Peirce had been involved then, too, which didn’t make this trip sit any easier with me. This time, though, I was looking for a girl, which was no easy feat when she was likely, knowing Eve, nowhere near the road. That trip had been a fast one, both of us belting out the wrong lyrics to a song together. This one was slower, with the window wound all the way down, though I could barely hear anything over the drone of the engine.
I parked at a familiar bend in the dirt track. The road continued on to a round trip of the property, but to access the back corner after driving for long enough that one ass cheek turned numb, I had to walk.
Which was fine. I had no idea if I had passed Eve’s destination, but I had more of a chance of finding her on foot where I could hear a whole lot better. The path before me seemed a better choice than getting lost in the foothills of the mountains that I barely remembered for no good reason.
Eve was my pine needle in the snowy haystack that was Red Hart, and she could be anywhere within a twenty square mile radius, quite literally.
I paced myself, taking longer strides but kept my breaths slow and steady as I walked. My mind refused to stop ticking over, the same way it had at the house. Why the hell wasn’t Jude or Travis out looking for her if they knew she was out helping her animals? Red Hart’s spotted red deer herd was infamous and Eve’s pride and joy. She’d do anything for her herd, and the boys knew that. Maybe Natalie had become Jude’s distraction,though he seemed to be on the property to help run it often enough. I gave her twin no excuse. As part owner of the ranch and Eve’s brother, he didn’t get off half as lightly in my book.
I halted beside a thick pine, my palm resting on its roughened bark. Icy water dripped on the back of my hand as I listened for the faint sound I thought I’d heard a moment before, but it didn't repeat. No, it wasn’t like any of the Red Hart crew to abandon their own.
Not unless Eve had a habit of taking off for days on a regular basis.
My boots crunched over snow and slush, the insides slowly soaking. I seethed silently, my footfalls careful but heavy as I strode deeper into the cold depths of the forest. What the hell had happened to my girl that she was hiking into the snow and no one knew where she was?
Or that anyone seemed to care.
My Eve, who had always brought light and warmth to the ranch hands and people who filled Red Hart, usually because of her. Every one of them adored her—some more than others, it seemed—but I couldn’t see anyone hurting her intentionally.
But then, after everything that had happened to her in the last year, I hadn’t been here to help prop her up, or let her cry.
God, please, let her still be able to cry.
My guts knotted as I strode through the underbrush that thinned into pine litter and mush, pausing to listen every few steps. Something warned me against calling out for the moment. The ground was soft underfoot, the snow less melted here as it had been in the yard. Small clumps of frost still clung to the trees, glazing them in a glistening array of sparkles both beautiful and blinding in reflected light.
It might have been the small change in altitude that cleared my head, but I wondered if the yard at the front of the ranch house was getting more traffic than I had assumed.
Surely Eve hadsomeonehelping out around the place. She’d always been as tough as hell and blessed with determination that rolled easily into the realm of stubbornness. That was what both drove me crazy and what I loved about her most, but even Eve had to admit when she needed help.
I rounded a slab of granite that always reminded me of stone boulders thrown by mountain giants, and stumbled over the first hint that I might actually have found my needle.
A ponderosa pine was split straight down the middle of its heavy trunk, the tips of the bark blackened at its shattered ends. New growth had begun to assimilate the damage done, its survival pushing through the season, but what caught my interest was the fresh turned dirt at its base. Scuffle marks spread across the pebbly soil in a wide pattern across the bowl where the tree used to stand.
I walked around it, tracing the path of destruction to a worse-for-wear oversized holly bush. Beyond that, the trail tipped down a small incline into a small dell, in a copse of elderberry and mountain laurel and right at the very bottom, Eve was planted on her perfect behind, uncoiling a ridiculous amount of wire from around a small deer that the property was named for.
She looked up as I peered down at her, my hands clenched at my sides. Dark circles hung beneath her eyes, her curls as wild a mess as the tangled deer she cradled.
But when she saw me, some part of that exhaustion was pushed away. Color rose in her cheeks, and she managed the kind of smile that sent me scrambling down the incline to help her.
“Rhys,” she whispered, her head tipping back.
And suddenly I didn’t give a single fuck if she wanted me there or not. Because I'd found her, and right now, that was all that mattered.
Chapter 4
Archer
“Christ, you’re a mess.”
That wasn’t what I meant to say, but it’s what fell out of my mouth anyway.
“Hi, Rhys,” Eve murmured. She continued to stare up at me, unmoving, clutching her deer.
I slid the last few feet of the incline through pine needles and sludge, adding to her mess, as I arrived in the little hollow she was settled in, swearing to myself. My elevated heart rate had nothing to do with the gorgeous woman at the bottom of the dip, I swore, only the fact that I hadn’t face planted right on top of her as I over-balanced and caught myself at the last minute.
“Hey yourself.” I crouched beside her and nodded to the deer. “What the hell happened here? I nearly didn’t find you.” It was a damned miracle and I figured she knew that. The closer I peered, the more I realized that the deer wasn’t the only one stuck. The barbed wire twisted about her legs as she uncoiled the deer until both of them were wrapped up like a spiked Christmas present.
Had Eve been out on her own overnight? She’d be hellishly sick if that was the case. I couldn’t see any evidence of exposure, but that didn’t mean there was none.
