“She did,” Leni said. There was sadness in her eyes as she spoke. A quiet sense of loss. Knox would know it anywhere. “Shannon’s the reason Travis Parrish has been in prison these last seven years. He assaulted her. Beat her almost unconscious. She had him arrested for it, mainly to protect her unborn child.”
Knox clenched his jaw at the ugly details. Some of the pieces he’d been trying to put together after the incident in the diner now clicked into place. “The boy Parrish mentioned, the one he said is his brother’s son. You’re not the mother?”
“No. Riley’s my nephew. I’ve been looking after him since Shannon disappeared a few months after he was born.”
“Disappeared.” Knox stared at her. “What happened to her?”
“No one knows for sure.” Leni’s haunted gaze said she had her share of suspicions. “I don’t have time to get into any of this right now. I need to call my friend Carla and let her know I won’t be able to pick up Riley tonight after all.”
“The boy is with your friend now?”
“Yes. He and I live in my family’s old house behind the diner, but Carla brings him to her place after school on weekdays so I can work. She’s his first-grade teacher. I was on my way to pick him up when this happened,” she said, gesturing toward the steep ravine.
Knox’s sigh rolled between his lips, the steam of his breath drifting on the cold night breeze.
He couldn’t leave Leni standing at the bottom of a thorny incline in the snow—no matter how much he wanted to assure himself it was the best thing for both of them if he did.
He watched her reach into her jacket pocket to pull out her phone.
“There’s no need to call your friend.”
“What are you talking about? I have to—” Leni’s argument cut off on a gasp when Knox scooped her into his arms. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Taking you out of this storm,” he said. “Then I’m going to get your truck out of the ravine so we can go pick up the kid.”
CHAPTER 5
When Knox said he was going to get the Bronco out of the ravine, Leni didn’t realize he meant he was going to do it with his bare hands.
After carrying her up to the road via some kind of Superman move, it shouldn’t have surprised her to realize the Breed male also possessed immense, inhuman strength.
It probably shouldn’t have turned her on, either, but it was impossible to not be impressed and more than a little awed by him. Knox had treated her so gently, yet those same strong hands and muscled arms were capable of moving in excess of a couple tons of metal and machinery as if he’d been pushing a kid’s toy.
Uphill.
In the middle of a punishing blizzard.
He’d done it all without her asking, and without seeming to expect a thing in return.
At least, so far.
Leni couldn’t keep her gaze from straying to him where he sat grimly behind the wheel, navigating the drift-filled track of road. He had insisted on accompanying her to pick up Riley, even though she’d argued that Carla’s house was less than a dozen miles from where she’d gone off the road.
“You really don’t need to do this, you know. The Bronco’s had better nights, but I’m perfectly capable of driving myself.”
He didn’t answer, just kept steering the truck through the snow and darkness, heading in the direction she’d said she needed to go. She got the sense he wasn’t exactly thrilled to be chauffeuring her through the storm, but he hadn’t been willing to leave her on the side of the road, either.
She would have been fine on her own. The accident had looked worse than it was and she’d walked away without a scratch, thanks to the shield of her secret ability. Not even the jagged branches that tore part of her flannel shirt open as she’d stumbled out of the vehicle had left a mark on her body.
Knox hadn’t been overly talkative in the diner. Now, there was a gruffness about him—a stony detachment—that she couldn’t ignore. It had set in almost immediately after he’d helped her away from the crash. As if his mind was somewhere else, his thoughts a thousand miles away from Parrish Falls.
Leni wondered if it had something to do with the name he’d shouted as he’d leapt into the ravine.
Abbie.
Was that the name of his Breedmate? He didn’t seem settled enough to share an entire night with someone, let alone an eternal blood bond. In fact, settled was just about the last word Leni would use to describe him. Solitary. Restless. Unreadable. Remote.
But as she studied his stoic profile in the dim illumination of the dashboard, she mentally added another word to the list. Empty.
