Page 6

He doesn’t say where he’s going or coming from. He just sits there, staring straight ahead through the windshield into the gathering darkness.

“Thanks.” His voice breaks the quiet—a low, gravelly rasp, deep and dark, that sends a sudden, involuntary shiver straight down my spine.

It isn’t a warm sound. It’s cold, heavy with a weight I can’t quite place. But sexy as hell at the same time.

I keep my hands glued to the top of the steering wheel, my knuckles aching from the pressure. My heart continues to hammer against my ribs as if it’s building a house.

Up close, his aura suffocates me. There’s an intensity radiating off him, a quiet, predatory focus that makes every self-preservation instinct in my body scream at maximum volume.

I turn my head slowly to look at him.

The fading twilight sharply outlines his profile.

He turns his head to meet my gaze, and I catch the full brunt of his eyes.

They’re dark, piercing, and entirely unreadable. Yet, as they lock onto mine, a strange, sickening wave of Déjà vu hits me.

My skin tingles as I rub the back of my neck.

“Have we met?” The question slips out of my mouth before I can filter it.

It’s an absurd question. A completely irrational thought.

But looking into those dark, intense eyes, a jarring sense of familiarity washes over me. Like a dream I can’t quite remember, or a nightmare I haven’t yet woken up from.

The question hangs in the air, and I cringe inwardly.

Shit, Harm.

It sounds like a terrible, clichéd pickup line. A ridiculous attempt to break the terrifying tension filling the car.

I expect him to scoff. To laugh or make a sarcastic comment about cheesy small-talk.

Instead, the corner of his mouth curves upward into a slow, faint smile. It’s a sharp, deliberate movement, devoid of any genuine meaning.

“Not recently,” he says softly.

The words land like heavy stones dropped into deep water as they ripple through my veins, freezing the blood in my heart.

Something about the way he says it—so calm, so absolute, as if he holds a secret I’m not privy to—makes my stomach drop into my asshole.

I gawk at him for a beat longer, my mind racing, searching his perfect fucking features.

I don’t know this man. I can’t know him. A man with a face like his, with a voice that sounds like pure, violent sex, isn’t someone a woman forgets. I’m certain I’ve never seen him before in my life.

And yet, the quiet alarm bell ringing in the back of my skull refuses to shut off.

He’s dangerous. He’s wrong.

I force my eyes away from his dark gaze, breathing through my nose to steady my shaking frame.

Reaching down, I push the gear shift into drive, and pull the car back onto the dark pavement of Blackwood Highway.

As we roll forward, the headlights slice through the gloom, catching the first carved jack-o’-lantern perched on a wooden fence post beside the road. Its jagged, hollow eyes and crooked grin glow with a faint, eerie orange light against the darkening woods.

I should be thinking about Noah. I should be thinking about the tragic anniversary, about the quiet memorial I planned to visit, about the crushing weight of the past that brought me back to this town.

Instead, every nerve ending in my body is painfully attuned to the stranger riding shotgun.