Page 67 of The Bodyguard's Fall

“He honestly wasn’t as bad as the guy I dated for a month who made me pay for my share of our dates.”

Tate looked over at me incredulously. “What?”

I laughed like it wasn’t a big deal. “It was a long time ago. I was a poor college student. He had graduated and had a nice car. I had student loans and two jobs, but he said he wanted us to feel like an equal team so one of us didn’t hold all the power.”

“We’d better turn back,” Tate mumbled as he turned us around on the trail. “Have you ever picked a good one?”

“What? A boyfriend? Yeah,” I said the word automatically, with a touch of defensiveness. But as I scoured my brain for past boyfriends, I hoped he wouldn’t ask me for a name.

“Will and I worried about you for good reason back then. You know that, right?”

I kept my eyes on the trees, critically assessing every bit of shadow before moving on. “I had two obsessive mother hens following me around everywhere. I definitely got the hint that you were worried.”

He made a sound of amusement. “You made it easy to worry.”

“They were mostly harmless. Ari and Reese were always with me. And Jaxon. He wouldn’t have let anything too horrible happen.”

“When I caught you at Make-Out Ridge with Wade Stevenson, were you planning to make out?”

I shrugged, feeling so disconnected from my past life. “I don’t know. Probably. That would have been it, though. Wade was a good friend. We were both just looking for something to do on a Friday night.”

Tate let out a hiss of air. “See? That’s why we were worried.”

“But you came. And turning your lights on right next to us on the ridge was a nice touch.”

He huffed out a laugh. “I thought so.”

I waited a beat, trying to decide if I wanted to share this. “To be honest, I was almost waiting for you to show up.”

His head turned to me. “What?”

I huffed out a laugh. “It got to the point where I had this safety net always underneath me. I don’t know how you always knew where I was, but you always came. Or sometimes Will.”

“You hated when we showed up,” he countered.

“I did on the outside. But there were actually…” I trailed off, wondering what I could say, how much to say.

He was looking over at me now, waiting.

“There were quite a few times where I’d gotten in over my head and wasn’t sure how to escape a situation. And making out with Wade Stevenson was pretty high on that list.” I grinned cheekily at him.

He shook his head, his lips lifting in a smile, but his gaze was faraway.

We walked along in silence for a bit. Me because my heart was somewhere in my throat. Tate because he was back to watching the trees to our sides.

A movement in the distance caught my eye.

Two hundred yards ahead, there was a round mass in the shadow of a tree. It was probably a bird. Or a squirrel. I squinted closer, stomach clenched, as we kept walking. Tate was busy surveying the trees at our left, teasing me about something.

I was sure it was nothing.

But if it were something, one could almost describe it as a head in the shadows peeking out from behind the large trunk. But it wouldn’t be. It would be just like all the other times where, from a distance, branches and rocks could look like a bobcat or a raccoon. I kept walking, trying to tamp down my imagination that began to run rampant. It was nothing, and yet my eyes remained trained on the spot. I felt Tate look my way before following my gaze.

And then it moved.

I gasped at the same time Tate swore, brandishing a gun from the back of his waist in seconds. He grabbed my hand and ran, keeping me behind him as we flew down the trail to where the shadowed round mass used to be. I squinted through the trees, but the woods were thick and dark, with a mixture of maple and birch blocking our view.

There was nothing there but the slightest indentation on a pile of leaves on the root of a tree. From a shoe? I didn’t voice that thought, but it was clear Tate was thinking it.