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This massive, powerful, controlled man wants me.
Needs me.
And I need him too.
“Ridge, I…” My tongue darts out to lick my lips, tasting the addictive flavor of him on my skin. I don’t know quite what I want to say, what I want to ask for, but I hope he can understand.
The wolf shifter’s amber eyes almost seem to glow in the fading light. He opens his mouth to speak when a soft noise comes from behind the cabin.
He goes tense, his gaze darting to the back door.
“Do you think they’re already back?” I ask, confused by his reaction. If it were only Trystan, Archer, and Dare outside, I don’t think he’d look so ready to fight. My skin prickles with unease.
Ridge’s senses are on full alert. Even in human form, he looks like a wolf, with his nose in the air and his eyes unfocused as he listens to sounds well outside my range of hearing. “No. I don’t think so. That’s not anyone I know.”
Fear strikes a chord within me
, and I fight the urge to run. “A stranger?”
Ridge catches my frightened gaze and briefly touches my face, then murmurs, “Stay here.”
Before I can argue, he leaves me sitting on the counter and disappears through the back door into the darkening night.
I clutch the counter beside my legs and feel that old hysteria rising up inside me. I never fully realized how calm and normal my time here at the cabin has become, but it’s obvious now. My panic attacks have become so few and far between that they don’t feel real anymore. The cabin has turned into a safe place, somewhere I can be me without fear of abuse or judgment.
But now there’s something here that doesn’t fit that narrative.
No sounds emerge from behind the cabin. Ridge closed the door behind him. I’m sure he did it because he wanted to protect me, but I don’t like not being able to hear what’s happening. What if he’s in danger? I glance at the counter where our two knives are lying by the cutting board. If all else fails, at least I have a weapon. Of sorts.
The clock on the wall ticks loudly in the silence, counting each second since Ridge walked out. I strain to hear anything beyond the cabin walls, wishing I had the preternatural senses of a shifter.
It’s okay, Sable. It’s probably nothing.
I repeat the comforting words to myself, trying to believe them. Trying not to let my old fears run away with me.
Any moment, Ridge will probably walk back through the door with a grin, telling me he found possums in the trash.
But I know that’s not the case. Ridge didn’t smell an animal outside. He smelled a person. “That’s not anyone I know.”
A loud pop breaks the mountain silence, and I jump, toppling off the counter in my shock. I’ve heard gunfire before, back when Clint and his friends would drink too much and go out to shoot Coke bottles in the yard, and I’m almost positive that’s what just came from behind the cabin.
My heart seizes in my chest.
Ridge.
A wave of fear and adrenaline like I’ve never known surges through me, so powerful it feels like I got struck by lightning.
Not Ridge. No.
Nothing can happen to the large, serious man who’s my protector, my savior, since the very first moment I met him. It can’t. I won’t let it.
I reach for the biggest of the two knives with trembling fingers, my heart racing as though it’s trying to beat a hole in my sternum. Who knows how much good it will do. It’s not like a knife could do any good in a gunfight, but the weight of it in my hand steadies my nerves.
Could the witches have found us?
Maybe that sound wasn’t a gunshot at all, but the sound of something magical, some kind of spell that knocked him out.
Or killed him, the terrified part of my mind suggests darkly.
