Page 80 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

“You stay behind the line,” he said. “You do not engage. You do not enter until we clear the building.”

“Understood.”

We moved in. The property was a farmhouse, old and isolated, set back from the road behind a line of trees that provided cover in both directions. Two vehicles in the driveway. Lights on inside. The police approached in formation, quiet and efficient, and I stayed behind the line with Josh and watched and waited and felt every second stretch like a wire pulled too tight.

The door went in. The shout of police identifying themselves was loud enough to carry across the property, and then there was movement. Chaos. The controlled kind, officers moving through rooms, voices overlapping with commands and responses. A gunshot, single, from inside the house, and my entire body went cold.

Then more shouting. Someone down. Cuffed. Another one, hands up, face on the ground. And then silence. The terrible, hanging silence that comes between action and information, when you do not know what has happened and every possibility, including the worst one, is equally real.

An officer appeared in the doorway. Waved.

I was past the line before Davis could stop me. My shoulder screamed as I ran, the wound tearing against the stitches, but I did not stop. I went through the door and through the hallway and into a room at the back of the house.

Chloe was on a chair. Hands bound in front of her with zip ties. Her face was pale and there was a bruise forming on her cheek and her hair was tangled and her eyes, her blue eyes, found me the moment I came through the door and they went wide and filled with tears all at once.

I was beside her in two steps. My good hand found a knife on the table and I cut the zip ties and she was free and then she was in my arms and I was holding her with everything I had and the pain in my shoulder did not exist because the only thing that existed was her.

“Why are you here?” she said against my chest. Her voice was wrecked. Raw. “Sawyer, why are you here? They could have killed you. Your shoulder. You should not be…”

I pulled back. Took her face in my good hand. And kissed her.

Hard. Desperate. The kind of kiss that was not about tenderness or romance but about the raw, animal relief of finding someone alive when you had spent the last two hours preparing yourself for the possibility that they might not be.

“Don’t you dare escape from me,” I said against her lips. “Or I will tie you up myself. Do you understand me?”

She laughed. A broken, sobbing laugh that collapsed into crying, and then she was clutching the front of my shirt with both fists and pressing her face into my chest and shaking so hard that I had to brace my feet to keep us both upright.

“They were going to kill you,” she said between sobs. “They were going to kill you and Emma. They pointed a gun at her, Sawyer. At our baby. I could not let them…”

“Don’t you trust me?” I said. I held her tighter. Pressed my face into her hair. “I told you I would protect both of you. I told you I would handle this. You do not get to make that choice alone, Chloe. Not anymore. We are in this together. Do not do this again. Please.”

She nodded against my chest. Crying. Holding on. And I held her in the back room of a farmhouse twenty miles from home while police moved around us and radios crackled and the world continued to turn even though mine had stopped for two hours and was only now starting again.

One of the officers approached. Davis. His face was serious but not grim, and the relief in his posture told me more than his words would.

“We got most of them,” he said. “Five in custody. But her ex-husband was not on the property. One of the men says he left an hour before we arrived. We are coordinating with state police to set up checkpoints.”

“Find him,” I said. My voice was low and flat and carried the kind of weight that made Davis look at me twice. “Immediately.”

“We are working on it, Mr. Cole.”

“Work faster.”

Davis nodded. Looked at Chloe in my arms. Looked back at me.

“Take your wife home,” he said. “We will contact you when we have him.”

I walked Chloe out of the house. Through the hallway. Through the door. Into the cold night air where Josh was waiting by the truck with his hands in his pockets and his face tight with relief. He did not say anything. He did not need to. He opened the back door and I helped Chloe in and climbed in beside her and pulled her against me, and Josh drove us home through the dark.

She fell asleep against my chest halfway back. Exhausted. Drained. Her hand fisted in my shirt even in sleep, holding on, refusing to let go even when consciousness had left her. I pressed my lips to the top of her head and watched the dark road unwind through the windshield and felt the weight of her against me and made one more promise.

Jonathan Marshall had escaped tonight. He would not escape again. Because I was not the kind of man who waited for the law to solve his problems. I was the kind of man who stood in front of his family and dared the world to come through him. And the world, when it was smart, chose another path.

Chloe smiled in her sleep. A small, unconscious curve of her lips. And I held her tighter and let Josh drive us home.

She slapped my chest softly without opening her eyes.

“Stop squeezing,” she mumbled. “You are worse than Sir Chomps-a-Lot.”