I step under some low hanging branches, twisting easily so that she isn’t struck by them. Her feeble attempts to break free from my grasp are a minor inconvenience, barely registering in my senses. The only way she’s going to reach the ground is if I put her there. After years in the military doing exercises where I had to carry men of my own weight and size over my shoulder like this, she’s like a feather.
“Let me go!”
A loud feather.
She punches me between the shoulder blades weakly.
A pesky feather.
“Please,” she sobs, sniffling loudly.
A scared feather.
I stop in my tracks and realize how terrified she must be. First some asshole tries to rape her and then I whisk her away into the forest. I know she saw my face, and if she’s here to track me down, it’s a face I’m sure she’s spent hours studying. I don’t know if she has seen photos of the crime scene. I don’t know what kind of psychological profile she’s been given. She probably thinks I’m going to do a lot worse to her than he was going to.
Sighing deeply, I gently set her on her feet and grab her arms as she attempts to dash away like a frightened doe.
“Listen to me,” I hold her tight and she meets my eyes with pure terror, “I’m not the bad guy here, okay? I’m trying to save you. You think that guy was gonna give you a big kiss and call it a night? You wanna be back there with him?”
“No,” she sobs, her body is shaking as big tears stream over her cheeks. “I don’t want to ever see him again,” she manages to form barely coherent words as her body convulses with fear and tears pour out of her. “I just want to get out of here.”
My heart squeezes as she brings herself to meet my eyes. It’s hard not to feel like a monster when you see yourself reflected that way. Her eyebrows reach skyward as she blinks her eyes. I can see now that they’re green. They’re so bright, it startles me. They’re the hopeful green of a spring bud exploding into the first leaf of the season. That green that breathes life back into your slumbering soul after the Arctic wasteland outside your door almost made you give up hope. The green that lets you know better days are ahead as the ice and snow melts away and taking the oppressive winter gloom along with it.
She looks so terrified, I instinctively want to wrap my arms around her and tell her she’ll be okay, but I know that would do nothing to calm her down. In fact, it would make everything much, much worse.
“Listen, there’s no way you can get back to the town without me taking you there. I’ve been watching you guys all day walking around in circles, it was pathetic.”
“You... you were following us?” She swallows hard and looks up at me. Her eyes just barely flicker over my face, moving faster than a hummingbird’s wing before she looks away.
“Yep, wasn’t too hard with all the thrashing and loud talking. If you two ever had to hunt to live you’d both have starved a long time ago,” I roll my eyes.
She trembles violently as I hold her and I know from the warm summer night that it has nothing to do with being cold. Her shoulders shake as the tears she can’t contain anymore fall from her face.
“Hey, listen to me, I won’t hurt you. I’m a good guy, okay? You can trust me,” I try to look into her eyes, but she won’t raise her head. I can see her chin quivering as even more tears spill over her face.
Fuck, I hate when women cry. There’s something about it that makes you feel like you’ve failed as a man. Just watching their soft features streaked with tears makes the biggest, toughest guys feel helpless.
“I won’t go with you,” she whispers, but her voice is crystal clear. “You’re not a good guy, you’re a murderer,” her voice steadies and she meets my eyes finally. “You killed an innocent young man in cold blood! He had his whole life ahead of him and you shot him. That’s not something a good guy does,” I can hear her trying to quell the fear overtaking her as her voice cracks.
Innocent?
The word burns across my mind like the lapping orange flames of wildfire. My body tenses up and my grip on her shoulders tightens as I see the image from the video in my mind. I see him fucking her, humping her like a dog. Rage boils up from my belly, blistering up to the back of my throat.
“You’re right, I fucking shot him! And let me tell you something,” I lower my face only inches from hers and can feel my lips pull back into a snarl, “he deserved much worse than that! If I had more time to plan it out, I would’ve been more fucking creative with that asshole, you understand?” my voice roars and her eyes grow wide.
In the dark, I can see her leg move, but it takes me too long to register what she’s doing. Not until her foot hits my nuts and the first sickening wave of pain drops my hands from her shoulders. I hunch over, wincing and fall to my knees as the dreaded second wave of pain builds up over me, like I’m a surfer riding a wall of water as tall as a building, hoping somehow the wave won’t break and crash over me. But it does. It always does.
Every man has taken a shot to the balls at some point in his life, whether it was when they were a clumsy boy awkwardly falling onto his bike seat, or as a teen missing a football pass. We’re all familiar with the debilitating agony. It doesn’t matter how many times it’s happened, nothing can prepare you for the intense, stabbing fire underlined by the dull, throbbing ache. It’s been a long damned time since I’ve taken a direct shot like that.
The girl is off and running through the darkness, stupidly she’s heading toward my cabin, not towards town. I knew she couldn’t get out of here without me. As the beads of sweat build on my brow, I have more than half a mind to let her run off until she runs into a bear or dies of starvation.
As the awful sensation begins to quell, I know I won’t let that happen. She’s in survival mode, I can’t blame her for trying to protect herself, no matter how misguided her instincts may be.
Finally the agony dissipates in my gut and, sucking a deep breath through my nose, I get my feet back under me. I can’t let her die out here. She doesn’t deserve that.
Taking off in the direction that she ran, I follow her once again, through the forest.
7
Abbie
I tear through the trees blindly, trying to put as much distance between myself and Cole the killer as I can. I stumble through branches, reaching like the long, bony fingers of the witch trying to throw Gretel into the oven. Twigs smack against me and I hold my hands up in front of my face to stop them from lashing my skin. Gracelessly, I stomp through the brush in the dark.
The beats of my heart are in a race with my feet, and my heart is winning. I can feel my pulse thud in my neck as panic wells up inside me, making it hard to breathe. It’s like I’m drowning from the inside as the fear squeezes my lungs and I struggle for air.
Is he behind me? I can’t tell if he’s following me. I can only hear blood rushing in my ears and the sound of my own frantic feet crunching over the sticks and pine needles.
Where am I going? Is this even the right direction? I’m lost in the woods with a murderer and a rapist. This is like something out of a horror movie. How could I ever have been so stupid? Why did I think I was cut out for any of this? Like a girl who is two years deep in a political science degree has any business pretending to be a private investigator’s assistant out in the vast Canadian north.
I stop running and swallow hard as I desperately try to breathe quieter. It’s damned near impossible when my body is convinced that every ragged breath could be my last. Tilting my head like a puppy learning a new command, I listen intently for sounds of him following me. Each silhouetted tree feels like him looming over me. Every creepy shadow is a potential killer in my mind as I try to adjust my eyes to the dark and hone in my senses.
What was that?
I close my eyes, hoping my ears will work harder and listen better. I can hear footsteps. I pray for them to be a deer. Hell, I’d take a bear at this point. It’s not though.
I know it’s him.
Judging
from the sound, he’s not very far behind. It’s only a matter of time until he finds me.
I begin to scurry back through the woods. This must be how a hunter’s prey feels. Except they at least have reflexes and senses born into them to instinctively flee. I pull oxygen deep into my burning lungs and lunge forward, pushing past more whipping tree branches and the air swirls around me as my body falls. For a moment, I have no idea which way is up as I feel weightless in the darkness.
Crunch!
“Ahhh!” I shriek. My ankle folded under me. I curl up on top of it, trying to be quiet as a halo of pain radiates around my leg. Tears that I wish I was strong enough to hold back slide down my face as I struggle to stand back up.
“Fuck!” I drop back to the ground in a clump as white heat sears through my ankle.
Now what? I can hear his footsteps get closer and my body begins to tremble. I’m shaking like I used to when I was a child and I stayed out playing in the snowbanks with my friends until my mother had to physically drag me back inside.
“Your lips are blue!” She’d exclaim. “What were you thinking?”
My breaths are quick and shallow like I’m hyperventilating as I whimper and try not to move.
The footsteps get louder.
Closer.
Then they stop.
I keep my head tucked down. I can’t look up. I can’t face him.
“Jesus,” he mutters. “What are you doing? Are you trying to hide?”
I don’t answer. I know he can see me, but there’s some small part of my brain that’s telling me if I don’t move or make any noise maybe I’ll become invisible. I know it’s stupid but I’m going to cling on to hope where I can find it.
“Listen, after that shit you just pulled I’m just about done here,” his voice booms making me shudder. “If you don’t want my help then you can wait here until sunrise and try to navigate your own way back to town, ‘cause I’m done with your shit!”
I don’t respond. I try to imagine getting out of here even if I wasn’t hurt. Apparently my imagination has limits because I can’t picture it.
Cole sighs deeply, “Fine. Have it your way, I’m going home.” I can hear his feet crunch as he turns away.
Would someone who wants to kill me just leave me like this? Wouldn’t he pounce on this opportunity? Everything I know about Cole McAllister is summed up in his crime. His cold-blooded murder of the twenty-three-year-old son of Senator Turner. With nothing stolen and no known connection between the men, it seemed to be a senseless crime. And yet he was intentionally targeted.
Tonight, when he saved me, I didn’t see a monster in his deep blue eyes. I saw concern.
Compassion.
Caring.
“Wait!” I call out, finally raising my head from the earthy smell of the decayed leaves and mud. “I can’t get up. I’m hurt.”
Cole turns and quickly closes the gap between us. I wince as I hope with all my heart I’m making the right decision and haven’t just sealed my fate in the hands of a murderer.
“You’re hurt?” His tone grows soft and he slides down the small embankment that I fell down. “Where?”
I sit up and my ankle flashes with pain as if to remind me of exactly where I was injured. “Here,” I point and Cole kneels in the dirt before me. His large hands are gentle as he maneuvers my foot from side to side.
“Can you bend your toes?” I can see in the dark that his eyebrows are furrowed together.
I slowly curl my toes over and the pain builds. “I can,” I wince, “but it hurts. A lot.” I answer through gritted teeth.
Cole stands up and holds out his hands to me. “I don’t think it’s broken, but I can’t be sure. I can take a better look at my place, but you need to let me help you,” he looks into my eyes and my fear slides away.
I bite my lip. If I stay here, there’s a good chance I’ll die. The only person who knows to look for me, besides Cole, tried to rape me. Not exactly a knight in shining armor. I meet Cole’s gaze, my trembling subsides and I reach up to his hand.
“Yes.” I whisper. “Please help me.”
It’s like being between a rock and a hard place. Go with him and possibly die at his hands. Although, when I look at him, it’s hard to believe he could ever execute someone like the pictures showed. Or, I can stay here and most likely die in the woods.
Cole wraps his arm under my back and my feet, hauling me up toward his chest. I instinctively slide my arms around his neck to steady myself and I see a small smile pull at the corners of his mouth. He looks handsome when he smiles. Not like the stony-faced pictures I’ve been looking at with Cecil all month.
“Just relax,” his voice rumbles in his chest as he holds me close, “I’ll do my best to get you fixed up, okay? You have my word, I won’t ever hurt you,” his tone soothes me somehow. Despite common sense, despite the file I’ve studied, despite everything my mind keeps screaming about why I shouldn’t believe him, I know that for some unexplainable reason, my heart does.
“Thank you,” I mumble into his jacket and cling on to him tight. My mother always said that the brain is smart, but the heart is wise.
“If you want to know the truth, you don’t read it from a book,” she’d say. “You feel it, here,” I remember how she tapped two fingers above her breast. Before the mastectomies took them both. Before the cancer spread and left my heart no wiser, but certainly more broken.
I tilt my head back against Cole’s arm and look up at the stars above. Up to her. I hope you were right, Mama.
8
Cole
My breathing is getting heavy, but I’ve got a good hold on her as I carefully carry her through the brush. This reminds me of when I first escaped across the border and made my way up here. I bought a shit-ton of supplies so I could hide out in the woods for as long as possible without needing to go back in town and risk being arrested. In the military, I’ve hauled heavy rucksacks in blistering heat and skin freezing cold, but those marches had nothing on that first hike I took out here.
I must have weighed myself down with well over two hundred pounds of canned goods and supplies. Hauling that much is always taxing, but especially when it’s not packed right and is digging into your flesh the whole way. When I finally found a place to set up camp and call home I was completely exhausted from maneuvering through pines and trudging over tree roots and uneven ground for hours.
This girl probably weighs a fraction of those supplies, and this time I only had a forty-minute walk to get to my cabin instead of a three-hour death march.
“Okay, here we are,” I try to keep my voice soft and even. I know she’s terrified of me, and based on what she knows, I can’t blame her.
“What do you mean?” She twists her head and looks around.
“Home sweet home. This is where I’m staying,” I answer.
“But,” she squints, “all I see are trees.”
“You’ll see,” I hold her close as I make my way to the small clearing among the large pines. To the untrained eye, it can be easy to miss my place. From this side, it appears to be nothing more than a hill between two trees. I carry her around to the other side of the hill, the side I dug into and built my cabin in. From the back my little place is hidden, and even though she can’t see it in this darkness, the cliff face that jaggedly falls down the other side provides a spectacular view of the canyon below.
She looks around with wide eyes, “Wow, this is amazing,” she murmurs. “It’s completely camouflaged. You could be standing right in front of this and never even realize…”
I open the door and carry her inside. “That was the idea. On one side I’m hidden by the hill and on the other side it’s sheer rocks that drop off about two hundred feet.”
My gut knots up as she twists her head around like a barn owl, trying to soak it all in. It was a mistake to grab her and a fucking fatal flaw in my plans to bring her here. Now I’m compromised, just as I finally got everything set up and running smoothly. Now I�
��m stuck with a gimped up girl who came here to hunt me down. And her partner is going to wake up with an angry lump on his head and even more motivation to find me.
I carefully sit the girl in a chair I put together and grab a flashlight along with a first-aid kit. What else could you do? Leave her injured and alone? No, I know I did the right thing, but I can’t help but wonder, at what cost?
Kneeling in front of her, I try not to notice her full lips or her mesmerizing eyes. I refuse to let myself look at her that way. Right now, the only thing I care about is her injury. The sooner I get her patched up, the sooner I can get her out of my hair.
“Hey, so you probably know my name, right?” She nods and her eyebrows scrunch together. “So, what’s your name?”
“Abbie,” she answers simply and tries to push her mud caked hair from her dirt streaked face. “Abbie Hart.”
Even covered in grime, she’s irresistible. “Abbie Hart,” I repeat. “Well that was one hell of a tumble you took, so let’s check out the damage, okay? I’m gonna take a look at your ankle.” I don’t wait for her to answer and unlace her hiking boot.
“Okay,” she tenses up as I try to ease the leather down over her heel and off her foot. “Oww!”
“I know. I just need to see if it’s broken or bleeding,” I put the boot down beside me and begin to roll her sock down her leg and expose her swollen ankle.
Abbie breathes in sharply, but she doesn’t cry out again. I can tell by glancing up at her that she’s putting on a brave face. I refuse to acknowledge her beautiful features, instead letting my anger about this intrusion on my life guide me.
“So, you and your friend obviously aren’t cops, right? Why are you guys trying to find me?” I peel the sock down and tug it off her toes.
Virgin for the Woodsman Page 3