Bile rushed her throat as he began to write in the condensation, the sound of his excited breathing reaching for her through the glass. Though she knew it was impossible, his cologne stung her sensory memory. There were only three letters that Nina read backwards.RUN.
She woke up in a full panic.
She gasped deeply, trying to inhale through the suffocating tightness in her chest. Each breath sawed out of her, sounding painful even to her own ears. Her sweat turned cold on her skin, making her shiver. Tears of frustration streamed down her face.
She lay stock-still and focused on breathing as she took in her surroundings.You’re safe, she reminded herself.No one knows you’re at Hunt Ranch.
Outside, early morning light was just starting to creep into the darkness, easing some of her claustrophobia. Nina closed her eyes and took deep, deliberate breaths as she tried to calm herself.
Slowly, her heart stopped racing, her tears dried. But as the adrenaline began to drain from her system, all she felt was deeply, unmeasurably empty.
On the computer screen in front of her, Netflix wanted to know if she was still watching, and because she desperately wanted to click ‘Continue’ and then curl up and stay right where she was, Nina, on principle, shut the laptop and sat up. She wrapped her arms around her legs and rested her forehead against her raised knees for a moment as she composed herself.
She wasn’t entirely sure how it had come down to this, wasn’t quite certain how a life could be so drastically altered in only one night.
The despair and hopelessness threatened to take her back under, but this time Nina did not allow it. She needed to find her way back to the woman she had been only a week ago. She needed to take control of her life again, needed to stop being so afraid. Of everything.
Only seven days ago she had been a successful, famous, wealthy woman who had started from nothing – less than nothing. She had been the most unlikely of statistics. The American dream.
But as she had discovered, the problem with dreaming is that at some point you had to wake up.
‘Get up. Move on,’ she told herself, and when the suffocating despair didn’t dissipate, she repeated it like a mantra. ‘Get up. Move on. Get up. Move on.’
She pushed up out of the bathtub, wincing slightly as her ribs protested the movement, and cautiously let herself out of the bathroom. Her eyes scanned each room before she entered, checking that nobody was there, but she tried not to internalize it too much. After being assaulted in her own home, Nina wasn’t sure any room would ever feel safe again, and she could allow herself that so long as she could still force her feet to enter them.
She decided, ‘Coffee,’ and after only one look at the sun just starting to peek over the mountains, added, ‘outside.’ She might live in the Hollywood Hills, but not even she had a view like this.
She didn’t bother changing, only picked up the red and tan striped blanket off the back of the sofa in the lounge, threw it over her shoulders, and padded barefoot to the kitchen.
Four minutes later, she unlocked the front door and stepped onto the little cabin’s porch, a cup of coffee in one hand, her cell phone and theBirdiefrom Markus in the other. She ignored the way her heart started that incessant anxious tick at simply walking outside and forced her feet to move forward. She padded to the porch swing and curled up on it, tucking her feet beneath her as she took that first sip.
The view was incredible. As dawn crept over the mountains, painting the sky in blues and golds, Nina looked out at green pastures. Horses of different colours grazed, their heads down, tails flicking.
Unable to resist, she put her coffee on the seat beside her and picked up her phone. She numbly dismissed the seven missed calls from Alexander Cane, theShadowlandsproducer, and snapped a picture of the sunrise. Though she knew he would be fast asleep for hours yet, she sent it to Markus, captioned it with:Are you sure you couldn’t live here?
And then she simply sat there alone, curled up on the porch swing, comforted enough by the unfurling day and stretching sunlight to fall back into an exhausted slumber, her coffee forgotten beside her.
Maverick saw her immediately. Or, rather, saw her head of glossy black hair immediately. The rest of her was cocooned in one of the fancy resort blankets.
He was surprised, too. If he’d had to guess which guests might be up before sunrise, Nina Keller wouldn’t have been one. But only because he figured a woman with a face like that got beauty sleep in epic proportions.
Still, he raised a hand and waved.
She didn’t respond.
At all.
With any other guest, it wouldn’t have bothered him. But given that Sierra had told them all to have their eyes and ears to the ground during Nina Keller’s stay, his compulsion to check on her won out over his rational mind, which told him she had probably just dozed off.
Maverick cued Zephyr into a brisk walk in her direction with a subtle shift of his lower body. He crossed the large pasture quickly, only slowing his horse when he was close enough to notice that she was, in fact, fast asleep.
He stopped Zephyr about thirty yards from the cabin’s porch, and though he knew he should have turned and walked away, he didn’t. Couldn’t. He looked at Nina, her skin clear of any makeup, and saw the patchwork bruises spreading over the entire right side of her face, from her hairline to chin. They were starting to fade. A week old, he reminded himself. But that meant that the reds, purples, and blacks were fading to that sickly yellow, which somehow looked so much worse.
He took in her size, so small and delicate, maybe five-four and a buck ten, and couldn’t quite fathom the type of person, the type of man, who would raise his fists to someone so much smaller than himself.
Fights happened. Mav understood that, accepted it. But any man who raised his fists to a woman, to someone who had no chance of an equal fight was the worst type of coward.
So many thoughts crossed Mav’s mind. He wondered if it had been a break-in, and if anything valuable had been taken. If it had been a random attack, the man had certainly possessed an unholy amount of rage. To hit a woman was bad enough, but to hit one you didn’t know, repeatedly …
