I deepen the kiss.
And the first bullet pings off the truck bed.
The sound is so sharp, so violently wrong, that for one insane half-second my mind refuses to name it.
Metal screams. Reva jerks against me. A second shot cracks through the night, punching through the rear window in a glittering explosion of glass.
“Down!” I roar.
I hit her hard, taking her with me as I twist and throw us both flat against the bed of the truck. Wine goes flying. The bottle shatters. The board overturns, cheese and grapes skidding through broken glass as another round sparks off the side rail inches from my head.
Gunfire. Not random.Targeted.
My pulse becomes a detonation.
I cover Reva’s body with mine, one arm hooked around the back of her neck to keep her face down while I reach blindly for the pistol at my back.
“Shiloh—”
“I’ve got you.” My voice comes out as a snarl. “Don’t move.”
Another shot. Too close. From the tree line, I think. Or the far side of the drive. Hard to tell with the echo bouncing off the house and the marsh and the truck itself.
The blanket jerks as a bullet tears through the corner of it.
Reva gasps under me. I get the gun free.
“Stay down,” I snap again, then lift just enough to sight over the side of the truck bed.
Movement, a dark figure near the edge of the yard.
I fire.
Once. Twice.
The muzzle flash lights up the grass in hard white bursts. Somewhere beyond the truck, a man curses. The house lights blaze on behind us. A door slams.
Voices—Nash, maybe Ever—shouting from the back porch, but they sound miles away over the blood pounding in my ears.
Another shot slams into the tailgate. Reva flinches violently under me. Rage hits so hot I almost lose clarity.
They shot ather.
Not the truck. Not the house. Her.
I rise onto one knee for a better angle and fire again toward the movement in the dark. A figure breaks from cover, running for the trees.
Run, motherfucker. Run.
“Probably” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
I got home from a shift this morning and Cal had changed the batteries in my smoke detector, bought groceries, fixed the loose knob on the bathroom sink, and left three different self-defense articles open on my laptop.
That man has never met a boundary he couldn’t step over in the name of “protecting” me.
I yelled. He yelled back. Then he made me eggs and acted like that solved something.
Which, annoyingly, it sort of did.
