Cash winced. “Maybe. If we can, we’re gonna have to scoop them up.”
Brilliant. I’d had hopes of laying the last stinger and scarpering home for breakfast, but nothing about sabbing was ever so simple.
We laid the second strip and retreated to a safe spot to wait for the vehicles to roll out. Instinct told me they’d move the hounds first, taking advantage of the fact that I’d failed to disable the lorry, but we had to keep watch to be sure, be ready to scoop the stingers and re-lay them if we needed to.Ifwe even could
I led Cash to a dug-out I’d holed up in before. Concealed by undergrowth, it was sheltered from the wind, relatively dry, and gave us the perfect view of the gates.
“Hope they don’t come out too fast,” Cash said. “We won’t have a lot of time to switch things up.”
I crouched and carved out an indent for myself in the earth. “We’ll be fine.”
Cash didn’t seem convinced, but I couldn’t do anything about that. I settled in, sensing his gaze on me, but I didn’t look at him when he finally ducked down beside me. Who knew how long we’d be in this hole, and now we weren’t busy laying stingers, his close proximity was…interesting. Whether he wanted to or not—and I had no idea where he was on that—Cash did something to me. Brought me to life in ways only sabbing had before. I’d felt it the last time we’d been together, but it had been dulled by the ludicrous state of me. Healthy and whole, I was a fucking mess for him. Every sideways glance and accidental brush of hands, I catalogued it all, buried it in theCashpart of my brain. Indecipherable, but undeniable.
He sat beside me, poised, and utterly focused on the gates. I tried to mirror him, but restlessness kept me fidgeting until he laid a hand on my arm.
“Easy,” he murmured. “Could be hours yet.”
“Fucking hope not.”
“So do I, but you’ll knacker yourself if you don’t rest.”
“Freeze to death, more like.”
Cash snorted. “Bollocks. You survived a good few winters in that tent. You’ll be all right.”
I didn’t want to be all right. I wanted to be somewhere warm—and preferably naked—with him, and the fantasy was a distraction I couldn’t handle when I had work to do. I’d seen only the next hunt, the next badger cull for so long that the new colours in my life were spinning me for a loop.
An hour passed, cloaked in a silence that was neither companionable nor loaded. Cash was a study in patience, while I tapped and twitched, swinging wildly between running through everything that could go wrong with the operation, and what it would feel like to push Cash down on the frosty ground, relieve him of his combat gear, and take his cock in my mouth.
It was an intense state of flux.
Two hours into our watch, my stomach growled loud enough to scare the birds. Awesome. I was hungry too, something else I’d neglected to take care off. The pockets I usually stuffed with chocolate and dry-roasted peanuts were bare.Fucking idiot.
Cash handed me a Bounty bar. “Eat that.”
“What about you?”
He produced another, dark chocolate this time. “I’m good.”
Famished, I inhaled the chocolate bar, hoping the sugary coconut would slow my racing mind, but Cash moved closer and wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “Are you okay? I’ve been-uh-worried about you.”
I tried not to lean into his touch. Failed. “Why?”
He shrugged. “I keep telling myself it’s because you got hurt, and ill, and there isn’t really anyone around to take care of you, but…fuck, I don’t know.”
“Don’t you?”
Cash shook his head. “You do something to me, man. It isn’t just about sabbing anymore. I like you, Rae.”
Am I dreaming right now?I was milliseconds away from kissing him. From absorbing the warmth from his body, adding it to the heat that pulsed between us, and trying to set right the imbalance in a relationship I didn’t truly understand. But the screech of wrought iron cut me off mid-lean, and Cash jumped back from me like he’d been burned.
“The gates! They’re opening.”
Snogging in the dirt forgotten, I scrambled to my feet. From our vantage point, I had to press up against Cash’s back to see. We fit together like a glove in a position that hadn’t occurred to me, but there was no time to dwell on it.
The hound lorry appeared on the road. Relief washed over me, but it was short-lived as it approached the stingers. For all I wanted to stop the hunt, I had no desire to see the hounds hurt. Cash reckoned the lorry would come off the road gently, but with my sole experience of stingers coming from traffic cop TV shows, I wasn’t convinced.
Faces covered, we crept from our hidey hole and ducked down into the ditch that ran alongside the road. It was a risky move, as it wasn’t quite deep enough to conceal us, but we had to stay close enough to act. To re-lay, or scoop and run. Or to fight, though it hopefully wouldn’t come to that.
