by Susan Stoker
But Eagle’s gut rolled. She might not have an hour. If the man chasing her was the stalker—and he’d bet everything that he was—her life was in serious danger.
Slipping his phone back into his pocket, knowing his team would get to him as soon as they could, Eagle set off into the forest.
He had to stop and wipe blood out of his eyes every several minutes, but nothing was going to keep him from finding his woman. Not the way his head was spinning. Not the blood oozing from the cut on his forehead.
Eagle had been trained to track targets, and he was more than thankful at the moment for everything he’d learned. He could tell when Taylor had been running and when she’d stopped for a moment. The man following her hadn’t lost her, either. Eagle had hoped he might’ve gotten turned around in the forest.
Even if the man was lost, Eagle wouldn’t go after him. No, his mission was Taylor. He needed to make sure she was safe and unharmed. She’d been in the Jeep with him. She could have broken bones, or the man could’ve hurt her before she’d run.
The forest was unnaturally silent. Even the birds weren’t chirping, and he couldn’t hear any sign of a pursuit. His own steps were nearly silent, as he avoided stepping on anything that might announce his presence to Taylor’s stalker.
He steadily followed Taylor’s trail deeper into the forest. He was impressed at her clear attempts to shake the man. She stayed off the easy, more obvious trails, choosing instead to cut through brambles and thick copses of trees. And Eagle was doing a good job of keeping himself calm and focused—until he saw blood smeared against the trunk of a tree.
He had a feeling it was Taylor’s. The tree was directly behind a particularly nasty group of blackberry bushes. He remembered the short-sleeve T-shirt she’d been wearing to travel to Bloomington and could only imagine how scraped up her arms would’ve gotten by cutting through the thorny bushes.
Gritting his teeth, Eagle wiped at his face once more, annoyed by the blood that wouldn’t stop seeping from his wound. He paused for a second, closing his eyes and straining to hear something. Anything.
Amazingly, he thought he heard a shout not too far ahead.
He had no idea how much of a head start Taylor and her stalker had on him, and was thrilled at hearing even the slightest evidence he might be getting close.
He opened his eyes and began jogging in the direction of the noise, not bothering to pay as close attention to the tracks at his feet anymore. The shouting could only have been made by one of two people, and instinct told him that Taylor and her stalker would be together.
The faster he jogged, the easier it was to hear the voice somewhere in front of him. If the woods had been quiet before, they weren’t now.
It was clearly a man’s voice Eagle was hearing, and the words made his blood run cold.
“You can’t hide from me, Taylor!” the man was shouting. “I’ll find you no matter where you try to hide. You know why? Because you’re perfect! You’ll never be able to recognize me. When I have you chained up in the basement, I’ll show you what helpless really feels like!”
Eagle ran faster, staying light on his feet. He had to be close, but he couldn’t quite pinpoint where the man was, his voice seeming to echo around him. It didn’t help that he was still dizzy from hitting his head.
“I can’t wait to wrap my hands around your neck and watch you stop breathing. But don’t worry. I’ll resuscitate you so we can do it all over again. And the best part is, you’ll have no idea if it’s the same man strangling you or a different one each time! That’s why you’re so damn perfect!”
Eagle regretted not grabbing his firearm before he’d left his car. He always carried it, but he’d been disoriented and not thinking straight when he’d climbed from the wreckage.
But he didn’t need a gun to kill this asshole.
He could do it just as easily with his bare hands.
He had no idea how much time had passed since he’d set off after Taylor, but it obviously hadn’t been enough for a helicopter to get to them yet. He was on his own, and that was all right too.
Slowing down and silencing his footsteps further when the man’s voice got louder, Eagle peered through a dense wall of trees when he was within yards of the stalker to get an idea of the terrain and to make a plan.
A man who looked to be in his early forties was in a small clearing. He was a bit shorter than Eagle. His hair was brown, and he was a little on the heavy side. From his current angle, the man looked completely ordinary. There was nothing about him that stood out. Even if Taylor didn’t have prosopagnosia, she might not have been able to describe him to the cops in a way that would make a sketch very valuable.
There was a large tree trunk lying on its side close by, with vines and weeds growing up thick around it. The man had a knife in one hand and was rooting around one end of the trunk with the other, talking to Taylor, as if he knew she was hiding within the hollowed-out tree.
“You might as well come out, Taylor. There’s only going to be one outcome to this. You’re coming back with me to my house . . . and we’re going to play.”
Without a word, and remaining completely silent, Eagle slipped up behind the man.
A mere few feet away, he stepped on a small branch—and it snapped.
Cursing his fuckup and wishing Smoke were here—he would’ve been able to approach the man without making a sound—Eagle braced as the man spun.
The smirk on his face faded, replaced with disbelief and rage, and Eagle recognized evil when he saw it. He’d seen more than his fair share of pure malevolence, and this man was right there at the top of the list with the worst of humanity.
Eagle had no idea what his name was, or what he’d done in the past, but there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that Taylor wasn’t his first victim. He’d done this before. Stalked and kidnapped women to torture them.
Moving faster than his target could react, Eagle punched him in the face as hard as he could.
The man staggered but didn’t fall. He growled and lunged at Eagle, knife swinging.
Eagle sidestepped as the man got close and hit him again. This time he went to his knees, dropping the knife and instinctively reaching for his broken nose.
Before the man could get up, Eagle was on him. He got behind the man and put him in a headlock, wrapping an arm tightly around his neck. They were both on their knees, and the man frantically thrashed and bucked in his hold, throwing wild punches behind him, trying to dislodge Eagle, with no luck.
Neither spoke a word, both concentrating too hard on winning this fight. It was to the death, and they both knew it.
Eagle tightened his hold, not feeling an ounce of remorse when the man went from trying to hurt him to clawing at the arm around his throat to get it to loosen. Eagle remembered what the man had said while trying to find Taylor—that he wanted to choke her out over and over again. How he’d gloated that she wouldn’t even know if it was the same man strangling her or if she was being tortured by several different men.
The thought of his Taylor in that situation, being in any situation where someone would psychologically and physically hurt her to satisfy their own sick desires, made Eagle tighten his arm even harder.
But it would take too long to kill him this way. As much as he wanted the man to undergo the same suffering he’d obviously planned for Taylor, Eagle needed to get this done. He needed to find his woman and make sure she was all right.
The man was making gurgling sounds deep in his throat as he tried to get air into his lungs. Moving quickly, Eagle released him. As he’d hoped, the man was too relieved to finally be able to breathe to fight him. The sound of the guy gasping for breath echoed, but Eagle barely noticed. He was concentrating too hard on what he had to do.
Without hesitation, without saying even a single word, Eagle grabbed the man’s head and wrenched it to the side as hard as he could.
The snap was loud in the quiet forest, but Eagle felt no remorse whatsoever. The man had threatene
d Taylor. Had bragged about the horrible things he’d planned for her. The world was a better place without him in it—and more than that, Taylor was safer without him breathing.
Dropping the man facedown in the dirt, Eagle stood. Now that he’d mitigated the threat, his entire concentration was on finding Taylor. Wiping his eyes once more, he called out her name.
“Taylor?”
There was no answer.
Kneeling on the ground next to the dead man, Eagle parted the vines and looked into the hollowed-out log.
It was empty. She wasn’t there.
Confused, Eagle stood. Why had the man been looking at the tree trunk if Taylor wasn’t hiding there?
Dread blossomed in his chest, and he looked around frantically. Desperate to see some sign of Taylor, his eyes scanned every inch of the small clearing.
The sound of a helicopter high above suddenly echoed throughout the forest, but Eagle couldn’t feel relieved that the cavalry had arrived. Was Taylor lying somewhere hurt, unable to move or respond?
For the first time in his life, Eagle panicked. Was he too late?
No, he wouldn’t accept that.
“Taylor!” he yelled as loud as he could. “Where are you?”
There was no answer to his desperate call, only the sound of the helicopter’s blades rotating overhead.
Taylor barely dared to breathe. Her heart was beating so hard it was difficult to hear anything over the sound it made in her head. So much so, she’d heard her stalker talking but hadn’t been able to make out most of his words.
She’d chosen her hiding spot carefully, praying the nearby tree trunk and vines would make her kidnapper think that was where she was hiding.
It was just a decoy.
When he didn’t find her there, Taylor hoped he’d assume she was still running, would then take off in the direction he thought she’d gone. Leaving her free to double back to Eagle’s car, where she could hopefully find her phone, or Eagle’s, and call for help.
She refused to believe that the man she loved was dead. Her stalker had to have been lying to make her panic. At least, she hoped that was what he’d done.
To the side of the tiny clearing had been another huge patch of blackberry bushes. Without hesitation, Taylor had gotten down on her hands and knees and backed into them, using dirt, sticks, and leaves to bury herself further. She had no idea if she’d completely covered her clothes and hair, but she tried to control her breathing and not move even an inch.
Flinching when she heard her name being yelled loudly in the forest, Taylor did her best not to whimper in fright. If the stalker found her, he was going to kill her.
The next sound she heard was the ringing of a phone.
It was such an odd thing to hear in the middle of the forest. Taylor had no idea who her stalker was talking to—the thumping of her heart prevented her from understanding the soft conversation.
Just when she thought she’d gotten lucky, that the man had left the clearing to search for her elsewhere, the leaves above her rustled.
This was it. The man had found her—and she was going to die.
“Flower?” a man cried.
But it didn’t sound like Eagle. This man sounded unsure, frightened.
Torn between wanting to reveal herself to the man who’d used Eagle’s code word and wanting to sink into the earth, Taylor remained frozen.
Her stalker could’ve discovered the code word. He knew Eagle’s nickname, and he’d found them on the road today. He could be trying to trick her, to make her give up her position.
“Oh my God, Flower!” the man said again.
This time, Taylor could feel the dirt being brushed away.
Knowing if she was going to make a move to run, she had to do it now, Taylor lifted her head.
The second she did, she met a pair of blue eyes looking back at her in shock.
There was nothing recognizable about the man kneeling in the dirt beside her. He had blood dripping from a nasty gash in his forehead, which he’d somehow smeared all over his face and hair. But something in his gaze made her frantic heart stutter . . .
“Flower, are you hurt?”
Without the leaves and other camouflage covering her ears, or the thudding in her chest drowning him out, she could finally hear the man clearly.
The second he said her name again, Taylor knew it was Eagle.
Flying out of the bushes and flinging dirt and sticks everywhere, Taylor threw herself at Eagle. He caught her, falling back on his butt yet somehow managing to hold on. The blackberry thorns had caught in her hair and scraped up her already-bleeding arms as she’d launched herself out of her hiding spot, but Taylor didn’t care.
Eagle was alive—and he’d found her.
She knew without a doubt that this was the man she loved. Her pursuer could’ve somehow learned Eagle’s code word, but Taylor’s gut told her that he hadn’t.
And she recognized Eagle by his scent. By the way they fit together. By the feel of his arms around her.
“Eagle!” she exclaimed.
“Fuck,” Eagle swore in an agonized tone.
They held each other a long moment before Taylor tried to pull back in a panic. “We have to get out of here. He’s going to find us!”
“He’s dead,” Eagle said, not letting go.
“What?”
“Dead. I killed him,” Eagle rasped, using his head to motion behind him.
Looking over his shoulder, Taylor could see a man’s body lying in the dirt, near the tree trunk where she’d first considered hiding.
The sound of a helicopter registered, and she looked up, not able to see it through the thick leaves on the trees. Yet she panicked once more, trying to pull out of Eagle’s arms.
“We need to go! We’ll tell them the guy ran off and we don’t know what happened to him. Then maybe we can come back later and bury him or something!”
“Taylor, it’s okay.”
“No, it’s not! You can’t go to jail. I’d never survive that!” She was hysterical, but she couldn’t help it.
“I’m not going to jail,” he said calmly.
“Yes, you are! You killed him, and I can’t identify him as the man who’s been stalking me. I mean, I knew he was because of the way he smelled, but no one will believe me. Lawyers will tear any self-defense argument apart!”
“His scent was still that strong?” Eagle asked.
“How can you be so calm?!” Taylor practically screamed. “Yes! He said he was a paramedic and wanted me to sit in his car while he went to check on you, but I recognized his piece-of-shit car from when he hit me before. That, and the way he smelled. He was trying to put me in his trunk, but I hit his arm and made him drop his keys. Then he hit me, and I ran.”
“He hit you?” Eagle growled, bringing a hand up to gently push the hair away from her face so he could examine her.
“Eagle, please!” Taylor begged, struggling in his arms.
“As much as I love that you want to protect me, it’s not necessary,” Eagle told her, his voice calm once more, even as he tightened his hold and took in her swollen cheekbone. “My team will be here in minutes, and everything will be fine.”
“Your team?” Taylor asked in confusion. “We’re almost an hour from Silverstone Towing.”
“They were in the helicopter. After the FLIR found our heat sources, they rappelled out and are hotfooting it to our location.”
Taylor’s head spun. “What?”
“No one’s going to jail,” he reassured her.
Wanting to believe him, Taylor shook her head, still dazed. “You’re bleeding,” she said.
“I know,” he replied. “I also have a concussion. What about you? Did he hurt you any other way than hitting you?”
“No. But my ribs are killing me, I lost a shoe and my foot hurts, and I got scraped up pretty good by all the thorns in this forest.”
Eagle just closed his eyes and pulled her even closer.
Taylor understo
od. She didn’t want to let him go either. Everything had happened so fast, and they’d both come close to dying.
Two minutes later, that was how Bull, Smoke, and Gramps found them. Sitting on the ground, Taylor in Eagle’s lap, holding on to each other as if they’d never let go.
Chapter Eighteen
Taylor sat in an interrogation room at the police station near Silverstone Towing. It was two days after her stalker had purposely run into Eagle’s Wrangler and had tried to kidnap her. They’d missed the awards ceremony in Bloomington, but considering all that had happened, it didn’t seem all that important anymore. She and Eagle were still feeling a bit rough, but she wasn’t going to put off this meeting even one day longer. She needed answers, and she knew Eagle felt the same way.
Bull, Smoke, and Gramps had also asked to sit in on the meeting. Familiar with the men, the police allowed it, and Taylor had no problem with that either. She owed the men everything. They’d gotten to her and Eagle quicker than she could’ve imagined. They’d been like the brothers she’d never had. She wouldn’t deny them information about what she’d gotten them in the middle of.
Taylor looked over at Eagle. He’d refused to wear a bandage over the large cut on his forehead today, saying it itched and he’d rather let the stitches get some air. She couldn’t decide if he looked better with the bandage on or off. At the moment, the wound was red and slightly infected, and the black stitches looked like antennas from bugs trying to crawl out of his forehead, so she was leaning toward him looking better with it on.
Eagle caught her watching him, and he reached for her hand. He scooted his chair closer, then rested their clasped hands on his thigh. “What’d you find out?” he asked the detectives.
Instead of answering Eagle, both the man and woman who’d been tasked with updating them on the investigation looked at Taylor. They had similar looks of sympathy on their faces.
Taylor tensed.
“First of all, in case you were worried, there will be no charges against Mr. Trowbridge,” Detective Allen said. She was dressed in a pair of jeans and a black polo shirt featuring the police department logo.