"Hold on."
I wrap my arms around his waist.
The physical contact jolts through me like a live wire. He feels like carved granite beneath his tactical jacket. My chest presses flush against his back.
The heat rolling off his body sinks directly into my skin, chasing away the freezing wind. I clasp my hands tight over his flat stomach, hyper-aware of the hard shift of his muscles beneath my fingers.
He dumps the clutch.
The bike surges forward, tearing down the dirt access road. My breath hitches. I tighten my grip, holding onto him for dear life as we hit sixty miles an hour over broken terrain. The wind screams in my ears.
The scent of pine, sagebrush, and gunpowder clings to him, a purely masculine scent that bypasses my logic and goes straight to my bloodstream.
We ride for three miles, weaving through a dense stand of lodgepole pines until we hit a logging trail.
A black, heavy-duty pickup truck sits idling in the shadows.
Harrison skids the bike to a halt. We dismount. He doesn't say a word. He grabs the bike by the handlebars and the frame, heaving the heavy machine into the bed of the truck with a terrifying display of raw physical strength.
He slams the tailgate.
"Get in."
I open the passenger door and slide onto the leather seat. The truck is warm, the heater blowing steadily against the biting cold of the morning. The windows are tinted black, turning the cab into a dark, confined sanctuary.
Harrison gets behind the wheel. The sheer mass of his shoulders makes the spacious cab feel suffocatingly small. He shifts into drive, and the heavy tires crush the underbrush as we pull onto the paved, two-lane highway.
We drive in silence. The Wyoming landscape blurs past the window. Endless stretches of sage, rolling hills, and the distant, jagged peaks of the Bighorns. A small herd of pronghorn antelope grazes near a wire fence, heads snapping up as we roar past.
I press my back flat against the leather seat, trying to create distance between us, but there's nowhere to go. The cab is too small. His presence is too absolute. Every time he shifts his grip on the steering wheel, my eyes track the movement of his large, scarred hands. Every time he draws a breath, my chest tightens in response.
The violent trembling that hit me in the kitchen is completely gone.
The delayed shock of almost taking a bullet to the chest in my own front yard should be crippling me right now. I should be hyperventilating. I should be demanding to be taken to the nearest federal field office.
But the fear is gone.
Instead, there's only the rhythmic hum of the heavy tires, the steady heat radiating from the massive man in the driver's seat, and the cold, hard facts of the data I need to process.
His profile is a sharp study in concentration. The hard angle of his jaw. The focused intensity in his eyes as he scans the empty road ahead.
"You were watching me." A statement of fact. Not an accusation.
He doesn't look away from the road. "Yes."
"For how long?"
"Two days."
The words land between us, heavy and loaded. Two days. Forty-eight hours.
He was on the ridge. He saw everything. He saw me drink my coffee on the porch in the mornings. He saw me working at the kitchen island late into the night.
He saw me yesterday afternoon.
The memory of the freezing creek rushes back. The heat of the sun on my bare skin. Stripping off my clothes on the rocky bank and wading into the water. The utter, complete isolation I thought I had.
He saw that. He watched me through the glass of a high-powered scope.
