It was impossible to tell what it was. The darkness was too vast, too intense. But whatever it was, it was approaching. And quickly too. It pushed through the tall grass with silent, relentless resolve.
An owl screeched somewhere nearby. A rustle sounded in the weeds just off the back porch.
Predator and prey.
Which category did the approaching shadow fall into? And what wassheby contrast?
The questions buzzed like angry wasps, each one stinging her with dread as the seconds ticked by and the unknownthingcrept closer.
Then it happened. The black shadow took shape, sharpening from an amorphous blob into the silhouette of a man.
Some lonely, reclusive hermit who’d watched all the action and who’d waited to step into the clearing until he saw her standing by herself?
What did he want? To bash her over the head and drag her to his cabin deep in the woods where he’d hold her captive and force her to bear his squealing, grubby babies?
She’d have blamed her racing mind on having watched one too many horror movies. But she was an FBI agent. She’d seen how fact was oftentimes stranger—and more terrifying—than fiction.
With slow, practiced motions, she thumbed off the safety snap on her shoulder holster, wincing when thesnicksounded obscenely loud inside the silence shrouding the porch. Then, inch by inch, she pulled her weapon from the leather.
The man was close now. Maybe fifty yards away.
His posture, partially hunched over, head on a pivot as he surveyed his surroundings, told her he wanted to gain ground without being seen.
Tension knotted her intestines until she felt nauseous. When the man turned and made for the small, dilapidated barn, recognition dawned like a slow sunrise. Her fears were instantly dispelled, and her jaw was instantly hard.
She’d know those broad shoulders and that flyaway hair anywhere. She’d seen them a million times in her dreams.
Sergeant Britt Rollins.
Gotcha!
15
Britt's first indication that he wasn’t alone inside the small barn was the hairs on the back of his neck lifting in warning.
And in that moment, it was less about training and more about instinct—ancestral knowledge lodged deep in the very nuclei of his cells told him to get ready to act.
His eyesight sharpened in the stygian gloom. His nose twitched with the smells of rusting metal and molding hay. His ears heard every sound as if blasted through a megaphone—the creak of the wood on the siding as a breeze blew by, the squeak of a field mouse in the back corner, and his breathing going slow and steady.
Before he’d begun his furtive trip across the field, he’d unzipped his jacket to give himself easy access to the sidearm strapped tight against his rib cage. But he didn’t have time to slip it from his holster before the air shifted around him. Before he felt the cold steel kiss of a gun barrel on the back of his head.
If there had been a mirror in front of him, it would’ve reflected the quick upward twitch of his lips.
Rookie mistake,he thought as his training took over.
In one lightning-quick move, he spun. His hands made contact with the weapon, twisting so it snapped around at one-hundred-and-eighty degrees. If his assailant had had his finger on the trigger, it would’ve easily hyper-extended the digit and then just as easily snapped it in two.
He realized two things as he gained control of the pistol and pointed it between the eyes of the guy who’d tried to sneak up on him. The first was that his attacker hadn’t had their finger on the trigger. There was no added resistance as the weapon changed hands, no bark of pain as bones broke. The second was that his would-be assailant wasn’t a man but a woman.
Not just any woman.
Thewoman.
Even in the darkness, there was no mistaking her diminutive stature or the way two locks of hair had escaped her messy, windblown bun to hang next to her cheeks and softly frame her face. The whites of her eyes stood out in the gloom. And the defiant tilt of her chin had him fighting a responding smile.
He may have caught her off guard but hadn’t bested her. She wasn’t beaten. Quite the contrary, her stiff posture and glittering gaze challenged him to do his worst.
He lowered the pistol…er…herpistol, pointing the deadly end at the ground. Her eyes followed the movement, and he thought he detected the muscles in her jaws twitching a second before she lifted her chin, her gaze slicing through the dark to clash with his.
