A Dark Lure

by Loreth Anne White

  He snorted. “He wasn’t upset. He just asked if he could count on me to have your back.”

  She sipped her drink. “And you said what?”

  He glanced at her. A beat of silence. “I said yes.”

  Olivia swallowed at the intensity in his eyes. It was as if he were devouring her, owning her. She fought an urge to shift slightly back in her seat.

  “Do you like him—Burton?”

  “I think he’s . . . kind. I believe he’s trying to do his best by Tori, even if he’s making mistakes. But I feel he’s genuine.”

  I don’t feel about him like I feel about you.

  “Yet you seem worried now,” he prompted. “You’re asking questions now.”

  She glanced away. Tori’s words in the boat came to mind.

  Why did you go with two guns . . . what’s that in your boot now . . .

  Olivia owned a pistol herself. But it wasn’t legal. Handguns were restricted firearms in this part of the world. They required a special “authorization to carry.”

  “Has anything . . . odd happened, Liv? Beyond the episode with the newspaper and lure that rattled you so badly?”

  Her heart beat faster. She felt trapped. Shit. She wanted to talk about this as much as she didn’t. She thought about getting up to go, but he placed his solid hand over her knee, halting her.

  “Look, we both know something bad happened in your past. And I don’t want to press you on that, unless you want to tell me. I just got a vibe about Burton and wondered if there was some link between him and your past.”

  Moth wings of panic fluttered through her stomach. Her thoughts turned to the berries, the scarf, the tracks, the sense of being watched, followed. The coincidence of this freakish Birkenhead murder with so-called echoes of the Watt Lake Killings. If she turned it all one way, she could see them as coincidences. Turn them another and she was no longer so sure. Pressure mounted in her to tell him. But she couldn’t.

  No matter how tempting the need for comfort, or the allure of having someone truly at her back, she couldn’t become Sarah Baker again.

  Olivia took a deep sip of her drink, holding her glass tight so he wouldn’t detect the tremble in her hands.

  “So, just be careful about him, okay?”

  Her gaze flicked back to him. Nerves deepened at the gravitas she saw in his eyes.

  “Also, know that I’m here if you need me.”

  She swallowed. Her skin grew hot. She felt she was at a crossroads, on the razor’s edge of telling Cole everything, of wanting to lean into him, be with him in more ways than one, but she was unable.

  Laughter from the table near the bar startled them both. Her gaze shot across the room. The last of the guests were getting up to leave.

  They waved and called out their good-byes. The room fell silent as the door closed behind them, just the roar of the fire and the battering of the wind outside.

  “There’s something else I want you to know.” He reached out and took her hand in his. Olivia’s muscles snapped wire tight. Her body warred between the urge to pull away and an impulse to turn her palm faceup under his, to lace her fingers through his. Her mouth turned dry. A buzz began in her head.

  “I agree with what my father did. I want you to have the ranch in trust. I want you to run it.”

  “Cole, I told you, I don’t want—”

  His thumb moved under the hem of her sweater sleeve, inching gently along the ridge of her scars. Their eyes met. She tensed, almost pulled away but didn’t, her world narrowing. She was vaguely conscious of Kim and Zack heading into the kitchen with the last of the dishes.

  “It’s the right thing,” he whispered.

  “Why?” Her voice came out thick.

  “Because I’m thinking of staying, helping. You said it yourself, ranching is hard work, and getting the livestock side of things up and running again is going to require an injection of capital. I could handle that end of the business, if you concentrated on the year-round tourism-destination side of things.”

  She stared at him in silence for several beats. “It’s the drink talking. You really are like your father.”

  His eyes darkened, and his energy changed. She could feel a dark electricity crackling off him in silent waves. He inhaled, deep, as if drinking her in, absorbing, consuming, trying to decide something. He glanced away, still holding her hand, his calloused thumb softly stroking against her palm. She could barely breathe. And she did it, she turned her palm up against his, lacing her fingers through his. He tightened his hand and his gaze snapped to hers. In his eyes she could read desire, fierce need.

  She felt it in her own.

  Slowly, he ran his hand up the outside of her arm, up to her neck. He cupped the back of her neck, fingers threading into thick hair. He drew her closer as he leaned toward her. He brushed his warm lips over her mouth.

  A bolt of fire cracked through her.

  She pulled away abruptly. Got up, heart stampeding. She stared down into his gray eyes. He stared back. Unspoken things surged between them. Things she did not want to broach. Too close, too intimate—not on just a physical level. She could not go there. Wherever he was going.

  “Olivia?” His voice was thick, dusky.

  “We can lock up the dining room now. The guests have all gone,” she said abruptly. “Unless you want to stay and have another drink, then please close up behind you.” She clicked her fingers, and Ace lifted his sleepy head and reluctantly rose from his slumber in front of the fire.

  “I’ll walk you.” He got up, came after her.

  “No. I’m fine.” She was shaking like a leaf.

  He touched her arm. She snapped tight. “You are fine, Liv. More than fine, but I’m not letting you walk back alone.”

  “Cole—” Her voice caught. Her eyes burned. Need throbbed painfully through her body, her nipples tight and screaming for touch, her groin hot and throbbing. It was overwhelming. She . . . she didn’t know how to handle this.

  “It’s okay,” he said, raising his palms. “No pressure. No obligations. Just a walk back through the dark woods.” He smiled. “I understand.”

  “I’ve managed on my own for years, you know.”

  “But you don’t have to.”

  CHAPTER 17

  They reached her porch.

  His boots sounded heavily against wood as he came up the stairs.

  “There you go.” Cole smiled in the darkness and stuck his hands deep into his pockets. But he didn’t leave. He appeared to be waiting to be invited in. In more ways than one.

  Tense, Olivia placed her hand on the knob, opened the door.

  He cocked his head. “You don’t lock it?”

  “I have nothing to fear here.” But her voice sounded bolder than she felt. Ace skirted into the cabin through the crack she’d opened in the door.

  Cole went to the porch railing, placed his hands on the banister. He looked out over the lake and into wilderness and the blackness of the mountains beyond. Ectoplasmic curtains of light billowed across the sky, a dance of the cosmos.

  “They’re like magic,” he said quietly. “I always imagine that they should make a sound, something crackling or electrical, or whispering, but they’re so silent.”

  The wind wasn’t silent, though. It chased through dry branches, chinked the halyard against the flagpole down on the shore, slapped waves against the dock that creaked and groaned with the heave of water dotted with ghostly whitecaps.

  Olivia couldn’t help it. She gravitated to his side, her shoulder almost touching his arm as she stood beside him. She zipped her jacket up higher and turned the collar up against the increasing chill. Side by side in silence they watched the interplay of light against sky and water. A black blot of weather grew on the south horizon, and it ate steadily toward them.

  He moved ever so slightly closer,
so that the sides of their arms touched. And he allowed his little finger to connect with the edge of her hand on the banister. Her heart stuttered.

  “I missed this,” he said.

  She swallowed. God, she missed this, too. Touch. Physical contact with another human being. She’d fought it off so long—this need to be held, loved, just accepted for who she was. And now his touch opened a great, yawning chasm deep inside her that just seemed to grow, and ache.

  “You must have seen aurora elsewhere,” she said, voice thick.

  “It’s more than lights,” he whispered.

  Heat washed softly through her belly. Tentatively, he touched her pinkie with his little finger, then hooked it through hers. Breath snared in Olivia’s throat.

  She held herself dead still despite the desire quivering down through her. Her vision seemed to narrow, spiraling in to just this moment, to them. Alone. Touching. Under this haunting light display. It felt as though every molecule in her body was straining toward him, drawn by an invisible but powerful magnetic north as the aurora crackled in an electrical storm around them.

  She closed her eyes for a moment, struggling to marshal logic, but her thoughts darted into the trickier carnal shadows of her mind.

  “It’s also about missing a sense of home, you know, real home. Roots. The place you grew up in. Those lights symbolize this place for me. Not everyone has a place like that. Sometimes you don’t realize that you were missing it until you return.” He fell into contemplation for several beats, then said, “To think this same view over that water, looking out toward that Marble range, has been burned into the eyes of my lineage for over a hundred years—you wonder if something like that can leave a DNA fingerprint of sorts. Something that creates a physical longing in one for a place in order to feel whole.” He paused a long while.

  “I wish I’d brought Ty and Holly here. To meet my dad. I’ve made mistakes. Big ones that can’t be fixed.”

  She inhaled deeply, almost afraid of speaking, because while he was being so candid with her, she didn’t want to open personal doors of her own.

  “But you can start over,” she said, cautiously. “You can grow out of those mistakes.”

  He turned suddenly to her. “As in a second chance?”

  She moistened her lips, held his gaze in the eerie light.

  “Tell me about your family, Olivia.”

  “I don’t get on with my family.”

  He regarded her for a beat, then a smile curved his lips. “So, you just throw stones from a glass house, then? By trying to tell me how to get on with mine?”

  “Touché,” she said quietly. “You’re right. I’m in no position to tell you how to act with your father. But in the same way Burton got up your nose with how he was treating his daughter, you and your father got up mine. You were both being idiot bulls, each refusing to back down first. And when you know how one ‘sorry’ could have changed everything in your own life, it makes you want to interfere in the lives of others where there is still opportunity to make things right. You ache to tell people they can still salvage what family they have left.”

  “This happened with your father, your family?”

  She glanced up at the magical sky. “I really don’t want to talk about them.”

  She was allowing him to skirt too close.

  How long before he—before they all—figured it out? Adele had now also seen her neck scar. Adele, the town gossip. Adele, whose son worked with Forbes, who in turn was connected to everyone. Nella had seen, too. Unless this Watt Lake Killer news died down, someone was going to figure out how she was connected. It wasn’t that hard if one dug into the Watt Lake news archives. Her identity had been safe until now because no one ever had reason to probe her past from that angle. Until this bizarre fresh murder. Until she’d gone and reacted like an idiot. Until Cole had exposed her terrible scar.

  “Look, I called you in Florida for the same reason you interfered with Gage and Tori. And now that it’s done, now that you’re here and can take care of your dad, it’s time for me to think about new plans.”

  “Such as?”

  “Moving on, finding a new place to stay.”

  “I told you—I want you to stay. This is your place.”

  Her gaze flared to his. “Why? What has changed your mind about trying to make this place work? You arrived here gung ho to sell.”

  He laughed. The sound was deep and guttural, and it tightened something in her belly.

  “Like you have so sweetly pointed out, Olivia, I am like my father. Stubborn. And I’ve gotten into my mule head that I really don’t want Forbes to get his claws into this place, to carve it up into ritzy estate lots. I mean, look out there, look at that view . . .” He fell silent. Then he exhaled deeply. “Truth? This is something that sneaked up on me.”

  “So, you really are serious, about trying to build the ranch business up again?”

  “I’d like to angle for that second chance. I’d like to dig my fingers into the soil, to feel grounded, to feel my roots.” His voice hitched on a dark thread of emotion. He gathered himself. “I got lost over the years, Liv. I want to see what happens if I stop running now. If I try to settle a bit. I want to see if I recognize myself when I wake up morning after morning in the same place, sober.”

  “You finally want to stop cheating death?”

  He was silent for a long moment.

  “I’m at a crossroads. I’m in no rush. No one to go back for. I have funds.” He paused. “Maybe this is about my father. About regret. And forgiveness. Maybe it’s about a knee-jerk dislike for Forbes.” He looked down at her. “Maybe it’s about you.”

  She swallowed, hearing the subtext of his words. And it confused and secretly thrilled her a little. It also terrified her.

  She cleared her throat. “What about your sister?”

  “If you stay under the terms of my father’s amended will, there should be no problem. If you leave, Jane would get her share. But I’m hoping you won’t, and that you’ll have me here, to help.” He smiled. “See? I’d be here by your grace.”

  He turned to face her fully and ran his hand slowly up the length of her arm. Dry leaves whispered. Water slapped harder at the dock.

  She wanted to resist, to tell him to leave her the hell alone, but couldn’t. Because as much as she didn’t want this, she did. And the two sides of her were at full-out war.

  He cupped the side of her face, his other hand going behind the small of her back, drawing her slowly, inexorably closer. He was strong, warm, and his eyes were dark pools. But she also felt the question in his touch—he was asking if this was what she wanted. Not pushing, yet making clear his design.

  The aurora pulsed, soft hues shimmering over the rough planes of his face, and his silent question hung, visceral, in the air between them, soft and crackling with promise and danger. For a moment Olivia dared dream forgotten dreams. All she had to do was yield, give herself over to it. Take what she wanted from this man.

  But in spite of her desire, she felt fear coiling low and serpent-like into the heat of her belly.

  He slid his hand around the back of her neck and lowered his head, angling his face, and tentatively feathered her lips with his.

  Heat exploded through her brain, zinging down latent neural pathways, sparking forgotten muscle memories of desire into life. And it was delicious, consuming, and also harrowing because the serpent stirred comfortably and dangerously into the heat, bringing to the surface a dark recall—of the times Ethan had tried to make love to her once she’d healed, many, many months after, and long after the baby had gone.

  But while she might have healed physically, her mind had remained broken. Her heart had ached with the loss of the child Ethan didn’t want. A child he’d reviled.

  And so had Ethan’s desire been broken.

  His perfunctory sexual advances r
ipped open raw memories of her assaults. She’d recoil from his touch no matter how she tried not to. And he from her. Because even on the occasion she had managed to quiet the flashbacks, she’d glimpsed disgust in her husband’s eyes when he looked upon her naked body. And fear of what one human could do to another. Of what one man had done to his wife. And of what that had done to him, and their marriage.

  She could see, also, in his eyes, the doubt, the questions—would this have happened to them if she hadn’t encouraged a killer?

  The end of their marriage had begun the day Sebastian George had walked into their store and chosen her as his next victim.

  Neither could look into the other’s eyes again without Sebastian George being present. Neither could live with Sebastian George present. So they parted.

  Olivia had not been with a man since.

  Cole drew her more firmly against his body, his mouth pressing down harder. Blinding desire swelled through her, obliterating all thought, all memories as she opened her mouth under his. His tongue slipped into her mouth, tasting, devouring her, and she leaned up into his kiss, into his solid body, her tongue tangling furiously with his as her own hunger consumed her.

  His stubble was rough against her face. It made her more fierce, hungrier. She felt the hard length of his erection press against her pelvis as he backed her toward her cabin.

  He backed her in through the slightly ajar door, and it crashed open wide. He kicked it closed with his boot as his tongue tangled and slicked and mated with hers.

  It was warm inside the room, embers in the stove pulsing a soft orange, casting a coppery glow through the interior. He edged her toward the sofa. Her knees buckled as they connected with the furniture, and he was lowering her down, his weight on top of her.

  Through the branches Eugene watched as they entered the cabin, locked in embrace. His pulse pounded. His cock was hard. Painfully hard. His fists clenched, and he gritted his teeth. A complication. That was all. This didn’t have to change a thing. He would correct her later for being a traitor. Females were fickle in heat. A good hunter should expect the unexpected with the female species.