Chapter 12 #3
He wanted to tear through them.
His fingers found the button of her jeans. Hers found his. The angle was awkward, cramped against the rock, and neither of them cared. She bit his lower lip, hard enough to sting, and he groaned into her mouth and felt her smile against him.
He should stop. Every protocol he’d built, every circuit breaker that kept people safe from him—she’d stripped them bare in three days.
His fingers found the zipper pull. The sound was lost in the rain, but he felt the vibration in his fingertips. Her breath caught. Not from pain—he’d learned that hitch, would have stopped cold if he’d heard it—but from the same thing driving him. Pure need.
He slid his hand lower. Her skin was hot despite the chill air, and he felt the raised edge of a scar.
She made that low sound again and hooked her leg higher over his hip, and the angle brought her against him, pressure where he was hardest. His vision narrowed to the wet gold of her hair, the dark of her eyes, the shape of her mouth as it said his name.
“Evander.”
He kissed her again, deeper, and he dipped a hand between her legs, finding her soaked.
“Damn, songbird. You’re ready.”
She bucked against his palm with a sound that broke something loose in his chest, some final restraint he’d been clutching since the moment she climbed into his truck.
The rain hammered the ridge. The stone was cold against his knees.
None of it mattered. Only this. Only her.
Only the impossible fact that she was still here, pulling him closer when every other person in his life had learned to run.
He worked her jeans lower. She helped, the movement awkward in the cramped space. Her sports bra had ridden up, showing the undersides of her breasts and the wildflowers tattooed along her ribs, the musical notes trailing toward her hip, and the bruises fading to yellow.
He wanted to trace every line of that ink with his mouth, soothe the bruises with his tongue, learn her by taste and texture. There wasn’t the time or space here on this rock ledge, but soon he would.
He played his fingers through her, dragging her wetness up around her clit.
Rainey bowed against his hand, a soft, strangled, “Oh,” escaping.
He circled her clit again and a tremble went through her thighs.
She was already close. He lowered himself down her body, intending to push her over that edge with his mouth…
Tilly growled.
Fuck.
Evander broke away from her. His body fought him—every nerve screaming at the interruption—but the part of him that had kept him alive was already moving. He rolled off her and came up with the rifle, bolt cycled, and put himself between Rainey and the open slope. Tilly stood, her hackles raised.
“Stay down,” he breathed.
She pressed herself flat to the rock and straightened her clothes. “What is it?”
“Maybe the mountain lion again.” He scanned the tree line below the shelter. Rain still fell in thin ropes off the overhang, the light gone flat and gray, and for three breaths nothing moved down there but wind in the pines.
Then it did.
Two hundred yards down the slope, where the game trail cut across the scree, a man stepped between two firs and stopped.
Big through the shoulders. Dark hair plastered to his skull, a beard, a rifle carried low and easy across his body.
He wasn’t hurrying. He crouched at the edge of the trail, laid two fingers to the ground, and read it.
Reading their sign. The trail they’d left coming up, hours ago, before the rain.
Evander’s whole chest went cold and still.
“Evander.” Rainey’s voice was barely sound. “Is that—”
“Don’t move.”
The man below rose. Turned his head slowly along the slope, working the terrain, and Evander eased back from the shelter’s lip, out of the sight line, drawing Rainey and Tilly with him.
“Quite.”
He’d laid false trails and booby traps all over this mountain. This man had already walked past most of them to be standing where he stood.
“He’s tracking us,” Rainey whispered. “How is he — the rain—”
“He’s good.” Evander kept the rifle up and his voice down to nothing. “Better than good.”
They had the high ground, but their cover would be broken the second they tried to run.
If Evander fired from here, he got one clean shot before the man made the trees, and a miss put a trained rifle on the two of them with Rainey out on open stone.
If they ran, they ran downhill into him.
If they climbed, they skylined themselves on the ridge they’d just left.
None of it was a plan. All of it was a way to get Rainey killed.
Which left the only thing he was actually good at.
“Listen to me.” He turned enough to catch her eyes, and whatever she saw in his face killed the argument before it reached her mouth. “You’re going back to the cabin. Now, while he’s still working the low trail and hasn’t cut the switchback. You follow Tilly. She’ll get you home.”
“No. We go together.”
“I have to lead him away.” He pressed a field knife into her hand. “Take this.”
“Evander—”
He kissed her, quick and hard. “I’ll be back before dark.”
Her eyes shimmered with fear and unshed tears.
“Hey.” He closed the distance between them and took her face in his hands. Her skin was cold under his palms, slick with rain, and he tipped her chin up until she had to meet his eyes. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you, songbird.”
“I know. And that’s what worries me.” Her hands came up and wrapped around his wrists, her fingers warm even in the cold. “Promise me you’re not going to let anything happen to you, either.”
He didn’t know how to respond without lying, so he let her go and turned to his dog.
“Tilly.” The dog was at his knee in an instant, rain sheeting off her black coat. He took her muzzle in his hand. “Take Rainey home. Guard her.”
Tilly’s intelligent eyes held his for a beat, then she turned and started herding Rainey away.
“Evander—”
“Follow Tilly. She knows where she’s going. Stay low to the rock, bar the door, and don’t open it for anyone but me.”
She went. Tilly went with her, a black shape sliding into the timber behind the rock face, and Evander watched only long enough to be sure the terrain had swallowed them.
Then he turned downhill, toward the man in the trees, and became the thing he’d spent eight years trying not to be.