Page 5 of The Puppet Master
How many are there?
I don’t slow enough to consider the question. My head points forward and my eyes fix onto the stream. When I reach it, I leap, body launching off the small bluff. My foot skids in mud just shy of the bank and slides into the water. My knee jams hard to catch me while my palms slap lush earth. I haul myself to flat land and take off again without looking back.
No one jumps after me. Or if they do, they land too cleanly to hear.
Strange.
Unease tightens my spine and slows my sprint to a run. Only my own ragged breaths follow me as I weave through the trees.
The quiet isn't a relief. It’s wrong. Something’s off. And even as distance widens behind me, it feels like I’m running straight into a trap.
I look over my shoulder. See nothing.
No shadows. No calls.
And I should know better.
But I keep looking anyway, even as danger materializes in front of me.
I don’t see him. I just feel a fist hook my sweater and yank me sideways behind a tree. A hand clamps over my mouth, my back held tight to a solid chest. I scream into the stranger’s palm until his warm breath brushes my ear.
“Shhh. They’ll hear you.”
They’ll hear you.
They.
I hold my breath and silence myself as leaves crunch close. I fight to twist toward the sound. The stranger steadies me as the footsteps draw near. When they’re uncomfortably close, he eases us slowly, carefully, around the tree.
The figure passes. Hoots. Its echo bounces a beat later—another call, farther off, headed the wrong direction.
Now isn’t the time for comfort, but I find myself sighing into the stranger’s palm. Large, warm, and strangely textured. As I shift, my lips rub a strip of raised, mottled flesh. A scar.
The arm around my chest loosens, but his strength is still apparent, corded muscle held like a warning.
“I’m gonna take my hand off your mouth.” The words march across my ears with the confidence of a general. “If you scream, they’ll come back. And you don’t want to know what they’ll do to you.”
A shiver runs across my shoulder blades. My neck prickles. Each thin inhale cuts through the chilled air, the rhythm slowing with my heartbeat. I wait for his hand to move, but he stays still with me—silent, watchful, studying my reaction.
When his palm finally lifts, I stay quiet instead of hurling the dozens of questions that flash through my mind. None of which I trust this stranger to answer. For all I know,he isthe trap.
The arm around my chest releases, and the man’s textured palm gives my shoulder a gentle nudge forward.
He slips around into my line of sight, blocking the woods with an athletic frame several inches taller than mine.
I should search his hands, look for a weapon, assess the danger; but the stranger’s eyes catch me by the throat, and all I can do is stare.
The sky blue of his irises hold a gentleness that automatically strikes me as out of place, yet fits his features beautifully. The tan curve of his cheeks carries the innocence of a boy, even as his chiseled jaw holds the strength of a man. He isn’t young. The lines in his forehead make that clear. But his head of shaggy blond hair brings him so much youth, I could forget he’s lived decades longer than me.
My arms grow rigid, and my feet root to the forest floor, even before remembering how I’m supposed to act around a potential predator. My eyes, so wide staring into his, must make me appear as silly and afraid as I feel.
Until this moment, I never believed thefreezeinstinct was real.
But for this man, my body forgets how to react.
“Hi,” he says. Soft, welcoming, a quiet invitation to trust him.
I don’t respond, but I feel my face flush with attraction both explosive and inappropriate.
