My heart thudded hard in my chest; slow, heavy, and inevitable.
When her tire hit the first caltrop, the vibration sensor pinged. When she hit the second, her dashboard flickered from pressure shock. The third? That was the one that did it.
Her front-left tire gave out with that soft, devastating sigh only a slow-pressure blowout makes—the kind that feels organic and inevitable, like it was just shitty luck and bad timing and not phase one of a perfectly planned trap.
She eased off the road exactly the way I knew she would. Her movements were careful but tired. She was so goddamn deliciously vulnerable it made something old and violent rise up in my chest. Good thing I was the one hunting her.
Henry exhaled.
“That’s your cue. You should get in the service truck and head out to help her now. You don’t want her to be hypothermic by the time she meets the other guests.”
“I know.”
I grabbed the jacket I’d laid out for this exact moment. It was dark, a little worn, and entirely nondescript… the kind of thing a groundskeeper would wear. Not Ben Stonewood’s usual clothing, and certainly not the clothing of a billionaire recluse.
For now, I was just Jacob.
My middle name… the name I gave her that day at Stonewood Hardware four years ago. Jacob was my metaphorical mask… not that I didn’t also have a real mask, but that would only become important if Chrissy passed this first test.
“Remember,” Henry said, his voice rough with warning. “She can’t know who you really are. Not yet. If you make the game too easy, she’ll see right through it, you’ll blow your cover, and shit will go sideways long before you ever get her signature on a marriage license.”
“I’ve got it under control, Henry,” I growled, pulling the jacket on. “Let’s just see how she performs during this initial test and work from there.”
Henry gave me a long, deeply unsettling look, the kind that said I hope to God you know what you’re doing, even though he already knew the answer.
“I’ll monitor from here,” he said. “You only get one chance to read her reactions before she enters the lodge and meets the faux Bens and the other contestants.”
“I won’t waste it, trust me.”
Chapter
Seven
BEN
Moments later,I stepped out into the cold, the wind slapping against my unscarred cheek first, then burrowing deeper into the ruined nerve pathways of the other side. The scars tugged. They always did, in the cold.
I welcomed the sting. It reminded me that I was still alive, by some miracle or curse, depending on how you looked at it.
The sky was a bruised, deep purple, clouds hanging low, pregnant with ice that the weather man had issued warnings about.
I started down the path toward the service truck I’d staged for this moment. Jacob didn’t drive a blacked-out luxury SUV. Jacob drove a beat-up F-150 with tools clanking in the back and a dent in the bumper from backing into a pine tree last summer. I had to keep the act authentic.
I drove down the access road toward her, passed where she was pulled off on the shoulder, then whipped the truck around, being careful not to go so far as to reach the point where I might hit one of the caltrops, and pulled behind her car just as she stepped outof it, wrapped in her threadbare excuse for a jacket, hugging her arms against the cold.
Her hair was wind-tangled. Her breath fogged in the cold air. And her eyes… God. Those big brown eyes turned my blood to molten lava.
She looked right at me, squinting into the halo of my headlights, ignoring the dark, empty stretch of woods on either side of the road. She looked like she was trying too hard not to fall apart, and it hit me just like it had that first time… the magnetic pull between us. It was so sharp and merciless it stole my breath.
Fate had carved a deep, desperate need to have her into my very bones, and it was going to take every ounce of my self-control not to answer its call here and now.
I killed the engine, stepped out, and let the door slam shut behind me as I ambled toward her.
“Evenin’, ma’am,” I called out, pitching my voice lower, rougher, speaking the way Jacob, a work-roughened groundskeeper, would speak.
She froze.
I pushed my hood back off my head, figuring it would be better to go ahead and rip the Band-Aid off on this test, rather than drag things out.
