Page 38 of Tormented Hearts

“Seriously, though—bullets, cliffs, now the actual ground is coming for me.”

“The mountain’s just jealous,” he teased. “Wants you all to itself.”

“Tell the mountain it can get in line behind everything else that’s trying to take me out.”

That got a short, surprised laugh out of him, and he kept one hand at her elbow the rest of the way down to the water, unwilling to fully trust the terrain—or his own nerves—until she was safely settled on solid ground beside the spring.

It pooled into a shallow basin before trickling off into the trees as the thin stream she’d spotted from above.

She stopped and he glanced down at her foot, wondering if she really had twisted her ankle and the pain was just now catching up to her.

But she stood there, arms wrapped around herself and a faraway expression on her face. He followed the direction of her stare and saw the early sunlight catching on the ribbon of water and wisps of fog curling off the surface.

“It’s beautiful,” she whispered.

He couldn’t look away from her face. When he swallowed, his throat felt as jagged as the rock under their feet.

“It is.” His voice came out rougher too, and the sound made Sinead snap her gaze up to his. A beat passed between them, throbbing with attraction.

Then he shook himself and gave a twitch of his head for her to follow.

They made it to the pool in no time, and he crouched at the edge and tested the water with two fingers.

“Warm.” Warmer than he expected this deep in the backcountry, far from anything resembling a hot spring.

Realization washed over him, and he went still. “Would you call this,” he said slowly, letting his fingers trickle through the water, “a secret spring?”

She crouched beside him, cupping some water in her palms to splash over her face and the back of her neck. “Looks pretty secret. I doubt a lot of humans have found it.”

He watched her wash the trail dust from her hands and face for a silent moment, struck again by how little of the woman in front of him matched the original image he’d built in his head when he heard who he was guarding.

He pulled off his cowboy hat, rinsed his hands and face in the water, and raked his damp fingers through his hair.

Everything about this mission so far had gone against what he expected. And he’d lived through too many battles by listening to his gut.

Right now, his gut was telling him that finding this spring was no coincidence.

“Sinead.”

She twisted to look at him, her temples and throat glistening with water. With her brow pinched, she studied his serious expression. What she saw on his face made her sit back on a wide, flat rock. “What is it?”

“I’ve got a story to tell you.”

* * * * *

Hawk settled onto the rock beside her, elbows on his knees. Sinead watched every move he made, from the way that tendon in his jaw ticked to the veins popping out on his forearms.

In the spell of silence between them, the stream splashed over the rocks and insects buzzed. He was quiet so long that whatever story he had to tell her was starting to freak her out.

“There’s a legend in these parts. Called the Legend of Three Prospectors.”

She stared at him with genuine surprise. She expected him to tell her about how he came to be a bodyguard or a time when he was a kid in the mountains.

He went on, “They were friends, back before this land belonged to anyone official. They decided to partner up and go looking for gold in these mountains.”

She settled herself in a more comfortable spot on the stone and listened.

“First one was Eli Winthrop.”