Chapter Fourteen
“THAT WAS YUMMY.” Summer leaned back in her chair and patted her stomach with relish. “If you keep feeding me like this, I’m going to be like a whale wallowing through the water, not a honed athlete in the prime of her life,” she joked.
“You could never look like a whale.” M?rten replied. “As a matter of fact, you look great,” he added.
Where the hell had that come from? It was supposed to be a joke, but it’d come out wrong.
He glanced accusingly at his wine. This was his third glass.
Normally, he had one beer with dinner, and that was it.
But he’d bought this red as it went exceedingly well with the reindeer steak he’d planned for dinner, or so the bottle shop attendant had told him.
Problem was, Summer did look great. Fantastic even. Relaxed and casual as they sat on the front porch in the evening sunshine in a pair of jean shorts and a tank top that again showed off her gleaming golden-brown skin, and long, toned legs. Black hair left long to cascade down her back.
She was staring at him with a confused look on her face.
She’d also consumed three glasses, and her stare was a tad glassy-eyed.
They’d both had more alcohol than they should’ve.
Summer said she didn’t drink this close to a competition, but when he told her it’d bring out the flavors of the dish and made puppy-dog eyes at her, she’d relented.
She continued to stare at him, and he continued to be unable to withdraw his gaze, ensnared as he was by the dark pools of her irises, all huge and tempting. If there hadn’t been a table between their two chairs, M?rten may have leaned across and touched his lips to hers. Shit. Not good.
“I think we should go for a walk.” He stood, and Summer leaned backward in surprise.
“It’s a beautiful evening, and we could walk off some of this food.
” They needed to get out of here; it was becoming dangerous.
She was becoming dangerous, this casual chatting, as if they were friends.
Because he was finding it harder and harder to resist her.
Yes, a walk was a great idea. It’d put some distance between him and Summer, help him get rid of some of that pent-up energy coursing around his body.
With a loud clatter of plates, M?rten cleared the small table and took everything inside. “Are you coming?” He didn’t wait for her answer as he banged through the fly screen door.
Three minutes later, M?rten was striding out, leading the way through the undergrowth around his house to a hidden walking trail that circled the outskirts of the suburb only the locals knew about.
It wound between the birch trees, the white bark of their trunks glowing in the orange light of sunset, and led through open patches where you could often pick smultron, a small native strawberry.
But M?rten barely noticed any of it; he was intent on only one thing. Getting his libido under control.
“Slow down. I can’t enjoy the scenery if you’re gonna pretend this is some kind of race.” Summer was only half joking as she jogged to catch up with him.
With a force of effort, he slowed his pace, listening as Summer exclaimed over a red-capped woodpecker tapping madly against the side of a tree, or a rare red squirrel darting across in front of them.
After a few more minutes, the peace of the forest worked its magic, and he drew in a deep, calming breath.
That was better. He needed to remember next time he got horny around Summer that a good dose of nature would set him straight again. Yeah, right, as if that was gonna work.
The path meandered through a little dell, with a ring of trees around a clearing of green grass and wildflowers. The setting sun filtered through the leaves, and it was very pretty.
“Did you tell Jacob about the woman I saw in the parking lot at the gym?” Summer’s question took him by surprise; he thought she was going to keep waxing lyrical about the forest, and he wondered why the sudden change in topic.
He stopped and casually leaned against the trunk of a tree facing her. “Yes, I did.”
“And what did he say?”
“That they would follow it up.”
Summer gave a loud snort. “That’s their standard line for everything, isn’t it?” She’d picked a long grass stem and was shredding it between her fingers.
M?rten couldn’t disagree; the FBI didn’t give away any information they didn’t need to.
But he wasn’t worried either, as there was no way the woman getting into that car this morning could have been Paige.
This Tyrone guy wasn’t one to muck around.
He had an agenda, and it seemed like nothing and no one was going to get in his way.
Including one nosy ranger. Both he and Jacob agreed Paige had been missing too long now.
It was unlikely that she was still alive.
Not that he would ever admit that to Summer.
“You think she’s dead, don’t you? That’s why you’re not in the least bit worried I might’ve seen her today.”
He looked up sharply. Oh, shit. Perhaps his poker face was no longer as good as he thought. Either that, or she was extremely good at reading him. He straightened against the tree as she began pacing through the long grass in front of him.
“Well, do you?”
Now he was in a pickle. “You know Jacob’s team is doing everything in its power to find her. We’re still hopeful we can locate—”
“Don’t give me that police rhetoric bullshit,” she interrupted. “Answer the question.”
He held up his hands in surrender, and she gave another sort of derision. “Typical. You’ll never tell me the truth because you think you’re protecting me. Well, you’re not.”
M?rten was at a loss. He couldn’t very well tell her he believed that at best they’d find Paige’s body buried in a shallow grave somewhere near where she went missing.
And at worst they might not find her at all, because she’d been dismembered and disposed of down a deep dark hole in the middle of nowhere.
Both scenarios were possible; he’d seen it all in his years as a cop.
But Summer didn’t need to know the awful truth.
“She could still be alive,” he said carefully.
“If it is in fact Tyrone who abducted her—and we don’t even know that for sure—then perhaps he’s holding her hostage, to use her as a bargaining chip if we get too close.
He might be trying to flee the country.” This was one of the many theories put forward by Jacob’s team. They had to consider every scenario.
“Do you think so?” There was a note of entreaty in Summer’s voice that hadn’t been there before, her face scrunching up in concern. “God, I hope that’s true. Because I really need her not to be dead.”
“Of course you do,” M?rten replied. “I know you must be scared for your friend. And it must be alarming thinking he might be after you too.”
“No, that’s not it.” When she looked up, there was a steely glint in her eye as her hair swung in an angry arc across the shoulders.
Surely she wasn’t still blaming herself?
He thought they’d already resolved this on the night back at Jacob’s.
It wasn’t Summer’s fault. She needed to remember that she was the victim here.
Perhaps he should’ve picked this up sooner; he was trained to see when a person was suffering from survivor’s guilt.
But Summer had seemed so together, so strong.
And he’d spent all of his energy convincing this stubborn woman that she was in danger and needed to take her plight seriously.
So when she’d agreed to come to Sweden with him, he’d thought it was only her physical safety he needed to look after. Now he wondered if he’d been wrong.
“Well, okay, yes, I guess some of it is fear,” she admitted. “But I’ve been thinking a lot about Paige’s secret email address. It’s been bugging me ever since you mentioned it.”
Oh, that caught him by surprise. “That’s probably nothing.
” The emails had seemed like a dead-end.
Apart from her mentioning the gold mining company at Yellowstone and how it had the capacity to destroy a large part of the park if it went ahead, the IT guys could find else nothing incriminating in the banal communications, which seemed to be mostly about the weather.
If there was an underlying message, the specialists hadn’t cracked it yet.
The only other suspicious thing about the email trail was that the receiver had since closed their account, and IT was struggling to track down the individual who’d owned it.
M?rten took a step toward her, arm outstretched is if to give her shoulder a gentle pat
“No.” She held up a hand to ward him off.
“Let me talk. I didn’t want to believe it at first. All I could think was, if I hadn’t taken those blasted photos, then she’d still be eating dinner with her fiancé, and driving to work every day, to do a job she absolutely loved.
Not missing, presumed dead.” There was a hitch in her voice as she said the word dead.
“But then I got to thinking, dredging up memories from our field trip. And I started to remember little things that I’d ignored at the time, or passed off as Paige just being overly passionate about her job and saving Yellowstone. ”
“Okay,” he said. “Like what, for instance?”
“Just a few odd things she said to me when we were chatting by the campfire at night. She was very anti-Trump, and very anti all of his policies, including any notion that mining companies should be allowed anywhere near a National Park. Which on its own isn’t so strange, because she is a ranger whose first duty is to care for the environment. ”
“Yeah,” M?rten drawled, distracted by her long, slender fingers as they darted through the air; she liked to talk with her hands when she got animated about a subject. But she was right; none of that specifically pointed the finger at Paige.