Page 11 of Defiant Hearts

Wyatt’s breath hitched. She was looking for the container, and he had a choice to make.

At that moment, he stepped out from behind the tree and held it up. “Are you looking for this?”

She whipped around to face him. The whites of her eyes flashed in the darkness, and he watched panic sweep over her whole body.

* * * * *

Whitley had been a traveling nurse before all this, bouncing between hospitals on short contracts. She was just coming off rotation and was excited to see Lance. She made a plan to surprise him at his office with wine and takeout.

She had on sexy underwear, prepared for what came later.

Lance was former military, working for a private security company with a handful of buddies who’d all gotten out around the same time he had. Before anyone saw her, she heard men talking to Lance. She stopped just outside the room and listened.

Within seconds, she knew she’d walked in on something dark.

These men didn’t sound like security consultants. They sounded like criminals.

What she’d overheard was bad enough. What she saw was worse. Either would have been enough to send her running straight to the police.

Except one of the voices belonged to Lance’s friend—a cop.

If he was involved in whatever Lance was doing, she couldn’t trust that the rest of the department wasn’t involved too.

She’d dated Lance for a year and never once asked the right questions. She should have asked before why his friends always left when she walked into a room and she hated herself for being so damn naïve. Only after she was buried deep in it, far from anyone who could help, did she find out what he was.

She couldn’t call her parents or run to them. Six years after retiring from the Army, they moved to Thailand, blissfully removed from her drama, and even if she could reach them, her passport sat in a drawer back in the apartment she couldn’t return to.

So she’d ended up on the mountain instead.

She thought the men she heard earlier had moved on. From her position, she didn’t hear voices, footsteps or anything but wind and her own ragged breathing.

After crouching against the rock in her cramped hiding spot for hours, her back was stiff with unbearable pain.

She needed more painkillers. Even if she wasn’t a trained nurse, it was clear she needed medical care. On a pain scale of one to ten, her back had moved past a six to a solid nine. Every move felt like being stabbed in the vertebrae.

And her painkillers were back in the tent.

She closed her eyes as the realization hit. In her rush to get away, she’d left them behind with the rest of the things she couldn’t risk stopping to grab.

Months of living on the mountain had stripped away her fear of the dark. She knew the path by heart, and despite the pain in her back, her steps were lighter at the thought of getting the jar of bodywash she’d left behind too.

Still, she was quiet. Cautious. On high alert for the men she’d broken camp to hide from.

If they were still here, they were quiet too.

The small clearing was just as she left it, and she swiftly moved to her tent and unzipped it. After long minutes of feeling around for the dropped bottle of painkillers, she realized it wasn’t here either. She must have dropped the bottle on the trail, but it was too dark to find it. She’d been navigating without a flashlight ever since the batteries died on her second night on the mountain.

Biting off a groan of pain, she zipped the tent shut. If she was going to be in pain, at least she wanted to be clean. Getting that bodywash was now a priority.

She approached the stream with quiet footsteps, throwing out her senses—

The man stepped out in front of her, dressed in camouflage head to military-issue boots.

Whitley’s soul left her body.

He could be a hunter. She didn’t have a clue what game might be in season, but it wasn’t a woman with matted hair. But ever since that horrible night months ago, she regarded every person she saw with total suspicion.

Especially military men.