Chapter 8
The minute Lakin stepped out of her parents’ house, she’d noticed the trucks speeding off down the road. They were both old, one more rusted than the other. The less rusted one showed traces of teal blue paint, and there was a shiny chrome toolbox in the bed of the truck.
“Troy…”
Was he the one who’d been watching her? But his gaze had never creeped her out; it had always warmed her with love and desire, somehow both reassuring and exciting. And he’d just returned to Shelby, so there was no way he was the one who’d been watching her over the past couple of weeks.
Had that been Jasper Whitlaw? Was that who Troy had sped after? Or was it someone else in the other vehicle?
Anxious to find out what was going on, she hopped into her SUV and headed after the two trucks.
She wasn’t brave enough to drive as fast as they were around those sharp curves.
The road was too narrow the higher it wound up the mountain, leaving rock on one side and nothingness on the other.
She didn’t bother trying to call or text Troy.
She didn’t want to be distracted and she didn’t want to distract him from whatever he was doing.
A high-speed chase up a mountain? Who was he so intent on catching that he was risking his life? And this after he’d had such a close call falling off the oil rig. She shuddered as fear gripped her.
“Stop!” she called out, wishing he could hear her. They were going so fast, though, that she quickly lost sight of them. She slowed down, peering off the side and around the curves ahead.
A truck nearly sideswiped her as it raced past. It was so fast that she couldn’t see the driver nor the vehicle itself clearly.
She jerked her wheel toward the right and nearly struck rock.
When she pulled back to the left, she glanced in her rearview mirror.
The truck gave a quick flash of brake lights as it slowed.
But it didn’t stop and soon disappeared from view.
Where was Troy? Why was the one vehicle heading back down, but he wasn’t following it?
“Troy?” she called out as if he could hear her. But then she heard the sound of another motor. Smoke was billowing from an exhaust pipe sticking up from the side of the road. That and a rear bumper were all she could see. Troy’s truck.
She braked, engaged the hazard lights and jumped out and raced across the road. Her heart pounded with fear that she was too late.
And she’d been such a bitch to him.
Sure, he hadn’t called when he got hurt, but he’d been hurt.
And scared. And sure, he hadn’t reached out to her, but it hadn’t been about her.
Since he’d come home, she’d made it all about her.
No wonder he hadn’t reached out when he was hurt; he hadn’t wanted to comfort her or focus on her. He’d wanted to focus on healing.
If he was hurt again, he might have undone all that healing. How hard it must be for him to have to live with the fear that paralysis could return if he wasn’t careful.
“Troy!” she yelled.
The rear tires of the truck spun, gravel flying as he tried to back up, but the truck didn’t move backward. Instead it slipped a few more inches forward, over the steep incline of rock and gravel that made up the side of the mountain.
“Troy! Get out!” she yelled over the roar of the engine he was gunning. The truck was going to go over the steep side with him in it. This would not be a fall that either his truck or he would survive. “Troy!”
He must have heard her or seen her in the side mirror because he rolled down his window. “Get out of here, Lakin! You’re going to get hurt.”
“No. You get out of there!” she shouted back. “Jump out before it goes over!”
But he kept spinning his back wheels, spewing more gravel. Yet again, instead of going backward, the truck slipped forward a bit more.
“Get out!” she yelled again.
“If I take my foot off the gas, it’s going over,” he told her as he kept gunning the engine.
Her heart pounded hard. “What can I do?” She’d left her phone in her purse. But if she ran to get it and the truck went over… Tears burned her eyes. “I love you,” she said.
“What the hell are you two doing?” a voice asked, the words slightly slurred.
Lakin glanced behind her to see Billy Hoover hanging out the side window of his truck, staring down at them. “Billy!” Was his the truck that had nearly run her off the road and probably Troy as well?
“Do you have a tow strap?” Troy yelled out his window.
Billy nodded, then pushed his greasy red hair out of his face.
“Hurry!” Lakin said. At the moment she was less concerned that Billy might have caused the crash than she was about making him help rescue the man she loved.
She was the one who wrapped the tow strap around Troy’s hitch and then Billy’s, making sure both ends were secure. Billy didn’t even get out of his truck, but that was fine.
“Gun it!” she yelled at them both.
Gravel flew and metal crunched as Troy’s truck came up the side of the mountain and bounced back onto the road, colliding with the back bumper of Billy’s truck as the redhaired man abruptly stopped.
Troy hopped out of his truck. Lakin would have rushed to hug him, but her legs were shaking too badly. She couldn’t get over how close she’d come to losing him forever. If that truck had gone over… She glimpsed over the steep drop. There was no way he would have survived that fall.
“You’re going to have to pay for that, Amos,” Billy shouted over his loud motor.
“Like you can tell what damage my truck did to yours,” Troy remarked as he unwound the strap from his hitch.
Before he could take it off Billy’s, the other man sped away, the strap trailing behind him.
The dents and dings on Billy’s rusted truck were undoubtedly caused by how the man drove.
Despite his help, Lakin was tempted to call the police.
Billy had obviously been drinking. And if he’d caused the crash, she would.
“What happened?” Lakin asked Troy, her heart still pounding frantically even though he was back on solid ground. She wanted to run and hug him even now, but she wasn’t sure her legs would hold her up.
He leaned against the side of his truck still idling in the road near hers. Maybe he was as shaken as she was. “Someone ran me off the road.”
“Was it Billy?” she asked.
He glanced in the direction their old school nemesis had gone. “I don’t know for sure. It was a rusted truck, too, but I didn’t get a good look at it or the driver.”
Could it be Billy who was watching her? She hadn’t considered it, but he’d been a bully as a child. What could he be now? A stalker? A serial killer?
She shivered as she had that sensation again that someone was watching her. Watching both of them now, and maybe getting ready to try something…while she and Troy were just standing in the road, both easy targets.
“Let’s get out of here,” Troy said, and he levered himself away from the side of his pickup. “It’s not safe standing in the road or even parked alongside it. Get in your vehicle, too, and let’s head back to your cabin.”
Lakin didn’t argue with him. He could have died if Billy hadn’t come along when he had. Even though Troy hadn’t been able to see who’d forced him off the road, they needed to call the police. She would insist that they did.
Later. When they were safe…
* * *
Instead of locking him out, Lakin held open the door for him when Troy walked up to her cabin. Or limped, actually. He tried not to grimace as he climbed the couple of steps and crossed the porch to her.
Going off the road had jarred his back again. Maybe it had already been hurting from taking the turns as fast as he had. And then Billy Hoover jerking the truck up the embankment with the tow strap hadn’t helped, either, but it had kept the truck and Troy from sliding down the mountain.
Was Billy the one who’d driven him off in the first place though? If so, from how he’d slurred his words, it might not have been intentional. Either way Troy should have called the police, but he’d wanted to make sure that Lakin was somewhere safe first.
Once he hobbled inside her cabin, he closed and dead-bolted her door. He wasn’t sure even that would be enough to keep them safe if someone was really determined to hurt them, though.
Her?
Or him? His supervisor’s words echoed inside his head. He might lose more than his job? His life? Or the woman who was the most important part of his life?
Lakin threw her arms around his neck and pressed her body against his. She was trembling. “I was so scared,” she said. “I thought I was going to lose you.”
He closed his arms around her and held her tightly against him. God, he’d missed her so damn much. Not just the weeks he’d been gone, but since he’d been back there’d been such a distance between them. He tipped her face up to his and lowered his mouth, brushing it across her lips.
Her breath whispered out, heating his skin, making him tingle. He wanted to deepen the kiss, but she stepped back and dropped her arms from around him.
“Why are you following me?” Lakin asked.
“I wanted to make sure you got safely home,” he explained. Her safety was what mattered most to him.
“I mean earlier,” she said. “I know you were parked outside my parents’ house. I saw your truck pull away when I walked outside. Why were you there?”
He sighed and pushed his hand through his hair. “I don’t like that after all these years some guy shows up claiming to be your father and that he approached you right after someone broke in here.”
“For food.”
“You don’t know that’s really why they broke in,” he pointed out.
“Because of the break-in and how shaken you were after Whitlaw came up to you, I wanted to keep an eye on you.” He wanted more than his eye on her, but she’d put distance between them again.
“And I don’t think I was the only one following you. ”
She shivered but didn’t argue with him. And she didn’t seem at all surprised, either.
“You know someone’s been following you,” he surmised.