Page 31 of Untamed Hunter Daddy

“Always am.”

“You carry a field suture kit and a backup radio buried under a rock pile. That’s not careful, that’s professionally anxious.”

The callback lands. His jaw loosens a fraction. Not a smile. Just the ghost of one. Then he’s moving toward Elm Street with his hand on his sidearm.

Jax takes me upstairs, locking the door behind us. I could say I’m not scared, but that would be a lie. My hands tremble as my heart pounds heavily inside my chest.

I quickly pack a bag of clothes and toiletries.

Afterwards, I stand in my apartment and look at the yellow curtains and the hedgehog mug and the radiator. None of it feels like home anymore. It no longer feels like me.

Home is a cabin on a mountain with a stone fireplace and a blue quilt and a chair beside the bed.

Home is wherever the door stays unlocked.

I wait. I listen. And somewhere on Elm Street, one block from the life I used to live, Ryker is walking toward a car with condensation on its windows and a name on its rental contract that doesn’t belong to anyone real.

16

Zoe

The sedan was empty.

That’s what Ryker tells me when he comes through the apartment door twenty minutes later. The car was still running. Engine warm, heater on, coffee cup in the holder still steaming. But no one inside. Whoever it was saw him coming, slipped out the passenger side, and disappeared into the alley between the hardware store and the post office before they could get a visual.

“Surveillance posture,” Ryker says from the doorway. He stays on the landing, eyes on the street below. “Parked facing the apartment entrance, engine idling, clear sight line to the side door and the stairs. They were watching this building specifically.”

“Any physical evidence?” Jax asks.

“Coffee cup, no prints. Rental agreement under the fake name. A road map of the county with two locations circled. This address and the Forest Service road that leads to my cabin.”

The cabin. Someone circled the road to the cabin on a map and left it in a rental car one block from my apartment. The information settles cold in my body.

Ryker sees it. He crosses the room in three strides, puts his hands on my upper arms, and ducks his head until his eyes are level with mine.

“You’re safe. Nobody’s getting through that door. Jax is on the landing, Kane is en route, and Mason has local PD running plates in a three-block radius. We’re going to find out who was in that car. But right now, in this room, you’re safe.”

I nod. The rational part of me believes him. The rest of me is still screaming.

Jax closes the door, staying right outside my front door. The latch clicks. Ryker and I are alone in my apartment and the adrenaline is still running hot through my bloodstream.

This is the apartment where I lived before everything. Yellow curtains. Hedgehog mug on the shelf with its tiny painted smile. The radiator clanks once, the same old sound, and it nearly breaks me.

Ryker stands in the middle of my living room looking too big for the space. Too solid. He studies the shelves, the animal mugs, the tilted photo of my parents in the cheap plastic frame.

“This is where you lived,” he says.

“This is where I lived.”

“It’s small.”

“I’m small. It fit.”

He turns and looks at me. Whatever he sees in my face changes his expression into something rawer.

I don’t let him speak.

I cross the room in four steps, and cup his face, pulling him down to me. I kiss him hard, with every ounce of the adrenaline that’s been building since he said the word surveillance.