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“I could’ve killed you,” he said, his tone softer. No, it wasn’t softer. It was smoother, like sandpaper instead of gravel slowly gliding over marble.
And yeah, I had no doubt he could’ve killed me with a twitch of his finger.
But there’d been no chance I was going down without a fight, and I’d taken self-defense classes while at university, so I knew to aim for the most vulnerable places: the throat and crotch. What I’d done a piss-poor job of was the first step—distract your assailant. Not that it would’ve mattered anyway. No way was an elite ex-Special Forces badass who now hunted the worst criminals in the world going to get distracted.
I inhaled a deep breath and rubbed my throat where his callused fingers had been. His eyes followed the gesture, and I dropped my hand.
I jutted out my chin. “Well, normal people ask questions first before they slam someone into a tree and put a gun to their head,” I retorted. Maybe it was stupid to piss him off, but he shouldn’t be lurking in the woods and attacking joggers, even if it was his property.
“Normal people don’t move into someone’s place without asking them.”
Jaeg and his sister Addie Mason had set me up in the cabin four months ago when I moved to the small town of Collingwood. Addie was my childhood friend from summer camp, and Jaeg was my brother’s friend from high school. They’d insisted I stay in the cabin, and that Vic no longer used it and hadn’t been back in five years.
And yet, he stood right in front of me, wearing a scowl that would send a panther running for his life with his tail tucked between his legs.
I shivered and crossed my arms over my chest, more to keep my heart from making a run for it alongside the goose bumps than because I was cold. “Jaeg—”
“Had no right to rent out my cabin,” he interrupted.
There was no chance I was telling him I wasn’t exactly renting it. “I, uh… assumed he asked you.”
He grunted. “Assumptions get you killed.”
Maybe in his world. Not in mine.
“I want you out. Now.”
Whoa. What? “I can’t just leave.”
“You have ten minutes.”
My mouth dropped open. Ten minutes? He had to be kidding. But from his fierce scowl and his flexed jaw, I knew he wasn’t. He could have all the hissy fits he wanted. There was no way I could pack up and leave in ten minutes. “That’s impossible.”
The hinges on the cabin screen door screeched in the distance.
I stiffened.
Vic’s hand went to his gun.
“You have a boyfriend living here too?”
Shit. “No. It’s just….”
My voice trailed off because Vic had already turned and was striding in the direction of the cabin. His long strides ate up the ground, and I had to half jog to keep up with him.
“It’s just Addie. Jaeg’s sister.” That was stupid. Of course, he knew her. Vic had lived with them in his teens after his dad went to prison for second-degree murder. I didn’t know what happened to his mother. And I only knew about his father because Addie had told me at camp one year, and a boy’s father going to jail was kind of big news to any kid.
Vic’s corded neck tensed, and his hands slowly curled into fists before relaxing again. If you could call anything about Vic Gate relaxed.
“Hey, Mac? Where you at?” I heard Addie yell from the cabin. Her sexy, scratchy voice broke on the word “where”, sounding as if she’d talked too much the night before, but it had always been that way.
Addie was my age, twenty-four, and a poster girl for sexy. You know, the kind teenage boys have pinned in their lockers of a tall, curvy goddess leaning over some fancy car.
I hadn’t seen her since I was twelve, our last year at horse camp, but as it turned out, Addie really did lean over cars, except she did it wearing baggie gray coveralls working at her brother’s auto shop. She still managed to look sexy, though, and I think it was because she didn’t play on the fact that she was beautiful.
We came into the clearing where the cabin sat, just west of the river. The place looked like something out of an Old West movie, with a rusted tin roof that sloped over a wide wooden porch.
The railing was made of crisscrossed cedar rails. There were two rocking chairs to the left of the front door with a tree stump between them used as a table.
