Striking Edge

by Kelsey Browning

  “That’s exactly what he used to say. ‘Jojo, I see something in you. Something special—a sparkle, a sharpness. It’s gonna take you further than your biggest dreams.’”

  Jojo. Shep liked that. Made her seem more like a real-life woman and less like a big-name performer who stood on stage and sang for thousands. “Is he the only person who called you that instead of Joss?”

  “I’m Jojo to the few people who really understand what music means to me. Joss Wynter is my stage name. My birth certificate says Jocelyn Mae Winterburn.”

  “Pretty.” Almost as pretty as she was sitting there in her grungy pants and shirt, looking at her beat-up guitar as if it was the answer to all the world’s problems. So Shep slid the case from his lap to hers.

  Joss tried to scoot back, but he caught her wrist and looked into her eyes. That simple contact amazed him because sharing this intimacy with her didn’t make his stomach hurt as it normally did. “You need to do this. It’s always hardest the first time.”

  “I… I have the craziest feeling she hates me now.”

  Shep tried to think like his dad would in a situation like this. Ross Kingston had a lot of thoughts on relationships. He always said people were puzzles, that they said things that misdirected, that weren’t exactly what they meant. And in a relationship, it was the other person’s job to figure out the puzzle, determine where the map really led.

  Joss thought her guitar hated her. Which was clearly impossible since a musical instrument was inanimate. No soul, no ability to experience emotions.

  She believed her guitar harbored bad feelings toward her, but she was actually projecting her own negative emotions onto her guitar. “Then do something to help her love you again. Show her how you feel about her.”

  Joss wiped her hands down the sides of her pants, and they were visibly shaking when she reached into the case. She probably had no idea that she let out a little sigh when her fingers closed around the guitar’s neck.

  It was a sound of relief. Of satisfaction. Of completion.

  He shouldn’t be having the kind of thought that sound drove through him, if Joss would sigh like that after an orgasm slid through her.

  She lifted out the guitar and ran her hands over it lovingly. Sensuously.

  Even if Shep could control his thoughts—and he was having a hell of a time wrangling them—he couldn’t will away his erection. As long as Joss kept stroking her guitar like a lover, he would be aroused. He shifted around for comfort, but thankfully, Joss wasn’t paying him a bit of attention.

  Her fingertips brushed over the strings, barely creating a sound, but the vibration shimmered through the night and skimmed over Shep’s skin. The pressure behind his zipper intensified until his cock was the only part of his body he could feel.

  With a long exhale, Joss pushed the case aside and settled the guitar fully in her lap and cradled it. She merely toyed with the strings for several minutes. From fear or pleasurable anticipation? But when the first note sang into the air, it was pure and clear.

  Completely absorbed and within herself, Joss quickly tuned the guitar and began to pick out a melody. Something soft and secret. Haunting. Healing.

  It was nothing like the sounds from the strident electric guitars she played on stage. It was almost as if Joss was talking to herself, reassuring herself. Becoming herself.

  Joss Wynter wasn’t at all the woman he’d thought she would be. And she was somehow making him want to understand how to love.

  * * *

  Joss was jerked painfully from sleep by a scream. Not an owie-I-burned-myself scream, but one of bone-deep fear and terror. Heart booming, she thrashed her arms and legs, trying to throw off whatever was wrapped around her, holding her down, suffocating her in the predawn haze. “Oh, God. I need out. I need out.”

  “Jojo, you are okay.” Then she heard the three quick notes of a whippoorwill call. They continued in a musical circle until she stopped struggling.

  Shep. She’d been with Shep last night outside his tent. Eating, talking, playing Fiona. She’d played. Not much, just plucked a few strings, but still.

  Joss took a breath and tried to get her bearings. She was in a sleeping bag, and fighting against ripstop fabric and duck feathers wasn’t doing anything for her. She shoved the whole thing down her legs and realized Shep was lying beside her. “Who screamed?” she asked him.

  “Probably Lauren,” he said without much concern, even though Puck was standing and peering into the trees, his ears and the fur around his neck raised.

  “That wasn’t like her scream last night,” Joss said and hurried to put on the shoes Shep must’ve slipped off her feet last night before tucking her into his sleeping bag.

  “She’s an actress.”

  But when Lauren stumbled into camp, Joss knew she wasn’t acting. Her skin was paler than watered-down skim milk and tears were streaking her wild face. That she could’ve fabricated, but her nose was running as well, and Lauren wouldn’t fake that. “He’s—oh, God—he’s just there. He’s hanging. He’s dead.”

  That brought everyone in camp to their feet, and Shep demanded, “Who? What are you talking about?”

  “Buffalo Moody,” Lauren sobbed out and wiped her nose on her shirtsleeve. “He’s… he’s dead. Someone hung him.”

  “Maybe you made a mistake. Could you have seen an animal strung up? Hunters do that to ward off predators.”

  “I know what I saw.”

  Shep coaxed sketchy directions from Lauren, then told everyone to stay in camp. Yeah, that didn’t happen. They followed him into the woods.

  Still unnerved by the authenticity of Lauren’s screams, Joss stayed close by Shep’s side. The trees seemed to lean together, conspiring with one another and sharing dark secrets. “Maybe… Do you think she saw something else and just imagined it was Moody?”

  He grunted. “Don’t know what to think since I haven’t seen it yet.”

  They smelled death before they found it, a putrid sweetness Joss had never inhaled before. But she didn’t have to have experience with the scent to know what it was. Her eyes watered, and she covered her mouth and nose with her palm.

  “Everyone should stay here,” Shep said. “Let me go on and see what’s what.”

  While the others seemed grateful to hang back, Joss forged on behind Shep and Puck. They weaved through the trees and slipped into a tiny clearing.

  It was still and quiet. It was horrible.

  She’d thought she was prepared from the scent, but the sight of Buffalo Moody sent Joss to her knees. Try as she might to fight it off, her gag reflex engaged, her stomach convulsed, and she heaved.

  “I told you not to come.” Shep’s tone was impatient and unsympathetic.

  “Just give me a minute, and I’ll be okay.” Untruth. She would never be okay again. From the corner of her eye, she watched Shep stride up to the body, hanging about two feet off the ground. Moody’s right foot—bare and bloated—swung back and forth like a gruesome pendulum. He was wearing only pants, and his torso and arms were also swollen.

  Now that she was looking, Joss couldn’t tear her gaze away. His face was so puffy and distended that it looked as if someone had blown him up like a helium balloon.

  “He wasn’t hung,” Shep said.

  Joss staggered to her feet and Puck leaned against her thighs, steadying her. “But he is hanging.”

  “That’s not how he was killed.” Shep stepped back as if to take in the entire grisly scene at once. “He hasn’t been here long. If he had, there wouldn’t be this much of him left. The animals—”

  “Got it,” she wheezed out, holding one hand out to ward off his words and pressing the other hard into her stomach. “Wh… what do we do now? Should we take him down or—”

  “No, we need to call the authorities and let them handle this.” Shep patted his pockets. “Damn. I left camp without the sat phone.”

  “Maybe I can run back and get it.” Because the alternative was for her to sit here
guarding Moody’s body from predators, and she wasn’t sure she could manage that without losing her mind.

  “Go back to the others and have one of them bring it me. I’ll stay here in the meantime.”

  “You said he wasn’t hung. What do you think… How did he… What happened?”

  “By the looks of it, Moody drowned. The river we camped not far from last night runs near here.” He stepped even closer to the body, making Joss want to yank him away. Making her want to run and run and run. Shep pointed toward Moody’s head. “If he’d been hung, we’d see broken capillaries in his face.”

  “I… I’ll take your word for it.”

  “So how the hell he found himself strung up in this tree, I don’t know.” Shep studied the ground under the body then followed a shallow twin-grooved trail to the edge of the trees. He used a stick to drag out a bright orange PFD similar to the ones Joss and the others had worn in the raft. “Looks like someone used this to float the body down the river. It was dragged for a few feet here, but any other tracks that might’ve been made have been covered. Joss, once you get back to the group, stay there with two people, and send the other two back with the phone.”

  Everything inside Joss compelled her to do as he asked, to flee, but she didn’t want to leave him here alone. “Why don’t you come with me? After all, it’s not like he’s going to—” Something erupted from her throat—a disturbing combination of laughter and a gasp—cutting off her words.

  “I’ll be fine,” Shep said. “Take Puck and go now.”

  Relieved to turn her back on the horrific sight and smell, Joss grabbed Puck’s leash, and they jogged back the way they’d hiked.

  But the rest of their group was no longer waiting.

  14

  Something crashed through the trees toward Shep, and he braced to defend himself from threat—animal or man. But it was Joss, her brightly colored hair falling out of its ponytail and whipping around her face. Puck trotted along behind her, shooting worried looks up at her and then toward Shep.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “They’re gone,” she puffed out. “The others.”

  “Are you sure you went back to the right place?”

  “By the pine tree that looks like a broken finger.”

  “Did you call out for them?” he asked, although he wasn’t sure which he preferred—that she had or hadn’t.

  “Yes, but nothing. No answer.” She cut a quick glance at Moody’s body, still hanging from the branch smelling like ten days of ass-ripe roadkill. “Do you think someone… He obviously didn’t do this to himself. Do you think whoever did this hurt the rest of the group?”

  It would take some real doing to snatch up four adults—three of them men who weighed over 170. “Any sign of a fight or struggle near the tree?”

  “I… I don’t think so.”

  Damn it all to hell and back. He’d known from the get-go that this Do or Die show was a circle jerk waiting to happen. But had Dan listened to him? No. No, he had not. And now the man would shit a llama when Shep called and told him this situation had become a full-on clusterfuckin’ orgy.

  No way would Shep send Joss back to camp alone to get the sat phone, which meant he either had to cut Moody down and drag him back with them or leave him here. Shep didn’t like either option. But when it came down to the safety of the dead or the safety of the living, there was no question.

  Moody would just have to wait.

  Shep turned back to the man’s body and spent several minutes studying everything about it.

  “What are you doing?” Joss asked him.

  “Trying to remember everything I can.”

  “Because…”

  “Because we have to leave him here and get back to camp for the phone. He won’t look like this the next time we see him.” He turned to see Joss shudder and wrap her arms around her torso.

  Oh, hell. She was probably scared and freaked out. This was way more than she’d signed on for. And he was standing around subjecting her to a dead body.

  He hurried away from Moody and touched Joss lightly on the arm. “I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have had to see this.” God, between the fawn and Moody, she’d seen more death in the past twenty-four hours than…

  No, she’d seen death before. And if the news reports had been accurate, she’d seen it up close and personal. Her band went down less than a mile from where they took off, and the tabloids had run pictures of Joss’s car racing to the scene. Of her kneeling amid the burning wreckage, her face buried in her hands.

  In response to his touch, she turned into him and burrowed against him, so close that it felt as if she wanted to open a door into his chest and walk inside him. “I’m scared.”

  Shep carefully enfolded her in his arms, tested it out to see how the tender hold felt to him. Not bad. In fact, verging on good.

  And the closer she pressed, the better it felt.

  “I’m here,” he said. “Puck’s here. And we would never leave you. As of this second, I’m not letting you out of my sight. Not until we get down off this mountain.”

  She looked up at him, her eyes watery. “You promise?”

  “Cross my heart and—”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Jojo, I’m a trained survivalist. So when I tell you that I will make sure you survive, you can believe it.” He kept his arm around her shoulders as he led her away from the scene. He hadn’t liked Moody worth a damn, but he wouldn’t have wished this—whatever this actually was—on anyone.

  But what concerned him more was who would’ve killed the man. There wasn’t a lot of love lost between the show’s host and several others in their group. Moody had seemed to get along with Greg okay. But he’d jumped the younger camera guy’s shit several times. Bradley seemed disdainful of Moody. And the host and The Bitcher had been playing at some sort of love-hate relationship.

  Everyone had left camp at some point over the past couple of days, giving them opportunity.

  The only one Shep didn’t suspect was Joss. Whoever had strung up Moody had done it this morning, and Joss had been sleeping next to Shep all night.

  But The Bitcher had been out and about this morning. Shep hadn’t smelled death on her. But she was smart. What his brother Way would call cunning. Could she have devised some type of pulley to hoist Moody up in that tree?

  “We need to start back,” he said to Joss.

  She straightened her shoulders and took a deep breath, but she stayed beneath his arm as they hiked back toward camp. “I thought he left the group to screw with us.”

  “So did I.”

  “He wasn’t a very nice man.”

  “He was a dick.”

  Joss’s laughter was combined with a snuffling sob as she gestured vaguely in the direction behind them. “But no one deserves that.”

  “As soon as I get a call in to my sister Maggie, she’ll have people up here. She’s the best at what she does. She’ll figure this out.”

  “This means the show is over.”

  “I know you wanted to win.”

  Joss stumbled, and he tightened his grip around her shoulders. “It sounds horrible and shallow now,” she whispered.

  “Moving forward is never horrible and shallow. You were doing this for a reason.”

  “Then is it horrible and shallow that I hate that our time together is almost over?”

  Fuck. He hadn’t given that a single thought.

  He’d call Maggie, help would come, and he and Joss would return to Steele Ridge. Then she would leave. Because the show was the only reason she was anywhere near North Carolina. Anywhere near him.

  He tightened his hold on her shoulders until she squeaked. Immediately, he dropped his arm.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, stepping in front of him. It was either stop, go around, or plow her down. Shep stopped.

  “We need to get back to camp,” he said, his voice gruff because his throat was tight. “And we’ll take it from there.”

&nb
sp; “What does take it from there mean?” She moved in and rested her head on his chest, making Shep’s heart pump double-time. “Once we get back to Steele Ridge, the police are going to have a lot of questions, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then it will be impossible for me to get back on a plane to LA right away. I’ll need to stay in town.”

  The tightness in Shep’s gut eased a little. “For how long?” Hopefully for long enough for that sex they both wanted to have. “You could stay…” He didn’t want to freak her out. “…with my parents.”

  No, no. That sucked. If she was in his parents’ house, it might be hard to have sex.

  “Or at the B and B in town,” he hurried to say, trying like hell to keep from reaching for his paracord to bolster his courage. “Or with me.”

  She smiled up at him. “Then taking it from there means I’ll stay with you for a few days.”

  “How many days?” He needed to know. Exactly.

  “Is three too many?”

  No, he wanted to tell her as he wrapped her in his arms, three was far too few.

  * * *

  To Joss, the walk back to their campsite seemed to take years. The forest and animal calls that had once sounded friendly now surrounded her, pressed in on her. This wasn’t some sweet nature show. It really had turned into Do or Die.

  She reached for Shep’s hand and held it tightly. He didn’t pull away, so the pressure must’ve been okay.

  Every couple of minutes, Puck let out a low whine, as if he intuitively understood that things were not right in the world. Shep laid a hand on his dog’s head and the retriever calmed.

  Silently, so silently a whisper would’ve sounded like a shout, a man stepped onto the trail in front of them. His clothes were made from multiple raccoon tails strung together that hung from around his neck and waist. When he spoke, his voice was rusty and low. “You are not welcome here.”

  Shep dragged Joss behind him, but she peeked around. The other man stood, feet spread, arms wide, and chin up.