Chapter 8
Luke moved before he’d made a conscious decision to move.
He closed the distance between him and Jenna in one stride. Grabbing Jenna’s arm, he drove them both down behind the hood of his truck.
She hit the ground, and he sheltered her body with his own.
Then he went still and listened.
One shot.
He waited for more.
None came.
Not yet.
He scanned the street from his position, but he saw no one.
Quickly, he pulled out his phone and called Sheriff Micah Sutherland.
He picked up on the second ring. “Luke.”
“Gunshot fired on Main Street.” He kept his voice low and level. “One round. I’m pretty sure it came from behind the house on the corner of Main and Fourth—the white one with the green shutters. Shooter may still be on scene.”
On the other end of the line he heard Micah’s chair scrape back and his footsteps crossing a hard floor. Then Micah relayed the incident to dispatch.
“Are you hit?” Micah asked when he came back on the line.
“No. I’m fine. For now.”
A car engine revved somewhere beyond the corner. The next instant, tires screamed against the pavement and faded into nothing.
As silence fell, he jumped back to his feet and peered over the hood of the truck.
The dark sedan was already gone before he could make out the plates.
“Vehicle just left the scene,” he told Micah. “Dark sedan, heading east on Fourth. I couldn’t see the plates.”
“I’ve got units coming,” Micah said. “Stay where you are. I’m headed out also.”
Luke lowered the phone, and his gaze caught. The bullet had hit the side of his truck—in the very area where he and Jenna had been standing.
Just a few seconds or inches difference and one of them might not still be here right now.
He glanced at Jenna.
She was still crouched on the street, a hand covering her face.
When she lowered her hand, a thin line of blood trickled above her eyebrow. Concern rushed through him.
“You’re hurt.” He reached toward her without thinking. But he stopped himself before he made contact. “Are you okay?”
She touched her forehead and looked at the blood on her fingers. “It’s nothing. I’m fine.”
She didn’t look fine.
He helped Jenna to her feet. Her whole body trembled, so he leaned her against his truck. He did one more scan but didn’t see any other danger lurking.
Somewhere in the distance, a siren wailed.
His spine tightened.
Why had someone taken a shot today? Was it aimed at Jenna? At him? At both of them?
He wasn’t sure.
The Hardings had been making noise for months, mostly through legal channels. He could easily imagine Dale Harding deciding that pressure wasn’t working fast enough.
Then again, the Hendersons had never needed an excuse either. They were angrier and less strategic than the Hardings, and a stray shot on a Wednesday morning wasn’t out of the realm of possibility of something Travis Henderson might consider a reasonable escalation.
Luke looked at Jenna again. Her hands were knotted together in her lap, knuckles white.
Something in his chest went hard and still. He had to figure out what was going on here.
Jenna leaned against the truck and tried to remember how to breathe normally.
Her heart still hammered inside her. She felt the pulse in her throat, in her fingertips, in the cut above her eyebrow.
She pressed the back of her hand against her forehead and focused on the simple mechanics of breathing in and breathing out.
Luke reached for her arm.
His gaze paused on the exposed scar on her arm, and he frowned. “What happened?”
“It’s . . . it’s a long story.” This didn’t seem like the time or place to recap how she’d cut herself while working at a seedy diner.
Luke’s gaze held hers another moment, more questions lingering there.
At once she became all too aware of his hand on her arm. Just like old times, he already felt steady and warm as his fingers curved below her elbow.
He didn’t grip her hard. He simply anchored her.
As soon as the shot had rung out, he’d acted without hesitation. One second they’d been standing on the sidewalk drowning in unsaid conversation. The next his hand was on her arm, and he’d put himself between her and danger.
Jenna hadn’t expected that. She didn’t know why she hadn’t expected it.
This was exactly who Luke was. But something about his protectiveness had cut straight through the fear and adrenaline and landed somewhere deeper.
He was the only person who’d ever made her feel truly safe. She’d known that when she married him, and she’d carried the memory with her like an open wound since she left him in the middle of the night.
Jenna had told herself she’d gotten used to the absence of the security she’d once felt.
She hadn’t. She’d just gotten better at not thinking about it.
Whatever happened from here—whatever Luke heard when she finally told him the truth, whatever he decided—she’d given up the right to this a long time ago.
She wasn’t going to think about that right now.
“Hey.” Luke shifted to look at her, though his eyes kept moving back to the street. “You with me?”
“I’m with you.”
“Good.” His gaze locked with hers. “Do you know what that was about?”
She swallowed hard. Fears lingered at the edges of her mind—formless fears she’d been carrying so long they’d become part of the landscape of her thoughts.
She couldn’t tell him all those things. Not yet at least.
She shook her head. “No . . . I don’t think so.”
She wasn’t lying. Not exactly.
She didn’t know.
She couldn’t know.
The life she’d left behind was supposed to be finished, sealed off, and no longer her problem. She had no concrete reason to believe otherwise.
A sheriff’s SUV swung onto Main Street, light bar going, and pulled up alongside them.
Jenna exhaled.
She’d never in her life been so grateful to see law enforcement arrive.
Her emotions had been trying to claw their way toward the surface for the past several minutes. This interruption was the only thing stopping her from completely falling apart in front of Luke, which wasn’t how she had imagined this morning going.
She straightened and drew in a deep breath.
Jenna had known this would be hard. But it was even more difficult than she’d anticipated.
But she had no choice but to move forward.