Page 41 of Rescuer
They walked in silence for about fifteen minutes. Suddenly, he stopped, listening. Mia paused close to his shoulder.
“What is it?” Mia whispered, her breath fluttering on his neck like butterfly wings.
He couldn’t let her distract him. “I thought I heard something.”
They waited a couple of minutes. “I don’t hear anything out of the ordinary,” Mia finally said.
“Me neither.” Motioning for her to follow him, he resumed walking.
The area between his shoulder blades itched, and he scanned their surroundings, searching for anything that might suggest they had company. Anyone who hid away had to be unfriendly company, to put it mildly.
“Jackson, you’re freaking me out. What’s going on?”
He barely looked at her and kept his voice low. He didn’t want anyone listening in. “It’s probably my imagination, but I feel like someone is watching us.”
She tensed. “Who?”
“I don’t know. Like I said, I’m probably wrong.”
Her arm brushed his. “You’ve never been paranoid.”
“I’ve learned to be cautious.” He took her hand, needing to feel she was safe. “When I was on my first deployment in the Army, we were in the woods, sleeping in tents. I heard a noise. Our team leader said it was an owl, but I didn’t buy it. I insisted that I felt someone watching us. He laughed and ordered me back to my tent, said my watch was at three a.m. and I needed to sleep. I didn’t argue. I should have.”
She stepped closer. “Was there? Someone watching?”
He nodded. “About two in the morning, there was gunfire. Two gang members looking for drugs and weapons, anything they could sell, ambushed us. My team leader and two other soldiers died instantly. The rest of us returned fire, and the two men were killed. But good men died because I didn’t stand my ground.”
“No,” she whispered. “You followed orders. Like you’re supposed to do. It’s not your fault, Jackson. This is one thing you can’t take credit for.”
“Maybe. But I still have nightmares about it.”
When her hand squeezed his, he realized he’d never told anyone that story. Why her? The one woman he should avoid.
“What do we do?” Her question brought him back to the present.
He nudged her forward. “Come on. Let’s keep going. Hopefully, it’s nothing.”
Even as they started walking, though, his nerves jangled. He wasn’t a betting man, but every instinct inside screamed they weren’t alone.
Mia shivered and inspected their surroundings. Now that Jackson had put the thought in her head, she could feel eyes boring into her back as they trudged over rocks, above-ground roots, and fallen sticks littering the dank, muddy ground.
“I think the place Dylan likes is up ahead.” Jackson pointed. “He’s gone with a group a few times. He’s never gone with just Reggie. I can’t believe I didn’t think to look here before.”
Jackson’s voice shocked her out of her thoughts. She channeled all her attention toward looking for signs that two boys had been in the area. When Jackson halted suddenly, she tripped over her own feet to avoid running into him.
“What was that?” Even as annoyance flared, she kept her voice down, unwilling to draw attention to them in case anyone was, in fact, in the woods with them.
“This is it. This is where they camped.”
She moved to Jackson’s side. A campfire had been there at some point. While there weren’t any embers, the black coals were still in place, and a pile of wood and twigs was nearby.
The thing that caught her attention, though, was the way the mud had been torn up near the fire. Scuff marks that could have happened when a group of boys wrestled, as boys often did. Or when there was a struggle of some sort.
Reggie wasn’t a wrestler. Dylan was built like Jackson—tall, muscular. But Reggie was small for his size. She couldn’t imagine him willingly fighting someone that much bigger than himself.
“It looks like they were fighting,” Jackson noted.
She shook her head. “Not the boys. I don’t for a second believe that.”
