to the sky, still cloaked in a heavy gray cloud.
“We need to get down to the crash site,” I reply. “It might start snowing again soon. I want to make the most of the clear weather while we’ve got it.”
“So that’s a no, huh?” Dax interjects as we begin to crunch our way through the snow toward the spot where the car crashed.
“A no?”
“About what happened between the two of you.”
“I don’t see what that’s got to do with anything.”
I don’t even have to look back at them to know they’re rolling their eyes at each other. Call it triplet telepathy—or maybe just my siblings’ bad attitude in particular.
“Because as long as she’s staying here, we deserve to know what you’re giving up room and resources for,” Chuck reminds me as he catches up to me.
I don’t look over at him as I reply. “Because it’s the right thing to do. She was in an accident.”
“And we could take her down to the emergency room right now, if you’d let us,” Dax points out. “We could gas up the truck, have her down there by this evening.”
“That’s not a good idea.”
“Why? Because of whoever she’s running from?” Dax presses.
Honestly, much as I’d like to have some quick comeback to that, nothing springs to mind. I don’t know exactly who she’s fleeing, but whoever it is, they had to have quite a grip on her for her to be considering marriage—to be on the brink of walking down the aisle, no less. And now she’s here instead, in the middle of nowhere, right on my doorstep. I’m not going to send her back out into the grips of whoever that guy is—it’s not who I am.
And, yeah, alright, maybe part of it is jealousy. Because there was a time, when I first knew her, that I thought I might be the one walking down the aisle with her.
Not that I ever imagined it seriously, of course, we were only together a few months. And I know logically she would have moved on—a girl like that, she would be snapped up the moment she was single, too good to waste. But being faced with the reality of it is something else entirely, and I’m not willing to just brush it off like it’s nothing, especially when whoever sent her running has her so terrified to be found again.
“What exactly are we doing out here, anyway?” Chuck asks, changing the subject. He knows when he’s not going to get an answer out of me, and this is, without a doubt, one of those times. They don’t need to know about our history together. It’s just not worth it, and I’m not about to let them try and coax the story out of me—the story of the mess I made with the best woman I ever had. God knows I’ve gone over it enough times in my head as it is…
“We’re moving her car,” I remind him. “She wants it off the side of the road, in case someone spots it and figures out where she is.”
“Damn, she’s got you whipped already, huh?” Dax teases me, and I shoot a look at him. I know kidding around is a better response than any I got before—he was stalking around, pissed as hell, most of yesterday, clearly wanting nothing more than to get rid of her before she could cause any more trouble—but I don’t like being talked to like I don’t have a clue what I’m doing.
“Whoever she’s trying to get away from,” I remind him. “We don’t want them finding this place any more than she does. It’s in our best interest too.”
“Or we could just do what she asked us to in the first place,” Dax suggests. “Get her out of here. Let her hitchhike her way to wherever she wants to go?—”
“Dax,” Chuck cuts in, trying to stop the conversation swerving in that direction again.
“Look at the weather,” I remind him. “And look at the state of her. She’s not well enough to be out on the roads, not by a long shot. And who knows what kind of psychos could be driving around. Even if it’s not the guy who’s looking for her, if someone spots some woman, injured, on the side of the road…”
I trail off and shake my head. No way am I letting her leave our place until I know what’s going on. She wasn’t exactly forthcoming when I tried to get it out of her before, but I can’t blame her for that, not after everything that’s happened between us. I blew whatever bond of trust we had, and now I have to find some way to get it back if I’m going to make sense of this one way or another.
We make our way through the forest—it’s stopped snowing, and some of the snowfall has begun to melt, leaving it icy but less treacherous overall. The cold is starting to lift, much to my relief, but I guess that means whoever has been looking for her might be out on these roads soon enough.
My mind has been racing as I try to put the pieces together—I’ve been tossing and turning for the last two nights on the couch in the living room, where I’ve been sleeping since she’s been in my bed.
Who could she be so afraid of? A psycho ex? Sure, but fleeing into the mountains like this, it seems overboard, even for something like that. And if that was the case, why would she not just call the cops and get his ass put away? What does he have on her—or someone else—that has her too scared to do anything but run?
Finally, we reach the car—it’s covered by a few inches of snow, but nothing too serious.
“You have that hot water?” I ask Chuck. He nods, pulling the flask from his pocket, and I grab it, pouring it over one of the wheels, which has frozen into a puddle on the ground below. With a hiss and a puff of steam, it slides free, and I hand the bottle back to him.
“Dax, you take the front,” I tell him—it’s the lightest, and least likely to put any serious weight on his leg, but there’s no way he would leave us to do this alone. “Chuck and I will take the back…”
We move into position. It takes a couple of attempts to get a decent grip on the car, given how cold it is, and how it’s iced-over in a few places, but we manage it—Dax goes backwards into the woods, steering us between the trees as Chuck and I guide the car down the hill a few yards.
“Woah, woah!” Dax yells out, and we stop—he drops his end, and shakes his head.
“The earth just drops away here,” he warns us, wiping a little sweat from his brow. “We’ll need to steer it to the right a bit.”
“Sure, sure,” I call back. “That way. Okay, let’s?—”
But before we can get started again, the sound of an engine draws our attention. This part of the world doesn’t get a whole lot of people passing through it, so any visitors are enough to attract attention. Usually, it’s loggers or hunters, mostly in beat-up vans or cars that look as though they’ve been through more than the three of us put together.
So, when a sleek, dark-blue car mounts the hill and starts on its way toward us, we all exchange glances. It doesn’t belong here. Either someone is very, very lost…
Or this could be the people who Charli is so worried about finding her.
The car slows down as it pulls up next to us. Charli’s vehicle is obscured among a few trees, but it’s probably still visible enough to attract attention from anyone on their way by.
A man rolls down the window as he draws to a halt beside us—an older guy, dark hair, thinning at the temples and on his scalp, with an expensive watch and heavy furrows in his brow.
“You gentlemen alright?” he asks us, and I nod, shifting so I’m blocking his direct view to the car.
“We’re just fine.”
“What are you three up to out here, in this weather?” he replies, doing his best to look past me without making it too obvious.
“With respect, sir, that’s our own business.”
He bristles—whoever he is, he’s clearly not used to being spoken to like that. But he seems to take the point, and nods.
“Well, anything I can do to help?”
“We’re good,” Dax calls out, an edge to his voice that seems to act as the final warning shot this guy needs. His eyes narrowed slightly, he rolls up his window and pulls the car away—and I can tell before he’s even out of sight that Dax is not about to take this well.
“What the fuck was that about?” he demands, stabbing his finger in the direction the man came from.”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “But we?—”
“I thought she was just paranoid, but there are really people looking for her, aren’t there?” he continues. His eyes flash with discomfort. I can already tell he’s starting to spin out, whatever calmness he managed to grab on to these last few days already beginning to fade.
“I have no idea, Dax,” I grit out. “But we still need to move this car.”
“You’ve got to admit, it’s weird,” Chuck interjects—as though I need someone else to point that out to me, after what just happened. “Someone rolling up out of the blue like that, in a car like that?—”
“Yeah, it is strange,” I agree. “But that’s all the more reason to move this fucking car before any more come by and ask what we’re doing.”
Chuck seems to snap back into reality, and heads to his position at the back of the car—but Dax is more distracted than anything else, his brows knitted together, his jaw tight.
“This isn’t a good idea, Callum,” he tells me. “That girl, whatever she’s dealing with, it’s not our business?—”
“She’s in our house,” I shoot back, irritable. “It’s already our business, whether you like it or not.”
“Doesn’t have to stay that way.”
“And what the fuck does that mean?” I demand, rounding on him. His face darkens.
“You know exactly what it means?—”
“Guys!” Chuck calls out, cutting through the bullshit before it can go anywhere. I gather myself quickly—the last thing we need is friction between the three of us, not in the midst of whatever the hell this is.
I move back to my spot at the side of the car, and Dax, after a moment, does the same. Steering the car to the right, we guide it into the trees and push it down the hill till it’s out of sight of the road. Dax leaps out of the way at the last moment, and it wedges against a large oak tree at the bottom, immovable.
Breathing hard, we dust our hands off, our breath creating little puffs of steam in the air.
“That should keep anyone seeing it from the road,” I remark, and Dax crosses his arms over his chest.
“Yeah, but what about anyone who comes looking for more?”
“And why would they think to stop here?” I ask, gesturing around. “There’s no reason for them to look at this place and think there’s anything other than trees and cold for as far as they can see. They’d be stupid to start snooping around in these woods without a damn good reason.”
“Unless that guy tells them he saw us moving a car out here,” he mutters. I’ve been trying not to think of that part, because he’s right. It might already be too late. And if that guy has someone to report back to, there’s a good chance he’ll come back with far more trouble to cause for us.
“We don’t know that he had anything to do with it,” I point out. “He could have just been a concerned citizen, offering a hand.”
Dax lets out a short, mirthless bark of laughter.
“You said it yourself,” he reminds me. “Nobody would stop by this place unless they had a damn good reason to. Only people who would make a point to come here would have to be…”
“Total psychos. Like us,” Chuck finishes up, dissipating the tension. Dax and I both laugh—this time, for real.
“Yeah, like us,” I agree. “Come on, let’s get back to the house. I want to let Charli know we moved the car.”
“And check on your girlfriend?” Dax taunts.
I roll my eyes. “She’s not my girlfriend.”
“But was she, at one point?” Chuck asks with interest.
I shake my head and start on the route back to the cabin. “Come on. I’ve got better things to do than stand around here gossiping with you assholes…”
We begin to head back to the cabin, but before we lose sight of the road entirely, I look back one last time. It’s quiet, as far as I can tell—but that doesn’t do much to stem the questions rushing through my mind. Who exactly was that guy? What was he doing out here? Was he the one Charli was running from—or was he just sent by that guy? I don’t know the answers yet, but I am damn sure I’m going to find them.
Because that’s what it’s going to take to keep Charli safe. And right now, that’s my priority.
Even if my brothers might have other ideas.