“That’s what Noble is for. Watching his six.”
Her fingers curled around the door handle. A big part of her really wanted to just thrust open the door and run after Preston. A very, very big part of her.
“Don’t,” Frankie warned her.
She’d never been good at doing what she was told.
“We aren’t going to find shit out here!” Noble grabbed his arm. “Let’s get back to the vehicles.”
Rain had already soaked Preston and Noble. Preston’s shirt clung to his skin, and he blinked against the pummeling rain. One hand held his phone as he swept the light over the scene. The other gripped the shovel.
“If you’re so worried, let’s call Sheriff Tooni. She can get a team out here after the rain stops. She can search properly. With more lights. Maybe even with dogs.”
“It will be too late by then.” He shook off Noble and marched to the right. His light had just hit a few low-lying bushes that looked crushed on one side. As if the lower leaves had been smashed by something. Someone?
“Too late? For what? You still have not told me why we’re trekking through the woods.”
Because someone took Sloane’s bracelet, the one with the tracker. It was turned back on, out here. “We might be walking into a trap.”
“Fantastic,” came Noble’s sarcastic reply. “Then how about you pull out a gun instead of a shovel?”
“You have a gun.” He did. Preston knew Noble had drawn it the minute they’d walked away from the vehicles.
“Someone has to protect your crazy self.” Noble did trample the bushes. “Look, you just escaped death again. You and the pretty new girlfriend.”
“She’s not—” Preston stopped.
“Pretty? Oh, hell, yes, she is. Undeniably so. I’d say you’re batting out of your league.”
Preston hadn’t been about to deny that Sloane was beautiful. She was. In a sharp and rather striking manner that made people look at her when she walked into a room. Any room. He’d seen the reaction that the deputies had to her. Eugene had looked as if he’d swallowed his own tongue. At the hospital, the orderlies and doctors and nurses had been doing double-takes when they saw her.
Gorgeous. Yes. Undeniable.
But…
Not my girlfriend. He’d been about to make that denial. Then he remembered how she’d come against his mouth.
She is mine.
Lightning flashed.
“We are not going to find anything,” Noble huffed. “I get that you’re paying me the big bucks, and I should shut my dumbass mouth, but we are?—”
Another flash of lightning. One that revealed a mound of dirt. Not too high. Really only an inch or two above the ground near it. The rainwater hit the mound and sent dark pools of water and mud sliding off it. The mound appeared to be about three feet wide. Maybe six or seven feet long.
“What in the hell?” Noble had frozen.
Preston lunged forward with his shovel. He drove the edge of the shovel into the ground and began to dig as fast as he could even as thunder boomed over him.
Thunder or a blast from a gun? The vehicle’s windows seemed to shake with the booming sound. “I can’t see Preston any longer!”
“Noble has him.” But Frankie didn’t seem quite as confident as he had been before. Maybe because he wondered, too…
Thunder or a blast from a gun? Her heart would not stop racing. No matter how she strained, she couldn’t see Preston any longer, and fear knifed through her. “We need to call the sheriff. Get her out here.”
But Frankie wasn’t making a move to call anyone.
“You have a phone!” Sloane snapped at him. “I don’t!” A situation she would be correcting immediately. “Get the sheriff on the line. Tell her what might be happening.”
